‍Sanofi is a global healthcare company involved in discovering, developing, and delivering medicines and vaccines to millions of people around the world. 

Their toolbox of drug discovery platforms is impressive and has allowed them to break scientific ground in six therapeutic areas: Immunology and Inflammation, Oncology, Rare Diseases, Rare Blood Disorders, Neurology, and Vaccines. 

Sanofi prides itself on creating a work environment where people can bring their best and whole selves. With over 2500+ employees, this is not easy. 

More so, when complicated hierarchies and multiple KPIs make Incentive calculation an administrative nightmare.

This case study explores how Sanofi successfully implemented Kennect’s IC solution to enhance transparency, accuracy, and efficiency in their compensation management.

Challenges:‍

Query Management was not efficient and there was no Real-time Visibility for the end-user.

For a pharma giant like Sanofi, efficient query management is essential to ensure timely and accurate payments to employees on incentive-based compensation plans. However, the sheer volume of queries at Sanofi meant that the company faced a significant challenge. 

Responding to queries and disputes related to incentive compensation was a time-consuming and resource-intensive process, causing delays in issue resolution and payouts. In some cases, payouts for the quarter were delayed by more than two months! 

Delays like these can foster mistrust among reps and slow down your revenue engine. It can also lead to what is widely known as Shadow Accounting. 

To put it simply, reps start keeping track of their commissions and earnings on their own by maintaining their personal records, independently from the company’s official records. This allows them to verify if their incentives are calculated properly and dispute their claim in the case of any discrepancies. 

Think of it like this- You have 50 sales reps. If a rep is spending even an hour every week maintaining shadow accounts, that amounts to 50 hours a week. This means you are essentially losing the equivalent of one sales rep’s time a year!

Needless to say, with 2500+ users, this was a major concern. 

Therefore, efficient query resolution and providing real-time visibility to the end-user was the top priority for Sanofi. 

It was challenging for Sanofi to calculate Incentives accurately across multiple hierarchies and schemes.

Like most of our pharma customers, Sanofi relied largely on spreadsheets to calculate incentives. While spreadsheets may seem convenient at first, the truth is that constant changes in your incentive compensation plan will most likely break this traditional system. 

With over 2500+ users across 400+ schemes and 20+ divisions, it was becoming impossible for Sanofi to keep accurate track of incentives. They are not alone. A study done by Deloitte is an eye-opener: 

According to the 2020 Global Human Capital Trends survey, 56 % of organizations felt the need to redesign their compensation strategy in the last three years. 64% are in the process of redesigning the strategy as we speak.

The truth is that spreadsheet-based systems usually hit a wall when growth demands scalability.

Sanofi needed a solution that was capable of calculating incentives accurately across multiple divisions, hierarchies, and schemes. 

Lookout Process and Decision-making Factors:

Given that compensation is the largest component of any organization’s total labor costs– around 70% –, one can draw the logical conclusion that businesses spend a lot of time and resources perfecting it. 

For most companies, using spreadsheets for sales comp management seems like the obvious answer. Well, at least before the pitfalls are revealed!

We understand that dismantling the status quo and switching to automation is a daunting task. Sanofi, too, had doubts. 

Their pressing concern was: 

Will our system be able to handle complex calculations factoring in various KPIs, logics, and hierarchies? 

Well, we’ll let Abhijit More (Data management Lead at Sanofi) answer that for you:

“We have multiple incentive components dependent on revenue and activity goals that keep changing every quarter for different roles across 20+ business units. 

With this complicated incentive structure, we were skeptical about automating it, even when Kennect approached us with their platform. 

I am now glad that we chose to do a pilot with Kennect and then went live for all 20 teams. After a year of using just the automation part, we now also seamlessly provide real-time incentive visibility to every sales rep"

We are glad to report that Sanofi has seen many notable changes in their IC Management after choosing Kennect’s IC Solution:

The number of queries went down significantly, resulting in a staggering 80% reduction in time required by sales ops for query resolution.

Since Sanofi was able to break the silos of legacy systems with us, their data accuracy and real-time visibility increased significantly. Today, more than 95% of end-users check their incentives at least twice a week, and almost daily towards the month-end.

Since reps know clearly how much they are going to be paid, queries have gone down significantly. 

Quick Implementation in less than 2 months from project kickoff to Go-live.

Once we got the go-ahead from Sanofi, our team was able to quickly integrate Kennect’s system with Sanofi. Today, 40+ schemes are configured and implemented across 20+ business units using our system.

Data Accuracy was achieved, while incentive processing time was cut down by 90%.

Automation has significantly reduced discrepancies, thus making Sanofi’s data more usable. Moreover, Sanofi’s sales ops team saved 210+ days annually by opting for automation.

We can confidently say that since its implementation, the solution has come a long way and has become the only source for “anything related to incentive” for Sanofi. Even though they were initially hesitant, Sanofi is now confident that our system can keep up with any changes that they require. 

Future:

Our future with Sanofi looks promising, to say the least. Going forward, Sanofi wants to proactively communicate with the end-users, particularly communicating to them what they need to do to earn more through our Nudge Feature. 

We are more than ready for the challenge!