Global Co-working Spaces Provider Navigates Through COVID Chaos
A United States-based coworking space provider that’s revolutionizing the way people and companies work recently reached out to us with a series of operational challenges associated with their sales incentive process. They happen to be one of the largest providers of coworking spaces, including physical and virtual shared spaces. With operations in 756 locations in 38 countries and with a weighted average commitment term of 20 months they are by far leading this space by a long distance. As it happened with all, COVID impacted this big company that provides coworking spaces in a big way. The impact was even more severe in India, where they are currently operating in 6 different locations serving multiple Fortune 500 companies.
Real Estate
USA
Co-working space service provider
Situation
As the pandemic stretched, it forced organizations to change their incentive structures.
Salesforce went remote, and selling patterns & behaviors changed.
Legacy incentive structures were not in line with the new way of remote selling and a substantial increase in incentive-related complexities needed significant manual calculations.
This led to uncovering a series of new operational challenges, especially in the coworking spaces industry.
From Our Clients
Every other platform needed us to change the way we managed data. Incentivate provided us flexibility without any compromise along with being the most cost-effective platform that has eliminated our incentives woes.
Approach
The Incentivate team sat with the Sales Operations team of the client to understand the challenges that the coworking industry and them in specific, were facing.
In absence of an effective current setup, it was difficult to conceptualize the eventual outcome that was needed.
The Incentivate team decided to work backward by creating mock-ups of incentive reports across the sales hierarchy, Finance & HR to help the client visualize the information flow.
A full-fledged onsite workshop was arranged for the same which simplified the process a lot and also opened up newer requirements that were critical for the success of the sales function.
A cohesive effort was put in to create a detailed requirement document which was used as the source of truth for a full-fledged implementation
Conclusion
The implementation of Incentivate's solution significantly enhanced the coworking spaces provider's operational capabilities during the pandemic. The new system delivered near real-time updates, reduced incentive-related query calls by over 50%, and improved data controls with a 100% audited system. This led to a substantial reduction in manual processing and increased the sales operations team's bandwidth for value-added activities, ultimately helping the company navigate through the COVID-19 challenges effectively.
Problem
The market opened up for the coworking spaces industry; however, legacy ways of operating helped little and started impacting the sales behavior. New products evolved organically owing to the new dynamics introduced by the pandemic. It led to a significant impact on the sales operations team that almost had to kneel down to manual and tedious Incentive compensation calculations on excel spreadsheets. This organization in the coworking spaces industry’s current setup was not designed to adapt to a continually evolving sales strategy.
The addition of new offerings expanded data sets; both horizontally and vertically.
Incremental bookings led to an increase in the number of add-on transactions and a complicated way of calculating in-year-revenue (IYR)
Data integrity issues began causing errors and inconsistencies while calculating incentives.
Lack of incentive reporting led sales executives to be found wanting for direction to improve their effectiveness.
Lack of information to align the evolving strategy with incentive payout led to an increase in disputes.
Lack of transparency and accuracy demotivated the salesforce leading to an increase in attrition.
Solution
The coworking spaces provider tackled the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic by partnering with Incentivate to revamp its sales incentive processes. The solution included creating mock-ups of incentive reports for various departments, organizing onsite workshops, and developing a detailed requirement document. This approach facilitated the visualization of information flow and identified critical new requirements, leading to a comprehensive implementation that improved incentive management and operational efficiency.
Experience our platform
Automate your incentives program without expensive licensing and long-drawn implementations
Outcome
Near real-time updates for the field
Over 50% reduction in incentive related query calls because of a seamless dispute management system
Stronger data controls and 100% audited system
Massive reduction in offline processing leading to an increase of over 50% bandwidth of existing sales operations team for value-added activities