IBM ICM Showcases Sales Analytics & Version 10 at Vision 2017

Intangent’s IBM ICM (Varicent) sales team and services team sponsored and exhibited at this year’s IBM Vision 2017 conference.  Here’s what we learned:

Moving from Incentive Compensation Management to Sales Performance Management with Analytics

At the keynote, IBM ICM sales leader Zach Burnett issued a challenge to all attendees: focus on internal forces.  For those who work in the ICM realm, this means intelligently managing sales people – along with their skills and their motivations – to achieve outstanding sales performance.  IBM’s position is that customers deploying incentive compensation strategies alone cannot reach peak performance. To truly motivate teams to outperform, businesses must leverage advanced analytics to help navigate the complex world of incentive compensation management.  Analytics will move traditional incentive compensation management to true sales performance management.

Throughout the conference, several analytics topics were integrated into the overall sales performance management theme.  Our favorites are:

• Predictive analytics that help indicate which opportunities are most likely to close
• Segmentation analysis used to group customers into buyer personas for sales and marketing
• Compensation plan modeling and testing to better understand which commission plans are likely to be most effective and drive the right behavior

IBM’s incentive compensation management suite extended with deep analytics capabilities makes for a compelling sales performance management story that will appeal to customers looking to generate additional value from the automation of sales commission processing.

IBM ICM / Varicent Version 10 Takes Center Stage

The second theme at Vision 2017 was the emerging story of Version 10 for IBM’s incentive compensation management software suite.  Unveiled last year, Version 10 is now the default platform for all future IBM ICM software releases.

Several success stories of migration to Version 10 were shared by customers, including Pitney Bowes and Zions Bancorporation.  This added to the confidence level of the new software platform.  In addition, new Version 10 features were also covered.  We are most enthusiastic about the new reporting capabilities in the Pulse reporting tool.  This tool provides rich, interactive reporting that also offer powerful analytics, tying Version 10’s strengths directly into the analytics theme set at the opening keynote.

For more information on IBM ICM / Varicent, Version 10, or Sales Analytics, please don’t hesitate the contact us to continue the conversation.