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great thank you all for joining us today for our webinar on sales performance management versus incentive compensation management or SPM verse ICM for those who've joined our webinars before you should be familiar with performia CEO David Marshall David has over 20 years of experience in the SPM and ICM fields and he successfully developed and implemented incentive compensation strategies for companies worldwide as well of course as founding and managing the growth of performia joining David Marshall on the call today is Dave kakari the VP of strategy at Canadian you can see some of Dave's qualifications right on the screen we're sharing here which include 18 years in leadership within the SPM space Canadian are the leading experts in sales performance management and they work actively with companies across all of the major industry verticals Canadian help customers employ all of the major vendor technologies in SPM and ICM including of course performia Canadian have successfully helped our customers deploy for Formio across North America and the asia-pacific markets so I'm going to hand over to David Marshall now to get us started thanks thanks for the intro Sara yes and welcome just briefly the objectives it is really just to want you everyone on the call today to get a feel for you know what what is the difference between sales performance management and incident management what's the distinctions Dave's gonna really drill into us for today as a real expert in this area around you know what's the opportunity that sales performance management presents customers and sort of the journey that customers are going on from deploying incentive comp software to SPM and that'll become clear as we go through it and Dave's also going to give us a bit of a nice frame worth of thinking about how to actually win at sales performance management so before I hand over to Dave I just wanted to kick off with yeah if he got an hour you know the feticide de veau regard as the gold standard globally in terms of how they assess different um software categories including sales performance management which they have been actively assessing now for many years and so the my gunner looks at this category is to say there are various critical capabilities around young managing commission calculations rule definitions your modeling and so on and so on as you can read there on the screen and I'm interesting they talk about use cases in scented comp management being one of them quota management territory management objectives management and so in terms of the way they think about ICM and SPM is that you know incentive comp is sort of you know one of several kind of modules if you like within the sales performance management suite but on this I just want to kick off with that perspective and then Dave is gonna take us through I guess Canadians look at this whole space of SPM away I see him fits in before I hand over Dave I mean dad we got but have you got any particular comments I guess at this point around the garden and categorization or should we just get straight into the Canadian stuff no yeah well first of all let me thank you and Sarah for for having me join today we're glad I'm glad to be here and glad to be representing to midium and participating with a great partner like perform yo and yeah I mean I think you know with all due respect to to our friends over at Gartner I didn't you to your point definitely they are a leader in sort of analyzing and assessing the SPM space as well as other market um but as you might imagine we at Canadian have formulated our own perspective on what sales performance management is there is some overlap with how Gartner and kind of categorizes and defines the capabilities and use cases but as we're about to walk through here in a second you know we do have a little bit of a different perspective that may include a few more use cases as well as additional capabilities that perhaps are not in in in Carter's perspective on the market so with that I think yeah why don't we why don't we go ahead and get into it so you know as as both Sarah and David have said you know today we wanted to talk a little bit about what what is sales performance management because that's that can mean a lot of different things depending on what your perspective is and as consultants here at Canadian of course you know we are very fond of frameworks so we've come up with our own framework if you will to describe what STM is and really it starts hopefully the process starts with with setting overall corporate goals and objectives right so if you think about it as an organization or as a company you have certain goals certain objectives certain KPIs that you're trying to to measure and achieve from that you derive your selling strategy or your sales strategy and then the spm framework if you will is a series of what we consider eight primary capabilities that support the execution and realization if you will of that selling strategy so let's walk through that from left to right so from our perspective it starts with design right so how do you design model and cost your compensation plans how do you make sure that you identify the behaviors within your selling roles that you want to support and drive and how do you compensate those those specific sales roles for the achievement of those results from there it becomes an exercise in what we call target or or targeting and that that's comprised of really two primary capabilities one is territory or account management and assignment right so how do i define the territories however those are defined whether they're you know a geography or product or or you know any combination of those data elements how do I sort of set those territories and then eventually