Zillow Group’s former compensation system—old, manual processes—couldn’t cut it. The pain was felt by sales managers, frontline workers, and across various departments. Performance was difficult to track and share, historical data and analysis was challenging to compile, and employee changes had to be manually entered in several places. As new products and verticals were rolled out, the inefficient processes simply couldn’t scale.
“We knew it was time to automate the process to make things run more smoothly,” said Karen Han, Director, Sales Finance.
Zillow Group committed to Anaplan for incentive compensation, and along with his team, Brandon Couch, Senior Analyst of Sales Finance, set to work. They created multiple models to manage compensation, engineered integration processes with company HRIS systems, and automated the display of pacing reports and goal-setting modules for sales employees. Han and Couch also developed detailed trainings and materials for different roles to reference.
A key cloud-to-cloud integration, managed with Boomi, is between Zillow’s Salesforce instance and its Anaplan Data Hub. Transaction data, entered and maintained in Salesforce, formerly was updated in Zillow’s plans weekly. Now it is updated every 20 minutes for some groups. Sales employees and sales managers can view their earnings and performance data in real time. Self-service dashboards instantly deliver information to stakeholders throughout the company. Pacing reports and goal-setting capabilities help sales employees plan ahead. The end results are happier and more productive employees and better insight for sales managers, while Han and Couch now spend less time on administrative tasks and more time on value-added activities.
“All interested parties are looking at the same data now,” Han explains. “Nobody on our team is spending their valuable time hunting down the correct numbers.”
To Han and Couch, any potential solution had to meet four requirements: collaboration, transparency, automation, and flexibility. Collaboration meant that stakeholders across Sales Leadership, Finance, HR, Analytics, and Sales Operations had a central source of actionable data that could be used to make quicker, better decisions. Transparency meant full access to current and historical data, with proper access controls. To satisfy the automation requirement, the new system had to accurately calculate all the various plan types, attach them to the right roles, and flow to all the right places. Flexibility meant the ability to support the pace of change and scale as the company grew. Only Anaplan met all four criteria.
