SPM Solutions 101 ft. Rob Blohm

Yeah.

Mark Danolo here with Michelle Seeger. And we have our guest Rob Blom on as well. So how you doing today, Michelle?

I'm great, thanks, Mark. I'm really happy that you're back here with us, Rob. So for those of you that were not on our last roundtable, we had a few weeks ago, we had so many questions that came in and by the way, we are taking them in the Q and A. We are taking your questions throughout our conversation today. But Rob Bloom, a colleague and friend of ours, he was with us and you had so many questions and we had such a great response. We asked him to come back and he said yes. I don't. I'm surprised. Coming back to see with us, but he said yes.

Hey, it'd be great, Rob, if you give a quick introduction to yourself as well. Just for people that may not have seen you last time.

Sure, yeah. No, happy to. And thanks for having me, guys. I appreciate the opportunity to be back. So my name is Robert Blohm, as stated, and I've been in the sales compensation space for a little over 20 years, believe it or not. Started as a project manager, worked in a number of different roles over those years. Currently one of the senior partners here at Open Symmetry. And I'm responsible for our sales and our marketing, our alliances. So, yeah, it's been a great ride and I would probably offer that my focus, not too dissimilar to you guys, has been sales comp. But I've been, of course, focused on the technology and the automation and the business process improvement side of things. So, yeah, thanks again for having me.

Yeah, that's great. So just a little bit about sales Globe. We are a problem solving firm for organizations. So you've got a sales organization with a problem to solve, you're your go to consulting firm. You'll see that we wrote a few books here, Innovative Sale. We wrote something on account planning, of course, what your CEO needs to know about sales comp and quotas. And really the problem that we're solving for today is around technology and technology needs, which is why we've got Rob.

Right, Right.

Yeah.

And we've been talking about our predictions for 2021. Getting firmly into it. 25 predictions. And this is number 11. I'm sorry, 23. Getting behind myself.

He's not wearing his glasses.

But the importance of technology, investment, CRM and especially spm and how it's becoming a big management tool and especially a communication tool as we're working in a virtual environment.

Yeah. What's been really Interesting about this is as we have come into this year, we've got a lot of companies that are more highly interested in spm. In other words, like putting it in instead of just asking questions about it because of the visibility and other things that they believe it'll offer to their organization, which we're going to get into today. So when we talk about sales performance management, you know, it's more than just incentive comp. Right. And we've seen that it's really about in these five areas that we see where the sales performance management companies are playing. Rob, you have anything to add to this list? We've got incentive comp, territory optimization, sales quota design, compensation administration and performance management.

Yeah, no, I think that that's kind of how we define it, Michelle, to be honest with you. I mean, over the years you've seen Gartner and different organizations define it differently, right? What SPM is as we evolve from EIM to ICM to spm. But what you've got on the screen is what we focus on as well. So when we sit down and talk to CL about automation of processes, this is the, this is the bucket. This is what you find in the bucket, if you will.

And so companies, you know, very often go in on this one point of we need to automate the sales comp plan. But as you see here, there are other disciplines that are, that are critical to that, obviously quotas. So if the quotas aren't working correctly, the comp plan doesn't work correctly. So that gets, you know, engaged. And then in order to do quotas, you've got to design your territories correctly. So then we have territory optimization. So all these disciplines start to connect together. So, you know, it's not just for sales comp anymore.

So multidisciplinary. Yeah, that's where it all started right now. And different of the providers out there, you'll see that they have varying skills and different offerings that they'll have around that. So Rob, you had conducted a survey with the big five. You want to talk a little bit about that? We're going to talk about some of those principles today or the outcomes.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, sure, happy to. And this is sort of the basis.

Of the last conversation is a lot of the research we did. Right. So we got together with Sales Management association and we, we polled as many people as we could, people that are using sales compensation solutions or automation tools and we asked them what they thought of these applications and we, we looked at it through a lens of capabilities, support and different things like that. But for this conversation and for the last conversation, we did focus on five core areas, right? And so what we were asking folks that use these applications is, hey, how satisfied are you with these? You know, the capabilities you're being provided as it relates to these things. So I guess if you guys scroll to the next slide, you know, that does take us into the components, right? So just again, as a refresher for those who weren't on the last call, what the survey focused in on, at least for the context of this conversation, was how satisfied clients are with these seven items. Right? So calculation, logic, the way we credit the resources or the payees, platform integration. So how well it integrates with your CRM, your Oracle, your mainframes and things like that. There's workflow. So think about dispute resolution, plan approvals, things like that. Forecasting, something finance usually wants to pay attention to. What's my cost of sales this year?

Reporting.

Reporting would be for payees, sales managers, administrators, executives, and then analytics is the last one. And analytics obviously would be dashboards and things like that. And more often than not used by the executives and administrators.

Now as it relates to this survey.

I think it was very interesting and I shared this last time, that while.

The vendors did really well at the.

