Deploying Sales Performance
Management Programs:
Build or Subscribe?

Executive Summary
Many sales organizations today are going through rapid changes whether moving towards a solution
selling model, shifting distribution strategies, re-aligning by business unit or product line, initiating
new coaching programs, and many others. Enter the first line manager. Arguably the toughest job in
any company, this role carries responsibilities as leader, manager, coach, mentor, teacher, judge
and jury. Neglected for years, many companies are seeing the need to deliver improved tools and
processes for this critical role.
Any organization that is looking to utilize technology to optimize overall sales productivity and
effectiveness can either build a performance management solution in-house or invest with a
purpose-built, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) performance management solution. A major challenge
for many companies is that while the sales function remains the most critical, the sales people –
individuals and managers alike – represent a highly fickle and demanding user base with little time
for substandard tools or processes. If proposed solutions don’t provide visible and significant value in
a short timeframe, they will be shelved in no time.
According to global IT research firm Gartner, the annual cost to own and manage software
applications can be up to four times the cost of the initial purchase. Traditional technology solutions
have failed to fulfill their promises in this rapidly changing climate. At the same time, they have also
become more cumbersome to use and less flexible to fit organizations’ changing business
processes. Meanwhile, approximately a third of software projects fail to be completed altogether and
the remainder often requires twice as much time and money than originally expected.
Confronting the Build vs. Subscribe Dilemma
When faced with making a Sales Performance Management program decision, there are many
variables that must be considered: sales force structure and size; sales management processes;
coaching processes; incentive compensation; customer relationship management applications;
periodic reviews; training and development initiatives; offline utilization; geographic considerations;
and, the corresponding access to volumes of data to support the effort.
The key cost drivers for any software implementation are the cost to develop the tool or application,
the hardware required to run the application and the people services required to design, deploy,
manage, maintain, and support the application. And what about periodic required enhancements?
This paper covers the “build vs. subscribe” considerations of an organization faced with the need for
a Sales Performance Management program. The first section outlines preliminary issues and the
due diligence required to start the process; the second sections presents more in-depth challenges
related to the build and maintain internally option; and finally, the third section explains the benefits
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of investing with a purpose-built sales performance management delivered via the SaaS model.
Preliminary Considerations
Whether or not to build an in-house performance management solution boils down to an honest
assessment of the needs of the organization and what it will take to meet those needs. Sometimes
the nature of the program dictates the necessary direction. Does your organization have an ample
supply of highly skilled developers to build, test, implement, stay in tune with the dynamic needs of a
fickle user base and provide ongoing support and maintenance? If so, then you should consider
building that solution internally.
Or do you need to flexibly support your sales teams as they ferret their way through multiple
systems and processes such as CRM, SFA, HRIS, ICM and EDW tools across the enterprise? In
this case, you should consider investing with a purpose-built, SaaS-delivered solution.
Evaluate the following factors in regards to your proposed performance management project:
• Availability of in-house resources, including development staff and project management
• Complexity and purpose of the project
• Time to deployment
• Familiarity with the unique business requirements of the daily/weekly/monthly sales rhythm
Also, consider these issues:
• Can your project's time-to-market strategy define the crucial business requirements
necessary for widespread adoption?
• Do you have IT members that are experts in sales performance issues, coaching
workflow, evaluation workflow and overall performance improvement processes?
In other words, is sales performance management your IT department’s core
competency?
• What is the cost of taking the time to build a system when an established system can
be up and running in weeks?
• Are your resources best spent developing homegrown data and application
performance management software?
• Are the day to day needs of your organization being met or is the demand for IT
resources already stretched?
Still considering a custom-built solution? The next section details some of the problems you might
encounter with developing a performance management application in-house.
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The Challenges with Custom Performance Management Solutions
Many IT departments tend to be biased towards traditional in-house developed tools and
applications because they fear they will relinquish control. They may only want to share control with
other departments (both internal as well as external) as long as these groups can prove that they
can do as good or better job running the application. Even then, some IT departments may still want
control due to factors unrelated to TCO or end-user satisfaction.
The complexity of today’s computing environments only magnifies the difficulties of implementing
custom sales performance management applications. Problems inherent in building these solutions
from scratch include:
• Too expensive to develop
• Too expensive to maintain
• Too time consuming
• No real program improvements
• The benefits of millions of dollars of R&D that is spent by a performance
management vendor will not be captured
Too Expensive to Develop
Many companies underestimate the true total cost of operations for building and maintaining in-
house solutions. Unique sales performance management requirements must be captured and
agreed to. Developers must be trained and code must be carefully tested. Think about the salaries
of your development team, the downtime in user departments during all phases of development,
and the opportunity cost of not putting developers on other worthy projects that would propel your
business forward. The bottom line: Labor costs dominate custom coding projects, which require
significant investments.
