Key strategies to manage your territories well

Territory management is an important aspect of sales execution. In this article, we will tell you about its meaning, uses, advantages, and disadvantages. Let us start this article now.

Importance of data governance & management in data-driven organizations

Here, in this blog, you will get to know about Data governance and management and their importance in an enterprise organization.

5 types of sales quotas every sales operations personnel should know

Sales quotas help you to ensure that you are on track to meet your sales goal. If set sales quotas are unrealistic then it demoralizes the team and even discourages the top-performing reps. It is necessary to set realistic sales quotas that motivate your team and that’s where knowing different types of sales quotas become important.

How to set volume-based sales quotas? (Part III)

As a part of the last blog of the series we focus on Quota fairness using percentage volume growth. Each out of the 3 metrics indicate has different takeaways and is useful in setting up fair and achievable quotas for the salesforce.

How to set volume-based sales quotas? (Part II)

Evaluation of quota fairness for your salesforce is a must. Unfair and achievable quotas can lead to higher attrition and loss of revenue for the organization. A fair but challenging quota is the best way to steer your organization towards a steep growth path. This blog highlights how absolute volume growth can be used to test the fairness of a quota set for your field.

How to set volume-based sales quotas? (Part I)

Quota setting is one of the standard tasks associated with IC planning in the pharma industry. A fair but challenging quota is the best way to steer your organization towards a steep growth path with a motivated field force in the driver's seat. This series of blogs check the fairness of a quota set using different types/forms of Product volume(actual, absolute, and growth) as the criteria.

7 Benefits Of Effective Roster Management

Are you still using excel spreadsheets to manage your employee/sales roster? Have you ever wondered about the complexities you are handling manually and the time you are spending behind it? The roster has evolved from being an employee management mechanism to a critical cog driving commercial excellence/sales operations processes like scheduling, sales force sizing, call planning, alignment, and incentive compensation management decisions. Through this article you will get to know all about the Roster management system, it's benefits like eligibility, operations, agility, communication and much more and things to consider for effective roster management.

Build a real-time data lake with AWS Lambda, Redshift and Athena

The analysis of prescription, claims trends, estimate market sizes, develop go-to-market strategies and construct target lists need the pre-commercialization healthcare organizations to adopt data stores & data warehouses making the data environment chaotic. On the contrary, commercialized healthcare organizations have activity, sample requests, quick starts, patient assistance programmes etc into play resulting in a less chaotic situation but a high volume of data. This blog speaks about the AWS ecosystem that provides a wide variety of services & tools to build a data lake or data warehouse that can quickly integrate new data sources, store, cleanse and quality-check incoming data in a configurable manner can make the difference between smooth commercialization and chaos.

MBO (Management by Objectives) as a strategic tool

Management by objectives (MBO); strategic model with clear objectives agreed to by management and employees with an aim to improve the organization's performance. They are also known as management by results (MBR) and were first popularized by Peter Drucker in his 1954 book, “The Practice of Management”

A guide to increase ROI of your Incentive Compensation Solution

Over 80% of manual incentive calculations have errors that translate into a dollar impact for the organization. A lot of it can be attributed to use of excel workbooks or legacy solutions that are inflexibile & too tedious to manage. This blog focuses on key metrics you should track while implementing an incentive compensation solution. Diligent efforts to track these metrics and associated benefits can significantly increase the RoI of your implementation and reduce ongoing operational costs.

Kenneth Pieh on approaching challenges in medical devices during this pandemic

The coronavirus pandemic has impacted the entire life sciences industry and all of them are striving hard to cope up with these difficult circumstances in their own way. IC landscape is no different and has not been spared by any of these challenges either. Covid has instigated social distancing and virtual meetings to be the new normal limiting the in-person access. This resulted into changing dynamics within the sales operations team across different industries. While talking about all these aspects, Kenneth Pieh shares his perspective on the changing and evolving trends in the incentive compensation management space.

Is making changes to your IC solution stressful?

Almost 70% of change initiatives fail and less than 1/3rd achieve clear success. A lot of it can be attributed to inflexibility & rigidity of existing incentive compensation solutions to adapt to change and resistance from stakeholders because of painful past change management experiences. Change management failures also result in introduction of parallel tools and rise in manual processes. This blog speaks about the need for sales organizations to look at new age out-of-the-box, no-code solutions that can be an effective partner to the sales operations team, adapt rapidly to ever-changing needs and automate new processes that are introduced over time.

Has time come to change the way you manage your sales incentives?

