Remember TV shows from the 80s? How they were always centered around a vehicle?. Kitt from Knight Rider, The Coyote from Hardcastle and McCormick, The A-Team's Van. But there is something to these iconic vehicles from a bygone yet fun era. Everyone needs a supercharged vehicle to move forward with a plan.
Now, looking back at some of these 80s TV shows, especially by today's standards, they don't really hold up quality-wise. But I'd still let Kitt take me for a spin. Now that we’re on the subject of supercharged vehicles, we’ll show you how to supercharge your sales comp reporting in our sweet ride.
Sales organizations rely on data to identify sales trends, monitor performance, and craft effective sales compensation plans. But for that data to be useful, someone has to track it, pull out relevant insights, and present it in a way that is meaningful and easy to understand. This process of tracking, analyzing, and presenting on sales compensation data is known as sales compensation reporting.
Effective sales compensation reporting supports the whole organization. It ensures that salespeople are paid accurately and on time, and that they’re given information on how they’re doing regarding compensation and sales. It provides management team leaders and executives with timely and concise overviews of the direction the company is taking, so they can respond quickly to any issue. And much more.
In this article, we’ll:
- Walk through the key elements of sales compensation reporting
- Report purpose
- Data sources
- Presentation and frequency
- Offer reporting strategies and best practices for each of the key stakeholders:
- Salespeople
- Executives and sales leaders
- Finance and compliance
- Sales comp admins
Key elements of sales compensation reporting
Sales compensation reports will often look different from one organization to another. What yours looks like depends on what you have to work with and how you plan on using the reports (and how often). It’s important to be deliberate about them in order to produce high-quality reports that support the sales organization.
If you’re refreshing your sales comp reporting approach, you’ll want to make sure you’re considering how you’ll handle each of these elements.
Report purpose
Although it may seem obvious, it’s crucial to think through the intention of any report you’re creating. Sales compensation reports should be focused to present only the most relevant and necessary information.
If you put out too many reports, or reports filled with superfluous data, the important elements risk getting lost in the noise, and you won’t be able to effectively communicate the information stakeholders need to know. Sales commission reporting is a clear case where “less is more.”
The specific intention behind a given report will vary, but it should ultimately come down to providing stakeholders—whether they be sales reps or sales leaders—with the information they need to know in order to make informed decisions, do their jobs effectively, and drive forward organizational goals.
A willingness to cut the components from your report and reporting process that don’t serve the ultimate report purpose will keep your report focused, meaningful, and clear—you don’t want stakeholders to get bogged down in irrelevant metrics and takeaways, no matter how interesting.
Data sources
A sales commission report is only as valuable as the quality of the data it’s based on. If you’re pulling from data that’s incomplete, inaccurate, or old, you could end up presenting a misleading picture that causes more harm than good. Stakeholders rely on sales commission reports to make crucial business decisions, and if they’re making those decisions based on unreliable data, it could have catastrophic consequences.
So it’s imperative that you know where your data is coming from, and to know that you can trust it to always be accurate and up to date.
It’s also important to have all your data together in the same place. Sales organizations rely on data from a wide range of sources, including Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, Human Capital Management (HCM) systems, and more. Having to pull from these sources individually is a waste of time, and it risks introducing errors or relying on out-of-date information.
With Performio, you get access to a single source of truth for all of your data. Our software seamlessly integrates with all of your other systems, pulling together the most up-to-date and reliable data you need to create trustworthy reports.
Presentation and frequency
A few more considerations to make when preparing a report include how you’re going to present the data, and how often you’ll do it. Stakeholders should be able to expect reports at consistent frequency, as they’ll be counting on each update to inform their decisions. If you’re constantly switching formats or sending out reports at unexpected times, it’s sure to cause frustration and possibly impact business operations.
Depending on the nature of the report, you may want to give a formal presentation, which you can schedule at regular intervals, whether weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, quarterly, or yearly. Be sure to include relevant charts, graphs, and other visualizations to illustrate the data. And it’s a good idea to include multiple formats for your report. For example, in addition to the presentation, you might also create handouts that include the key information for people to process independently.
Ideally, everyone who needs access to the report’s information should have immediate access to it, any time, anywhere. Performio enables this with our intuitive dashboards that make sales reports instantly available to anyone you’ve granted access to. The key information stakeholders need to know is always highlighted upfront, with additional details available for those who want to dig a little further.
Key stakeholders for sales comp reporting
For most sales organizations, there are only a few key stakeholder groups who will need the bulk of sales commission reports. So you’ll need to identify who these stakeholders are, what kinds of information they’ll require, and how to craft reports specially catered to their needs. Performio allows you to create carefully tailored reports for all of them:
- Salespeople need clarity on how they’re getting paid and how they’re performing in key areas.
