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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
