Enhance Your Sales Performance Management System for Organizations

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hi my name is scw and welcome to selling pow daily report today we have the pleasure of speaking with Chris Cabrera he's the CEO of exacted Corporation welcome Chris thank you for having me your can you explain exactly what exactly does sure can uh exactly is in the sales Performance Management space uh this is a space that includes compensation and many other things like quot and territory management everything to do with getting salese to perform at their Peak how do you see the relationship between sales performance and compensation they're very interrelated sales compensation is a piece of overall sales Performance Management uh it's a piece of the strategy uh certainly an important one but by itself doesn't really Drive enough behavioral changes in the Salesforce and so when you combine comp done right with quote in territory management and then the proper analytics and modeling and things like that that's how how companies can really maximize performance of their sales teams how many times do sales compensation plans change in a company during their year they change a lot and in fact we we that's a good thing I mean uh if if companies are not changing their comp plans that's usually a sign of uh bad things and so companies really should recognize that these compensation plans do Drive behavior and so they need to be adaptive as the economic conditions change or competitive environment changes uh a lot of times companies are doing Acquisitions or adding more people and anytime that happens there's cause to tweak the comp plan or change things the problem is that in the Excel Paradigm today companies make these tweaks without proper modeling and Analysis and they don't really know what the tweaks can can result in and that uncertainty can be very bad for business Chris a lot of CEOs are really concerned with improving sales productivity as a matter of fact in a recent survey was the number one concern how can a good comp plan improve productivity that's a great question and it's one of the most exciting things about the sales Performance Management space because it's very complimentary to CRM uh and also it's more in tune with the DNA of salespeople to want to log in and see how they're being paid and understand how their comp pl's behaving even prior to closing a deal and so in fact we've had many companies of ours customers of ours who have used the acquisition of our service to get the adoption rate of their CRM application up higher so what is your major differentiator of your company versus all the others in that space well there's not a lot in the space really who we primarily compete against is Excel that is the way that the world uses to that's the product the world uses to pay comp uh but being a SAS model being a multi-tenant model that that has what's allowed uh the Advent of exactly in this world of SAS is what's allowed this space to really start to explode what's wrong with Excel Excel is a great app in fact I use it almost every day as I'm sure most people do uh it just wasn't designed to manage the complexities of a large Salesforce and imagine 200 500 a th000 people and the many you know changes that we've already talked about it's very hard to manage that in Excel in fact Gartner has done a study that there's a 3 to eight% known error rate in these manual excel-based systems and so for these large companies that are paying hundreds of people you're talking about tens of millions of dollars so you're saying it's slow it's inaccurate and it's subject for many disputes it is it's all those things and and that's not the worst of it the worst of it is you don't have the webbased visibility and so if you realize that the reason that companies are using comp is is to motivate salespeople to go do something different sell fries with a shake or upsell or cross sell or do all these different things if you don't provide them web-based visibility you're really throwing your money away now let's talk about the visibility do salespeople really get a quick picture of where they stand with your solution they absolutely do in fact uh it can be effectively instantaneous as soon as an order comes into our system it immediately will calculate and and the reports on the web will be updated but more importantly because of these mashups you probably heard Ben off talk about mashups we do these mashups with all the major vendors and certainly Salesforce who not only is a great partner of ours but a customer if you're a Salesforce rep and you're you're using salesforce.com you're going to see your commission statements right through the same interface that you would see and be looking at your opportunities within Salesforce so salespeople can count their money A lot quicker a lot quicker but but they can also gain the comp plan right they can start to say before I close this deal hey what if I get one of these or two of those or what if I change the price how much will that be worth to me we are going to continue our conversation with Chris Cabrera tomorrow and we talk about the key elements that go into a sales compensation plan