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.

How Manufacturers can Benefit from Hyper-Automation

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Supercharge your Operational Efficiency with ServiceNow

Supercharge your Operational Efficiency with ServiceNow

ServiceNow, a SaaS (Software as a Service) platform, helps organizations transform and effectively manage their businesses by automating their processes and workflows, resulting in increased productivity, reduced costs, and better risk resiliency. They provide solutions across domains such as customer experience, employee experience, technical excellence, and operational excellence and across a plethora of industries such as Education, Energy, Financial Services, Healthcare, Logistics, Manufacturing, Retail, Telecommunications/Media, etc. 

With the help of a single unified cloud platform, ServiceNow’s Now Platform has transformed the digital ecosystem of enterprises and helped them boost their efficiency, deliver value, and connect people and systems. Moreover, ServiceNow has been named a Leader in the Forrester Wave™: Digital Process Automation Software, Q4 2021. Detailed below are the various digital transformation solutions that they offer.

IT Workflows

ServiceNow provides a unified platform to handle Information technology (IT) operations, risk management, and security administration. It enables optimization of IT services and provides a modern, credible experience in alignment with the customer priorities.

Below are some products that power the IT Workflows:

IT Service Management:

In the world of IT service management (ITSM), ServiceNow has been a pretty dominant force with its powerful features in incident management, change management, and problems management, and knowledge management, along with many others. It has a powerful ITIL package (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) built inside, along with a helpful scripting engine to do customizations. Using the ServiceNow Platform, the University of Maryland was able to achieve an impressive reduction of 75% in incident resolution times.

IT Operations Management:

These workflows enable predicting issues and auto-resolving them using the power of AI, thereby significantly minimizing user impact. Finastra, a financial services provider based in London, was able to save $350K annually using this platform.

Strategic Portfolio Management:

This platform enables organizations to develop strategies, create plans, set targets, make decisions, and track the progress until the desired outcome is reached. Using this platform, the Western & Southern Financial Group was able to align IT investments with their business targets successfully.

Customer Workflows

In this era of cut-throat competition, providing the best service to customers is the number one priority for any organization. But it is easier said than done. With so many channels of communication in use, such as phone, email, chat, social networks, etc., it has become a challenge to maintain consistency and ensure service quality. With limited staffing and continuous incoming calls, it becomes even more difficult to give timely responses, that too within the stipulated SLAs. Fortunately, ServiceNow provides some excellent solutions to handle this. 

Customer Service Management:

This platform strives to provide a hassle-free experience to both customers and agents. By connecting teams and systems and also enabling self-service, customer needs are addressed quickly. Tennessee DHS saw a 70% reduction in inquiry resolution times and a 99% reduction in inquiry assignment times using ServiceNow.

Field Service Management:

This service enables connecting the field service team with other teams and tools to improve operational efficiency and enhance customer experience. Scheidt & Bachmann, based out of Germany, reported 97% customer satisfaction after implementing ServiceNow’s solutions.

Financial Service Operations:

These solutions deliver modern capabilities in the areas of banking, insurance, and wealth management that result in accelerated performance and easy experiences.

Employee Workflows

Employee workflow solutions allow employees to work productively and collaborate effectively by providing them with the right set of tools and training. These workflows help improve agility, boost productivity, and raise employee morale. As per a recent IDC report, agile organizations retain employees at a 34% higher rate. Using this platform, employees are equipped to traverse through complex processes with ease and are also able to retrieve information through their preferred channels. 

HR Service Delivery:

These solutions aspire to improve employee productivity by providing them with unified work experiences along with enterprise-wide workflows that can be accessed through any digital channel. Distell, a global alcoholic drinks manufacturer and distributor based in South Africa, was able to automate 57 processes and close to 100 sub-processes using ServiceNow’s solution.

Workspace Service Delivery:

Through modern digital services, this solution enables support for a hybrid workforce from any device and any location.

Here’s how we helped a business create a unified service portal using ServiceNow’s Employee Centre Pro module for an enhanced employee experience.

Creator Workflows

Creator Workflows enable developers to develop low-code apps and transform legacy business processes into modern, digital workflows. These apps are designed to be cross-enterprise, scalable, and deliver a top-notch user experience.

This suite comes with the below offerings: 

App Engine:

App Engine facilitates developers to build low-code apps with very less complexity rapidly. These apps can automate critical business processes and be built targeting specific business needs, thereby fuelling growth and revenue. Intercontinental Exchange, a financial services provider based in Atlanta, developed more than 20 custom apps using ServiceNow, with a 50% reduction in the development effort. 

Integration Hub:

Integration Hub enables easy and quick integration of ServiceNow with critical business systems, along with minimized cost, complexity, and risk. American University was able to leverage the ServiceNow platform during the COVID-19 pandemic to keep the classes running for over 13,000 students remotely. 

Manufacturing Connected Workforce:

This solution aims to unlock worker productivity by digitizing SOPs and also by providing them with digital tools to perform at their best, collaborate with others, and share knowledge across the enterprise.

To know more about how we can help you enhance your business outcomes with the help of the ServiceNow platform, reach out to our experts at contact@vsplc.com.

