Can ‘Multi-Utility Brokers’ manage all financials in 1 CRM ?
There are over 90 licensed B2B suppliers in the UK market and many choose to utilise energy brokers by offering commercially attractive incentives & commission schemes as a route to market, to quickly grow their customer base. However, it is difficult for energy brokers to easily expand their own businesses whilst managing the additional overheads created by cumbersome variations in energy supplier payment processes, but also managing all other monies flowing in & out of a broker’s business.
- Manual analysis & reporting is a time-consuming process
- Reconciling supplier statements vs anticipated payments
- Managing multiple statements & payments across several relationships & stakeholders
- Different commission payment terms, often by product & segment
- Keeping tabs on cashflow, revenue leakage & health of your business performance
In this post, the Enerex team have outlined how Sparkplug, our cohesive energy broker solution, manages all the different aspects of commission payments & reconciliations for energy deals and other revenue streams derived from other products & services you deliver to your customers.
Statement Automation
At the push of a button, Sparkplug can load each of your supplier commission statements to avoid tedious and time-consuming offline analysis and data entry, which reduces the probability of human errors. Sparkplug is designed to validate all supplier commission statements & payment received, which is one of the biggest time-savers for our broker users.
Commissions Reconciliations & Payment Tracking
With hundreds of payments to manage across several different products & services and multiple suppliers, vendors & partners – it is easy for even the most vigilant professionals to miss out a detail or two, which can have a butterfly effect on the bottom line of the business. Sparkplug comes integrated with a payment verification feature that ensures the accuracy of all payments.
Stop Revenue Leakage
The Deal Audit Tool is one of our most used features in Sparkplug, used to track if there are any missed commission payments that are still owed, or whether the amounts received are in line with what was expected for every MPAN or MPR across our brokers’ contracted deals. The Sparkplug system automatically highlights & colour-codes every deal variation by usage month, making it easy for brokers to identify revenue leakage.
Distribution of Commissions & Stakeholder Payments
Brokers usually maintain internal & external incentive schemes to allocate & distribute commission payments across their sales staff, affiliates and sub-brokers. Sparkplug takes the time and trouble away, by enabling brokers to define commission payout parameters across all stakeholders that contributed to any type of deal. The system allocates received deal payments and generates automated commission reports for all of your products & services, not just your energy deals, for every tagged stakeholder, which streamlines broker payroll processes.
Investing for the Future
Rising above the waves of the energy retail industry, requires brokers to up their game and seek out opportunities to differentiate themselves against their competition. Investing in a future-ready solution like Sparkplug can open up a multitude of new opportunities for an energy broker and the payback can be exponential. There can be many reasons why a broker might choose to make the investment – perhaps to reduce costs by consolidating one or many disjointed existing systems into one which would reduce monthly fees & system running costs, or it might be to half the time of their core processes and allow more time to cash-in on other sales opportunities, or it might be to simply reduce admin overheads or out-sourcing costs. Sparkplug investments have been used to enable brokers to sell additional types of energy procurement products, that were perhaps too cumbersome or risky to manage beforehand, or they have used Sparkplug to track all of the financial forecasts & monitor payment performance across all other products & services like Telecoms, Water, Energy Services & Solutions by utilising the Sparkplug Consulting Module. In some cases, aggregator brokers have used Sparkplug to attract new sub-brokers & affiliates in order to grow their network & channel revenues, by providing them with free licences for Sparkplug that allows their partners to gain similar benefits within the system, rather than it just being used for submitting business via a portal. Sparkplug is the leading solution available now in the UK Energy Retail Market and will make a real difference to any broker’s business performance, almost immediately!
Hours Saved & Potential £ Returns
The long-term value & potential payback that a broker can gain in return for their investment in Sparkplug can be huge. A recent study of a small to medium sized UK broker with 10 employees that included 5 sales staff, 3 admin staff & 2 directors, worked out they would save over 3,000 hours in processing time per year. They calculated that re-investing those hours back into more sales opportunities that were typical for their business at similar performance levels, that they could potentially increase their revenue by more than £500k per year!
If you are interested in learning more about how Sparkplug could benefit your business then please reach out for an initial introduction call, or feel free to click on the hyperlink to our simple booking tool to schedule a demo.
