CUNA MUTUAL Group Revamps Sales Compensation Model with Alteryx

Powering a brighter financial future

Founded over 80 years ago, CUNA MUTUAL Group continues to help credit unions, businesses, and people build financial security. Built on the principle of “people helping people,” their goal is to create a more equitable financial system that helps improve their customers’ lives because a brighter financial future should be accessible to everyone.

With $5B in revenue and $44.3B in assets — CUNA MUTUAL Group is constantly innovating to stay ahead of the evolving financial landscape. The question that’s always top of mind for them is — how do we react, adapt, and survive change?

Escaping spreadsheet hell

For Steve Konkol, Senior Manager, Business Experience Reporting and Analytics at CUNA MUTUAL Group, taking on change began with battling against spreadsheets. “To support our sales organization, there was a lot of pain. There were 70 people on a weekly basis that relied on our reports, which were spreadsheets. That’s 4,000 spreadsheets a year. There was also the issue of data frequency. We were giving salespeople weekly information, but they were getting real-time information in Salesforce.”

So, Steve and his team increased data frequency, but it wasn’t a sustainable process. “We were killing ourselves trying to do it with Access. It was crazy.” Luckily some business partners recommended Alteryx to Steve. “All of sudden we were able to do something new and do it faster and easier. We eliminated those spreadsheets and went to daily updates. Discovering Alteryx was a wow moment for us, and it had an impact on my team. By automating manual processes, we’ve saved thousands of hours and have been able to cut cycle time by a third to a half.”

Taking on new and bigger challenges from the C-Suite

At the request of the chief revenue officer, another crucial project Steve and his team took on was developing a new revenue-based sales compensation system. The previous point-based system they used had a major flaw. It drove the wrong behavior where employees maximized points rather than revenue.

Steve and his team were able to complete the build in three months. “We started by creating one source of the truth, which meant gaining access to source systems then aggregating, cleaning, and blending the data. We then created a data science model based on metrics and customer attributes to forecast revenue. With no IT support, no coding experience, and being a small but mighty team of three — we couldn’t have pulled this off without Alteryx.”

Small team, huge wins

The new sales compensation system and forecasting model was a huge win for Steve, his team, and the company. After the first year, it was rolled out to all 500 frontline salespeople and that year CUNA MUTUAL Group achieved the best sales results in the past 10 years.

“Our forecasts very quickly became important to the business by providing salespeople insight. Do you have enough in your pipeline? How are your sales tracking? Those were questions salespeople could now answer. ”

The exposure gave Steve and his team a seat at the table. “It was great to be thought of as a real partner with leaders. I was able to have my team members grow too with significant promotions over the last few years.”

What’s next?

Steve and his team are helping take analytics company wide as other areas of the organization adopt Alteryx. They’ve already made significant progress. “All of our dashboards are fed by Alteryx, supporting over 700 people, and 130K views. We have around 800 workflows that support multiple business processes and tens of millions of dollars of annual expenses.” As analytics at CUNA MUTUAL Group grows, their mission is to provide even more insights to leadership and frontline staff to enable them to make better business decisions, while “automating the mundane.”