What Is Important When Configuring Commissions?
Accuracy Is Key
Several Sales Cookie customers issue commissions worth $1M or more per month. Therefore, it's important to double-check all entered rates, thresholds, and settings. Note that some formulas may not be exercised during test calculations. For example, when configuring a plan with YTD attainment tiers, some of those tiers may take some time to "get to". Therefore, it's worthwhile to compare formulas within each tier, and make sure they are all correct. Exporting plan descriptions is a good way to check that ALL configuration parameters are correct.
No Stupid Questions
Commissions can get complicated really fast. At Sales Cookie, there are no stupid questions. When in doubt, it's always better to ask. It's also OK to ask the same question multiple times. This is part of reinforcement learning. However, questions should be asked after some effort. Effort is part of reinforcement learning and memorization.
Leave No Stone Unturned
With commissions, ignoring potential problems, or making too many assumptions during plan design is guaranteed to blow up later. It's best to confirm. Also, we must think ahead when configuring logic. For example, consider the following edge scenarios:
- What happens if a transaction's date is moved to a new period? This may warrant a formula to calculate the delta between re-calculated commission amounts and previously paid commissions.
- What happens if the transaction's amount is negative? If we're doing a rate lookup based on this amount, we might need to use the absolute value.
- Is it possible for attainment to be negative? If the first attainment tier starts at zero, it's possible that negative payouts won't be activated.
- What happens if there are multiple estimated commissions for the same deal? This may warrant a formula which specifically looks up an estimated commission amount from a specific plan.
Think "Sequential Data Processing"
Sales Cookie automates a data processing pipeline. If you can focus on mentally thinking how each individual transaction will:
- Be filtered
- Be credited to users / teams
- Contribute to user / team attainment
- Be selected & processed by reward formulas
Then you'll quickly master the art of automating sales commissions.
Truth Is Safe
Everybody is going to make some big mistake at some point of time! Sure, it's painful (and recovery may be difficult), but transparency is the best way handle this for ourselves and our customers. For example, if you accidentally deleted hundreds of transactions, or your laptop was stolen, we would rather know than ignore the problem. We can then prepare an organized response to the problem.
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