Top half of this grid. Right. So logic crediting and integration, you know, they have to. Right. Because you can't pay comp if you don't get those three things. Right. Where you saw the biggest decline was in reporting, analytics and forecasting. And that is it was concerning. Right. For us to see that because a lot of these organizations, SAP. Exactly, Oracle and the like, they sell their products based on, you know, the wow factor that these other functional areas provide clients, right? So think of a lot of people on mainframes or Excel, you know, they're not going to have great reporting, great analytics. So this is one of the reasons sales organizations are interested in seeing their company invest in spm. So yeah, that was the idea is last time we got on the phone we talked about, hey, here's everything. We asked clients what they thought of satisfaction of their vendors and then, you know, rank them. Right? And so this is kind of the ranking. And so I thought today we could get into why did we see dissatisfaction or why do we see any dissatisfaction, right?

Because I would argue that any of.

These applications, at least the big five that were germane to this study can handle it. They can handle this stuff out of the gate. It doesn't take a lot of custom code.

They can do really, really well across.

All these different capabilities. So yeah, today's conversation, you know, at least up front, from the planning stage and the selection stage, what goes wrong? What are the challenges? Why are people not actually satisfied with these vendors? You know, it's a big investment.

Great. Now I just want to back up for one minute and talk about the vendors who we have in this study is exactly Verisant, SAP, which was formerly Callidus, Cloud, Oracle and Optimize. And I'd be remiss, we talked about this the last time to not bring up that Anaplan is not in this study. And we discussed why. Okay. Oh, I was going to have you comment on that.

So, you know, just, just to be completely transparent. And I just got a note. Are our slides being shown? Are slides coming across? Okay. All right, so we're good? Yeah. So. So the study actually had a whole list of vendors that we polled people. Right. So even some of the other applications like Captivate, Performio and Spiff, you know, those, those were, were on the list. The challenge and the reason, two reasons why we didn't have Anaplan on this list. One is we just didn't get the response rate on Anaplan clients that would support this. So we weren't able to bring them in. We tried to identify statistically relevant set sets of data that were applied or aligned with the vendors that we have in the big five. That's sort of how we land on the big five. The other side of it is Anaplan isn't what we would consider a purpose built SPM platform. It can do it. It can absolutely do it. We have a lot of clients that have used us and a plan to manage their spm. But when we talk about the vendors in this study, at least that we've got the results on. These guys build a system specifically for sales compensation automation. Right? That's what their vision is, that's their focus, there's their mission. And you know, and I think that's part of the reason why we got the results. We did, or I guess elevated results from people that are on these platforms versus Anaplan.

All right, that makes complete sense. So let's get right into it.

Okay. All right. So the thought here when I was talking with Michelle and Mark was really, okay, what could we think about or what could we tell people to think about before they start their implementation that could hopefully help with satisfaction down the line? Right. So this steps, or I guess these four items were items that I would recommend any client at least consider if they're going to go forward with selecting a platform. And, you know, I'll go through these quickly because we have a couple slides on each one of them. But the developing the framework is key. Right. So creating that vision of how you want your sales compensation program to operate, that's first and foremost. I would argue that is the first thing anybody needs to do. The next piece is once you have that, you have the ability to essentially do a market scan and figure out which vendors should you look at, you know, because there's probably a dozen or more vendors out there, you know, should we bring them all in? Should it be a giant cattle call, or should we get that short list to something manageable? The next piece is when you're going through the selection process, when you're going through the RFP and the demos. You know, we want to tell you a little bit about what kind of questions to ask. And then the last piece is really a little bit of a discussion on, you know, in the investment that needs to happen on an implementation to make sure you don't get those bad satisfaction numbers.

All right, great. So we're going to dive into these four areas for sure. Yep.

So I think one of the things that you can think about when defining that framework is who do you need to talk to? Right. So obviously the stakeholders, the people that are going to be overseeing your sales compensation program. And you know, this, this might be folks, the cfo, it might be the SVP of sales. You know, if your sales compensation program operates underneath sales or finance or hr, those are the people that are going to a little bit of a vision right, on where they want their sales compensation program to be. Next group is your IT department. Right. You're going to have to figure out how this, this platform is going to integrate. And this is especially critical, I think, for companies that are casting themselves as an SAP shop or an Oracle shop or, you know, whatever the case. Right. Because you don't want to go have a bunch of conversations with vendors that aren't even in the tech stack of approved vendors that it is going to want to talk to and integrate with. Finance is another group, whether they own it or not, that you want to talk to because you want to collect information from them. On, hey, how do you guys want to use sales comp data, you know, from a forecasting and accrual standpoint to modeling things like that. And then last but not least, and probably one of the more important ones is sales or sales ops.

Right.

How are they going to use this platform? What is their vision for sales Compensation in the future. This framework, Michelle and Mark, is really going to help you define who should we look at in the, in the market. And so if you skip to the next slide or. I'm sorry, you know what? I got ahead of myself. So I think what we wanted to do with those bubbles is just share with everybody examples if we want to put the bubbles back up. These are bubbles or examples of all the different things that you're essentially going to be pulling from these four groups or these four main areas of discussion.

Right?

So I've already touched on a lot of these. I'm not going to unpack them. But the idea is you're going to really start to create this framework that's going to help you decide, you know, which vendors are actually going to meet best, be best suited to meet your needs.