- Executives and sales leaders need to know how the sales program they put into place is working.
- Finance and compliance needs to know that the sales program is working correctly and that you’re paying attention to critical areas.
- Sales comp admins need to support the sales process in place.
Let’s take a closer look at these key stakeholder groups. We’ll offer some tips and best practices for reporting to each, and consider examples of specific reports that provide the information they need without overwhelming them.
Reporting for salespeople
Performio puts a strong emphasis on providing sales reps with transparent access to the information they need. But most salespeople don’t have the time or inclination to go through lengthy reports every day. And let’s face it, you don’t want them to spend a lot of time reviewing reports. You want your salespeople doing what they do best—selling.
Salespeople need quick, easy-to-digest reports they can view on any device at a moment’s notice. And those reports should pinpoint the information that impacts them directly every day: things like their earnings, actual revenue versus targeted revenue, sales over time, and progress toward quotas. Being able to access this vital information helps salespeople know where to focus their energies to improve their performance.
But a few sales reps may want to take a deeper dive. For them, you can create more detailed sales reports to improve their confidence in what they’re doing.
Performio’s “my summary” dashboard makes it easy for sales reps to see crucial information at a glance.
And the “my reports” page provides all the additional details for those who want it.
Sales reps will also be able to download reports as PDFs.
Finally, be sure to create reports that encourage competition. Salespeople are, by and large, a competitive bunch. They want to compare their performance with their peers, and healthy competition can help them all do their best work.
Develop a leaderboard or “top sales circle” to recognize exceptional performance, motivate your sales team to stretch their limits, and promote a healthy sales culture within your company.
In Performio, you’ll find such reports on the “president’s club” tab.
Reporting for executives and sales leaders
Unlike salespeople, who are more focused on the daily grind, executives and sales leaders want the 30,000-foot view. They need to know what’s happening each month with all their employees. A critical report for this group shows them factors like the amount paid out to salespeople in the company, the percentage change over the entire year, and how that percentage change differs from month to month. It should also make it easy to spot any anomalies or outliers in commission payments.
Performio’s “year summary” report puts all of this information at their fingertips.
Executives quickly learn who the movers and shakers are and who seems to be struggling, which allows them to think about ways they can assist those with challenges to offer appropriate coaching.
One common executive responsibility is signing off on critical pieces of data and information. But too often, that arrives to them in the form of an email with a giant spreadsheet attached and the vague request to “approve” it. But approve what? Which part of the spreadsheet are they supposed to look at and sign off on? People aren’t nearly specific enough about what they want or need from executives.
Here, we can revisit the “less-is-more” concept. Create a report that focuses on the specific pieces of data they need to approve, and don’t overwhelm them with additional information. It will save you and them frustration, time, and money.
In Performio, the “approvals” report lets you easily single out specific items to approve or deny. Execs will see just the pertinent information, and all they have to do is click the appropriate button.
Executives also benefit from analytics-based reports. By looking at different slices of data and seeing how they compare, they can develop ways to improve the sales process, highlight strengths, or find weaknesses in essential areas.
Within Performio, you can put together a report that creates information on payable trends, so your executives can see them in particular areas and over time.
Reporting for finance and compliance
Finance and compliance people tend toward an abundance of caution—and you wouldn’t want them to be any other way. Create reports that draw their attention to exceptions that may have developed during the reporting period, and give them clear flags about the commission table.
Performio’s “exceptions report” calls out specific records that need their attention.
These critical reports ensure your finance and compliance teams can catch any mistakes or anomalies before they develop into more significant problems. For example, if essential sales reps are getting over- or underpaid, the company needs to know.
Reporting for sales comp admins
Administrators wear a lot of different hats and tackle a variety of duties, which means they’ll be working with a lot of different reports.
Performio allows you to build a checklist of the key tasks you need to accomplish and reports you need to run to manage the monthly process.
These reports, whether they be analytics or sales figures, are built into the checklist, allowing you to see everything you need in one place.
Administrators also need to check on source data, such as total payables for the month or average commission rates between months. Once you've established these numbers, it’s easy to reconcile them back to the source data table and ensure you’ve entered the data correctly. Then if you notice a significant discrepancy in numbers, you can resolve it before going all the way down the monthly checklist of reports.
Performio gives you at-a-glance access in the “sales commission table” report.
Supercharge your sales compensation reporting with Performio
Meaningful and thorough sales commission reporting is essential for any sales organization. You want reports that show your key stakeholders all the information they need, without bogging them down with superfluous details.
And Performio’s report-building options make it easy to deliver exactly what is needed, every time.
Want to see what Performio can do for your organization? Request a demo today.