Anderson: If it is someone who's never used a people-based incentive, they want to try it. They may have already drunk the Kool-Aid of the CRM (vendor) that says, "People are going to love this. It's going to increase your productivity." But wait about six months, when salespeople are saying, "It's too hard. We can't do it." And they aren't going to go back. So that's really the wrong time to put the accelerator in place. But we do.
CM: What are the types of behavior you look to advance, and do these intersect with a company CRM system?Anderson: It's the number of sales targets, the number of C-level meetings, and the only way you can record them is through the CRM. So the way you actually get them to use the CRM system and the different portions of its functionality is by designing and reinforcing the sales-focused incentive, or the service-focused. And we end up interfacing with a lot of CRM systems today.
CM: You often talk about an elite group of performers, and how not everyone understands them . . .Anderson: In the consulting world, the question is really how to clone the top performers. So we help our clients look at data, customer satisfaction and retention, growth, and profitability. And they also haven't had good customer satisfaction. We do use that metric, and we've never seen anyone that was low in customer satisfaction and had both strong growth and retention. We look at that and go back and ask to interview some of the individuals. And we want to be as close to the customer engagement point as possible.
CM: Are you often surprised by who the top performers are within an organization?Anderson: The way we help our clients is to really define top performers. It's not the person who's actually at the top, necessarily. We're looking for those who are growing fast, because that's the behavior we want to copy. And normally those who are growing the fastest are using tools and resources more effectively than their peers.
But also, I believe that we find the management is better, as well. When we design incentive programs, we use noncash, because you only want to reward them at the time they're making a behavior change. Then it's time to focus on another set of behaviors. We look at the data, identify the client's top performers, those who are growing at the fastest rate. What are the things that they are doing? And then we put rewards behind the things that they know or are doing in addition to improvement on the end result. To behaviors, we add increased end result. And that's what we do day in and day out. Call centers, sales force, IT staff.
CM: Where do the difficulties with CRM systems begin? Do they start with the data being entered?Anderson: A lot of companies today are getting better. They are getting better at moving a lot of that information and feeding the system.
The problem is when you have an enterprise system and you have maybe nine sales teams, and they've all used their own numeric identification for their customers. It's really hard to get that to be effective, because only the salesperson can straighten their own data out so that they can send it or feed it across an organization. In most cases, if you're at midmarket, or usually a large-market, global enterprise, you've got a support team that can actually do that. But the systematic side is that they always target, they always plan, and they do it in their own way, whether it's on paper or otherwise. So the key is that now you need to reward them for moving that information over, and that can be a huge milestone. And often it comes down to moving it over in a timely fashion.
CM: You indicated that often clients contact you when already it's a little late.Anderson:The companies that actually get the greatest return on investment call us in as part of their strategic plan, and it's before they lock down their compensation. Because we've had some clients move some of the comp to non-cash. Because they're over their market threshold already in their comp and they're still not beating the market in their sales. So they've got really good people, and they've got really heavy commissions. And they have a huge range in performance, and if you are at the top of your market in your comp plan and you still have a huge range in performance, there are behaviors that could really bring cash to your bottom line. And we have some financial compensation consultants that actually recommend us to come in early, when it's at that planning stage at this point.
CM: Why do so many consultants fail?Anderson: Because when you look at the whole consulting environment, consultants (identify) a lot of really good information but often it never gets deployed. It comes down to what they leave behind and how organizations lose the knowledge. And that's why we end up coming in behind consultants. The client didn't get the lift they'd expected, and they lost the knowledge.
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