So anyway, let me ask you this, Rob. When we. Okay, who typically within. Now we got a lot of people that are on today. Who typically would be bringing in the SPM provider and who typically. And how does that vary? But who's the typical. Call it that the sponsor of the program and who would be responsible usually for making sure that these four groups are included and that the right questions are asked. All these different concerns that you've got behind us, and there are a lot of them, right? Everything from reporting, which we know is important to everybody on that list, to the, oh, gosh, data integration, which it really cares about, but maybe not so much sales if they don't understand. Right. Who knows? Just saying that different stakeholders here are going to have different needs.

So who typically coordinates that, really, as you know, the consultative answer, it depends, right? I mean, you've got different drivers around why people are buying these systems. You know, a big piece of it is just operational efficiency, accuracy of payments and things like that. The other side of it is creating transparency into the program for the sales reps and the sales executives. There's other issues, you know, auditing, right. Sarbanes, Oxley and things of that nature drive these types of programs. But more often than not, I would say the people that own the sales compensation program are usually the ones that are initiating the discussions, right? And 80% of the time, based on surveys that we've conducted and looked at, 80% of the time, Sales Performance management or sales compensation Administration is either owned by finance or sales. So more often than not, finance or sales ops are the ones that are initiating the conversation and starting the dialogue with these vendors to say, hey, you know, here's our challenge, here's our situation. You Know what, what do you have to offer? But to your point, Michelle, you know, whether it's finance, whether it's sales ops, you know, before you engage these vendors, if you are the ones that are challenged with these, I still argue that going back and building the framework based on the inputs from IT and the other organizations that maybe touch or depend on sales comp is going to be very important.

So you've got all these players. I want to share with you just something I heard from a client not too long ago, Rob, which was, hey, I was really excited because this is somebody in sales ops. I got the budget to do the SPM system. Finally we got all the clearance, all the budget. And then he came back months later and he said what happened was I had the budget but then I had to deal with it and I couldn't get anything to move ahead. They threw down every roadblock you can imagine and it's like it didn't matter that I had the budget because I couldn't get anything done. So how do you negotiate, how do you work between those groups? Because it obviously is a very powerful factor here because as you said, it's got to be part of the technology stack. But they may have preferences in one direction that maybe aren't the best approach for what you need for the, for the sales system.

Yeah, I think that it's always, it's always interesting, right. When you get down the path and you find out that you know there's a roadblock you didn't anticipate and didn't clear. One of the, one of the benefits of having these early conversations within your organization and gathering stakeholder information, you know, one of them is from with it.

Right.

Because not only are you getting a chance to talk to them about what your project is or what it's attempting to do, but you're getting the opportunity either A, bring them into the process so they feel like they're part of it, or B, you're hearing from them right out of the gate. No, we're staying with the mainframe. That's where our money is in that situation. You know, then it's going to require some in house politics and the development of a business case that will support the argument and hopefully, you know, allow you to win the. Win the discussion or win the point.

Okay, so you've got the framework and you've got the business case. And so it people, they're kind of left brain so they would respond to that. Right. Framework and business case. Any tips though? Okay, so how to deal with Your IT person, any tips, anything you've seen work, and I hear what you're saying, those are great steps. Anything you've seen work to kind of break some of those roadblocks.

You know, I don't know if there's any one set of tips. I think maybe the thing to keep in mind is that you're developing your business case within that business case. It needs to be supported by your future state. Right? How you define how you're going to manage sales comp in the future. Now if you have an IT dependent sales performance management program today, that is you're on a mainframe or you've got a lot of in house calculations that are done by something that they built, you know, creating that future state design and then within that future state design having a racing matrix or a governance model for who's going to manage this in the future is going to be I think very interesting for the IT department to see because you will hopefully be telling them, hey, all this stuff you're doing today, if we go forward with one of these SPM solutions, they're meant to be business owned, they're meant to be managed by the business organization. So great example. We work with the Blue Cross Blue Shield and it took them I think four months to update a rate change in a table for sales compensation because it was IT and you had to get on the list and you had to wait for your turn and they had to do it and they had to test it and all that other stuff when they sat down with the IT department said look, all that stuff is going to migrate over here to business. We're going to own it. The only thing we're going to need from you is our data and you know, X, Y and Z. Right. But, but the, the requirements on the IT organization when you move to an SPM platform, especially when it's in the cloud, you know, hopefully it goes down.

Right.

So you can hope you ideally would be able to have that conversation and say look, your responsibility and the dependency that we're going to have on you and the fire drills, all that goes away, right? We're going to bring it over here to business and we're going to own it over here. I'm just going to look for you guys for my data, you know, I'm generalizing and simplifying but that, that kind of can go into that conversation if you will.

Right. So that's a whole nother side. So you got you know, a framework and you've got your business case you described before but then when you talk about, okay, I can make your life easier, we're going to take work off your plate so you can do things that you really want to do. Right? So there's a whole kind of quality of life or quality of work appeal to it as well that you can use.

It can be, especially if you've got homegrown or mainframe built systems. I mean, you know, it probably isn't going to matter if you're on Excel or doing Access today or something like that. But yeah, if you've got a heavy dependence on these guys to update rates, update comp plans, create new reports, you know, all that fun stuff. Oh yeah, this, this, hopefully they should be happy to get that off their plate.

