Today's Business Leaders Talk IT For SMBs

Small and midsize businesses are fighting tooth and nail for every sale as consumers and businesses cut spending to the bone. With dollars growing scarce, businesses can't afford to leave the incentives and compensation that motivate sales staff to chance or blunt instruments such as winner-take-all sales contests. Yet armed with only rudimentary tools for managing incentive compensation, many business owners don't know another way to manage sales compensation. Recently, bMighty spoke with Chris Cabrera, founder, president, and CEO of Xactly, a provider of software-as-a-service sales performance management products. He shared his insights about the value of managing sales compensation with precision, the impact that effectively motivating a sales force can have on business revenue, and how SaaS has made incentive compensation management affordable for smaller companies.

bMighty: You say most businesses manage sales performance management [SPM] in Excel. Why should they spend money to upgrade to another solution, especially in this economy?

Cabrera: Today, 90% of businesses still manage SPM in Excel [according to Gartner data]. That's the paradigm today, and it's a huge problem. There's up to a 10% error rate in what the system knows [from Gartner, which also estimates that sales compensation represents up to 10% of total company budgets]. What's worse is that these manual systems provide no real-time visibility for the sales team. There are potential SOX violations, not to mention version control headaches. You can't dangle a carrot in front of your sales team three weeks after the month closes; that's not motivational. You need to tell them how they're doing every day.

Don't Miss: The Complete Q&A with Chris Cabrera