Choosing an incentive compensation management (ICM) platform is a high-stakes decision. The right solution can transform how your organization manages commissions, motivates sales reps, and measures performance. The wrong one can leave you stuck with brittle systems, manual workarounds, and frustrated teams. The time, resources, and long-term impact involved make it a decision worth approaching with care.
In this guide, we’ll walk you through how to structure your buying process, what to look for from an ICM vendor, and the critical factors that separate today’s leading ICM solutions.
The ICM market is crowded with solutions that all claim to solve the same problems. But when you look closer, many fall short where it matters most. As Performio CEO Grayson Morris points out in his letter on the future of ICM, today’s solutions often struggle with three critical challenges:
Instead of tackling these problems directly, many vendors have turned their attention to less-critical add-ons, leaving room for improvement in the areas that actually matter.
This matters because your choice of ICM software will shape not only how commissions are managed today, but also how well your organization can adapt to new plans, structures, and business priorities in the years ahead. It’s a decision that demands clear-eyed evaluation and careful comparison.
[SME note idea: A quote or short reflection from Grayson tying back to his letter.]
We created this guide to be useful no matter where you are in the ICM buying process, but not every reader will need every section.
If you’re starting the process from scratch, begin with part one, “How to design your ICM software selection process.” This section walks you through assembling the right team, building a decision framework, conducting initial research, and sending a request for proposal (RFP).
If you already have a shortlist of ICM vendors and are ready to narrow it down further, head to part two, “How to compare ICM solutions.” Here, we’ll show you how to create objective evaluation criteria and score vendors consistently.
And if you want to dig into the details, skip ahead to “10 critical factors to consider when buying an ICM solution.” This is where we take an in-depth look at the factors that matter most and show how leading ICM vendors compare.
Finally, if you really, really want to get into a technical explanation of our own grading rubric, the appendix will walk you through our precise scoring methodology.
Finding the right ICM solution starts with having the right process. We’ve worked with hundreds of sales organizations across industries, and the best-prepared buyers build a decision framework to keep their teams aligned and focused on the factors that matter most.
Choosing an ICM software solution is a significant financial commitment, and it affects a wide range of roles across your organization. So it isn’t a decision that should be made by a single individual. Ideally, you should assemble a cross-functional team to evaluate options and make the decision collaboratively. This team can be broadly divided into two key groups: gatekeepers and additional stakeholders.
Gatekeepers are the ultimate decision makers. They have the authority to make the final call, approving or rejecting your proposed choice for an ICM solution. So it’s essential to understand their criteria early. Without their buy-in, even the most carefully chosen platform could be blocked at the final step.
The most common gatekeeper will be the Chief Financial Officer (CFO), who typically controls the budget and has to ensure a good ROI for the ICM solution. In cases when the decision doesn’t fall to the CFO, final approval typically shifts to whichever executive owns the compensation budget or revenue mandate. It’ll be important for you to identify who that is in your organization and to keep their priorities at the forefront of your selection process.
Additional stakeholders may not have formal decision-making power, but since they’ll be using the ICM solution regularly, you want to make sure it will work well for their needs. Including them in the process shows respect for their needs and helps avoid future conflicts if the ICM solution doesn’t live up to their expectations. Typical stakeholders to consult include:
[SME note idea: Practical tips for handling politics in cross-functional buying groups. Like how to frame ROI for the CFO, what details technical stakeholders want to hear in early conversations, or how to get sales leadership to engage constructively.]
Before you start evaluating vendors, lay out a specific plan for how you’re going to make the decision. This ensures everyone involved is working toward the same goal and comparing options against consistent criteria.
First, clarify your desired outcomes. Ask your decision team questions like:
Depending on your organization’s needs, priorities could include things like eliminating commission errors, reducing audit risks, improving visibility for sales reps, speeding up monthly payout cycles, or replacing a system that can’t keep up with plan complexity. Whatever your specific goals, document them to use as benchmarks for evaluating ICM solutions.
Next, set your desired timeframes. This includes both the time to make the decision (how long you plan to spend on research, comparisons, and demos) and the time to complete onboarding and implementation (when you need the system to go live).
Treat these as ranges of acceptable timelines rather than a single rigid deadline, and approach them with realistic expectations. Selecting and implementing an ICM solution tends to be a long process—months to years, not weeks. Ask vendors for examples of similar projects they’ve completed to verify their claims—and be wary of vendors who promise unusually brief implementation periods.