um how do i allocate targets against those territories or account assignments right so how do I manage that quote or target allocation process from there it becomes a matter of communication and acceptance right so now I have these pieces of information I have a plan I have a target I have my territory or account rage that I'm responsible for how do I push that information out into the sales organization so that as a rep I know you know what I'm responsible for what my target is and how I'm going to get paid for the achievement of the results that what my organization expects out of me in the middle is administration and reporting right this is the blocking and tackling this is how do I make sure that I get all of the data that I need on how do I make sure the right people get credited how do I do the calculations and ultimately how do I put money into someone's checking account you know a reps checking a child and how do I give them good transparent reporting that says you know here's all of the transactional activity and the calculations and all of the contributions that led to that money ending up in your in your chicken in the checking account inquire is what happens when I look at my checking account or my report and I don't like what I see right and I'm sure this never happens to everyone but if you do find yourself in this situation that inquiry or dispute resolution process is how do I manage that to resolution right so the work flow the investigation the the analysis that's required to make sure that I address those concerns coaching is the ongoing dialogue that should be taking place between managers and reps right so we like to say a lot of this is about sort of building or establishing the carrot coaching is helping the rep get to the carrot right so focusing on the behaviors and the activities that are going to make the rep successful and ultimately which achieve the results that you want in order to get the compensation that they deserve and then finally analyze this is the brass ring right this is what we all care about ultimately is how do I take the data that sits and all of these capabilities and mind that for trends for insights how do I eventually serve that up to leadership so that the organization can ensure that leadership is making good data-driven decisions around this program and and the outputs and of course it is a program right so it's technology is an important foundational element to this but there are organizational and process pieces to this that you have to think about as well that's that's really good does frauds of good live is he really got eight I'd sort of Kay components there that are like technology-based process and organizational base so I guess from interesting from a technology point of view I to what extent is say like really by process and organize a but what extent do you say companies succeeding or adopting technology in particular in some of those areas like you know you know the design pace using technology to help them in that design because I guess I say a lot of companies and they're using spreadsheets and like a different alice and stuff but I yeah it's what extending you st. adoption you know yeah now that's a great question and I think you know it's particularly relevant in a number of different dimensions today right so we're going to talk a little bit about ICM versus SPM and I think you hit on a critical distinction there David which is you know if you think about ICM adoption that's probably a lot higher than what I would consider SPM adoption right and we're going to talk a little bit in a second about what the different you know what do we think ICM is versus SPM and depending on what kind of market research you look at or benchmarking information you have access to you know roughly about 25% of companies out there have adopted some sort of what I'll call ICM based technology right and the percentage which which is not that much right so you know 75% of the marketplace out there is either using some sort of custom solution or you know quite frankly the largest solution in the marketplace today is the one you just identified right spreadsheets it's Microsoft Office um and in fact you know has a sort of shameless plug for some new benchmarking information that Canadians put together you can actually go to our website right now and fill out a small questionnaire and we'll give you some insight into you know how your organization stack stuff from a benchmarking perspective including some insights into some of the things that David just just referenced around you know solution adoption in some of these areas mm-hmm cool I do you think busy dress with the other design face how would you write I guess your benchmarking might show that in terms of from beginning the technology might from a process point of view yeah well people actually had an issue design because I guess the design is the foundation for the whole program I guess right in design you know if you think about it design is more than just you know a lot of people when they think about design they say they think about modeling right so you know how do I basically take you know either prior prior year plans and tweak those plans or holes create wholesale new plans and be able to pull in the data and the requisite information I need to be able to run those models and do the costing exercises that I need to um well but it's also you know a lot of cases we like to think that there's there's a work flow marriage there too right so once you've got those models sort of in place there is usually some sort of review and approval process that you need in order to in order to you know basically drive acceptance and completion and approval those models as well so I would argue that from a pure modeling perspective you know you