(Originally covered on TechCrunch, October 21st)
In many ways, business is a race. A race to bring the best product or service to market. A race to find and acquire loyal customers. Now imagine running that race with a twisted ankle – how would you do?
This is the reality for companies that calculate sales commissions manually. Every month, they waste hours on complex spreadsheets or clunky software, leaving sales teams unmotivated and in the dark. Hobbled by outdated tools, they limp on, with little prospect of serious growth.
Spiff, a SaaS incentive compensation platform, is changing that. With $6,000,000 in funding from Peak Ventures, Kickstart Seed Fund, Peterson Partners, Pipeline Capital, and $500,000 from the management team, Spiff is relieving the burden of commission calculations around the globe one nasty commission spreadsheet at a time.
“Amazing as it may seem, there isn’t an effective, modern SaaS solution for managing incentive compensation,” said Jeron Paul, Spiff’s founder and CEO. “Most companies use Excel or decades-old tech that’s really just professional services masquerading as software.”
According to a Spiff survey, 90% of businesses rely exclusively on spreadsheets to calculate commissions. And despite the best efforts of burnt-out Finance teams, error rates are huge – as much as 88%. When the numbers don’t add up, sales teams feel undervalued. On average, reps learn about their commissions one month after they’ve closed the deals. So eliminating that gap creates a serious opportunity for growth.
“When your sales teams stop trusting your calculations, you know there’s something wrong,” Jeron said. For the Spiff team, whose compensation platform already processes over $4M in calculations every month across thousands of deals, spreadsheet logic is simply no match for purpose-built technology.
“Our understanding of what drives great behavior has changed so much over the last decade, and we’re excited to bring incentive comp into the 21st century,” Jeron added, who shared his vision for Spiff last October. “Along the way, we’ll be introducing huge innovations that will drive better performance for our clients.”
Spiff, which launched its initial product offering in the fall of 2018, already counts some of the fastest-growing tech companies in the world as customers, including Podium (Cloud 100), Weave (Cloud 100), Bitglass, Workato, Sendoso, HireVue, Lucid, and more.
Jeron Paul is a seasoned entrepreneur with three exits under his belt. Most recently he sold Capshare to a subsidiary of Morgan Stanley (NYSE: MS). Before that, he founded and sold Scalar Analytics, and Boardlink, which became a part of Thomson Reuters (NYSE: TRI).
Spiff has also enrolled JP Maitre, former Head of Product at Ancestry DNA, and Albert Candari, a former head of UX at Instructure, and Mike Ries, former interim CTO at MX, to make sure Spiff is intuitive and easy to use.
Also joining the team this month are bestselling author and keynote speaker Aaron Ross as an advisor, and serial entrepreneur and Inc Magazine’s 30 under 30 Andrew Gazdecki as Chief Growth Officer. “Spiff would’ve been life-changing for our sales teams at Bizness Apps,” Andrew said, referring to the business he bootstrapped and later sold to ESW Capital.
The market for sales commissions is over $800B in the US alone. The market for incentive compensation is in the trillions – larger than all advertising spend globally. With a successful funding round behind them, while solving a ubiquitous problem and solving it well, Spiff is on a mission to become a standard part of the tech stack for every business serious about growth.