[SME note idea: Practical advice on what “realistic” looks like for decision-making and implementation, and why rushing leads to poor outcomes.]
Finally, outline your decision criteria. Translate your desired outcomes into a specific rubric you can use to compare and evaluate the ICM solutions under consideration.
In part two of this guide, we’ll elaborate on the decision criteria, covering the 10 factors we see as most impactful for every organization.
Once you’ve outlined your decision criteria and established a rubric for evaluations, it’s time to research ICM solutions and create a shortlist of options that will, at least on paper, meet all of your needs. This means looking to a variety of sources to collect information.
The first and most obvious is each vendor’s own website. Here you should be able to identify the basic feature sets a given ICM solution advertises, and if they don’t offer what you need, you can move on. But keep in mind that every claim on a vendor’s website is self-reported. So you should attempt to verify what they say with unbiased reviews and reports.
Community discussions in places like Reddit, LinkedIn Groups, and industry forums can be invaluable sources of information, giving you a front-row seat into real user experiences, including both the benefits and pain points others have experienced with different ICM tools. And if possible, reach out to industry peers for conversations about the solutions they’ve used. That first-hand user feedback can give you an even more granular perspective, allowing you to ask detailed questions about how a given tool handles your specific criteria.
[SME note idea: How to get the most out of reaching out to industry peers. What specific questions to ask that result in useful answers.]
Third-party industry reports can also help you understand the playing field of options available, offering professional reviews of each solution that highlight their strengths and weaknesses. For example, the Forrester Wave SPM/ICM report is a highly regarded annual examination of how various incentive compensation management tools perform.
Finally, “best of” lists can offer easy-to-read comparisons between different ICM options—but be careful with these. Try to identify what source they’re coming from and how they were compiled. These days, many such articles are just AI-generated listicles that add little real value at best, and can be full of misinformation at worst. Look for a detailed methodology section that outlines exactly what the process of comparison was and how they came to the conclusions they did.
And note whether the list was sponsored by one of the options being compared. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing. (After all, we’ve published our own list.) But keep an eye out for any biases that may be at play: if a given list tries to hide its true origins, that’s a red flag.
Using the information gathered from all of these sources, and comparing it against your decision criteria, narrow the field down to a handful of viable options. A manageable shortlist is usually around three to five vendors. Too many, and you risk bogging down the process and overwhelming your decision team. Too few, and you could miss out on a strong contender.
The goal of the shortlist is to make sure you’re using your time wisely by evaluating only the solutions that are most likely to meet your needs.
After identifying your shortlist, the next step is to send a request for proposal (RFP) to each of those vendors. The RFP should outline your requirements, ask targeted questions, and obtain pricing information. Ideally, the responses to your RFPs will allow you to evaluate each ICM solution side by side.
Once potential vendors have signed an NDA, give them the context they need to understand your business and respond meaningfully. Include details like:
From there, ask vendors specific questions about their ICM platforms like:
Finally, your RFP should call for detailed pricing information. Ask about their overall pricing structure, cost of implementation, ongoing expenses, and cost of support or custom build requests.
[SME note idea: Real-world examples of things you’ve seen in RFP responses that signal a problem.]
Once you’ve received responses from each ICM vendor, you can do an in-depth comparison to determine which one is best suited to your needs.
Vendors all want to make their platforms look as good as possible, and their claims can easily blur together. So it’s important to have clear, objective criteria in place that allow you to make meaningful comparisons.
The first step is deciding what really matters for your organization. That means thinking through the challenges you’re facing, the needs of your sales compensation plans, and the outcomes you expect from an ICM solution. If you’ve been following this guide from the start you’ll have already developed a list of criteria with your decision team. The details will look different for everyone, but it’s important to break your needs down into clear comparison points.
To help you get started, we’ve identified 10 factors we believe belong on every organization’s list. They come from a combination of Performio’s expertise, research from our 2025 Incentive Compensation Trends report, and insights from industry reports like the Forrester Wave.
Use this list as a foundation, and add any criteria that reflect your unique goals and challenges:
We’ll explore each of these points in greater detail later in this guide, as well as rating five major ICM vendors on each of them.
[SME note idea: Advice on future proofing your criteria by including factors that anticipate growth, not just what’s needed right now.]
