In today’s highly competitive business environment, sales execution proves to be one of the most important aspects of the industry. With constant competition from other companies, sales teams must work constantly to maintain an edge over their competitors through specific tactics. Through this process, the sales performance management (SPM) functionality has become very valuable to companies and is essential to any organization’s success.
SPM technologies have the capability to accelerate sales representatives’ time-to-value curves, according to a Gartner report, and the results have shown to be extremely bankable. The software-only portion of the market grew by approximately 10 percent in 2015 to about $715 million and is expected to continue to grow to $1.54 billion by 2019, according to Gartner. Also, statistics show that less than 5 percent of companies using at least one SPM solution have implemented the full set of SPM functionality.
The following list includes a description of the top 5 SPM strategies:
1. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) – A CRM system, such as Salesforce, allows organizations to effectively manage business relationships and the data associated with them in one central location in an attempt to help organize easy access to the information. This SPM helps promote collaboration among multiple departments and enables the ability of the company to have effective management throughout the customer lifecycle.
2. Configure Price Quote (CPQ) – The software category serves as a sales tool that is designed to help companies produce accurate and highly configured quotes. Moreover, a CPQ system automates complex products so salespeople have the materials to produce a sales proposal on the spot. This software category helps increase speed and accuracy in producing price quotes and global distribution of pricing data to stores.
3. Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) – ERP software gives organizations a system of integrated applications to manage the business and also to automate many behind the scenes functions related to technology, most of which are provided by human resources. It is important to note that ERP software does recommend using other software in an effort for collaboration to see maximum results.
4. Human Capital Management (HCM) – HCM software helps automate payroll, performance reviews, recruiting and training. HCM has become more popular as HR professionals are using the software to help run their operations and also to provide functionality to develop their workforce.
5. Incentive Compensation Management (ICM) – ICM software helps improve the visibility of a company’s sales performance and its compensation plans. This software has been dominant in the SPM market, and according to Gartner, it was estimated to be worth more than $2.7 billion in 2015. Since it allows organizations to automate most of the technical processes involved in compensation plans, it makes sense that this SPM is one of the most valuable.
Sales performance management is an effective way to promote efficiency and productivity in the workplace, and with its success in the past 10 years, one can only imagine how much more reliant companies will be on its software.
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