Why Is Sales Performance Management (SPM) Important?

In the current economy, most operations can be considered as sales. But the question is, given such an abundance, how can businesses optimize their sales approach? This especially applies to businesses whose trajectory keeps changing directions frequently. Well, that’s what Sales Performance Management (SPM) can help with!

What is Sales Performance Management?

Gartner defines Sales Performance Management as “A suite of operational and analytical functions that automate and unite back-office operational sales processes, and are implemented to improve operational efficiency and effectiveness.”

The target of SPM deployment is to meet business performance measures. Varicent provides industry-leading SPM solutions. An SPM software, such as the one Varicent offers, helps enterprises magnify their digital operations. SPM creates functionality across departments, such as compelling horizontal and vertical communication advantages. It results in desired sales numbers using tactical strategies.

Why is Sales Performance Management Important?

SPM’s core capabilities include

  • Territory Management (TM)
  • Incentive Compensation Management (ICM)
  • Quota Management (QM)
  • Objectives Management (OM)
  • Advanced Analytics
  • Natural Language Processing
  • Gamification
  • Mobile Apps

SPM is helping businesses, large and small, across various sectors improve their sales operations. For example, SPM helped United Rentals to automate calculations, manage adjustments and approvals, build models, and view performance and trends. This enabled them to improve the effectiveness of their compensation programs continuously.

Similarly, owing to SPM, numerous other businesses have witnessed tremendous improvements and growth. Thus, businesses yet to implement SPM tools at their workplace are rushing to reap the benefits. In fact, the global market size for SPM is projected to grow at a Compounded Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of around 15% between 2020 and 2026.

SPM innovation is a way of sales performance enhancement that brings leaders together. They can overtake the competition irrespective of what they are selling. In a gist, SPM allows sales managers to impact and improve all sales touchpoints. Here’s how sales performance management benefits organizations to streamline processes and scale business: 

What are the Benefits of Sales Performance Management?

Generating Analytics

Long gone are the days of intuitive decisions. Compensation is now proportionate to the performances of the sales force, and the credit goes to SPM. A data-backed analytical system keeps a real-time tap on performances. Gratification is one of the outcomes. Performance stats allow a business to understand the strengths and weaknesses of the sales infrastructure. SPM software today generates exceptional insights to quantify results. Goals are defined and classified in the right manner, backed by purely analyzed data.

Predicting Future Sales

With advanced data capturing, monitoring, and analyzing capabilities, SPM tools help forecast future sales accurately. This helps with employee compensation, business planning and strategizing, and making other business-related decisions more precisely. For instance,  with the help of SPM, MetaCompliance has been able to:

  • Drive greater revenue predictability
  • Eliminate intuition bias within the forecasting process and make data-driven decisions
  • Achieve sales adoption of the product to boost clean data entry and improve forecasting data hygiene
  • Enhance visibility to provide a more accurate view of the pipeline

Enabling Execution

The factors of integration and distribution make a significant impact. However, execution also matches the weightage. There are many boxes to tick here – the compilation of assigned tasks, the balance of on-site task assimilation, setting the numbers right, etc. 

Once the structures across departments are adequately figured out, sales can accelerate. Instruments like gamification to manage and measure sales success are all possible additional SPM components. They help keep sales on course. These components may be and easily connected using an AI-led edge solution to sales quality management created to natively handle the unique needs of IT, sales, and finance.

Bringing in Transparency

SPM puts it all on the table. Daily notifications on the activities support the employees’ updates on everything. It is practically impossible to keep a note of and revise everything, especially with numerous processes operating at once. An SPM software generates real-time notifications and creates utmost transparency. Not only is everyone up to date, but also in check with the timelines. SPM will revamp data structures and standardize the in-house performance with no effect from the external environment.

For example, Colt could instantly identify their mistakes with payments due to real-time notifications provided by the SPM solution by Varicent. Thus, their employees could ensure that they charged customers the correct fees. This helped boost accountability and led to 30% sales team growth.

Here’s how we helped a US-based healthcare and insurance company leverage Varicent’s Sales Performance Management platform (SPM) to streamline its sales operations. 

Summing Up

Sales Performance Management is a boon for organizations, providing them with an edge in sales processes. SPM solutions, like Varicent, have enabled businesses to strategize operations effectively, enhance sales opportunities, and embark on a journey of continuous, sustained growth.

Now that you have understood what SPM is and what benefits you can derive for your business, you might be looking for a robust and agile SPM tool to implement at your workplace. You can check out Vasta’s sales performance management solution that can help you create adaptable strategies and own your revenue growth. Contact our experts at contact@vsplc.com to know more.