15Five Success Story

15Five Increased Rep Transparency by 10x

Summary

15Five was growing— fast. The last thing the organization needed was clunky commission software slowing them down with jumbled spreadsheets, lagging data, and an onslaught of rep questions every pay cycle. As their sales team continued to expand, 15Five used Spiff to speed up compensation management processes and improve commission visibility and user experience for their reps.

Key Results

Used Spiff to decrease average number of rep questions from 20 per month to 2
Decreased time spent adding new users by half
Saved 3 to 4 hours in commission processing time each month

The Challenge

15Five’s former commission solution was confusing reps and burdening finance with hours of additional work each month.

15Five’s groundbreaking people management platform has reimagined HR, combining positive psychology, rich data, and a smooth user experience to drastically improve employee satisfaction and drive high-performing teams. With transparency and efficiency integral to both their software and ethos as an organization, 15Five was continually at odds with their legacy sales compensation solution from Xactly.

Cumbersome and error-prone, their former platform had more in common with traditional spreadsheets than 15Five’s own modern, user-friendly software. Their company’s staggering growth saw this operational headache escalate into an increasingly bigger problem. 15Five had amassed over 450,000 users across more than 3,000 customers, with year-over-year revenue up by 90% in 2021 alone.

As their sales team expanded, so did the administrative bloat. Finance was regularly fielding around 20 commission questions a month from confused reps— even after creating resource documents and how-to guides. They also labored over manual report compilation, not to mention bugs, mapping and calculation errors, as well as general troubleshooting— all of which ate into their time even further.

“Our sales team was growing so fast, I couldn’t keep up with answering five complex commission questions a week,” says Chloe Sayers, Finance Manager. “It just wasn’t scalable.”

It became clear that 15Five would either need to hire full-time assistance just to operate the legacy solution, or find an alternative better suited to their rapidly growing sales team.

The Solution

15Five leveraged Spiff’s real-time Salesforce integration to drastically improve commission visibility for reps, while streamlining operations to keep pace with rapid growth.

15Five began searching for new commission software that was equipped for sustainable growth and aggressive revenue goals, but could also boost motivation and employee satisfaction across their sales team.

15Five’s first requirement was seamless data synching with their CRM— delays with their previous solution often caused a spike in status queries from reps, undermining motivation in the process. Spiff’s robust Salesforce integration didn’t just mean automated commission calculations based on real-time data, but object-oriented logic 15Five was already familiar with.

“We really like that Spiff uses the same logic as Salesforce. A lot of other solutions we looked at were trying to translate Salesforce objects into Excel items. They just seemed like glorified spreadsheets and not worth the expense,” says Sayers.

Spiff’s intuitive, visual interface and calculation tracing also stood out to 15Five, who was determined to not only streamline operations, but improve user experience and commission visibility for their reps.

15Five implemented Spiff in just two months, with account executives confident enough to jump into the tool after a single 30 minute training session— no hefty user manuals required. “We’ve done a lot of really big implementations over the past few years,” says Sayers. “Spiff was definitely the smoothest.”

Account executives work in Salesforce all the time, so Spiff’s calculation tracing provides visibility using logic they understand. The number of questions have gone down dramatically across the board.

Chloe Sayers

Finance Manager

15Five

The Results

15Five used Spiff to vastly improve clarity around commissions, with questions from reps dropping from 20 a month to 2 a month.

15Five used Spiff to get compensation management processes up to speed with their accelerated growth, while providing reps the clarity they needed to understand commissions. Spiff’s real-time commission calculations— pulled directly from Salesforce— combined with calculation tracing and an intuitive dashboard, granted 15Five sales’ team unprecedented visibility into their pay.

“Our sales team was really excited and happy about the new user interface,” says Sayers. “Account executives work in Salesforce all the time, so Spiff’s calculation tracing provides visibility using logic they understand. The number of questions have gone down dramatically across the board.”

Instead of answering around 20 commission-related questions from reps each month, 15Five’s Finance team now only receives a couple— a 10X decrease from their previous solution. When questions do arise, reps leave easily trackable comments— a vast improvement over the flurry of monthly emails. “The comments are great, because then I can actually see what they’re talking about,” says Sayers.

Since implementation, 15Five’s sales team has continued to grow. New hires can hit the ground running in Spiff almost immediately. “Spiff is just so easy and intuitive to use,” says Sayer. “We haven’t created extensive resource documents, because we haven’t needed to use them”

15Five’s expansion has been equally painless for the Finance team. “Adding new reps to existing plans has been really straightforward,” says Sayer, who can now set up new users in half the time she would spend with their previous solution. Commission processing times have also been reduced by 3-4 hours per month.

“15Five has big goals as an organization. As a Finance department, we needed to ensure we had the back office structures in place to support them,” says Sayer. “With Spiff, we’ve been able to create a sustainable process that we can administer and operate ourselves— without it becoming someone’s full-time job. We’ve also used Spiff to increase commission visibility for our reps, using data we trust.”