Sales Performance Management Strategies

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>> Gerhard Gschwandtner: Hi my name is Gerhard Gschwandtner and welcome to Selling Power TV. Today we have the pleasure of meeting with Laura Roach. She's the leader for sales performance strategies and Xactly. Welcome Laura.

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Laura: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

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Gerhard: You're with Xactly. What does Xactly do exactly?

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Laura: Well we focus on sales performance management and we provide tools to solve those problems with companies. So whether it be calculating your commissions, managing your quotas, your territory, brining all of that together with the tool to automate it and that's what we provide and the services around that.

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Gerhard: So you are a specialist in sales performance management. Can you define for us what that means?

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Laura: Gartner did a good job with actually defining the pillars of what a sales performance management is so if you look at that you've got you know quota, setting your goals, what are your goals? What are you going after? Territory? What is your playground to go after as a sales person? Where are you targeting? and then actually paying the commissions on that and then wrapping it up with how are we doing? What are the analytics with that and sales performance management is really putting the umbrella over that and pulling it all together and being able to manage that effectively ultimately driving results to your bottom line.

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Gerhard: So what is the difference between Sales 1.0 and Sales 2.0 when it comes to sales performance management?

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Laura: Oh that's an excellent question cause you look at 1.0 it's very siloed assumed spelling and you look at technology out there it might be an enterprise application it's sitting on premise versus Sales 2.0 is really taking the web 2.0 technology, the cloud computing that you've seen out there and really leveraging that power and so you look at you can go across all those pillars I just mentioned and be able to pull all that data together and you really have some powerful, rich data that's all collaborating and talking together. You didn't have that before in Sales 1.0.

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Gerhard: So you've taken this a step further with the rich data. You've created a center of excellence. Can you tell us about that?

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Laura: Yeah no I'm glad you asked that because I'm very passionate around you know being on the side of sales performance management having done plan designs and been in the business side as well as working for a vendor like Xactly and so what we've done with the Center of Excellence is we've created a community to bring everybody together. It's a destination site for all that data. Sso whether it be people, processes or technology it's one form for people to come to and gather so if you think about before Sales 2.0 you kind of had to gather by going to a vendor meeting or going to a you know cocktail hour or something which are all great and people still do that but now with Sales 2.0 and actually a community and a forum you can have people from finance, sales operations, HR, sales all gathering together to share that knowledge.

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Gerhard: So how do people find the Center of Excellence and how do they get into this?

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Laura: Oh well that's an easy acronym, it's SPM for Sales Performance Management and then Center of Excellence. So SPMCOE.com anyone can join. It's very specific around the industry and the community. All you have to do is join like you do any community whether it be Linked in or Facebook and you know a few easy clicks and then you can join the community.

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Gerhard: So is this commercial free or it's just a library of knowledge and the interaction tool where members can interact with one another?

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Laura: So it actually advertising free. So you're not gonna get what you normally get with the Google ads and stuff but there are partners I mean the benefit of the community is expanding your network you know throwing that bigger fish you know net out there so you can capture a lot more information and so that's what the community is about and so you can go out there and you can blog, you can get discussion forms, there's the knowledge base, resource links, white papers and so we have a broad community, not just people that are vendors in the sales performance space but people who are practitioners.

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Gerhard: So if I'm a pharmaceutical company and I want to change my compensation plan I can go into the community and ask others in their industry what are you doing and what is a fair way to change the commission in this economy.

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Laura: Absolutely. No and that's the reason I mean it should be viral I mean you want the community sharing and growing that and then you benefit with experts out there that have done research like Xactly, Xactly's got research and benchmarking so we have as I mentioned earlier a repository of all this data so you've got a cross hundreds of companies what's actually happening with their comp plans so not only can you hear in theory or in practice what's going on with the industry you can validate it with benchmarks as well.

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Gerhard: Laura besides benchmarks you also share best practices right?

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Laura: Absolutely.

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Gerhard: So where would I find as a sales manager if I for example have all commission sales people and I want to move to another compensation plan which is sometimes a very dramatic shift in a company strategy what can I find?

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Laura: So you could just go out to a community in your vertical and say pharmaceutical for example I want to look at what are other people doing in the community and just chat there. We also have a concept of sales performance experts so you could ask the experts, people who are actually experts in the industry that are not only collaborating on the site but have actually been providing services there and just chat with them specifically and get their feedback or you've got the resources. So I talked about the tools so you can not only chat and hear about best practices but you can validate it as well with studies that are out there.

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Gerhard: So what can you tell other companies that are listening to this you've created this community which obviously is going to feed your sales and customer satisfaction how challenging is it to build a great community?

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Laura: Think about any party that you have. You want to have you know all the guests there, you want to have everybody enjoying, you want to have all the pieces there, you're not gonna have a good party if you don't have music and you don't have you know your food and your entertainment well that's the same as the community. I mean you're not gonna have people participating in the community unless you have all of those pieces and so you have to have the right technology to share. You have to have the right content and you have to make sure that people are sharing, it's not an advertising board for what you know who's looking for a job or it's not a place for people to say hey come see my site and I'll sell you these services. It's a place to join and interact. So it's challenging to do that if you don't have the right technology and you have to have the right technology to support that community so that it lives and thrives.

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Gerhard: Laura I like the analogy and for anybody who wants to create a community or tap into that sales conversation management community follow the link on the screen.

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Gerhard: Thank you Laura.

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Laura: Thanks a lot.

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==== Transcribed by Automatic Sync Technologies ====