Challenges of Determining Sales Credits
Even after territories and coverage rules have been established, assigning sales credits and determining sales attainment remains a complex and time-consuming process. This is specially true when thousands (or millions) of direct and indirect sales transactions need to be analyzed to determine who gets credit for which sale. What further complicates matters is that multiple people may get credit for a single channel sales transaction. Most companies, even if they have sophisticated sales commission systems, calculate sales attainment at a per-transaction level using spreadsheets.
This process is extremely time-consuming and error-prone. As a result, salespeople (company employees or manufacturer’s reps) spend much of their time building “shadow” systems to double-check the company’s figures. Since they lack faith in the assignment process, this is the only way for them to ensure that nothing is slipping through the cracks. As one might imagine, both morale and sales productivity take a hit as a result.
Focus Your Salesforce with cCRM
Regardless of whether you sell-through one-tier or multi-tier channels, it has been repeatedly proven that “a properly incentivized salesforce will sell more”. In support of this goal, Entomo’s cCRM solution helps companies automate the entire process of calculating sales credit assignments and sales attainment. This gives sales reps the comfort of knowing that they will get their due while sales management and finance departments get a timely and accurate picture of accrued and potential commission payouts. The credit assignment processing pipeline includes the following stages:
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Quota Domain Definition
Your existing quota domains (aka territories) based on any combination of partner, end customers, geography, product family, industry vertical, etc. are loaded into the Entomo SmartHub®.
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Data Aggregation, Cleansing and Normalization
Direct and indirect channel data is collected and aggregated via Entomo’s data management modules. The data is then processed, to match and rationalize names of resellers, retailers, contract manufacturers and end customers.
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Transaction Classification
This process identifies and categorizes sales transactions according to geographies, industry verticals, product types and other pre-configured and company-specific rules.
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Transaction Valuation
To ensure accurate credits, transactions are valued in manner consistent with the company’s revenue reporting rules, net of any back-end credits that might have been issued.
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Payee Assignments and Commission Splits
This stage assigns transactions to one or more channel managers, account reps, systems/application engineers, industry specialists, etc. The assignment is based directly on your unique rules and conditions, including commission split rules. Additionally, the partner collaboration portal can be used to automate the commission split and commission adjustment workflow for industries such as semiconductor and components.
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Commission Forecasting
The Entomo SmartHub can be configured to perform “what if” calculations using existing sales credit assignment rules to forecast commissions for budgetary purposes or to take appropriate reserves.
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Compensation Analytics
Complete visibility into the performance of both internal and external sales teams is available by through a variety of dashboards and reports. This enables companies to examine, in real-time, the sales performance of individual reps or sales teams in the aggregate.
The SmartHub can be configured to pre-process the transaction data to assign sales credits and feed existing ERP, commission, or Sales Performance Management (SPM) systems. Alternatively, the entire commission calculation, aggregated by payee, can be performed in the SmartHub.
