The 9 Best Sales Performance Management Software Solutions

Sales performance—and critically, sales compensation as a component of this—is a difficult beast.  

You’ve got a sales force of reps each with their own targets and commission levels to ensure proper on-time payouts for—not to mention GTM stakeholders requesting regular sales performance reports aligned to whether sales compensation is impacting the correct behaviors leading to growth.

Often, jumping in and out of an average of four to eight different, disparate tools for managing incentives and compensation, what you really need is sales performance management software; ideally just one, designated solution to house all sales-related performance data, including designated territories, quotas, commission plans, stakeholder approvals, and pipeline reports.

The good news is that SPM software is plentiful; a quick Google search retrieves a list of potential vendors.  

However, not all SPM platforms are created equal.

You need to choose a vendor with robust capabilities to scale with a global enterprise business.  

While Forma.ai happens to be in this space and acknowledge our inherent bias here, we also wanted to share our guide to comparing nine of the best SPM solutions with considerations for various criteria you’ll have as you create and evaluate your shortlist.

What is sales performance management software?

Sales performance management (SPM) software is technology designed to help organizations automate and optimize incentive compensation. These platforms allow revenue and sales operations to improve sales performance and align a sales force on high-impact activities resulting in revenue.  

The best SPM platforms enable the end-to-end management of a sales function as part of the go-to-market motion. Depending on the robustness of your selection, you can use this software to:

• Outline, plan, and manage sales territories,  

• Set fair data-drive quotas,  

• Forecast sales based on simulations or modeling,  

• Manage individual sales representative’s compensation plans (automating the calculation of payouts), and

• Create real-time reporting dashboards to show sales performance.  

• Most SPMs also allow you to train and coach salespeople

SPM software becomes (at best) the single source of truth in your organization for territory and quota management, as well as incentive compensation management. It’s used to maximize operational and planning effectiveness, model the impact of various financial outcomes, to report on the value of sales, and incentivize sales reps to close more deals.

The benefits of implementing sales performance management software

For enterprises needing to adapt SPM strategy quickly (responding to market need on a dime), sales performance software isn’t just nice to have. It’s a critical need with the following advantages:

• Especially agile sales productivity for maximizing revenue. SPM software often automates key aspects of incentive compensation, taking rote calculations or manual work off the plate of payroll operations. These manual tasks include calculating commissions, creating manual performance reports with cumbersome data from various unstructured sources, and ensuring timely, accurate payouts. This allows your organization’s compensation leaders more time to focus on higher-impact sales tasks generating more revenue.
  

• Enhanced forecasting and planning. If your sales quotas and territories are based on gut instinct or guesswork, they might be too ambitious or incredibly easy to achieve. The best SPM solutions collate all your data from multiple sources via robust integrations, making it easier to simulate and model the financial impact of various SPM decisions and predict future sales accurately. You can use this modeling to make data-driven decisions about sales targets.
  

• Motivated, high-performing sales representatives. Sales compensation plans designed, implemented, and optimized within SPM solutions are powerful motivators that encourage reps to close more deals. Not only this, but the platform’s ability to help you analyze your choices in advance, allows you to identify specific behaviors that have a high propensity to convert to sales that are especially valuable to the business. You can use your compensation plans to pinpoint the behaviors that lead to high-value deals. An SPM helps you follow through on your employer promise to give agents the commission they’ve earned with automated payouts and accurate commission calculations.

Key features to look for in your sales performance management software shortlist

Incentive compensation management (ICM)

Almost every shortlisted SPM software vendor will have the ability to manage incentive compensation plans both team-wide, and on an individual basis. As Gartner notes, ICM is still far and away the primary purchase reason for sales performance management solutions, even despite the introduction of more sophisticated capabilities.

ICM or incentives solutions as a component of your SPM platform ensures (among many things) that you can calculate accurate compensation automatically. You can easily see each rep’s sales performance inside the SPM, and use automation to allocate bonuses, commissions, and other incentives.

Sales territory and quota management

The logistical hassle of outlining and assigning sales territories is made considerably easier with an SPM solution. You can easily assign an individual agent or a specific team to a particular region, preventing overlaps or over-resourcing for the resulting ROI.

An enterprise-ready SPM vendor should also have quota management features that not only outline exactly what you expect from representatives, but also set reasonable, data-driven expectations on the sales you expect. The software will help you model and set realistic quotas based on the potential of each territory.

