According to slickdeals, a US-based e-commerce company, US consumers on average spend about $5400 / Year on impulse purchases. Most of them are food, groceries, clothing, and household goods. To stay relevant and increase their market share, companies need to ensure their goods are stocked up at all times at the right place with the right price and promotions. With the insurgence of multiple D2C brands and also e-commerce channels, the fight to get the self-space with the right visibility has intensified. This increased the prominence of a good relationship between the sales representative and shopkeeper.

So, organizations need to constantly nudge to motivate the employees to achieve their maximum potential. According to multiple types of research, sales representatives are highly motivated by the incentive compensation structure that the organization provides to them. There are several terms for incentive compensation: variable comp, sales comp, at-risk pay, performance pay, etc., but they all mean the same thing.

As the market conditions are highly dynamic due to multiple reasons, companies need to constantly revaluate their incentive compensation management elements, collaborate with the regional salespeople, and communicate transparently to the employees.  To manage all of this companies need tools that can help in scenario planning, dynamic forecasting, collaborative and transparent system which are integrated into the ERP / CRM Systems. But most of the companies are still using traditional spreadsheets, which are non-collaborative and time-consuming to manage the incentive compensation management process. Organizations that have poor incentive management processes saw attrition to the north of 60% in the last couple of years, coupled with increased recruitment costs.

Hence companies should prioritize implementing Incentive compensation management technologies, which are integrated into the traditional ERP/CRM systems, flexible to create multiple incentive elements, Scalable to the different levels of the organization, dynamic in doing scenario planning for multiple situations, and open to all. 

According to multiple Research companies with strong incentive compensation management processes are 20% more productive compared to the other organizations. Companies have realized benefits across the departments:

1. Sales: With collaborative, transparent, and reliable sales data. Sales representatives are motivated to stay on track with goals. Sales representatives focus on revenue-generating activities rather than dealing with calculation and payout errors
2. Sales Operations: With reduced compensation calculation and payout errors, employees could move their focus from data collection, formatting and consolidation to Insights generation and add value to the organization
3. Finance: With dynamic scenario planning and forecasting capabilities, they are equipped with more informed decision-making capabilities. As it is automated, chances of payout errors are minimal, which allows for easy tracking and being auditable.
4. Human Resource: With transparent and holistic performance management systems, HRs can easily keep track of the performance and provide training opportunities to underperformed representatives.

Anaplan is a cloud-based connected planning platform positioned to solve the new-age planning problems of organizations. Customers can easily implement their compensation management processes with multiple incentive elements at scale. It can be easily integrated into ERP / CRM Systems with inbuilt connectors across multiple ETL tools, which automates the process and reduces the chances of errors. Anaplan has inbuilt intelligence for augmenting predictive intelligence and ML algorithms.