Sales Transformation Services: Incentive Compensation & Reward Management

Accenture helps companies optimize their incentive management processes and technologies—as part of a comprehensive solution for transforming sales performance.

Today’s market and customer dynamics make it difficult for companies to achieve sustained growth—particularly when deficient incentive management processes and technologies prevent them from influencing sales force behavior.

Effective incentive compensation management is vital to business performance—giving the sales force incentives to do the right things the right way has an enormous impact on revenue growth, profitability and retention. Our research shows that a $1 billion business can boost its pre-tax profit by $13 million by using better motivational tools and incentives.

However, incentive management is typically cumbersome and error-prone. Many companies rely on inadequate homegrown technology applications or elaborate multilayer spreadsheets. Besides being hard to adapt when market conditions change or product lines evolve, these systems often result in higher administrative costs, decreased productivity and lost sales force confidence in the overall incentive compensation process.

Accenture helps companies optimize incentive management—by replacing inefficient, ineffective legacy application and processes with new capabilities that encourage specific sales force behaviors, improve operating efficiency, measure and manage sales performance more effectively and administer incentive payments more accurately.

Read more about our approach to helping clients achieve high performance by mastering the capabilities that drive profitable, organic growth. [PDF, 1.5MB]

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Accenture has developed a holistic approach to incentive management, and partners with clients to use it to align sales forces with a company’s strategic goals—so contributing to high performance.

Refreshing incentive management technologies can relieve some of the administrative burden and subsequently reduce compensation cycle times, improve compensation accuracy and cut administrative costs.

However, Accenture believes this approach—the one most organizations follow—offers only basic improvements. In our experience, companies realize much larger and more strategic benefits by approaching incentive management holistically, featuring next-generation incentive management technology solutions as central components of business process-led programs.

To enable high performance, Accenture offers an end-to-end solution—Sales Transformation—which helps organizations align their selling strategies and selling resources; influence the behavior of the sales force; and revitalize strategic, analytical and operational capabilities. Helping companies effectively plan and manage their variable and incentive compensation plans is a key part of the Accenture Sales Transformation offering.

Our approach integrates sales planning and incentive compensation, leading to better sales performance in areas where it will benefit the company most. Other benefits include better incentive plan designs and implementations, automation of key activities, better business administration for the company, improved incentive plan accuracy, improved compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley and standardized compensation plans across sales forces.

Accenture helps clients transform their incentive compensation management capabilities through a combination of services.

• Plan design, including sales planning, compensation budgeting, objectives, quota and territory management and more.
  
  
• Plan set-up and administration, including plan modeling, business rules definition, plan creation and changes, hierarchy and participant management and sales plan communication.
  
  
• Incentive compensation processing, including data validation and gathering, sales credit assignment, compensation calculation and payment, research and inquiry management and adjustment processing.
  
  
• Reporting and analysis, including query, reporting and analytics; earnings estimation; plan diagnostics; and audit trails.