Closing the Big Sale

My client's software calculated sales commissions, including:

• Overrides
• Bonuses
• Residuals
• Upline and downline commissions

This software also:

• Tracks those commissions
• Lets the sales force check and instantly update their commission information online at any time from anywhere in the world
• Provides password protection to prevent sales staff from checking each other’s commission data.
• Lets sales managers check the sales of their own downline, and their overrides on these sales.

A relational database management system was provided, to:

• Keep all data up to date in real time.
• Store supporting documentation about each sale.
• Pay commissions only on properly-documented sales.

Many potential customers kept all their commission data in an Excel spreadsheet. They feared loss of data, or a massive data conversion, if they migrated to our more robust and sophisiticated software.

One of the software developers, with management support, developed a tool that reads Excel spreadsheets, converts that data to the sales commission software’s format, and feeds it into the relational database.

I worked closely with this software developer, to document how to use this tool. This manual was also used as a marketing tool, to persuade customers to buy the software and use the tool to migrate away from the severe limitations of their Excel spreadsheets.

The developer and I showed the finished document to a major credit card company, and it allayed their fears about data loss or the need for a massive data conversion effort.

This credit card company then purchased the software for use by 500 of their sales agents worldwide—it was my client's biggest sales that year.