What is Sales Performance Management?

Sales Performance Management (SPM) is the process of using performance data to drive sales effectiveness and improve sales results. At the core, Sales Performance Management is built around Incentive Compensation Management for automating commission calculation and related processes. Sales Performance Management expands from incentives to include quota planning, territory management, analytics, dashboarding and sales coaching.
In smaller organizations, SPM can be executed by good managers and analysts. In large, multi-channel sales organizations, there can be significant data and organizational obstacles to ensuring effective SPM execution and overall alignment. Sales Performance Management solutions readily address these challenges by enabling sales operations to automate the commissioning process, leverage metrics, reports, analytics and dashboards, plan territories and quotas, and use workflow features to clarify goals, align the organization, uncover opportunities and improve business results.

When pursued, Sales Performance Management has the potential to dramatically increase sales effectiveness by motivating sellers, aligning individuals to corporate goals and uncovering opportunities for improved selling, all while reducing operating costs.
Through a comprehensive set of domain specific applications, Merced Systems helps organizations with their Sales Performance Management initiatives by offering:

• A robust incentive compensation management core engine
• Advanced analytics
• Quota management
• Territory management
• Sales coaching
• Tools for sales improvement campaigns

Merced Systems also maintains the largest, most experienced team of Sales Performance Management professionals to assist your organization with implementation, program design and change management.

back to top

What is Service Performance Management?

Service Performance Management is the process of using service performance data to drive service excellence and customer loyalty at the lowest possible cost. At its core it is frontline performance management, which includes personalized dashboards delivered to every employee in the operation, integrated workflow to deliver automated best practices, such as coaching or quality management, and comprehensive reporting for management control. Service Performance Management also includes advanced analytics which can be applied to understanding contact reasons, repeat call patterns, customer journey, customer segmentation, and customer satisfaction.

When pursued, Service Performance Management has the potential to dramatically increase customer satisfaction and lifetime value by aligning individual service agent goals with strategic objectives- improving the effectiveness of frontline staff and uncovering and fixing the root cause of problems using analytics.

Through a comprehensive set of domain specific applications, Merced Systems helps organizations with their Service Performance Management initiative by offering:

• Personalized dashboard
• Best practice coaching
• Advanced employee segmentation
• Detailed transactional analytics, such as First Contact Resolution and contact reasoning
• Variable compensation management
• Goals management

Merced Systems also maintains the largest, most experienced team of Service Performance Management professionals to assist your organization with implementation, change management and application design.

back to top

Why do organizations need Sales Performance Management and Service Performance Management?

Too often, sales and service organizations are unable to effectively and efficiently execute on improvement initiatives (such as new product launches, customer experience campaigns or increased cross-selling programs) because success requires coordinated alignment within their individual sales and service operations, requires change to core processes as well as to frontline performance, and requires coordination across their two organizations.

Sales Performance Management and Service Performance Management deliver significant business impact for any enterprise, including:

• Rapid Return on Investment through increased sales, customer satisfaction and productivity
• Culture of continuous improvement, increasing accountability and overall performance
• Competitive advantage through improved execution and business agility
• Alignment across functions resulting in improved customer loyalty and lifetime value

Why is comprehensive performance management so hard to execute?

• Operational data locked in silos and not delivered in context (right person, right time, etc.)
• Lack of front line visibility into their performance, inhibiting proactive self-improvement
• Inability to put individual employee goals and incentives in context with organizational goals
• Rigid or hard to manage incentives limit the organization's ability to adapt to changing business conditions
• Limited tools for coaching and other performance-related workflows
• Inadequate analytic capabilities for measuring FCR, contact reasons and understanding the customer journey across all contact channels

back to top

Why Work with a Best-of-Breed Vendor?

Merced Systems uniquely delivers the domain specific solutions to not only deliver improvement within both sales and service organizations, but across the two operations including:

Leading Sales Performance Management

• Single screen, excel-like calculators
• Data availability for real-time performance
• Intelligent adjustments
• Scalability
• Fully integrated Quota Management, Territory Management, Analytics and Reporting
• The only closed loop Dashboards, Coaching and Improvement Campaign capabilities available

Leading Front-Line Performance Management

• Personalized dashboards for every employee in the operation
• Advanced reporting and analytics
• Forms, workflows and tasks to deliver closed-loop employee development activities
• Automatic alerts to accelerate issue resolution
• Integrated data delivering a consolidated view of performance
  

Leading Analytics

• Pre-built applications built specifically for sales and service operations including customer journey, voice of the customer, first contact resolution, pipeline analytics, incentive plan effectiveness, and product analytics
• Predictive models
• Real-time analysis
• Advance ad-hoc analytics

back to top

What is Merced Performance Suite?

Merced Performance Suite is an advanced, fully integrated performance management application designed from the ground-up to meet the unique needs of front line Performance Management and turn sales operations and service operations into higher performing, data data-driven organizations.

