An Overview of Forma.ai
A new approach to sales performance management
Sales compensation—including target setting (quotas) and coverage planning (territories)—is the primary lever modern revenue leaders have for driving motivation and performance. Compensation is also the largest financial investment made in the sales team, accounting for ~15% of top-line spend at organizations.
Comp, territories, and quotas done correctly will have outsized revenue returns. But with massive data volumes, disconnected planning and execution workflows, (plus integrating stakeholders and processes across the organization), the basic requirements to manage sales performance effectively are incredibly complex.
Due to the complexity, today:
- Decisions are made without comprehensive data
- Incentive plans do not drive desired behaviors from the sales team
- Quota and territory design is not grounded in data and analytics
- Design and roll out of programs takes months, hindering business agility
In fact, while 75% of organizations review territories, quotas, and sales comp plans annually, almost 60% fail to launch updated territories, comp plans, and quotas on time.
The typical approach to sales performance management (SPM) at most organizations—encompassing territory, quota, comp planning, and execution—is cumbersome, chaotic, and wildly inefficient. And current Territory and Quota Management (TQM) and Incentive Compensation Management (ICM) tools vastly over-simplify the challenge.
That is, historically, organizations have needed to choose between flexibility and ease of administration.
Most organizations purchase software in a bid to simply automate as much as possible. And while some legacy SPM tools allow for rule complexity and can facilitate large calculations and data requirements, they then also require large technical teams and external consultants to operate. With this path, the overhead and cost of ownership is considerable.
Oppositely, many organizations opt for simplified SPM solutions, prioritizing ease of use for faster implementation. But they quickly discover these tools do not accommodate the complex requirements of a global enterprise.
At Forma.ai we reject the idea you need to choose between precision of the nuanced compensation structures you require, or agility. We've built a better way.
After years in management consulting, implementing successful ICM and SPM solutions, we created a Sales Performance Management Platform that seamlessly integrates planning and execution, enabling organizations to be more agile and maximize revenue opportunities.
In this guide, we'll cover an overview of how Forma.ai delivers agility, bridging the complexity required for administrative excellence, and speed-to-market.
“[Forma.ai’s] product vision has the most potential of any in the SPM space and will change the market...”
- Forrester, 2023 SPM Wave
The Sales Performance Management suite overview
Forma.ai revolutionizes SPM by unifying planning and execution for incentive compensation management (ICM), as well as territory and quota management (TQM)—all in one comprehensive platform. Built on a robust foundation of machine learning and artificial intelligence, our solution enables enterprise organizations to accelerate and optimize SPM, with meaningful, built-in data-driven insights for driving revenue.
Solving the biggest challenges in SPM today
Implement an integrated SPM ecosystem: With a solution spanning the sales process, Forma.ai allows you to fully connect all aspects of SPM from planning territories, quotas, and incentive compensation, through to execution and tracking. This eliminates tooling and data silos for a truly agile go-to-market operation.
Reduce comp complexity: Forma.ai is the only solution that leverages AI (natural language processing) to automate the configuration of territory, quota, and compensation logic. Our unique architecture enables you to leverage an ever-expanding library of templates that support any SPM configuration. Accelerate the speed at which you deploy TQM and ICM changes from months to hours.
Set fair quotas: Forma.ai’s suite of analytical models and connected TQM and ICM planning allows you to set fair and equitable quotas. Our flexible quota-setting methodology and ongoing performance tracking means you can test limitless quota structures and iterate in real-time to maximize sales output aligned to organizational goals.
Balance your territories: Using Forma.ai’s Territory Workload Indexing, you can optimize and balance your territories to optimally serve prospective customers with the right seller capacity. Ensure every team member has the potential to succeed and unlock revenue opportunities.
Motivate with transparent incentives: With dynamic, tailored seller dashboards, you can deliver critical incentive information to sales reps at exactly the right moments. Each incentive structure is paired with a unique dashboard component designed to supercharge focus and motivation.
Unify your data: Consolidate all your go-to-market data into Forma.ai for a single, reliable source of truth on sales performance. With an intelligent end-to-end solution you increase auditability, analytic capabilities, and improve decision-making with comprehensive, accessible data.
The Forma.ai SPM difference
Forma.ai transforms your sales performance management (SPM) process end-to-end, using AI to build, optimize, and manage high-performing territories, quotas, and sales incentive programs.
Accelerate & automate with AI: Harnessing powerful native AI capabilities, our SPM solution accelerates rule configuration for comp plans, crediting logic, territories, and quotas. This drastically reduces turnaround time, support costs, and errors. Simply specify comp parameters in natural language (similar to chat commands in ChatGPT), and Forma's AI-supported data model automatically generates the configuration output. This is enabled via a match of your plan parameters with pre-built rules from our ever-expanding library of rule objects within our proprietary data model.
