Case study
Cleaning up sales and marketing for a publicly-traded waste services provider
Improving organizational structure and incentives unlocks over $70M in EBITDA
Situation
One of North America's leading providers of integrated waste services initiated an ambitious growth strategy to grow revenues by $7B over five years while reducing SG&A by over $1B. The Company, however, had minimal line of sight or control over significant marketing expenses spent in the field, and recent audits had identified critical issues in the sales commission calculation and payment processes, resulting in substantial excess commission payments.
Candela's Role
Our team fielded a comprehensive study of all sales and marketing activities across the company and evaluated field marketing spend to assess current state. We also analyzed sales compensation plans and evaluated the plan administration process to identify the root causes of commissions overpayment. Our findings led us to design a new organizational model centralizing all sales operations activities into a corporate Sales Center of Excellence (SCOE), providing more control over the sales process and visibility into sales and marketing spend.
Impact
The Waste Services Provider was able to reduce and reallocate non-value-added activities to allow sales to focus on revenue-generating activities, representing $57M in incremental EBITDA potential over five years. Our team also identified $8M in sales commission overpayments and eliminated $5-7M in unproductive field marketing spend. The client proceeded with our recommendation to centralize sales operations and incorporated a redesigned sales commission process that improved governance and accountability.
$9M
Sales Commission Savings
$5.7M
Marketing Spend Savings
$57M
Incremental EBITDA
