5 Ways Comp Pros Can Maximize Their Market Management Tool

The days of big Excel spreadsheets to manage market pricing jobs are in the rearview mirror for those in the total rewards profession (or, at least, they should be). In recent years, there has been an explosion of compensation technology (“comptech”) solutions to help you better manage the survey management and market pricing process.

Novo Insights research from 2024 found 42% of participating organizations were using a third-party market management system. At the same time, 45% of those organizations also reported they were willing to consider a new provider. So, in summary, usage of such tools is relatively high, but satisfaction is often low.

This disconnect likely stems from an underutilization of the platform’s power. If you have ever navigated within a built-for-purpose market management platform, you at least have a vague notion that it can do a lot. Outright, market management products are designed to warehouse survey files, map jobs to benchmarks, model pay structures, and increasingly, highlight equity gaps and market trends. Yet many practitioners admit they extract only a fraction of that potential. In conversations with customers at WorldatWork’s Total Rewards ’25 conference in Orlando, Fla., longtime users of these systems described million-row databases steeped in labyrinthine configuration, security models that made them afraid to touch any of that configuration and learning curves longer than the tenure of their predecessor in that role. Meanwhile, licensing fees keep climbing.

The mismatch between cost and realized value isn’t confined to the well-established players in this space. Newer entrants tout faster deployments and cleaner user experience as a path to speedier insights, yet their roadmaps pace ahead of many clients’ adoption curves.

Most commonly, one fires up their market management tool the few times a year that a survey needs to get loaded or a structure needs a refresh. At the pace these tools are rolling out updates, compensation teams that don’t stay engaged find themselves facing a mountain of new features, stalling adoption.

If your organization feels stuck on Page 10 of a 1,000-page manual, you’re not alone. The good news: Extracting value rarely requires a rip-and-replace. It does require disciplined governance, smarter configuration and supportive enablement.

This article shares five principles to help you reclaim that return on investment.

1. Anchor the Technology to a Clear Compensation Philosophy

A platform cannot infer why you pay engineers at the 75th percentile in Berlin but only the median in Boise, Idaho. That job rests with your compensation philosophy. Ensure you can express that philosophy in plain language first, then let the tool reflect it. Key elements to spell out include:

• Reference market. Which peer sets and surveys define “the market” for each population?
• Range methodology. Should you build directly off benchmarked jobs, or abstract to broader internal levels such as grades or banded segments?
• Percentile target(s). Do you go with single-point, inter‑quartile ranges or something else (for example, variable targets by career stage or job family)?
• Geographic approach. Should you choose multi-country/national/region-level specificity? Should you apply cost-of-labor/living differentials or be location-agnostic?
• Refresh cadence. Is the right choice annual, biannual or rolling?

Documenting these guardrails (setting grade midpoints to the 60th percentile of a blended survey cut, for instance) can reduce debate, accelerate onboarding and keep future configuration changes tethered to strategy.

2. Practice Data Hygiene

Great analytics generally rest on good plumbing. Compensation teams already obsess over survey cuts; so, bring the same rigor to system feeds. Consider ways to:

• Version every load. Label survey year and vintage on every import. Be judicious when overwriting data loads as it can make a later audit more difficult.
• Use the pipes you already pay for. If an application programming interface (API) to your HR information system (HRIS) or applicant tracking system (ATS) is available, work toward enabling that integration instead of manual loads. Bonus tip: If your management tool lets you submit a survey directly through the platform, updated organization data can shave off considerable time up front on each submission.
• Tap real-time offer signals. Tools like Pave and BetterComp can surface near-real-time offer data (Pave via native Offers API; BetterComp through its integration with Compa). If you’ve got a tool with this capability, last quarter’s benchmarks can get a fresh read next to the market’s current pulse.
• Appoint a data steward. Ensure that someone on the team owns the “data dictionary,” approves loads and keeps an eye on synchronization errors.

Clean, current inputs help you unlock the fun stuff: range-generation wizards, regression-based grade design and credible pay-outlier flags.

3. Invest in Continuous Enablement

To remain competitive, market management platforms are evolving on a quarterly (even monthly) basis, so your mastery must evolve, too. The upside is that once you learn how to wrangle survey versions or build structures in one system, those muscles transfer to almost any other vendor. You’re not just investing in your organization becoming more efficient, you’re investing in your professional currency. Continuous enablement can come through:

• Vendor communities. Park at least one team member in the product’s forum (or Slack workspace).
• Quarterly feature sprints. Pick a feature you’re underutilizing and run a mini-pilot.
• Peer showcases. Rotate a “lunch-and-learn” where someone demonstrates a workflow they refined.

Bear in mind, sharing feedback upstream often lands you on beta programs, cutting service fees while giving you influence over the roadmap.

4. Unlock Opportunities with Scoped Role-Based Access

Market management tools, in general, default to broad administration rights because compensation data is sensitive and teams are small. That convenience can backfire (i.e., everything looks daunting, and no one else on the team wants to play around in the system). While truly approval-driven workflows are only found in enterprise-ready market management platforms, nearly all support some level of security-role segmentation. Adding a few targeted roles can make the platform less intimidating and more collaborative overall. Opportunities here can include:

• Create lightweight contributor roles. With pay transparency initiatives gaining momentum, get the talent team to weigh in on what part of the range shows up in the contract management system or request pricing without exposing salary structures.
• Work around workflows. Yes, it’s generally easier for a compensation leader to review analyst benchmarks or new ranges prior to publication with a formal workflow setup. However, many platforms support workarounds using tags, comment threads and staged visibility of ranges and reports based on role assignment.
• Segment manager visibility. This may be easy at some organizations but virtually impossible at others. Still, scoped visibility for managers into select data elements (e.g., pay outliers, position-in-range for their team or a high-level internal equity metric) can help them become better-informed customers of the compensation team’s work.

The objective here is not to downplay the sensitivity of compensation data in the wrong hands. Instead, it’s to highlight the “you don’t know what you don’t know” element, where new kinds of prudent collaboration can open doors to new possibilities.

5. Run a Friendly Annual Tool Health-Check

Think of this as preventive maintenance, not a forensic audit. Schedule it ahead of budget season so insights can shape the plan. This can include:

Finish by noting one capability you haven’t activated (e.g., artificial intelligence [AI] job-match suggestions or a visual pay equity dashboard) and set a 90-day experiment to try it.

When an Upgrade Makes Sense

It may be time to look beyond your current platform if, after all this, it still can’t:

1. Automatically sync with your HRIS data.
2. Reflect the reality of how your organization structures compensation.
3. Support some level of collaborative work.

Novo Insights’ 2025 CompTech Category Assessment: Market Management Report may prove helpful in this exercise.

Success Is Fundamental

Market management tools are systems that echo your compensation philosophy, data cadence and appetite for transparency. Master the fundamentals. Crisp philosophy, spotless data, rightsized access, relentless learning and even a decade-old deployment can deliver modern, defensible insights. Ignore them, and the shiniest AI-infused platform likely will gather the same dust, only at a higher subscription price.

Editor’s Note: Additional Content

For more information and resources related to this article, see the pages below, which offer quick access to all WorldatWork content on these topics:

• Employee Compensation
• Organizational Performance
• Total Rewards