How to use technology to manage and administer a sales incentives program?

Ready to take your sales incentives program to the next level? You are at the right place because today, we will specifically talk about the automation of sales incentives and how technology can be your biggest asset here.

Sales motivation and sales incentives go hand-in-hand. Introducing technology as a means to strengthen the incentive program and make it result-oriented involves broadly two things - one, consists of using technology to empower your salespeople, and the other empowers the back office to ensure timely and effective calculations, disbursements, and more.

Sales Incentive Platforms for Administrators

Over-dependence on spreadsheets, especially Microsoft Excel, to manage and administer your sales incentive program is cumbersome. Because Excel, unfortunately, was not designed for the management of a complicated gamut like sales incentives. Thankfully, technology has evolved at a neck-breaking speed in the last few years. Today, we have multiple sales incentive software that have helped resolve innumerable problems posed by manual handling and spreadsheet calculations.

The Answer Lies With Technology

That’s true! Be it the risk of factual and calculation errors, speeding up the process of incentivizing your sales, or saving up on redundant work, automation takes the program several steps ahead. The right sales incentive software puts your incentive program on the fast track. Meaning the software, with its intuitive and analytical features, powered by the cloud, AI, and other latest technologies, empowers the program to be driven in real-time, relevantly, and effectively.

Continue reading to understand how a sales incentive platform will help manage and run your sales incentive program viably, end-to-end. To ensure the thorough and flawless working of your tech-enabled sales incentive program, you need to focus on four core areas:

Platform Type
Integrational Aspects
Data flows & Processes
Reporting Needs

1. The type of platform will help resolve administration complexities

Broadly, there are two types of sales incentive systems that you can work with. One is the self-managed platform, while the second is a tailored software system curated for your organization.

Between the two, the former or the self-managed platform is a system that is available off-the-shelf and customized or tweaked as per the specific needs of the enterprise. It is either a no-code or a low-code software and comes with reusable modules. Admins must use and rearrange these modules to prepare various components of the incentive program. Since, in most cases, there’s zero coding, and most of these platforms have graphical user interfaces, the work of admin is pretty easy, and they can visually create a complex plan without having any know-how of the underlying source code.

When you go in for the creation of a software solution from scratch, you need to hire an IT vendor with developers having deep knowledge of coding and technicalities. The admin, in this case, is mostly dependent on the vendor for customization of the software as per changing needs of the incentive program. Additionally, the enterprise will need to spend a lot on engineering and hardware support, which can make the incentive software costly.

2. Integrations with your existing tech stack

Backend integration is an essential part of the sales incentive software. This means that whichever software system you use for your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), payroll system, etc., the sales incentive app or platform should work in tandem with these systems.

Seamless working means that all the concerned software systems have to be synced to facilitate faster and more accurate pulling of data from one to the other. You need to find out about system lags and processing times before signing a contract with a vendor for the incentive app.

3. The Data Workflows of the Platform

Data is a crucial deal today because it will help you understand how your salespeople operate and their possible challenges; second, most of your competitors are taking the help of data to make their sales verticals foolproof and performance-oriented.

The right sales incentive software provides data not just to the administrators or the higher-ups in the system but puts it right in the hands of the people who can use it effectively - your sales team. They can do their calculations in real-time, obtain summaries, gain visibility into their performance metrics, and more. The purpose is to empower the team while ensuring that the incentive program is fair and relevant.

In addition, ensure that the software system’s data processing capabilities are at par with the best technologies available in the gamut today.

4. Reporting Needs

The drive behind going in for complete automation of the incentive program is the reports that the system can generate and give you key insights. Whether it is about the day-to-day functioning or the annual audits, the system has to generate reports at the granular level to support the existing program and commission cadence.

To top it off, the reports should be a part of the admin dashboard customized as per your organizational needs.

Features That a Sales Incentive Platform Should Have

Real-time calculations of commissions
Capturing sales data and calculating incentives accurately
Have pre-built incentive plan templates and creating of new plans
Real-time visualization of crucial metrics for the admin on an integrated dashboard
Intuitive User Interface with zero coding requirements for the backend team
Seamless integration with your existing software systems
Self-management of commissions through embedded commission trackers
Visibility to sales reps to track their performance and payouts in real time
Analytical and compliance reporting tools
Supports multiple currencies
A SaaS-based software app that works on the cloud
Mobile support

All in all, a modern sales incentive app should have features that facilitate your sales team to perform their best and stay motivated. It should have a robust backend that enables easy and transparent incentives management and promote high-growth business.

Interested to know more? We have a specialized platform powered by sales motivation technology. Call us for a demo and see My Incentives in action!