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Speakeasy Aligns Sales Team with Corporate Objectives, Enhances Sales Productivity and Ensures Compliance“With Xactly Incent, we can now use variable compensation to closely dovetail sales efforts with corporate goals and objectives. In short, we’re able to now ‘pull the sales team into the program’ because they can see for themselves precisely how the plan works.” - Andy Hyde, Speakeasy, Chief Financial Officer Challenge By 2006, it became clear that the compensation management system was proliferating problems. The spreadsheet-driven process was simply not scalable enough to gracefully handle the escalating flow of new people, new sales tasks, new quotas and constantly shifting personnel assignments. Separate spreadsheets had to be created for everyone, and painstakingly linked to tables and formulas. Salespeople, meanwhile, had no visibility into exactly what they were getting paid on, and time-consuming compensation disputes were multiplying. Errors were also finding their way through the system, often simply because of someone hitting the wrong key. As a result, reps were being paid for things they shouldn’t have been compensated for and shortchanged on things they should have been paid on. Finance, meanwhile, was becoming increasingly concerned and annoyed, while payroll was perpetually cutting new checks. And everyone’s faith in the accuracy of compensation payouts was eroding. “As we grew, the old process was no longer good enough and was fast becoming a detriment,” states Andy Hyde, chief financial officer of Speakeasy. “It was essentially a process of calculate and pay, with all the problems and issues surfacing after the fact and burning up everyone’s time and energy.” One of the biggest pain points revolved around the company’s inability to use variable compensation strategically. Claims Hyde: “We’d learned what works and what doesn’t, but we lacked a tool to make our compensation strategy visible to the reps. The sales force simply didn’t understand.” A second major issue was that individual reps were trying to maintain their own “shadow accounting system—usually another spreadsheet—to track their performance. This became a major time-sink for the sales force. Rather than providing critical sales, they were spending substantial time each day trying to keep track of closed deals to make sure they received sales credit. In answer to these issues, Speakeasy resolved to find a sales compensation management solution that would:
Solution Since Speakeasy was already using salesforce.com’s CRM application, the ability to seamlessly integrate that pioneering on-demand application with the new compensation management solution was another “must have.” Just as important was the ability to help drive Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) compliance. Though it was a private company at the time, Speakeasy desired SOX compliance and understood the key role that a compensation management system could play in that endeavor. Now that the company is part of public Best Buy, the wisdom of that decision is readily apparent. At the end of 2006, Speakeasy selected a Web-based, on-demand solution that met its complete range of needs: Xactly Incent™. And by the next month, Speakeasy was fully up and running with Xactly—designing, implementing, managing, auditing and optimizing its sales compensation management program. As before, one person currently manages the program. But unlike before, that person has considerably more time to focus on the strategic aspects and not merely on data entry and spreadsheets. The effect has been liberating, but has hardly stopped there. Xactly Incent was quickly configured to accommodate Speakeasy’s complex sliding-scale rate table (with its 12 distinct formulas). New people can quickly be added to the system – “Ten minutes, and now I’m done,” claims Teresa Wahl, commissions analyst at Speakeasy. “Salespeople can see precisely what is being paid out and for what. New plans and plan components can be quickly implemented. And inaccurate payments are a thing of the past.” Benefits Increased profits Sales reps are also able to see cancellations, and the resulting take-back of commissions. This, says Wahl, “incents them to stay on the customer and ensure satisfaction, which of course often leads to further profitable sales.” Enhanced sales productivity Affirms Hyde, “What they’re able to do now is ‘work’ the future, instead of worrying about the past. And because they can see where the best payouts lie—and how each of their customers stacks up in that regard—we can now use variable compensation to closely dovetail sales efforts with corporate goals and objectives. In short, we’re able to now ‘pull the sales team into the program’ because they can see for themselves precisely how the plan works.” New competitive advantage Low total cost of ownership New trust and confidence Ensured compliance and management visibility |
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