Varicent

We asked 1,000+ revenue leaders why they hit or missed their number last year. They said what you'd expect... execution... pipeline...market conditions... hero reps. Then we analyzed the data. We got a different answer. The single strongest predictor of whether a team hit its number was the quality of their revenue plan. And companies with the strongest plan design beat target 58% more often than their peers. We tried pretty hard to break it. We held variables like revenue, industry, seller tenure, and sales force size constant and ran it again. We moved where we drew the lines between groups. We tested it against four different definitions of "winning." It held every time. That's the through-line of our 2026 Market Spotlight Report: Nobody Outsells the Plan. The decisions made before the year starts... coverage, targets, capacity, pay... set a ceiling that no amount of selling gets you over. The report drops soon, and on September 16 I'll be talking through what it means in practice with Deloitte Digital's Abe Awasthi. If you want an advance copy, let me know. Would love your feedback (and may even use some of your quotes in the promotion of the report!)

Today, I’m proud to share that Varicent has been named a Leader in the 2026 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Sales Performance Management. This is our eighth consecutive recognition as a Leader. We believe this recognition reflects a vision we’ve been advancing toward for 20 years. In 2006, Varicent led the shift from Incentive Compensation Management to Sales Performance Management. Today, that vision continues through an AI-powered SPM platform that helps enterprises uncover opportunities faster, pivot quickly, and grow with more predictability. The Gartner® evaluations follow our Leader recognition in The Forrester Wave™: Sales Performance Management Solutions for Incentive Compensation, Q1 2025, where Varicent earned the highest possible scores in 16 criteria, including innovation. Along the way, we made bets most of the market wasn't ready for. We built sales planning when our entire business was incentive compensation. We carved out our AI offering early, before the rest of the market knew what to do with AI in SPM. We brought planning, incentives, analytics, and data management together on one intelligent platform when most of the industry was still selling these as separate tools. Every one of those moves came from the same belief: SPM is a business-critical system for increasing revenue and maintaining a competitive edge. That’s what Varicent has built and what these evaluations reflect. To our customers, thank you for trusting Varicent with the work that matters most. To our partners who help us show up at the scale our customers demand, thank you. To the Varicent team, thank you for relentlessly delivering on the vision every one of these analysts evaluated! The most important chapter for Varicent and for this industry is the one we're writing now. Access the report here: https://lnkd.in/gxWMurbb

Oops, we did it again. I shared yesterday that Gartner® named Varicent a Leader in the 2026 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Sales Performance Management. Today Gartner released the companion 2026 Gartner® Critical Capabilities for Sales Performance Management, and Varicent was ranked #1 across all three evaluated Use Cases: Sales Planning & Governance, Incentive Compensation Management, and Performance Analytics & Intelligence. The 2026 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ is a culmination of research in a specific market, giving you a wide-angle view of the relative positions of the market’s competitors. The 2026 Gartner® Critical Capabilities is an essential companion to the Gartner Magic Quadrant. This methodology provides deeper insight into providers’ product and service offerings by extending the Magic Quadrant analysis. Enterprise #SPM is no longer just comp calculation and it hasn’t been for a long time. It's sales planning, incentive compensation, analytics, AI, seller insights, and the data foundation required to make better revenue decisions faster. I believe Varicent’s #1 rankings across all evaluated Use Cases reflect the depth of a platform built to solve that complexity, bringing planning, incentives, analytics, AI, and data together in one connected, AI-native system for enterprise organizations. If you’re evaluating SPM solutions for enterprise scale, here’s another reason why Varicent belongs on the shortlist. Access both Gartner® reports here: https://lnkd.in/gQX8cEWC

When we kicked off the company this fiscal, I told a story about a story. I framed Varicent's growth as a story still being written, because the chapters we'll celebrate later are made of milestones we hit today. Today's news is one of those recognitions. For the 8th time in a row, Gartner® has named Varicent a Leader in the 2026 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Sales Performance Management. We have also received Leader recognition in The Forrester Wave™: Sales Performance Management Solutions for Incentive Compensation, Q1 2025 earlier this year, where we earned the highest possible scores in 16 criteria including innovation. Most companies are trying to meet the bar of "we shipped AI." We're thinking bigger. We're not just adding AI to simplify mundane tasks; we're building a platform that uses AI to help you think, to help you plan, to bring you recommendations that don't just save time, but that open up new revenue opportunities. It's AI for strategic leverage. When I look at where Varicent has been and where we're heading, the thing I'm most excited about is that we're still adding plot points to this story rather than resting on the ones already there. To our customers, to our partners and our global SI network, and to everyone at Varicent, thank you for your trust and relentless innovation that got us here. The best chapters are still ahead. Learn more here: https://lnkd.in/gCy5wnZ9

How’s this for a buying signal? Gartner® just named Varicent a Leader in the 2026 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Sales Performance Management for the eighth consecutive time. Forrester recently named Varicent a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Sales Performance Management Solutions for Incentive Compensation, Q1 2025. We believe this recognition validates the platform direction Varicent has been building for 20 years: #SPM built for enterprise complexity, where planning, incentives, analytics, data, and AI work together in one connected system. Keep those pieces disconnected and don’t act surprised when the year starts slow, sellers question the number, payouts turn into debates, and the forecast keeps moving. If you still think SPM starts and ends with calculating commissions, you're buying for yesterday’s problem. Take time to read the reports. Ask harder questions. Look past the demo. Then take a serious look at Varicent. You can get the report here: https://lnkd.in/gfRKpxH7

"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.