ICM and CRM Integration

While Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Incentive Compensation Management (ICM) systems focus on different business processes, glocent’s ICM works within your ICM system to align employee behavior with corporate objectives and improve relationships between your employees and your customers.

Large businesses, with complex sales systems, need a sales incentive compensation management tool that can work with their existing customer relationship management system in order to drive sales. Glocent provides fully automated incentive calculations, while integrating with CRM systems to make all sales management processes move smoothly.

CRM Products Are Not ICM Products

Many CRM software products promise to automate every business process found within your company’s sales operation. Unfortunately, many of these solutions neglect important processes like sales incentive compensation and Sales Transaction Intelligence (STI) analysis. If features for incentive compensation are included at all, they are often limited to extracti summarized sales information; and sales incentive calculations are performed with other software or by using spreadsheets.

Many CRM product developers, and many sales teams, don’t fully understand that ICM processes directly affect a company’s bottom line. With Glocent, organizations can avoid:

• Over payment of commissions
• Commission disputes
• Sluggish sales caused by distracted sales people
• High administrative costs
• Sales reps “gaming” the system

The effects of outdated ICM solutions don’t stop at profits, either. Confusing or inconsistent sales incentive systems cause distrust and distraction in sales teams, and leads to sluggish sales.  When sales teams don’t trust their employer to accurately compensate them for their efforts, they will waste a lot of time performing their own “shadow accounting” double checking their commissions and challenging the calculations when that time could be spent on new sales efforts. Also, when sales people discover that they can “game” the system, they are tempted to put less effort into the hard work of making new sales and instead spend more time creating the “appearance” of hard work by gaming the system.  Improper incentive compensation leads to slower sales, a demotivated sales team and damaged relationships between your company and your customers. It also directly impacts your bottom line.

A lack of trust and motivation in a sales department can also cause problems internally. The self-reporting, or shadow accounting, common to outdated ICM solutions like spreadsheets can also lead to inaccurate financial reports. In the post-SOX Act business world, financial transparency in large public corporations is vital, and companies can’t afford to have inaccurate internal audit documentation. While a CRM solution may provide some internal audit capability, only an automated ICM system, focused on accurate STI can provide truly reliable reporting.