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Delivering robust, timely and accurate sales performance reports is critical to helping
organizations hit their sales goals. Like a radio beam guiding airplanes through the clouds to find
a runway, performance feedback helps sales reps find their targets. Unfortunately, the majority of
sales reporting projects fail to deliver value, although they do manage to spend their budgets - and
then some. It's amazing how paralyzing technology decisions can be on some projects. It's not
unusual for six month delays to be caused by back-to-back tool selections before anything of
value is delivered to sales reps. To deliver meaningful feedback and maximize sales
compensation effectiveness, companies need to address four key areas: have a business
intelligence game plan, totally engage the sales organization, design intuitive, accessible, and
interactive reports and start small but deliver early and often.

A Business Intelligence (BI) game plan outlines how technical infrastructure and reporting
applications will evolve over time to meet the requirements of your sales organization. Without a
game plan, many programs paint themselves into a corner, become trapped and end up being one
of those expensive do-overs you hear about. A game plan should be guided by a list of Key
Performance Indicators (KPIs) prioritized by sales management.

Some projects start at the other end with low level information. "I have engaged with clients that
began their BI journey with low level commission data, and then wished to see sales against rep
tenure, product categories or year over year trends. Unfortunately, this is very difficult to do after
the fact. Had the KPI approach been utilized, data structures could have been designed to provide
sales management with a multi-dimensional view into the key factors influencing sales
performance," says Mahmood, Partner with Compensation Analytics.

When the Soviet Union was under communist control, they were not known for being very
customer focused and the result was poor quality products that nobody wanted - remember the
Lada? You might not think this approach would be popular today; however, far too often sales
reports are designed in a vacuum by the home office, and are received about as well as the Lada.

A much better approach is through iterative design sessions with sales advisory groups made up
of reps and management from all channels and tenure levels. By doing so, not only have you got
the field's fingerprints on the product, you also have a core and diverse group of enthusiasts that
can help roll out the new reports and management processes.

"Technology is supposed to make our lives easier, yet it is amazing how often inadequate
solutions are implemented with lightweight reports buried under layers of menus, with separate
logons and discordant user interfaces. Good designs are rich in information, well organized and
include interactivity such as drill downs and sliders for forecasting, We help our clients design
and rollout reports that will get high marks with the sales force,´ says Mahmood.

Many large reporting projects fail under their own weight. When projects start with too large of a
scope or huge infrastructure components, the excitement around delivering game changing sales
reporting often evaporates quickly.

Your game plan can communicate a broad vision but your project plan has to deliver reports
frequently. Imagine if you went to a fantastic restaurant and ordered the expensive five course
tasting menu and then sat there forever waiting for the first course. Eventually, you would get up
and walk out. Too many projects want to perfect the infrastructure before delivering anything
and their stakeholders lose patience.

Begin by delivering reports in the high priority KPI area and then layer on additional features and
reports as new data structures become available. This approach has proven to be the best
compromise in the need-infrastructure-first versus need-reports-now debate.

With a top down game plan, an engaged sales team, user friendly designs and an approach that
delivers early and often, sales performance feedback can make a big difference in helping your
organization achieve its sales goals.

About Compensation Analytics, LLC.

Compensation Analytics is a boutique consultancy that specializes in streamlining sales
compensation through the alignment of incentives, internal business processes and technology.
Visit http://www.compensationanalytics.com for more information.