Too Expensive to Maintain
Maintaining a custom-built performance management application and keeping it running on the
current platform or a succession of platforms can be an expensive proposition. Is your IT staff ready
to take on routinely synchronizing data, managing hierarchies, and providing quarterly upgrades as
needs continuously change? And what happens when the programmers who developed the original
application move on to other projects and other jobs?
The maintenance of custom performance management applications is complex, time-intensive and
fraught with undocumented functions. Unless the performance management application is well
documented – another complex and expensive proposition – your costs will continue to rise.
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Too Time Consuming
Traditionally, in-house application performance management projects have involved long learning
curves and slow deployment schedules. Time consuming custom development requires considerable
due diligence to scope and plan the entire performance management project. Once again, your
developers’ time is better spent – and time is money.
No Real Program Improvements
One danger of in-house development lies in the tendency to fall back on the “one and done” build
mentality. The challenge is that sales styles, coaching processes, measurements and review programs
are constantly evolving as the business climate changes. Unless your programmers are versed in the
latest performance management technology best practices, you risk ending up with something that’s
less than what you hoped and planned for which only falls further behind over time.
The Benefits of Subscribing to a Performance Management Solution
In most cases, a purpose-built, SaaS-based performance management application can overcome the
challenges presented by custom-built solutions. Purpose-built toolsets leverage existing expertise and
technology and offer the following compelling reasons to subscribe:
• Low total cost of ownership (TCO)
• Faster time to market
• Flexible, scalable implementations
• Integrated, cross-functional processes
• Automated, standardized design processes
• High reliability through proven performance
• Enhanced Customer Experience
Lower Total Cost of Ownership
As stated in the previous section, high costs remain the primary drawback to developing in-house
performance management applications. Development and especially maintenance costs are often
underestimated. Performance management costs in general continue to skyrocket as enterprise-wide
computing environments become ever more heterogeneous and complex.
Comprehensive SaaS-based performance management solutions keep these costs down through:
• Automation and standardization of the design process, which eliminates the need for
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costly custom coding.
• Optimization of development resources, programmers are not necessary to deploy the
purpose-built system and typically the vendor will configure the system for your needs.
• Fast implementation and deployment, which reduces the cost of the entire performance
management process.
• Broad range of connectivity options, integration options are standard and tested with
known systems.
• Project scalability, which allows the organization to start with smaller performance
management projects before investing for the whole enterprise.
Faster Time to Market
The long development cycle of a custom-built solution isn’t an option if your organization needs to
deploy a performance management application quickly. Every day a system is not in use costs the
company revenue and profit. Sales performance has become critical for most companies and
purpose-built software solutions offer the following features that speed the time to value of your
performance management solution:
• Easy to learn, so sales managers, executives and sales people can begin working on
performance management immediately.
• Easy to design and configure performance management processes and transformation
maps for faster implementation.
• Short deployment period process has been done before with many customers.
• Easy to use, for sales individuals and managers as well as sales operations and human
resources staff who have vested interests in the outputs of the program.
Flexible, Scalable Implementations
Instead of leaving your organization to its standard old “build it yourself” methodology, the best SaaS-
based performance management solutions provide maximum opportunities for flexibility. Most include
customization/configuration features for fine-tuning the environment as it changes with business
needs. Logic and business rule definitions, for example, can be customized to work with native sales
systems through user-friendly tools. Open architectures accommodate emerging applications,
allowing new technologies to plug into the platform. Through all this adaptability, the performance
management application can remain up to date with best practices.
In-house performance management applications are often developed to meet the needs of the
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moment, without taking into account rising user demands and data volumes. Purpose-built, SaaS-
based performance management solutions, on the other hand, meet growing levels of user requests
and needs with real-time, event-driven, scalable solutions.
Integrated, Cross-Functional Processes
Custom-built performance management applications may only address a limited spectrum of
performance management issues, including hooks into other processes. The best SaaS options go
beyond simplistic performance management projects to aid in managing process and data workflows,
including third-party processes. For example, even with several applications linked together, users
can get one point of view on the sales organization’s data – they don’t have to toggle between
applications.
