The Big Cs of Sales Success: Customers and Compensation

In good news for big business, the days of tracking information on cumbersome spreadsheets are behind us. Have your company’s sales outgrown manual tracking methods for sales and compensation data? Whether your business is expanding into new markets or striving to outpace the competition, it’s time to consider your sales management alternatives.

Customers and compensation

Identifying key data points is critical to your company’s stability and growth. Understanding a profit margin is important, but understanding how it is achieved is essential. If your business is growing or expanding, you need scalable data tracking tools and advanced insight on your KPIs.

In business, your company’s success relies on two primary groups: your customers and your employees. In a sales-driven business, building market share requires a motivated sales team, and their motivation relies on incentives and compensation. Maximize sales team performance and enhance the customer experience with comprehensive data management solutions.

Customer relationship management

If your business has a well-developed sales process, you already understand the importance of identifying the key stages of your pipeline, determining where you can improve, and where to apply more time and effort for maximum ROI. The right tools and technology are essential to accurately gathering and analyzing the right data.

Customer relationship management (CRM) platforms allow your company to track customer interactions from first communication to final sale and beyond. A robust CRM system provides thorough analysis and reporting for insight on gaining, engaging, and retaining customers. CRM benefits include:

• Data sharing among teams to improve their ability to brainstorm, collaborate, and innovate.
• Automation features to gather and analyze relevant data for accuracy, precision, and actionable insight.
• Custom options for creating clear and attractive reports and sales presentations.
• The ability to grow and scale along with your business.

Sales compensation management

Commissions and incentives are inherent to sales compensation plans, and with the right management solution, you can gather and analyze data to determine the efficacy of your company’s compensation strategy. A comprehensive sales compensation management solution (SCMS) is an invaluable tool for calculating, evaluating, and adjusting incentives and commissions to optimize sales team motivation and performance. A good SCMS will provide and analyze the necessary data to give your company enhanced accuracy, efficiency, and control.

Other benefits of a complete SCMS include:

• Centralized data for enhanced efficiency, visibility, access, and alignment.
• Accurate, relevant reporting for increased productivity and better business decisions.
• Data transparency for recruiting, retaining, and motivating high-performing sales teams.
• Consistent data quality control measures and standardized processes for mitigating business risk.

Better together

SCMS and CRM platforms come equipped to gather all the data you need to track, analyze, and streamline your sales activity. Each is a comprehensive data management tool on its own, but when they work together, your company achieves a complete picture of your sales process — and gains unprecedented insight for improvement, scalability, and growth.

A CRM allows for detailed, systematic sales tracking and gives sales managers real-time insight for fine-tuning and supporting a positive customer experience. SalesVista’s SCMS incorporates incentive and commission planning with rules-based automation and calculation, which makes it easy for sales, finance, and accounting teams to plan, validate, adjust, pay out, track, and measure sales team compensation and performance. Enhanced accuracy, efficiency, and control provide your teams with the transparency and motivation they need for a better employee experience.