Handshakes or hands-off: Managing the B2B sales experience
Today's B2B sales experience blends digital sales with the human touch. What's the right mix right for B2B sales success?
Many organizations face a quandary when choosing to build or buy solutions for certain business challenges, including sales commissions. While sales commissions are quite strategic in nature, putting this on the list of technology priorities tends to occur at a certain point in the company’s maturity.
Many times, once all the core processes start humming, someone, usually from sales ops, realizes the need to automate sales commissions. This creates a rush to deliver “something that will work.” The intentions start out noble, but typically only focus on current needs. Oftentimes, organizations can easily underestimate the complexity.
Sales commissions solution: Why build?
There are three main scenarios for considering a build effort for sales commissions: build to suit, build to fit, and organizational uniqueness.
Build to suit is usually the strongest argument that works in favor of a build decision. Organizations can create something that exactly matches their needs; they have the control and know-how within their existing teams. Additionally, the organization’s internal IT team may say they can deliver a custom solution that the business needs for a lower cost than buying a solution.
In a build-to-fit approach, the IT teams plan to reuse/repurpose existing tools and technologies. Typically, this means custom-built solutions are created on the available platforms, at times bringing a blend of built and purchased solutions to support this business process.
Finally, an organization may believe that their business needs are so complex or unique that off-the-shelf solutions cannot fit their business needs.
In these scenarios, there may be other considerations, such as the desire to control when new capabilities are introduced, maintenance of existing business processes, or specific needs within the sales organization.
Why buy a solution for sales commissions?
The list of considerations regarding a buy decision surrounds what value the solution vendors can bring to the organization — items that go way beyond pricing, including:
- Business agility
- Configure vs. customize
- Adoption best practices
- SaaS and security models
- Ability to integrate
Let’s explore these to see how they can impact your decision.
Change on a dime
The nature of business and selling is constantly changing. As businesses change, organizations need to change their sales commissions in a timely, efficient, and compliant manner.
Agility is a key requirement to keep pace with the accelerating rates of change while also maintaining top- and bottom-line growth along with a positive sales rep experience.
Show me the way: How guided selling helps seal more deals
The modern B2B sales process is dynamic and fast-paced. Through guided selling, businesses can empower their sellers to engage more effectively with customers and win more deals.
This requirement often surfaces when sales commissions teams are asked to execute changes in in days, not weeks or months. Purpose-built solutions must provide this agility for their customers, including features that enable organizations to make targeted changes easily, from the plan level all the way down to the individual rep and everything in between.
The above activities are commonly assessed based upon whether an outcome is based on configuration changes or whether the solution must be customized. Customization takes time, resources, and may even require IT.
Discovering what customization is required for specific use cases and how important those are to a business is central to a build versus buy decision.
Best practices, SaaS, and integration
Organizations considering a buy scenario often look for best practices their peers are leveraging to solve problems. There also are continuous changes in the regulations surrounding sales commissions. Ensuring compliance and security, along with innovative features is attractive for many organizations assessing solutions on the market. Some of these features may be more critical to their business than others
As with most solutions, SaaS delivery models allow customers to enjoy the latest and greatest innovations. Sales commissions data is highly sensitive, from order data and performance to compensation and employee salaries. This makes security and access restrictions a top priority for any commissions solution.
Sales Commissions process needs to absorb/deliver data from multitude of upstream and downstream systems from CRM, Order to Cash, HCM, POS (Point of Sale), BW, Finance, Policy Administration, Loan/Account Origination systems etc. A typical customer landscape can have multiple touchpoints for the commissions environment to function effectively. Hence, most leading providers use standard tools and technologies to support changing ahead of the customer’s changing landscapes.
Decision time
While both schools of thought have their merits, sales commission vendors have come a long way in their ability to deliver configurable solutions that allow customers to get more from less.
This is key as customers manage multiple challenges: changing business models, constant M&A scenarios, retroactivity, mid period corrections/changes, annual transaction volumes, regulatory changes like GDPR, and a complex data landscape.
For most customers, out-of-the-box features allow them to take advantage of the marketplace learnings without having to go through the pain of a custom build.
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