Automated, Standardized Design Process
When it comes to sales performance management business requirements, most organizations have
similar needs. So why reinvent the performance management wheel when it already exists in the
form of purpose-built SaaS-based solutions? SaaS-based performance management solutions
automate and standardize the design process. While there’s plenty of opportunity for configuration –
as described above – the basic implementation is ready to go.
High Reliability through Proven Performance
Building a performance management application in-house is only the beginning. Next comes a time-
consuming iterative testing process, during which developers fine-tune the application and hope for
the best in terms of reliability. In contrast, a purpose-built SaaS performance management solution
offers high reliability by definition, right out of the box. Existing customers can attest to its proven
performance.
Enhanced Customer Experience
SaaS is a recurring service, so for a SaaS provider the sale does not end when the initial contract is
signed. If a customer does not use the application, they can simply choose not to renew the contract at
the end of the contract term. If the system is hard coded and not used, these are sunk costs never to
be regained. As a result, SaaS vendors have a vested interest in seeing customers widely adopt and
use the application. SaaS vendors need to “win” their customers’ business day in and day out. Often,
that translates into more intuitive, easy-to-use interfaces, increased availability and high levels of
performance. It is for this reason that most SaaS vendors offer initial and ongoing end-user training,
and this training is in most cases included in the service fees.
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Conclusion: Subscribe Trumps Build
In today’s complex IT landscape and competitive business environment, custom-built performance
management applications can’t stand up to road-tested p u r p o s e - b u i l t S a a S s o l u t i o n s . Quick-
hitting, cost-effective SaaS solutions can meet your organization’s performance management
demands by leveraging existing applications and technologies while taking the burden off of internal
development resources.
Where custom-built solutions present expensive development and maintenance considerations, SaaS
solutions counter with proven lower total cost of ownership. Where in-house performance
management involves long deployment cycles, easy-to-learn and easy-to-use SaaS solutions speed
time to value. Where custom applications can get mired in old methodologies and lack scalability,
available SaaS-based performance management solutions offer the flexibility of customization options
and the scalability that meet your organization’s needs – now and into the future.
Even though a custom-built performance management application may seem to offer control and
flexibility, it will only lock your organization into a suboptimal solution. Is performance management
really your organization’s core competency? Can you spare the programming resources? Do you have
several months to a year to develop, test and fine-tune your application? Do you want to deliver
another sales tool du jour that sits on the shelf due to a fickle user base? If like most organizations you
answered “no” to all of the above, subscribing to a highly reliable and functional purpose-built SaaS-
based performance management solution is your best option.
The ForceLogix Performance Management Solution
ForceLogix’ purpose-built, SaaS-based performance management solutions help reduce the
complexity, costs and risks associated with in-house performance management deployments by
providing a versatile and configurative performance management architecture for rapid
implementation, superior scalability, low total cost of ownership and high ROI. The software leverages
30+ years of industry expertise and features a comprehensive set of easy- to-use tools that allows
organizations to rapidly deploy performance management processes – regardless of size and
complexity – across the enterprise.
More information about ForceLogix and Sales Force Optimizer is available at www.forcelogix.com.
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What our customers are saying
• “All encompassing view of the business at hand.”
• “Cut the time to fill out a coaching form in half, if not more.”
• “…having all the information available in one spot has helped me to stay on top of potential
issues and coaching opportunities.”
• “Overall, the efficiency of completing a coaching session has been drastically improved, which
allows focusing more on the pure coaching of each rep. Also, with many of us having large
regions, the offline tool is great/essential.”
• “To me the key has been identifying areas of improvement earlier by making the data readily
available.”
• “This 360 view has made me a better coach by making me aware of opportunities that I may have
missed otherwise.”
• “Overall great tool and big improvement from our current excel based coaching forms.”
• “Freeing up time to spend more on coaching instead of finding data from multiple sources.”
• “Significant improvement. All data is accessible via the new coaching form. No need to run
numerous CRM reports.”
• “Excellent for accountability.”
• “The new Sales Performance Management tool is great…”
Contact Information
ForceLogix Corporate Office:
100 East Cook Street, Suite 300
Libertyville, Il 60048
Sales: 1-847-281-9308
Email: info@forcelogix.com
© 2010 ForceLogix Technologies Inc. All rights reserved. All ForceLogix’ brand and product names are trademarks or
registered trademarks of ForceLogix Technologies Inc. in Canada, the United States and other countries. All other marks are the
property of their respective owners.
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