Companies are always on the lookout for ways of improving the way they motivate and energize their sales teams. Getting personnel to perform better can lead to better engagement, customer retention and overall revenue for the organization. Engineering these outcomes is one of the obstacles that firms of all kinds need to learn how best to overcome.

A major part of these initiatives should include upgrading incentive compensation management solutions. As technology resources continue to advance and get upgraded all the time, agencies need to understand that the ways in which they've traditionally managed their sales teams may no longer be the most efficient. CFO Online wrote that upgrading core HR systems can help companies improve the total user experience for everyone from end user personnel who directly interact with consumers, to high-level corporate managers who oversee the creation of business intelligence and digest performance metrics to help engineer future directives.

What's more, adding new compensation solutions in the HR software infrastructure can help corporations cut costs in a variety of ways. Not only are these programs less expensive to operate, maintain and access, but advanced analytics and information collection allow companies to be more proactive rather than reactive to changing market and internal factors. A study by CedarStone showed that one-third to half of all responding organizations said that they were able to reduce expenses by implementing new, more advanced HR and incentive management tools. What's more, nearly half of all businesses were able to implement these solutions quickly, meaning reduced downtime for all kinds of operations from the moment these applications were first launched.

Weighing worth of compensation solutions
One of the other advantages that new technology assets can offer companies is that they can separate out certain metrics far more easily. These enhanced programs can track the kind of work a person was doing at the time a sale was made, isolating whether these transactions were the result of pure sales, cold calling, membership applications or other forms of advertising or marketing pitches.

As Robert Eady of Axiom told CFO, there can be up to six people involved in the total spectrum of a sale. How can companies determine which of these individuals gets a bonus, and if all of them, how much goes to each person? This has traditionally been an area where incentive compensation was unbalanced and problematic. Not so with the integration of advanced analytics and metric readouts from new HR solutions, which can track the impact of various staff members on the final outcome of the customer interaction. This can shed more light on which personnel are providing the best performances, as well as isolating where employee training needs to take place. What's more, it offers companies a better method for seeing which departments are performing the strongest, allowing for proper compensation management.