With the global economy on the upswing, businesses are looking to upscale their productivity. This means many companies are also investigating ways to boost sales. Making more sales drives the need for smoother sales department operations, such as calculating commissions and figuring out bonus payouts in a timely fashion.

Colfondos, a pension fund administration company, is one of the many businesses that has recently turned to sales performance management software to streamline sales operations. The Colombia-based business opted to use the CallidusCloud SaaS Commissions product to manage and calculate incentives and compensation for its sales teams. The deal was signed at the close of the second quarter of 2012.

"Colfondos was looking for a flexible and easy-to-use solution to calculate and manage sales incentives and compensation, and to obtain a clear view of sales performance across the board," said Jimmy Duan, senior vice president of international sales at CallidusCloud. "Our cloud Commissions product alleviates the complexity of incentives and compensation management, that eliminates manual intervention and costly errors without the need for a lengthy services engagement."

For Colfondos, agility was paramount. The company needed a solution that could be used to improve sales operations, and Callidus delivers by enabling Colfondos to make adjustments throughout the fiscal year and gain buy-in from sales.

Many businesses, regardless of size, are now turning to sales performance solutions as viable tools to help them keep their sales departments under control. In past years, only the largest of companies had the resources required to invest in dedicated, high-performance sales software. However, as technology improved and implementation costs declined, smaller companies also became able to make use of these tools.

This enables companies that previously relied on antiquated tools and equipment, such as spreadsheets, to gain the same resources as their much larger competitors. These older tools were prone to errors (particularly entry mistakes) that could delay operations and even impact employee satisfaction. With newly available dedicated solutions, this is less of an issue.

"What is now happening is we are seeing small businesses waking up to the fact that they can now afford to use the best in class, the best practices and the best software solutions that are in the cloud," Chris Cabrera, an associate at sales compensation management vendor Xactly, told Business Insider.