Sales Operations / Commercial Excellence plays a critical role in any organization as they draw insights from the unstructured and unorganized information to improve the overall ROI and efficacy of sales & marketing spend. Inflexibility & rigidity of their existing incentive compensation system has been a major hurdle in this process. This leads to increased dependence on solution providers and impedes the overall outlook towards changing existing IC ecosystem. This blog speaks about similar challenges and the desired state one should try to achieve.

Press Release 2020/09/24 - Roster Manager - Aurochs Solutions’ newest business ready cloud platform

Aurochs Solutions recently introduced its newest platform Roster Manager for the life sciences industry. Aurochs claims its Roster Manager is a tool that manages sales personnel & territories and help their clients reduce potential loss of revenue & significantly reduces administrative overheads.

Press Release 2020/09/17 - Aurochs Solutions launches innovative business solutions for the life sciences industry

Aurochs Solutions recently launched a conglomeration of some innovative business solutions for the life sciences industry. With these new solutions, Aurochs boasts that the commercial organizations can efficiently manage their data, operations & advanced analytics methods to deliver meaningful insights.

10 Incentive plan adjustment ideas to deal with a pandemic

We have lived through these unprecedented times of a global pandemic and are now approaching the planning period for the next fiscal. After the rude shock that everyone experienced, it is imperative for businesses to appropriately react from a future standpoint. Sales reps are now getting more worried of their pay checks over catching an infection. What is your organization planning to do about it? Here is a list of options to choose from now that we are past the hiccups and have a grasp of the magnitude of the situation.

Different types of sales incentive payout curves explained

During a highly fluid and uncertain global business situation it's imperative for businesses to design their payout curves right. Basis of the nature of business and markets we operate in there are different types of curves that do justify every sales reps performance. This article walks you through different types of payout curves and helps you choose the best one for your business.

How to design your incentive payout curve?

A traditional incentive payout curve delivers different payout amounts for performance between minimum (threshold) level of performance and excellence (“superior” or “stretch”) level of performance. Usually, a curve is designed with additional elements such as threshold, target slope, excellent slopes and Cap to pay out 100% of an employee’s incentive opportunity on achieving the target. This article walks you through on ways of accounting these elements while designing your payout curve right.

Press Release 2020/09/08 - Aurochs Solutions launches operations & analytics support services for the life sciences industry

Aurochs Solutions recently launched an array of services in the operations & analytics domain targeted at the life sciences industry. It has expanded its offerings to several new services & is now positioned to be a holistic partner that supports quota modelling, segmentation, targeting and many other analytics & operational needs of the commercial operations group.

Structure of incentive payout curve

Designing a payout curve is one of the most important steps to ensure that the incentive plan is aligned to broader corporate goals and has enough potential to entice salespeople to sell more by incorporating understanding of the selling process and competitive environment. This article walks you through the fundamentals of payout curves and the elements associated with it.

Press Release 2020/08/31 - Aurochs Solutions introduces business ready cloud platforms for the life sciences industry

Press Release 2020/08/17 - Aurochs Software is now Aurochs Solutions

Aurochs Software launches a new business intelligence solution – RepEye

Leading provider of innovative sales compensation solutions, Aurochs Software, announces the launch of RepEye, an integrated mobile-friendly business intelligence platform

Aurochs Software Launches Highly Intuitive Self-Managed Sales Target Setting Tool for the Healthcare Industry

Aurochs has newly launched a tool that allows creation and analyzing quotas which is easier and more precise. An integrated business workflow helps organizations establish the most business-appropriate quota methodology, model different factor influence, and supervise quota setting cycle to make sure that everything is being done in accordance with corporate guidance.

Aurochs Software successfully completes SOC 2 Type II Audit

Aurochs Software, a leading name in sales incentive management solutions for the healthcare industry, recently announced that it has successfully completed the Service Organization Control (SOC) 2 Type II, demonstrating compliance to strict information security, availability, and confidentiality standards.

Press release 2019/06/26- Aurochs Software Launches New Management by Objectives (MBO) Software for Effective Management

The new Management by Objective system allows businesses, organizations, and institutions to manage their non-sales based key metrics and objectives more efficiently

Key metrics to consider while analyzing impact of mid-year plan parameter changes?

Are you struggling to manage complexity of your sales incentive plans?

Incentive Compensation is inherently a complex business process. The complexity is generally accentuated due to several reasons such as: 1.Geographically diverse business environments. 2.Dynamic market conditions

7 Signs Your Incentive Process Has Grown Beyond Spreadsheets

Do you still rely on Excel spreadsheets to manage sales incentive calculations for your pharma salesforce? Here are 7 signs you should start thinking about implementing an IC solution instead of spreadsheets for incentive management.

