Sales Credit Assignment Gets Compelling

One of the stickier parts of compensation management is figuring out who gets how much of a particular commission when there's more than one salesperson involved. Centive, a provider of sales compensation management software-as-a-service (SaaS), today announced the Summer 2007 release of its Compel product. The Compel Automated Credit Assignment feature is the first auditable and fully automated crediting suite in an on-demand application, according to the company. Compel Automated Credit Assignment allows companies to more easily manage account-crediting rules within Compel, including split credits, team credits, and rollups, as well as direct credit. This helps companies strategically leverage compensation to drive sales performance, revenue, and profitability, according to Centive. By moving credit assignment up front--into the sales department instead of finance--Burlington, Mass.-based Centive is making it easier for companies to adopt the feature. "This is a pretty cool tool," says Denis Pombriant, founder and managing principal of Beagle Research Group. "There are two ways to market a product like this; most do it as an aid to the finance department. I like the way Centive is positioning credit assignment as a sales closing tool as well as a finance tool." Other features of Compel Summer 2007 include:

• Enhanced Custom Reporting Capability: Includes the ability to add calculated fields to reports on the fly as well as formatting enhancements that include full charting and graphing capabilities.
• Adobe Flex 2.0: Enhancements to dashboards for sales representatives and sales executives.
• Plan Document Generation Tools:Enhancements in the compensation-plan distribution and approval process. Also, the creation of a sales-plan detail report customized for each representative with such features as rates, accelerators, quotas, and a payment schedule.
• Quota Management: Includes automated creation of quota templates and quota reports that ease the burden of quota setting, reporting, and maintenance on executives and compensation administrators alike.

"The Summer 2007 release is particularly illustrative of Centive's strategic vision for continued development of Compel around what we refer to as 'The Sales Operations Center,' " said Michael Torto, president and chief executive officer of Centive, in a statement. "Having now mastered modeling, crediting, and reporting, we next plan to further enhance Compel's existing territory and quota management capabilities and add tools to support sales forecasting and analytics, expense and budget planning and other related sales performance management functions." "The big competition Centive sees is in the on-demand market, and they're trying to maintain their lead," Pombriant says. In the long term, he sees compensation management growing into something more rounded, something that will pervade the sales department and extend to other parts of the organization. "Finance will need to have this in order to keep up with the rest of the company--it's a dynamic situation. Centive has done what it needed to do with Compel." Related articles: Money Matters New incentive management solutions deliver top-flight tracking and compensation information to companies and reps alike. Viewpoint: Sales Compensation Best Practices Designing new plans, by Centive's CMO. Viewpoint: Sales Compensation Best Practices Plan modeling and forecasting, by Centive's CMO. Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, Sales Compensation Style Centive unveils the latest release of its on-demand sales compensation management system, featuring custom reporting and operational enhancements. Sales Compensation is Back, Baby! The market is experiencing growth for the first time in years as vendors introduce new delivery models and applications to drive strategic value.

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