DATA GOVERNANCE Working pilot
Customer Governance for Sales Performance
Make sales traceable—to the right customer, representative and group.
Established customer relationships and clear sales attribution, replacing repeated local cleanup with maintained rules and supporting actuals-versus-target reporting.
Canada’s actuals-versus-target views were in use, checked against source data and explained to users.
Cleanup proposal, attribution decisions and correspondence on the Canada pilot and training.
Result & scope ↓The business problem
Local teams relied heavily on Excel to answer: who sold how much to whom? Duplicate customers, unclear representative assignments and incomplete hospital-group relationships made performance attribution and aggregate reporting laborious. Rebuilding customer data locally also delayed recurring forecast preparation.
My contribution
I proposed the cleanup and maintenance rules, led work on sales-representative attribution and worked with country and central data specialists on hierarchies and exceptions. I helped translate sales targets and customer assignments into performance-reporting requirements. For the Canada pilot, I worked with the BI developer on the business logic, checked results against source data, reviewed assignments with users and delivered training.
Winning participation when capacity was the constraint
One country finance team initially declined the cleanup because of workload. I discussed it with regional finance leadership and continued with participating countries, respecting the local decision. As the BI tools developed, I returned with practical benefits and reduced forecast-preparation work seen elsewhere. The team subsequently joined.
Firsthand account of stakeholder engagement; individuals are not identified.Maintained customer data. Usable sales-performance views.
Subsequent forecast rounds could omit the recurring local customer-data cleanup. In Canada, customer and representative actuals-versus-target views were functioning, source checks had been performed and users had been trained. Customer-group relationships also made member-hospital sales easier to aggregate for reporting and contract discussions.
The Canada evidence supports a working pilot with remaining refinement tasks, not a completed international rollout. I also helped draft a pilot for Italy. Removal of recurring cleanup is based on my operating experience. Public records and checks are fictional.
SEE THE WORK
From unclear assignments to traceable performance.
Illustrative examples use fictional data.
Fictional records · reviewed allocations
First, clean up sales attribution: duplicate Harbour Hospital records have conflicting Division A reps. The reviewed correction replaces Rep 04 with Rep 01, then the duplicate merges into one customer. Next, record customer relationships: Harbour and Riverside remain distinct hospitals, linked to Harbour Hospital Group, which has no direct sales. Clear attribution supports comparison of actual sales with rep and team targets; recorded relationships support group reporting and contract discussions.
The delivery approach
Resolve the attribution before building the report
Unify duplicate customer records and resolve conflicting representative assignments within each customer and product division. Agree the applicable assignment and exceptions with local teams and central specialists so actual sales can be compared with the right representative and team targets.
Preserve the group, even when it has no sales
Establish parent/member relationships without merging distinct hospitals. A hospital-group parent can have no direct sales and still be needed to select all members for contract discussions and aggregate their sales for reporting.
Maintain the rules at source
Keep customer, hierarchy and representative assignments maintained in SAP and consistent with Salesforce and business-intelligence reporting. Explicit ownership and exception review reduce repeated local cleanup and support reliable reporting over time.