Once you know which factors matter to you, the next step is deciding how to measure them. Too often, buying decisions are swayed by gut feelings, vendor relationships, or surface-level impressions from a polished demo.
In our evaluation, we built a structured rubric that scores each platform against the same set of factors. For example, it’s easy for a vendor to say their ICM system is “scalable,” but it’s much more meaningful to define the specific capabilities that make a system scalable (as we outline below) and then ask whether each platform can meet those benchmarks. This ensures consistent comparisons that go beyond subjective impressions.
You don’t need to overcomplicate this process, but you do need a way to make your evaluation specific, repeatable, and aligned with your goals.
Once you have objective criteria in place for each of your factors, you can score the ICM platforms on your shortlist and compare the results.
The 10 core factors we identified can be grouped into four areas that most determine an ICM solution’s value:
We compared major ICM vendors on each of the 10 objective factors, rating them on a scale of 1–5 (with 5 being the best score). Then we averaged each group of factors to present an at-a-glance overview of their scores:
|
How major ICM software providers perform in these areas |
||||
|
Vendor |
Self-service |
Handling complexity |
Ease of use |
Customer support |
|
Performio |
4.0 |
4.9 |
4.8 |
4.3 |
|
Varicent |
2.7 |
4.9 |
4.2 |
4.1 |
|
CaptivateIQ |
2.7 |
3.0 |
4.0 |
2.7 |
|
Xactly |
2.3 |
3.5 |
2.8 |
3.2 |
|
Everstage |
1.7 |
2.2 |
2.8 |
3.0 |
Finally, we took a weighted average of scores in each factor to reflect the level of priority we’d place on each one. (Weightings were informed by findings from our 2025 Incentive Compensation Trends report, the Forrester Wave, and our sales staff’s experience.)
|
Final scores for major ICM software providers |
|
|
Vendor |
Score |
|
Performio |
4.6 |
|
Varicent |
4.1 |
|
CaptivateIQ |
3.2 |
|
Xactly |
2.9 |
|
Everstage |
2.4 |
We’ll explain each factor and provide the individual scores next.
We’ve identified a set of 10 key factors that belong in every discussion about ICM solutions. These criteria are based on our own expertise and experience in the space, our 2025 Incentive Compensation Trends report, and trusted industry sources like the Forrester Wave.
Think of these factors as a starter set. They cover the essentials every organization should consider, but your final rubric may include additional criteria that reflect your unique goals, constraints, or industry needs. The most successful organizations take the time to define a clear set of criteria and use it consistently throughout the buying process.
[SME note idea: Advice on weighting mission-critical areas (like data management, support for complexity, and common-sense workflows) more heavily than less-important factors (like custom reporting and onboarding momentum).]
In this section, we’ll walk through all 10 factors, explaining why they matter, how to evaluate them, and how major ICM vendors stack up.
Ideally, your staff’s expertise in incentive compensation management should be all they need in order to use your ICM software: they shouldn’t also have to be experts in programming languages, workflow and logic rules, or spreadsheet formulas. However, some ICM tools require users to have some degree of familiarity or expertise in these technical areas.
If you choose an ICM that requires additional technical skills, one of two things ends up happening:
In either case, the tool falls short of its potential.
[SME note idea: Practical examples of the kinds of day-to-day changes that should be easy to make but can become major hassles if the system requires excessive technical skills.]
It may be tempting to think, “Our comp manager knows how to code, so we’re okay.” But that creates a single point of failure. If that person leaves, you’ll not only have to replace them with someone who also has coding skills, but you’ll also burden the new hire with deciphering layers of custom code. Untangling those workarounds can be even harder than starting from scratch.
|
Technical skill required |
|
|
Vendor |
Score |
|
Performio |
5.0 |
|
CaptivateIQ |
3.0 |
|
Everstage |
3.0 |
|
Varicent |
1.0 |
|
Xactly |
1.0 |
The best ICM solutions will require no previous experience in these areas at all, because they don’t force you into hard-coded workarounds. Performio accomplishes this with our unique components-based system. These customizable and reusable modules provide unlimited flexibility without requiring specialized expertise.
[Visual callout: For a more direct examination of these vendors, check out our Best of ICM list, where we compare leading platforms head-to-head.]
When making changes to your compensation plans, it’s important to do so without risking your existing setup. You also want visibility into how those changes will ripple across the organization. A good ICM solution lets you model scenarios in advance—testing how different incentives affect payouts, behavior, and overall costs—before anything goes live.
