This FP&A Manager saved a week’s worth of work after retiring her sales commission tracking spreadsheet by switching to QuotaPath.
Muck Rack’s Financial Planning and Analysis Manager Katie Cooper stayed loyal to spreadsheets until she had enough.
“At the end of the day, the result was great. As long as everything was updated and formulas weren’t broken, spreadsheets did the job,” said Katie.
At the time, she and her team also leveraged HubSpot’s CRM platform to manage their sales cycles.
But as Muck Rack’s revenue team scaled to 20 reps, the financial planning and analysis manager struggled to keep up manually.
At the end of every month, Katie had to build a list of every deal sold, pull data from HubSpot, cross-reference the data twice, and make sure that every payment over $1,000 was correct. This entire process took a week to complete.
“We only had eight sales reps and two account managers. The entire commission process took a week to complete each month. I ran it in a big Excel sheet that I stored in Dropbox and had to re-create a new version of every time.
Katie Cooper
It was not the way to live.”
FP&A Manager
Before switching to QuotaPath, the tricky part for Katie involved maintaining a spreadsheet for every sales rep. She felt she couldn’t provide real-time transparency without oversharing information, so they all had their own versions of a master sheet. Additionally, if a sales rep got promoted and their pay structure changed, then that’s back to square one with formulating a new spreadsheet. And it wouldn’t be a true spreadsheet if a formula didn’t occasionally stop working. Which isn’t hard to fix, but who wants to have to deal with another corrective step?
Even though Katie formulated a way to make spreadsheets “do-able,” she grew convinced that spreadsheets weren’t the most efficient way to work.
There had to be a way to automate this, she thought. Then in December 2020, Katie changed her entire sales commissions workflow by implementing QuotaPath. Now, a team of 70-plus relies on QuotaPath for attainment and earning transparency powered by QuotaPath’s HubSpot integration.
Meet Katie
After earning a fine arts degree from The University of Utah and an MFA from The Accademia dell’Arte, Katie began her career as a sales coordinator. Next, she became an inside sales rep for a small local tech company. Then in 2019, Katie started at Muck Rack as the sales operations manager. Last year, the public relations media platform promoted her to a financial planning and analysis manager role.
What Katie enjoys most about her job: “Every conversation I have with people at Muck Rack is so encouraging. The company is full of people who believe in the markets we are serving, our product, and how we are building something to serve public relation professionals and journalists communities.”
Why make the switch from spreadsheets to QuotaPath?
Katie: It made sense to pay for an actual software that has a scalable system and is easy to reference for everyone involved. Now, I can send a link in a Slack post when commissions are approved every month. Furthermore, everyone follows the same instructions on how and where to find information that’s specific to them within QuotaPath. Before, I had to tailor directions for every person.
How has QuotaPath changed your workflow?
The tool allows me to seamlessly automate everyone’s commissions into one platform so that sales reps, customer success managers, SDRs, and revenue management can view their own commissions in the tool. This makes it easier to troubleshoot when needed. It’s easy to reference and the information is made to be transparent for the entire revenue team.
A major game-changer for me is the ease in which I can onboard a new team member…and with our rapid growth, efficiency and accuracy here is a must. Assigning a plan, quota, and rate in QuotaPath saves me about a half-hour per employee.
You mentioned it took you a week when you had less than 10 reps. Today, your sales team is closer to 70. How long do commissions take now?
January’s commissions took me less than six hours from start to finish.
Lastly, imagine your spreadsheet’s retirement party. What does it entail?
This is definitely more of a party for myself than my spreadsheet. My commission tracking spreadsheet is no more. I don’t want to see it again. I am kicking it out. Here’s some gasoline. A candle. Then I can sit back in my lawn chair and relax in the glow of a bonfire.
Final Thoughts
Now that Katie is done with commission spreadsheets forever, she doesn’t ever plan to look back. Separating from your trusted spreadsheets can be difficult. However, let us help send your commission tracking spreadsheet into retirement by switching to QuotaPath.
