Dear Calcy: How To Increase Efficiency With Automation

Dear Calcy,

Many of our sales compensation processes are manual, tedious, and time-consuming – which means my organization’s small team is constantly swamped, and always playing catch-up rather than spending time on critical business initiatives. 

I want to manage the end-to-end commissions process more efficiently, but I’m not sure where to start. What would you recommend?

Best,

Strapped for Time

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Dear Strapped for Time,

I’m sorry to hear you’re feeling overwhelmed! If it’s any consolation, you’re not alone – manual processes plague compensation professionals across organizations of all sizes and industries.

The CaptivateIQ team recently surveyed 200 professionals at B2B companies and discovered that compensation leaders spend an average of 49 hours per month on manual tasks. On top of that, nearly ⅔ of respondents are still processing commission payouts, fielding and responding to rep inquiries, and making comp plan adjustments manually – which not only takes up a lot of time, but also leaves more room for human error.

While it's probably impossible to eliminate every manual task altogether, you can streamline many of your workflows with automation to free up more time to focus on more strategic business initiatives. 

After working directly with plenty of comp teams myself, there are my top tips on how to work more efficiently and get time back in your day:

Centralize Your Commissions Data

Most commission teams rely on data from various systems – including CRMs, ERPs, HRIS platforms, and data warehouses – to run commission calculations. But exporting and culling through multiple spreadsheets from disparate data sources is a time-consuming and tedious process.

To save time and reduce the chance of errors, I recommend starting your automation journey by consolidating all relevant commission data in one place.

Unifying your commission data sets the foundation for additional automation capabilities. More specifically, aggregated data enables you to:

• Easily create and edit complex formulas
• Test different commission scenarios in real time 
• Provide deeper pay visibility 

The TL:DR? Data management becomes much easier when you’re working from a single source of truth.

Streamline the Inquiry Approval Process 

Another excellent opportunity for automation exists within the inquiry approval process, especially since, according to CaptivateIQ’s report, 82% of compensation professionals receive over 20 inquiries per month from reps, 21% receive over 50, and only 1% rarely or never receive inquiries.

After calculating commissions, teams can spend days – if not weeks – manually managing reviews, approvals, and dispute resolution. These inefficient and time-consuming ICM processes impact Time-to-Payroll – the time between commission calculation and commission payout.

In addition to being highly manual, the traditional inquiry process is also often a black box, providing little, or even no, visibility to reps. When relying on manual calculations, it’s challenging for compensation professionals to share their reasoning and work with reps to find solutions.

Incorporating automation into your approval and inquiry process results in more accurate and faster payouts and increased rep visibility. That’s a win-win in my book.

There are a few options for how to build automation into your inquiry workflows, including defining inquiry types, streaming inquiry and approval assignments, and creating more visibility for approvals cross-functionally.

Adding automation into the mix ensures you don’t have to chase key stakeholders and helps you reps get paid sooner. If a deal is incorrectly calculated, a fix can be automatically implemented without any additional work on your end. The inquiry will automatically route to the correct stakeholder, flow through the approval process, and enter the correction process. Then, the commission can be reprocessed. 

With a more automated workflow, reps have a well-defined path to help them verify the accuracy of commission calculations and payouts. And increased transparency makes reps more motivated – according to another CaptivateIQ survey of 1,000 commissionable employees about what improves their motivation at work, 59% answered having confidence that commissions are calculated accurately, 53% said timely commission payouts, and almost half said quick responses to questions about payouts.

Seamlessly Scale Your Commissions Program With More Automation

As your company grows, processes naturally become more complex, error-prone, and time-consuming. 

One way to decrease growing pains is via reusable attributes and components, which allow you to make updates in one place, then push changes to all locations and calculations to save time and improve accuracy.

Automation can also help you tackle more sophisticated commission processes,for example handling commissions in other currencies when your business goes global. 

Managing currency is definitely a complicated order, as exchange rate changes daily and payment methods can vary. By implementing automation into your workflows, however, you can set rates and preview statements in different currencies, resulting in huge time savings, and fewer headaches. 

Hopefully, by starting with these specific use cases, you’ll feel more equipped to get started on your automation journey and enjoy more strategic-thinking time in your day. 

Good luck, Strapped for Time!