700+ reps
Across medical reps, managers, and leadership, incentives are calculated for more than 700 employees.
SUCCESS STORY
SUCCESS STORY
Serum Institute of India is the largest manufacturer of vaccines and immuno-biologicals in the world, selling more than 1.5 billion doses/year. Along with this, they manufacture and sell several life-saving biologicals - both domestically and globally.
Serum Institute of India was managing commissions manually on spreadsheets. It used to take one month after the end of the commission cycle (1 month after quarter-end) to consolidate commissions for their 700+ strong sales team.
With ElevateHQ, SII was able to automate all processes that reduced their time to payouts from 1 month to 3 days. Along with this elimination of payout delays, their medical reps also got complete real-time visibility into their commissions, resulting in improved sales.
Operations at such a scale demand a huge sales team, and that is exactly what SII has - over 700 members, including reps and managers.
They also sell over 80 products - a combination of key and generic medicines with individual sales targets.
ElevateHQ helps SII with commission automation for their sales in India and handles end-to-end implementation and maintenance of the systems.
Pharmaceutical sales are carried out by territory. SII has 100s of territories across the country with multiple medical reps assigned to each.
Sales are tracked territory-wise, and commissions are earned and paid to reps in the respective territories. Multiple products are sold within each territory and different quotas/targets are set for each product, according to the territory.
Now imagine this for 80+ products across 100s of territories.
Tracking sales against quotas for territories itself is close to impossible on spreadsheets; add assigning medical reps and managers to it - it’s a spreadsheet nightmare.
Such a large sales team comes with strong team hierarchies - it provides structure to the operations and accountability to the targets. The teams were also maintained and managed on spreadsheets.
Medical reps are constantly transferred across the territories every quarter, and this brought about the next big complication: the changes had to be manually made and, as you can imagine, were very time-consuming.
Apart from just transfers, there were multiple members who moved up the hierarchy - reps became managers, managers became senior managers, etc. As you can guess, this was also maintained on spreadsheets.
Constant transfers also complicated the commission process: attribution of sales was not straightforward, resulting in delayed payouts.
Not just that, other details like accurate deal info, the right values to the right deals and currency differences between Pound Sterling and USD were not factored in.
Having multiple products to sell in different territories meant having different commission plans for different scenarios.
For example, the simplest plan for reps had two different components:
1. Total number of units sold
annually
2. SPIFs running at different time intervals
Both these components were defined differently for each product and territory. The scale of the operations compounded in the number of such plans present.
The simplest plan for a manager had two different components:
1. On a product level, the total number of units sold annually
2. Percentage of sales generated every quarter
Commissions for product-level components are prorated and paid every quarter and this also had to be calculated manually on spreadsheets.
Heavily relying on spreadsheets gave rise to a different problem with the reps: minimal visibility into their commissions.
With calculations taking a month after quarter-end, reps and managers got visibility into their sales and commissions once every four months only.
This left them in the dark about their performance and often affected their morale.
An important aspect to note is that SII medical reps were not selling 10-12 large enterprise deals, but 1000s of small orders to stockists and pharmacies.
The sheer scale of this meant that commission calculations were error-prone. A small miss in the system (for tracking) could result in wrong payouts, resulting in conflicts.
To avoid this, the finance team at Serum had always been careful of errors, and this resulted in delayed payouts.
1. Delayed payouts due to manual calculations
2. Limited visibility into performance and commissions for reps
Long story short, ElevateHQ automated the end-to-end commission processes for SII.
ElevateHQ eliminated manual tracking of deals, and this meant the operations team at SII didn’t have to edit spreadsheets for the 1000s of deals their reps were completing.
Across medical reps, managers, and leadership, incentives are calculated for more than 700 employees.
With streamlined processes, incentive payouts are now finished in 3 days compared to 30 days earlier.
They’re also able to get detailed incentive payslips with deal-level incentive breakdowns and see which deals contributed to their incentives.
With ElevateHQ’s incentive simulator, reps are now able to visualize how much they would earn in the entire year resulting in overall increase in sales.
SII was spending an entire month in commission calculations after quarter end. With all automation set up, commission calculations are now done in real-time.
The SII team now spends less than 3 days after quarter-end to verify the accuracy of the commission calculations - reducing time spent by more than 90%.
This massive reduction has second-order effects on the reps. They now get paid on time, boosting morale and motivation.
The reps now have 100% visibility into their commissions.
Earlier, they used to have this data once a quarter, but they’re able to see their commissions being updated in real-time now.
They’re also able to get detailed commission payslips with deal-level commission breakdowns and see which deals contributed to their commissions.
This level of clarity in their commissions was close to impossible with spreadsheets before.
ElevateHQ got Serum Institute of India up and running inside 4 weeks.
A key lever to medical rep success is visualizing their earning potential. With ElevateHQ’s commission simulator, reps are now able to visualize how much they would earn in the entire year.
This gives them clarity, direction, and a clear path to making more money, while it gives the managers enough data to push their teams to perform better.
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