Blog

  • Is Salary a Proxy for Value? Not If You’re Steve Jobs

    Is Salary a Proxy for Value? Not If You’re Steve Jobs

    January 25th, 2011 | Articles, bonus, Compensation Plans, humor | Jason Kearns

    Compensation for a job well done can take on many meanings. To most of us, it’s simply a means to an end. We need to pay the bills and support our families. Our rate of pay is necessary to maintain our lifestyle. Most of us correlate our lifestyle and status to our income. And most [...]

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  • Starbucks Tip Conspiracy

    Starbucks Tip Conspiracy

    January 10th, 2011 | Articles, humor | Jason Kearns

    Any frequent coffee user can confidently describe their local Starbucks. Coffee, pastries, lattes and cappuccinos are all served up by happy, smiling employees shouting through the buzz of machines and blaring background acoustics (available on iTunes). Every item on the overpriced menu and every collectible on display seems to be handpicked. Not surprisingly, it is [...]

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  • Holiday Bonuses for the Sales Organization

    Holiday Bonuses for the Sales Organization

    December 21st, 2010 | Articles, bonus, Compensation Plans, humor, Non cash incentive | Jason Kearns

    Santa’s View on Pay for Performance By Jason Kearns, Canidium, and Scott Barton, NewSigma It’s the most highly anticipated time of the year: year end, holidays, bonuses and token gifts. This year, many cash-hording companies will open their purse strings to say thanks to their overworked masses. It takes the form of monetary bonus, gift [...]

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  • Reflections on World at Work Conference and ROI

    Reflections on World at Work Conference and ROI

    November 4th, 2010 | Articles, EIM, large projects, ROI | Doug Erb

    Last month while attending a World at Work conference I heard an alarming confession. During one of the sessions on vendor evaluation, a customer confessed that they didn’t focus on hard dollar ROI because they didn’t feel the system would ever be able to provide ROI based on hard dollar costs. The vendor doing the [...]

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  • Health Care Reform Impacts

    Health Care Reform Impacts

    October 5th, 2010 | Articles, SPM | Doug Erb

    Recently portions of the Health Care Reform bill went into act. We are all trying to grasp how it will affect us individually and as a nation, but in our industry how will it affect SPM (sales performance management) systems and compensation as a whole? After researching regulation changes, increased premiums, and some policy options [...]

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  • Merced and Canidium announce upcoming ICM Webinar:  Solution Assessment and Road Mapping

    Merced and Canidium announce upcoming ICM Webinar: Solution Assessment and Road Mapping

    April 12th, 2010 | Articles, EIM, Merced, Project Direction, SPM | Michael Stus

    Canidium and partner Merced Systems will host a webinar at noon Eastern / 9:00 A.M. Pacific on Tuesday, May 11th. The key speakers will be Canidium Principal Consultant (and frequent Alpha Comp contributor), Jason Kearns, and Merced’s VP of Business Consulting, Matthew Katz. Kearns and Katz will be discussing the classic progression of incentive compensation [...]

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  • Goals Under Attack!

    Goals Under Attack!

    January 15th, 2010 | Articles, Compensation Plans, Goal setting | Michael Stus

    Heard an interesting piece on NPR this evening (transcript here). One of the participants, Lisa Ordonez, a management professor at the University of Arizona was citing some examples of what she calls “Goals Gone Wild.” Here is what Ordonez had to say about a corporate goal of GM’s to achieve 29 percent market share: And [...]

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  • The Perfect Gift, a Christmas Bonus

    The Perfect Gift, a Christmas Bonus

    December 22nd, 2009 | Articles, bonus, SPM | Jason Kearns

    In recent years the “Christmas Bonus” has been a species in decline. Once an American staple, it went out of favor for a couple of reasons. First, you couldn’t call it the Christmas Bonus anymore if you wanted to be politically correct. And unfortunately, “Year End Bonus” or “Holiday Bonus” just doesn’t have the same [...]

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  • The Dangerous Power of Pay

    The Dangerous Power of Pay

    December 3rd, 2009 | Articles, Compensation Plans, EIM, SPM | Jason Kearns

    One aspect of compensation that has always fascinated me is the psychology of motivating people to do what you want. People are motivated by a lot of different things and there’s a lot of literature around that. However, the common belief is that money is number one and always will be, especially amongst sales people. [...]

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  • Callidus Introduces SPM Community: OpenCommissions

    Callidus Introduces SPM Community: OpenCommissions

    August 18th, 2009 | Articles, Callidus, EIM, SPM, User communities | Michael Stus

    Callidus Software announced the launch of OpenCommissions a community sales performance management (SPM) website today with this press release. Featured are SPM related forums, a wiki, blogs, and even sales compensation management Excel and Word templates. Essentially what Callidus has done to create OpenCommissions is to make public parts of TrueConnect, the community site previously [...]

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