Varicent

June brings longer days, fresh energy, and a chance to see things in a different light. As we reach the midpoint of the year, it's the perfect time to focus on what drives results. In this month's edition of Varicent Monthly, we're sharing new KPIs to help diagnose performance, new research from top revenue leaders, and practical lessons on AI ROI. Let's dive in:

"We'll fix it in the next planning cycle." I hear some version of this from customers all the time. I get it. I really do. Mid-year, everyone's already running full speed just to execute what's in front of them. The idea of also improving how the plan gets built? That sounds like a second job. Spoiler: it doesn't have to be. So the quota that everyone suspects is unrealistic keeps running. The friction between comp and territory design that adds weeks to every change keeps being worked around. The KPI that the whole team reads but nobody fully trusts keeps showing up in the Monday review. Then September rolls around, planning season opens, and you're building next year on the same foundation you meant to fix this year. Sound familiar? I'd bet good money it does. Our research team, led by Curtis Schroeder, surveyed 1,500+ revenue leaders over the past year to understand what's holding performance back. The answer kept pointing inward: structural issues that teams can name clearly but can't find a way to fix because every fix looks like a massive initiative. His team developed a new guide I'm genuinely excited about, The Mid-Year Sales Performance Reset Guide. It's five actions, one per month between now and September, that can change how your next planning cycle goes. Each one is scoped to fit alongside everything you're already managing. No cross-functional initiative required. No executive sponsor needed to get started. Just one focused change that moves something forward before the next cycle locks in. It's a completely different way to approach the plan fixes that have been sitting on your list. If planning season tends to feel like groundhog day, download the roadmap and start with month one. Get your copy here: https://hubs.ly/Q04j0WtL0 Your future self will thank you. Trust me. 

Manual workarounds for sales planning have a way of outlasting the problems they were built to solve. What starts as a quick fix for one comp cycle often keeps running long after. Timothy Ernst, Manager of Incentive Tech at Iron Mountain, calls it technical debt: 🚩 fixes that outlive the problem and create more tickets, handoffs, and cross-team friction.  We have a fix for that. The Mid-Year Sales Performance Reset Guide gives you five research-backed actions, one a month, to tackle the planning fixes that keep carrying over each fiscal.     The first action helps you track the diagnostic metric your dashboard is missing, so you know what's driving your results and where to act. Get the roadmap here 👉 https://lnkd.in/gmt3xNyt Timothy is on The Mid-Year Sales Performance Reset alongside a community of SPM operators. He's just shared an update on his progress here: https://lnkd.in/g9-RnqDt Join the LinkedIn Group to follow what they're trying, where they're getting stuck, and surprises they learn along the way. 💡

While 48 countries chase the FIFA World Cup 2026™ this summer ⚽, Varicent just picked up 13 shiny accolades of our own. 🏆 We’re excited to share that Varicent has been named a G2 Grid® Leader for Enterprise Sales Performance Management, recognized across 81 reports with 13 new G2 Summer 2026 badges. Varicent has consistently been named a leader in Compensation Management and Sales Performance. This recognition reinforces what our customers already experience: Varicent delivers the industry's leading AI-native platform for orchestrating revenue performance. As one customer shared:  "The platform provides extremely useful tools across the entire lifecycle of territory planning and sales compensation. Its ability to be customized to meet complex needs is critical for successful deployment and adoption. The fact that it continues to evolve to keep pace with the changing SPM landscape is also a big plus." With Varicent, Sales, Finance, Compensation, and Operations teams build sharper plans and keep sellers working the right opportunities. Our customers shape everything we build. Their feedback drives what we innovate next, and their outcomes tell us whether we got it right. 🤝 See how we're helping them exceed their revenue goals: https://lnkd.in/gCwZ_44Q

Planning season usually raises the same question: where will next year's growth come from? For many teams, part of that answer is already inside the current sales plan, hidden in territory gaps and uneven coverage carried over cycle after cycle. The Revenue Optimizer helps you calculate how much those gaps cost. Enter your own numbers and in just two minutes, see where misalignment is holding back growth and what your numbers could look like if territories and capacity were operating as they should. Try out the calculator here 👉 https://lnkd.in/eU5-KdQs The easiest revenue to find is often the revenue you already have.

Moving off spreadsheets and onto a sales performance management (SPM) solution creates an opportunity to do more than automate manual work. Compensation teams can support new plans, metrics, and priorities without rebuilding calculations and processes every time the business changes. Rick Butler, Vice President of Global Sales Compensation at ServiceNow, encourages teams to use the move away from Excel as an opportunity to modernize how compensation is managed, instead of carrying years of spreadsheets and calculations into a new system. Watch the clip below to hear Rick's advice on what revenue leaders should consider when evaluating an SPM solution.

"We hit 95% attainment" sounds like the system is working. It can also hide the fact that your top three reps carried the quarter. That's the difference between a scoreboard metric and a diagnostic one. The scoreboard tells you what happened, and the diagnostic reveals why and what you can do about it. Chapter 1 of The Mid-Year Sales Performance Reset Guide focuses on adding a diagnostic KPI that changes how you see performance before your next planning cycle begins. The guide walks through new metrics like: ➡️ Median attainment  ➡️ Pipeline evidence scoring  ➡️ Deal concentration None require a new system. Most can be done with CRM data in a few hours. Our research with 1,500+ revenue leaders and operators shows that organizations tracking fewer than two diagnostic metrics were 36% more likely to miss plan. Adding one diagnostic this quarter can help you start next fiscal with a clearer read on what's working and where it isn't. Read the chapter and the get the full 5-step guide here: https://lnkd.in/e7rdFCUq Want to follow your peers applying these changes in real time? Join the LinkedIn Group: https://lnkd.in/e_4SMeeq

Outsourcing might solve a short-term need. But over time, it erodes the very thing that drives performance 👉 trust. Columbia Bank decided to take control back. By rebuilding their incentive process in-house with Varicent, they cut costs by 35%, restored trust across teams, and gained real-time visibility into performance. This is what happens when ownership replaces outsourcing. See how they did it: https://lnkd.in/gBa4XCi2

3 keys. 3 cities. 1 goal: Find your revenue advantage. 💪 Across London, Dallas, and Boston, we learned the future belongs to leaders who redesign how their revenue systems work, not those who simply add more tools. ▶️ Hit play on our Unlock Live opening video and see how top revenue leaders are building an advantage that compounds. #VaricentUnlock #UnlockLive

You already know which planning fix you'd make if you had the time. The problem is the fix often looks so big that figuring out where to start can feel like its own project. It doesn't have to. Instead of scoping a massive change, break the problem down into one focused action at a time.  The Mid-Year Sales Performance Reset Guide gives you the full roadmap. It’s 5 research-backed fixes that you can start making now, with results that compound over time.  By September, you’ll have a framework that covers where to find the friction points most teams overlook, how to scope an AI use case that ties to something leadership cares about, and how to turn those moves into a credible case for bigger change. Get the 5-step guide here ➡️ https://lnkd.in/exf6PWPh 📢 Follow your RevOps peers on their Mid-Year Sales Performance Reset journey! 🤝 Join our LinkedIn Group and see their progress unfold in real time as they make these changes in their own orgs: https://lnkd.in/e_4SMeeq