Salesforce is a web-based CRM application that enables users to forecast revenues and track leads. It is a leading sales, service, and marketing app. Salesforce.com's Sales (CRM), Service, Platform and Marketing applications are designed to help companies connect with customers, partners, and employees in entirely new ways. According to the vendor, on average, reps using Salesforce see: a +29% increase in sales from greater visibility, +34% increase in sales productivity, and +42% increase in…
$25
per month
Varicent Incentive Compensation Management
Score 7.5 out of 10
N/A
Varicent (formerly IBM Cognos Incentive Compensation Management, or IBM Sales Performance Management) is presented by the newly reformed vendor as a Sales Performance Management (SPM) Solution that will accurately track, manage and report on sales-related data and processes to reduce administrative costs and provide insight into key performance metrics. The solution encompasses Incentive Compensation Management, Territory Management, Quota Planning and Channel Management.
Varicent was acquired…
Out of all of the products I have ever evaluated for this space, Varicent is head and shoulders above the rest in my opinion. For me, I think of Varicent as akin to building an Access database while the other programs are like building an Excel data model. In Varicent you …
Salesforce is so customizable that I can't think of situations where you couldn't configure the tool to do what you need. If Salesforce hasn't developed the capability itself, there is a marketplace where anyone else can develop and upload their solution for others to use as well. Also, due to Salesforce's success and size, almost every other app/software that you can think of has or is working on an integration with Salesforce. So if you need to use a different tool for a certain function, you can more likely than not still integrate it with Salesforce to enhance value.
Varicent is well suited across all the domains (Finance, Insurance, Hi-Tech etc.) for sales incentive calculation. It can tackle the difficult scenarios/conditions provided by the client. This tool may not or should not be used in incentive forecasting. It's not a planning tool. Small scenario modeling can be done here but not on a large scale.
Salesforce.com is extremely customizable. I would not consider it an out-of-the-box solution, although its standard fields allow for fundamental CRM activities and reporting.
Salesforce.com is able to integrate with 100s of third-party softwares—often times creating efficiencies in processes.
Reports within Salesforce.com have the ability to be simple as a standard Account report, or you can get very granular with your report filtering to segment a very specific result, eg. Accounts in California who are active clients and fall within the pharmaceutical industry and have a specified market capitalization.
The Knowledge module can be improved. It is still limited compared to regular CMS. Still not possible to have a filter view per data categories
Using the Community portal also comes with a limited Community reply function that doesn´t allow text formatting. Very difficult to move staff away from emailing customers when this text box is very poor
Rigidity when you work in a big organization with same template. It needs to be a one fits all instance and the local needs are deprioritized because SF doesn´t allow customization
Zions Bancorporation takes security very seriously. While we have NOT had any security issues with ICM, with it being a cloud application, our internal infosec team really wants some kind of MFA (multi factor authentication) support for off corporate network access.
The ICM internal workflow manager is not as flexible as we would like. For what it does, it works extremely well. However, for our purposes, it would not fit our process so we created our own workflows using presenter reports, scheduler and automated data imports. We'd love to be able to use the internal workflow and I think with recent improvements we're getting close but it's just not there yet.
In order to send emails to users (ie. payments need approval) we had to write an external python script. It works well but for most admins, they are not able to support it. It would be nice to have the ability to send emails based on defined triggers. The built in workflow can do this but as mentioned previously, we are not able to use it.
I'd like to have the ability to run a partial calculation. Currently, there is only an option to run a full system calc or a single calculation. I would like the ability to run a stream of calcs (ie. from a parent down to all children only).
There are days when I wish we hadn't switched, but I know that if we put in the time, we will get to where we want to be with the software and that it has many more capabilities than anything else we looked at. However, the amount of time and onboarding we need to do is also far greater than we realized/were told when we originally bought the product. They told us we should hire onboarding support, but at the end, after we had already reached our budget maximum for this, so it's been slower than we had hoped.
Customer support from IBM is impeccable. They are quick to respond and they don't nickel and dime you for every request you make. Their goal is to ensure your success and as a user, I really feel like they listen to my concerns. That's not to say there are no problems. All software has its issues, but I don't feel like those issues fall on deaf ears.
I'm a Millenial and more tech savvy, so learning this tool is more intuitive and I don't mind learning the ins and outs of the product. It can be cumbersome when permissions or new rules by our admins get enacted, that can cause disruptions in our workflows and annoyances. Overall, the usability is fine, and helps in my day to day more than causes disruptions
It was extremely difficult to create reports. We had to download data and create them in other applications. This was very limiting and required a great deal of time and effort. Drag and drop functionality is needed so we can self serve in the product.
Salesforce is always available securely from any internet-capable device anywhere in the world, UNLESS you choose to set security measures so that ONLY trusted IP ranges may access the system at certain times of the day. It's all about choice and flexibility with Salesforce products.
