How Automating Sales Compensation Makes Your Organization Healthier

How do you keep your company healthy and profitable? The answer lies in the incentives that are offered to employees. Strong incentive plans create healthier, more profitable companies that can adapt their strategies as markets change, allowing them drive long-term revenue growth.

Incentives are a big investment for companies, and to succeed, you need to execute them effectively. But if you are unable to access the right information, it’s difficult to gauge how good your incentive compensation is at driving sales behaviors and how to adjust your incentive plans accordingly.

The problem is more than 75% of companies are still relying on spreadsheets or homegrown systems to handle incentives along with managing their sales planning and forecasting. Errors are common in spreadsheets, but that’s not the only problem. Approximately 81% of professionals combine data from five different spreadsheets to answer a single business question. That makes it nearly impossible to gauge organizational health and adjust plans with agility when disruption hits. 

Aligning Sales Behavior & Revenue Strategy

Incentive Compensation Management (ICM) software, automates the processes that bog down your team, eliminates the risk of errors, and unifies your entire company around a central source of data. The strongest revenue-driven companies are recognizing this need and taking measures to accelerate their digital technology adoption, equipping their sales teams with the tools and data insights necessary to succeed.

Here are some of the most impactful benefits of compensation automation:

1. ACCELERATED SALES PERFORMANCE

One of the most important reasons for an ICM implementation is eliminating the risk of human error. Organizations can eliminate nearly all payout errors with automatic calculations. That means sales teams spend less time double-checking their commission payments and more time selling. As a result, Gartner research shows that automation solutions improve sales productivity by more than 12%.

2. REAL-TIME VISIBILITY INTO COMPENSATION

According to Harvard Business School, 80% of U.S. enterprises revise their incentive compensation structure every two years or less. The best ICM tools empower you to analyze continuously in real-time, outside of the traditional annual planning sessions. This ensures that any potential issues are identified faster, ensuring you always stay on target.

3. ALIGNMENT AND UNITY ACROSS THE ORGANIZATION

Team alignment is essential to achieve revenue targets. Your ICM technology should consolidate all your compensation data into one location, providing in-depth visibility into performance for the entire company. This ensures everyone is accessing the same data and utilizing the same strategic insights, building trust and unity among the sales and finance teams and empowering your entire organization to become more efficient and effective.

4. BENCHMARK INCENTIVES AGAINST INDUSTRY DATA

Competitive incentives are essential to attracting and retaining top sales talent. Using compensation data insights, you can benchmark your sales incentive structures across industries to learn best practices, improve your planning, and ensure you’re always paying reps competitively.

Becoming a Revenue-Driven Organization

Compensation plays a vital role in the success of sales organizations. As the biggest revenue driver, it’s critical to ensure reps are motivated, payouts are accurate, and processes are as efficient as possible.

Automation simplifies the tactical execution of your compensation by eliminating errors, driving higher performance, and gaining valuable strategic insights to become a revenue-driven enterprise.

To learn more on how you can deliver positive results with ICM automation, schedule a meeting here.