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Big Data: The Key to Efficient Decision Making

Big Data: The Key to Efficient Decision Making

As technology evolves, data has unquestionably turned into the “new oil.” In the cutting-edge technological environment, big data plays a crucial role in tapping useful values and making necessary decisions. Organizations are now swerving toward big data to make strategic policies and gain a competitive edge in the market. In the era of data-driven decision-making (DDDM), it is easy to discover the product’s current stage in its lifecycle and forecast trends accordingly.

An example comes from a 2020 poll of CMOs of significant companies: More than half of study participants indicated they lacked the tools necessary to extract meaningful customer insights, despite 75% of respondents believing that harnessing data will help their organizations greatly improve their business. In the poll, 58% of participants claimed they lacked the knowledge and tools necessary to analyze marketing data, and more than 70% claimed they couldn’t make use of the consumer data.

In April 2022, Forbes analyzed big data operations at reputed firms and concluded that “Netflix and Amazon take their customers’ viewing customs and movie ratings to run down a complex algorithm to generate personalized recommendation systems for each subscriber. A popular online dating site, OkCupid generates a stream of hilarious insights and converts them into modern romance by screening through user profiles and building correlations.”

In the modern world, enterprises have access to high-value datasets and customer data points such as websites, business apps, social media pages, and documents. Big data helps businesses convert this data into value-added, qualitative decisions.

The benefits that enterprises can gain with the help of big data and data engineering processes are enormous, some of which are:

Improving customer data and retention 

Customer metrics are an essential touchpoint for businesses nowadays. Companies are ambitiously deploying and inventing new services to address customers’ queries and provide better aid. Big data helps to perform competitor analysis and analyze and entertain the market trends. Big data analytics helps companies adapt to aggressive environments and predicts the product’s future.

Using big data and AI, Netflix saves $1 billion per year on customer retention. Netflix is undoubtedly the largest TV network globally, with over 221 million paying subscribers as of June 2022. Their success is largely attributed to using AI to know which movies, TV shows, and documentaries people want to watch.

Enhance operational efficiency

Organizations leverage big data to automate their processes and optimize overall efficiency. Data analytics allows firms to draft product and technical roadmaps and bring about operational coherence. It also reduces the time, effort, and money required to deduce and employ the correct distribution channels. Data analytics allow companies to log in an excessive amount of information and draw relevant conclusions.

A large number of enterprises mutually agree that there is a need to manage unstructured data to simplify their businesses. In a data-powered economy like us, only those who can use the data in the right form can successfully navigate the market, make future predictions, and adjust their business to fit market trends.

Increase in production capacity

Big data analytics mitigates blockages arising on account of data and optimizes resources by analyzing real-time statistics. It also allows firms to assess prior blockages and rectify them in the future. Through big data, the information generated during production, storage, and services can be utilized to enhance the company’s productivity and efficiency.

A report published by Research and Markets stated that Big Data Analytics in the manufacturing industry was valued at $904.65 million in 2019 and is estimated to reach $4.55 billion by the end of 2025. With the continuous usage of big data analytics in manufacturing, manufacturers can now establish patterns allowing them to enhance processes, boost supply chain efficiency, and positively determine variables that impact production.

Identification of new opportunities

The greatest boon of big data analytics is its ability to identify and scale patterns. Big data helps a company know where it stands and its prospects. Analytics allows firms to fill in gaps in the strategy and repurpose it to meet the company’s demographics.

Companies use customer data and predictive analytics to determine the customers’ specific needs and tailor it to attract and retain them. An excellent example of this is the infamous “Target Snafu.” As reported by the NY Times, Target used data insights to figure out that a customer was pregnant and sent her personalized coupons based on the trimester she was in. The situation turned out to be hilarious, no doubt.

Benchmarking the success

Big data tools can collect customer feedback and comb opinions to change the company’s algorithm. SWOT analysis came up with the advent of big data itself. It enables firms to make the right strategies to stay competitive.

Every time Google advises changing the spelling of a search query, it does so because other inquiries on the same topic have done so and found other spellings to be more helpful. Hal Varian, a Google economist, has discussed how the company can foresee economic and public health trends by identifying patterns in search queries. Google gets approximately 3.5 billion searches daily. This makes it the highest shareholder (87.35%) of the search engine market as of 2021. This means that there are 1.2 trillion searches on Google done yearly and over 40,000 search queries per second.

So, is big data the future? If we look at the massive investments of big firms, then yes, it is. Big data and artificial intelligence were the two main topics of New Vantage’s Executives Survey. About 60 executives from Fortune 1000 organizations, including Motorola, American Express, NASDAQ, etc., responded to the survey.

The New Vantage study responded to the question of how much money businesses spend on data analytics and its presence in leading businesses. So, here is what we’ve discovered. A Chief Data Officer (CDO) was reportedly hired by 62.5% of participants, up from 12% in 2012. Additionally, a record percentage of the study’s participating organizations—97.2%—have engaged in big data and AI activities.

Here’s how we helped a telecom and ISP service provider enhance their network bandwidth using Big Data. 

As more and more organizations turn toward a DDDM approach, big data continues to receive undiluted attention. While big data helps to gain and collate information from all around the world in an unstructured format, business data analytics translate and interpret it into a comprehensible form. Thus, companies have hard facts to back up their qualitative strategies. Along with the advent of the data, the role of domain experts has also evolved over the years. To conclude, the big data movement has transformed not only companies but also employees.

To know more about how we can help you leverage Big Data capabilities, reach out to our experts at contact@vsplc.com.

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