All right, that's good. So let's go on to the next piece, which is. I actually love this part about creating a short list.

So yeah, this is just an example, guys, of what we do. So I'll give you kind of a little bit of a talk track. So when we sit down with a client, we build out that framework and we talk to them about what they want to do in the future and how they do things, like a day, you know, all that's going to hopefully give us a set of requirements, right? In high level requirements, if you will, that will then get guide the discussion around. Okay, of the 10 vendors that you know we want to look at, which one should we focus in on?

Right?

Because if you can spend less time doing RFI and RFP and demos with 10 people or 10 different vendors and get down to the two or three that are the most meaningful, that's the whole intent, right? That's the purpose of building the framework and creating the short list. And so, you know, what we've got at the bottom of this screen is, and I apologize, I probably should have started there, but the research you can do. So just think about this. So if you built your framework right, you meet with all these organizations in your company and you've kind of got this idea of what sales companies look like for you. My next recommendation would be do the research. You can look at the analyst papers, you can look at vendor guides. There's a lot of independent consultants out there like Open Symmetry and others that will provide support and GUID as you do this process or go through this process, networking and referrals. I can't understate enough how many people have touched one of these systems in the sales comp world. So probably one degree of separation away from somebody who's done an implementation. The Direct vendor research. A lot of the vendors put YouTubes up about their demos, simple kind of walkthroughs on how they handle analytics or a workflow or a dispute. You know, there's a lot of content out there that the vendors themselves put out there. So the offer, or I guess the argument is you've got your framework, you do your analysis, you do your research, you have your phone calls, you know, work with consultants, do it yourself, whatever. But the idea is to get to that short list so that, that table behind you, Michelle, is really what you ultimately want to have. And if you've got that, then you can sit down as a team and go, guys, we said these were our biggest priorities, right? And guess what? Based on all my research and talking to analysts and consultants, we really think that these A, B and C are going to be best suited to meet these needs. Right. And so that hopefully will give everybody some confidence to say, look, let's focus on these three or maybe four or whatever. But you know, you layer in it's conversation around, well, we're an oracle shop, but we'll look at this platform. Or you look at finance saying, hey, if we're going to put money in the till for this, we're going to have to get good forecasting, good analytics and blah, blah, blah, you know, but all those things kind of come into this conversation so that when you do your research, you come up with your short list. Now you've got your focus, right? Here's, here's what we want to look at.

Yep, I couldn't agree with you more on that one. So there's a lot of information out there with you. People just have to go to YouTube. But instead of looking at all the choices out there, you can clearly get it down to just a few, which I think is really helpful for the organization as well. It can get a little confusing out there.

Yeah, and I think that that's absolutely true, which is in complex situations like this where you've got so many different variables and you've got so many different possibilities in terms of vendors simplifying down to what it is that's really important and sort of understanding the story of, okay, here's how we got here and here's what we're really trying to solve for. Just because, you know, another company or industry used a certain vendor, certain system doesn't mean it's the right answer for us. Because our requirements and the way we got here and where we want to.

Go may, may be different.

But if you can simplify that down it can help people make decisions.

Yeah, and the other thing I would probably offer guys is, is just because you're a really big organization doesn't necessarily mean you have to have an enterprise class solution. I've seen a lot of very large organizations be very, very happy with more simple, less complex SPM solutions. You know, the things that are going to drive the differentiation are, you know, some of the things that are on this, on this slide or this table, you know, your coverage model, especially if you're an international company with a lot of different moving parts around, language, currency and things like that. Crediting coverage. Crediting, you know, is a big one. Right. So a lot of these firms have a very simplistic crediting logic in their system. If you're a company like HP who's got 300 to 400 people getting credit on one transaction, you better look pretty closely at the solutions you want to look at to make sure that they can cover that. Data management. You know, if you're an organization with very clean data sets and you've got, you know, you've reached nirvana, then yeah, any of these systems are probably going to be fine from a data management perspective. But if you know for a fact, like big telcos have a lot of going back in time and looking at, well, you know, was this T1 set up on this date and they're going to change their subscription and they're going to up it or lower it. So all that kind of comes into play with how you're going to migrate that data in, do checks and you know, the ETL process can be very convoluted. But anyway, what I'm getting at is, you know, have those conversations before you, before you pick your short list because it's going to be, I think, really important that you have the right group of vendors that you're looking at so you can save yourself some time and heartache.

Yeah, you know, and you made a great point around the complexity of the solution. Enterprise companies may believe that they need something more, or even a mid sized company more complex than they actually need. It really depends on where are you starting and what are your requirements moving ahead. I mean, gosh, we've got, we have done consulting with companies that have actually made decisions or wanted to take out very large implementations that have been done with very complex solutions because at the end of the day it was too hard for them to manage and administer internally and it ended up being more than they needed. That actually does happen. So really just look at your starting point.