Connected planning & execution: Our solutions' built-in simulation engine enables modelling of limitless scenarios for territories, quotas, and compensation plans—plus you can predict and visualize the financial result. With full connectivity between ICM and TQM, simply model a territory change and see the resulting impact on a rep’s earnings. Once satisfied with the plan, you can deploy any modelled change live with a click of a button, eliminating the need for extended, messy analysis outside of ICM and TQM or in separate sandboxes; this simplifies and accelerates the process for deploying plans efficiently.
Integrated data ecosystem: Finally unify your performance data into a comprehensive source of truth for go-to-market (GTM). Our solution seamlessly integrates 200+ upstream and downstream data systems and offers robust validation and transformation capabilities for reliable, accurate, and actionable SPM data. Forma.ai’s data versioning helps track and manage data changes and exceptions, providing a complete audit trail for every input data adjustment. This not only alleviates the manual burden of data management, but also enhances transparency, security, and compliance within your organization.
Forma.ai ICM: Orchestrate more, at scale
ICM is at the core of Forma.ai. Our platform is purpose-built to accelerate the end-to-end workflow of sales compensation, from data management, to calculations, through to dashboards and reporting.
Forma.ai provides end-to-end coverage to deploy & manage ICM
Data management: From flexible and easy integrations, to custom ETL and data error validation checks, Forma.ai has robust data management capabilities for any organization.
ICM rule automation: Easy configure, deploy, calculate, and track any incentive or sales crediting rule. Our solution ensures even the most complex incentives are streamlined.
Orchestration and workflow: Our E2E workflow system helps accelerate and automate your ICM workflow to ensure everyone is aligned.
Dashboards and nudging: Motivate the field with performance dashboards and ensure your reps always know exactly what to focus onto maximize their earnings.
Reporting and tracking: The Forma.ai Performance Reporting suite helps you keep a pulse on every SPM lever, while our Financial Reporting suite helps automate everything from accruals to ASC606.
Data management
Flexible and limitless integrations: Forma.ai has over 200 pre-built integrations available to connect seamlessly to any data source powering your business, including CRM, ERP, HRIS, and more.
Hassle-free ETL and data transformation: Our robust data transformation capabilities ensure automated and accurate pre-processing of ICM data—no matter the scale and complexity of your organization—without requiring technical expertise.
Data validation and accuracy: Forma.ai provides customized verification rules with automatic notifications and workflows to streamline issue resolution and proactively ensure your data is error-free and accurate.
ICM rule automation
Comp plan management: Whether creating, modifying, or assigning and tracking acceptance from sales, Forma.ai streamlines the end-to-end plan management process via one platform.
Seamless rule changes: Now, you can instantly accelerate ICM configuration across comp rules and crediting logic using our native AI capabilities. Define parameters for the change you need in plain text and let Forma.ai configure the rules for you.
Agile SPIF management: Most organizations resort to calculating SPIFs manually, even with an ICM system. Using Forma.ai’s AI rule configuration, rapidly build and launch SPIFs to motivate reps with visualizations front and center on their dashboards.
Orchestration &workflow
A control center for every change: Stay in control of every change made in Forma.ai with our Change Request System. You'll get full visibility into every configuration change, communication, approval, and calculation—allowing you to orchestrate from above and streamline the entire ICM process.
Disruption-free dispute management: Avoid painful back-and-forth with payees using our workflow system for dispute resolution. Payees can submit disputes tagged to specific transactions and have them routed correctly for resolution, eliminating wasted time.
Enterprise-level audit and governance: All changes and updates in Forma.ai are tracked for an immutable record and audit log to help organizations meet strict compliance requirements (e.g. Sarbanes Oxley (SOX) Act).
Approvals and stakeholder management: Forma.ai helps you bring the right stakeholders together in a centralized place—away from bloated email threads and Slack messages. Customized approval routing and automated notifications help streamline all ICM decisions, processes, and changes.
"[Forma.ai] has the true AI capabilities that other platforms today do not have. They're a few years ahead of others...that was the core reason we chose Forma.ai in the first place. You can literally dream up any comp plan you want. There are no limitations to the implementation, because you're not limited by UI."
- Dr. Robert Beishaar, Sr. Director, Worldwide Sales Incentive Compensation, Autodesk
Dashboards & nudging
Dynamic and tailored dashboards: Sales team dashboards are dynamically generated based on each seller's comp plan, so every team members has full clarity on how their performance translates to pay. This helps you ensure all reps understand their plans fully and focus on the right areas at the right times.
Leaderboards and president’s club: Customize team-based incentives, leaderboards, and gamification badges directly in Forma.ai to drive competition and motivate reps to go above and beyond.
Estimator and pipeline views: Pull in deal-level information from your CRM to provide reps with a deal-level view of where to focus and what actions to take to maximize earnings and increase quota attainment.
Reporting & tracking
Leadership and performance dashboards: Make data-driven decisions with Performance Reporting, where you can monitor comp plan, territory and quota effectiveness. See what’s working and iterate based on best practice benchmarks.
Sales performance data access: Easily extract the data you need to provide cross-functional stakeholders with the critical sales performance insights they need to execute.
