4 Core Features of a Sales Incentive Program Solution
They say happy employees are productive employees. One popular way to keep your sales partners happy and show your appreciation for their hard work is to implement a sales incentive program. When the people you work with feel appreciated, they are going to work harder toward their own goals. That, in turn, benefits your business overall.
When implementing and/or managing a sales incentive program, it is important to have an automated solution to ensure the program runs smoothly and efficiently. This ensures easy management for your administrators and a transparent view of sales incentive programs and payouts for everyone involved.
Read on to learn about 4 core features to look for when implementing a sales incentive program solution.
1. Real-Time Visibility on Incentives Payables
Although excitement is high at the beginning of any sales incentive program, interest may dwindle over time. Keeping your team engaged over the life of the program is key. One way to keep them engaged is real-time visibility on incentives payables. This provides better direct communication with more transparency into current incentive programs.
Three of the most significant ways to drive engagement with better visibility include:
- Tweak low performing programs quickly – if you have a sales incentive program that is off to a bad start, you can save it and still find value by making small tweaks.
- Build stronger relationships with brand partners – greater visibility into the channel lets brands accelerate the relationship building process by gaining a more intimate understanding of what is happening and respond accordingly.
- Improve marketing and training – real-time incentive data is useful because it helps you recognize problems quickly. You can use this data to target your marketing and training content more effectively to fix these issues.
2. Manage Complex Sales Agreements and Contracts
Contracts are the lifeblood of your organization. Contract lifecycle management is important for all aspects of your business, including your sales incentive program. You need to be able to create, store, manage, revise, and track progress for each of your agreements. Having a formal, streamlined process with a fully integrated solution will increase overall productivity. It is vital to implement a management program that is fully technology-enabled, collaborative, transparent, scalable, and data-driven.
3. Accrual Calculation and Reversals for Incentives
With any incentive program comes the need to track the total number of incentives being paid out. Implementing a system that does this automatically for each active and inactive program is vital for future planning. Using this data helps determine which programs are successful and which need tweaks or to be inactivated. It helps your organization with financial planning and forecasting.
On the flipside, not only do you need to calculate incentive accruals, but you need the ability to reverse incentives when they are accrued erroneously. This could be a tedious task if done manually. However, it can be seamless with the right sales incentive program solution.
4. Automation of AP/AR Processes
Accounts payable and accounts receivable processes are often very manual processes. Often, they involve paper documents being sent by post from the accounting department to the partner organization. Then they have to wait for a response. This creates a very long cycle.
With document automation software, these manual processes can be abolished and many benefits achieved. These include:
- A faster workflow cycle
- Fiscal savings, because less accounting staff will be required to do the same amount of work
- Greater efficiency and improvement in accounting processes
- More control over the full AP/AR workflow process through continual data being created by the solution