Yeah, well, you're bringing up another point, and maybe that might be another conversation for us is really what can you do during the implementation to ensure satisfaction with the vendor you chose? You know, when we talked about that framework, Michelle, earlier, and building your governance model for your future state, like who's going to be doing what, how and when. You know, if you can define that before your implementation, what that then does is create your business process change management strategy during the implementation so that if you're migrating a lot of your process ownership from it over to business, well, you've got to sit down and figure out who in the business side is going to be running this stuff once you go live. And once you figure that out, then you can evaluate or assess their aptitude for taking on this responsibilities and then you can put the right training in place. So unless you do those steps up front around designing your governance model and creating that future state management, a RACI table, if you will, you know, if you can do that early days, then you can migrate your organization's team or the resources into that RACI matrix so that they're able to do their job. Because most large implementations that we've seen fail over time is because they just don't pay attention to keeping that system up right. And they don't learn as the implementation is going on what they need to do and how they need to do it. I mean, there's, there's a lot of complexity with these programs and there's a lot of dependency because you got to pay people and you got to pay them correctly. So the pressure is really high to get this stuff right and to roll it out so that people don't become disillusioned with it. But anyway, I could get on a soapbox and spend a day there if you want.

Yeah, no, it's a really good point. We, you know, you and I think had a discussion about a large unified communications company that we consulted with and actually Open Symmetry came in and did the assessment because they wanted to take out a large system and we didn't think that that's what needed to be done. And they were looking at putting in a completely different solution. And at the end of the day your assessment was agreeing with what we did on the plan design piece, which was, guys, it just, it wasn't configured properly to begin with and they didn't have the proper training and no one really knew how to use it, so they just said it just doesn't work. That wasn't the case at all.

We do, we do probably four or five projects a year with clients that are dissatisfied with their current SPM platform. And I'd say four out of the five, it's them, it's the deployment of the application, it's your ability to maintain it and keep it configured correctly that is their problem. Right. I mean, it's very random that are very rare that we come out of the back end of the assessment, go, yeah, this platform is not going to meet your needs. It's usually, hey, it's because of the implementation, it's because of the adoption strategies, because of the ongoing management and, or sort of support that you're getting around it that are driving a lot of the problems. You know, the grass isn't always greener, especially if you've got a bag of issues that you're going to drag over the fence.

So that would, that would say. Then what you're saying, Rob, is the selection is. Selection of the vendor is just a piece of the entire process. It's not about, not the whole thing. So you select the right system that's you're not done because it may be, you know, the other 60% or whatever that large percent is of what we're doing that's actually causing the problem. So we've got to hold that up as well.

Yeah, yeah, no, for sure, for sure. I mean, the point of today's conversation was really just, hey, here's some things we can do to make sure we don't get the wrong solution, to make sure you've got the best chance of being happy. But once you have, you know, and look at this chart, right?

Yep.

For instance, none of these vendors are going to, are going to hit all of your needs 100%. And you need to know that going in. Right. I mean, you just do. And so when that's the case, at least get closest to the mark you can, and then have a strategy for the things that they're not going to do perfectly for you. You know, it's just, it's just one of those things. But once you identify the right vendor, the vendor that's going to be closestly more closely aligned with what your needs are in the future, then you can at least create a roadmap to achieve what you ultimately want to achieve from your sales performance management program.

Yep. Okay, so now what we've done is we have gotten our stakeholders around the table and we have figured out what is important and what their priorities are. They've created a short list. And now this next point is a really, really important one. Something that you want to ask Those vendors, Rob.

Sure.

Yeah. This is, this is a fun one, right? So if you ask a vendor can they do that, they're always going to say yes. Always, right? I mean, what vendor is ever going to say no, we can't do that? So what we tend to do is get them to prove it a little bit, right? And say, well, you know, we assume you can do this. How do you do it? Right? Because if you go to a less sophisticated vendor and you say, hey, I've got, you know, I'm HP, I've got 300 credits that get assigned to one transaction, how are you going to do this? How is this going to look in the system? Because if you have that conversation, what you're going to do is you're going to unpack a lot more information around. Hey, is this vendor really a good fit for us given this requirement? Is it out of the box or is it going to create a lot of configuration? The other pieces of it is going to tell you how hard is the implementation going to be, right? I mean, if you're looking at a lot of custom code or you're looking at moving all that logic into your ETL process. So to be clear, the crediting component should sit in the SPM application, right? You should get your raw data in and you should assign credits in the sales comp system. Now if you're losing, using a less sophisticated system, they're going to say, well, how I would do this, I would move this upstream into your ETL and maybe manage this in Informatica or SSLA or whatever that, whatever it is, right? And if you do that now, you're going back to it and going, hey guys, you got anybody that knows Informatica? Because I've got to put all my credit in here.

Yeah.

