People are the critical element to organizational growth. When you give people the tools they need to thrive, they’re able to do and be their best. And a more engaged workforce, where people feel appreciated and valued, is a more sustainable workforce.
Sales teams specifically are a strategic asset and critical differentiator. They bridge the gap between businesses and their customers, and they are central to generating revenue, expanding into new markets, and staying ahead of the competition.
Yet organizations across all sizes, industries, and geographies continue to struggle when it comes to keeping their sales teams engaged and productive. Why? Sellers are bogged down in administrative tasks or they don’t have the tools or insights they need for accurate forecasting. Managers struggle to access the data they need to make decisions quickly when it comes to adjusting sales territories, quotas, and compensation plans. On the other hand, sometimes there are too many tools: IDC research found that 79% of businesses report having more than 12 separate sales automation tools and systems.
All of these challenges have a negative impact on the overall employee experience. And in a competitive labor market, this means a more difficult time attracting and retaining top talent.
Increasingly, there is a need to equip sales teams with effective sales performance management tools that can help improve operational efficiency, motivate and engage employees, improve job satisfaction, and reduce churn. SAP Sales Performance Management solutions empower organizations through agile and connected incentive management processes that motivate sales teams while improving operational efficiency and maximizing business results.
Providing Comprehensive Sales Performance Management Tools
SAP Sales Performance Management solutions provide a comprehensive set of tools, including built-in workflows, embedded intelligence, rich analytics, mobile capabilities, and personalized dashboards. The solutions include SAP Commissions, SAP Territory and Quota, and SAP Agent Performance Management. They provide organizations with flexibility to create, optimize, and deliver territory, quota, and incentive compensation plans at speed and scale in line with evolving business needs and changing market dynamics, to help ensure increased seller engagement, drive performance, and support business growth.
Our customers are recognizing significant results with SAP Sales Performance Management. Maui Jim, an American sunglasses manufacturer, reduced the number of incentive plans from 34 to eight, and gained the ability in just one week to roll out any new compensation plan. Expedia Group, the world’s largest internet travel company, streamlined incentive compensation at scale to deliver rate consistency and performance visibility for its 2,600 sales representatives across the world.
Bringing SAP Sales Performance Management into the Human Experience Management Portfolio
Global organizations have continued to adopt SAP Sales Performance Management solutions since they became part of the SAP portfolio via the CallidusCloud acquisition in 2018. In 2021, SAP Sales Performance Management became a part of the SAP SuccessFactors Human Experience Management Suite.
We made this decision to help our customers deliver individualized experiences for their sales teams while providing the agility, compliance, intelligence, and transparency needed to drive positive business outcomes. Since this move, we have continued to make significant investments in SAP Sales Performance Management solutions, focused on simplifying our commercialization, modernizing the solution architecture on hyperscalers, embedding analytics and artificial intelligence (AI), and delivering more than 200 features and functions to drive process improvements.
It’s simple: sales performance management is critical to putting people first and accelerating business growth from the inside out.
In this new world of work, where organizations simply have no other choice but to put people and their experiences first, customers using the SAP SuccessFactors Human Experience Management Suite are realizing the value of market-leading capabilities, including sales performance management, to attract and retain top talent.
SAP SuccessFactors Human Experience Management Suite capabilities help sales teams to thrive by providing leaders with the tools and guidance they need to hire the best candidates, onboard new hires, develop skills, improve performance through coaching and feedback, and help ensure that every employee is rewarded and valued. In addition, powerful employee listening tools make it easy to gather employee sentiment data so that the right actions can be taken to close experience gaps.
At SAP, our focus continues to be on helping organizations deliver the best employee experience possible, and this includes ongoing investment in delivering a robust sales performance management solution with global reach. That is why this month we will release new dashboards, rich embedded analytics, and a number of process improvements.
These updates — and innovations in the future — will continue to help organizations provide the experiences their sales teams need to accelerate business performance, including winning compensation programs that keep everyone motivated.
Learn more about SAP Sales Performance Management solutions.
Maryann Abbajay is chief revenue officer for SAP SuccessFactors.
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