Automated sales commission platform Spiff secures $46M

Spiff, an automated commissions platform for businesses, today announced it has raised $46 million in a series B round of funding from Lightspeed Ventures Partners, Salesforce Ventures, Stripes, and Norwest Venture Partners.

Founded out of Sandy, Utah, in 2017, Spiff is one of several platforms designed to automate sales commission payments, a challenge that is “magnified” in enterprises that have to deal with myriad complexities such as geographical spread and a multitude of commission plan structures, according to Spiff.

How it works

Companies connect Spiff to their customer relationship management (CRM) platform, business intelligence (BI) tools, or accounting and payment systems to automatically glean real-time sales data. While its pre-built integrations include the likes of Salesforce, Looker, Snowflake, Quickbooks, and Stripe, the company also follows an API-first philosophy which opens things to just about any data conduit.

It’s worth noting that Spiff also recently announced a tie-up with Netsuite, Oracle’s suite of business management tools spanning enterprise resource planning (ERP), CRM and more.

“If you think about commissions, it sits at the center of CRM, ERP, HRIS, BI, and data lake systems,” Spiff founder and CEO Jeron Paul told VentureBeat. “These aren’t ‘Excel-oriented’ systems. These are object-oriented systems. So Spiff is perfectly positioned to connect to these systems, transform the data using Excel-like syntax to achieve complex mathematical and logical modeling, and automate processes.”

Through the no-code Spiff commission designer dashboard, companies can combine rules, variables, and conditions around commission payments, so that when an employee meets certain pre-set criteria, they automatically receive their dues. This can support any number of commission structures, including deal splits, ramps, and team roll-ups.

Above: Spiff: Commission designer

Managers can assign or un-assign sales reps to commission plans, with Spiff automatically adjusting the commission payable based on the dates they were assigned to a deal.

The Salesforce factor

Adding Salesforce to its roster of investors is particularly notable, given that almost 70% of Spiff’s customers use Salesforce as their CRM. And alongside today’s funding, Spiff also announced that it has launched a new Spiff iframe for Salesforce.com, enabling customers to see their commissions and calculations without leaving the CRM.

Above: Spiff Salesforce iframe

Spiff has now raised around $60 million since its inception, and while its latest series B round ushered in some notable VC backers, it also attracted individual investors including UiPath CEO Daniel Dines and Alteryx CEO Mark Anderson.

With its latest cash injection, Paul said that the company is prioritizing road map items that “put trust back into motivational compensation,” including adding new sales performance management functionality and making its core designer product “more powerful and easier to use.” Other investments will include machine learning, sales forecasting and planning integrations, rolling out deeper integrations with payroll, and more.

The raise also comes shortly after rival CaptivateIQ also raised $46 million, suggesting that there is big demand for technology to help companies manage their commissions.

“As far as what is driving investor interest, it’s a combination of factors — it’s a large market that desperately needs innovation with a lot of old-school legacy vendors,” Paul said. “Commissions represent 10% of the typical company’s budget, and investment in sales reps remains one of the best ways to grow revenue. So there’s little doubt sales commissions are a critical area to get right. So many finance people are pulling their hair out with manually intensive, error-prone processes that end up demotivating sales teams.”

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