News Stories

	Business Finance Compensation Management: No Longer an Option "But most companies simply don't have the processes in place for setting organizational objectives and cascading them down to the individual level. 'Stock options are just an excuse for creating a compensation program without really creating strategic alignment," notes Mark Stiffler, CEO of Synygy, a sales performance management solutions provider. "A much better measure for the CFO, for example, might be to reduce the cost of capital by 0.5 percent --a move that would positively impact the value of the company and is directly connected to the CFO's direct responsibilities."
	Sales Performance Journal The Miller Heiman Sales Performance Journal 2007, Volume 2 Issue 9 "Getting Sales Compensation Right Planning, implementing and managing a sales compensation plan is more complicated than it may seem on the surface and the consequences can be seen at many organizational levels. Sales managers who don't comprehend their company's comp plan can't effectively leverage the plan to reinforce behaviors that drive the organization's strategies and salespeople are unable to adequately prioritize and plan. To learn what works in the area of sales compensation management, the Sales Performance Journal sat down with Synygy's Mark Stiffler, founder, president, and CEO, to talk about the technical mishaps and strategic missteps that can cost an organization dearly in money and time."
	CFO Onus of Bonus "The company's new ICM program, from Synygy, has sped up commission reporting. In addition, the finance department can make an ad hoc change — for instance, adding a promotional incentive — in a day or two. Errors are also way down. Equally important to Gottlieb, the system now rewards salespeople for instruments sold as well as dollar volume. In fact, sales staffers can use the software to run what-if scenarios that forecast commissions on specific deals. "The behavior [of the sales force] has changed," says Gottlieb. "They understand now what they need to do to optimize their commissions."
	Phone Plus magazine SALES COMP FOR ALL "While sales compensation management is partly a software function, it’s important to realize that there’s more to it than that. There’s also a very important human element. Any company that goes shopping for software is doomed to fail because of a lack of internal capabilities needed to effectively manage the plans,” says Mark Stiffler, president and CEO at Synygy Inc., which consults and provides software solutions for compensation management. “The software alone is not going to solve the problem.” Stiffler says he’s found that only about 20 percent of sales mismanagement is due to a lack of software, while 30 percent is inefficient processes and a full 50 percent is a lack of expertise, experience or time to implement and manage the plan. “So, you have to approach it holistically,” he says. “What are the problems? What are the symptoms of the problems? What are the costs of not solving these problems? Then [you need to] assess the internal ability to solve them. Most companies have around 20 percent of the capabilities they need. Good ones have 50 percent. So software can’t solve everything.” Synygy provides supplementary expertise to implement software and redesign internal processes, and clients can then outsource the management of their plans to Synygy. While the SaaS model delivers software over the Web, Synygy also can provide a managed service that takes over compensation management. It does the processing, data collection, report designing and rules application. “Outsourcing this minimizes risk — and annoying the salespeople is a big risk,” Stiffler says."
	Insurance Networking News Insurance Networking NewsAgent Attrition & Its Consequences " …apart from the amount of compensation provided, insurance firms sometime poorly manage their compensation plans. "There is very little communication between the insurance company and the agent about how the plans work; about how they are getting paid," says [Mark] Stiffler. "Another problem we see is a lack of accuracy - a lot of errors, both plus and minus. And, of course, if someone is overpaid due to an error they are not going to say anything, but if they are underpaid then that leads to complaints, disputes and disgruntled people." …Not only are carriers plagued by outdated systems but they also face other compensation management woes, such as a lack of trained personnel to manage agents' compensation in a sophisticated fashion. "There is no real expertise within insurance companies on the processes of managing broker commissions," says Stiffler. If they redesign and automate their compensation processes, carriers need to ensure that they have staffers with specific knowledge of process management."
	Destination CRM.com Solving Sales Compensation Management Problems "There is no college course on how to manage sales compensation plans, and people who end up in that role often find themselves there unexpectedly, driven by organizational needs rather than career goals. Even if the expertise does exist within an organization, the people responsible for process management are often too involved fighting fires to apply their expertise to improving processes--and the IT department is too busy with other initiatives to redesign the systems needed to support those processes. As a result, most organizations lack an understanding of best practices associated with sales compensation management along with a consistent, reliable source of expert knowledge."
