How Coburn Supply Cut Manual Commission Calculations and Grew New Business by 7% with Varicent Incentives

Incentive compensation should help sellers understand what drives their pay and give managers a way to steer performance. At Coburn Supply Company, the commission process made both a challenge. The family-owned wholesale distributor, which has served customers across the southern United States since 1934, relied on spreadsheets and legacy systems that kept much of the work manual and error-prone.

For Vice President Christy Maloney, and former CFO Pam Mouton, that meant carving out one stressful week each month to make sure reps were paid on time.

"We made a deal that we would make no major life decisions during the week that we were calculating commissions because it was so stressful," Pam Mouton said.

To support its growing sales force, Coburn Supply Company needed more than a faster way to calculate commissions. They needed an incentive compensation management system that could give sellers timely visibility, help managers adjust incentives as priorities changed, and free the team to use compensation more strategically.

Here's how they got there.

Sellers Waited 45 Days to Understand What Drove Their Pay

Slow commission calculations didn’t just consume Pam and Christy’s time. They left sellers unable to see which deals were driving their pay.

Giving sellers a breakdown of their commissions was just as manual. Once Pam and Christy finalized commissions each month, Coburn's payroll manager printed a paper commission report for each seller. If the printer ran out of paper, she had to start the run again.

By the time those reports reached sellers, the sales behind them were about 45 days old. Reps could see what they earned, but they couldn’t easily connect the payout to specific customers, products, or profit.

Sales managers couldn’t use the plans to steer seller behavior either. When they wanted to reward a new priority or introduce an incentive, Pam first had to determine whether the legacy system could calculate it.

"There were times when our managers would come to us and say, 'Can we do this?' And I'd think about that one week of stress, and a lot of times I had to say, 'No. We can't. I like what you're thinking about, but there's no way I can program that," Mouton said.

Coburn brought in Alexander Group to help the company take a more strategic approach.

“They said, ‘We can’t do anything with you until you fix the tool that you’re using to compensate your people.’ And so we said, ‘Well, what do you recommend?’ Varicent was their solution,” Mouton recalled.

Nightly Commission Calculations Cut Manual Work to 8% and Gave Sellers Time to Act

After implementing Varicent Incentives, Coburn stopped running commissions once a month and started calculating them every night. Manual calculations fell from 50% to roughly 8%, giving Pam and Christy back a full week each month to validate plan changes and see whether incentives were driving the results Coburn expected.

Today, the same two-person team, Pam and Christy, manages commissions for 560 payees with a 99.99% accuracy rate.

“Our relationship with the sales team is they have confidence in what we do each month when we pay out. It’s transparent. They can see where they are every night. We have a 99.99% accuracy rate," Maloney said.

Sellers now see their sales, customer profitability, and expected payout the following morning. That daily view gives them time to understand what’s driving their earnings and act before the month closes.

“So when they’re confident that their numbers are being calculated correctly and their pay is right every month, they’re out on the street getting more market share for us, getting that business, taking care of existing customers,” Maloney said.

A confident sales force gave Coburn a stronger foundation for the next step: building incentive plans around the customers and sales activity the business wanted to grow.

Rewarding Profitable Sales Helped Coburn Retain 93% of Customers and Grow New Business by 7%

Once sellers could see and trust their numbers, Coburn could use incentives to guide where they focused. In Greater Houston, one of the company’s most competitive markets, Coburn wanted sellers to protect profitable customer relationships, win new accounts, and introduce customers to more of its product lines.

Coburn built a tiered plan around the profitability of each seller’s customer portfolio. Sellers earned higher commission rates as profitability increased and received an even higher rate during the first year after bringing in a new customer.

“Knowing that we pay on gross margin, it gives them the incentive to go out and find that more profitable business, which helps us all, because gross profit pays the bills,” Maloney said.

The comp plan also encouraged sellers to look beyond the products they typically sold. Plumbing sellers began pursuing commercial HVAC opportunities, while others looked across Coburn’s electrical, plumbing, HVAC, and appliance lines for more ways to serve the same customer. Over the next two years, Coburn saw the result in both retention and growth.

“With that new structure, within the last two years, we noticed we were able to keep 93% retention of our customers, because our salesmen are out there talking with them and keeping that business because it’s profitable. And then we had 7% increase in new business,” Maloney said.

New Compensation Plans Can Now Go Live in One Day

With Varicent Incentives, Coburn can put a new compensation plan in place the same day a seller joins the company or moves into a new role. A rep starts knowing exactly how they'll be paid and what they're expected to deliver.

“So when we hire someone new or we put an existing employee into another position, their pay’s going to change, their comp’s going to change, and we can install that in place day one,” Maloney said.

Coburn has the same level of flexibility when it acquires a company. The team can configure and test different compensation structures in Varicent, then bring the new sales team onto the system without disrupting how they’re paid.

New sellers can start with the right incentives from day one. Acquired teams can transition without losing confidence in their pay. And managers can respond to new roles, markets, and sales priorities without creating another manual calculation cycle.

The week Pam and Christy once spent surviving commission calculations can now go toward shaping how Coburn protects margin, grows customer relationships, and wins new business.

“If I were to describe Varicent in one sentence, efficient, reliable, no stress,” Maloney said.