NetLedger Adds Sales-Compensation Management For Smaller Companies

NetLedger Inc. is adding sales-compensation management capabilities to its hosted NetCRM customer-relationship management applications for small and midsize businesses. The Sales Compensation Manager software, unveiled this week at the DCI CRM Conference in Boston, creates and maintains sales-commission policies and calculates commissions in real time as sales representatives process orders.

Sales Compensation Manager calculates sales commissions based on quotas, product quantity, service items, and other criteria. That motivates sales professionals by letting them immediately see the results of their efforts to close deals, NetLedger says.

The application can be linked with the vendor's accounting and payroll applications, allowing finance to automatically process commission payments. The system also provides sales executives with reporting capabilities to help manage sales-department finances.

"There is a large and growing market for sales-commission management capabilities," says Joe Galvin, a Gartner research director. Oracle, PeopleSoft, SAP, and Siebel Systems provide such capabilities in their apps, while "best-of-breed" vendors such as Callidus Software, Centiv, and Synygy market sales-commission management software. But Galvin says those vendors focus on companies with 100 payees or more, ignoring companies with 25 to 50 payees—the very ones NetLedger is targeting. And Sales Compensation Manager is the only such app offered on a hosted basis, Galvin says.

Sales Compensation Manager will be available later this summer as part of a new release of the NetCRM suite. NetLedger's hosted applications are priced at $50 per user per month.