This brief posting in TechCrunch is about a fintech called Spiff, a 2017 startup out of Utah that provides sales commission software. Frankly, this is not a space Mercator Advisory Group knows much about and it seems very specialty, so I would need a briefing to understand it better. Based on the commentary, it seems that novelty helped Spiff with a recent investment.
‘The idea at Spiff is to create a new software category around sales compensation management, and it’s gotten buy-in from investors at Norwest Venture Partners, Next World Ventures and Epic Ventures. Seed investors, including Kickstart Album Ventures, Pipeline Capital and Peterson Ventures, returned to invest in the company as well.’
A review of the website suggests a fairly comprehensive set of capabilities, integrable with ERPs, payments, and payroll. It looks like open APIs allow for fast implementation. After a little more digging, one finds some competitors, although not really familiar names to us since the topic is a bit off our radar (for now). One would think that this type of f&f would be in CRMs. We recently released member research that reviewed vendors in the earned wage access space, which is as close as we have come to this specialty. So now readers are aware of this space and we’ll keep an eye on it.
‘“Commissions are a major cause of anxiety for teams who don’t understand or trust their incentive plan and many waste hours every month correcting mistakes or arguing with finance, which hits bottom lines,” said Spiff chief executive, Jeron Paul. “Norwest’s investment will help us automate commission calculations so sales teams have one less thing to worry about in these challenging times.”
“The world of sales compensation software is long overdue for a revamp,” said Sean Jacobsohn, partner at Norwest Venture Partners, in a statement. “With 85 percent of companies still calculating sales commissions manually in Google Sheets or Excel, I’m excited to partner with Spiff to help transform the way people think about sales compensation and provide sales teams with a deeper level of visibility into their commissions.”
Overview by Steve Murphy, Director, Commercial and Enterprise Payments Advisory Service at Mercator Advisory Group