So what I'm getting at is it's going to, it's going to let you know not only how tough the implementation is going to be, but it's also going to start creating a picture for you around what it's going to look like when you, when you manage this on a day to day basis. So as I was just alluding to, if I've got to move my crediting logic into an ETL layer, now I've got a dependency on it when I just told them, hey, if you give me this budget, I can move this stuff off your plate. So again, I'm getting a little passionate here. But asking how you do it is going to have, I think a much more interesting response than can you do it? And even to the point where I know a lot of people are educated on these systems and they understand the out of the box technology. I think clients actually take for granted the fact that they do some stuff today that seems simple to them that are going to be tough for the vendors. So understand what table stakes are, what these guys do out of the box and focus on the things that you think are going to trip them up. Things that are kind of unique. Right. To your organization and things like that. And then as I said, it's how do you do this? Not can you do it? Because you know, you want, you don't. You want to stay away from yes or no answers. You want to get to more, more a better understanding of what world the world is going to look like if you actually buy their app.

You know, that's really an interesting concept here because, you know, a lot of these go out to rfi, RFP and they're asking them, can you, can you write? And it's check boxes and everybody always answers yes. So when we're called in to help out with an assessment and Rob, you've been part of those. Often our client has already gone through an RFI or an RFP and they're saying everybody can do everything. So what do we do the whole how.

Yeah, we've done some RFPs. So again, we do a lot of selection work and I should probably offer that. So Open Symmetry is an independent consulting firm.

Right.

So not too dissimilar to Sales Globe. We work with a lot of different vendors in the market and a lot of what we do are helping our clients figure out which vendors are good fit for them. And that's where I'm pulling a lot of this information in kind of anecdotal data points. Well, I would probably offer that on some of the RFPs we've run. We've asked three questions. We asked, do you have this capability? How hard is it to implement and how hard is it to manage for those similar types of three questions. And you know, you ask those three questions across all those different, different functional requirements, you're going to get a very clear picture of. You know, is, is it the first question, do you have it right? Is it out of the box? Is it configurable or is it something that we would have to custom code? The next one is how hard is it to implement? Is this something that a, you know, a regular consultant can do or are we going to have to bring an engineer in and then how hard is it to manage? Right, that's a Little bit of a kludgy question to ask on an rfi. But if they're worth, they want your business, they'll respond. This can be handled by business or this can be handled by it or whatever the case might be. But asking those kind of very specific questions and assuming you've narrowed your list down to two or three vendors you want to focus on, it's worth the due diligence, if you will.

All right, so now let's discuss a little bit about the deployment itself. This was a really good finding from your survey. It was interesting finding.

Yeah, yeah, it was, it was kind of a knock at the vendors and a knock at the SIS at the same time. Yeah. The point of this slide and the last point of our conversation was really, don't skimp on your implementation. I can't tell you how many clients have shown up and said, Yep, I got 100k for licenses and implementation. And you know, when they get done talking to the vendor, I got, I got 40k left. How do we get this stood up? And it's like, yeah, this isn't going to end well. Right. It just doesn't, you know, especially if you get somebody who says, I can do it for 40k when you know, you know, it's more than that. Anyway, that was the idea for the slide is really just have a little bit of a conversation on the investment of these, the investment you should make. Right. So if you've defined your future state and you've picked a vendor that you think is a good fit for your organization, you know, my guidance would be take the time to scope out the implementation with your SI or your vendor correctly. You know, make sure that you're taking into account not just your current state plans and reports, but really what the future state needs to give you when you get done with this project. And the slide that you're showing is from the survey and the findings, if anybody has looked at this now, is that the vendors are better at being on time and on budget, but the overall satisfaction goes up and significantly when you're working with a third party firm. And the analogy I like to use, and I think, Michelle, Mark, you probably have a better one, but the analogy I like to use is walking onto a car lot and if you walk over to the fleet desk and you say, I need a four door sedan and here's the money, they're going to go, yeah, that's the Malibu. Have at it. If you walk over to one of the senior reps on the, on the lot, yeah, you're going to get the how you doing and shaking and all that stuff. But they're probably going to ask you a bunch of questions like, you know, are you going to go off road? Do you have any pets? Do you need to tow something? You know, are you going to go into cold climates? You know, do you want dual climate controls, things like that? Right. And so, yeah, it's going to take longer to get through the process and you're probably going to spend more on the car, but you're going to come out happier. I would argue the same exact thing with the sis. If an SI comes in to help you with the deployment, they're going to force you to think about stuff that the vendor may not like. Well, what is the future state of your workflow process? You know, what are, what ideally do you want to be able to do for finance from forecasting and accruals management standpoint? You know, what does the mobility, what is what mobility support do you want to give your payees? You know, all those questions are going to tick, tick, tick. Your scope is going to keep going up, but at least you're going to have a framework of reality with regard to what scope is going to take to get this deployed. Now the vendors, the sis, you know, everybody has got similar rates, right? So you need to kind of get, get that in your brain and now come to the realization that it's ours. It's hours. How long is it going to take to set this stuff up? Especially, you know, getting the dual climate control, getting the four wheel drive, you know, all those things have to be brought into the conversation because if you get out of this implementation and you've gone through it with a vendor, okay, we're on time, we're on budget, and they gave us exactly what we asked for, not what we need, what we asked for. And there's a big difference. If you say, hey, vendor, here's my comp plans, here's the reports and you know, I want that out of the box. Workflow, sure, done, you know, and we got it done on time and on budget. Wow. I didn't know that. I didn't really want that. I wanted this, you know, I wanted better reports. I didn't want what I had today, you know, and I didn't realize that my credit and logic should have been cleaned up on my side before we tried to implement it. That's what I'm getting at. If you, if you bring an SI in, they should be your advocate, they should be working on your side of the table. To make sure that that system does what you need long term.

