Why best-in-class organizations are turning to sales compensation automation to cut costs, drive sales, and increase revenue.

Sales compensation automation is one of those critical strategies that clever companies use better than others to align their corporate goals with the full capacity of their workforce.

The importance of compensation plans is often overlooked because businesses don’t understand the potential impact of behavioral science – what it can do to turn and drive business profits. But sales comp influences the behavior of everyone in your organization, from sales reps to senior level executives.

That’s why top performing enterprises rely on sales compensation as their sales performance management tool of choice to achieve their strategic objectives. Because with the right kind of sales comp plans, companies can reward desired behaviors to produce desired results (translation: revenue) – and not just on a one time basis, but every month, every quarter, and every year. In fact, it’s safe to say that your company’s future success hinges on what sales compensation plans you develop in this very moment.

But there’s a critical difference between sales comp strategy and sales comp execution. The proper strategy is essential, but without automation, effective execution is nearly impossible. After all, if it were easy to hit target numbers, everyone would be doing it all the time – and as you well know, this simply isn’t the case.

One company that has benefited from improved sales performance management is data center fabric deployment and technology leader Xsigo Systems.

As Xsigo’s sales team scaled up from 30 to 60 reps to meet the market demand, its operations team struggled to manage the increasing complexity of sales compensation on spreadsheets. With the addition of each new rep, sales operations had to make significant updates to comp structure – revising quotas, shifting territories and developing new comp plans – all time-intensive processes that kept the company from being as nimble as it needed to be.

“The amount of time saved with Xactly Incent is unbelievable. Previously, we were spending hours upon hours churning the calculations on spreadsheets and manually emailing commission statements with a much higher probability for error,” said Lesley Dyer, director of worldwide sales operations and North America inside sales, Xsigo Systems Inc. “With Xactly, comp administration time has been cut down by more than half, freeing us to focus on the quality of data and gleaning insights that help us improve our revenues.”

Small businesses benefit from automated compensation as well. OpFocus Inc., a Massachusetts-based consulting firm that specializes in salesforce.com and Marketo, chose Xactly Express to support an overhaul of its growing sales organization.

David Carnes, president of OpFocus, said the company will have the flexibility to pay different compensation levels for different product offerings. Express supports multiple sales incentive plans by product, service, or timeframe, and allows different quota rules for different reps.

Sales reps are motivated by the ability to check their numbers daily via up-to-date reports and dashboards to see how much they’re on track to earn. “In most companies, the compensation is so complicated, and it’s done long after the fact, instead of being in front of the person’s face to help them make the right decisions,” Carnes said.

Over the coming weeks and months, we’ll discuss key things you need to think about as you assess your current sales compensation practices, perhaps develop a new plan altogether, or even get started for the very first time.

We’ll also explore how you can use sales compensation to harness the collective intelligence of your organization. When you reward top performers who contribute above and beyond average, you’ll optimize your available resources to create a company that wins.

Because companies that incent right, sell more.