Austin-based Iconixx lets you unleash the beast in your sales force

The days are long gone when accurate and on-time commission payments is all it takes to keep a sales team happy and ready to return to battle day after day. It’s a whole new ball game in a whole lot of ways. Incentive compensation plans – with individual performance plans, team performance plans and performance bonus structures – reward desired behavior and help companies achieve strategic objectives. By automating incentive compensation, companies realize significant benefits that help them effectively reach their overall goals. 

Iconixx is a sales compensation solution that automates commission plans and eliminate sales downtime caused by trivial administration. Founded in 2010, the company’s software achieves this by diligently calculating commissions and bonuses, forecasting future sales for potential compensation plans, measuring results and determining the effectiveness of compensation plans. Whether you work in sales or finance, human resources or compensation, IT, or operations, the breadth and depth of the Iconixx platform will change your game – and boost the value of your organization’s compensation incentive plans.

Iconixx is driven by the industry’s most powerful compensation management engine that can process the calculation of thousands of sales performance components, millions of transactions, and multiple currencies at lightening speed. The firm is based in Austin, TX.

Feed and nourish the sales beast in today’s world

Iconixx believes to free the beast inside every sales person, and be sure the beast returns home after every hunt, you need a compensation system that fulfills 5 critical needs: automation, transparency, flexibility, accuracy, and dependability.

You need to do more for your beasts than get commissions right every time. You need a system and processes that create dependable commission experiences over and over again. It’s the only way to prove you care about each sales person on the team, establish trust among sales members, sustain performance excellence, and present a bright future for the organization and each salesperson.

It goes beyond being competitive

Even the best sales commission plans can become difficult to maintain when kept in manual systems (such as spreadsheets) or when you try to scale them to meet the needs of a larger sales team. Automating sales compensation plans ensures that despite the constant ebb and flow of your sales team, calculations are always done efficiently and seamlessly. An automated sales compensation solution ensures:

• Consistently accurate payment of commissions
• Measurably improved sales performance
• Lower administrative costs
• Real-time visibility into commission data for the sales team executives
• Insight into the impact of commission adjustments

They’ll leave if they don’t trust you

Even the most straightforward sales compensation plan can create mistrust among the sales ranks when it’s not clearly understood by every stakeholder in the process. When commission payouts are predictable and the logic behind them is deliberately apparent, everyone in the sales ecosystem is motivated to focus on the work that truly matters.

High performing sales people are driven by clear targets and deadlines. Sales managers who closely monitor and strictly enforce sales processes are more successful than those who don’t. The only way to get buy-in from sales managers and teams on clear, meaningful targets, deadlines, and processes is with an automated system that allows transparency for everyone involved. The solution is having access to real-time data, reporting, and a work flow inbox, all in one place on an easy-to-use dashboard. Each participant in the sales ecosystem must be empowered with real-time visibility into the factors that impact payments.

Managing for optimum sales means never fearing even the most complex sales plans

Sales compensation plans are like snowflakes – no two are the same. The right compensation plan for your company probably even differs among salespeople. Variable compensation plans combined with complex processes for calculations and approvals can lead to wasted time and money.

In a nutshell, flexibility translates into being able to deliver accurate forecasting, reporting, and analyzing, regardless of the idiosyncrasies of your compensation plan today or tomorrow. It demands capabilities for easily designing and reviewing plans before they’re implemented. If you wait until after the changes are implemented, you run the risk of losing the trust of your sales beasts.

You need to be able to see the impact of any proposed changes in a model environment – before you release those changes out into the world and wonder what the impact will be. This kind of flexibility in sales compensation management to feed and continually win the trust of the sales beast is increasingly important with the ever-increasing speed of change in how people work and how work gets done.

The beast needs to know you’ll get it right every time

At the end of the day, accuracy is what it all boils down to. A single mistake in sales compensation (no matter how minor or innocent) can erode confidence in management. Salespeople are most effective when they can focus on their work knowing that the company always has their back on payday.

Automation, transparency, flexibility and dependability in your sales compensation system are fruitless without accuracy. It’s the one absolutely critical factor on which the other four hinge. But maintaining the confidence of your salespeople is only the most visible reason for demanding accurate data. The risk of noncompliance is equally important, if not as obvious or top of mind. It’s critical that a sales compensation system support the internal controls of an organization’s CFO or other financial or accounting stakeholder.

Variable compensation is obviously an area that demands close attention to avoid. If finance doesn’t have a strong grip on sales compensation, it risks having a material control weakness. Accuracy also means having the ability to integrate processes with overall auditing and reporting. It’s one way of making it easy to manage Sarbanes-Oxley compliance, for example.

You need to deliver what successful salespeople visualize

The best salespeople are a confident bunch who visualize success and make life plans bases on their vision. To perform at their highest potential, they need to know that when they succeed, they can depend on receiving exactly what they planned for.

Dependability in the sales world also means continually supporting training and learning. Just as great sales managers offer their experience and practical knowledge to nourish less experienced salespeople, an automated compensation management system can be a font of data that sales managers and compensation leaders can use to help sales beasts clearly define their vision – and work toward achieving their near – and long-term goals.

On the other hand, error-prone and unwieldy spreadsheets are likely to result in undependable financial forecasting. The dangers here are obvious and many. They range from giving top performers a reason to walk out the door, to facing enormous expense shortfalls when incorrect commissions need to be restated or payouts exceed forecasts by inordinate amounts.

Dependability in sales compensation management requires:

• Powerful, accessible reporting tools and automatic reporting
• Functionality to query and estimate, to be able to develop “what if” models with potential orders and pipeline information from CRM solutions
• The ability to align behavior to specific goals with short-term incentives, such as new-product launch bonuses and to create additional incentives for top-live revenue growth

Iconixx unleashes the sales beast

Iconixx fulfills all five critical needs that support the sales beast to visualize and achieve success, while ending the headaches and heartburn of compensation leaders, who are set free to focus on improving compensation strategies and targeting business goals.

Automation

Iconixx automates the design and administration of sales compensation plans to eliminate the manual burden of calculating sales commissions in a group sales environment.

Transparency

Iconixx makes sales compensation transparent by empowering all participants in the commission process with real-time visibility into the factors that impact payments.

Flexibility

Iconixx is flexible enough to automate even the most complex and varied sales compensation plans, leaving more time for the business of selling.

Accuracy

Iconixx helps sales compensation plan administration avoid mistakes of all sizes and types, resulting in a focused, trusting and loyal sales force.

Dependability

Iconixx helps create an environment of dependable sales compensation by taking the mystery out of commission plans and providing tools to model outcomes, so expectations are realistic.

The Ultimate Beastmaster Founder/CEO, Derrik Deyhimi

Derrik has been in the compensation industry since 1997, building profitable technology software and services companies. He’s led organizations with $100 million in revenues and over 600 employees worldwide, as well as companies awarded for being the fastest-growing technology businesses in the United States.