Pharmaceutical company navigates merger chaos and adapts to change with Optymyze

Effective integration of merged and acquired businesses 

Stronger data controls resulting in reduced data errors 

Insightful performance analytics enabling sales strategy improvement 

Situation 

A United States-based pharmaceutical company went through a succession of mergers and acquisitions and restructured itself as a new organization focused on the treatment of respiratory diseases and disorders of the central nervous system, such as anxiety, depression, epilepsy, and schizophrenia.

Challenges

Like in most industries, mergers and acquisitions create challenges for sales operations because incentive compensation programs need to be redesigned to align the strategies of the acquired businesses. At the same time, the stakeholders’ information needs changed, and processes need to be automated—within weeks, not months.

The company’s original sales commission system was not designed to adapt to a continually evolving sales strategy.

  • Each merger and acquisition expanded data sets from new third-party sources;
  • Data integrity issues began causing errors and inconsistencies with sales commission payments;
  • These disruptions had sales executives looking for direction to improve their effectiveness;
  • Information to help convert an evolving strategy into action was not readily available;
  • More effective approaches to incentivizing sales reps were needed; and
  • Transparency and accuracy were important so sales reps would stop feeling the need for shadow accounting.

The company also needed to make its sales commission system easily accessible to the field on mobile devices, which was not something they could do at the time.

Solution

The company chose the Optymyze unified, no-code platform to design and create their sales performance management solution that included sales commission management.

Outcomes

The single, unified platform enabled the customer to increase its salesforce and the complexity of its commission plans with no increase in administrative headcount.

The customer has succeeded in the face of chaos borne of a merger and multiple acquisitions, to effectively unite disparate sales operation processes and achieve outcomes such as:

  • better integration of merged and acquired businesses;
  • stronger data controls and formal change control processes;
  • new quota setting methodologies and processes;
  • insightful analysis of performance by salesperson, product, region, compensation plan, and more; and
  • visibility for salespeople and managers to see what they are making and how to maximize their compensation.