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Sales Performance Best Practices. October 1, 2014. Background. Batesville is a $600M subsidiary of Hillenbrand, Inc (NYSE: HI) 100 years of leadership in the death care industry in North America with a mission – ‘ Helping families honor the lives of those they love.’
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Sales Performance Best Practices October 1, 2014
Background • Batesville is a $600M subsidiary of Hillenbrand, Inc (NYSE: HI) • 100 years of leadership in the death care industry in North America with a mission – ‘Helping families honor the lives of those they love.’ • Manufacture and sale of funeral services products including burial caskets, cremation caskets, containers and urns, and other personalization and memorialization products
Sales Cloud Usage and Focus • ~ 150 sales reps from all levels of our sales force • Key AccountReps • Inside Sales Reps • Territory Reps • Business Segment Specialists • ~ 25 managerial and analytical users One goal – Maintain our Pole Position in Market Business challenges include maintaining our leadership position in the face of a declining market, strong competition and new entrants. Provide real time insight and efficiencies that will allow our sales organization to focus on selling time with our customers and drive overall growth to maintain our leadership position within the industry.
Why did we undertake this SPM project? As part of our lean management principals, we needed to find a way to reduce the time to set quota while improving our rep’s understanding of their incentive compensation program and eliminating some of the most common objections … • “How did you come up with this quota???” • “Why did it take so long??” • “Didn’t you remember to move those accounts, before setting the quota??” • “I don’t know what they did, it’s not what I suggested for your numbers!” • “I don’t know what I am earning until the end of the month!” • “I can’t figure out how much I need to sell to reach my goal.”
Current State Incentive Compensation Quota 1 – 2 Month Process
Current State Pain Points • 1 to 2 month process involving multiple departments with numerous wait times • Multiple versions passing between users – changes missed • Changes are difficult and very time consuming – size of Excel file(s) is challenging • More time spent crunching numbers than reviewing numbers • Reps don’t know how they are performing until the end of the month • Reps don’t know targets until mid Q1 • Reps struggle to understand how much they will be paid • No analytics around the performance
SPM Accomplishment • Reduced the quota process from 1 – 2 months down to ~ 3 days worth of work • Created visibility for Regional Directors to see factors that went into the quota calculations • Improved accuracy • Changed process from data crunching to data analysis • Increased awareness where reps can see their earnings on a daily basis • Provided BI tools to drive insight for Reps and Regionals
How did we accomplish this? • Establish buy-in from Sales Management • This is not a Finance or IT project, but a Sales initiative • Put the right people and skill sets on the project • Having the individuals who are most familiar with the legacy process actively engaged leads to success • True partnership with Oracle R&D and Support • Let Oracle know where you are struggling so they can provide support with formulas and system functionality … and will be aware of future needs/enhancements to the products • Don’t make this a side project
What did we learn? • Incentive Compensation support teams truly understand their product • Quota R&D team listens well to suggestions for enhancements and will work hard with you to hit the implementation timeline • You can easily get crazy with your incentive compensation program and quota setting process given inherent flexibility of the tools • There are built in capabilities that we haven’t even explored
Next Steps for Batesville • Tap into the BI capabilities of the SPM platform around Quota and Incentive Comp • Continue partnership with Oracle around future enhancements • Utilize more of the forecasting capabilities • Expand quota setting from solely revenue-based to include activity-based items
Contact information: Chris Charlton Business Integration Manager Batesville Email: chris.charlton@batesville.com Telephone: 812-934-1055