EIM and SPM system and related commentary presented by Canidium

The Dangerous Power of Pay

Thursday, December 3rd, 2009 | Compensation Plans, EIM, SPM | No Comments

One aspect of compensation that has always fascinated me is the psychology of motivating people to do what you want. People are motivated by a lot of different things and there’s a lot of literature around that. However, the common belief is that money is number one and always will be, especially amongst sales people. I’ve always bought into that. I’ve advised clients to simplify compensation plans down to where they know what to sell, how much to sell, and how much money they’ll make when they achieve their goals.

“If you want something sold, put a quota on it.” I always say.

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Callidus Introduces SPM Community: OpenCommissions

Tuesday, August 18th, 2009 | Callidus, EIM, SPM, User communities | No Comments

Callidus Software announced the launch of OpenCommissions a community sales performance management (SPM) website today with this press release. Featured are SPM related forums, a wiki, blogs, and even sales compensation management Excel and Word templates. Essentially what Callidus has done to create OpenCommissions is to make public parts of TrueConnect, the community site previously exclusively available to verified Callidus customers. Today’s visitors will find some of the content immediately available upon arrival; additional content is available after a free registration and finally, some content is still restricted to only Callidus customers. › Continue reading

Compensation Management is not for Sissies

Monday, August 17th, 2009 | Compensation Plans, EIM | No Comments

Any of us who have had the pleasure of being responsible for compensation management can relate to some of the recent events at AIG, albeit on a smaller and hopefully less dramatic scale. If you’re not up to speed, this article will give you the scenario.

Here are some key excerpts:

The disclosures came as AIG was lambasted for about $450 million in bonus payments planned for employees at a business unit that lost $40.5 billion last year. The unit’s woes pushed the company to near-collapse, forcing the government bailout.

“Something is terribly wrong with this picture, and the reckless behavior at AIG must stop immediately,” said Rep. Elijah Cummings (D., Md.), in a statement Sunday. He called on AIG’s government-appointed chief executive, Edward Liddy, to resign over the bonus-payments issue.

The reason we can relate is because this basic scenario occurs regularly at every company that uses variable pay to incent performance. That is, sometimes people achieve on their plans even though the business overall is suffering. And in many cases we have people who qualify for large payouts even though they clearly don’t deserve them. › Continue reading

SaaS Pricing for Callidus On-Premise Solution

Tuesday, August 4th, 2009 | Callidus, EIM, SPM, SaaS | No Comments

In addition to the financial results Callidus Software’s Q1 2009 earnings call last week (transcript available here) had much other interesting information including mention of some new customers, new products, and employee headcount reduction. One item in particular that caught my attention was a comment by Senior Vice President, Finance and Operations, and Chief Financial Officer Ronald Fior:

When we get to that stage I mean, we’re going to seriously consider and we’ve been actually testing it out, going to more of a subscription-based term license kind of idea for the license side of this business for the on-premises side, because as I already said, there are some certain verticals that just seem to be pretty well stuck on the idea that they’re going to do an on-premises.

What Fior is discussing here is a software as a service (SaaS) like pricing model for the verticals and customers that insist on an on-premise solution. › Continue reading

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