Forrester recently released its Sales Performance Management Landscape, Q4 2022. The landscape includes large vendors like Anaplan and Varicent and also up-and-comers like Fullcast. There are many differences between these vendors. Here are some key takeaways from the report
What is Sales Performance Management?
Forrester defines Sales Performance Management (SPM) as “automated solutions that help optimize incentive compensation, territory coverage, and quota assignment for direct and indirect sellers. These solutions enhance collaboration among stakeholders, increase sellers’ motivation, and provide business leaders with a systematic way to operationalize their company’s sales strategies.”
Furthermore, “SPM’s primary use case is to support incentive compensation management (ICM), [and] its next core use is in territory and quota management (TQM).” After annual planning SPM also involves effectively administering the plans, managing performance, and owning the change management process as rep and business needs change throughout the year.
Fullcast supports core SPM activities like territory and quota management. It enables teams to design “optimal territories and quotas that are equitable in terms of sales potential and workload,” a core benefit of SPM explained by Forrester. Fullcast leads with territories and quotas because these elements form the basis of your GTM plan. You can have the best designed incentive comp plan possible, but sales reps won’t hit their numbers if territories and quotas are poorly designed or sales managers spend all their time focused on operational issues.
Fullcast also excels at another important SPM capability highlighted by Forrester – enabling organizations to tie “sales execution to the business strategy.” With Fullcast, operations can easily make runtime changes to the plan in response to changing resources or strategy, eliminating time-consuming manual workflows and sales downtime.
What is a RevOps Platform?
Although SPM is a mature market that has been around for 20 years, Forrester points out several important trends driving vendor decisions. One is the need for “integrated workflows [to] break down silos to allow for strategic planning.” This is where additional RevOps capabilities offered by vendors like Fullcast can enhance the benefits of SPM.
Compared to SPM which focuses primarily on Sales operations, a RevOps platform takes a broad approach. It recognizes that your GTM plan spans organizational silos. It optimizes operations workflows beyond sales to other functional areas, such as marketing and customer success. It enables higher-level end-to-end strategic planning across the entire revenue engine and continuously syncs any plan changes with execution. For example, a RevOps platform ensures that both your sales and account management teams have optimized territories with a coordinated handoff of accounts between them. When an account executive leaves in the middle of the quarter, it ensures that new assignments are quickly made, holdouts are defined, leads are routed properly, and all changes are effective dated so commission can be paid accurately. By bridging the gap between functional silos, RevOps tools make the entire revenue generation process more efficient and the sales team more productive.
Sales Performance Management vs RevOps?
Revenue leaders face a multitude of choices when it comes to selecting the right vendor. Forrester’s SPM Landscape provides useful guidance for choosing your B2B tech stack. When evaluating the different options, consider the emerging trends impacting the SPM marketplace and align those with your business needs. Determine what will have the biggest impact on your organization’s ability to hit its goals. Will designing better territory plans enable reps to hit their numbers? Or will better compensation plans drive performance? Is alignment across the revenue engine central to successfully implementing your GTM plan? You may find that choosing a platform with cross-functional RevOps capabilities can complement your SPM tool or provide the best of both worlds.
