Guide
Jan 20, 2021
Digital transformation has become more necessary than ever, but it’s hard to know where to begin or how to navigate that journey. Here are five ways Sales Performance Management (SPM) can help accelerate your digital transformation.
After a tumultuous 2020, many organizations are beginning to see digital transformation more as a need rather than a luxury. A recent report from Dell Technologies discovered that 80 percent of companies have taken some action to accelerate their digital transformation journey.
So why are companies making this big shift to automation technology? It’s simple: they need to better understand and analyze their data and make decisions quickly. And to do that, they need a solution that enables both agility and data accuracy. The challenge, according to Dell, is that more than half of executives fear they’re not moving fast enough to adopt automation.
Accelerating Digital Transformation with Sales Performance Management
Enterprises must use their comprehensive data as a guide for decision making. This is nearly impossible to do effectively when your data is housed in multiple spreadsheets or other manual homegrown systems. To accelerate and achieve digital transformation, companies need the right tools to use their data strategically.
Sales Performance Management (SPM) solutions empower you to use your data as an intelligent resource to continuously gain insights, reduce risks, and make strategic business decisions in real-time. Using those insights, you’re able to then optimize sales capacity and quota planning, territory design, incentive compensation, and more. To help you kickstart your digital transformation journey, here are five ways Sales Performance Management helps your organization become more data-driven.
1. Take Sales Planning from Reactive to Proactive
SPM solutions provide real-time visibility into your performance, which is key for understanding the effectiveness of your revenue-driving strategies. For example, how do you know you need to make changes to your sales plans if you can’t analyze how your incentives, territories, etc. are performing?
Using SPM technology, data can become a strategic asset. Sales leaders can continuously monitor and analyze performance at any given point in time, allowing them to watch key data indicators, identify potential issues early, and take action quickly before there is any detrimental impact on performance.
2. Design Balanced Sales Territories
Sales territories have a huge impact on sales performance. To ensure the right amount of coverage, companies need to fully understand the opportunity and sales potential in each area. Territories need to be balanced to ensure that each rep has equal opportunity to close deals and attain quota.
Sales Performance Management helps you use your existing territory maps and combine them with third-party data to identify white-space opportunities. This ensures that you are maximizing selling opportunities across all of your target markets.
3. Create Incentives That Drive the Right Sales Behaviors
Understanding the effectiveness of your sales incentives is critical to hitting your revenue goals. Well-designed plans should take corporate objectives and executive goals into account to ensure that incentives and sales commission structures motivate and encourage reps to perform behaviors that help reach company goals.
Incentives should also be competitive enough to recruit and retain top performers. With SPM, you can analyze how well your incentives drive behaviors and can benchmark compensation against third-party data to make sure your pay is competitive.
4. Improve Forecasting Accuracy
Accurate forecasting is key to the financial success of a company. To accurately forecast, companies need well-designed sales territories, properly allocated quotas, and strategic compensation plans. Any data inaccuracy can wreak havoc on sales performance and goal achievement.
Data is the most important factor in accurate forecasting. Automated SPM solutions create a central data source, making data accurate and secure. It also allows organizations to express different “what-if” forecasting scenarios in an automated SPM platform, aligning sales and finance teams.
5. Predict and Reduce Sales Attrition
Keeping top-performing sales reps is a necessity. Replacing top talent can hurt any company’s sales performance, especially when the average cost of replacing a rep is $115,000, according to Maestro. Taking key performance metrics, companies can now identify reps at risk for attrition before they leave the organization.
Xactly Insights helps sales leaders closely monitor sales rep performance. When a rep’s performance negatively changes, Insights flags those who are at-risk for attrition and identifies the appropriate leadership. This allows leaders to better predict performance, intervene and halt poor performance earlier, and effectively reduce overall attrition rates.
Guide
Sep 10, 2024
The Complete Sales Planning Handbook
Make Digital Transformation a Reality
Data is a critical driver behind effective revenue strategies, and for organizations, it plays a critical role in the way they plan and manage their sales operations. With the right data, companies gain key insights into sales performance and can use this as a driving force for designing sales territories, allocating quotas, and building compensation plans.
But most importantly, organizations need to be able to use that data strategically. Sales Performance Management helps organizations take control of their data and turn it into a competitive advantage. With data insights at your fingertips, you can analyze performance towards revenue goals at any point in time, giving you the agility you need to succeed in any situation. And at Xactly, we’re here to help you do just that.
Interested in learning more about how Sales Performance Management aids digital transformation? Download our guide, “The Enterprise Guide to Sales Performance Management."
