Planning for Success (both yours, and ours)

The market for sales performance management (SPM) solutions is expanding exponentially every year. Putting it broadly, post-recession businesses are not only focusing on what the new ground rules for success are, but how they can reset their sales capacities to meet those expectations. In short, people are planning for success, and want to make sure they can manage it.

Transparency and forecasting capabilities that can speak to realistic objectives and quotas are top of mind for management teams planning for sustainable growth. As a result, they are looking at SPM software solutions to improve governance, support increasingly dynamic and complex sales models and, at a fundamental level, move away from spreadsheets and other inefficiencies in the sales compensation cycle.

While improving sales performance affects companies of all sizes and in all industries, lately retail operations are taking a hard look at utilizing sales performance management solutions to better align store managers compensation to their local performance, all while keeping activities aligned with corporate strategy. Financial services are faced with increased regulations and challenged with providing better visibility into sales operations, increasing automation and improving reporting and communication across growing divisions.

How do businesses address these issues? By improving data gathering, modeling, forecasting and reporting across stores or branches and variable sales plans. Companies need effective and flexible analytical tools to dig deeper into variable compensation results. They are looking for sales intelligence and the means to apply it to their day-to-day operations.

Where does their search lead them? To toot our own horn… Varicent. We are easing the pain and, as a result, we’ve recently been recognized for all our hard work:

Deloitte’s 2010 Technology Fast 500™: Ranked #1 in the software category on Deloitte’s ranking of 500 of the fastest growing technology, media, telecommunications, life sciences and clean technology companies in North America.

PROFIT 200 ranking of Canada’s Fastest-Growing Companies 2011: Top 5 two years in a row (#1 in 2010, #4 in 2011).

Ventana Research 2011 SPM Value Index: Top ‘hot’ vendor (Evaluating the maturity of software vendors and products and their appropriateness for the methodology and process of Sales Performance Management).

Have you established your ground rules for success? Are you in a position to manage your sales expectations? What kind of information would be helpful to get you started, or keep you on trajectory? Your feedback is appreciated so please leave a comment or contact us.

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