With the advent of CRM systems, companies are attempting to automate the sales process and customer interactions. More and more sales people access CRM systems to get their job done. But there have been challenges in CRM adoption as sales people resist the solutions. If salespeople have to access the CRM system to get access to their commission statements, they are more likely to use the CRM system for its intended purpose. If a salesperson knows they can help get paid accurately, they will make sure to keep the systems accurate and thus help keep the system up to date.
A commission solution that can accurately establish and calculate commissions and can seamlessly provide the commission statements for viewing by sales people can be a great advantage to firms. In addition to reducing commission errors, reducing time taken to administer and increasing sales people productivity, the solution can increase Salesforce.com adoptions.
QCommission is a powerful, flexible sales commission software tool. It calculates sales people’s compensation, accurately, quickly and professionally. QCommission is integrated with Salesforce.com CRM systems as well as accounting systems such as QuickBooks and SAP Business One.
Salesforce.com is the worldwide leader in on-demand customer relationship management (CRM) services. More companies trust their vital customer and sales data to Salesforce.com than any other CRM company in the world. Currently more than 400,000 subscribers at more than 20,000 companies use Salesforce.com. Salesforce.com also offers AppForce/AppExchange, a hosted platform for 3rd party applications.
Technology
Salesforce.com, supplies AppForce, a services platform for building applications and integrating with Salesforce.com’s offerings. The AppForce platform allows you to customize standard objects and build custom objects, tabs, and s-controls. The technology also includes a Web Services API that allows integration between apps on the platform and other applications. Use of the AppForce tools makes sure that the integration works well with the various versions and models of Salesforce.com. The platform also ensures that the third party product is properly authenticated prior to getting access to the Salesforce.com data. All access to Salesforce.com data is through the AppForce platform.
QCommission utilizes a technology called QXchange to integrate to other applications including Appforce. Specific data access plug-ins (DAP) for different systems can be added to QXchange to integrate with various different data sources. A special DAP for Salesforce.com allows QCommission to exchange data with Salesforce.com.
Integration
Architecture
QCommission is a composite application. It has two components: an administrative module that calculates commissions and a presentation module that presents commissions results to the sales force.
The administrative module is the system used to establish sales compensation plans for the sales force. The responsibility for this function typically lies with sales operations but can also be shared by finance or human resources. Commission plans can be unique by sales people or common across groups of people. Data for commissions calculations can come from various sources, but is primarily invoices from the corporation’s accounting systems. Commissions are primarily calculated on Revenue. Revenues are mostly based on invoices entered into the accounting system. This is the primary data that is imported into QCommission. Opportunities within Salesforce.com can also be imported into QCommission and treated as transactions against which commissions should be calculated.
Various attributes of transactions can be used in the calculation of commissions. In many situations, sales reps are directly associated with transactions. This can be used in properly crediting the transaction to the sales rep prior to calculating commissions. Other data attributes useful in commission calculations include Quantity, Amount, Customer, Product, etc.