Sales 2.0: Where Your Sales Force's Technology Is Headed

What does it mean to be a productive sales force? Well, that depends on who you ask. For some companies, productivity is a science, and is measured by factors such as how much time reps spend in front of customers or the speed with which they close deals. For others, judgments are as lax as the number of times reps' cell phones ring or their BlackBerrys buzz.

Luckily for the sales force, technology is evolving to meet the demands of reps who are pressured to produce, but don't always have the tools to get there. All the gadgets in the world won’t help your sales team meet its goals if there's no behind-the-scenes help with activities such as lead generation, pipeline management—and even getting paid. Here are some areas where software can make a significant impact on easing the sales force’s productivity pains:

Taking the Confusion out of Compensation

A salesperson's strengths lie in his ability to be resilient, engage people, and clearly communicate a value proposition. What's not on this list is being a math whiz. So why do most companies expect their salespeople to figure out the complex formula used to pay them?

In an ideal world, your sellers shouldn’t have to re-crunch the numbers. Enterprise incentive management (EIM) software that helps manage and reward performance—and prevents the head-scratching that goes with figuring out commissions—can go a long way toward taking the headache out of calculating incentive pay. And when the process of paying your reps is more transparent, it motivates your sales force and eases the burden on your sales administrators.

When Mark Coleman, vice president of field administration for Thrivent Financial, a membership-based financial services nonprofit for Lutherans based in Minneapolis, meets with his firm's top financial advisors, he says he typically hears the same thing: "'I don't know how I get paid, I just trust that I'm getting paid right.' We put so much effort into comp design and we think it's simple, but the people we design it for say it’s not that simple."

But not understanding the formula was the least of the company's worries. Thrivent's commissions were handled by a legacy system that was the product of homegrown systems used by the two companies that merged to form Thrivent in 2002. "We couldn't get a paycheck correct for the first six months, and changing the old system was like a junkie playing Jenga," he says. That is, one wrong, shaky move and the whole system could fall apart.

The clunkiness of its pay process and the firm's changing business models sparked an effort to revamp Thrivent's compensation strategy. On top of being unreliable, the homegrown system was based on a transactional sales model, and it wasn't able to accommodate