As much as sales people say, “I’m not a numbers person. I’ll just let you accountants handle that”, you start messing with how their commissions/T&E are calculated and you’ll see them become the best actuaries that MIT ever turned out.  Below we talk about a Sales Compensation Model.

How IBM Cognos Performance Management Can Help You

• Utilize IBM Cognos Performance Management (TM1) to plan, calculate and track commissions and sales personnel performance.
• Use historical data to get baseline.  Who are your best performers?
• Plot out your design to allow insight to compare commission costs and productivity from one comp plan to another.  Are you really saving money if you lose your better performers?  Did setting a maximum dollar limit on a T&E line item lower costs or increase them?
• Track productivity of existing versus new sales people.  Are your new hires ramping up effectively?
• How long does it take to make a new sales person profitable?  Does your cash flow allow you to hire more sales people and when should you plan for that?
• If you are expanding your sales force, how are the additional sales affecting other operational departments that support this increase?  Do you need to increase headcount elsewhere?
• What about inventory levels, supplier lead times and purchasing power of increased volume?

With IBM Cognos Performance Management, you are able to tie in all these factors to your financial forecasts.  If you are not doing this already, well then maybe these are good ideas to start your next phase for expanding your IBM Cognos footprint and get the most value out of your software investment.  Plus, with the latest version of TM1, you are able to design calculated scorecards using metrics cubes.  Wrap it up with BI and you have the perfect holiday gift for your CFO!