Salesforce performance in general is excellent. "The cloud infrastructure beneath Force.com has been fine-tuned over the past 10 years. It powers nearly 100,000+ businesses running more than 185,000 applications that 3 million users count on every day." Points per Salesforce - 1) Multitenant kernel - With a multitenant platform, each business that uses the app doesn’t have its own copy. Instead, all businesses share a single copy and then customize it for their specific needs. 2) ISO 27001 certified security - You can’t compromise when it comes to enterprise-level security. Force.com is road-tested and trusted by nearly 100,000+ companies, including many of the world’s most security-conscious organizations, such as banks and health care providers. 3) Proven reliability - All Force.com apps run on world-class data centers with backup, failover, and disaster-recovery facilities. Force.com has had a proven 99.9 percent uptime record for years. 4) Proven, real-time scalability - Force.com is used by many of the world's largest enterprises, including Cisco, Japan Post Network, and Symantec. Applications can automatically scale from a few users to millions of page views, as needed. 5) Real-time query optimizer - You need fast access to your data. The Force.com query optimizer delivers under 300ms response time, at a massive scale. 6) Real-time transparent system status - You can always see real-time system performance, availability, and security information at trust.salesforce.com. 7) Real-time upgrades - Unlike traditional software platforms, our upgrades never break your customizations, code, or integrations. We upgrade the platform for you 3 to 4 times each year. As a result, you’re always on the latest version, with access to the latest features, performance, and security enhancements. 8) Real-time sandbox environments - With a single click, you can create copies of your applications, configuration, and data in separate environments for development, testing, and training. 9) Three global production data centers and disaster recovery - Force.com runs on three geographically dispersed, mirrored data centers with built-in replication, disaster recovery, a redundant network backbone, and no single points of failure
All is fast, but with API's it is sometimes slower due to the application we are pulling data from. Reports are loaded directly or within seconds and our reports are very detailed with many columns and rows.
The overall support has been good. More and more features are being released quite frequently. Very small features are also making big difference in how the tool can be adapted and used better. If there is anything we need or are stuck, the support team sets up a call and helps in resolving the issue/provides workarounds.
Giving a 10 would suggest there is no room for improvement. I don't feel like their support is perfect. However, I have never met another team that was more dedicated to making sure we get what we want and need.
I attended two training sessions. I would rate them a 4 as an advanced user. It was very basic – great for someone new – would give 8+ for new person.
I had 3 years of experience at the time. I skipped basic and went onto advanced and still not helpful. A lot of it was best practices that didn’t feel relevant for our business
I have gone through multiple. The content that’s delivered is quite basic – I wish they had more advanced training.
We are grandfathered into premium support plus training. We get unlimited access to instructor led and online training for free. We have taken advantage of this
Just from an organizational standpoint - we standardized our data prior to moving to Salesforce. But we essentially standardized it wrong. That's created a big disgusting mess for us know that I'll have to deal with as the Admin. Be sure you think through use cases prior to doing something like that - seek outside opinions on how the data will work best, especially depending on what else you're going to integrate with Salesforce.
Test test test. Make sure that the product is calculating everyone 100% correctly. DO NOT accept a 70% pass rate as some companies would like to have you believe is acceptable. This means conducting thorough testing by providing 100% of all expected results, but it will be worth it when you know that the compensation plans are working entirely as expected.
I've used Act CRM by Xperience previously. Salesforce is way more robust and intuitive and meets the needs of an enterprise company with enterprise clients way more effectively. I don't think there is another CRM in the market with the overall functionality and usability that can complete with the Salesforce platform for someone in my role.
Out of all of the products I have ever evaluated for this space, Varicent is head and shoulders above the rest in my opinion. For me, I think of Varicent as akin to building an Access database while the other programs are like building an Excel data model. In Varicent you control everything from what tables are built to how they are leveraged with the calculations that you build. In the other tools, you are pushed into finding ways to leverage their pre-built mechanism of action and any deviation from what you build necessitates you to build a brand new plan. This is the key differentiator of a table driven system as opposed to a rule based one. The flexibility and usability is wholly unmatched.
Salesforce is the most widely used CRM system. Professionalism tends to increase when things go wrong for market leaders. Salesforce considers us as users because they own the market. Having all of our data in one place and all of our teams working within Salesforce. Anyone who uses Salesforce is impacted by it, even if they don't.
I've worked with Salesforce since 2001 in companies ranging from 4 to hundreds of sales people and the system has been able to scale and perhaps more importantly expand (functionally) to the needs of larger organizations. In fact in my previous company, as a provider of a solution that integrated with Salesforce, we had customers that had thousands of sales people using Salesforce.
Varicent Incentive Compensation Management is a tool that allows [users] to implement the specific rules applying to the business, [without] any technical constraints from the tool. The reports would, however, need to be a little bit less rigid and add more controls regarding what has been entered by users.
Using Salesforce.com has made my daily routines more efficient and simplified the manual tasks I had to perform independently. I can now access data from any device, online or offline, and provide better guidance to my team about the forecasts provided by the built-in artificial intelligence (AI). A chat with a Salesforce support specialist would be great. The knowledge base has a community forum where Salesforce users can ask questions and learn more about the product.
It requires a lot of time to manage but does a good job keeping everything in one place
Managers! Quit having sales professionals create spreadsheets and reports ad hoc. The information is in SFDC. Build a report so you can get it yourself.
If used properly and not restricted and overmanaged, SFDC will provide huge ROI
Fewer calculation errors as previous solution was manual based.
Ability to build tailored solutions in ICM to entice Brokers to write business for ANZ.
Allows the Broker Managers to easily to see what commissions they are going to pay in the next Commission Run payment cycle and make changes if required.
