Optymyze helps data giant increase agility and accuracy

Situation

Through steady growth – including several mergers – over its nearly two centuries of existence, a publicly-traded data and analytics company had blossomed into a globe-spanning firm, serving 90% of the Fortune 500 with insightful and incisive business data.

However, with that global reach came some challenges – chiefly, an assortment of disparate business processes and systems for sales performance management (SPM), which led to persistent delays and confusion in salesperson payouts.

Senior management was intimately familiar with both the importance and the difficulty of managing large quantities of data, making it digestible and tracking its dissemination.

Challenges

The company’s legacy SPM methodology consisted of an amalgamation of online sales compensation tools, complicated Excel sheets, and an existing software partner – a convoluted, inflexible, and costly system that was failing to provide adequate compliance and auditing information.

It consisted of a single person emailing an enormous, unwieldy Excel sheet to an entire country worth of sales reps, then receiving a horde of replies addressing all the inaccuracies in the spreadsheet – followed by adjusting and resending it accordingly.

Salespeople were spending nearly as much time doing shadow accounting as they were on making sales and generating revenue. Meanwhile, administrators were unable to focus on the big picture due to spending much of their time performing manual calculations and dealing with disputes.

Moreover, these legacy methodologies were putting pressure on the company to stay consistent with its Sarbanes-Oxley compliance; doing so was highly complicated and resource-intensive.

With these immediate concerns at the forefront, sales coaching and strategic positioning fell by the wayside, preventing the salesforce from taking full advantage of its resources. These inefficiencies were starting to impact morale and the company had to quickly change its processes.

Outcome

The company implemented a centralized sales commission management solution using the Optymyze unified, no-code platform. This enabled decision makers, program managers, and business liaisons to work on higher-level strategic initiatives rather than the day-to-day operations of sales compensation. In fact, the United Kingdom’s compensation manager had so much time liberated by the new system, he was able to incorporate all the company’s reps in Ireland into his responsibilities.

The salesforce was now able to focus more time on sales with automated daily performance updates, instead of ensuring their pay was accurate.

Newly simplified reporting lightened the company’s Sarbanes-Oxley and audit compliance burden, making those tasks easier and more efficient with automated workflows. These improved methods reduced risk and improved privacy controls.

All these advances made their value apparent immediately, but the company realized longer-term benefits as well. For instance, with parameterized commission plans, plan changes now require minimal effort to implement. When the firm divested a multinational department and added an entirely new continental workstream, the agility of the platform made those seemingly mammoth adjustments manageable and hassle-free.