may see some some limited adoption of technologies greater than Microsoft Office in the market today but you know the vast majority of organizations are probably still using some version of Excel um but that workflow piece is still in many cases manual all right you know either you know here you're dealing with powerpoints and emails and physical meet you know physical meetings where you're going through that process so there's a long way to go I guess in terms of the evolution of that particular capability within this overall framework yeah and then we get to I guess talking about the journey to go and then I think that worth coming back to that just tell us a little bit about I think this quite little strides a bit where you say ah see I'm fitting it does yeah yeah so you know we you know our perspective is incentive compensation management is at a critical subset of those eight capabilities right and its focus right in the middle no.not administration and reporting pieces and so you know when we think about incentive compensation management we're really talking about the specifics around how do I administer the operational aspects of what it takes to calculate and pay pay people and then deliver kind of statements and reporting to that payee population so they understand what they got paid and why right so you know quite simply it is you know we like to break it down into sort of what we call the five C's right the first C is collect how do I collect data from all of the requisite source systems that I need in order to pull in information in order to do the calculations um and that could be transactional information it could be HR information you know there's a number of different kind of usual suspects sources that you're going to pull information from from there its crediting right so how do I make make sure the right person or persons or entity or entities get credit for that you know for those transactions with that sales activity um then it's the calculations themselves an actual plan mechanics once I've got that then it's you know it's compensate how do I push that final check or that payment amount into someone's checking account through and you know hopefully do some sort of automated payroll feed and then finally it's communicated right so now that I have and I've gone through this process how do I communicate that information out to the payee population so that they understand what happens and when you think about it it's really and we'll talk about this in a little bit too it's the foundation for this entire exercise it's the place where most people start because it's probably from an organizational and operational perspective where you're feeling the most acute pain right most of the time if you think about the cadence of some of these other activities you know chances are unless you're in a very unusual situation you're not designing your plans every month right your that's probably an annual exercise in most organizations you're hopefully not setting quotas and targets every month right your said you might be tweaking those as accounts move around and territory shift throughout the year but that's more of an annual exercise but we think about really ICM it's probably the highest frequency cadence activity that takes place within this entire framework you know you're probably paying people at least minimally monthly in some cases weekly and you know in some extreme cases we even have customers that paid you know twice a day so just you know from that perspective that's normally why people start there in terms of where they start to focus and make investments from an SDM perspective yeah it's um yeah legaud yeah as a software vendor I think there's a tendency to want to put our arms around an entire category so it's slightly depressing day that you've just got that narrow box around those two things there but um um yeah we see ourselves as from day one yeah we've been focused on the sales commission software piece but we know from day one we've also helped customers you know obviously bring their quotas and targets into the whole process and yeah from day one about dashboards and reports for salespeople so yeah it kind of feels like that it's a bit under coaching or or you kind of make a distinction there between what you mean by dashboards and reporting for example for coaching yeah yeah you know I think um again this is like any framework it has its limitations right David so yeah this is sort of the starting point for having a conversation around what sales performance management is um but you bring up some good points around you know coaching for example when we talk about that sort of ongoing dialogue and giving the rep visibility into their you know their activity that could be in many cases pipeline reports right so I can see you know where are where are my opportunities you know all the way through close win where where I'm where am I in various stages of that pipeline process um so you may be some you may be checking these boxes I guess what I'm trying to say in in other applications and in other areas of the organization and supplying that information but you know what we've seen happen is in the marketplace over the last 20 years to your point is generally organizations start in that middle area I see em and then they start to move tangentially out both in terms of interesting that it in two dimensions right one is how companies sort of tend to look at this issue right I start here I solve this immediate visceral problem that I'm having with and then I move it you know tangentially outward and subsequently also in the venting the way the vendors have approached it right so solving that problem first and realizing wow I have a really great technology platform that can also start to migrate into these other