Mark Smith's Analyst Perspectives

Sales organizations strive to maximize the performance of their staffs to meet quotas and revenue targets in an efficient manner. This focus is part of my agenda to help organizations innovate and maximize revenue in sales. To achieve this requires automation of various sales activities including compensation, incentives, quota development, territory optimization, channel management, analytics and planning. Varicent is focused on these aspects of sales, offering software deployable in three ways: rented in the cloud, hosted for easier management or purchased for use inside the organization. My last analysis of the company and its products was part of our 2011 Value Index for Sales Performance Management; in it we rated Varicent a Hot Vendor overall across our seven evaluation categories applied to its application suite. That analysis included our analysis of Varicent SPM version 7 that made significant advances in the use and process of managing compensation and incentives but also the rest of their application portfolio from territory management, sales quota management and channel management. 

Varicent continues its efforts to improve its capabilities and this summer came out with version 7.1 that takes steps to improve large-scale calculations, support for mobile devices and Web-based access to its applications, compensation composer and sales analytics along with critical administrative improvements in its API, migration, logging and scheduling. Now Varicent can investigate areas where it can expand its portfolio and add more value for the sales teams; among those collaboration and mobility will become even more important. Many of the expanded set of capabilities in Varicent SPM 7.1 resonate with our latest research in sales analytics which showed that sales management is looking for intuitive metrics that can be centrally managed and work interactively. 

Varicent has been steadily growing its customer base and organization, and we expect that to continue on a global scale with its current expansion to Europe and Asia Pacific. Many of its largest customers tout the performance and scalability of its calculation and processing capabilities, as well as its flexibility in compensation modeling. Varicent has been growing its cloud computing based set of customers where you can rent their applications and managed by them. Varicent has also got many customers integrated with Salesforce.com SFA like Deltek, Maritz and Silverpop to more tightly integrate with SFA. The company has a lot of potential and a very focused team at its headquarters outside of Toronto. Varicent is a company any organization should evaluate for sales performance management.  

Regards, 

Mark Smith – CEO & Chief Research Officer