Intelligence-driven incentive plans can boost returns

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Changing Business Climate

‍Gone are the days when a sales call could excite, stir, and cause intrigue among prospects and customers. - Today, prospects can do their research before being swayed by the most absorbing sales pitch. This empowerment has led to a need for an increased effort by salespeople resulting in longer buying cycles and inaccurate customer demand forecasts.  

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Keeping up with the changing times

‍Companies are forced to make meaningful changes to keep up with the changing times to hit the sales target consistently. Changes like leveraging omnichannel capabilities, creating specialized roles, and adopting team-based selling are becoming indispensable. However, a more significant shift that often goes unnoticed is the development of strategies around compensation models that can drive motivation among the salesforce to continue to sell effectively. At the end of the day, the fuel that ignites the sales folks is what makes the difference between that extra thrust to close the sale or leaving the leeway for losing an opportunity.  

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Reinforcing the workforce with fuel and fire

‍Instead of telling sales teams what to do, a better approach would be creating an environment that persuades them toward behavior that will bolster the organization's marketing strategy. For instance, making meaningful changes to the salesforce's mix of commissions, quotas, salaries, and bonuses can quickly drive motivation and translate to growth. 

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A recent study by McKinsey shows that intelligent revisions of incentive models can have 50% more impact on sales than through advertisement investments.

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The -challenges of an incentive planner

Incentive planners must navigate through daunting datasets like market forecasts, bank rates, regulatory shifts, inflationary impact, contemporary trends, and pressures of stock clearance. By the time they have amassed data from different sources, there still exists the probability of missing out on some new numbers or latest releases. They must stay on top of all the relevant data before they can reasonably begin to plan an incentive campaign. Since most of the time is spent collecting data, validating it, and ensuring the numbers are still fresh, the time left for -decision making is minimal. This part of planning needs to be carried out meticulously. A minor error can drastically impact the bottom-line performance of the organization.

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Rushed appraisals can bite into the bottom-line performance of an organization, disrupt manufacture-dealer relationship harmony, and even impede optimal workforce performance. 

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Challenges of Manual incentive Planning

‍Manual incentive planning is a process that must be carried out painstakingly. Incentive planners cannot afford to leave loose ends or make human errors that may ultimately defeat the very purpose of the incentive. Some of the most common challenges that organizations face due to manual incentive planning are:

1. It is a prolonged process: Incentive planners spend most of the time between data sources, trying to collect and refresh data in preparation for the planning. There is often very little time left for the actual analysis and planning. A delayed rollout can considerably impact the sales targets and overarching organizational objectives.
   
   
2. It lacks robust analytics and intelligence: Since the analysis is carried out manually, there are no predefined parameters that can guide decision-making. The campaign outcome will primarily be based on the competence of the incentive planner. If anomalies and inaccuracies in the data are unchecked, the ripple effects can easily bite into the profit margins.
   
   
3. Loyalty and Relationship: It has been seen that better planner incentive campaigns directly affect all the stakeholders involved. Campaigns that take stock of contemporary variables offer the best possible compensatory plans without affecting bottom-line performances and have reinforced relationships, created loyalties, and built powerful synergies. Conversely, an inadequately planned campaign can have the exact reverse effect.   

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What is an Incentive Management Solution? What are its benefits?

Incentive Management Solution is an Intelligent Process Automation driven process aimed at digitizing incentives, offers, and promotions management and -      operation for all staff and management levels in any industry. Equipped with interoperability features, it seamlessly facilitates data extraction across internal and external sources. It eliminates the need for manual efforts and minimizes human- error vulnerabilities. It comes loaded with features that can quickly scale horizontally and vertically.

Benefits of using Incentive Management Solutions:

1. Intelligent Process Automation: An incentive management solution is powered by Intelligent Process Automation with intent-driven processes aimed to digitize incentive management and empower decision-making for staff across all management levels.

2. Interoperability: It allows for interoperability across external and internal data sources, eliminating manual data collection. This will improve the quality of data by ensuring nothing is missed out and eliminate any manual errors that the traditional workforce may be vulnerable to.

3. Minimize manual efforts: The Incentive management solution eliminates manual efforts to the greatest extent possible. 

4. Highly Scalable: The incentive management solution is highly scalable as it can be expanded horizontally (including new incentive measures) and vertically if needed.
   
   
5. AI-powered -decision-making     : Leverage AI-driven analysis to model "what if" scenarios that will significantly optimize decision-making.

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Conclusion

An Incentive Management Solution would offer enhanced visibility into the nuts and bolts that go into making an incentive program and help estimate the sustainability of such promotional schemes and their direct bearing on the bottom-line performance. 

EvonSys is an emerging leader and the fastest growing next-gen advocate of digital transformation through low code solutions. EvonSys has proven proficiency in building low-code solutions across industries for over a decade.

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