IBM Cognos Sales Performance Management software allows companies to automate commission calculations, manage sales quotas and territories, provide sales analytics and reporting, and model compensation plans. This helps drive sales behavior, reduce costs, and provide visibility into sales performance. The software provides a single platform to manage the entire sales performance process, including quota planning, territory management, channel management, incentive compensation, and analytics and reporting. This gives organizations better control and insight into sales, helps ensure accurate compensation, and boosts overall sales effectiveness.

1. IBM Software
Business Analytics
IBM Cognos Sales
Performance
Management
Highlights
•
Automate commission calculations
•
Top-down and bottom-up quota planning
•
Sales analytics and performance reporting
•
Compensation plan modeling and
forecasting
•
Manage and track territory assignments
•
Electronic plan approvals, inquiries and
sign offs
•
View robust audit log
•
Available on-premise and Cloud
Benefits
•
Drive sales behavior to boost cross-sell
and profit
•
Reduce administration costs and errors
•
Align revenue targets to sales resources
Improving sales effectiveness with speed,
flexibility and visibility
With a single application that manages sales compensation programs,
data and processes, organizations are able to significantly reduce
administration costs and drive profitable sales across the entire
product portfolio.
By automating compensation calculations, IBM® Cognos® Sales
Performance Management distributes detailed commission statements
to sales professionals in a more timely manner and with greater
accuracy. As a result, field reps can conduct more customer-facing
activities instead of spending time tracking their own sales and pay,
while more accurate calculations reduce overpayment of commissions
which help control corporate costs.
Sales leaders and executives have even better visibility across the sales
organization with the alignment of field reps along with their
products, quotas and territory assignments, enabling them to
effectively drive performance.
Cognos SPM provides a single, integrated platform to manage sales
performance processes including:
Territory management
Efficiently manage frequent territory reassignments and maintain
crediting rules to help ensure more accurate compensation and optimal
sales coverage. Cognos SPM enables organizations to define territories
across complex combinations of geographies, industries and
named accounts.
Quota planning
Align corporate revenue plans and objectives to each sales
representative by establishing the appropriate quotas, commission
rates, and product mix to motivate the right desired sales behavior.
Cognos SPM automates workflow processes to efficiently facilitate plan
sign-offs and approvals across the organization from a top-down or
bottom-up approach.

2. IBM Software
Business Analytics
Best-of-breed sales performance
management solution
“ ognos SPM was selected based on its ability
C
to provide us the speed, flexibility and
visibility for our sales compensation across all
of our business units.”
Business user centricity
Cognos SPM is designed for business users and does not
require IT resources or technical expertise in order to deploy
and administer incentive programs. Compensation analysts
are able to navigate through, create, and administer plans and
reports without coding or scripting skills. This helps enable
organizations to quickly roll out new incentive plans that
more accurately align the sales team to constantly changing
marketplace conditions.
— Global Information Services Director of a Global Medical
a
Technology Company
Channel management
Identify and manage sales talent to develop a high performing
sales force. Cognos SPM tracks and manages employee
attributes including certifications and training to help ensure
that compensation and plan eligibility rules are properly
applied and maintained.
Analytics and reporting
With a better understanding of the composition of their sales
forces, organizations can better manage their internal and
external sales capacity to capture more business opportunities.
Cognos SPM provides an easy-to-use, graphical reporting tool
that enables business users to quickly generate highly formatted
and customized reports. Sales managers and executives can gain
deep, detailed insight into sales performance and effectiveness
such as profit margins, cost of sales, and account penetration in
order to drive more effective selling strategies and enhance
up-sell and cross-sell opportunities.
Incentive compensation
Modeling and forecasting
Build and manage incentive plans efficiently through a
graphical interface to drive corporate growth and profitability
across the entire product portfolio. Cognos SPM automates
commission calculations while managing complex
compensation rules including sales splits, prior period pay
adjustments, selfreported sales, and plan changes in a timely
and accurate manner.
Cognos SPM provides modeling capabilities that enable users
to simulate the effects of plan changes or new components
prior to roll out in order to optimize sales strategies and
reduce risk. By modeling against real historical data, managers
can more accurately forecast the payout amounts of incentive
programs to control costs.
Robust calculation engine
Organizations can more quickly deploy sales incentive
programs and processes using Cognos SPM’s library of
prebuilt solutions. Users can focus on the distinct aspects of
their plans rather than creating them from the ground up,
dramatically reducing implementation time and expense.
Faster to implement
Cognos SPM delivers a robust calculation engine for
managing sales compensation processes. With support for
defining complex compensation logic, managing retroactive
pay adjustments, tracking effective dates of incentive plans or
territory assignments, and streamlining quota relief
allocations, Cognos SPM can significantly reduce the amount
of manual administration effort and calculation errors in
managing sales compensation.
Systems integration
Cognos SPM consumes data from any number of disparate
data sources, integrating directly into an organization’s
existing infrastructure. Compensation results and commission
statements can also be exported directly to downstream
systems including payroll and customer relationship
management (CRM) applications, business intelligence (BI)
systems and corporate portals.
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3. IBM Software
Business Analytics
Figure 1: Cognos SPM delivers high-level and in-depth detail into sales performance measures
and metrics
Customer experiences
About Business Analytics
Large bank holding company:
IBM Business Analytics software delivers data-driven insights
that help organizations work smarter and outperform their
peers. This comprehensive portfolio includes solutions for
business intelligence, predictive analytics and decision
management, performance management, and risk management.
•
Reduced their commission calculation cycle from 2-3 weeks down to 1
day.
•
Impacted their profit margins by 25 percent by improving their plan
management.
•
Reduced their annual review cycle down to monthly incentives.
Business Analytics solutions enable companies to identify and
visualize trends and patterns in areas, such as customer
analytics, that can have a profound effect on business
performance. They can compare scenarios, anticipate potential
threats and opportunities, better plan, budget and forecast
resources, balance risks against expected returns and work to
meet regulatory requirements. By making analytics widely
available, organizations can align tactical and strategic
decision-making to achieve business goals.
World-class employment services company:
•
Unified their data across Human Capital Management (HCM),
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and financial applications into a
single repository.
•
Supported complex compensation plans to streamline sales planning
and execution.
•
Delivered detailed, personalized commission statements to their
payees so they could fully understand their payout results.
•
Modeled their compensation plans before rollout to better understand
and optimize its impact on their business.
For more information
For further information please visit
www.ibm.com/business-analytics.
Leading provider of process control and yield
management solutions company:
•
•
To request a call or to ask a question, go to
www.ibm.com/business-analytics/contactus.
An IBM representative will respond to your inquiry within
two business days.
Achieved 5-6 additional selling hours a month per employee by
improving reporting accuracy and reducing shadow accounting.
•
Request a call
Reduced their administration of compensation process by 50 percent.
Reduced errors in data and calculations by automating imports from
key source systems.
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January 2013
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