The Sales Performance Management (SPM) market has been growing quickly, and is now considered a mainstream technology. “Sales Performance Management (SPM) has a market penetration of more than 50% of the target audience,” as per the Gartner® Hype Cycle™ for CRM Sales Technology, 20211. SPM is one of those sales technologies, and it has taken hold faster than expected, with good reason.
The increasing popularity of SPM solutions
SPM refers to the automation of sales back-office processes, the primary one being incentive compensation management (ICM)—basically, the processing of commissions. Other components of SPM include quota setting and territory management, and related planning, analytics, and reporting tasks.
SPM has come a long way in just the past five years. In 2016, Gartner estimated that SPM solutions had a market penetration of just 1% to 5% of the target audience.2 Even as recently as 2018, SPM was in the “trough of disillusionment” with a market penetration estimated at 5% to 20%, and was tagged as “early mainstream.”3 In 2021, just three years later, SPM now is considered by Gartner to be “mature mainstream” with a market penetration of more than 50% of the target audience.1
Why SPM?
Why do companies buy SPM solutions? “Companies usually implement ICM first, to eliminate manual processes, then deploy planning and quota and territory management next,” according to the 2021 Gartner Hype Cycle report1.
Sales compensation is unique in that it typically requires complex processing to credit all individual sales transactions to the appropriate parties involved in the sale, and then calculates commissions based on predefined business rules, which may change frequently due to new sales strategies and initiatives.
SPM makes sales operations more efficient and gives sales management more control over sales incentives so they can better drive the performance of sales teams. Centralized SPM enables better planning and coordination, and offers the transparency needed for good governance and compliance with global regulations. At the same time, the automation of these sales back-office processes reduces costs, improves accuracy and timeliness of incentive payments, and fosters greater trust within the sales force.
The beqom SPM solution
beqom is listed in the Gartner Hype Cycle for CRM Sales Technology, 2021 1 as an SPM vendor. beqom has provided a Sales Performance Management solution since 2009 as part of its Total Compensation Management solution. beqom is unique in handling sales compensation and broad-based employee compensation like salary and bonus on the same unified platform. Companies like PepsiCo and JM Family use beqom to manage not only global sales compensation but employee compensation worldwide, giving them a holistic view of total compensation for sales and other employees.
[1] Gartner, "Hype Cycle for CRM Sales Technology, 2021" by Adnan Zijadic and Melissa Hilbert, 26 July 2021.
[2] Gartner, "Hype Cycle for CRM Sales, 2016", by Tad Travis, Ilona Hansen, 5 July 2016.
[3] Gartner, “Hype Cycle for CRM Sales, 2018”, by Melissa Hilbert, Tad Travis, 9 July 2018.
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