Case Study

Shadowing Large Enterprise Account Executives revealed that reps were spending roughly 70% of their in-office time on administrative tasks rather than with customers. Commissions was the most significant pain point: reps had no visibility into payment terms, payout dates, or holdbacks. They called Finance for answers. Finance was overwhelmed. A transparency problem was masquerading as a performance problem.

See also: Contract Management for Sales — another sales enablement initiative from the same research study.

See also: The ethnographic approach used in this engagement was presented at the Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference (EPIC) and informed a peer-reviewed publication on applying observational methods in commercial software contexts.

Company & Position

SAP Americas, Director, Sales Operations (2005-2006)

Details

A single Purchase Order might carry multiple invoices with different payment terms, payout dates, and satisfaction-contingent holdbacks — with no interface making any of it visible. The research method was observational fieldwork rather than surveys or interviews. Following reps through their actual workday surfaced more than a dozen friction points that would never have appeared in a questionnaire.

Actions

• Conducted ethnographic fieldwork shadowing Large Enterprise AEs to observe activities, tools, friction points, and workarounds firsthand.
• Built dual-stakeholder value propositions for Sales and Finance; secured joint sponsorship from the SVP of Sales Operations and the CFO.
• Designed a commissions interface with real-time visibility into payment terms, payout dates, and holdbacks — with autofill forms to reduce Finance data entry errors — built into the Sales & Marketing Intranet.
• Coordinated delivery across Sales Operations, Finance, IT, and GDC over an eight-month timeline.

Outcome & Impact

• A $27K implementation reduced commissions-related Finance call volume by nearly 40% within weeks of launch.
• Contributed to a 20% improvement in overall sales productivity across multiple Sales Operations initiatives.
• Designed for scale: next phase included improved reporting and planned rollout to Latin America and Japan.
• Observational research surfaced more than a dozen additional field enablement opportunities — including the Contract Management for Sales engagement.