What do organizations need to know about Salesforce’s growing Sales Performance Management ecosystem?

AI and the data cloud currently dominate mindshare — both in the Salesforce ecosystem and the general business landscape. As an early proponent of artificial intelligence with Salesforce Einstein, it’s clear that Salesforce will continue focusing heavily on AI. At any Salesforce event or conference, AI sits front and center. As part of Salesforce’s focus on the future of business, there have been a slow but steady stream of mostly unnoticed — yet extremely important — improvements happening in parallel to some of the “core” areas of Salesforce to accelerate and develop its AI and Sales Performance Management capabilities.

AI and Data Cloud are means to an end, not an end in and of themselves

Amid the media cycle, it is easy to over index on AI and conflate technology with strategy. This is not to diminish their importance nor the impact they most certainly will have in the near future. As Salesforce and other companies build toward the AI future, it is critical to not ignore the step change and innovations happening in the space where Salesforce originally built its name — sales.

While a potential Informatica acquisition grabs headlines, Salesforce quietly acquired Spiff, an incentive compensation management (ICM) platform, in February 2024. Spiff now folds under a larger umbrella of sales-related features called Sales Performance Management (SPM).

A growing SPM focus alongside improvements in Pipeline and Forecasting visibility — Pipeline Inspection, now complimentary, provides visibility into the traditional Pipeline Waterfall — and a larger picture of core sales process enhancements emerges.

Amid geopolitical tensions and persistent inflation, profitably growing revenue remains a challenge for many businesses. Consequently, many businesses have attempted to unlock efficiency as a core profit driver. However, without a clear view of the landscape and a view to what lies ahead, many businesses risk making decisions that undermine their core goals.

What is Sales Performance Management (SPM)

Sales Performance Management is a set of tools enabling sales organizations to increase sales efficiency and unlock insights into the production of a healthy pipeline. This allows sellers to manage numbers and relationships while sales and sales operations leaders can more effectively manage strategy and technology.

Primary components of Sales Performance Management include:

Sales Planning

Sales Planning is an end-to-end planning tool that helps segment efficiently and allocate capacity, territories, quota, compensation, and custom information all in one place — dynamically. It helps make sales planning an iterative process, including what-if scenarios, rather than something that happens annually. Sales Planning enables sales leaders to manage geographic-based planning and other segmentation levels, like industries or rule-based territories. 

Territory Planning

Layering Territory Planning on top of sales planning empowers organizations to gain the proper insights to allocate resources efficiently against those territories to optimize coverage in both existing and whitespace areas. This is not only about designing, defining, auto-balancing, and tagging territories, but rather the strategy behind it, which enables organizations to scale and drive performance. There is the ability to run multiple scenarios quickly and automatically balance territories. Additionally, users can gain a historic picture of revenue performance based on almost any account field to better inform forward planning.

Salesforce Maps

Salesforce quietly acquired MapAnything in 2019 and rebranded it to Salesforce Maps. This feature enables “location intelligence” and the ability to visualize data geographically, which complements sales and territory planning. It can also apply to field service (tech deployment, install scheduling, service territories), and location-based segmentation and targeting for marketing amongst other use cases. There is also a logistical benefit to Maps in terms of route optimization, location tracking, and maximizing productivity to drive efficiency. Moreover, spatial insights can help uncover sales opportunities in the first place.

Spiff

Incentive management was a lingering gap in Salesforce’s portfolio. Historically, one had to go to third-party players to manage incentives/compensation. The major benefits of designing, implementing, and tracking incentives in the same place where sales updates happen are visibility and motivation.

Bringing Sales Performance Management together to propel sales performance

Territory Planning, Sales Planning, and Salesforce Maps are inputs to healthy pipeline generation and operational efficiency. Spiff provides a feedback loop at the end of the sales process to align sellers to organizational goals and to let them know what they will get paid.

In addition to SPM, Salesforce quietly made Pipeline Inspection complimentary last year, allowing sellers and managers to see the traditional Pipeline Waterfall — where did my pipeline start and end in each period and what changed? What deal cycles accelerated, which ones are slower than anticipated? Where have amounts increased or decreased? What have we won and what have we lost within a given timeframe? When looking at a Pipeline/Forecast holistically, answering these questions has historically necessitated a BI tool on top of Salesforce. Now it is out of the box.

While other areas grab headlines, SPM and recent sales-focused features demonstrate why Salesforce  maintains its number one spot in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Sales Force Automation for nearly two decades.

How Acquis helps organizations get the most out of their Sales Performance Management and Salesforce instance

As operators and consultants, Acquis brings a strategic — but practical — view to Salesforce management. Our Salesforce experts accelerate digital innovation and elevate human experiences across industries to help clients successfully execute their vision. Curious to learn more about how Acquis drives performance? Reach out today.