Our On-Demand Webinars
Our webinars are recorded and available to you on-demand, at any time. Our SPM technology experts provide guidance on a variety of topics.
If you have any questions about the content, or how it can be applied to your business, let us know. We’re here to help.
On-Demand Webinars
OpenSymmetry SPM technology experts have decades of combined experience. They aim to provide guidance on a wide variety of SPM/ICM topics to support sales strategy and increase organizations’ ROI. Our webinar collection comes from a variety of sources – virtual events, think tanks, roundtables, corporate sessions, and much more – where our Thought Leaders provide valuable education to prospective SPM users and adopting clients.
The Framework for SPM/ICM Best Practices
Learn about the necessary initiatives that an organization must adopt to support their sales initiatives to drive revenue and create a better alignment within their sales teams.
Vendor Selection and Strategy Planning
In the dynamic world of Sales Performance Management (SPM), selecting the right vendor for technology solutions is akin to making the significant decision of buying or building a house. This analogy serves as a guiding framework for organizations to understand and navigate the vendor selection process effectively.
How to Invest in an ICM Upgrade: Key Considerations for Future Planning
After moving on from spreadsheets, many large enterprises find themselves facing a whole new set of problems. Now, they’re locked into an outdated incentive compensation management tool that’s hard to use, costly to maintain, and difficult to scale.
Join us for a panel discussion hosted by CaptivateIQ and OpenSymmetry — and featuring compensation experts Alisa Rawnsley, Senior Compensation Manager at Intercom and VitalIy Patsay, Senior Manager of FP&A at Pantheon — to hear best practices and real-life examples for how to build and manage a compensation strategy that is tied to business objectives and helps drive revenue goals.
SPM Reporting: The Art of the Possible
Join Brian Ramaeker and Donia Abuzaid for a second webinar to dig into the art of the possible with SPM reporting. Few companies truly leverage the power of SPM to drive meaningful business intelligence from their SPM programs. This session is designed to help get the creative juices flowing by sharing the full spectrum of what an SPM solution can provide. Brian and Donia will provide real examples of where companies have deployed reporting and analytics to help drive their business and increase revenue. During this discussion, Brian and Donia will leverage their consulting background to share specific considerations to help support you on your own engagements.
Best Practices for Building New Sales Plans in Your SPM Platform
In today’s dynamic business landscape, organizations seek innovative approaches to motivate and engage their sales force while achieving strategic goals. Incentive plans are a vital tool for achieving this. To succeed in this endeavor, it’s crucial to understand the intricacies of incentive plan design.
Reinventing Sales: Outbound Selling, Incentive Compensation, Tech Innovations & Why You Should Care
Michelle Seger, Revenue Growth and Sales Executive at SalesGlobe sits down with Edward Moss, Account Manager, EMEA, to unravel the dynamic shifts transforming the sales landscape.
The two will hit on a variety of sales topics, so whether you’re a top-tier sales leader seeking innovative strategies, a sales professional keen on honing your craft, or simply intrigued by the evolving trends in sales, there’s something here for everyone!
Best Practices for Building New Sales Plans in Your SPM Platform
It’s that time of year when a little coaching can go a long way! Whether you are a seasoned resource or tackling this effort for the first time, our panel of SPM experts and solution architects will provide insights into how best to make sales plan updates in an SPM platform.
Where Do Sales Performance Management (SPM) Systems Provide Value?
This virtual, interactive discussion will review the SPM category, including its most important vendors, and offer a clear description of what these solutions provide – based on feedback from 200+ users of these SPM technologies. The session is recommended for firms considering adopting or optimizing SPM solutions, or those who are interested in learning the latest on this solution category.
How a Global Product Company Achieved SPM Success
In this webinar, learn how DSM was able to make a more informed decision based upon the reality of today, next year, and the years after that with their new SPM solution.
CFO Financial Predictions for 2021
Sales compensation is important for businesses but the real question is how many are using it strategically. This webinar dives into comp plans and the operations that support it.
How to Build a Business Case for Incentive Compensation Management Technology
This discussion focuses on how organizations need consistent, up-to-date, and dynamic Incentive Compensation Management (ICM) administration to ensure accuracy. Without it, process and strategy can be rigid and not quickly adaptable to changing market conditions.
APAC SPM/ICM Challenges and Technology Consideration
In this on-demand webinar, in partnership with Varicent, our panel of experts discuss key challenges and considerations for the sales compensation process in APAC.
Sales Incentive Plan Design & Administration: Understanding the SPM Space and the Value these Solutions Provide
This discussion highlights how well these SPM applications are meeting client needs (and their costs). We intend to provide a forum for questions about available solutions, enable you to hear what others are considering, and help you clarify appropriate next steps in the process to consider an SPM solution for your company.
9 Resources to Optimize Your Comp Management
This webinar on having the right incentive compensation management solution will provide the powerful data you need to optimize your territories, quotas, comp plans, and the overall performance of your entire sales force.
What HR Professionals Need to Know About SPM
This webinar focuses on what SPM is, what SPM best practices can do for an organization, and how HR can leverage SPM technology solutions to more than just pay sales commissions or incentives.
SPM Territory & Quota Planning Optimization
In this on-demand webinar, partnered with Varicent, we dive into territory and quota planning best practices and how you can address them.
Sales Incentive Plan Design & Administration
This webinar review trends in incentive plan governance and the increasingly important role of software packages designed to help companies automate their sales compensation process.
How The Great Resignation Is Leading to a Shift in the World of Commission Management
This webinar highlights the current market and its complexities, and compelling insights driving employee behavior.
Achieving World-class Sales Compensation Design
Join our webinar for a deep dive into incentive plan design best practices and benefits of an effective sales compensation plan assessment.
Sales Incentive Plan Design Principles and Best Practices
This webinar focuses on plan design for emerging markets, plan design for different cultures, and plan design across multiple countries.
Research First Look: Updated Survey of SPM and ICM Solution Providers
This webcast with Sales Management Association presents the latest update in our ongoing research on sales performance management (SPM) and incentive compensation management (ICM) solution providers.
Incentive Compensation and Sales Performance Reporting Practices
Join us for a first look at recently concluded research on incentive compensation and sales performance reporting.
Your Commission Admin Left, Now What?
This coffee chat, in partnership with CaptivateIQ, is focused on the challenges facing sales commissions and finance teams in managing sales compensation and sales performance.
The 5 benefits AstraZeneca received by transforming their manual sales commission process
This on-demand webinar, in partnership with Performio, is focused on the challenges facing sales commissions and finance teams in managing sales compensation and sales performance.
Updating the Sales Compensation Program
Presenters share not only some of the common pitfalls to avoid, but also best practices to use when making updates to your sales compensation plans.
RevOps: Cutting Through the Hype
This is the first of a two part series on revenue operations, “revops” where we join forces with Varicent and The Alexander Group to cut through the hype.
Sales Performance Management in Financial Services
This webcast focuses on how common issues and risks related to sales compensation management and how high performing firms address these challenges.
SPM/ICM Solution Providers
OpenSymmetry & NI share research results that examined how sales performance management (SPM) technology providers perform against client needs.
Designing High Performance Sales Compensation Plans
This webcast covers the tactical considerations of sales incentive compensation plan design, including selecting the most effective performance measures, and a lot more.
Realizing Value from Revenue Operations
How can organizations find value from a revops model? Join us with industry experts from Varicent and The Alexander Group as we unpack this.
Best In Class Sales Compensation
A client case study that provides a real-life scenario of how the approach of using industry best practices coupled with cutting-edge technology helped improve transparency.
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.
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