You should have access to a dedicated testing environment where you can safely model and validate changes. And version control is just as important. The ability to track changes and roll them back means that even if a misstep reaches production, it can be reversed without compromising your system.
[SME note idea: A story or example illustrating how Performio’s ability to roll back changes saved the day.]
|
Safe testing & experimentation |
|
|
Vendor |
Score |
|
Varicent |
5.0 |
|
Xactly |
4.0 |
|
Performio |
3.0 |
|
CaptivateIQ |
2.0 |
|
Everstage |
1.0 |
Look for an ICM solution that combines a sandbox for experimentation with version control across both runtime and testing environments. Performio allows you to test new ideas, run simulations, make changes, and never risk disrupting day-to-day operations.
Generating reports is essential for keeping incentive compensation on track and supporting broader organizational goals. Reports help admins verify payout accuracy, resolve disputes quickly, and monitor plan performance. And they give leadership the insights needed for forecasting, budgeting, and aligning incentive spend with business strategy.
Reporting should be intuitive and straightforward. But if every new report is a major lift, you’ll waste time and increase costs—or end up without the visibility you need.
[SME note idea: Real-world use cases of the kinds of reports most frequently needed and how easy they are to build in Performio.]
|
Custom reporting |
|
|
Vendor |
Score |
|
Performio |
4.0 |
|
CaptivateIQ |
3.0 |
|
Varicent |
2.0 |
|
Xactly |
2.0 |
|
Everstage |
1.0 |
Your ICM platform should enable users to build and run reports directly in the tool, without needing to get over a steep learning curve first. Performio makes it easy to create custom reports and dashboards on demand with no technical expertise required.
Compensation plans are inherently complex. They often involve SPIFs, custom hierarchies, multiple crediting models, frequent changes in the participation module, and ongoing rate management. If your ICM platform doesn’t support these components out of the box, you’ll be forced to rely on coding, formulas, or vendor intervention just to keep plans current. Or worse, you’ll end up simplifying your plans just to fit the system.
[SME note idea: A note detailing how the hidden costs of continual vendor intervention can add up, with specific examples.]
These mechanisms also need to be easy to adjust as business needs evolve. When market conditions shift, territories change, or new incentives are introduced, your admins should be able to make updates directly without waiting on vendor support.
|
Out-of-box complexity support |
|
|
Vendor |
Score |
|
Performio |
4.8 |
|
Varicent |
4.0 |
|
Xactly |
4.0 |
|
Everstage |
2.4 |
|
CaptivateIQ |
2.0 |
Look for an ICM solution that handles these common components natively and makes them easy to adjust directly in the tool. Performio empowers admins to manage complexity without sacrifice.
Incentive comp involves managing a variety of different processes, and you shouldn’t have to move them all along by hand. Disputes need to be resolved, exceptions require approvals, and plan changes demand proper oversight. If workflows are too rigid or require technical expertise to configure, admins end up chasing people down across disjointed communication channels, slowing everything down and increasing the risk of errors.
[SME note idea: An anecdote about how essential dispute-resolution workflows are for maintaining rep trust.]
Workflows should be flexible, easy to set up, and able to handle real-world scenarios. That includes support for multi-level approvals, single-transaction dispute resolution, and conditional workflows that adapt based on approval status.
|
Common-sense workflows |
|
|
Vendor |
Score |
|
Performio |
5.0 |
|
Varicent |
5.0 |
|
CaptivateIQ |
3.0 |
|
Xactly |
3.0 |
|
Everstage |
2.0 |
The best ICM solutions, like Performio, streamline these processes while keeping human oversight in place where it matters, preserving accuracy and accountability.
Compensation plans are only as accurate as the data that feeds into them. Sales, finance, and HR teams rely on information flowing in from multiple systems, often in different formats and varying levels of quality. If your ICM solution requires extensive preconfiguration or technical expertise just to clean or import data, you’ll bottleneck your processes and increase the risk of error.
[SME note idea: Some real-world examples of the different kinds of data formats that will need to be imported into an ICM solution and just how messy it can become.]
A strong platform should handle that heavy lifting for you. That means supporting built-in ETL (extract, transform, load) capabilities, user-defined batch processing, and intuitive controls that let admins manage data without outside help.
|
Data management & transformation |
|
|
Vendor |
Score |
|
Performio |
5.0 |
|
Varicent |
5.0 |
|
CaptivateIQ |
4.5 |
|
Everstage |
3.0 |
|
Xactly |
2.0 |
Look for an ICM solution that lets you work with your data as it is, without forcing heavy reformatting or constant vendor intervention. Performio provides robust, in-tool data management and transformation features.
