Gap between Expectations and Results in Sales Compensation Management.

Centive together with Southborough, MA-based Theikos announced survey results that indicate an overwhelming dissatisfaction with spreadsheet-based sales compensation management systems and their inability to drive sales performance.

An August/September 2006 survey of U.S. sales and finance executives sponsored by Centive and conducted by Theikos found that 92% of respondents continue to use spreadsheets or homegrown-based systems to manage sales compensation. An analysis of those respondents revealed that nearly 70% believe these systems were less than satisfactory in providing strategic value to their organization by aligning sales representatives with corporate goals or impacting selling behavior to drive sales performance. In addition, the survey results reveal the following:

– 61% of respondents expressed dissatisfaction with the ability of their sales incentive management system to support financial reporting and compliance initiatives.

– 66% of respondents rated their current system as “unsatisfactory” when asked about their ability to model new compensation plan scenarios in order to forecast commission costs or examine the impact of changes to existing compensation plans.

– 70% of respondents expressed dissatisfaction with the timeliness and quality of reporting and analytics in their sales incentive management system.

– 74% of respondents report an inability to provide sales and finance executives and sales representatives and their managers with real-time visibility into earnings, attainment and performance metrics.

– 88% reported no integration between their CRM and sales compensation systems, and therefore no ability to forecast potential commissions based on deals in the sales pipeline.

“These results validate findings of two earlier surveys; one in January 2006, the other in May 2005, that the majority of mid-size companies today fail to manage sales compensation strategically or to invest their sales incentive dollars effectively,” said Bob Conlin, CMO of Centive.

“Theoretically, everyone recognizes the power of sales compensation to drive performance, but in practice most companies fail to leverage sales compensation strategically to model and evaluate plan costs and effectiveness or to drive sales performance and revenue.”

“We were not surprised by the survey results,” said Andy Zimmerman, Senior Vice President of Sales & Marketing at Theikos.
“As a leading provider of CRM services, we speak to a lot of companies about sales processes, and we frequently hear from our customers and prospects about their dissatisfaction with spreadsheet-based sales compensation systems. We think Centive Compel is the answer and we highly recommend it to our customers. It’s a terrific on-demand solution for automating sales
compensation management, and it provides sales and finance executives with the tools they need to model plans and measure results.”