Centive’s latest release of its flagship on-demand sales performance management solution, Compel, continues to enhance the critical role access to sales compensation information has in driving sales performance. The Winter ’08 release introduces powerful sales analytics integrated within Compel’s interactive dashboards, enhanced reporting automated generation of plan documents, and personal level multi-currency support, among others. Centive continues to provide all essential sales compensation management capabilities, as well as all new enhancements, within its core solution. There is no need to purchase, install and maintain additional modules for key processes such as modeling analytics and reporting. The summary below highlights some of the key enhancements.

• Dashboard Analytics: Compel’s Sales and Executive Dashboards have always offered excellent sales and performance information. The addition of graphical representations of sales achievement and earnings statistics lends, at a glance, understanding to the performance trends of individuals and teams across multiple dimensions.
  
  The Sales Dashboard includes analytics for incremental and cumulative pay as of each period in the fiscal year, each measure’s contribution to overall payment and net sales vs. target in each period. The Executive Dashboard displays the relationship of incoming revenue to net payment expenditure on each measure sales vs. targets for each sales representative, and payment allocated to each sales representative.
• Compensation Detail Reporting: As part of its Custom Report Builder, Compel offers dynamic reporting to analyze revenue and commission spend across any transaction or dimension attribute, such as customer product, territory, region, etc. This capability is vital to executives and compensation administrators, who require a clear understanding of the net revenue and expense of plans, accounts and the organization as a whole.
• Automated Plan Document Generation: Customers can easily design as many templates as needed for each sales compensation plan with the format, content and terms and conditions they desire. Participant-specific content, such as name, position, quotas, rates, target compensation, etc. gets automatically populated in the plan document. Compensation administrators can easily manage the signoff workflow though automated document routing that releases the document in order, to a series of participants that require signoff.

As the leading on-demand sales performance management solution, Compel offers real-time performance visibility and performance analytics. Compel provides strategic value by enabling customers to run in-depth analysis, model and forecast sales compensation expense, optimize plan effectiveness, and drive sales performance and top-line revenue growth.

Take a tour of Compel to learn how sales compensation can become your most powerful tool for sales performance management.

US Draeger Medical is a subsidiary of Drägerwerk AG, a global leader in the medical and safety technology markets with annual revenue of $2.6B. Its sales organization is based on a direct sales model with account managers responsible
for the entire product portfolio and focused on nurturing customer relationships.

Challenge Draeger recognized that managing sales compensation with spreadsheets lacked the visibility necessary for optimum performance of their rapidly growing sales organization. Account managers maintained their own spreadsheets (known as “shadow accounting”), wasting valuable selling time tracking deals and reconciling commission earnings. Manual commission processing also introduced risks of calculation errors and process inconsistencies, and burdened finance with long hours of reviewing, validating and correcting commission calculations. Draeger recognized the importance of continuous analysis of sales plan effectiveness, and the inadequacy of their spreadsheet-based system to support such analysis.

StrategyThe company decided to automate sales compensation with an easy-to-use, on-demand solution that drives improved sales productivity and streamlines the sales incentive management process. Draeger sought a system that included plan design, modeling, reporting and analytics without the need to deploy and maintain separate modules. After a thorough evaluation Draeger selected Centive Compel.

ResultsWith Compel, Draeger increased sales productivity by 15%. The company also boosted finance productivity, cut payment questions and disputes by 75%, and eliminated “shadow accounting”. Draeger successfullyreduced commission processing time from 2.5 weeks to 2 hours and eliminated 1 week previously needed to generate and distribute commission reports.

“Compel brings our sales incentive programs to life for account managers. It provides the visibility and tools needed to reinforce plan objectives, boost motivation and provide unwavering tactical direction for meeting and exceeding sales targets.” Florian Kluge, Senior Director of Finance, Draeger Medical US

Draeger Medical successfully leveraged Compel to improve sales productivity, streamline its sales commission process and support in-depth sales analysis. By automating sales compensation the company expanded its sales performance horizon and positioned itself for proactive strategic management; the kind of management that ensures corporate goals are consistently accomplished.

To learn how Compel can help you increase sales productivity, follow the links below.

Centive, the leader in on-demand sales performance management, recently completed a "blind" survey with 144 senior sales and finance executives based in the US. The survey reveals that while 80% of executives view sales compensation management as a sales performance function, fewer than 25% claim their current sales compensation system provides measurable strategic value. The survey results validate previous analyses by industry analysts and thought leaders which indicate that for many companies, a significant gap exists between expectation and reality with respect to sales compensation programs and their affect on sales performance.

Centive attributes this gap to a longstanding industry-wide reliance upon home-grown spreadsheet-based commission calculation systems. In fact, 92% of the survey respondents indicated they currently use in-house spreadsheet-based sales compensation systems, and within that group, 68% indicated their level of satisfaction at a "1" or "2" on a 5-point scale (5 being very satisfied).

Additional data points from the survey include the following:

• 77% claim their current system provides no access to performance data until after the close of a period
• 62% claim their current system does not easily support plan modeling or commission expense forecasting
• 54% claim that commission disputes result in lost sales focus
• 42% claim their current system does not support Sarbanes-Oxley compliance.

“The results of this survey validate what we see time and time again, particularly in small and mid-market companies. Ultimately, sales compensation is one of the best means of communicating to the sales force what is important to accomplish... We’ve found that automated systems like Compel enable companies to better manage this day in and day out communication with the sales force, consistently motivate the right behavior, and thus enable a company to realize the strategic value of a soundly designed program.”
David J. Fritz, President, Growth Solutions

As the leading on-demand sales performance management solution, Compel offers real-time performance visibility and performance analytics. Compel provides strategic value by enabling customers to run in-depth analysis, model and forecast sales compensation expense, optimize plan effectiveness, and drive sales performance and top-line revenue growth. To learn how Compel can help you achieve best-in-class sales performance, follow the links below.