boxes and start to check off capabilities and functionality on that that the customer needs in these other areas and so I fact you know that your journey has probably been somewhat similar right to your point you started with hey you know we want to help our customers pay commissions and report on those Commission's and you realize because of the flexibility and the capabilities that you've baked into your platform you're also able to start to move out and to fill those requirements and capabilities in these other areas as well yeah that's definitely been an experience where you know core business is the ICN pace but we're getting more and more use cases where your customers want to bring the opportunity data in and and and have that within the tool you know for a broader scoreboard of performance you know having targets calculated and not just entered into the system yeah which but again it's that journey isn't it's that thing I've you know that the ICM pace is so immediate and you know for the customer it can be off quite intense around you constantly you know as you say every week month for night delivery on the IC M so it tends to be almost a lockdown focus on that not realize the opportunity of the other areas potentially yeah and that's very important point that that will probably drive home a little bit more on the next slide to which is you really have to think about this as a journey right like there are you stage one if you will is is really the ICM piece of it right this is where we focus on how do we get it how do we wrangle our data under control because that's always you know a problem every organization that we go into you know this date you know I see em and SPM or downstream consumers of a lot of upstream information so you have to have great CR CRM data and ERP data and you know financial systems that are feeding to you so you've got to wrangle that under control you know in order to get clean input into your praat into your administration process and then you layer self-service reporting on top of that and that's really if you want to think you know we like to think about it in two dimensions right focus on the on the vertical axis and outcome on the horizontal you know it's really about execute from a focus perspective and the outcome that you're looking for is accuracy right accurate timely payments with clear transparent reporting so at a population knows what's going on from there then once you've solved that problem then you can go to stage two right then it becomes a conversation around efficiency so now workflow becomes very important how do I start to layer in and look at some of these other tangential capabilities like quota and territory management dispute resolution and communication acceptance maybe even some standardized coaching process those are very workflow based and that workflow is driven towards efficiency and that efficiency helps you accelerate right that's the outcome that you're looking for I want to get through these processes faster and more consistently so that I can then ultimately get to stage three right and this is really again if you think about the brass ring this is this is where we all want to get to its effectiveness right so this is where it becomes a more strategic function for the organization and more proactive function where I have modeling and forecasting and analytics and I'm able to look ahead right not just historically but look ahead and start to prepare and plan for things that I know are going to come my way and I'm able to start to really serve very good detailed information up to the executives so they can make better decisions about the business and that becomes an outcome the outcome there in adaptation right flexibility being able to deal with the you know multitude of things that are going to come at you from a business perspective whether it's mergers and acquisitions or introduction of new competition or new product launches or you know whatever it is that you're dealing with from an organizational perspective that's where you want to be right minute is a journey it's a journey that's what I think a lot of organizations sort of you know they tend to focus like you said on that acute pain and stage one and they don't necessarily always think about the long-term ramifications of some of the decisions that they're making both from an operational and program perspective but also in terms of thinking of sort of the technologies that they're employing in each of these areas we didn't say you'd say that's the biggest art block goal thing that's slowing customers done this that lack of focus yeah you know that that's certainly that you know if you ask me sort of yeah ten years ago um what what the biggest roadblock was I would tell you the data you know just getting wrangling the data under control and it by no means is it you know is that that problem been completely solved but I think now with the proliferation of staff based software you know and this idea that you know you need to build interconnectivity so that you can consume and provide data to multitude of sources we've started to wrap our arms around that you know and now really when we work with customers it's less conversations around how to get their data under control and more roadmap long-term roadmap conversations right like don't just go through stage one and stop you know make sure that you have a long-term roadmap make sure that you that you hold yourself accountable to get to stage three because if you don't you're really missing out on the true benefits of sales performance management right like stage one is great don't get me wrong like we got to get that problem solved but that's really an operational efficiency and effectiveness kind of benefit right like hey this was this is a really tough