Are You Ready for Incentive Compensation Management?

Sales incentive compensation management software can help companies significantly reduce the cost and pain of managing sales commission calculations, easily communicate rewards to reps for meeting targets, and provide actionable insights.

But before you embark on your ICM search initiative, make sure you’ve given time to consider these key factors that will help you evaluate whether to invest in an ICM solution.

These factors can make the difference between success and failure. They’ll help you see if you’re ready to evaluate and implement an ICM solution and ensure you can move quickly and avoid unnecessary delays that can kill the project entirely.

1. Have you identified your goals?
   It is important to identify what your end goals for the initiative are. By identifying your goals and objectives, you can ensure that whatever vendor you select can help your organization achieve these outcomes.
   
   
2. Do you have clearly defined comp plans?

It’s important to have clearly defined comp plans, including quotas, performance measures, and incentive plan structures. Defining plans on-the-fly, or changing plans mid-flight, can introduce project delays and wasted effort.

3. Do you have the internal resources to evaluate ICM?
   A proper ICM evaluation involves an internal commitment from several stakeholders, including executive management, sales operations, finance, HR and comp plan administrators. It takes time to do this right to ensure you have the core source data systems identified and the comp plan structure defined and approved.
   
   
4. Do you have the budget identified?
   Are your project stakeholders prepared to allocate funds – for both license fees and the often overlooked implementation costs? While implementation costs and time frames can vary across vendors, do not underestimate the importance of investing in a professional services team that can ensure your solution is properly implemented to meet your organization’s goals and objectives.
   
   

5. Do you have the data?
   Incentive compensation management solutions depend on multiple data sources, including transaction data and participant data. Having access to this data is crucial for vendor proofs-of-concept, project quality assurance and solution automation.

By following the 5 recommendations above, you’ll find out if your company is ready to automate sales compensation with an ICM solution.

Contact us if you are interested to learn more on how we can help you kickstart your sales commissions automation process, schedule a meeting here.