Sophisticated data and integration capabilities

It’s extremely difficult to make data-driven decisions while pulling vast amounts of data from several sources (let alone when that data isn't structured). Sales compensation teams are also more likely to make errors configuring incentive comp or commission information manually.  

You’ll ultimately be seeking a sophisticated SPM solution that can integrate several data sources together for you successfully.

For example: your CRM software shows deal progress and how many interactions you’ve had with a particular lead. When this data flows through to your SPM platform, it can show enriched data, like your best and worst performing sales reps in dashboards for your consideration as you design, model, and deploy compensation plans.

Many global enterprises consider the efficiency gains of condensing a disconnected, incomplete tech stack. It’s significantly more efficient (and makes data-driven optimization possible) once all SPM-related functions are available in one platform, rather than needing teams to work with disruptions in Excel spreadsheets, or various legacy SPM software with incomplete integrations.  

Compliance & ability to meet local and international regulations

It’s critical that your SPM solution enables your organization to remain compliant with laws and regulations that your business operates in (e.g. the Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) Act).

In particular, you’ll be looking for an SPM platform to include features like:

• Audit trails and traceability of how payments were calculated

• End-to-end SPM data encryption to protect sensitive customer information

• Customizable user profiles with granular permissions (like edit or read-only access)

The Top Sales Performance Management Software Solutions in 2024

Alright, let’s get into a comparison of leading SPM platforms, ranked by the best features, their pricing plans (if publicly available), and user ratings from software review sites like G2, Capterra, and TrustPilot.  

Our goal here is to help you shortlist the best sales performance management software solutions for your organization, and provide some considerations as you evaluate.

1. Forma.ai

2. Anaplan

3. CaptivateIQ

4. Everstage

5. Performio

6. Salesforce (Spiff)

7. SAP Callidus

8. Varicent

9. Xactly

1. Forma.ai

Best suitable for: Enterprise sales operations and sales comp leaders seeking rapid SPM agility via a full-stack, AI-powered SPM platform.

Forma.ai is an AI-enabled SPM platform that unifies the entire SPM process. The platform consolidates the design and optimization of both territory and quota management and incentive compensation management; all underpinned by artificial intelligence.  

Making it 4x faster to build, test, and deploy territories, quotas, and incentive plans, it’s a way enterprises can create a holistic, complete single source of connected SPM data.

As customer Dr. Robert Bieshaar, Senior Director of Worldwide Incentive Compensation at Autodesk shares of his experience:

"[Forma.ai] has the true AI capabilities that other platforms today do not. 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."

Key capabilities include:

• A flexible, robust calculation engine: Forma.ai is the only solution that leverages AI (natural language processing) to automate the configuration of territory, quota, and compensation logic. You can accelerate the speed at which you deploy territory, quota, and compensation changes from months to hours.

• Real-time modeling architecture: Simulate an unlimited amount of compensation scenarios and configurations, all without impacting your production environment. You can run comparison calculations rapidly allowing go-to-market teams to iterate faster on every SPM and ICM decision to maximize revenue growth.  

• An end-to-end workflow: Not only does Forma.ai create a global, end-to-end workflow, it becomes a central hub for orchestrating changes and streamlining approvals from several stakeholders in the SPM process. You can communicate the right info to decision makers quickly.

• 200+ integrations with CRMs, ERPs, and business intelligence tools like Salesforce, Workday, and Oracle NetSuite

• Sales territory and quota planning and management capabilities: Using Forma.ai’s Territory Workload Indexing, you can optimize and balance your territories to optimally serve prospective customers with the right seller capacity.

• Leadership and performance dashboards: Performance reporting for monitoring comp plan, territory and quota effectiveness.  

• Built-in controls for and SOX compliance, and ASC606 adherence: Get an immutable audit trail for all changes through Forma.ai’s ticketing system. Further, customize amortization schedules, track ongoing adjustments, and collaborate with finance to stay on top of ASC606 compliance.

User reviews and ratings: Forma.ai has 4.8 out of 5 stars on G2. The platform scores highly for ease of use, customer support, and dashboard usability.

As one G2 reviewer says:  

“Its [a] comprehensive approach to workforce optimization, offering features like scheduling, time tracking, and performance analytics. Its upsides include increased efficiency, better resource allocation, and data-driven decision-making, ultimately leading to improved productivity and profitability for businesses.”

