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Advisory Partners

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Alexander Group

Alexander Group provides revenue growth management consulting services to the world’s leading marketing, sales and service organizations. Founded in 1985, Alexander Group partners with their clients to develop customized go-to-customer solutions that are practical, high impact and aligned with the needs of the business.

Alexander Group helps the world’s leading companies build the right revenue vision, transform their organizations and, most importantly, deliver results. Their work is based on a proven set of tools, methodologies and experience to optimize revenue growth. More than 3,000 clients, many of whom continue to work with them year after year, have realized sustained added value from their efforts.

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Better Sales Compensation Consultants

BSC helps companies drive optimal sales results through creating better sales compensation plan designs and sales effectiveness solutions. The company was founded by industry veterans Clinton Gott and Ted Briggs in 2009, and along with Joe Clarkson and Per Torgersen, their consulting team averages over 26 years of years of sales compensation plan assessment and design experience.

BSC’s delivery model exclusively features senior-level resources working collaboratively, flexibly, and proficiently with clients. BSC is known for crafting motivational, cost-effective, and customized sales compensation solutions that leverage the best and most appropriate cross-industry practices.

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Chief Executive Group

Chief Executive Group, the leading community for business leaders worldwide, publishes Chief Executive magazine (since 1977), ChiefExecutive.net, Corporate Board Member magazine and BoardMember.com, as well as conferences and roundtables that enable CEOs to discuss key subjects and share their experiences with their peers. The Group also runs the Chief Executive Network, the leading CEO membership organization arranged by industry, and facilitates the annual “CEO of the Year,” a prestigious honor bestowed upon an outstanding corporate leader, nominated and selected by a group of peers. Learn more at BoardMember.com.

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Novo Insights

Novo Insights is a firm of former practitioners who help their clients analyze, design, and implement compensation programs. Novo Insights’ operating experience coupled with their proven tools and methodologies help you get to the best plan design in a fast, efficient manner. They understand how to marry great plan design and enabling technologies to maximize the return on your compensation program investment.

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Prosperio Group

Prosperio Group is a management consulting firm that uses compensation as the “wedge issue” to help companies define goals, realign and clarify roles, increase focus, and align employee/management goals at all levels of the organization. Prosperio Group knows that compensation models need to evolve to fit new objectives and changing roles, and we work with companies to uncover and resolve issues lurking just beneath the surface.

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Sales Management Association

Sales Management Association

The Sales Management Association is the world’s largest cross-industry professional association for managers focused in sales force effectiveness. Its members include sales managers (at all levels, from first-line to senior-most), as well as professionals in sales operations, sales enablement, commercial effectiveness, and other functions that support the sales force. The association promotes professional development, peer networking, best practice research, and thought leadership to help those who support, manage, coach, or lead sales organizations. The association’s Sales Force Productivity Conference is held each fall.

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SalesGlobe

SalesGlobe is a leader in sales effectiveness consulting and sales innovation. They help companies with new solution development that connects their sales strategies to growing revenue and the bottom line. SalesGlobe’s services include sales transformation, sales organization and talent design, strategic account planning, sales compensation, quotas, and change management.

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The Cygnal Group

The Cygnal Group

The Cygnal Group is a consulting firm devoted exclusively to sales compensation plan design. The Cygnal delivery model is lean and efficient, developing the right comp plans quickly and affordably. The result is better comp plans that focus, motivate and align the sales team to get the right results at the right cost of comp for the business.

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Willis Towers Watson

Willis Towers Watson

Willis Towers Watson is a leading global advisory, broking and solutions company that helps clients around the world turn risk into a path for growth. They deliver solutions that manage risk, optimize benefits, cultivate talent, and expand the power of capital to protect and strengthen institutions and individuals. Their well-established team of dedicated Sales Effectiveness and Rewards consultants, with a presence in over 35 countries and access to unparalleled surveys and innovative research, provides a healthy blend of consulting advice and practical industry experience to help companies maximize their sales potential via improved sales compensation plans and other sales talent management programs and tools. 

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OpenSymmetry Global Offices

About Us

OpenSymmetry enables clients to achieve greater operational efficiency and get better sales results. We are a global consulting company specializing in the planning, implementation, and optimization of industry leading technology suppliers of sales performance management solutions.

