You know you’ll need them both, but the order of acquisition matters.
If you contract for MLM software before your compensation plan has been designed, you may be diving into the water before you know what’s in the lake.
There may be unwelcome surprises waiting for you.
Over Budget
Most MLM software providers allocate a specific number of hours for the preparation of their design document, programming, testing, and QA.
If you can’t show them your compensation plan, you won’t know if your plan fits within their budgeted number of hours. If you provide the plan to them after you’re a client, be prepared to discover your plan doesn’t fit their budget. They can program it, but it may cost you more than they quoted you when you became a client.
How much more? You won’t know until you present your compensation plan to them.
More Than A Compensation Plan
You may think that the programming of your compensation plan is all you need, but very often that’s not the case.
You may need to keep track of dates when your representatives achieve specific milestones that matter to your compensation plan, or other fields of data that your software provider doesn’t store at all.
You may need special reports or inquiry screens for these fields.
You may need interfaces to or from other systems to communicate data between them.
Until your compensation plan has been designed, you won’t know about these things to be able to communicate them to your software provider. The time required to support them won’t have been known before you became a client.
That means you’ll pay more. How much? You won’t know until you present your compensation plan to them.
Your Compensation Plan Isn’t Supported
It’s rare, but it’s possible your MLM software provider upon looking at your plan may tell you your plan isn’t supported. They may say…
- “We don’t program daily plans”
- “We don’t support multi-currency plans”
- “We can’t program your plan because it doesn’t make sense.”
Conclusion
Have your compensation plan designed before you get software.
For more information about MLM Software, go to MLM Software Advice.
Jay Leisner, the President of Sylvina Consulting, is a top compensation plan and direct selling expert, a trusted adviser to new and established network marketing and party plan companies. For more than 30 years, Jay has enjoyed assessing and improving party plan and network marketing companies across the globe.
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