Conterra's Tele-tale: Optimizing Incentive Compensation Management With Xactly
In the fast-paced world of telecommunications, operating with agility and precision is required to sustain business growth. This often leads to businesses facing slowed sales efficiency and misaligned strategies, as the complexity of their incentive plans can result in errors stemming from inefficient processes. Knowing this, compensation teams are recognizing the need to optimize their incentive compensation management (ICM) processes to swiftly adapt to drive sales to peak performance.
Conterra is a regional provider of bandwidth infrastructure services, specializing in the design, deployment, and operation of customized broadband networks, largely in underserved areas. The company has a diversified sales structure targeting different customer segments — commercial businesses, wholesale partners, and the education sector — which requires different sales strategies and incentive plans for each division.
Conterra identified the need for a solution that not only automated calculations, but also seamlessly integrated with third-party sources . Needing intuitive design features,optimal calculation speed and easily unifying data for reporting, the team quickly identified a path to optimized ICM processes with Xactly Incent and Xactly CEA, achieving significant improvements in performance, productivity, and overall sales force motivation.
Tele-challenges
Before implementing an ICM solution, Conterra was encountering a series of tough challenges, each posing barriers to its sales efficiency and strategic alignment. The complexity of Conterra's incentive plans gave rise to intricate calculations, leading to inefficiencies and errors within their existing processes in Excel. Additionally, the need for better system integrations indicated a requirement for a more cohesive and streamlined approach to managing incentives.
Critical factors in choosing Xactly Incent and Xactly CEA included its ability to handle Conterra's complex sales plans, automated improvements in accuracy and speed, the centralized dashboard and reporting capabilities, and the reduction in administrative overhead compared to the previous Excel-based system.
Chris Vogan, FP&A Sales Analyst at Conterra, came on board after his team initiated their transformation with Xactly has played a key role in continuing to align their Incentive Compensation Management (ICM) with the dynamic demands of the industry.
A Tele-change
By implementing Xactly, Conterra has realized a multitude of benefits — all while maintaining compliance and auditability of its commission plans and payouts.
Xactly's plan design functions in Xactly Incent effectively manage Conterra's intricate sales commission structures that were difficult to maintain in Excel.
The plan design functions in Xactly are great, given the complex sales commissions that we pay. It provides us with the robust functionality that we wanted without worrying about the accuracy or manual alterations like we had to do in Excel.
What’s more, the enhanced accuracy and speed of sales-related calculations and incentive distributions have led to faster processing of sales commissions, enabling sales representatives to promptly access their commission details for quick identification and resolution of any discrepancies.
Chris commented that, "Nowadays, our sales reps can see a general outline of what they're going to get paid at the end of the month a lot quicker. This allows them to address any issues or changes faster."
Lastly, Xactly CEA’s centralized reporting and analytics feature has provided a more comprehensive and holistic view compared to the disparate Excel reports previously used.
Most of our analytics and reporting is very customized because I'm the one putting it all together. Xactly's flexibility allows us to tailor it to our specific needs.
Connecting the Future: Telecom's Path Ahead
With the time savings and efficiency improvements with Xactly, Conterra has reduced the resources needed to administer their compensation plans by 50%. This has allowed the Conterra team to focus on more strategic activities — particularly during the busiest time of the month.
Looking ahead, Conterra has outlined strategic plans to deepen its collaboration with Xactly by integrating the platform with its existing CRM system, Salesforce, and ERP systems. By streamlining these integrations, Conterra aims to establish a more seamless and efficient flow of data and information across all their business systems, enabling better decision-making and operational excellence.