It’s that time of the year again, the leaves are changing, pumpkin lattes are back, and you’re starting to hear about changes to next year’s sales incentive plan. You could sit back and wait and for these changes to find you, hope that they’re small and will be easy to make…but if you’re wrong, you’re setting yourself up for long days and a late program rollout. It would be wiser to seek out these changes now and carefully analyze their impact on the current IC system.

1. Tips to Manage Changes
to Your Annual Sales Incentive Plan
www.spectrumbiztech.com
Phone: 408.418.4996

2. An IC steering committee, typically a cross
functional team, often decides on the annual plan
changes.
The committee may finalize these changes as late
as mid/late December.
Major changes may take 2-3 months to implement
and this puts undue pressure on your timelines and
quality of deliverables like your initial payroll
Any mistake and it will take you 3-6 months to
regain credibility.
The key is to push the steering committee to
provide final compensation plans as early as
possible.

3. The key here is to make the stakeholders
recognize what the key deliverables are to a
new plan year rollout.
Communicate timelines to all stakeholders early.
Track dates to reinforce dependencies and
accountability.
Establish a weekly meeting with all key
stakeholders to assess project risks, and resource
plan for all roles (HR, support, IT, etc.).
If a vendor engagement is planned, secure the
resources early on to help the vendor ramp.

4. Modelling the new plan is the key to
ensure that the plan behaves as
expected.
Understand how the plan behaves
under a variety of conditions in order
to
adjust the plan if the behavior isn’t
desired
serve as a baseline later in the year
when discussions arise to change the
plan.
Monte Carlo simulation can be
particularly helpful to gauge the
financial sensitivity of the plan.

5. Too often, little or no time is spent archiving or
removing unused components (rules, data, reports,
etc.) for various reasons.
The key is to allow enough time to archive and
remove unused components from your system to
keep it as clean as possible.
This simple activity
extends the overall life of your IC system
keeps the processing speeds faster
allows for faster configuration changes

6. You are spending a lot of money on sales incentives
and obviously you would like to drive home the
performance of your sales organization and strong
ROI in your sales incentive plan.
You have implemented the changes and updated
T&Cs of the plan for the new year.
Does that guarantee that the salesforce has
understood the implications? Often the answer is
“No”!
The key is to remind and educate the salesforce on
their sales incentive plan each and every year.
This can be accomplished in multiple ways like
testing and certification
road shows promoting the plan
sessions at a national sales meeting
webinars, on-demand videos, and more

7. Dan Ganse is an accomplished Professional Service and Sales Management Executive with
20+ years of experience. As a Sales Performance Management (SPM) and Incentive
Compensation Management (ICM) thought leader, he has a track record of designing and
implementing solutions throughout various industries such as life sciences, banking, insurance,
and high technology.
As Principal at Spectrum Technologies, Dan is responsible for the strategic and operational
leadership including sales, marketing, channel, and customer account management
activities. His experience includes assisting customers in all aspects of enterprise-wide
incentive management and brings a unique combination of business and software
technology knowledge and expertise to address customers’ incentive management issues.
This presentation is based on an original article by Dan Ganse. The complete article is available at
http://incent360.com/5-tips-to-manage-annual-sip-changes/
Connect with Dan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danganse

8. A technology and business consulting firm offering specialized
services in the area of Sales Performance Management (SPM) and
Incentive Compensation Management (ICM)
Launched in 2006 by a Group of SPM Industry Veterans
Strategic Guidance ➔ Vendor Evaluation ➔ Business Process Re-
engineering ➔ Implementation ➔ Support
Locations
HQ: Santa Clara, CA | ODC: Mumbai, India

9. Contact us:
mktg@spectrumbiztech.com
408408.418.49964996
www.spectrumbiztech.com