Incentive Compensation Management (ICM) - Case Study

 A global healthcare logistics company faced an uphill battle unifying two Incentive Compensation Management systems across newly acquired organizations. The company had an opportunity with these new acquisitions to gain extremely valuable insight into each business unit’s compensation process and update and enhance those processes, while also uniting the BU’s.

Effectively integrating mergers and acquisitions is crucial to achieving business value. Sales organizations face a unique range of questions and challenges, including how the new sales teams will be organized, how territories & quotas will be managed, and how incentive compensation will be processed accurately. Furthermore, with each entity bringing unique technologies and processes, leaders need to decide which solutions(s) to implement. Or does the newly integrated organization demand a new, best-of-breed solution? Overcoming these challenges is critical and Voiant has worked with many clients to achieve sales performance management synergies as part of acquisition integration. Our experience and ability to leverage Anaplan, our preferred software partner, in these situations have resulted in the swift integration of sales technologies that helps companies effectively execute sales planning and incentive compensation management.

Updated Method with Full Data Clarity

The Method

Each newly acquired business was using its own time-consuming and manual spreadsheet-based compensation management system, managed by an individual compensation administrator. This outdated process caused:

• Delays in compensation processing and opportunity tracking
• A major lack of visibility at the executive level
• An inability to plan and schedule future activities
  

The Voiant team was able to create a solution that armed the leadership teams with a full view of the incentive compensation process and drastically cut down processing time, allowing for leadership to focus on future planning. This solution was built using Anaplan software and Voiant’s proprietary Sales Data Desk™ concept. Using new software and incorporating Voiant’s SPM knowledge throughout the implementation the sales teams from all business units are now able to work within a quicker, more user-friendly, data-driven plan.

The Data Clarity

The organization also felt strongly about giving their sales reps full visibility from the time an opportunity is created to the time the opportunity is sold, and, finally, to how each sales rep would be paid. This kind of visibility required specialized dashboards and custom Salesforce data integrations. The Voiant team was able to achieve the company goals of an improved and more transparent process by integrating Anaplan with Salesforce to get opportunity information and then organizing that data in a way that became actionable for a sales rep.

Incentive Compensation Process Outcome

The newly built Incentive Compensation Management process, which included a live statement dashboard, along with a Salesforce integration enabled:

• A singular view for sales leadership of all business progress in real-time, across all customers
• A merged executive view across business units for the first time
• What-if ability to push an opportunity from Salesforce in and out of a processing period to see the effect on attainment and payout
• Additional engagement with sales teams allowing them to make better decisions that align with business objectives
• Visibility of key enterprise account opportunities, overlap, and gaps in coverage

Surviving Drastic Market Changes Requires Real-Time Analytics

This engagement began during the pandemic, and since then, this organization has been able to leverage its new Incentive Compensation model while adapting to the drastically altered healthcare market that emerged during the Covid-19 pandemic. Leadership, armed with a full view of the Incentive Compensation process, has been able to proactively make changes that have allowed the company to avoid future discrepancies and quickly adapt to opportunities. The decrease in compensation processing time has freed up resources to analyze data and design plan activities for future years.

There is certainly no way to know exactly how a market might change in the future, but with the right systems and processes in place, designed correctly to fit business needs, sales leadership can be prepared to make quick adjustments and minimize chaos.

To learn more about Voiant and Anaplan partnering together to fit business needs – please visit our partner page today.