Former Toshiba bigwig Andy Bass rocks up at Open Symmetry

Industry vet grabs EMEA reins at sales management software biz

Former Toshiba exec Andy Bass has landed at sales performance management (SPM) consultancy Open Symmetry as head of European ops.

Bass recently exited Toshiba after 24 years' service amid a regional cost cutting shake-up that saw his dual roles as European veep for the PC and TV biz and UK country director evaporate.

SPM automates management of quotas, commission plans and other levers that firms pull to direct and reward sales staff - it is aimed at sales managers, and bods working in HR and finance.

Bass told us that many organisations dedicate an entire department using home grown systems, often based on Excel, to figure out the payroll at the end of every month.

"Some of the sales teams in a business can be paid on sell out, some on sell in, some on revenue only, some are on a revenue plus margin plan, some on certain [tactical] products. It can be very complicated," he said.

"You can make quite a lot of errors, you can overpay or underpay people. Businesses are trying to find more ways to incentivise sales teams but doing that can result in more of a challenge to calculate payroll".

ROI comes from reducing mistakes and the time it takes to manually deal with pay, improvements to governance and risk and by providing audit trails for finance people.

Open Symmetry, which pulled on board former Insight EMEA boss Stuart Fenton in December as a non-exec advisory board member, consults and implements SPM wares from IBM Cognos, Nice, Xactly and Callidus Cloud.

Current customers include O2, AXA, Barclays, HSBC, Coca Cola and VMware.

"In the US there are hundreds of these implementations going on, Europe is the next big market," Bass forecast. ®