With the CallidusCloud acquisition, SAP added industry-leading sales performance management functionality to the SAP Sales Cloud pillar of SAP Customer Experience.
This is important because sales performance management requires a holistic approach to ensure sales representatives are set up for success.
It starts with setting your sales representatives’ territories and quotas based on data, not gut feel. After territories are set up for success, you can use your data to ensure forecasts are accurate and based on historical performance trends, combined with your sales representatives’ activity on deals. Finally, you need to make sure that your sales compensation plan is driving the right behaviors to drive the right results.
SAP Sales Cloud includes this functionality, including comprehensive commission management, territory management, and quota management. Let’s take a look at all three.
Commission Management
SAP Commissions (formerly CallidusCloud Commissions) is an end-to-end configurable solution that can manage your entire incentive compensation process from sales order to payment for your direct as well indirect sales force.
The solution can suit your business process and deliver agility to meet the fast-changing market scenario. It reduces commission errors, aligns sales to corporate goals, and helps you spend your compensation budget wisely. This out-of-the-box solution delivers transparent incentives in an agile manner and gives you the power to change sales behaviors.
SAP Commissions makes incentive compensation management a fast, easy, and accurate process, and delivers complete transparency and control over past, present, and future compensation payments, enabling you to make the right business decisions with powerful dashboards, prepackaged reports, and robust modeling.
These are the key features of commission management with SAP Commissions:
Changing Sales Behaviors
You can give your sales representatives and sales managers unprecedented visibility into payouts and performance such that sales representatives can accept commission plans, raise compensation disputes, see detailed compensation statements and performance metrics, and forecast income anytime, anywhere, and on any device. Sales representatives can see real-time attainment and key performance metrics to understand where they stand versus their sales plan.
Built-in, Accurate Crediting
For any given sales deal, you can accurately process complex splits to credit an unlimited number of direct and indirect payees across internal and external hierarchies. Using the robust built-in crediting engine, you can credit over complex roles, relationships, and numerous functions through simple drag-and-drop actions.
Settlements of Compensation Disputes
Handling compensation disputes are the most time-consuming tasks for compensation administrators. SAP Commissions not only reduces the number of errors and disputes you have to deal with but also makes it easier to deal with disputes as and when they do come in. Compensation admins can research and settle disputes fast with one-click traceability and can share this information with the sales rep, often settling the dispute in minutes rather than days.
Complete Auditability and Traceability
This solution has 100% audit trail visibility and traceability for Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) compliance. Every screen has detailed audit logs that record who made what change and when. Previous states are tracked by time and by user. You can easily trace any payout amount back to the originating sales transaction with one-click traceability.
Integration to Backend Systems
You can easily integrate this application to all major CRM, ERP, and HR systems. It integrates both at the data level as well as at the process level, so you enjoy real-time data insights and have the flexibility to execute business processes across your multiple systems.
Territory Management and Quota Management
Territory and quota planning are often an overly complicated and laborious exercise that happens at least once a year in every company. When done with spreadsheets and email (as is the case in most companies), the process takes too long and is next to impossible to track. Your sales operations team tends to pour over it for months on end, doing multiple iterations, and more often than not your sales representatives don’t feel they have a say in the targets they get for the year.
You can automate the territory and quota management process with SAP Sales Cloud by using actionable data based on historical performance and whitespace potential to value territories, as shown in this figure.
Key functionalities for territory and quota management are as follows:
Sales Planning
For quota setting, territory management, and quota management, SAP Sales Cloud comes with a quota recommendation engine that spares you any complex formula writing. This tool allows you to shrink the time spent on territory and quota planning from months to just weeks and potentially even reduce the administrative overhead involved in the process. Completing planning earlier also has other benefits: sales representatives who were sitting idle waiting for their targets can get productive faster.
Catch Inequities in Territory and Quota Allocation
Out-of-the-box graphical reporting gives a snapshot of territory and quota allocation across teams and geographies to sales managers. These reports call out inequities in the system and protects against under-allocation/over-allocation to individual sales representatives. Managers can ensure that targets are aligned to corporate goals, all target accounts get good coverage, and none are neglected.
Scientifically Allocate Quotas
A powerful quota recommendation engine intelligently recommends quotas for individual sales representatives based on various metrics, such as historical data and SAP CRM opportunity data. Using both backward-looking as well as forward-looking metrics helps ensure quotas are set in a fair and scientific manner both for new businesses and existing businesses.
Out-of-the-Box Integration
Integration is possible with all major CRM platforms, compensation management software, ERP systems, billing systems, and HR systems. With a choice of extract, transform, and load (ETL) tools, you can connect to any system that has an API, be it software-as-a-service (SaaS) or on-premise. Its integration with SAP S/4HANA is under development and should be generally available soon.
Collaboration
With this tool, it’s easier to involve the sales field in how you set their quotas. Getting their buy-in is important so that they take responsibility for their targets. With a built-in workflow, sales managers can assign quotas that give every sales rep the opportunity to request a change. Territory and quota management ensures faster, more intelligent, and collaborative quota assignment, distribution, negotiation, and acceptance across your direct and indirect sales force. The built-in workflow also keeps a record of all change requests and subsequent conversations, making every change trackable and auditable.
Conclusion
SAP Sales Cloud brings a host of helpful features for teams looking to enhance their sales performance management tasks. The acquisition of CallidusCloud helped round-out the features already available to those using SAP Sales Cloud, meaning those running on SAP have a robust and comprehensive solution for their sales activities.
Editor’s note: This post has been adapted from a section of the book SAP C/4HANA: An Introduction by Sanjjeev K. Singh, Drew Messinger-Michaels, Sven Feurer, and Thomas Vetter.
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