Yep, that's exactly right. Gosh, we've gone into two organizations and that's what we find out. Right. It's not been implemented properly, and it's not because the vendor didn't implement what they were supposed to, but they didn't really understand what the client needed. The other thing is what you'll uncover during that process. I know that we do this early on in the processes. They might be automating stuff. They just should not be automating. So it starts all the way at the beginning. Right. Looking at your plan designs too, and making sure that you're actually automating the right thing. Right. So have you done that? I mean, when we're called in to do incentive compensation work, many times the plants haven't been touched for years, so it's not necessarily even driving the right behaviors.

Yeah.

You go to solve a single problem, like we need to automate the plan, and all of a sudden, if you try to solve just that problem, you're.

Not solving the right thing.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You got to look at it holistically. And I, And I can't tell you how often that we've talked to clients that are not happy. And it's not the tool. It's because whoever did the implementation didn't realize, you know, didn't. Didn't understand where to push back. Right. To say, hey, you know, I know you want all these comp plans in here, but do you think, you know, 80 comp plans for 90 people is the right approach? You know, maybe we should.

Exactly, yeah.

I mean, at least they got 10 people that are unhappy because they don't have their own comp plan. I mean, you know, at a minimum, we should get 10 more.

So we were talking to a client very recently, and you were part of this discussion, Rob, and they had more than 60 plans for not a very big sales organization, but their challenges. They wanted to make sure this was going to be implemented for the next fiscal year. But we had to say stop and let's discuss what's the most important here. To do it right or to do it on time, to your point, because they really did need to step back and look at a plan redesign first, which might take a little time.

Well, yeah, there's the opportunity to harmonize your plans. Right.

Yes.

And there's other areas that you can gain efficiencies during the. The implementation is figure out your data strategy before you start the project. Right. Understand if you can consolidate that Data, put it in a data lake, pull it from there. There's a lot of work that can usually be done up front around reports. Sitting down with your sales leadership and your finance team to understand what reports do. They want to see, you know, a little bit of that future state, but get into it a bit. That's gonna help as well. But, yeah, it's, it's, it's always interesting, you know, when you sit down with a company and, you know, you start talking about, you know, what the future could hold, because a lot of times they're going to want it all right? And they're going to be pushing to get it all. And our default position is, look, why don't we figure out a phased approach? Because we now have a deadline, right. This mainframe is going to be taken offline August 1st. We know we're going to have to pay people. So perhaps the play is to set the comp plans up, set a comp statement up and aim for that. Right. Because we want to be testing for that, you know, in June, July, so that we're paying people correctly in August. And then phase two can be the advanced workflows, it can be the additional analytics dashboards and things like that. So, I mean, yeah, I mean, everybody, you know, nobody can follow the PMP best practice all the time. And when that's the case, you need to come up with a strategy to get there in one piece.

Yep, that's exactly right. So should we just take a look at what the whole roadmap looks. Looks like? The journey. SPM journey. And we can kind of walk through that. So we're looking at. Do you know that, Rob, you're not going to like me saying this. Mark drew this for me in like 10 minutes.

I just came up with that in my head.

Right.

Well, no, I said, here's what I need and here are the pieces. Can you draw this for me? I do this to him all the time and he just does it. He did this in like 10 minutes. Isn't that great? I'm very fortunate because I think it's kind of cool. Anyway, so the first piece of the SBM journey is going through that assessment. Right. So going through the selection process and we talked a lot about that today. Is there any final words that you'd want to leave people around? Just, you know, one of the big things on that. And, oh, by the way, we do have the Q and A open if anyone has any questions. Yeah. But any final words on selection?

Yeah, I think my only final word would be you know, there's a lot of vendors and they have a lot of really good capabilities. A lot of them have very similar core capabilities. But I think, you know, as everybody knows, the devil's in the detail. And so getting an understanding of what you want to have before you ever even pick up the phone and talk to these guys is going to serve you a lot of value throughout the process. Otherwise, I always worry that if vendors get in there, they will start showing you bells and whistles and make me pull you off track a bit and down their path versus what path you should have. So that would be my only guidance, is chart your course without, you know, bringing the vendors in too early.

That's really good advice. And then the discovery process, we just talked about making sure that the system or what it is you're looking at will actually align with your needs and doing that due diligence internally to make sure that all of the stakeholders, that we really understand what the strategies are. This is taking it a little bit deeper than just, you know, we need data integration. But what is it that you actually need? And in this phase, I'm envisioning that we're also looking at the future state, not just what we need today, but where do we want to be?

Yeah. And you're starting to look also at the plan designs, which is, you know, your next step. So there's kind of this iteration between how we're going to automate and how the plan designs need to need to work. So you're going to be discovering some things. And Rob, I don't know if you have any words of advice about get the plan designs right before you select or can you actually select what you're going to use for a system while you're working on getting the plan designs? Right.

