NetSuite delivers all the key capabilities sales people need to drive renewals, quote the customer correctly, upsell customers, and ensure that they are aligned with the latest product offerings and company strategy:

Upsell Management:

NetSuite lets you monetize existing customers with strong upsell and cross-sell management features, even allowing service functions to upsell. NetSuite also provides strong sales incentive compensation management to balance customer acquisition with upselling/cross-selling and to enable the roll out of SPIFs and upsell/cross-sell sales plans.

Customer Success: Managing Revenue Performance
“We have to responsibly manage growth, and NetSuite provides the business application infrastructure that we need to do exactly that.”
— Rob Gottschalk, Director of Sales Operations, SolarWinds

Integrated Pricing and Quote Management

NetSuite supports agile pricing for subscription plans in response to customer or market demand, allowing you to:

• Ensure that sales quotes are up-to-date with the latest finance and pricing information
• Effective-date new customer agreements
• Update billing processes and prorate payments
• Communicate pricing changes to the sales and service team
• Synchronize quote management, financial management processes and incentive compensation.

To see exactly how NetSuite works, try a free demo.

Sales Commissions Management

Compensation and commissions visibility are key to keeping sales people focused on their target, which can be particularly challenging in complex software contracts. NetSuite gives you a number of ways to manage and adjust commissions, including:

• Complex commission schedules can be managed centrally, and set monthly, quarterly, bi-annually or annually to allow for maximum flexibility
• Commission rules can be configured based on quota, sales or quantity
• Calculation options enable you to calculate commissions based on a linear scale, marginal scale, or no scale at all.
• Support for complete commission plans allows for multi-tiered scheduling and maximum flexibility in creating sales compensation formulas
• Retroactive commissions options enable you to make changes to compensation plans, as needed, when needed
• Target commissions enable sales managers to set a goal and calculate commissions for the entire sales team.

Clear Business Visibility

NetSuite’s strong dashboard and reporting capabilities help you drive revenue management and financial reporting, and manage customer profitability. They let you continually monitor recognized revenue; examine breakouts of recognized revenue across the various elements; and achieve detailed visibility down to the transaction level. They help ensure that you’re confident in reporting your financials and you’re able to quickly diagnose any unforeseen issues. In addition, they equip you to handle the more complex revenue and deferred revenue reporting (by region, product line and so on) resulting from new revenue recognition rules such as EITF 08-01 and EITF 09-03.

NetSuite helps you minimize “cost-to-serve” by giving you a handle  on all direct and indirect customer costs — including acquisition costs, service costs and product delivery costs. You can see which customer
segments drive margin and which don’t, so you can change strategy accordingly.

NetSuite’s real-time visibility even extends to mobile devices such as Blackberry and Apple iPhone, with the NetSuite for iPhone application. It enables decision makers and any employee interacting with the customer to have comprehensive access to the latest customer and business information, no matter where they are.

For more info on how to survive and thrive in new software industry, download this free whitepaper.

The post How to Survive and Thrive by Driving Sales Performance with @NetSuite appeared first on Think, The Blytheco Blog.

A recent video blog stresses the importance of developing a commission payment plan that best suits your type of company.  Taking that a step further, the timing of commission payments is also crucial and relies heavily on accuracy and sales team projects/goals.  Sales force motivation and cash flow are also directly affected by commission payment schedules. While there is no perfect method, there is, however, a method that best suits your company’s needs:

• Receipt of Payment
• Invoicing
• Project Milestone Completion
• Booking

Receipt of Customer Payment:

Pros:

Commissions are paid from money in hand (good for cashflow.) It also motivates salespeople to help collect outstanding amounts.

Cons:

This isn’t as good of a sales motivator as paying earlier. If you’re computing commission manually, paying on receipt of full payment can be time-consuming. Certain software can shorten times and paying commissions on partial payments also help to simplify.

Variation: Partial Payments

Although commission is usually paid when an invoice is fully paid off, some pay pro rata on receipt of partial payment. The main reason to pay on partial is that, with some accounting software, it is easier to compute. Also, it decrease wait time for sales teams. However, if your commission rates depend on the product or service sold, paying on partial payment is very imprecise, since there’s no way to know to which invoice lines a payment applies. Also, when most of an invoice has been paid, paying on partial doesn’t motivate salespeople to resolve a dispute which may be delaying final payment. Returns can also be hard to account for when the original item was partially commissioned.

How Common?

Paying commissions upon customer payment is the most common method.

Invoicing:

Pros:

Since salespeople are paid sooner than if they must wait for collections, this motivates well. It’s easy to compute.

Cons:

Because sales teams are receiving commissions before payment is actually received from the customer, businesses might end up paying commissions on payments not received. Also, salespeople have no incentive to help collect receivables. This can be tough on cash flow.

How Common?

Second most common method.

Project Milestones:

Pros:

Salespeople don’t have to wait until the end of a long project to get paid. It encourages them to keep the customer happy throughout the term of service. Salespersons that leave during the course of a project aren’t paid for work done after they leave. It also doesn’t strain cash flow as commission payments are incremental.

Cons:

This can be difficult to compute accurately because project tracking software is often separate from the software which computes commission.

How common?

This works best if you sell either long projects, such as construction, or services which will be delivered over time, like support contracts or repeating magazine advertisements.

Booking

Pros:

Rewarding salespeople immediately after they make the sale is the most powerful motivator because it provides immediate positive feedback.

Cons:

Since you pay commission before you get paid, this can be tough on cash flow. Also, it can be hard to recoup the commission if the order is cancelled or changed – perhaps impossible if the salesperson has left the company or the commission was paid to an independent rep. Because most accounting systems don’t keep an audit trail of order changes and cancellations, it can be hard avoid errors when orders are changed.

How Common?

Very unusual.

Summary:

Commission payment schedules, like other parts of a commission plan, come in many flavors. Your choice will depend on your objectives.

Stephen Flaum

Principal, Flaum Technologies Inc.

Practical commission software for “impossible” plans.

The post Are You Paying Sales Commissions at the Right Time? appeared first on Think, The Blytheco Blog.