As your organization grows, your incentive compensation process needs to keep up. That includes onboarding new sales reps quickly, reorganizing territories, and adding new data sources as your tech stack expands. If your ICM solution can’t scale smoothly, you’ll end up buried in manual updates or stuck waiting on vendor support.
[SME note idea: An anecdote about the things you see breaking most often as sales orgs grow without a scalable ICM solution.]
The platform should automatically sync with systems like HRIS or Salesforce, adding new payees as they’re hired and reflecting changes in real time. It should also give admins in-tool control to add data points, customize integrations, and adjust territories—without leaning on professional services or external intervention.
|
Scalability |
|
|
Vendor |
Score |
|
Performio |
4.5 |
|
Varicent |
4.5 |
|
CaptivateIQ |
4.5 |
|
Everstage |
3.5 |
|
Xactly |
2.0 |
Your ICM solution should scale with your business, not hold it back. Performio was built to grow alongside your organization.
Sales strategies and market conditions are constantly evolving, and your compensation plans must evolve with them. That might mean adding new crediting structures, introducing incentive mechanisms, or adjusting rates and rules mid-year. It also means preparing next year’s plan in advance—without disrupting the current one.
[SME note idea: Highlight how often companies need to tweak their plans mid-cycle, and how painful it is if the tool can’t handle it well.]
The right platform should let admins build new plans, set future effective dates, and make mid-cycle adjustments directly in the tool. It should support a “build now, activate later” approach, allowing you to prepare changes that only go live when the timing is right. And none of this should require major system changes or vendor intervention.
|
Agility |
|
|
Vendor |
Score |
|
Performio |
5.0 |
|
Xactly |
4.5 |
|
Varicent |
3.0 |
|
CaptivateIQ |
3.0 |
|
Everstage |
2.0 |
Plan changes should be fast, flexible, and safe to execute. Performio gives admins the agility to adapt quickly while ensuring accuracy and continuity across every cycle.
An ICM solution only starts delivering value once it’s up and running. If implementation takes too long or leaves gaps in support, then you’re delaying your ROI.
High-quality onboarding should include clear timelines for implementation, a plan configured during onboarding, and bespoke training and documentation to set your team up for success. The vendor should also be equipped to handle enterprise-scale requirements, provide complementary break-fix consulting, and offer predictable costs via a fixed implementation fee.
[SME note idea: A note on the value of receiving training, documentation, and consulting during onboarding.]
|
Onboarding momentum |
|
|
Vendor |
Score |
|
Everstage |
4.0 |
|
Performio |
3.5 |
|
CaptivateIQ |
3.3 |
|
Varicent |
3.2 |
|
Xactly |
2.7 |
Look for a vendor that prioritizes timely and reliable onboarding. Performio ensures customers see value quickly and are well supported at every step.
Even the best ICM platforms need strong customer support behind them. Admins will inevitably face questions, unexpected scenarios, or issues that can’t be solved with documentation alone. If your vendor’s support staff isn’t responsive or reliable, minor challenges can quickly turn into lengthy delays and lost revenue.
[SME note idea: An anecdote about how responsive support builds trust and avoids costly payout delays.]
Service level agreements (SLAs) are one of the clearest indicators of support quality. Pay attention to how a vendor defines severity levels and what their response times look like at each level. The best vendors treat time sensitivity as part of severity, not just whether the system is technically down. They also account for issues where workarounds exist but don’t scale, so you aren’t left with a “temporary” fix that creates more problems. And premium support should come with guaranteed resolution times, not just faster acknowledgment.
|
Customer support quality |
|
|
Vendor |
Score |
|
Performio |
5.0 |
|
Varicent |
4.3 |
|
Xactly |
3.8 |
|
CaptivateIQ |
2.0 |
|
Everstage |
2.0 |
Look for a vendor with a proven record of responsive, effective customer support. Performio was the only platform to receive a halo in customer feedback from the Forrester Wave report (Q1 2025).
Not every organization will need enterprise-grade capabilities right away, but for large or fast-growing companies, they’re non-negotiable. High-volume data loads, complex approval structures, and global operations demand a platform that can scale without sacrificing speed or reliability. If an ICM solution isn’t built for enterprise use, you’ll eventually hit a ceiling.