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CONSIDERATIONS WHEN REPLACING YOUR SPM TECHNOLOGY SOLUTION

Understanding the challenges companies face when migrating Sales Performance Management (SPM) technology solutions can be a significant undertaking. This paper is designed to provide high-level guidance to stakeholders who carry this responsibility. As OpenSymmetry has helped many companies evaluate and effectively migrate to new technology solutions, we are sharing seven key areas that we find critical to completing this kind of effort.

1. CURRENT STATE ASSESSMENT & FUTURE STATE PLANNING

A critical initial step before migrating to a new SPM solution is understanding how well your current program is performing across people, processes, and technology. From there you can devise a future state vision for how your SPM program should operate. By understanding both current state gaps and what your future state needs look like, you can effectively begin defining requirements while also clearly articulating success criteria. It’s important to recognize that your previous or initial SPM implementation may not have gathered all necessary processes/requirements, so it’s vital to take a fresh, holistic view in this first step.

2. DATA INTEGRATION

One of the most complex and time-consuming requirements is determining how to best leverage current source data feeds to support the new platform. Within the context of your current state assessment and future state planning, the team should review what their reporting, analytics, and any future state compensation elements needs are to ensure a meaningful inventory of data requirements are defined. SPM solutions vary in terms of how data is gathered, translated, and uploaded into the system. Some solution applications may have a standardized format requiring additional configuration, whereas others may have the ability of data field mapping, which provides additional flexibility. The ability to own the data translation from your source systems to the SPM platform is key. Another focus point is to ensure that you evaluate all manual feeds to incorporate automation, as well as any additional error validation processes.

3. HISTORICAL DATA

Migrating historical data is an often-overlooked requirement when moving from one SPM platform to another. To keep costs down and minimize complexity, clients may want to ID only the data that is needed to ensure ongoing management of comp (e.g. payment history) and then transfer detail-level data into data storage to be referenced at a future date. It is important to consider what historical data is needed for the new system for reference on future payments

4. PROCESS IMPROVEMENT

Each SPM solution may require users to interact with the system in different ways. This area may need additional attention, especially as it has the potential to improve processes currently employed to manage sales compensation. Understanding the impact a new system will have on current processes, as well as those who manage the processes, is critical to ensuring a successful launch and ongoing management of core processes. As an example, two of the leading solutions in the market have very different expectations regarding the skills users need to possess to effectively maintain compensation plans and reports and, in some cases, execute the day-to-day activities. Defining expectations of your staff related to the new technology, prior to the project, will ideally give your organization the necessary time to introduce training that ensures effective ongoing management of the program.

5. WORKFLOW

SPM solutions vary widely in their ability to support automated workflow. As a result, there are significant challenges for sales compensation teams related to an SPM migration. Capabilities can range from templates to existing documentation, levels of routing, and even implementation of a stopgap for a payee to accept plan documentation prior to payout. Within the context of your future state definition, capturing and defining areas where automated workflows can be leveraged is a necessary part of the core requirements. Before a new system is deployed, it is important to map these processes out to drive user adoption, leverage the SPM system as an auditable repository, and minimize email management.

6. REPORTING & ANALYTICS

It is critical to develop a holistic vision of information distribution to the various stakeholders and tools used to deliver this content (i.e. static pages vs. dashboards). Similar to workflows, different vendors have various capabilities related to reporting for the end users. Assessing these capabilities against your business requirements is imperative to the success of the roll-out. For example, some vendors require more robust configurations in the system (e.g. crediting logic) to enable specific analytics capabilities, while some solutions, architected specifically for reporting and analytics, have much more robust capabilities. Another area for consideration is the use of the vendor’s reporting solution against your in-house technology stack. Some solutions make it easy to port data into new environments, which could be a consideration in helping to keep the number of reporting tools requiring management to a minimum.

7. DEPLOYMENT

The implementation of a new solution should be designed to minimize the impact on payees and managers. One of the most critical aspects of your effort is assessing how all stakeholders will be impacted and how to mitigate any disruption. It is important to identify upcoming changes for your sales organization, administrators, and other internal partners with a plan in place to offer the steps needed to ensure the best chances for solution adoption.

The first step when considering a new SPM platform is an assessment of your current program and the development of a future state vision. OpenSymmetry offers a no-cost workshop to help you gain an understanding of how your current SPM program performs against your needs and industry best practices, as well as a readout on current solutions in the market.

Leveraging the OpenSymmetry assessment methodology and knowledge of the leading SPM providers, you will be equipped with:

• A current state analysis scorecard
• The framework for a business case to support change
• Contemporary intel on the SPM market and SPM vendor capabilities
• High-level deployment and license cost estimates

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