As an Executive, you need to understand how ICM adds strategic value to your organization to support business objectives. This White Paper answers your questions and demonstrates potential benefits.

1. The ROI of Incentive Compensation Management – Making the Business Case
Incent Perform Grow
Adding Strategic Value
to Your Organization with
Incentive Compensation
Management

2. Adding Strategic Value to Your Organization with Incentive Compensation Management
Any process designed to drive meaningful business results must provide efficiency, scalability and ease
of use. Incentive Compensation Management (ICM) solutions successfully deliver those features while
offering better insight into incentive remuneration.
But how do you make the business case?
Organizations have difficulty justifying the ‘spend’ without a clear understanding of the ROI delivered by
these solutions.
This paper helps business leaders understand how ICM solutions add value to their organizations. It
allows executives and their teams to embrace the technology with the confidence that it supports their
business objectives.
To take full advantage of an ICM system and better understand the ROI, organizations should consider
the potential benefits outlined in this report.
Overview
ICM solutions can reduce costs by eliminating errors and overpayments, enhancing audit trails and
streamlining administrative processes.
Incentive compensation can be costly and may account for a considerable portion of an organization’s
budget. Most of the costs come from payments, but the administrative costs are also significant.
When you also understand that managing incentive-based payouts requires organizations to do the
following tasks, then it is clear that the expenditure can be dramatic.
Auditing payment accuracy
Adjudicating appeals
Integrating plan changes
Lower Costs: How ICM Drives Cost
Reduction
Integ

3. Adding Strategic Value to Your Organization with Incentive Compensation Management
Furthermore, older, homegrown systems demand ongoing upgrades and enhancements that can create
an unhealthy dependence on IT support, which also consumes ICM dollars.
Organizations that have not adopted an ICM tool regularly incur significant costs from errors and
overpayments. Overpayments are rarely reported to the company, meaning those funds are lost forever.
Companies can lose a significant amount of money from the overpayment errors.
Newer ICM solutions automate and streamline processes so companies spend less on staff to keep
the system running. New solutions also reduce the costs of outside auditors as improved accuracy and
clearer trails reduce audit-driven inquiries into payment practices.
ICM offers greater accuracy. This advantage is arguably the low-hanging fruit of ICM benefits – the
savings are realized almost immediately through the elimination of errors and overpayments.
Manual Solution ICM Solution
ACCURACY
RELIABILITY
REDUCED
ADMINISTRATIVE
COST
ERRORS
OVERPAYMENTS
ADMINISTRATIVE
BURDEN

4. Adding Strategic Value to Your Organization with Incentive Compensation Management
Increased Productivity: How ICM Improves
Employee Performance
Greater Alignment: How ICM Aligns
Incentives with Business Goals
Homegrown, manual and spreadsheet-based tools are inaccessible and can result in lengthy payout
cycles, errors and miscalculations. These challenges generally translate into employee dissatisfaction
and frustration as staff receive less immediate reward for their efforts, and have limited access to real-
time data on how their accounts are performing.
Furthermore, when employees spend their time trying to understand their performance and
compensation, it detracts from the time spent on more meaningful work.
A quality ICM solution ensures that:
Calculation cycles are shortened, speeding up the time between employee
performance success and payment
Frequent plan changes are accommodated and integrated quickly and seamlessly
Employees have easier and real-time access to data to understand their plans and
performance expectations
In a spreadsheet environment, administration is cumbersome, time consuming, and lacks the ability
to effectiently communicate performance with employees.
Automation allows visibility for employees to be more motivated and excited to perform, bringing
considerable return on the ICM investment.
When employees cannot see the link between pay and performance, the incentive structure is lost.
When earning calculations are difficult to interpret, employees will struggle to understand how incentives
are earned, causing a disconnect between the plan’s effectiveness and business goals.

5. Adding Strategic Value to Your Organization with Incentive Compensation Management
User-friendly,
easy-to-
access
dashboards
with goals
Clear, timely
earning
statements &
calculators
GOAL
ATTAINMENT
Pure alignment drives the desired behavior.
A robust ICM solution can help ensure that business goals are well aligned with compensation goals and
everyone in the organization can understand and buy into plans. It also allows employees to conduct
“What If” analysis to project their potential payouts on various projects, accounts or transactions.
When plans are more transparent – resulting from user-friendly dashboards, clear earning statements and
earning calculators – employees are more invested. Employees perform better when they are motivated,
and that performance drives business growth. This level of ROI cannot be overstated.
A robust ICM also maintains alignment with business goals as the company grows. Industries and markets
change quickly, so ICM solutions offer companies the flexibility to revise their compensation plans and
ensure they maintain alignment with company goals. Companies can respond to changing circumstances
by revising their ICM according changes in staff, product lines, customers or territories. Similarly, ICM
solutions are scalable to accommodate company growth, including the growth from acquisition.
+ =
Better Insight: How ICM Enhances
Management Functions
When reports are unreliable, delayed and difficult to generate, management can struggle to make
thoughtful and strategic business decisions.
Without a robust reporting tool, it’s challenging to understand the full impact of ICM plans and to
determine how they should be adjusted or changed. Manual systems tend to lack sophisticated reporting
capability, and often the reports generated are unreliable, outdated and irrelevant by the time they reach
management’s hands.
Newer ICM tools offer real-time analytics and reporting that provide real-time insight into plan
performance and impact. Executives can immediately get key performance indicators on individual
accounts, territories or sales teams. ICM solutions also allow management to forecast model plans to
make strategic business decisions going forward.

6. Adding Strategic Value to Your Organization with Incentive Compensation Management
Another key piece of ROI comes from the enhanced management insight achieved through “What
If” analysis. This benefit is considerable as it arms key decision makers with meaningful, 360-degree
data to anticipate future performance and productivity by modeling compensation plan, quota or
deployment changes with reliable and accurate metrics.
REAL-TIME INSIGHT
FORECASTING &
MODELING CAPABILITY
SPEED TO MARKET
ADVANTAGES
RELIABLE AND
ACCURATE DATA
ENHANCED ICM
REPORTING

7. Adding Strategic Value to Your Organization with Incentive Compensation Management
3420 Executive Center Drive, STE 250
Austin, TX 78731
877-ICONIXX
www.iconixx.com
There should be no doubt that a robust, flexible and scalable ICM solution empowers companies to:
LOWER COSTS
INCREASE PERFORMANCE
ALIGN BUSINESS GOALS WITH COMPENSATION PLANS
GAIN MEANINGFUL INSIGHT
Together these benefits translate into tangible business benefits that drive meaningful results and
support corporate growth.
Summary
About Iconixx
Iconixx is a total solution provider for compensation management. The Iconixx
product suite – Iconixx Sales, Iconixx Incentive and Iconixx Merit –makes the
company a one-stop resource for sales, bonus and salary compensation solutions.
Our cost-effective, Cloud-based solutions deliver incentives to the entire workforce
for businesses of all sizes. Drawing on over 15 years of experience, Iconixx also
partners with clients to accelerate their business growth through actionable
intelligence. Whether it’s using Iconixx technology or leveraging a client’s current
investment, Iconixx’s expertise can drive efficiencies for their compensation
environment. For more information visit www.iconixx.com.