By integrating data from disparate sources, providing personalized dashboards to every employee, and, delivering advanced reports and frontline analytics throughout the organization, Merced Performance Suite increases accountability while establishing a culture of continuous improvement. Merced Performance Suite also automates critical managerial activities, including employee coaching, recognition, and performance improvement to allow front-line managers to become more effective and efficient and have more time and better information with which to develop their teams. As a result, operations are able to substantially improve productivity, boost revenue and increase customer satisfaction.

back to top

What is Merced Incentive Compensation Management?

Merced Incentive Compensation Management is a comprehensive Incentive Compensation Management solution that provides the end-to-end ability to create, manage and distribute all aspects of an incentives program. Automating the process of commission, bonus, and incentive administration in support of any type of variable pay strategy, Merced Incentive Compensation Management offers organizations greater calculation accuracy, reduced costs for managing incentives, improved sales force and service employee motivation and retention, and ultimately a pay-for-performance system which rewards employees for achieving targets that align with business strategy.

back to top

What is Merced Intelligence?

Merced Intelligence is a suite of innovative targeted analytic applications which enable executives, managers and analysts in sales and service operations to produce data-driven insights across the business lifecycle. Customers can view linkages across key processes, uncover opportunities to reduce costs, identify execution gaps and drive targeted improvement campaigns.

back to top

What is Unique About Merced Systems' Solutions?

Merced’s customers experience substantial impact from their performance management projects because Merced’s offerings are deep in their respective categories and broadly cover more sectors of performance management then alternatives. Merced offers:

• Domain Specific Applications built specifically for performance management and with specific features needed for sales and service functions
• A family of integrated applications from analytics, to incentives, to frontline performance management, to monitoring, that work together in a closed loop process for greater business impact
• Solutions across sales and service functions to align the entire customer facing organization for maximum results
• Expert consulting and professional services

back to top

What are the typical benefits, ROI and time to payback?

While specific returns vary by application and industry, companies typically recognize a full return of investment within 6 months for a Sales Performance Management and Service Performance Management project. By improving the effectiveness and efficiency of critical customer facing sales and service employees and processes, organizations can rapidly increase revenue, boost customer satisfaction and maximize customer life time value. With Merced Systems line of domain specific applications, operations can maximize adoption while minimizing deployment time, further increasing return on investment. Customers have recognized significant improvement in sales, productivity, effectiveness and customer experience.

These organizations realized a rapid return on investment in their programs by taking advantage of the key benefits offered by performance management:

1. Improved Process Design - Driven by:

• Advanced transactional analytics to analyze key processes including First Contact Resolution, Customer Journey sales performance, and contact profiling
• Predictive analytics to complete rapid root cause analysis
• One version of the truth to measure and improve cross departmental coordination
• Detailed modeling to predict incentive compensation plan cost and likely impact
  

2. Increased Front Line Employee Productivity and Revenue Generation - Driven by:

• Increased self-correction through frequent viewing of performance data
• More effective variable pay and incentive programs
• Increased coaching time and effectiveness of Supervisors
• Increased sharing of best practices from top employees to developing teammates
• Retention of staff as a result of transparent objectives and improved supervisory management
  

3. Increased Supervisor Effectiveness and Efficiency - Driven by:

• Reduction in administrative activities, such as data gathering for coaching or performance appraisals
• More efficient and impactful employee coaching due to availability of individual performance data and historical coaching and training context
• Manager and director transparency into Supervisor performance and effectiveness
  

4. Improved Analyst Performance - Driven by:

• Substantial time savings due to automated data integration and cleansing
• Business-driving insight resulting from focus on analytic tasks vs. repetitive report generating tasks
• Improved strategic decision making from - "one version of the truth"
• Identification of and focus on true business drivers and metrics - not just data that is easy to access
• Reduced errors and rework
  

5. Greater Executive Impact from Culture Change - Driven by:

• Ability to ensure complete organizational alignment with critical initiatives and goals
• Focus on the meaning, rather than the accuracy, of the data
• Performance-based environment without subjectivity or perception of management bias; a culture of accountability
• Transparency into performance of the business, across all roles and departments
  

back to top

Who Within the Organization is Affected by and Benefits from Sales Performance Management and Service Performance Management?

One of the defining characteristics of Sales Performance Management and Service Performance Management is that every employee, irrespective of his or her role or level, benefits from performance management.

• Front line employees are able to improve their performance by increasing self-correction with frequent viewing of performance data and variable pay.
• Supervisors are better equipped to coach their employees with immediate access to agent or sales representative performance data and a reduction in rote administrative activities, such as gathering dispersed employee performance data.
• Executives have access to high level operational performance data that enables them to match employee and team goals to larger operational objectives.
• Analysts have immediate access to the tools and data needed to perform comprehensive root cause analysis, predictive modeling and ad-hoc reporting

back to top