Yeah, I mean, so you can, you absolutely can start your implementation during your plan design review. These systems are designed to be able to take on any plan you pretty much can throw at it and allow you to change plans without too much rigmarole.

Right.

So you're not depending on a mainframe IT team, blah, blah, blah. But I. My guidance would be, yeah, you spend a little bit of time looking at your comp plans to harmonize them to make, to probably reduce the amount of components and measurements and all that fun stuff if you can. Right. Stepping into a situation with 80 plans for 100 people, that's going to be, that's going to be an expensive implementation.

Yes.

And there's an order of magnitude in cost savings not only from the implementation, but Ongoing management. If you can bring that plan count or at least the component countdown, because these systems are mostly object oriented, right? So you can build out the 20 components for all the plans and then apply them to the plans as you need. So getting those components down would usually be a very strong recommendation.

All right, so then we talked, you know, about the design process and you want to make sure as part of that that you've defined a really good governance process and you touched a little bit about on that. And when we talk about the pilot, what we're really thinking about here is having the phased approach. So if one unit or one group or one region comes online first and you're kind of working out and validating that you've actually implemented what you want before you do the wide scale, let's call it global implementation, what are your thoughts on how you deploy? Deploy like that? Rob?

Yeah, a phase approach is never a bad thing. It's just understanding that a phase approach needs to encompass or it needs to allow for a high level design of the entire implementation. You need to gather requirements and a design, at least a high level design for the entire shoot match. Because if you don't and you're using one of these systems that is has an open architecture, what you can do is you can build yourself into a box because you will say, okay, our first group is North America and we're going to sit down and build those plans, build the data feeds, build the reports, workflows, and then we're going to go to emea. And what happens is if you don't allow for the adoption of other regions or other global groups or other business entities in your requirements, in your design phase, you could be shooting yourself in the foot. So a phase approach is great, but when we do phase approaches, it's always after we do a high level or at least holistic requirements and a high level design. Because then if you start doing sprints, each sprint should be aligned with your long term strategy. So you don't leave things out of the core configuration or the core data integration model or whatever it is that is ultimately going to need to support the entire team.

That makes complete sense. And then once you've design that you want to go ahead and, and migrate the migration just refers to your full integration then support. And we talked a little bit about this. It happens early on and later on in the process. So early on I'm talking about for the, the client that's buying this, you talked about the amount of time that is required and the investment that people need to make regard, you know, they're using a third party to implement but they need to be fully part of this entire journey and then particularly when we get into the support piece. So will you talk a little bit about that?

Yeah. You're either going to pay for this during the implementation or you're going to pay for it afterwards. And what I mean by that is if you plan to be fully self sufficient, then you're going to have to invest in the implementation to leverage more extensive training and even have your resources part of the project through what you know, we have a mentorship program that we actually will fold clients resources into the project, treat them as a consultant and then when we go live they then get handed off the platform and they're the SMEs and they're responsible for running on a day to day basis. Our best case study is US bank, they folded three or four of their resources in and now I would argue they have probably the most adept team of Configuration resources in North America, you know, working in house. So you, if you decide self sufficiency is your goal, then you're going to have to make that investment. Now if you don't make that investment and you don't have resources that you've hired that are fluent on the technology you've bought, then you may have a dependency on an SI like Open Symmetry to come in once a year and update your plans or have a bucket of hours that you can spend with them to make plan changes and changes to reports on a day to day basis. Some companies said, yeah, you know what, I'm not going to do that much stuff. I'm fine with that. I don't want to invest the cycles and trying to train resources. I'm good spending, you know, 20 grand a year to have somebody babysit my configurations and my reports. So point is you either invest up front because you want to be self sufficient and you, and you understand that is a sizable investment or you, you understand you're going to be paying for some sort of configuration support later.

All right, that's great advice. So thanks so much for joining us today. As we've had this discussion, everyone, thank you for joining us today on the roundtable. Are there any last words that you would like to leave? Rob, I think this was great advice that you gave to everyone here today.

No, I appreciate your time. I mean obviously we do a lot of this work. So if anybody has any questions I'd to love, you know, I'd love to feel them, I'd love to help we're even putting out what I would consider my. My book. I'm finally getting to the point where I'm published. It's not a book like you guys. It's really a white paper on vendor selection. When you're doing it yourself, it's like a DIY for. For doing a vendor selection. And it takes you through all the steps that I just kind of laid out in detail. So if anybody's interested in taking a look at that, ping me. I, you know, I'm hopefully going to have this ready to go in a week and a half, so we'll make it.

Oh, that's exciting.

It's going to be really useful.

Yeah. And I hope so for everybody watching.

If you'd like copies of the slides, let us know. In fact, that Journey just showed us, Michelle, there's a much more detailed version of that one as well, so.

Yeah, actually there is on everything we talked about.

Yeah.

Yeah. That's great. So thank you, everyone for spending time with us here today. Again, Just feel free to reach out to us, any questions you have on your SPM assessment or beyond. We are happy and pleased, and thank you for spending your Friday afternoon with us and everyone. Have a great weekend. And thanks, Rob, for joining us.

Thank you, guys.

Bye.

Bye.

Bye. Bye.