process that requires a lot of headcount and we do it in spreadsheets today and and we make a lot of mistakes because it's manual those are important problems to solve but the real benefit starts to come in stage 2 and stage 3 right where you really start to extract more selling effectiveness out of your sales organization and ultimately you start to make better decisions about the business because you have better access to data in analytics so yeah you know for us that's the conversation we're having more now which is hey you've got stage one under your belt that's great you know but let's not forget we need to keep pushing stage 2 stage 3 getting to those higher levels of ROI I guess if I decide if you look at the rotten you've got your your X and y-axis there's also potentially an axis on the rod that talks about you know yeah breadth of stakeholder engagement you know if you look at stage one you know obviously there's a lot of you know that thing around different systems Faden but ultimately it's yeah it's the function of a finance or commissioned team written when you move to stage three you got to get all these other people on board so there's also that complexity of the organization of the process is that and that that's a great that's a great observation David so yes you know and I you know I think you know what we've seen here over the last 20 years is stage one well technically ownership and governance of all of these stages has migrated to various parts of the organization right so you know when I first started doing this 20 years ago chances were quite good actually that that stage 1 was HR right you know HR being a compensation function well you know it takes on my HR analyst and have them you know calculate comp on some spreadsheets and over the years we've seen that migrate out of HR you know because it probably doesn't make that much sense other than the design portion of it right move more into finance like Finance has the rigor and sort of the mentality that it takes to to wrap you know good audit country and controls around around that process which is what you want and I would say ultimately over the last probably four or five years what we started to see if the emergence more of a wholesale sales operations organization within companies right so you get to a certain size and scale and you know maybe it starts off as you know a science project and your sales organization or your more even more likely your finance organization but ultimately it eventually becomes its own entity and really where we've seen a lot of governance success is sales operations starting to take ownership of all these pieces right and this becoming a strategic function within the organization all of these capabilities getting managed under one sales operations umbrella home oh yes so to your point governance and ownership is very much a part of the dialogue and needs to be part of the conversation when you think about about how this works within your team yeah I think I'm definitely saying here in North America and sort of emerging so increasing roles and responsibilities of sales ops compared to I guess perhaps what we see in Australia impact but Ellie it's an exciting opportunity for the sales up story you know make their marquee about taking that organization on that journey I think go just looking at the time here day we might just wrap to kind of wrap up for questions shortly just a very quick very quick editorial for for me oh just some of the features that we do it the way we think about sales performance management incentive comp across the salespeople the management the administration portal and and yeah why matter just a very some thinking music just to show some of that awesome yeah that stage 3 and all the things that you're talking about just some examples of that but we're gonna wrap now with some with some our Q&A just as our little so I this is actually for my marketing magic I promise you I'm showing a video of the product in the webinar um and yeah so just in summary I guess sign and chiming here Dave if you want to make any final points but I guess some of the key takeaways I think that we're hopefully the audience is taking away today is that obviously I see em sitting comp is is very much a subset of this broader opportunity called sales performance management companies are leaving a lot on the table if they just stop at ICM so I think you made that really good point that you know stage one ICM is crucial and there's there's a huge amount of value and it's got right but it's about execution there's then it's all fitting this opportunity that that needs to be taken up by companies and you made that point that it's an evolutionary process that you know have a have a roadmap so at least start your incentive comp program with a roadmap to say right once we've done the execution now we're going to move on to X Y & Z rather than just losing energy after the the controller and and then obviously aligned with a partner that can evolve with you so certainly you know we're evolving our product capability to sort of stretch out to the left and right heracross SPM but and obviously I guess a Canadian I guess you go evolving as well I guess in terms of the work you're doing right across the market here yeah I'm gonna stop there anything else you want to add to that died before we go to Q&A no do I think that's a good summation and you know you know to that evolutionary point you know I think that's one of the reasons I know you and I have been in the space for two decades which you know these days seems like an anomaly given how fast technology changes now often people shift careers but but I think it's a credit to you the space right the space continues to evolve the definition of SPM it has evolved you know again five ten years