Spiff Raises $46 Million in Series B Funding to Put Trust Back Into the Commissions Process

By AIT News Desk On Jun 1, 2021

Revolutionizing commissions automation with a new class of software, Spiff has raised more than $60 million in funding in less than a year

Spiff, the leading sales commission software for forward-thinking revenue and sales organizations, today announced $46 million in Series B funding from new and existing investors. The amount raised reflects the critical need every business has for the right kind of revenue growth that aligns both the “top-line” and “bottom-line” aspects of an organization.

Led by Lightspeed Ventures Partners, the new round includes investments from Salesforce Ventures and Stripes, along with existing partner Norwest Venture Partners and all of the original investors. In total, Spiff has raised $68 million. This latest investment follows a year in which Spiff secured its Series A funding, deepened customer relationships, particularly those in sales and finance, and redesigned its flagship product, Spiff Commission Designer, making it the sales performance management industry’s first enterprise-grade compensation platform that is easier to use than a spreadsheet. For its accomplishments in 2020, G2, the peer-to-peer review site, named Spiff one of the top 10 fastest growing software companies of 2021 with the highest rankings across both the Sales Performance Management and Incentive Compensation Management categories.

This funding will fuel Spiff’s mission to put trust back into the commissions process. “It’s been an amazing year at Spiff,” Jeron Paul, chief executive officer, Spiff, said. “Our product goal is simple: Put trust back in the commissions process. Commissions you can trust should drive dramatic, measurable revenue growth. They should motivate reps to perform at their peak. And most of all they should free finance from endless spreadsheet challenges. For salespeople, a smoother commissions process gives them peace of mind and motivational insight into their earnings. For finance and sales ops executives, it’s buttoning up and trusting a process that has grown manual, error-prone, time consuming, and expensive.”

Real-Time Finance Automation Software

Automating commissions is hard. Commissions are complex, mathematically and logically-intensive, and they require seamless integrations with object-oriented systems like Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Human Resources Information Systems (HRIS) , Business Intelligence (BI), and data lake systems in real time. Spiff believes that solving these problems requires building a new class of software that provides the flexibility of custom-coded applications with the ease-of-use of spreadsheets.

Deep Integrations with Salesforce and Netsuite

Welcoming Salesforce Ventures as an investor allows Spiff to build on its market-leading Salesforce.com integration and collaborate even further with Salesforce for Spiff customers. Nearly 70% of Spiff’s customer base uses Salesforce.com as its CRM. The collaboration follows a recent partnership with Netsuite where Spiff achieved Built for Netsuite status, enabling it to integrate with a growing list of important platforms for its customers. Along with the funding, Spiff also announced today that it has released a Spiff iframe right inside the Salesforce.com platform so that customers can see their commissions and calculations in the platform they use most frequently.

Ending The Cold War Between Sales and Finance

Commission design and management has become the bane of the organization – and a morale killer. Sales doesn’t trust the math behind the commission numbers and reps have little to no transparency into the activities that will get them paid. Finance teams are focused on the bottom line and making the company money – which is often at odds with plans for individuals. At bare minimum, it monopolizes the time of finance and sales organizations but, more often than not, also requires the attention of others on the senior leadership team. From design, to planning, to managing through adjustments, commissions planning has become an onerous responsibility for most organizations.

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This challenge is magnified in enterprises that deal with the complexities of different geographies, various plan structures, and thousands of global salespeople who are motivated by their commissions. Quick to experiment and fail with other emerging technologies, enterprises have been slow to adapt from the aged-old solution for commissions planning and management: spreadsheets.

While unarguably still a valuable business tool, spreadsheets lack the flexibility and scale to work effectively with today’s commissions.

“Commission spreadsheets and other legacy commissions apps continue to have a stranglehold over sales and finance teams when it comes to commission design,” Paul said. “Spreadsheets have become the ripped and tattered sweatshirt of the commission process and it’s time to toss them. We are in the waning years of spreadsheets as enterprise tools. Spreadsheets will always be amazing scratchpads but they are horrible enterprise automation platforms. Similarly, legacy commission software is just professional services masquerading as software. Spiff is a completely new breed of software, and a spreadsheet replacement for forward thinking businesses looking for a low-code/no-code commissions solution that can grow with the organization.”

Individual investors in the round include: Mark Anderson, CEO, Alteryx; Daniel Dines, CEO, UIPath; Marc Maloy, CRO, BetterUp; Paul Melichiorre, CRO, Anaplan; Hanno Renner, CEO, Personio; Alexi Robichaux, CEO, BetterUp; Leslie Stretch, CEO, Medallia and former CEO, Callidus.

Supporting Investor Quotes

Arsham Memarzadeh, Partner, Lightspeed Venture Partners: “Spiff takes commissions out of obscurity, both from legacy systems or manual spreadsheets, to a modern, drag and drop interface that’s integrated into your entire stack. They’re being used as the control plane behind sales motivation and planning, and their daily usage rates among customers – from individual reps to the C-suite – indicate how critical incentives are in driving behavior. It reminds us more of consumer apps than what we’re used to seeing in enterprise software.”

Bill Patterson, EVP of CRM Applications, Salesforce: “Sales reps are the foundation for getting businesses back to growth, so Spiff is revolutionizing how companies drive motivation for sales teams by bringing transparency and trust to compensation. We’re thrilled to be traveling this growth path with Spiff as it simplifies the complexities of the commissions process that currently pains enterprises.”

Sean Jacobsohn, Partner, Norwest Venture Partners: “Norwest saw early the potential Spiff offers in solving a massive, underserved problem: the dogfight happening between finance and sales. Spiff not only automates the commission process, providing transparency and visibility into it, but it has a profound impact on employee experience. In our conversations with Spiff customers, we repeatedly heard that Spiff delights customers, who reduce their compensation calculation error rate from five percent to less than one percent. That’s math any sales or finance team can get behind.”

Paul Melchiorre, Operating Partner, Stripes: “From SAP to Ariba to Anaplan, I’ve witnessed great innovation in enterprise software over the course of my career. Spiff is the next generation Sales Performance platform that will replace the old school legacy products from Anaplan, Callidus and Xactly ”