Performance Improvement Journal	Performance Improvement Journal Move from Managing to Driving Performance "The challenge for organizations that want to become truly performance driven is to adopt an approach that unifies the individual and organizational aspects of performance management and addresses the missing linkages that exist in the non-unified approaches to performance management.Only when the efforts of every employee are directed toward executing your organization’s strategy, when your organization measures and analyzes organizational and individual performance with a view to improving on past behavior, when it rewards each individual in accordance with his or her contribution to the organization’s performance, and when it is able to adapt quickly to changes within or outside the organization will it become a truly performance-driven organization."
	Sales & Marketing Management *Motivation Inspiration* "Jeff Evernham, the managing director of client services for Synygy, an incentive management company headquartered in Chester, Pa., warns that one mistake can create months-long distrust. "Trust is huge. If you don't have trust in the results, then people will become de-motivated," he says. "And if they don't leave, it's very difficult to turn that disillusionment around."”
	Benefits & Compensation Solutions Outsourcing It’s Not About Cutting Costs “Insufficient resources to manage a process manifests itself in the inability to manage peak work loads, the inability to provide around-the-clock services using internal staff, and risks associated with turnover of key people that results in loss of “institutional memory. By working with an outsourcing services provider that has sufficient resources, these problems can be eliminated.”
	Executive Decision The New Face of Outsourcing “However, it should be noted that “outsourcing of a business process is very different than outsourcing technology,” explains Mark Stiffler, president and chief executive officer of Chester, Pa.-based Synygy, Inc., a third-party provider of sales compensation plans.
	Workforce Performance Solutions Driving Performance "Many organizations enthusiastically formulate and communicate a new strategy but somehow fail to translate it into reality. The link between strategy formulation and execution is the workforce, and the key lies in translating the overall strategy into tasks and responsibilities for individual employees. "For every department and each individual to have a clear sense of how their respective activities fit into the organization’s overall purpose, organizational objectives must be broken down into sets of individual goals. These goals must be of sufficient detail to enable managers to pick the right people and provide the right direction for them to achieve the objectives."
	Workforce Management Lessons from the Front Lines "Workforce Management sat down with a group of human resource leaders and experts in the field of compensation during Synygy's spring Performance Conference in Los Angeles to gain insight into their experiences with performance management. Much of their discussion focused on the workforce-related challenges of adopting and living with performance management plans that are pushing toward pay-for-performance goals. "The companies, which are at different points along the performance management continuum, shared lessons that they have learned along the way. The participants represent a variety of corporate cultures and each provided a unique perspective on the subject."
	Sales and Marketing Management Performance "Stiffler notes that the absence of a unified view of performance management and how it can be applied to the workforce is where most organizations go wrong. He offers a singular approach to rethinking strategy execution and developing a first-class performance-management system that stretches organizational and individual productivity."
	Pharmaceutical Executive Incentives: Heart of the Sell "The survey gives us an industry marker as to what the top sales compensation challenges are, so we can identify where we can be more effective at managing and driving performance," said Jim Daly, director of sales operations for business intelligence at Sepracor, one of the survey participants. "Clearly, one of the industry's top challenges is measuring performance, especially when it comes to deciding whether to compensate the individual or team."
	Workforce Management The State of Compensation: Raising the Performance Bar "According to a June 2004 study by Synygy, World at Work and Sibson Consulting, 72 percent of companies say that paying rewards based on individual performance was the top goal of their organization’s performance management program."
	Selling Power The Incentive Bounce Effect "CIGNA, a major provider of employee-benefit products, uses Synygy software to manage incentive compensation for its group insurance unit. Synygy configured CIGNA’s system in just four months, well within its usual three to six months for implementation…. The Yankee Group, a premiere market research and consulting firm, calls Synygy one of the “thought leaders” in incentive compensation."
	Workforce Management "Synygy puts candidates through arduous behavior interviews with its seven-person India human resources team and two interviews on the technical side to make sure they have the ability to work on that level. But before they even get to that stage, the candidates have already gone through one or two specific skills tests and a personality profile. Once on board, the candidates go through three months of training conducted by teams sent from the United States. Some of the India hires may also be sent to America for very specialized training on specific project needs."