Aberdeen Group Report on Sales Compensation Management

Over 130 companies were surveyed to identify the strategies, capabilities, and enablers that Best-in-Class firms are using to improve sales productivity and effectively manage compensation plan design and administration. Companies are pressured by increasingly complex sales compensation plans, developed out of the need to increase market share and productivity. If companies can find the right business strategies to develop plans, and automate calculation and reporting, success will follow.

Best-in-Class companies improved their reporting accuracy by 25% and payment lag by 30% more than laggards.

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Compensation Management

VUE Compensation Management is a powerful, flexible and intuitive tool that makes it easy for insurance organizations to organize and streamline complex commission and incentive programs.

Drive Successful Product Lines
Utilizing the intuitive interface of VUE Compensation Management, companies can create incentive programs that maximize sales of the most profitable products. Compensation strategies can be changed quickly in response to market opportunities, providing companies with a competitive advantage, and delivering the flexibility sales and marketing executives need.

Align Compensation to Company Goals
With clear compensation metrics and commission statements, there’s no question on how individuals are paid. This clarity ensures that producers focus on the priorities defined by the compensation program rather than spending time on shadow accounting.

Accurate Compensation Runs - On Time
Rich automation capabilities greatly reduce the administrative and operational costs of managing the compensation payout process. A robust transaction engine ensures the accuracy of all commission and bonus payouts regardless of product, distribution channel complexity or transaction volume.

Accurate Compensation Runs - On Time
Rich automation capabilities greatly reduce the administrative and operational costs of managing the compensation payout process. A robust transaction engine ensures the accuracy of all commission and bonus payouts regardless of product, distribution channel complexity or transaction volume.

Features :

Unlimited hierarchies including support for multiple hierarchies per payee

Unrestricted payout schedules and compensation plans using client-defined business rules

Flexible client-defined bonus programs

Advance and draw support

New business registration tracking ensures full awareness to prepolicy milestones

Easy plan maintenance with full audit trails

Insightful research tools to resolve compensation disputes

Comprehensive licensing and compliance management

Retroactivity

Performance-tuned high volume transaction engine

Powerful and extensible reporting

Field level security and auditing ensure control and accountability in system modifications

Customizable workflow for rules-based distribution of communications to producer channel members

Integration engine using standards-based XML technologies supporting SOA and Web Services interfaces

Add-on VUE Online module for web-based agent access

On-site or hosted deployment models

VUE Software

Enterprise Incentive Management

Organizations that deploy Enterprise Incentive Management (EIM) are able to tightly align employee, partner, and dealer behavior with corporate objectives in order to increase revenue and profits. Specifically, Enterprise Incentive Management refers to the modeling, administration, and reporting of all forms of non-fixed (e.g., salary) or variable pay.

EIM is mission-critical — it drives the behavior that supports organizational strategy. Incentive compensation is one of the largest line items on the enterprise P&L — in some cases, greater than 10% revenue. But for most large enterprises, managing incentive payments to employees, distributors, agents and channel partners is a monumental task that has the following challenges:

Many enterprises still struggle using spreadsheets, or try to work with other financial systems not designed for managing incentive compensation. As a result, they lose millions of dollars a year due to inaccuracies or mistakes in payouts, and risk demotivating valuable sales people and channel partners through delays and re-dos.

In addition, the lack of a proper solution prevents many enterprises from gaining full value from their incentive compensation programs — the ability to more strategically and competitively manage sales resources.

• Increased business risk due to an inability to plan, model and forecast effectively. Without EIM, sales incentive plans and decision-making information is locked away in multiple systems, including spreadsheets. This leads to an inability to make fact-based decisions when evaluating the best sales incentive strategy.
  
  
• Missed revenue and cost management opportunities due to an inability to execute timely and accurate sales plans. Because sales plans are hard to create and manage, incentives are out of line with corporate initiatives, such as new product introductions, resulting in revenue lost through missed opportunities.
  
  
• Reduced sales and incentive effectiveness due to lack of visibility into performance. The sales team often lacks clear insight into their pay for performance, resulting in lack of alignment and sales days lost through shadow accounting. The finance and sales ops team fail to maximize performance because they lack the analytical tools to understand the effectiveness of sales incentives.