Building Trust, Agility, and Collaboration in Sales Planning at Shaw Industries
Shaw Industry places high importance on sales performance management including both incentive compensation and sales planning.
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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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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About Us
OpenSymmetry enables clients to achieve greater operational efficiency and get better sales results. We are a global consulting company specializing in the planning, implementation, and optimization of industry leading technology suppliers of sales performance management solutions.
CONSIDERATIONS WHEN REPLACING YOUR SPM TECHNOLOGY SOLUTION
Understanding the challenges companies face when migrating Sales Performance Management (SPM) technology solutions can be a significant undertaking. This paper is designed to provide high-level guidance to stakeholders who carry this responsibility. As OpenSymmetry has helped many companies evaluate and effectively migrate to new technology solutions, we are sharing seven key areas that we find critical to completing this kind of effort.
1. CURRENT STATE ASSESSMENT & FUTURE STATE PLANNING
A critical initial step before migrating to a new SPM solution is understanding how well your current program is performing across people, processes, and technology. From there you can devise a future state vision for how your SPM program should operate. By understanding both current state gaps and what your future state needs look like, you can effectively begin defining requirements while also clearly articulating success criteria. It’s important to recognize that your previous or initial SPM implementation may not have gathered all necessary processes/requirements, so it’s vital to take a fresh, holistic view in this first step.
2. DATA INTEGRATION
One of the most complex and time-consuming requirements is determining how to best leverage current source data feeds to support the new platform. Within the context of your current state assessment and future state planning, the team should review what their reporting, analytics, and any future state compensation elements needs are to ensure a meaningful inventory of data requirements are defined. SPM solutions vary in terms of how data is gathered, translated, and uploaded into the system. Some solution applications may have a standardized format requiring additional configuration, whereas others may have the ability of data field mapping, which provides additional flexibility. The ability to own the data translation from your source systems to the SPM platform is key. Another focus point is to ensure that you evaluate all manual feeds to incorporate automation, as well as any additional error validation processes.
3. HISTORICAL DATA
Migrating historical data is an often-overlooked requirement when moving from one SPM platform to another. To keep costs down and minimize complexity, clients may want to ID only the data that is needed to ensure ongoing management of comp (e.g. payment history) and then transfer detail-level data into data storage to be referenced at a future date. It is important to consider what historical data is needed for the new system for reference on future payments
4. PROCESS IMPROVEMENT
Each SPM solution may require users to interact with the system in different ways. This area may need additional attention, especially as it has the potential to improve processes currently employed to manage sales compensation. Understanding the impact a new system will have on current processes, as well as those who manage the processes, is critical to ensuring a successful launch and ongoing management of core processes. As an example, two of the leading solutions in the market have very different expectations regarding the skills users need to possess to effectively maintain compensation plans and reports and, in some cases, execute the day-to-day activities. Defining expectations of your staff related to the new technology, prior to the project, will ideally give your organization the necessary time to introduce training that ensures effective ongoing management of the program.
5. WORKFLOW
SPM solutions vary widely in their ability to support automated workflow. As a result, there are significant challenges for sales compensation teams related to an SPM migration. Capabilities can range from templates to existing documentation, levels of routing, and even implementation of a stopgap for a payee to accept plan documentation prior to payout. Within the context of your future state definition, capturing and defining areas where automated workflows can be leveraged is a necessary part of the core requirements. Before a new system is deployed, it is important to map these processes out to drive user adoption, leverage the SPM system as an auditable repository, and minimize email management.
6. REPORTING & ANALYTICS
It is critical to develop a holistic vision of information distribution to the various stakeholders and tools used to deliver this content (i.e. static pages vs. dashboards). Similar to workflows, different vendors have various capabilities related to reporting for the end users. Assessing these capabilities against your business requirements is imperative to the success of the roll-out. For example, some vendors require more robust configurations in the system (e.g. crediting logic) to enable specific analytics capabilities, while some solutions, architected specifically for reporting and analytics, have much more robust capabilities. Another area for consideration is the use of the vendor’s reporting solution against your in-house technology stack. Some solutions make it easy to port data into new environments, which could be a consideration in helping to keep the number of reporting tools requiring management to a minimum.
7. DEPLOYMENT
The implementation of a new solution should be designed to minimize the impact on payees and managers. One of the most critical aspects of your effort is assessing how all stakeholders will be impacted and how to mitigate any disruption. It is important to identify upcoming changes for your sales organization, administrators, and other internal partners with a plan in place to offer the steps needed to ensure the best chances for solution adoption.
The first step when considering a new SPM platform is an assessment of your current program and the development of a future state vision. OpenSymmetry offers a no-cost workshop to help you gain an understanding of how your current SPM program performs against your needs and industry best practices, as well as a readout on current solutions in the market.
Leveraging the OpenSymmetry assessment methodology and knowledge of the leading SPM providers, you will be equipped with:
• A current state analysis scorecard
• The framework for a business case to support change
• Contemporary intel on the SPM market and SPM vendor capabilities
• High-level deployment and license cost estimates