Carestream Health Drives Strategic Sales Behaviors on a Global Basis with Xactly Incent

Testimonials & Case Studies / Carestream

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“We had no global data before, but with Xactly we have our 500 sales people in one system, with reports from one tool. Now individual sales team members can easily view their targets and achievements while management can see the big picture of the field’s performance along with the details making up the compensation. This is a tremendous business advantage that was impossible to achieve through shuffling spreadsheets.”

- Katie Guest, Worldwide Sales Operations Project Manager, Carestream Health

 

Benefits at a Glance

• A global and more strategic sales compensation plan
• Visibility into compensation and performance across nearly 500 payees
• Valuable post-sales analytics and reporting
• State-of-the-art SaaS solution

Onex Corporation, Toronto, Canada, acquired the Health Group of Eastman Kodak Company in a multi-billion-dollar transaction in May 2007. Upon closing, the business began operating as Carestream Health, Inc., a standalone entity within the Onex family of companies. Today, Carestream Health, headquartered in Rochester, N.Y., has some 8,000 employees, including nearly 500 salespeople, serving tens of thousands of customers around the globe.

 

Challenge

When Carestream Health split out as a new company, a consultant was engaged to help restructure the sales organization – a restructuring that included launching a highly strategic global sales compensation plan in place of the business’ former regional plans. Based on revenues, margins and units, the sophisticated new plan drives sales performance by incenting sales representatives to sell across Carestream’s broad portfolio of medical imaging systems and healthcare IT solutions. For example, the plan contains commission rates for groups of products, and a rep has to sell to a threshold for each set of products in order to earn 100 percent commission. On top of the base structure, there is also a series of bonuses.

“It’s a complex plan that would be almost impossible to manage manually,” explains Katie Guest, worldwide sales operations project manager, Carestream Health. “This is not something you’d want to tackle with spreadsheets or homegrown systems. Hence, to go along with our global plan, we needed a global compensation and sales performance management tool.”

Critically, the solution sought by Carestream Health would not only need to automate the management of its strategic compensation environment, but also provide reps and management with visibility into the increasingly sophisticated compensation process – in effect, making it easy to “see through” the complexity. The solution would also have to integrate seamlessly with Carestream Health’s salesforce.com implementation.

 

Solution

Following a competitive investigation, Carestream Health implemented the Xactly Incent on-demand sales compensation solution in mid 2008. The company also licensed the complementary Xactly Analytics module for reporting and analysis based on post-sales data gathered as part of the compensation management process.

“From automation to visibility and analytics to linkages with salesforce.com - Xactly Incent covered all our bases, plus it is a SaaS solution, which happens to be a big plus,” claims Guest. “We’re investing in SaaS solutions with the knowledge that overtime they only get better and that we will continually benefit from their development efforts.”

 

Flexible on-demand infrastructure

Working with Xactly consultants, Carestream Health aligned Xactly Incent first with its back office systems and then with salesforce.com’s CRM solution to create an on-demand infrastructure supporting its 500-strong sales team of account managers, territory managers, channel managers and product specialists. As Carestream Health’s compensation plan is a “bottom-up plan,” every sales transaction is sent to Xactly Incent for processing – amounting to thousands of transactions per month, with line item and order item detail. Xactly Incent’s rules-based commissions engine accurately calculates the proper payouts based on the plan’s many provisos.   

Members of the sales team can log into Xactly Incent from salesforce.com’s CRM solution using Xactly’s single-login feature and see where they stand vis a vis their compensation plan. Using the patented Incentive Estimator feature within Xactly Incent, they can run “what-if” scenarios against live salesforce.com opportunity data to quickly determine which deals will be the most profitable for them and, by extension, the company. As they are compensated both by revenue and margins, the accurate margins data required for commissions calculations automatically flows into salesforce.com from Carestream Health’s Big Machines implementation making it available for use by the Xactly Incentive Estimator.

“Having seamless linkages across Big Machines, salesforce.com and Xactly has been a hugely positive thing,” says Guest. “The synergy between these on-demand applications is very positive and something we intend to build upon further.”

 

Single global system

With Xactly Incent in place, Carestream Health now leverages a single system to manage sales compensation and drive sales performance for all 8 of its sales regions around the world. As a result, the company is enjoying economies of scale and uniformity of efforts that were impossible when each region largely managed its own compensation plans and processes via spreadsheets/local tools. It also has meant that the company can now leverage a unified, global view of sales performance made possible by the accurate, global post-sales data consolidated within Xactly Incent.

“We had no global data before, but with Xactly we have all 500 sales people in one system, with reports from one tool,” explains Guest. “Now individual sales team members can view their targets and achievements while management can see the big picture of the field’s performance along with the details that make up the compensation. This is a tremendous business advantage that was impossible to achieve through shuffling spreadsheets.” 

 

Business Benefits

A global and more strategic compensation plan
With Xactly Incent, Carestream Health is supporting a single and highly sophisticated global compensation plan that aligns sales behaviors across its 8 regions with strategic corporate goals.

“We’re now driving strategic sales behaviors worldwide, with all our people in all our regions hearing the same tune,” says Guest. “We couldn’t have done this without a global tool. Also, we know we’ll be fine tuning our global compensation plan over time, and Xactly Incent will make that relatively easy to do.”

Real-time visibility into plans and performance
When dealing with a sophisticated compensation plan, visibility is crucial to understanding. With Xactly Incent, Carestream Health’s sales team members are able to see how they are being compensated and why, as well as being able to see which potential deals will yield the best commission payouts.

“Xactly Incent enables plan transparency, which helps our reps understand our new complex plan better,” claims Guest. “Plus, Xactly is very easy for them to use. They simply click on their incentive statement to see their results, and click again to drill down to deal details. It’s the epitome of self-service, and it reduces contentions as well as eliminating confusion.” 

Valuable post-sales analytics and reporting
Carestream Health is using the Xactly Analytics module to give the sales people their information (via their incentive statement) and to give visibility into sales performance based on valuable post-sales data collected in Xactly Incent as part of accurately calculating compensation. The module has been used to create management reports as well as incentive statements.

“Everyone likes the reports and people are now looking for ways to leverage new reports,” says Guest. “We’ve built some very effective ones, and have enjoyed brilliant support and service from Xactly professional services which helped us construct the original reporting configurations.”

State-of-the-art SaaS solution
Having standardized on Xactly Incent, Carestream Health is enjoying the far-reaching advantages of a 100 percent SaaS solution, from easy integration with its other SaaS solution (salesforce.com) to seamless and cost effective scalability to low entry costs and simple maintenance. Equally important is that the company is ensured of having the latest sales performance management software functionality without waiting on lengthy product upgrade cycles.

“Xactly Incent keeps getting better and will always keep improving, and we can contribute to that,” explains Guest. “We’ve fed back to Xactly ideas and changes we’d like to see implemented and we’ve been taken seriously. They clearly value the customer and we get very quick and professional help, and always to a good resolution.

Concludes Guest, “Xactly Incent is providing us with good value for money. Monetarily, the ratio of payment for the solution compared to the amount of sales compensation we pay is minor. Yet, for that, we gain a true driver of sales performance on a global scale.”