Lastly, Forrester research has said of Forma.ai:

“Forma.ai’s product vision has the most potential of any in the SPM space and will change the market.”

Pricing: Forma.ai’s SPM is custom-quoted unique to your business’ needs. Contact us today for a demo and personalized quote.

2. Anaplan

Best suitable for: larger organizations already on an Anaplan solution for another area of their business. Most suitable for those who can commit to dedicated Anaplan knowledge and resources in-house to support.  

Anaplan is a robust business performance management software incorporating sales, finance, supply chain, and HR management.

Designed to show the bigger picture of how sales operates within the context of your entire business, Anaplan solves for non-secure collaboration (vs. the status quo of using spreadsheets and email). Everything’s all in one place, giving you a central repository to store all of your sales-related data.  

Overall, Anaplan is a solid financial planning and analysis (FP&A) option, though in terms of sales planning and incentive compensation management, it's notable you may need to customize Anaplan more significantly to achieve outcomes you need for scaling. This adds to overhead if you are a particularly small or mid-sized team.

Key features include:

• Predictive account segmentation and scoring

• Territory planning and quota management

• Support for sales incentive and compensation plans

• Sales forecasting with predictive insights and trend analysis to manage the pipeline

• Resource and demand planning functionality  

User reviews and ratings: 4.6 out of 5 stars on G2. It’s rated highly for its ease of use and flexibility.

That said, G2 reviewers think the cost of Anaplan’s SPM software is a disadvantage. One reviewer says:

“Reporting capability is good, but due to cost of data storage, [it] has to be limited in some cases to only the timescale necessary for planning purposes.”

Pricing: Similar to many enterprise solutions, you’ll need to contact Anaplan for a custom quote. Bear in mind that extra features—like the DocuSign integration, auditing, and application lifecycle management—aren’t included in the basic plan.

3. CaptivateIQ

Best suitable for: SMB organizations evolving from using spreadsheets alone for ICM (Note that CaptivateIQ is not necessarily a full-suite SPM tool).

As a sales commission tracking tool, CaptivateIQ helps you manage your incentive compensation programs in a user-friendly interface. Its commission calculation engine, automated workflows, and out-of-the-box reporting templates are helpful for smaller organizations transitioning away from manual spreadsheets to automate tedious sales compensation tasks.

What’s especially great about CaptivateIQ, is its Excel-like interface that feels very familiar to users adopting an ICM solution for the first time. This allows new users to more readily configure incentive calculation rules and reporting dashboards to suit their needs—without custom-coding or deep architectural knowledge. It's a more approachable solution than some of the legacy enterprise alternatives.

Great for smaller businesses getting started with ICM, CaptivateIQ for commissions is quite flexible, and a lot easier to use than legacy platforms for SMB to mid-market.

Key features include:

• Integrations with HubSpot, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Salesforce, and Stripe  

• Scenario modeling to test different compensation plans  

• Automated commission payouts  

• Customizable dashboards for reporting

• Detailed audit trails for compliance

User reviews and ratings: 4.7 out of 5 stars on G2. Users say that it’s easy to set up and that they see a return on investment relatively quickly.  

Criticism seems to surround the cost. As one reviewer put it:  

"Captivate is a relatively expensive commission management platform, particularly for small businesses. While the platform does offer advanced features, the cost may be prohibitive for some companies.”

Pricing: CaptivateIQ doesn’t share its ICM software pricing publicly. However, it does say that plans are calculated based on how many reps’ commission you’re managing. There’s also a one-time setup fee.  

4. Everstage

Best suitable for: SMB to mid-market sales teams getting started in their SPM journey.

Everstage is a fast-growing, newly-emerging or up-and-coming sales commission software that helps SMB to mid-market businesses design incentive programs for sales reps. It integrates with tools like HubSpot and Workday to create a central source of data for your sales team’s performance, complete with easy payouts to pay representatives the commission and bonuses they’ve earned.  

Everstage has a simple interface that’s easy to navigate, even if you don’t have any experience building dashboards inside an SPM software. Anyone can use it to design commission plans, automate calculations, and create reports to track sales performance.