Customize critical reports for any stakeholder: Customize key reporting outputs including payroll, financial accruals, performance to budget, and more. Multiple user groups can access the platform to collaborate on reporting in one centralized place and ensure outputs fit your business-specific needs.
ASC606 adherence: Forma.ai helps automate demanding enterprise reporting for ASC606 standards. Users can customize amortization schedules, track ongoing adjustments and true-ups, and collaborate with finance to stay on top of ASC606 compliance needs.
“Sales Ops is the noisiest department. There’s always some fire starting or a major change coming down the line that causes issues or takes weeks to implement. It’s hard to believe this thing is working [so well]; the silence from sales ops is deafening."
- Suzanne Shadgett, CFO, Stryker Canada
Meet Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) Act compliance requirements with our built-in controls
In our solution, there is an immutable audit trail for all changes. These are managed through Forma.ai’s ticketing system. For every single change, there is a record of who made the change, who approved it, and the estimated financial impact at time of change.
You can also customize access permissions. Any number of user profiles can be configured based on your specific needs, plus you can control at granular levels, such as read/write access for specific data fields.
Forma.ai TQM: Optimize & manage territories & quotas
Forma.ai’s Territory and Quota Management (TQM) functionality allows users to seamlessly plan, optimize, deploy, and manage territories and quotas in tandem with ICM.
Merge TQM planning and operations
A strong sales compensation strategy is only effective when supported by an equally strong territory/quota strategy and operation. When territories are unbalanced, or quotas are unfair, your organization risks eroding team motivation, plus you risk unrealized revenue potential by not serving customers especially efficiently.
Effective TQM includes both planning and administering territories and quotas, which for many organizations relies on separate data, tooling, and teams to manage .
Forma.ai uses an integrated approach to SPM, unifying planning and execution functionality across TQM and ICM. This allows sales operations and compensation professionals to collaborate on territory, quota, and comp planning (along with execution) to rapidly understand the impact across all three levers for every decision.
Territory & quota planning
Forma.ai’s territory planning capabilities ensure optimal sales capacity and help carve fair and motivational territories that align with over-arching corporate objectives.
Ensure optimized territory coverage: Create account-level scoring using custom methodologies (e.g., historical sales, projected sales, or others) to balance and optimize territories. Built-in analytical models (e.g. Potentialization) can be used in addition to supercharge planning effectiveness.
Build any territory or crediting structure: Create and manage any territory, hierarchy, or sales assignment structure easily. From geographic or account-based overlays, to multi-dimensional hierarchies, Forma.ai can handle the most simple—or complex territories.
ICM and territory modelling integration: Through direct integration with our ICM module, quickly see the real-time potential impact on rep earnings when simulating different territory plans.
Our solution's quota setting capabilities offer a suite of analytical models, real-time impact assessments, and comprehensive workflows, to allow teams to deploy quotas connected across the entire SPM workflow.
Optimized quota planning methodologies: Forma.ai facilitates quota planning using any methodology—no matter how complex. Build quotas off of any input including territory potential, historical sales, projected sales, and more.
Assess quota impact in real time: Our built-in impact analysis and turnkey financial analytics allow you to fine-tune quota setting in realtime to harmonize with corporate objectives and motivate the field.
Streamline quota allocations at any level: Our customized permissions, approval routing, and workflows help you collect feedback from different layers of stakeholders and provide any level of autonomy in the quota roll-out process.
Territory & quota execution
Managing and executing on day-to-day changes across territories and quotas requires connected data, tooling, and processes to execute decisions rapidly with confidence.
Forma.ai’s TQM module helps your organization automate and streamline both territories and quotas:
Territory reconfiguration: Forma.ai helps manage changes in sales capacity at speed by carving out new territories or adjusting existing attributes and mappings, without the need for technical configuration.
Full integration with ICM and crediting: Territory changes are immediately reflected across the SPM suite and directly in ICM and sales comp calculations; you can immediately identify the financial impact of any reconfiguration.
Exception handling: Expedite how you address exceptions or overrides at an account level by using Forma.ai’s workflow system to route changes directly to sales management for fast resolution.
Streamline day-to-day quota workflow: Easily automate the E2E quota workflow, from new hire ramps, to territory changes, role changes, quota proration, bulk updates, and more.
ICM and quota integration: Quota updates are seamlessly integrated into downstream operations, including plan assignments, commission calculations, reporting, and analytics.
TQM and ICM: Now in lockstep
Forma.ai’s unified approach to SPM enables global enterprises to finally enact and visualize a holistic process surrounding TQM and ICM.
Full TQM integration with our ICM solution means that the business and financial impact of territory and quota changes can be modeled comprehensively to see aggregate and rep-level impact on sales comp.
A sales performance management solution that moves as quickly as your business
With Forma.ai, you finally get a unified, data-driven approach for tackling the complexities of sales compensation. Let's make sales comp your most powerful GTM lever.