ago there probably would have been you know five boxes on that slide versus eight so um so it keeps it exciting and and you know we like to evolve as the space involves - cool yeah we've got a question here interesting question just you'd ever think about if you look at yeah you write a whole bunch of difference of disciplines and activities there with your framework think being in that framework from a technology point of view can you think of what outside of ICM what would be is there any particular thing that's really hot but you're seen at the marketplace in terms of customers really asking a lot about a particular part of them SPM yeah I mean I think you know what we if I think about the sort of selection exercises I've been helping customers with um as well as just generally what I've seen the vendors you know spective focused on over the last several years um you know analytics is still very you know very hot very important being able to actually take that data that you're sitting on and and make it usable digestible to be able to action off of it um coaching is also another thing that we start to you know see become more and more part of the dialogue whereas you know five years ago probably wasn't even on on anyone's radar now it's much more frequently part of the conversation because I think there's a wreck there's there's a growing recognition that perhaps salespeople aren't as coin-operated as soon as we like to believe so you know coaching and in helping them understand what activities and behaviors they need to focus on it's more important workflow in general is is is hot right now right so I think a lot of organizations have come to what I think is the logical conclusion which is you know it's one thing to have functionality that's it's there and you know you have an administrator or someone that's able to take advantage of it it's another thing to have workflow capabilities that are able to systematically kind of walk you through those functions and to allow a dialogue to take place if you will an auditable traceable dialogue throughout the you know various constituents in the organization that may be involved in that process um those are really you know I think those are the things that we're seeing a lot of you know I think you know there's always going to be conversations around you know how do we better integrate into CRM you know if you think about SPM it's really a continuation of the CRM conversation so you know a lot of discussions today around how do i integrate this with cbq or how do i integrate this with my you know Salesforce automation or CRM tool how do I do more real-time connectivity between those two right so this idea that you know as a rep I might be able to go in and look at my pipeline reporting in my CRM tool and at the same time I'm able to view you know all of my compensation and permissions information those are definitely becoming more you know those types of requirements and discussions are becoming more and more prevalent in the in the evaluations that were that we're assisting with yeah okay so um integration workflow analytics mention recognition it just on the there's one that's actually sorry there's two more questions that have popped up here and then we'll we'll close it off it's quite a few questions popping up there but this question here actually yeah just asking where you can get that benchmarking report you said there was a benchmarking record or a survey yeah yeah if you go to our websites and which is WW Canadian comm and Canadian is CA NID I um you can fill out some characteristics of your organisation and supply your contact information and we will send you a copy of that benchmarking data cool and a final question is if you think about we've told you I'm obviously commissioned there and Senate comp is in the core and your framework what about anything anything with companies the lights on sales comprar effect they even don't have any incentive this this just generally a sales performance management methodology or is it specifically for companies that have a heavy whiting on paying variable come to their salespeople uh you know I think it's there is a growing kind of acceptance that you know performance management not the sales performance management I would say performance management in general is sort of making its way into into the conversation more and more I mean obviously from our perspective it's very heavily focused on sales sales sales performance management but I would argue that you know in other parts of the organization like the contact centre for example performance management is also if not already a part of the conversation certainly an emerging part of the conversation you know I think it's there's sort of an interesting um you know we do a bit of both right we focus on sales performance management we also do some contact center performance management to you and in some ways there's been kind of a swapping between those two right so on the sales side a growing recognition of coaching whereas on the contact centre side you know there's a growing recognition that not just coaching is important but also incentives too so you know from both sides to sort of say I'm seeing sort of a convergence between both of sales and service performance management so I don't know I'm sure if that answered the question but but hopefully it addresses some of those points great thanks Dave thanks for joining our webinar today and I think yeah well there'll be a link going out with a copy of the video as well as we should put a link on to the Canadian website for that benchmarking survey and report and yeah we will be returning again in April with our next webinar but Mielec thanks for joining thank you Sara thank everyone else for joining today and we'll see you see you next month