Building Trust, Agility, and Collaboration in Sales Planning at Shaw Industries

Shaw Industries Overview

Shaw Industries is a leading manufacturer of flooring products and services, providing innovative solutions to the global market. The company’s products are sold through various channels including builders, retail, and commercial dealers. The market for these products is highly competitive and Shaw Industries keeps its edge with innovative solutions and competitive distribution and sales strategies.

As part of its industry leadership, the company places high importance on sales performance management including both incentive compensation and sales planning. Sales performance management helps Shaw Industries align the sales team to strategic goals and motivates them to achieve the best results.

Business Challenges:

As an innovative organization that leads the industry, Shaw Industries is constantly looking at improving their go-to-market approach and recently embarked a study of its current end-to-end sales performance practice that uncovered many opportunities and challenges:

• Technology Footprint Evaluation: The company operated on multiple platforms, leading to complexity and inefficiencies. They lacked the expertise to evaluate the best long-term technology strategy for their sales planning needs over the next 5 to 10 years.
• Data Accessibility and Visualization: Shaw Industries recognized opportunities to enhance how they accessed and provided data to the business. This included improving data visualization through reporting and dashboards and determining optimal data accessibility for their users.
• Technology Assessment: Shaw Industries was using Varicent for sales compensation and another tool for sales planning. The company wanted to evaluate the design of their existing systems to increase agility and flexibility when designing sales plans, modeling, and setting goals in each planning cycle. Shaw Industries sought a partner with industry expertise and benchmarking capabilities to help them make informed decisions about their technology assessment and selection.

Course of Action:

Shaw Industries partnered with OpenSymmetry to address these challenges and transform their sales planning and compensation management processes. The key stages of the engagement were:

1. Current & Future State Workshops: The workshops help define the current and future state of Shaw Industries’ sales planning process. This effort ensured alignment with the company’s objectives and needs as well as helped the company make the process more collaborative with the sales team.
2. Vendor Selection: OpenSymmetry supported Shaw Industries in evaluating various technology options to address their sales planning and compensation management needs. Varicent was chosen over two other vendors based on its capabilities, ease of use and long-term flexibility.
3. System Agility Improvement: Together we identified opportunities to enhance system agility and streamline processes. OpenSymmetry Managed Services were utilized to implement recommendations, update reporting and clean up outdated code.

Impact:

The partnership between Shaw Industries and OpenSymmetry yielded significant results and improvements in their sales planning and  compensation management processes:

• Cost Reduction and Administration Improvement: Shaw Industries achieved cost savings and improved the efficiency of administrative tasks related to sales planning.
• Tight integration between ICM and Sales Planning: By implementing Varicent as their integrated platform, Shaw Industries gained the advantage of shared data and enhanced connectivity between incentive compensation management and sales planning.
• Data Management Enhancement: Varicent ELT (Extract, Load, Transform) was implemented to enhance data management capabilities, ensuring data accuracy and integrity. This eliminated the need for IT resources and effort to prepare data for sales planning.
• Top-Down/Bottoms-Up Reconciliation Process: Shaw Industries successfully established a robust reconciliation process for creating sales goals and optimizing sales planning. By involving the territory manager in the planning from the outset they created more trust in the goals and a clear path to success for the sales team. Future enhancements, such as workflows and notifications, are in the pipeline,  improving the overall functionality of the system.
• Reporting Visualization: Shaw Industries is poised to update their reporting visualization with the assistance of OpenSymmetry Managed Services, using Varicent’s presenter adaptive reports to provide even more valuable insights to the business.

The collaboration between Shaw Industries and OpenSymmetry showcases the positive impact of a strategic approach to sales planning and incentive compensation management. By addressing their challenges and leveraging Varicent’s capabilities, Shaw Industries is better positioned for sustained growth and success in a highly competitive and dynamic market.

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