To drive profitability, sales compensation must be aligned with revenue strategy. Learn how automating your incentive compensation creates a healthier, more profitable organization.
The effectiveness of your sales compensation and the health of your organization are directly linked. Strong incentive plans create healthier, more profitable companies. Healthier businesses are able to adapt their strategies as markets change, which allows them to drive long-term revenue growth.
But it’s difficult to gauge just how good your compensation is at driving sales behaviors and how to adjust your incentive plans if you can’t easily access the right information.
Aberdeen Group research shows that 91 percent of companies use spreadsheets to some extent to manage their financial planning and forecasting.1 Errors are common in spreadsheets, but that’s not the only problem.
The average executive spends 15 hours per month working in spreadsheets.2 And 81 percent of professionals combine data from five different spreadsheets to answer a single business question.2 That makes it nearly impossible to gauge organizational health, and adjust plans with agility when disruption hits.
However, many businesses are overcoming the challenges of manual sales compensation by expanding their digital technology and automating their sales incentive processes. The results are more than just reduced errors and faster commission payouts.
The Power of Automated Compensation: Aligning Sales Behavior & Revenue Strategy
Managing compensation effectively at this scale without an automated solution would limit our ability to make strategic decisions, because our time would be spent calculating comp on spreadsheets, which is unnecessary. We’d still be stuck in the mentality of ‘what can we do?’ versus ‘what do we want to do that will drive results.
Automation simplifies the tactical execution of your compensation, reducing errors and the time spent calculating and paying out incentives. More importantly, it empowers you to align sales behaviors with your revenue strategy, which is critical to driving long-term revenue.
With automation, you gain valuable insights into just how well your compensation plans are working. In-depth incentive plan analysis allows you to design incentives that motivate reps to target long-term contracts and build resilient revenue streams. This gives leaders the ability to analyze and make plan changes in real-time to stay on course.
Long-term Revenue Growth Starts with Automated Compensation
Predictable, resilient revenue is critical for companies in today’s fast-changing markets. Yet, 94 percent fear they’ll miss their revenue targets,3 and another 85 percent are unable to generate long-term revenue.4 To generate long-term, sustainable revenue, you need to align seller behavior with your revenue strategy. We call that Intelligent Revenue.
And you can’t achieve it without automating your incentive compensation processes. But sales compensation is only one part of it. You need to expand automation and data intelligence across your entire business, including quotas, territory design, and forecasting.
We’re here to help. Learn more about how automating helps you drive resilient, predictable revenue on our Intelligent Revenue Resources page.
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