The 2025 IDC MarketScape for Worldwide Sales Performance Management [SPM] clearly sees the market evolving.
But here’s the bigger question: Are market vendors actually solving the problems that matter to finance and sales operations teams?
SPM vendors are missing the mark: commission management is the key to eliminating inefficiency
Sales Performance Management (SPM) solutions today promise territory management, sales forecasting, and AI-powered analytics–all useful in theory. But here’s the reality:
Most SPM vendors still see spreadsheets as their biggest competitor. That low bar makes it clear there’s still a gulf between buyer needs and what most software vendors are offering.
Companies aren’t struggling to forecast or map territories as much as they’re struggling with inaccurate, delayed, and untrustworthy commission payments. As a Major Player in this year’s IDC MarketScape for SPM we hear it every day from folks who are looking for a better solution.
We wrote about this at the outset of the year, and it’s clear businesses who haven’t elegantly solved the core incentive compensation problem compound the further challenges of quota planning and benchmarking. Well created sales compensation management ensures:
❌ Sales reps are not shadow-accounting because they don’t trust their payouts
❌ Finance teams don’t need to spend weeks fixing comp errors
❌ Systems aren’t so fragile that every small change requires expensive professional services
That’s the real problem. And it’s one Performio has solved.
The Fix? ICM first
In the 2025 MarketScape for SPM, IDC highlights the growing importance of SPM among sales leaders. Yet most vendors in this space move quickly to other challenges when their base incentive compensation management solution is passable.
We disagree. ICM isn’t a feature—it’s the backbone of sales performance.
What IDC got right about Performio
The IDC MarketScape recognizes Performio’s strengths in data flexibility, structured plan management, and powerful dashboards. These are all key to getting ICM right. The report also mentions our Plan Builder’s component-based approach, which are versatile building blocks for your sales comp plans that empower users to design unique plans while maintaining the simplicity and flexibility needed for scaling. On that backbone, Performio delivers AI-powered ICM analytics without sacrificing accuracy, transparency, or usability.
Here’s how we ensure that powerful simplicity for our customers:
✅ Our plan & crediting setup is structured because it ensures long-term maintainability. It’s also powerful with ready-to-use components. No need to write formulas, rules, or reinvent the wheel. ICM use cases are built-in, allowing admins to model their own plans with ease.
✅ We recommend expert-led implementation—because we want customers to start on the right foot. Our approach guarantees:
- Implementations Done Right – A structured setup for faster time to value.
- End-to-End Support – Help when needed, without ongoing service dependencies.
- Complete usability, complete support – Customers have full ownership over their incentive plans while knowing support is always available.
✅ But, you can do it yourself if you want to: companies like Abbott Labs, Thryv, and MYOB have successfully self-implemented, showcasing how intuitive it is to get Performio up and running.
✅ 90% of our platform is self-maintainable, reducing added consulting dependencies. Recent investments, like the new Plan Builder, enable self-service for complex crediting and plan scenarios out-of-the-box—something many vendors bypass in favor of ongoing services engagements.
✅ Our customers love how easy Performio is to use and the top-notch support we provide. They also appreciate having options—whether they want expert-led implementation or a self-service setup, they get the experience that works best for them.
If you’re fed up with halfbaked solutions, there’s a better way
SPM vendors can keep adding features, but without an elegant solution to the foundational challenge, everything else is just window dressing.
If you’re tired of solutions that feel halfway there, Performio is the right choice.
Organizing commission data, managing plans and payouts, providing transparency, and automating workflows aren’t just features, they’re the foundation–the core problems companies have been struggling with for decades. And we’ve solved them.
Ready to get commissions right? Let’s talk.