Best Practices
Best Practice - Paying Commissions Ad-Hoc
There are 3 recommended ways to pay ad-hoc commissions. Applicability The following assumptions apply: Estimated commissions are being calculated You want to manually release commission payouts Option #1 - Add a Release Date To Your Data Here are the ...
Our Work Process
Standard Workflow The following diagram explains how we work with you to automate your commissions. Questions & Demos You can book a demo directly on our web site. Our team of commission experts will demo Sales Cookie and answer as many questions as ...
Best Practice - Adjusting Commissions
Here are some recommendations when manually adjusting commissions. Adjusting commissions is a complex topic because they are different ways to adjust. We hope the following recommendations will help you. Analyze Adjustment Frequency Assuming your ...
Best Practice - How Can I Audit Calculation Results?
To audit calculation results, we recommend exporting data from calculations. Consider watching this short video for a brief overview. Export Credits Credits represent the attribution of transactions to users or teams. Credits are used for attainment ...
Best Practice - Handling Terminated Payees
When an employee leaves your organization, you may want to: Ensure they cannot access online commission statements Stop paying for a Sales Cookie license Finalize remaining owed commissions Below are different actions you can perform when an employee ...
Best Practice - Configure Formulas Only When Needed
In many cases, you don't need to define formulas because default behaviors implemented by Sales Cookie are sufficient. For example: To control filtering, you can create a saved query and apply it to your plan - without using a dynamic transaction ...
Best Practice - Allow Users To Monitor Attainment
Often, users want to understand how close they get to various attainment levels. Here are some ways you can ensure users can continuously monitor their progress from their personal incentive dashboards: Release credits often This allows users to ...
Best Practice - Legally Protect Your Sales Incentive Plans
By clearly documenting your sales incentive plan's terms and conditions (and ensuring that potential beneficiaries are aware of those rules), you can: Increase transparency Reduce confusion Reduce the chance of disputes Reduce overall legal risk and ...
Best Practice - Designing Plans Which Are Fair
When designing a sales incentive plan, your goals typically include: Limiting total spend to a reasonable amount Maximizing the effectiveness of your spend Ensuring that top performers feel recognized Ensuring that participants are challenged to ...
Best Practice - Configure Per-Transaction Limits
In some cases, you may encounter transactions with unreasonable values such as as a multi-million dollar revenue value, when it should be in the thousands for your business. When configuring your sales incentive plan, you can configure maximums for ...
Best Practice - Use Meaningful Transaction Dates
When importing transactions, you must map a field to category "Transaction Date". This field will be used to determine whether a transaction is valid for a given time period (ex: Q3, November, etc.). It's important that the chosen field and ...
Best Practice - Define A Baseline Plan Attainment Level
When defining a sales incentive plan's rewards, we recommend you always include a baseline attainment level: If using raw values, add an attainment level with a threshold value of 0 If using competitive ranking, add an attainment level with a ...
Best Practice - Configure Payout Limits
By configuring a maximum payout limit for your incentive plan, you can work with a budget. If the specified maximum is exceeded during calculations, we will re-allocate financial rewards based on each user's initial reward. For example, if your ...
Best Practice - Use Simulations To Forecast Sales Incentive Spend
Running a calculation in simulation mode allows you to forecast sales incentive spend, attainment levels, and reward assignment. By drawing past simulations at random, while "pretending" they happened in the future, you fulfill the claim that "the ...
Best Practice - Release Credits Often
When you release credits to users, you allows those users to view progress on their personal incentives dashboard. This can motivate participants as they are able to measure their progress towards sales goals. This also allows participants to review ...
Best Practice - Only Use The Complexity You Need During Design
When designing a sales incentive plan, you could use a complex approach such as: Use a score, based on calculating profit, and then applying a rule-based profit multiplier Measure a % increase for the score vs. the previous period Define 8 levels of ...
Best Practice - Apply Transactions Filtering To Plans
Normally, you want your sales incentive plans to only process sales transactions within a time period, but also matching a certain criteria (ex: exclude all line items of type "renewal", only consider transactions associated with new products, etc.). ...
Best Practice - What Does Good Transaction Data Look Like?
First of all, we want to make it clear that the system offers a high degree of flexibility, and any transaction input is very likely to work: Combining currency symbols and numeric value in transaction data (ex: "$123")? Not a problem - learn more ...
Best Practice - Do Not Provide Salaries Unless Needed
You could provide each user's salary. However, there are many situations where this is not needed. And remember, all full admins can view salary data. So even though your data is protected, there is still some level of risk associated with sharing ...
Best Practice - Only Add Users You Need
We recommend that you only add users you need. Our billing is per user. It is designed to match usage, our own costs performing incentive calculations, and complexity associated with managing records. Here are our recommendations to avoid unnecessary ...
Best Practice - Do Not Provide Catalog Entries Until Asked
You could proactively visit the product catalog, and provide for each product you have: The product / service name The estimated revenue / unit The estimated % margin The estimated % tax The product category Etc. However, this is a lot of work, which ...
Best Practice - Don't Create Workspaces You Don't Need
By having only one workspace, you simplify things: Users are never asked which workspace they want to log in to Administrators never have to think about which workspace contains which configuration Administrators never have to switch between ...
Best Practice - Add A Backup Full Admin
If you are the only full admin in your workspace, we recommend that you add another one. We do prevent the last full admin from downgrading its own security role. Indeed, this would result in having no full admin left within the workspace, preventing ...
Best Practice - Create All Plans As Hidden By Default
When adding a new plan, you can choose between two access options: Public - Full & Limited Admins Visible to all workspace full and limited admins Hidden - Specific Admins Only Restrict visibility and delegate plan management While working on ...
Best Practice - Don't Use Demo Workspaces For Production
Demo workspaces expire after 14 days. They are designed to let you explore the application, provide training to your employees, or run experiments. However, they include demo users and data, are so are poorly suited for production needs. To start ...
Our Vision
A brief overview of sales incentive programs Superior sales organizations cannot thrive without successful incentive programs. Well-designed sales incentive programs energize the sales force, enforce correct priorities, and provide a sense of ...