In the dynamic realm of pharmaceutical sales operations, precision is paramount. Every detail, from strategic planning to execution, can impact the company’s success. One crucial aspect often overlooked is the calculation of incentives for sales teams. While spreadsheets have long been the go-to tool for such tasks, they can often miss the mark in this high-stakes industry.
1) The Complexity of Pharmaceutical Incentives:
Pharmaceutical sales operations entail a unique set of challenges. Sales reps need to meet target customers (not necessarily end consumers) and adhere to stringent regulations and ethical standards while sharing details. Moreover, the products they promote might come with varying side effects, usage patterns and are often influenced by factors beyond their control, such as shifts in market demand & healthcare policies.
In order to accurately reflect this complexity, sales operations teams must intricately design incentive plans to account for product lifecycle and selling process. Standard spreadsheet formulas, while versatile, often fail to capture the nuances of these multifaceted calculation steps. Attempting to shoehorn these intricate calculations into a spreadsheet can lead to miscalculations, demotivation among the sales team, and even compliance issues.
2) Human Error Amplified:
Spreadsheets are susceptible to human error, which is particularly perilous when dealing with pharmaceutical incentives. A single incorrect formula or misplaced decimal point can result in a cascade of miscomputed incentives. The financial repercussions of such errors can be substantial, not to mention the potential for damaging the morale and trust of the sales force.
Moreover, maintaining spreadsheets requires manual data entry and updates, leaving room for discrepancies and inconsistencies. This can create confusion and distrust among the sales team, as they may perceive unfair treatment due to inaccuracies in their incentive calculations.
3) Dynamic Data and Real-time Changes:
The pharmaceutical industry is far from static. Market dynamics, product launches, and regulatory changes constantly reshape the landscape. Spreadsheets struggle to keep up with these rapid changes. When new information becomes available, updating numerous spreadsheets can be a time-consuming and error-prone endeavor.
Modern pharmaceutical sales operations demand real-time insights and flexibility. Using spreadsheets for incentive calculations can lead to delayed adjustments, putting the company at a disadvantage in responding to market shifts promptly.
4) The Need for Comprehensive Solutions:
Recognizing the limitations of traditional spreadsheet-based incentive calculations, forward-thinking pharmaceutical companies are turning to more sophisticated solutions. New-age incentive management solutions are designed to handle the industry’s intricacies, ensuring accuracy, compliance, and agility.
These software tools offer features like automated data integration, multi-layer index calculations, application of qualifiers, and real-time analytics. Such tools can tailor incentive calculations to various scenarios, considering product-specific variables, market dynamics, and regulatory requirements. This level of customization is virtually impossible to achieve with spreadsheets.
5) Boosting Motivation and Performance:
Incentives play a pivotal role in motivating sales teams to exceed their targets. However, spreadsheet errors and delays can erode trust and dampen motivation. In contrast, advanced incentive management solutions enable transparency, accuracy, and timeliness, boosting the sales force’s morale through visual reports with embedded what-if calculators and personalized nudges.
By eliminating calculation errors and offering clear visibility into incentive structures, companies can inspire their sales teams to perform at their best. When sales representatives have confidence in the fairness and accuracy of their incentives, their focus shifts from questioning calculations to driving sales and building strong client relationships.
6) Embracing the Future:
As the pharmaceutical industry continues to evolve, embracing technological advancements becomes imperative. Incentive calculations are a prime example of an area that can greatly benefit from modern solutions. While spreadsheets have served their purpose, they need to improve in an industry as intricate and fast-paced as pharmaceuticals.
By adopting incentive management software, pharmaceutical companies can streamline operations, reduce errors, and foster a more motivated and productive sales force. As technology continues to reshape the landscape, those who choose to evolve will be better positioned to thrive in the challenging yet promising world of pharmaceutical sales operations.
Conclusion:
In conclusion, spreadsheets have their place, but calculating incentives in the pharmaceutical industry demands more than what traditional tools can offer. The complex nature of the industry, coupled with the potential for human error, underscores the need for specialized incentive management solutions.
As pharmaceutical companies pivot toward these innovative technologies, they pave the way for more accurate incentive calculations, motivated sales teams, and ultimately, sustained success.
