TecHR Interview with Tanya Jansen, CMO & Co-Founder at beqom

How has your journey been into Marketing for technology platforms?

Technology is clearly an enabler to do things better and more efficiently reduce people’s needs to do redundant tasks – this is especially relevant for HR and HR processes. Compensation is one of the biggest strategic differentiators for large organizations to attract and retain people, and they should be aware that the technology exists in order to help them manage that process in a more strategic and less administrative manner. The resulting benefits include cost savings, pay equity, better retention, performance, etc. It is my job to build that awareness in the market.

What galvanized you to start at beqom?

My fellow beqom co-founders and I were working at SAP in 2007 when we realized a huge gap in the enterprise software market. Companies like SAP and their customers — the largest, most sophisticated companies in the world — were not able to automate their compensation processes across one integrated solution. Instead, we saw that many of these organizations were relying on spreadsheets sent through email or dated in-house systems to manage their largest expenses. This is when we realized we were facing the biggest market opportunity we had ever seen during our careers, which led to the creation of beqom.

What is beqom and how does it fit into the current Compensation Management and Payrolls landscape?

beqom is cloud-based total compensation management and sales performance management platform. beqom connects directly into organizations’ HR suites to help them manage the whole compensation process. In the larger market, beqom focuses on transparency; we want to help organizations provide their employees with a clear picture of the link between their performance and total compensation, as well as manage compensation fairly among all employees.

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What does your ideal customer profile look like? Which businesses are the fastest to adopt your HR Technology products?

We’ve found the beqom platform works best for large enterprise companies who need a system that can scale across multiple levels of the organization with different compensation structures, globally. We’ve seen companies with great success in adopting the platform in various industries including financial services, manufacturing, and retail, telecommunications, automotive, and technology.

What are the key components your customers look into before finalizing a Compensation Management Platform?

Key components our customers look into before deciding to work with us include:

• One Integrated Platform – This keeps all the data in one accessible place and removes significant room for error when transferring information from one platform to another. It also allows for one centralized data model that can report and analyze information in real-time.
• Flexible Security Models – Compensation managers want control over who from the company is able to access the system and the data. Having this control helps protect security and privacy on the platform, while still arming the necessary managers with the information they need.
• Auditable Data Flow – Compensation requires collaboration, so total compensation management platforms should have the workflow capacity to drive the process and then manage multiple rounds of reviews and approvals. It’s essential that the platform has a way to track these edits to show how a final salary number or bonus was decided.
• Adaptability – What works for one company may not work for another, so the platform should be flexible enough to allow managers to adjust the data models for items such as bonus calculations, stock options, benefit eligibility, changing regulatory requirements and more.

Why should every organization leverage a Compensation Management HR Platform?

Leveraging a total compensation management platform can save companies both time and budget. By investing in one streamlined platform, organizations can reap benefits including reduced (or eliminated) costs related to compensation review, a huge reduction in time lost to managing spreadsheets used for compensation management and tracking, faster salary review, higher retention rates, better compliance management, and perhaps most importantly a reduction in calculation errors, which can save organizations millions of dollars.

What kind of skills are you looking for in a candidate to drive growth for your Sales Performance and Compensation Management tools?

At beqom, employee happiness is our first priority, and it’s a huge driver of our success as a business. We look for candidates who are passionate about the HR and compensation management industry, thrive working in a global environment, seek out challenges and face them head on, and of course, people who can have fun while helping us grow this product and business to its full potential.

How does beqom help businesses evolve digitally?

beqom is focused on helping businesses overhaul their compensation processes to tackle some of the biggest challenges we’re seeing in today’s HR departments through one integrated solution. Those challenges can include everything from closing pay gaps to executive compensation ratios to recruiting and retaining employees to pay transparency. We created beqom to be able to manage and automate compensation all on one integrated platform, which gives HR managers the tools they need to help keep their employees happy without spending hours going through spreadsheets and analyzing data themselves.

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How can modern HR teams fully-transform their overall organization and promote sales-centric growth using HR-related technological capabilities?

Compensation technology can help managers predict retention, create personalized compensation packages, and provide transparency into factors such as sales quotas and commission-based pay. AI in compensation technology can identify flight risk employees (such as through low engagement, slow performance, continued absence, etc.), allowing HR managers to address the problem before an employee becomes truly unhappy. They can then provide incentives to the employees to create better engagement. For example, if an employee has a particularly long commute, offering remote work options or flexible schedules may keep them more engaged. This technology also allows HR suites to create personalized compensation plans to best cater to different employees. With the current workforce spanning up to five generations, all with different needs, it’s important to be able to predict what each subset of employees will value and cater their benefits toward those areas.

In sales performance management, not only does automated compensation technology give employees more time back in their day, as they can cut down on administrative work, it also provides greater transparency into commission structure and quotas. Machine learning data can spread out quotas more evenly throughout the year, meaning employees are more likely to achieve their commission and stay engaged. This technology can also help associates become better salespeople by comparing their conversion rates among peers and benchmarks to pinpoint problems in their strategy and work with a mentor or manager to adjust accordingly.

How can customers connect your technology to HRMS? Tell us about your integrations and technology partnerships with other platforms?

beqom’s platform is able to close the compensation process gaps not addressed by HCM suites. Our solution connects seamlessly with Workday Human Capital Management, SAP SuccessFactors, Oracle, and Salesforce.com. The Workday and Oracle integrations are enabled by bidirectional built-in connectors, bringing all relevant employee data into beqom, streamlining your HR processes, ensuring transparency, fair pay, and regulatory compliance. For SAP Success Factors, our platform provides an integration cloud that allows our clients and partners to design integration packages using inbound and outbound API connectors. Finally, with Salesforce.com, we offer API-level integration and advanced tagging and markup to provide the context required by other applications.

Which Marketing and Sales Technology solutions do you use at beqom?

Our Marketing and Demand Gen teams are heavy users of HubSpot, which helps us connect all our efforts across the sales cycle. We want our customers to have the best experience with us in each of our interactions and giving our teams a system that allows them to optimize and personalize the experience of our contacts helps us in that mission.

Which start-ups in the tech industry interest you the most and why?

I admire what Inuit has done for the financial industry. They’ve completely digitized processes that people used to dread, such as budgeting and taxing, and have created a platform to make complicated processes feel manageable.

What technologies within AI and HR Technology are you interested in?

We’re interested in technologies that can adapt to the future, and thus “future-proof” companies’ HR departments and compensation plans. This includes staying compliant with the constant stream of new regulations around the world, managing a global workforce and scaling compensation management across teams, offices, and departments.

What are the new emerging markets in HR Technology, that you see providing the biggest opportunities?

Data is absolutely a top growing area of HR technology. There are so many different use cases we’re seeing already, and the industry is still young. AI and analytics can take unconscious bias out of compensation management. Machine learning algorithms can now analyze huge data sets, clean out information and offer HR teams recommendations. Data Analytics will no doubt continue to grow and evolve to provide an immense opportunity in the HR industry.

What’s your smartest work-related shortcut or productivity hack?

Delegation is essential in staying productive. One person can’t do everything, so being able to say no to certain projects or opportunities and delegating them to other people on your team is an essential component of staying productive.

Tag the one person in the industry whose answers to these questions you would love to read:

What I would really like is to get the feedback directly from the people who buy or benefit from solutions like ours, this is the most relevant and best way to understand how to meet their needs both today and in the future.

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