Rapid Sales Incentives: Seeing the Results

Background

Client with a domestic sales force of over 4500 established annual sales compensation plans. The formalized plans and compensation methods supported the strategic objectives of the company, but proved to be less adaptive to more tactical "quick win" situations. In cases where there was a need to rapidly incent individual sales results and behaviors not addressed by the basic sales incentive plans, the client reverted to a time consuming process using spreadsheets and manual data entry.

Challenge

The client's sales force was not seeing the results of their "quick win" activity reflected in their pay until 2 or 3 pay cycles limiting the effectiveness of the sales incentive. The challenge was to develop a method to manage the "quick win" Sales Promotion Incentive Fund (SPIF) compensation method, and reduce the time between a "quick win" event and when the sale representative received compensation.

Solution

In less than 90 days, ADC developed, deployed and performed the necessary training on a web-based application that allows the sales operations team to easily enter up to the minute achievement information provided by the sales management team. Data validations are systematically performed at the point of entry and payout amounts are fed directly to the downstream compensation system.

Results

The client is now able to rapidly reward sales reps for focusing their efforts on selling specific product lines/services geared to increase the company's market share in areas identified by the business. The sales force is now able to see the results of their hard work in the very next pay cycle.