How to effectively design and manage MBOs / KSOs?

Management by Objectives is a management strategy which helps in alignment of broader corporate objectives by cascading down higher strategic goals to individual level goals depending on their function and expectations from their role. This approach was most prevalent for higher level roles and in industries with poor quality sales data or in cases where higher volatility in sales is observed. In the pharmaceutical industry until recently, this incentive plan type was primarily seen for managed markets roles and a few managerial roles. With the evolution of sales roles for specialty therapeutic areas, higher collaboration requirements with other teams and stringent compliance regulations, several companies are moving towards a combination of qualitative and quantitative sales performance measures to calculate incentives of their salesforce to account for changing business dynamics.

Press release 2017/06/13- Aurochs Software Launches out-of-the-box Incentive Eligibility Management Solution

How to identify unfair sales quotas?

Why sales organizations around the world use sales quota achievement as a primary performance metric? It is because sales quotas can help provide visibility to the salesforce on the target that needs to be hit and align the sales force to broader business objectives. In addition, quota achievement plans are easy to administer by HQ and easy to understand by the salesforce which results in increased motivation and engagement of the salesforce.

Press release 2016/07/28 - Aurochs software launches its Objectives Management solution

Aurochs software launches its Objectives Management solution- a self-service module that helps pharmaceutical companies to efficiently administer management based objectives.

Better sales call preparation ensues high performance

No plan no result! It's always good to plan your sales meetings beforehand to get most out of them. Pre-call preparation includes many aspects from the introduction to presentation to handling objections to closing. A simple pre-call homework ensures high closure rate besides maximizing the use of limited face to face sale time.

Various market potential markers to be used during sales quota setting?

The life sciences industry is evolving quite a bit with more and more companies focusing on the research and commercialization of specialty drugs. These new product launches at times are in relatively newer areas and always brings in too many uncertainties with them. Despite of thorough market research using epidemiology techniques and availability of sophisticated forecasting tools/methodologies, it is often difficult to predict how a newer product is going to do in any particular market.

Interactive what-if incentive calculators improves alignment and engagement of your salesforce

“What-if” calculators help clarify the relationship between sales performance, corresponding performance measures, other plan parameters and final plan earnings.

How to assess the effectiveness of your sales incentive program management?

A comprehensive assessment of IC plan administration based on four critical aspects - Outcomes, Processes, People and Systems. Our Incentive Plan administration health check tool helps you to identify the level of effectiveness of your IC plan administration based on the above aspects.

Press release 2014/12/01 - Jason Bryant, European Pharma Market Expert Joins Aurochs Software Advisory Board

Jason Bryant, an expert with 20 years of experience in pharmaceutical domain practice areas like sales force effectiveness, business intelligence, analytics, CRM and marketing planning has joined the Aurochs Software Advisory Board.

How to organize your IC Operations?

For any incentive compensation (IC) program to be successful, a skilled team is required with right mix of technology, process and business expertise. It is very important for this team to understand the importance of quality and build a strategy to incorporate appropriate quality framework into broader operational paradigm.

Is managing exceptions to incentive plans and localized disputes stressful?

If you’re a Sales Operations leader in the pharmaceutical industry trying to manage the monthly or quarterly Incentive Compensation calculation process for your sales force with nothing more than a homegrown spreadsheet-driven solution, this scene is probably all too familiar to you.

How to effectively estimate the cost of an inefficient / manual incentive management system?

Several factors needs consideration when justifying investment into an incentive compensation solution as they may have impact on the selling time, motivation etc. Aurochs has created a standard model for calculating cost of using an ineffective incentive compensation management system which you can tweak to your business situation. Use it to estimate the cost impact of using an inefficient IC system and build your business case for implementing an industry standard solution around it.

11 ways to address key compliance guidelines while managing sales incentives

SOX and it’s equivalents (EFPIA code) require companies to establish, document and adhere to internal financial controls and proactively report on any gaps. The primary objective of compliance is to increase financial transparency and accountability by assigning responsibility to executive leadership and board members.

Press release 2015/08/18 - Christopher Godwin, US Pharma Market Expert Joins Aurochs Software Advisory Board

Christopher Godwin, an expert with 12 years of experience in pharmaceutical domain practice areas like sales force effectiveness, sales force alignment optimization, incentive compensation, business intelligence and analytics has joined the Aurochs Software Advisory Board.

Incentive Process Centralization : Govern IC centrally leveraging operations best practices (Part 3)

In the third part of this series, we will discuss the other aspect of the centralization process. HQ prefers to create a global incentive compensation plan design and structure. This may be considered as taking a “framework” approach from which regions and countries may pick from a menu of plan components.

