Back in 2019, just as Bengaluru’s investors were moving from optimism to outright exuberance, countless startups were disrupting the traditional way of conducting business. Plenty of startups closer home changed the way people booked cabs, ordered food, or booked hotels. With the winds of innovation flowing across the Garden City, there was one problem that was persistent for all sales teams across industries – inconvenience in incentives. They were delayed, incorrect, and cumbersome. And that’s where Compass comes in. Compass is ‘Lego for incentives’. Compass is an unorthodox solution to the orthodox problem that deeply affects Sales. With Compass, an incentive automation software, one can easily build logic with any number of variables where the only input is defining the variable. Compass will take care of incentives no matter how complex. Apart from easy incentive calculation, Compass helps motivate the sales reps with gamified sales contests and a library of templates to choose from. Compass is also created to handle complex tax implications across geographies and tax brackets, to enable seamless payouts.
Take insurance, for example. An industry that has always thrived on human engagement but has been considered unglamorous and uninteresting as a career option for far too long. A large workforce, too many geographies, how is it possible to align all of them? One common complaint agents have is that their daily tasks can be repetitive, boring, and unrewarding. With this being the nature of the job, how can an agent, uninspired as they are, be expected to hit their targets? It only gets worse because these agents start working independently of organizational goals leading to heavy attrition and low stickiness. This is one end of the spectrum. At the other end are new-age tech companies who function in a fast-paced environment where most startups are trying to disrupt traditional ways of business. There’s almost no time for meaningful communication. And when one cannot communicate crucial and critical bits of information with the sales teams, keep abreast of their performances in real-time, allow them the opportunity (and time) to course-correct, and align them with the larger organizational goal, things can get problematic.
Whichever end is looked though, the trend is the same. And companies need to change the way they enable their sales teams. Because the large young workforce that’s taking over the world today is more likely to look for meaning and impact in their work and aren’t satisfied simply punching a clock. Helping them understand their role in a larger plan gives them a clearer sense of purpose. And this is the challenge. To be able to communicate and motivate that part of the workforce that isn’t made up of employees who work out of home or office but are central to the business model and impact the most critical KPIs. The company is talking about delivery partners, on-ground 24×7, young, tech-savvy, and highly motivated if the reward is right. How do companies get through to them? Consider any business. Even those as different as chalk and cheese in terms of function, human capital, and their demographics. Their delivery partners, their feet-on-the-street, those on-ground 24×7 have one single concern: Why are incentives so inconvenient? Never on time. Never enough. Never easy to get.
One of the major reasons why sales incentive programs fail is because of a simple fact: the ones who built and led the sales teams eventually left the loop and lost track. Surprising? Well. Not really. There are tons of tools and software organizations use to motivate, measure and reward FOS performance. But, they are rarely owned by the sales leaders. It will most likely be rolled out, in the hundreds, by the folks at HR or Administration or Tech. Without really listening to what the FOS actually wants and truly understanding their shortcomings. Yet another problem with the way sales programs were run and incentives were calculated was that it was all manual which made it tedious, slow and immensely boring. Majority of sales incentives are still calculated on Excel sheets. Spreadsheets were never built to calculate incentives but to automate simple mathematical calculations which had more math than logic. This is one of the major reasons why sales programs always fail. Excel sheets aren’t the most excellent choice for the job. But what would be an excellent choice is to build a comprehensive sales engagement strategy that motivates and re-engages agents and delivery partners, fosters transparent communication about tasks, milestones and achievements, and facilitates error-free and timely rewards.
This is the major reason WHY Compass exists. Compass was built with the sole aim of ‘Democratizing Sales Incentives’. And the vision was to change the lives of all the people who sell, across startups and corporations alike. To help them sell more and sell meaningfully. Compass focuses on the underlying fact: Sales performance acceleration is about re-engaging with the sales teams for enhanced accountability and performance by using levers that they crave for: meaningful and timely rewards, lucrative commission plans, and instant payments. Have a business and want to motivate a team to influence a behavior? Compass is built for every business. The world’s largest organizations leverage the power of Compass.