INTRODUCTION
In simple words, you can say that; Roster is a list of current & previous employees along with the territory/geography assignments. Gone are the days when organizations used paper rosters or old-fashioned complex spreadsheets. Managing alignments for thousands of sales reps offline on Excel or complex spreadsheets has now made way for flexible & nimble Roster management systems.
As organizations grow, the number of sources used by HR function increase. There is a need to consolidate these disparate sources to ensure key rep details like location, training status, work status, hierarchy, role, promotions, transfers, and salesforce alignment for a particular period are in sync. A Roster Management system empowers you to manage this information with minimal effort. It also serves as the system of records that drives few key decisions on the sales, recruitment, and finance side of the business.
BENEFITS OF A ROSTER MANAGEMENT SYSTEM
Here are a few areas where effective roster management can help you
Eligibility – Incentive compensation plans can vary by role. Rules driving eligibility can be different for employees. Analysts depend on roster information, and lack of accurate role alignments lead to an employee being tagged as ineligible for sales incentives.
Operations – Well-planned roster ensures accurate data flow for sales alignments, incentive compensation planning & payroll processing. Out of sync alignments lead to improper sales force planning, which results in wrong performance calculations
Agility – Promotions, transfers, new hires, and exits need swift alignment changes to be done across all the downstream systems. The roster being the source of truth, needs to reflect this information sooner than anywhere else.
Communication – An accurate roster helps you track employee to employee, employee to territory relationships as well as identify and filter by work statuses. This helps drive situation / scenario-specific messaging to discrete sets of audiences.
Audit – An intelligent roster management system retains historical changes and captures audit trails for legal as well as compliance purposes
Alignment – Designing & aligning reps to territories are dependent on rep location and training status. Improper information can lead to unbalanced territory alignment. This can result in employee burnout and inability to realize territory potential
Leave Management – Few incentive plans may account for leaves as a part of their Incentive calculation or eligibility. Historically, rosters have just managed alignments while leave-related information has been maintained in a different system. If not accounted for, it can lead to erroneous payout calculation resulting in overpayment for the organization.
THINGS TO CONSIDER FOR EFFECTIVE ROSTER MANAGEMENT
Ownership – Too many cooks spoil the broth. It is imperative to identify the owner/roster manager to maintain all the information. Lack of accountability on this front can lead to any or all of the above-mentioned challenges
Data Governance – Roster feeds into multiple disparate systems that rely on the underlying information. Data governance helps everyone understand the ownership of all the upstream systems feeding into the roster as well as the process and time needed for them to receive the needed information from the roster. Visibility into the end to end process goes a long way in avoiding any sort of conflict scenarios.
Design – While Roster may be the source of truth for multiple other functions, it still depends on multiple upstream data sources. These sources usually hold the same information but not necessarily all of them are accurate. It is recommended to identify how the final roster should look and every field in the roster needs to be mapped with the one that holds accurate information from the upstream source. This helps avoid duplication and the flow of erroneous data to the roster.
CONCLUSION
There is no doubt that today, roster management is a must and can turn out to be a blessing for sales operations functions that rely heavily on accurate roster data to plan all the commercial processes. Agility and accuracy in designing the above processes boost employee morale, avoid any sort of distraction, and allow them to focus on one key thing we need from them; Sales.
