Multi-Channel Global Market
Challenge of Tracking Sales Commission
In this article, we examine the challenge of tracking commission from the perspective of manufacturers and manufacturer representatives. First, we elaborate on this challenge in detail. Next, we introduce our solution.
1 - The Challenge
It is essential to track shipments of a project to earn full commission credit for that design-win. Therefore, every month salespeople decipher multiple shipment lists to track their projects. Salespeople from both manufacturers and manufacturer representative firms perform this exercise. This demanding activity impacts the earned commission and has evolved to be complicated and exhausting. Such that even after spending hours on spreadsheets, the results are far from satisfactory. Conflicts between projects and missing shipments are unavoidable.
2 - The Complexities
In most high tech industries, salespeople spend their time designing products into end customers' projects. This occurs in the early stages of design. It often requires revising the offer and submitting additional samples to stay in the design through design revisions. If all these efforts succeed and the prototype qualifies to enter the market, then the customer will plan mass production. Production's purchase orders lead to shipments. These shipments, if traced properly, will result in earning a commission on the design.
Tracking shipments is an intricate effort because global supply chains have evolved into complex models. On the one hand, the end customer rarely issues any purchase orders for products. Instead, they outsource procurement and production to EMS firms. These firms have widely different practices when it comes to buying products.
Small and medium-sized EMS firms rarely buy directly from the manufacturer or larger authorized distributors. Instead, they buy from various local distributors. Larger EMS firms use uniform global sourcing practices, which allow them to consolidate purchases of products used in different regions for different designs. Some EMS firms purchase products from multiple channels to better negotiate cost and availability.
On the other hand, manufacturers offer their products through multiple channels. They ship products from several warehouses around the globe and through numerous authorized distributors. Who also have shipment hubs spread across continents.
These complications make tracking shipments and claiming credit for design-wins extremely difficult, and in some cases, impossible. Which negatively affects salespeople's commissions.
3 - The Solution
We have decided to tackle this and many other problems in a multi-channel sales environment. We aimed to ensure that salespeople, manufacturer representative firms, and manufacturers' branch offices will receive full credit for their design activities, regardless of fulfillment channel(s).
SalesDataFlow is our solution. We have implemented Data Science and Machine Learning algorithms in SalesDataFlow to precisely track projects in multi-channel global shipments.
SalesDataFlow streamlines the entire sales process with its smart and responsive Design-In Pipeline Management, Sales Team Management, and Customer Management.