Key features include:

• Quota attainment distribution charts and trackers

• Integrations with Workday, Quickbooks, and Microsoft Teams

• Slack integration to deliver commission updates in your team chat tool automatically

• Gamification features and commission predictions to encourage reps to sell more

• Customizable sales performance dashboards to show revenue splits, new bookings, and quota achievements  

• Plan modeling to predict the impact on sales performance by changing commission structures

User reviews and ratings: 4.8 out of 5 stars on G2. It’s rated highly for its quick implementation and speedy return on investment.

Reviewers don’t list many disadvantages, though one review states:  

“While Everstage is excellent overall, enhancing the reporting features would make a significant impact. Adding more advanced and customizable reporting options would allow for deeper analysis and strategic planning, greatly benefiting users who need detailed insights into their commission data.”

Pricing: Everstage doesn’t share pricing publicly, but you can schedule a free demo with its sales team to get to grips with the software and receive a custom quote.

5. Performio

Best suitable for: Mid-market sales organizations.  

Performio’s sales performance management software that’s used by managers and representatives who want to track commission plans. It can pull data from various other apps into a single dashboard, showing the impact of sales on your predicted commission payouts—and more importantly, how this compares to your budget.

Performio also has preconfigured components that simplify the administrative side of sales compensation. Prebuilt formulas allow you to edit and reshuffle your sales strategy within the software. Its tagline explains it all: “avoid the rat's nest of logic”.

Key features include:

• Automated sales commission calculations based on closed deals by agent

• Compare predicted sales incentives against your budget for easy planning

• Integrations with data connectors like Netsuite

• Customizable sales performance reports that can be shared with agents  

• Sales rep portal with workflow, chat, and commission features to keep them on-track  

User reviews and ratings: 4.3 out of 5 stars on G2. Ease of use is Performio’s most-loved feature on the review site.

Despite its decent rating, some reviewers have reported issues with the time it takes for data to sync in the platform. When asked what they dislike about the SPM software, one user said:  

“Performio can become bogged down by the number of users accessing the system at the same time....[it] can also be confusing to those who have a hard time understanding the simple equation Performio uses for calculating commissions (net invoice x commission rate = commission payable).”

Pricing: Performio doesn’t share pricing plans on its website, though Capterra reports that plans start at $50 per month. There is no free trial or free version available.  

6. Salesforce (Spiff)

Best suitable for: SMB and mid-market enterprises with relatively straightforward/simple data pipelines and want to simplify their commission (ICM) process.

Spiff is a sales performance management tool that’s owned and operated by Salesforce. The commission management software can design new compensation plans, set ambitious targets, and help you motivate sales representatives to achieve them.

Spiff has a unique no-code approach to calculating commissions which is valuable for businesses who do not rely on complex data pipelines to manage their incentive compensation process. However, similar to CaptivateIQ, Spiff is not as much a full-scale SPM solution.

Key features include:

• Native integration with Salesforce’s CRM

• Commission reporting that allows agents to understand their incentives with a detailed history of past sales

• Payroll reports (which will likely be required by HR, finance, or accounting teams)

• Customizable alerts to get notified by email or Slack whenever there’s a major change to sales commission plans

• Clean, simple user interface that’s easy to understand

User reviews and ratings: 4.7 out of 5 stars on G2. Most of its positive reviews come from agents who see the representative view of previous commissions and promised incentive plans.  

That said, Spiff’s future has some uncertainty. It’s yet to be seen how Salesforce will integrate Spiff into its CRM, and how much investment and innovation it’ll receive post-acquisition.  

There are currently areas in need of improvement, as one reviewer said:  

“The only downside we have encountered when using Spiff for bonuses, is that if the bonus metrics are too complex or the data compilation is too complex, we need to add it manually.”

Pricing: Spiff starts at $75 per user, per month. There’s an additional cost of $250 per connector, per month if you want to integrate the SPM software with another platform (excluding Salesforce).

7. SAP Sales Cloud

Best suitable for: Large enterprises already using the SAP suite of products.

Formerly known as CallidusCloud, SAP acquired this sales performance management software back in 2018. It now sits under the SAP Sales Cloud solution, which acts as a CRM and sales management dashboard that gives you a 360-view of your customer service interactions, sales pipeline, and deal history.  

SAP began to migrate all existing users off their legacy database structure and onto a new architecture this year. The change doesn’t affect new users—if you were to sign up today, you’d instantly join the new architecture. Existing customers, however, needed to reimplement their platform, likely with additional support from SAP or third-party vendors.  

