Conga Success Story

Summary

With 400+ commissioned employees spanning across multiple plans, teams, geographies, and currencies, Conga’s process for managing commission calculations in a spreadsheet was unsustainable for their small, yet talented finance team. Searching for a better solution, they were drawn to Spiff’s clean, intuitive interface — and more importantly, the ability it gave them to automate the end-to-end commission process. No longer spending over a week per month calculating commissions, they now direct more time and resources to valuable analytics that help grow their business.

Key Results

• Reduced time spent on commission management by one week each month
• Improved trust among sales reps and across the company
• Provided senior leadership with enhanced visibility to drive smarter decisions

The Challenge

Conga’s company was growing fast— and their comp plans were far too complex— to manage sales commission in a spreadsheet.

Brett Van Zanten, Conga’s Senior Manager of FP&A and Compensation, oversees a team that manages commission pay for 400+ employees. They handled this task manually, tracking commission payouts in a spreadsheet— an approach that Van Zanten knew was unsustainable, considering the size of Conga’s staff and the complexities of their various commission plans.

Their process, which required pulling commission data from multiple sources and transferring it into each individual statement, took the team a full week every month to complete. They dealt with frequent disputes over inaccuracies, as they were unable to provide reps with any visibility into their compensation beyond their monthly statements.

Moreover, this lack of visibility hindered their ability to deliver actionable reports to senior leadership. Without a comprehensive view of quota attainment and deal status across their sales force, the company lacked the insights they needed to generate accurate forecasts, pipeline acceleration initiatives, and other vital business strategies.

The Solution

Spiff helped Conga automate their commission management workflow and save the team a week of productivity per month. The hands-on implementation process enabled them to learn the platform quickly and instantly improve their commission process.

Van Zanten began evaluating commission vendors and instantly loved the look and feel of Spiff’s clean interface. When he explored the platform’s capabilities, he realized it was a perfect fit to solve the organization’s most pressing challenges: time spent on commission calculation and the poor visibility they were providing to reps and leadership.

Spiff’s automated commission calculations meant that Van Zanten’s team could save a week of productivity every month. Meanwhile, their sales teams would finally gain the real-time visibility into their sales commission that they’d been sorely lacking. Rather than wait until the end of the month, they could now see their commission earnings every time they closed a deal. Reps would no longer be in the dark: Spiff provided a real-time view  of where they stood against their quotas and how close they were to reaching accelerators.

Van Zanten worked closely with Spiff’s implementation team, which enabled his team to hit the ground running. They quickly began to make plan enhancements and cobuild future plans, consulting Spiff University about any small tweaks and lingering questions they had as they learned the platform. The close collaboration allowed Van Zanten and his team to feel empowered to self-manage and make changes with confidence.