Challenges
Outside of being time-consuming for the finance team, spreadsheets offered little to no visibility to their sales team.
“As we started designing the comp plans we also wanted to make it very transparent and user-friendly for the sales staff to get energized by the comp plans. That was something that felt pretty obvious as a reason to get off the spreadsheet.”
Thomas E., Head of Finance
Thomas said that finance leaders stress often about how much money pours into sales compensation and incentives.
“There’s this stress of ‘Are we driving the right behavior? Are we overcompensating or under compensating?’” Thomas said. “Generally, finance feels like we’re overpaying. But, the only thing worse than overpaying is having an overly generous incentive structure where the commissionable team is not actually seeing the incentives right in front of their noses.”
What they need
By December, he began pushing for a tool to streamline their sales commission process. “I made the pitch to sales leadership that we had a great incentive plan in place but no way for reps to see how their pipeline translated to earnings,” Thomas said.
To address this issue, Thomas wanted a:
- User-friendly solution fit for the sales team
- Platform that could fully automate commission calculations, tracking, and payouts for the Finance Team
- Straightforward user interface with quick implementation
“Once we made the decision to get off of the spreadsheet, the question became how do we do it in a relatively easy and cost-efficient way from a SaaS overhead perspective.”
“Once we made the decision to get off of the spreadsheet, the question became how do we do it in a relatively easy and cost-efficient way from a SaaS overhead perspective.”
Thomas E., Head of Finance
QuotaPath over CaptivateIQ, Spiff, and Xactly
While working with a short timeline to get everything implemented by January, Thomas quickly began exploring different tools.
Right out of the gate, Thomas eliminated several solutions falling within the “heavier enterprise-class systems.”
“I didn’t want to be responsible for implementing something like that,” Thomas said.
So, it came down to QuotaPath, CaptivateIQ, and Spiff.
“It was obvious that QuotaPath was going to have a manageable implementation and a more cost-efficient approach than CaptivateIQ, and QuotaPath seemed more aligned to what we were looking to do by securely integrating our data with Salesforce over Spiff.”
“The whole point of having generous incentives is to energize the team and not have it be mysterious.”
Thomas E., Head of Finance
Sales commissions and attainment forecasting
QuotaPath offered something Thomas didn’t even know he needed: earnings forecasting.
“Now that I’ve seen that reps have visibility into how their pipeline translates into earnings, and how powerful it is to be able to forecast deals, I’d absolutely consider this feature a requirement.”
This feature enables reps and leaders to toggle between existing sales commissions and future earnings and attainment progress based on existing opportunities. It’s an excellent tool for reps looking to run “what if” scenarios and see how the next deal impacts their overall standings.
Comp plan customization
With plans to triple Prefect’s sales teams, Thomas also needed to customize comp plans easily.
“It was obvious that we weren’t going to keep a super simple, vanilla plan. We needed something that allows for a lot of flexibility to add different contingencies and business logics.”
QuotaPath’s flexibility and the ease of in-app adjustments is one of the reasons G2 users recognized us as “Easiest Admin,” “Fastest Implementation,” and “Easiest Setup.”
Next level onboarding
And while QuotaPath’s app may be easy to standup, Thomas credited our Customer Success team for a smooth transition away from spreadsheets and into the world of automation.
“QuotaPath’s onboarding team was eager and willing to help with the modeling of our existing comp plans and implementing those within QuotaPath,” said Thomas. “It was frankly awesome to configure some of the comp plans ourselves given how admin-friendly the platform is.
“Within 22 days, from the onboarding kickoff call to admin training, QuotaPath had fully automated Prefect’s commissions.”
Thomas E., Head of Finance
The impact
Save time, build transparency
It’s been seven months since Prefect first adopted QuotaPath, and already Thomas reported a significant reduction in his team’s time spent running, calculating, and paying out commissions.
Plus, now that his reps have full transparency into their commissions and attainment, Finance has spent less time going back and forth addressing questions or errors.
“We cut our time spent on commissions calculations by 50%+ and have enjoyed providing real-time transparency to our sales reps and technical pre-sales team.”
“This platform has significantly upgraded our sales compensation process. From the time saved on the financial side to our reps fully understanding and feeling motivated by our incentive structures. QuotaPath saves days of time worth of unnecessary spreadsheets and emails.”
Thomas E., Head of Finance
See how Quotapath cleans up the commissions process for Prefect