Incentive Process Centralization : Design the global IC guidance while allowing local variations (Part 2)

In this part of the IC Centralization series, we will focus on the strategy to create a global incentive compensation plan framework and drive the design process from HQ.

Incentive Process Centralization : Source the solution that supports global but aligns local (Part 1)

In recent times we have seen an increase in calls for greater geographic centralization in the Incentive Compensation function within global pharmaceutical companies. The aim generally is to strive towards HQ driven incentive compensation administration and defragment IC management across geographies within the organization.

When is it important to consider changes to your sales incentive plan?

Sales incentive compensation plans, like any other business strategy evolve in accordance with changing needs of the business. If this evolution does not happen at the correct time, it leads to a significant financial implication in terms of lost opportunities. Therefore it is very important to identify the correct time to review the IC plan.

Press release 2015/05/26- Aurochs launches its Quota setting solution - Aurochs Software

Aurochs Software launches its Quota Setting solution- a self-service module that helps pharmaceutical companies to efficiently set sales targets for their sales force.

Press release 2015/05/26- Aurochs launches its Quota setting solution

Aurochs Software launches its Quota Setting solution- a self-service module that helps pharmaceutical companies to efficiently set sales targets for their sales force.

Press release 2015/05/05 – Aurochs Software launches its incentive plan health check module

Aurochs Software launches its incentive plan health check module

Infographic - How healthy is your incentive operations?

Incentive Compensation plan operational strategy needs to be reviewed regularly. Many companies rely on excel spreadsheets or home-grown script based solutions to manage their salesforce incentive compensation programs. These solutions are generally preferred because of familiarity and perception of control without necessarily understanding the associated limitations.

Do's and don'ts to consider while setting sales quotas?

Every incentive cycle, sales leadership and the operations teams face a difficult job of setting fair but challenging quotas. As a company, you want your sales team to meet their quotas but also push the envelope to achieve growth. Quotas play a big role in motivating sales reps to achieve broader strategic business objectives.

Press release 2015/01/08 Aurochs Software launches Rep-Eye, field reporting solution for incentive compensation

Aurochs Software launched Rep-Eye, a field reporting solution for incentive compensation

Press release 2014/12/19 – Larry Novacich, Sales Compensation Expert Joins Aurochs Software Advisory Board

Larry Novacich was one of the pioneers in the sales compensation solutions industry when he joined Synygy as a start-up in 1993. As COO, he was instrumental in the rapid growth of Synygy from a startup to a market leader in the sales compensation space with a focus on services.

Do you constantly worry about managing incentive process exceptions? (Part 1)

Are IC exceptions slowing down and complicating your IC process? Is your current IC system only meet the basic needs while exceptions usually are managed with the help of manual processes and adjustments? This blogpost talks about some of the commonly seen exceptions in the pharmaceutical industry that your IC system should be able to handle out-of-the-box.

Do you constantly worry about managing incentive process exceptions? (Part 2)

Are IC exceptions slowing down and complicating your IC process? Is your current IC system only meet the basic needs while exceptions usually are managed with the help of manual processes and adjustments? This blogpost talks about some of the commonly seen exceptions in the pharmaceutical industry that your IC system should be able to handle out-of-the-box.

Drive behaviors using incentive payment qualifiers and modifiers

Qualifiers and Modifiers are a very useful plan components for incentive plan design and enables organizations to meet specific business needs. This blogpost elaborates on some of the different types of qualifiers and modifiers along with few examples.

How to effectively design incentive plan communication strategy?

Clear and precise communication is a key factor of success for incentive compensation programs. The plan has to be presented to different stakeholders in a structured manner. This blog goes over the plan communication process and the thought process behind that.

How to assess health of incentive plan operations?

IC plan operations is generally considered more tactical and is not given the importance it deserves. In this blogpost, we will discuss how to perform a health check for your incentive compensation operations.

Strategies to adjust incentive compensation plan and parameters for new hires

New hire IC plan handling is one of the more difficult parts of implementing an incentive compensation management system. Aurochs software makes handling new hire IC plans a breeze. Here's how.

How to improve the accuracy of your sales incentive payouts?

How does one think about quality and the processes that should be developed to ensure error-free deliverables. What thought processes must we use to ensure our processes can prevent errors upfront and if some errors still get through, what processes can we build to capture them?

Press release 2014-07-31 - Launching Aurochs - Intuitive, Pharma-ready Sales Compensation Software

Aurochs Software launched it's flagship sales compensation management product today. Aurochs is a new sales compensation software specifically targeted at small and medium sized pharmaceutical companies.