As Executive Vice President of Store Operations for Harry Rosen, Alan Whitfield's top priorities are providing an incredible in-store customer experience, and keeping business growth strong with high-performing sales associates:  

"Our success involves having great people, paying them correctly, and creating a transparent and empowering environment. Happy employees create happy customers, which drives our business."

With dozens of clothing advisors across 19 in-store locations in a commission environment, the business needed a highly agile sales performance management (SPM) solution to match retail's fast pace.  

Running up to three sales contests a week had become exceedingly cumbersome using a bespoke, homegrown SPM solution. Calculating earnings and deploying payroll with an in-house tool simply wasn't going to scale with the business.

Alan and team could easily design a compensation plan with compelling incentives, but configuring or integrating the plan into the payroll system and ensuring accuracy on delivery was slow and painful. Without a unified, easy-to-use system of record:  

• There was no way for sales associates to track toward performance goals,  

• Manual errors in comp administration (across many disparate tools) meant incorrect or late payouts, and  

• Contests or incentives intended to drive high-impact sales behaviors took weeks to set up and deploy.

This significantly affected sales agility, morale, and confidence. Alan knew the business needed a solution that would improve not just incentive design and deployment (with legacy plans to address), but also visibility and transparency:

"We needed a platform that could manage all of the information that we have from multiple sources: departments, categories, advisor sales, etc., and [it had to] really slice and dice that information into the right outputs.  
‍
A major goal was to improve transparency, accuracy, and visibility to regain credibility in paying people correctly and on time, every time...We [also] needed a way to help [sellers] understand how to change their behaviors to align better with their desired outcomes."

‍

And so the organization implemented Forma.ai.

Enabling rapid agility with a full-stack SPM platform

Harry Rosen's president, Ian Rosen, initially discovered Forma.ai for creating a holistic, complete single source of connected SPM data. Sharing the AI-enabled SPM platform with the team for evaluation, Alan recalls his first impressions:

"It turned out that it really was a perfect fit. There aren't too many solutions like that out there that are as customizable as Forma.ai."  

‍

The flexibility and the easy-to-navigate interface stood out from the start:  

"Our people need to quickly access and understand [sales performance] information on their phones. The visibility and display of information were crucial.

‍

‍Forma's ability to handle complex calculations and package the information into a user-friendly app was game-changing. It gave our associates visibility and control over their earnings."

Since implementing Forma.ai, one of the most significant and immediate outcomes for Harry Rosen employees has been increased trust thanks to streamlining timely, trackable compensation.‍

Increased visibility, transparency, and flexibility

With seller dashboards, Harry Rosen associates can now see exactly how much they've earned in commissions weekly and understand discrete details behind earnings, including product returns (especially significant in a luxury retail commission context). This ability to track effectively and align toward business goals has been highly appreciated by the sales team, leading to greater motivation and sales performance.

Moreover, sales contest reports that previously took weeks to create and deploy (requiring manual parameters to set up and track correctly) can now be configured and rolled out in just days.  

"[Before] if we had a contest design or an opportunity a vendor came to us with to offer something in our environment...[we] would have to pull that information manually, and it wasn't personalized--it was just a whole long list of transactions and names.  

‍

Now there are leader boards, [and] the leaders can get global views of their store in the region they're competing, so that's been a real game changer."

‍

Ultimately, incentivizing the right behaviors aligned to business goals has become significantly faster to facilitate, and sales performance results are available in real-time.

Harry Rosen was able to run 23 different contests/SPIFFs efficiently across the March-April 2024 timeframe, and Forma.ai delivered, managing 80 different compensation plans across ~400 users (sales advisors and leaders).

Performance-based compensation

Thanks to the data and optimization capabilities of Forma.ai, Harry Rosen has made a shift to better align employee incentives with overarching company goals. The shift to a full-stack SPM solution has enabled a true pay-for-performance model. As Alan shared:

"We have revamped our Top Performers' Club, compensation packages, and incentives to be more performance-based. We've moved from paying people regardless of performance to a model where their pay is tied to business performance."

‍

Previously, designated selling associates would get compensated even if a collection didn't perform very well. Now associates are only compensated at a certain level if the business performs at a reasonable level, too.  

Payroll operations efficiency

With Forma.ai, the Harry Rosen team has also automated many, previously manual processes. The business has eliminated the need for manual payroll admin reminders and has vastly reduced the time required for adapting to dynamic market changes and business objectives.

"The payroll team has freed up time previously spent on manual review and calculation; they're able to redeploy that time...On the seasonal basis, it's going to make a big difference."

Post-implementation with Forma.ai, the time between end of the season and actual payout to associates has been dramatically reduced from five to six weeks to potentially one or two weeks max.  

Reporting and insights

With Forma.ai, Alan can leverage detailed reports on various aspects of their sales operations, including minimum wage payouts, new hire performance, app usage, and coaching bonuses.  

The coaching report has been particularly useful in tracking team performance and using leaderboards for contests. Sales leaders now have access to personalized information that helps them manage and motivate their teams more effectively.

Sales managers can segment by brand and by department where opportunities lie for maximizing revenue (and thereby seller earning potential). With this level of detail, managers can ensure each salesperson has the training necessary to speak to and sell all product lines effectively aligned to performance goals.

White-glove implementation experience

On the implementation of Forma.ai Alan shares, it was a true, reliable partnership:  

"Forma has been a great partner—fast, reliable, accommodating, and smart. They handled all changes and updates efficiently and supported us every step of the way.

This level of support is not always the case with tech integrations where scope tends to change [post-sale]...We had such a great experience with the whole thing with Forma. "  

‍

Based on his experience with the implementation team to date, and what types of businesses he believes would benefit from the platform, Alan was quick to share praise:  

"Forma.ai is perfect for performance-based sales organizations that want to drive behaviors that lead to revenue. It’s essential for organizations looking to incentivize activities that improve client experiences and drive sales."

The future

As Harry Rosen continues refining their sales compensation strategy, the future looks bright. Next-up initiatives include defining various plans for different types of sales roles and leveraging more of the data within Forma.ai for informing compensation design. There are plans for incentives to drive the right behavior and selling tactics and advancing the analytics and coaching aspect of their Forma.ai usage.