Enterprise readiness includes role-based access control to protect sensitive data, the ability to quickly process billions of records, robust workflow automation, native ETL and APIs for seamless integration, multi-currency support, and compliance with standards like SOC II. It also means having enterprise-grade support available 24/7 and a proven record of success with recognizable enterprise customers.
[SME note idea: A reminder that even if you don’t need enterprise capabilities yet, you (hopefully) will some day, so it’s important to have an ICM solution in place that can continue supporting you.]
Look for an ICM solution that demonstrates proven enterprise readiness, backed by technical performance, security certifications, and a track record with large-scale customers. Performio delivers enterprise-grade capabilities—whether you’ll need them now or tomorrow.
Selecting the right ICM solution is one of the most important technology decisions your organization will make. The stakes are high, but with the right process and a clear-eyed comparison, you can cut through the noise and find a platform that truly meets your needs.
With Performio, you don’t have to choose between ease of use and flexibility. Our components-based ICM platform lets you intuitively manage even the most complex plans, with built-in data management tools, powerful reporting, and workflows that scale with you.
We’d love to show you how Performio meets these needs, schedule a demo.
Want a closer look at how we developed those scores? Here’s the process we used for grading ourselves and four other major ICM providers. Feel free to use all or part of this rubric yourself, or use it as inspiration to build your own.
This grading scale looks at three aspects of an ICM tool’s self-service capabilities, namely, the level of proficiency users need in any of the following areas in order to make use of the tool:
To grade these tools, we start with a perfect base score of 5 and apply penalties based on the level of proficiency required in these areas. We use four proficiency levels:
To calculate a final score, we subtract the single highest penalty that a tool earned from a perfect 5. Only tools that require no expertise in any area receive a perfect score, and only tools that require expert-level skill in programming languages receive a score of 1.
|
Scoring ICM software on technical skills required |
|
|
Score |
Score implications |
|
5 |
Requires no skill in programming languages, workflow logic, or spreadsheet formulas |
|
4 |
Requires beginner-level skill in spreadsheet formulas AND/OR workflow logic |
|
3 |
Requires EITHER:
OR:
|
|
2 |
Requires EITHER:
OR:
|
|
1 |
Requires expert-level skill in programming languages |
To grade a platform’s ability to support testing, we look at two capabilities of the software:
We begin with a perfect score of 5 and apply penalties based on these two vectors.
The first vector assesses whether users could experiment in one, multiple, or zero sandbox environments, and assumes being able to test multiple sandboxes simultaneously is better than only having a single test environment.
Similarly, the second vector applies points based on whether the tool includes version control (the ability to track and revert to past iterations of compensation plans). Tools that include version control for both the live plan and testing environments received no penalties in this area.
|
Scoring ICM software on safe testing & experimentation |
|
|
Score |
Score implications |
|
5 |
Supports multiple testing environments AND version control in both runtime and testing. |
|
4 |
EITHER:
OR:
|
|
3 |
EITHER:
OR:
|
|
2 |
EITHER:
OR:
|
|
1 |
No testing environment AND no version control |
This grading scale examines whether or not the ICM software gives users the ability to build in-tool custom reports, and the requisite technical skills required to build and run custom reports.
The first aspect of this scale is binary: if an ICM doesn’t support in-tool custom report builds, it receives the lowest score of 1. If it does support custom reports, penalties are applied to a perfect score of 5 depending on the level of technical expertise a user needs in order to build and run those reports:
|
Scoring ICM software on custom reporting |
|
|
Score |
Score implications |
|
5 |
Supports in-tool custom reports that require no technical skill to build and run |
|
4 |
Supports in-tool custom reports that require beginner-level technical skill to build and run |
|
3 |
Supports in-tool custom reports that require intermediate-level technical skill to build and run |
|
2 |
Supports in-tool custom reports that require expert-level technical skill to build and run |
|
1 |
Does not support in-tool custom reporting |
This grading scale focuses on five plan mechanisms where ICM platforms tend to struggle when it comes to managing complexity:
For each of these problem areas, we ask two binary questions:
This grading scale begins with a base score of 1, and then applies bonuses based on the answers above when applied to all five plan mechanisms:
All in all, basic out-of-box support accounts for 3 possible points total, while easy adjustments account for 1 possible point total.