Key features include:

• Overview of active leads and deal history  

• Interactive analytics and customizable reporting dashboards

• Automated workflows to take care of repetitive tasks like call scripting and recording interactions

• Robust architecture that supports complex hierarchies with the right technical administrator knowledge  

• Capacity to process larger data volumes  
  

User reviews and ratings: 4.1 out of 5 stars on G2. The SPM software is rated highly for its feature richness and integration options, though the most critiqued part of its tool is the steep learning curve.

“SAP Sales Cloud can be complex to set up and configure, requiring significant expertise or resources to customize it to specific business needs,” one reviewer said.

Pricing: This isn’t public information shared by SAP Sales Cloud, but Capterra suggests that plans start at $57 per month.

8. Varicent

Best suitable for: Large enterprises seeking highly customizable SPM solutions.

Varicent’s SPM software architecture was built from a foundation prioritizing flexibility. This enables customers to essentially configure any type of incentive plan or SPM rule in the system, but usually requires deep architectural knowledge to do so, which can mean larger internal overhead to manage the solution.

Over time, Varicent has expanded its SPM offering through acquisition and deployment of different modules. Its offering includes Varicent Incentives, Varicent Sales Planning, Varicent ELT, and Varicent Seller Insights.

Key features include:

• Incentive management and tracking

• Sales territory mapping and balancing

• Real-time performance tracking with metrics like quota attainment, ranking reports, and customer acquisitions

• Integrations with Google Analytics, HubSpot, Oracle, and Salesforce  

User reviews and ratings: 4.5 out of 5 stars on G2. It’s praised for being a scalable SPM software that grows as the business does, but it has been criticized for being difficult to use.

one reviewer shares:

“My experience is specific to their Incentives solution, which does have a steep learning curve to use...You really need to have a good understanding of joining data and coding to be able to complete all work in house, especially if your model and business requests are complex.”

Pricing: According to Gartner, Varicent pricing is priced per payee. Contact their sales team for a personalized quote.  

9. Xactly

Best suitable for: Enterprise teams that want to benchmark sales data.

Xactly’s SPM software is a comprehensive tool that can manage sales incentives, compensation, and report on overall sales performance. It supports territory mapping and has a bunch of artificial intelligence features designed to streamline the process and help reps get more done.  

Key features include:

• Personalized statements to show each rep a breakdown of their bonuses and commissions

• Drag-and-drop hierarchy management to easily add new hires or reshuffle sales team structures

• Native iOS and Android support to monitor sales incentives on the go  

• Integrations with Microsoft, Workday, HubSpot, and Google Drive  

User reviews and ratings: 4.2 out of 5 stars on G2. Reviewers like how it scales as the business does, but some shared concerns about the complexities of doing so.

One reviewer shared:  

“Some of the functionality is clunky and not intuitive. I like the new refresh but have trouble finding some features I need. I think search and navigation functions with Incent could be improved.”

Pricing: Xactly doesn’t share its pricing details publicly. However, TrustRadius reports that a setup fee applies. If you’re shortlisting this SPM software, contact its team for a personalized quote.

Top trends in sales performance management software

AI and machine learning innovations

Artificial intelligence is far from a buzzword—it’s a key component of modern sales strategies. You don’t have time to complete repetitive tasks by hand, nor deal with the aftermath of human error from copying and pasting data between multiple tools.  

Some SPM companies are already deploying machine learning capabilities into their software to solve these problems. Forma.ai, for example, has the capability to build your sales compensation plans based on a predetermined prompt thanks to natural language processing.  

Simply use a prompt to tell the AI what type of plan you’d like to create, who it’s for, and what the payout structure should look like. It’ll automatically build your request inside the SPM software.

Advanced analytics and predictive insights

To say the world has been a turbulent place over the past few years would be an understatement. Companies continue to tighten budgets off the back of a downward spiral in consumer spend—all of which impacts your sales activities.

Before committing to a new SPM software, ensure it offers advanced analytics and predictive insights or modelling. You’ll be able to analyze patterns and trends based on historical data, allowing you to understand shifts in customer behavior and leap on opportunities that you haven’t yet taken advantage of.  

Test drive your next sales performance management solution

While we’ve given you a round-up of the best SPMs currently gracing many shortlists, the only way to settle on the right one for your business is to take your options for a test drive.  

Experiencing the interface first-hand is the only way to determine whether a particular SPM software has the features you need to future proof your organization.