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Sales management specialists acknowledge the importance of Incentive Compensation strategies in influencing sales behavior. That said, innovative Incentive Compensation strategies alone cannot guarantee the desired sales behavior outcomes. They have to efficiently operationalized in the form of accurate, consistent and timely Incentive calculations so that their full potential can be realized.

• Accuracy of calculated Incentive amounts has been an enormous concern for all companies regarding direct and indirect sales, because errors can lead to overpayments, declining sales morale from conflicts over credits, the loss of credibility of managerial and administrative processes, and an inordinate consumption of time and resources for resolving problems. Source: Research from Gartner, Inc. (2010)



• There is dissatisfaction with the reliability and costs of Spreadsheetsbased Incentive Compensation management. Spreadsheets cannot support innovative Incentive Compensation strategies, for example - differential compensation based on price points at which a product or service has been sold. They are extremely manual intensive therefore error prone. Their calculations cannot be easily exposed in an easy-to-understand form, to sales staff for purposes of explaining how incentive amounts were arrived at. They require significant human involvement to monitor and audit; and which adds to operational costs.



• High IT ownership costs for custom-built Incentive Compensation Management systems for Industries like Insurance, Financial Services, Information Technology & Communications, etc is also a concern. These industries have intrinsic Incentive Compensation complexities like (a) the need to incentivize 1000s of payees from multiple indirect selling organizations organized within sophisticated sales hierarchies (b) high regulatory oversight from state and federal authorities; and have tended to custom-build their Incentive Compensation Management systems. Many of these systems, built using legacy technologies, require significant IT support staff to manage ongoing administration activities. Change requests also take up significant IT capacities and involve long lead times.
  
  To deliver a solution to the above problems, a flexible and powerful Incentive Compensation Management infrastructure is needed. This infrastructure has to be able to support multiple operational challenges encountered by enterprises…



• Streamline the administration of complex Incentive Hierarchies encompassing 1000s of Payees including Sales reps, Sales managers, Agents from multiple sales and channel partner organizations. These payees have to be rapidly on-boarded and administered.



• Efficiently administer Incentive Runs by leveraging a high performance, Transactional Engine to calculate incentive amounts and generate incentive statements for 1000s of Payees, encompassing complex hierarchies, spanning incentive compensation emanating from sales for various products and lines of business. Provide easy-to-understand explanations for incentive amounts along with rationale for calculation and program metrics. Support retroactive Incentive Runs too..



• Allow Payees to engage in self-serve mode by providing them with tools to access their statements; submit disputes and get resolution status on their submissions; run hypothetical “what-if” scenarios to observe payout projections for different sales achievement scenarios.
  
  Efficiently administer Incentive Runs by leveraging a high performance, Transactional Engine to calculate incentive amounts and generate incentive statements for 1000s of Payees, encompassing complex hierarchies, spanning incentive compensation emanating from sales for various products and lines of business. Provide easy-to-understand explanations for incentive amounts along with rationale for calculation and program metrics. Support retroactive Incentive Runs too..



• Enable non programmers to author and test Incentive Plans through easy-to-use GUI tools. This can eliminate the delays and translation gaps associated with more traditional software development and change processes wherein business writes up detailed specifications documents and hands over to IT for programming.