Automation should reduce busy-work as much as possible, while creating as few new headaches as possible. To grade ICM platforms on this, we examine each platform against four binary, true/false statements:
The grading scale begins with a base score of 1, adding an additional point for every statement that is true about the tool being graded.
|
Scoring ICM software on common-sense workflows |
|
|
Score |
Score implications |
|
5 |
All of the following statements are true:
|
|
4 |
Three of the statements listed in tier 5 are true. |
|
3 |
Two of the statements listed in tier 5 are true. |
|
2 |
One of the statements listed in tier 5 is true. |
|
1 |
All of the statements listed in tier 5 are false. |
Similar to the grading scale above, this scale begins with a base score of 1, and adds additional points based on whether the following statements are true of the product:
ICM platforms receive perfect scores of 5 if all the above statements are true.
|
Scoring ICM software on data management & transformation |
|
|
Score |
Score implications |
|
5 |
All of the following statements are true:
|
|
4 |
Three of the statements listed in tier 5 are true. |
|
3 |
Two of the statements listed in tier 5 are true. |
|
2 |
One of the statements listed in tier 5 is true. |
|
1 |
All of the statements listed in tier 5 are false. |
To grade ICM tools on their ability to accommodate rapid growth, we began with a base score of 1 and applied additional points based on the tool’s capabilities in the areas of:
Each of these areas account for a potential additional point for a total perfect score of 5.
The first two areas (adding new data points and reorganizing territories) are graded binarily, with the combined potential of adding 2 points to the grade:
In terms of adding new payees to the plan, tools were awarded additional points depending on how much the tool’s automation capabilities support the task, with the potential to add 1 additional point to the grade:
To grade tools on how they handle managing the Salesforce connector, a potential or partial point could be awarded based on how dependent on vendor professional services users are:
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Scoring ICM software on scalability |
|||
|
Scoring area |
Scoring options |
Scoring option bonus |
Potential points |
|
Adding new data points |
Supported in-tool |
1 |
1 |
|
Not supported in-tool |
0 |
||
|
Reorganizing territories |
Supported in-tool |
1 |
1 |
|
Not supported in-tool |
0 |
||
|
Adding new payees |
Fully automated |
1 |
1 |
|
Blended |
0.5 |
||
|
Fully manual |
0 |
||
|
Managing Salesforce data connector |
Fully self-servicable |
1 |
1 |
|
Blended |
0.5 |
||
|
Professional serivce–dependent |
0 |
||
To grade tools on their ability to accommodate rapid plan modification, we examine tool’s ability to handle two key tasks:
The grading scale assumes a base score of 1, with the potential to score 2 additional points per task. For each task, we grade a given tool against three true/false statements and apply additional points accordingly:
Perfect scores of 5 are awarded to tools that allow users to perform both tasks using the ICM interface, without making major changes to the platform or needing to push them live immediately.
Every implementation and onboarding experience is unique, and you can’t know for sure what yours will be until you’re already going through it. However, there are pre-decision indicators that your setup process will be successful.
To grade products on their ability to set customers up for success, we assume a base score of 1, and apply bonuses in three areas:
A perfect score of 5 goes to products for which all binary indicators are TRUE, and for which both implementation time and time to value are “Very fast” (at least one standard deviation faster than the mean).
Similar to onboarding momentum, there’s no objective way to predict what your exact experience will be with a given vendor’s support team. However, a company’s service level agreement (SLA) and third-party analyst reports can give a decent picture of what to expect.
To grade ICM products on quality of customer support, we award points in five areas:
Our grading scale is set so that an ICM platform receives a score of 3 if their SLA promises at an average response time across all four priority levels for service requests. From there, a tool may receive the following bonuses:
|
Scoring ICM software on customer support quality |
|
|
Bonus criteria |
Bonus awarded |
|
Vendor’s SLA promises exceptionally fast response time for a given service request priority level (can be applied to up to four service levels) |
+0.25 |
|
Vendor’s SLA defines time-sensitivity criteria to escalate a service request to priority level 2 |
+0.25 |
|
Vendor’s SLA qualifies issues with known non-scaling workarounds in priority level 2 |
+0.25 |
|
Vendor’s SLA includes guaranteed resolution times for customers paying for premium support |
+0.5 |
|
Vendor received a halo from the 2025 Forrester Wave report for exceptional customer feedback |
+1 |