Abhijit Sant recently joined Spectrum as senior vice president of our SAP Practice. Prior to joining Spectrum, he spent 20 years at CallidusCloud, now SAP, where he worked directly with CallidusCloud customers and help build a world-class professional services organization. We asked Abhijit a few questions about his move to Spectrum.
Q: You could have easily remained with SAP. Why join Spectrum?
A: Spectrum’s customer-first approach to building sales performance management and incentive compensation solutions for its clients is in-line with SAP’s philosophy. While I was evaluating potential opportunities, I knew I wanted to work with a partner specializing in Callidus products. I also wanted one who shares SAP’s philosophy and the commitment to customer success I had throughout my career at Callidus. Spectrum presents me with the perfect opportunity to help SAP customers get the most value out of SAP Sales Cloud suite.
Q: What’s new in the Sales Performance Management (SPM) market?
A: Organizations – regardless of size – no longer need just a commissions solution that does accurate calculations. They are looking for solutions that provide information and insight on how to influence the behavior of sales reps. They also want to understand how the buying process can be expedited and how the outcomes can be changed. It’s no longer about calculations, it’s about optimization and finding opportunities.
Q: What’s your plan for expanding Spectrum’s SAP practice?
A: We’re an SAP Silver Partner. For the next few months, we’re going to continue our focus on the Callidus products. We have customer successes and experience there. As we get into the second half of the year – which will be here before we know it – we’re going to offer consulting and implementation services for SAP Sales Cloud, SAP Customer Data Cloud and Qualtrics.
Q: According to the 2020 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Sales Performance Management, SAP “customer references mentioned issues with some partner-led deployments, saying they needed to bring SAP resources in.” What are your thoughts on this?
A: When Callidus was a standalone company, the majority of the implementations were done by Callidus Professional Services. Hence, the majority of the knowledge and expertise resided with their professional services. As you know, I worked for Callidus for 20 years doing North America implementations, so I have a deep understanding of the customer base. At SAP, there is an emphasis on partner-led implementations. This means there’s a transition – as customers and prospects look at the existing partners to implement SAP solutions, they do not necessarily have the in-depth knowledge they might claim to have. It created a huge gap in the knowledge/expertise the partners did on the implementations in 2019.
Spectrum, with our customer-first implementation approach, combined with a unique agile implementation methodology designed specifically for SAP Commissions implementations in mid-to-large enterprises, is filling that gap for SAP Sales Cloud customers and prospects. My focus is to ensure customer implementations are successful. We’re not in the “churn and burn” business.
Q: How else does Spectrum differ from other sales performance management consulting firms?
A: Unlike some of the consulting firms that offer SPM services, we are entirely focused on SPM and CPM. We bring industry-specific, in-depth knowledge to our implementations. When you combine our focus, knowledge and methodology, that results in faster implementations and quicker ROI for our clients.
We also make sure our clients get the most value out of the solutions – we care about a lot more than just calculating commissions! Our team brings insights into customer’s compensation landscape that makes compensation plans more effective.