Gremlin Success Story

Summary

After struggling with user adoption and manual, time-consuming commission management processes, Gremlin decided to switch from their previous commission platform to Spiff. With Spiff, the team at Gremlin was quickly able to cut down the time they were spending on commission management, win over their sales reps, and automate a lot of the work their previous platform couldn’t help with.

Key Results

• Decreased time spent managing commissions by 50%
• Increased rep adoption from 20% with their previous platform to 90% with Spiff
• Reduced manual commission calculations and reporting with Spiff’s robust Salesforce integration

The Challenge

Spreadsheets and legacy commission software could not provide a flexible enough solution for Gremlin’s growing organization.

Gremlin struggled with maintaining spreadsheets to calculate commissions for their growing sales team and turned to a software solution to help keep things organized and consistent. While this solution helped perform the calculations, it fell short in providing a flexible enough solution to meet Gremlin’s changing needs. The Excel-like interface had been a key selling point, but it ultimately introduced complexities that made it incredibly difficult to build logic and resolve errors. The administrators had trouble trusting the rules, and the team never embraced the reports.

This user interface was “Too simplistic, and lacked the relevant detail that my team wanted to see on a month to month basis. The reports frequently translated data incorrectly which led to inconsistencies. We couldn’t get it right.,” explained Daryl Allen, Senior Director of Finance. Gremlin’s sales reps were not confident in the software and, consequently, were hesitant to use it.  As a result, user adoption suffered and ultimately, their sales team failed to reap the benefits that they had hoped for.

Not only was user adoption affected, but the team at Gremlin quickly realized that they needed an automated commission software that was agile, dynamic, fast, and more transparent. Daryl conveyed that making changes to plans in their previous platform required “tracking changes through 7-8 interdependent worksheets,” which was time-consuming and made it nearly impossible to monitor accuracy. Most alarmingly, after the back and forth required to make changes, it wasn’t clear if or when updates had even made it to the system. “Every time we had to make a change, it felt like almost an entire rewrite to the plan, and the statement itself didn’t necessarily even reflect those changes. We couldn’t keep track of how anything worked which made it incredibly difficult to modify as plans changed.”

Lastly, the team at Gremlin struggled to share data between Salesforce and their previous commission platform.  This presented its challenges, especially during Covid when plan structure and quota changes occurred more frequently. Instead of providing a seamless, automated experience, their former sales commission platform relied heavily on admins to compile reports and then upload them to their commission platform manually. This process was often time-consuming and prone to errors.

The Solution

Gremlin quickly saw increased transparency with a solution they could rely on.

After Gremlin decided to make a switch from their former commission platform, Spiff was an obvious front-runner. Ultimately, the team at Gremlin was sold on Spiff’s intuitive UI, the platform’s seamless data sharing between systems, and finally, access to real-time reporting- all features they’d hoped for with the previous platform but were unable to achieve.

Spiff was able to provide a quick and painless experience from the start. Reusable rules and fields empowered Gremlin team members to easily modify, create, and manage plans, proving to be the accessible and agile software they had been missing all along.

Spiff’s overall flexibility has given Gremlin long-term security and peace of mind, knowing they are set up to scale, a necessary and crucial component of their overall plan for growth.

Thanks to Spiff’s integration with Salesforce, the team at Gremlin no longer relies on manual uploads or data sharing and they’ve been able to maximize their time and focus on other critical areas of their business.

In addition to the increased productivity Gremlin has experienced during the course of their time with Spiff, they’ve also heard nothing but rave reviews from their sales team. Citing Spiff’s clean user interface, easy-to-understand quota management, immediate access to critical insights, and greater transparency made possible by Spiff’s tracing feature, after switching to Spiff, Gremlin saw a 400% increase in rep adoption. Reps understood where they were at in the quarter, the accelerators they qualified for, and how they were trending over time.