The series of tasks that go into manual commission management takes a lot out of you. The whole process is frustrating. It’s the reason we created Core Commissions — to simplify every step and ease the frustration.
In our 15 years of working with sales organizations, we hear a lot of complaints about commission management. We listen when our customers tell us their biggest annoyances when it comes to calculating incentives. Our tools are built to address these issues directly.
What are the most common commission management complaints? We’ve compiled a list. Let us know if you see your biggest grievance below.
Commission administrators face a number of challenges with every step of the commission management process.
1. Infrequency
Commission distribution happens pretty infrequently. Some organizations pay out commissions every couple of weeks but most schedule it monthly or even quarterly. That means commission administrators only return to commission management tasks sporadically. Every time they do the job, they have to relearn every single element involved.
When organizations implement Core Commissions, powerful automation solves this problem. That’s because each of those tedious little tasks gets done automatically. If Core’s application takes care of it for you, there’s no reason to relearn or remember how to do the task yourself.
2. Tracking Down All Data
The data required to calculate commissions lives in a number of places. More and more organizations use CRMs or other business applications to store sales info. However, it may still end up scattered. It’s up to the administrator to confirm they received all the data to accurately run commissions. If they don’t, it’s their job to go track all those numbers down and input them into their commission management tool.
Thanks to integrations, the Core application also automates data collection. Additionally, Core’s Managed Services package allows organizations to fully hand over this job to our experienced team. We’ll review and confirm we’ve got everything we need without bothering you for a single digit.
3. Calculation Errors
Spreadsheets regularly turn out inaccurate calculations. A copy-and-paste error or a misplaced decimal messes up an entire commission payment. When these errors occur, administrators go digging to find the mistake and fix it. It’s an errand that can eat up hours of time.
By automating commission management entirely, Core cuts out the element of human error. Those spreadsheets get tossed, removing the possibility of miscalculation.
4. Infrequent Calculations or Variables
From time to time, calculations will need to adjust temporarily—often for just a single cycle. This happens when special exceptions, like referrals, factors in. Variables, like overrides that only apply to a small percentage of records, also need special attention. It all results in more work for administrators.
Core’s powerful tools are also incredibly flexible. The application allows administrators to easily set up rules that will trigger special calculations in these scenarios. This takes a lot of the pressure off the administrator.
5. Commission Audits
If errors occur and go unnoticed, administrators become investigators, searching through document after document. They need to find that little mistake that led to a big blunder. It’s certainly not something any administrator looks forward to.
The Automated Auditing feature gives administrators the power to look at every step of a calculation in a single view. It eases the pain of auditing commission as a whole when it’s all right in front of you.
6. Report Creation
After dedicating what may become days to just calculating commissions, administrators then build reports. Every single individual earning commission requires a report. This means that the administrator goes back, once again, through their documents. Loads of spreadsheets are summarized into each statement. They occasionally require formatting and design work as well.
However, with Core, administrators generate reports automatically. Every time data is entered and calculated it immediately populates analytics, dashboards, and reports. Core offers pre-designed and formatted reports but customers may easily create their own as well. It almost entirely eliminates the report creation part of the job.
7. Getting Info in Front of Sales Reps or Agents
Once reports are created, administrators need to get them in front of the payees—individuals receiving commission. This challenge comes with a deadline too. Every one of those sales reps or agents must receive their reports by a specified date at the end of the cycle. Whether they’re emailing, mailing, dropping them in company inboxes, or whatever the case, it can be difficult to manage.
This challenge is the reason Core offers bulk emailing to customers. Once created, each individual report gets emailed directly to the right payee. For those customers who want to forego email altogether, Core’s Sales Web Portal gives payees direct access to their stats, commission data, and progress at any time.
8. Dispute Management
If an employee spots an inconsistency in their commission report, they generally file a dispute. This triggers a dispute management process that demands more work from administrators. They now must investigate the dispute, alert management, get answers, and communicate with the complainant. It gets difficult to coordinate at times.
For this very scenario, we created our Dispute Management feature. Once again, we offer a way to automate the task. Agents and sales reps get a destination where they can take their disputes. The program then allows administrators to easily manage the dispute and communication around it. Automatic updates are also sent to payees to alert them to the progress of the dispute. It eases the trouble of dealing with these issues.
9. Employment Changes
Employees start, change roles, and leave all the time. Incorporating those changes into commission calculations requires a level of attention that an administrator often can’t dedicate to commissions. However, if employment changes get overlooked, it results in enormous commission errors across the entire team.
Changes in the sales team or among commissionable employees are an easy thing to build into Core’s application. Setting up employee details and developing integrations with other business systems will easily solve this issue.
10. Scalability
As a sales organization grows, its commission plan expands with it. Pretty soon, managing commissions through spreadsheets becomes an unsustainable solution. Administrators’ workload increases as sales teams grow and commission plans multiply. Eventually, the organization needs to evolve its process and adopt a scalable solution.
When organizations implement Core, they immediately find a solution that will grow and evolve with them. The application handles all kinds of complexities, from new commission plans to increased sales teams and hierarchies. It’s ready for anything you can throw at it!
Did we address your biggest commission management mistake? If not, we can help you figure out how to solve it. Contact us for more information. Set up a free demo and we’ll walk you through all of these features. Let us help you solve your commission management pain points!