IBM, Armonk, New York, United States: Sales Role Automation

A video of up to five (5) minutes

https://ibm.box.com/s/xfd4pb1h0n0mxigw71gphmdk87o42sww

Total 197 words used.

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Within IBM there are approximately 19,000 sellers on Sales Incentive Plans with the details of those plans defined by a Sales Role.  Supporting these sellers are approximately 3,000 Sales Roles across the company which define what is included in the sales plan including the various elements (whether the plan carries Revenue or Signings for example), the weighting of those elements (summing to 100%) and the related Measurements – meaning how the achievement will flow to allow payment(s) on a monthly or quarterly basis.

The foundation for each Sales Roles is the Plan Design Template or PDT which denotes, for example, the elements and weightings that are aligned to the specific Sales Role.  The elements can be items such as Revenue or Signings and the weightings, of course, would total 100% thus putting more or less emphasis on a particular element.  The PDT can be used across various Sales Roles and business units within IBM but the basic tenants need to be defined by the Sales Leaders with the PDT being manually created by the Plan Design Advisors (PDA) that are part of the Global Sales Incentives (GSI) organization.

Total 245 words used.

An intelligent workflow was created to re-purpose a new set of PDTs which would allow the team to generate, in a single run, thousands of new Sales Roles.  In the end, the team leveraged two key technical enablers – their long-proven Sales Role Data Model, which had been refined over the years by CIO (and had achieved the Third Normal Form) and DataBlocks code engineering framework which was highly suitable for this type of automation. In short, Third Normal Form (3NF) data models greatly simplifies operations such as duplication the Sales Roles which was the foundation for the approach deployed.

The key to success was the ongoing collaboration between GSI and CIO that led, first to clear requirements and specifications and eventually to a nearly defect-free solution.

In the end the solution delivered fantastic results:

• The solution was delivered on May 16, 2023 which was about a week ahead of schedule
• 1300 new sales roles created in about 10 minutes, saving the PDA team 200 hours of work (each run).
• The solution was 99% accurate with issues only occurring in situations where the sales role had a unique design.
• The solution allowed managers to issue Incentive Plan Letters (IPL) to sellers coming on plan effective May 1^st without having to wait until June which would have a negative effect on the seller including, potentially, being in an overpayment situation as they would have continued to receive 100% of their salary until the IPL was issued.

Total 61 words used.

Overall feedback was extremely positive across the team – from the executive team to the CIO and PDA teams as well.  When you consider the results, and that the solution delivered exactly what was expected – that’s a huge success.  This project goes to show that through collaboration with the right focus and agreed to end-result, fantastic results can be delivered.