Market Perspectives

Sales leadership and operations teams can ensure their most effective outcomes by properly managing territories, quotas and incentives. In that journey, sales teams struggle to reach their full potential if they do not orchestrate their efforts and optimize every week and month of the year. The need for immediate access to up-to-date information shared by sales professionals, managers, operations teams and leadership is critical to meet everyone’s expectations. Unfortunately, most sales organizations are operating with a disparate set of tools and legacy applications that do not facilitate selling based upon territories or quotas and lack management visibility for potential incentives.

Sales organizations need flexibility to examine data related to customers, buyers, sellers, products and opportunities and identify gaps to quota attainment by channel, territory, products, sellers and partners. Advanced technology should streamline work and eliminate manual tasks. By unifying forecasts and data across revenue channels, sales performance software ensures prioritized focus on gaps and opportunities to reduce customer churn, increase retention and identify lower acquisition costs and expansion opportunities. Most importantly, revenue insights are critical to guide coaching activities and highlight performance and outliers. By 2025, one-quarter of sales organizations will replace applications with more intelligent systems that focus on optimizing sales performance to guide organizations for maximum outcomes.

Varicent, a long-term provider of sales performance management software, assists sales organizations with effectively managing sales teams and revenue outcomes. Varicent exited from IBM at end of 2019 to once again become an independent software company. It provides three key products as part of its offering, including incentive compensation, sales planning and revenue intelligence. Incentive compensation tools enable the design of incentives that realize the full yield from the selling activities of the organization. The sales planning application aids in the visual design of territories and quotas, creating a path to revenue growth. It ensures market penetration of territories so sales teams have the capacity to sell to their greatest potential and quickly weigh trade-offs, deploying adjustments as needed. The revenue intelligence offering brings new capabilities to the portfolio that deliver revenue insights and predictive forecasting to identify gaps to achieve quota. Varicent’s ability to manage larger volumes of transactions and calculate incentives has been one of its longstanding points of differentiation. With the addition of tools to develop balanced territories, revenue objectives and optimally designed incentive compensation, Varicent is importantly aiding organizations to motivate and retain sales talent. These are challenging times for sales leaders, and having the right, data-driven motivations are a prerequisite to put sales teams in position to achieve goals and reach their maximum potential.

Varicent provides a workbench that assembles the underlying sales modeling and connects to appropriate source systems, including common customer relationship management and enterprise resource plannings systems. The workbench was accelerated through Varicent’s acquisition of Symon.ai. Its release of the Data Module manages data from across cloud computing and application sources. Workflows and the usability of its activity module further support manageability. Minimal technological skills are required, and the software can be managed by revenue or sales operations professionals.

Varicent has depth across customers that spans financial services, insurance, telecommunications, media and the entertainment industry. It was rated as a leader in Customer Experience in the Value Index for Revenue Performance Management, and is yet to evolve its full potential and suite of applications. Varicent’s expertise in supporting sales organizations spans decades, and its return as an independent company is reestablishing its presence in the market. Supporting revenue and sales operations teams is essential to sales performance management and achieving revenue objectives, and Varicent is one of few vendors with the experience and legacy to understand those requirements. While some vendors are focused on revenue intelligence or incentives with sales compensation, the larger opportunity for sales leaders and operations teams is to connect with the complete set of requirements for revenue performance. Organizations seeking to manage overall sales performance should evaluate Varicent and its potential to support revenue optimization.