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Excel Spreadsheets were never designed to calculate incentives; they were designed to automate simple mathematical calculations. Here’s why
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spreadsheets for calculating incentives miss the mark.
Excel has ruled the spreadsheet market since the 1990s and remains a powerful tool for data analysis. Excel is superb because of it:
- Is adaptable
- Simplifies data collection
- Let you summarize & visualize the data
- Enables logic building through formulas
- It is used universally and hence easy to adopt
According to statistics, 88% of all spreadsheets contain one or more severe errors. Let me remind you about “How The London Whale Debacle Is Partly The Result Of An Error,” when JP Morgan suffered a $6 billion trading loss due to nothing more than an Excel error?
You all know when you try to put a square peg in a round hole. You can relate this with Excel spreadsheets and incentive calculations.
Let’s discuss in more detail why an Excel spreadsheet and incentives can never have a long-term relationship.
1) Time-consuming
In this digital era, all the data calculations in the Excel spreadsheet are done manually, which is tedious, & time-consuming. You copy-paste the data you need to calculate, which results in another manual process. It is possible with little effort for a few reps, but as the number increases, it becomes tedious to calculate these incentives and consumes our time.
2) Human error
The reason we can’t connect the Excel spreadsheet and incentive calculation is that Excel only handles mathematical calculations and not logic. The exact opposite is true for incentive calculations. It is more logical and less mathematical. This is where we need business analysts to calculate incentives. If we get an error, the analyst can easily enter the logical process and calculate the incentives, potentially of your sales reps.
3) Lack of data errors
Unless someone manually updates the data on Excel sheets every minute, otherwise the data becomes outdated. Because Excel sheets are not linked to live CRMs and ERPs, they cannot be updated in real-time. As a result, data transparency and visibility are non-existent.
4) Not built for scale
According to experts, Excel is a functional mathematics language. Despite the fact that Excel combines data analysis, visualization, and programming, it works best when the data is small and limited to hundreds of records. It can be entered manually or copy-pasted, but the logic is more mathematical than complex.
5) Lack of audit history
Excel never provides a history of every change made to the individual cells, and you cannot see who made the changes or if they had permission to do so. You also lack the ability to create a sequence of permissions. Despite Google Sheets’ efforts to address these issues, it is impossible to check the history of changes for individual cells. Even the minutest of errors may lead to a significant monetary impact without being able to identify the root cause or the real culprit. This may hold liable to be sued by the impacted individual or entity
6) Expensive
When you use Excel for incentive calculations, you invest significant resources, including technology, human resources, and time, all of which have a cost. Given that 88% of spreadsheets contain errors, every time you encounter an error, you incur the cost of all of these resources once more, making it uneconomical at all levels and shattering the balance. Well, you may also account for the intangible monetary loss that went unidentified and may range from 5% to 8% of your annual incentive spend
7) Not Shareable
Isn’t Excel simple to share? When you can, simply send it as an attachment to an email. Maybe it is. But not when you have a large team of thousands of employees all requesting access to the same file. This is where Excel fails. You can make an Excel incentive spreadsheet for your company, but what if you want to share it with 10000+ sales representatives? Assume those reps are divided into 15 different incentive plans. You can create an Excel spreadsheet, but you can’t divide and share it so that users only see the information they need to see. This is precisely what makes it more difficult.
8) Limited reporting
Excel is a business tool designed for mathematical calculations with a straightforward input, process, and output mechanism. It does not allow you to configure tax implications, let alone by slabs or geographies, and it separates financial reporting and legal compliance from incentive calculation and payouts.
9) Cannot automate payouts
Excel is a calculation tool that can assist you in calculating the final incentive. It cannot go any further than that. It separates incentive calculation from incentive payouts. To process payouts, you must manually release payments through the bank transfer, which leaves plenty of errors. Excel does not support connecting to APIs or payment gateways to process payments.
10) Not built for incentives
It’s all well and good as long as your incentives remain simple, but they won’t be for long. With the addition of different factors, it will become more complicated. So you cannot manage all the factors while calculating incentives on Excel spreadsheets.
Final Thoughts
Spreadsheets may be useful in the early days of your company, but they are not a long-term solution for calculating incentives. To handle complex incentive plans, you’ll need something more, such as sales incentive commission software.
