What is Sales Performance Management?
Frequently Asked Questions
Everything you need to know about Sales Performance & Incentive Compensation Management
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General understanding
1. What is Sales Performance Management and how is it different from Incentive Compensation Management?
Sales Performance Management (SPM) is a strategic discipline that covers everything related to managing, guiding, and optimizing sales performance including territory planning, quota setting, incentive compensation, coaching, analytics, and performance tracking.
Incentive Compensation Management (ICM) is a subset of SPM focused specifically on the design, calculation, administration, and payment of sales compensation plans.
SPM = end-to-end performance ecosystem.
ICM = compensation and payout engine.
2. Why do companies need a dedicated SPM/ICM solution instead of using Excel or their CRM?
Because manual tools break under scale and complexity. Excel and CRM are not designed for:
- Many transactions
- Multiple plans, tiers, accelerators and exceptions
- Frequent plan changes
- Auditability and compliance
- Clear visibility and trust for reps and managers
- Automated workflows
- Easy and fast integration with other enterprise software
3. Which departments typically use SPM and ICM solutions?
- Sales Operations/Revenue Operations – admins of plans and performance dashboards
- Finance/Controlling – forecasting – accruals, and payout approvals
- HR/Compensation & Benefits – plan governance and alignment
- Sales Managers – team performance insights
- Sales Reps – transparency into earnings
- IT – integrations, data flows, and security oversight
Incentive plan design, calculation, what-if analysis
1. Can the SPM software handle complex compensation plans with multiple tiers, accelerators, caps, and exceptions?
Yes. Modern ICM tools support highly complex and multi-layered plans, including:
- Tiered rate structures
- Accelerators and decelerators
- Product- or geography-specific logic
- Caps, floors, guarantees, and MBOs
- Exceptions and manual adjustments with audit trails
2. Can the ICM system manage clawbacks, adjustments, and disputes?
Yes. Modern platforms include:
- Automated clawback logic
- Adjustment workflows with approvals
- A dedicated dispute resolution module with tracking and communication through A mobile application
3. Can Incentive compensation management simulate and forecast the impact of plan changes before rolling them out?
By leveraging historical performance data, the system allows you to model different scenarios such as adjusting quotas, modifying accelerators, changing product weightings, or introducing new incentive rules and immediately see how these modifications would have affected past payouts.
This capability helps you:
- Evaluate financial impact
- Identify unintended consequences
- Compare multiple plan versions
Trust and transparancy
1. In ICM, can sales reps see their real-time or near real-time earnings?
Yes. Reps get dashboards showing:
- Attainment
- Earnings-to-date
- Deal-level attribution
- Forecasted and projected earnings
- Leaderboards, status, levels
2. In ICM, can managers see performance dashboards for their teams?
Yes. Managers have access to hierarchical dashboards with:
- Individual and team performance
- Pipeline and quota attainment
- Leaderboards
- Alerts for at-risk performers
Governance compliance & auditability in SPM
1. Does the Sales performance Management solution support audit trails and approval workflows?
Yes. The system provides comprehensive auditability and governance features designed to ensure transparency, compliance, and full control over your incentive compensation processes.
Find out more about Vulki by Akeron’s Sales Performance Management software
Full Audit Trails
Every action performed in the system is automatically logged, timestamped, and versioned, including:- Calculation runs and recalculations
- Adjustments and manual overrides
- Plan configuration changes (rates, quotas, eligibility, rules, payout curves)
- Data imports, exports, and integrations
- User actions, such as approvals, comments, and data edit
Find out more about Vulki by Akeron’s Sales Performance Management software
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