Challenge

As a result of its sizable sales force, the Truckstop.com finance, sales ops, and people and culture teams were spending about half of every month collecting and processing commissions and compensation data. In an age where data is meticulously stored by any half-decent platform, pulling data was not the roadblock for their team. Pulling data for 120 reps from Salesforce was easy enough. However, building and creating a nicely formatted Excel spreadsheet for every single rep became a gargantuan monthly task.

We had to take into account all of the details, like documenting every single sale, every qualified lead, every clawback, every SPIFF, etc. It was a lot of filtering and sorting, says Jeremy Aldrich

On top of that, if there were ever any issues, it would lead to a stream of e-mails that could take weeks to resolve.

Because of the sheer volume of spreadsheets, we also suffered through several Copy/Paste errors in the early days, says Sales Operations Analyst, Connor Follet.

With a wide assortment of compensation plans and evolving commissions structures for each rep, there was simply a lot of room for human error.

Solution

Both Jeremy and Connor were part of a 6 person task force whose mission was to update the commissions process. Their requirements included:

• Automated calculations
• The ability to pull information with minimal manual work
• Integration with other data platforms like Salesforce
• Robust ASC606 features
• Easy UI and onboarding
• No need for a specialist to update compensation plans or run future scenarios
  

After hearing from colleagues who had previously worked with competitor platforms such as Xactly and Spiff that those options were complicated and not suitable for a fast-paced startup environment, the team decided to move forward with a CaptivateIQ demo.

Easy onboarding and superior flexibility

The easy onboarding and being able to write the rules ourselves with Excel-based calculations was great. We didn’t want a solution that required a specialist to re-write the rules for us, says Jeremy. Finance loved the ASC606 features, Sales Ops loved the Excel-based calculations, and the customization capabilities appealed to everyone on our team.

Single source of truth

Compiling the data all into one place was a big headache and has been a big relief with CaptivateIQ says Connor.

Insight into the future

With CaptivateIQ’s reporting and analytics tools, teams are now able to better predict how compensation plan changes may impact their business. This foresight is what will allow companies to get ahead of their competitors in a meaningful manner.

With CaptivateIQ, we’re able to better understand — What motivates our sales reps and how do customers’ purchase behavior change based on our own commissions structure? How does a change in commissions structure impact sales rep behavior and ultimately sales? What happens if we change how territories are assigned? What happens if we use a different quota multiplier?

‍Connor mentions just a few ways that Truckstop.com has leveraged CaptivateIQ’s report and analytics tools to plan for 2021.

He mentions that the company did not conduct this type of analysis last year, not for lack of necessary data, but lack of a tool that could accurately and quickly help them analyze all of that data. With Excel, they found it impossible to run analyses down to the deal level to predict impact on future sales and revenue.

CaptivateIQ gave us insight into how we could achieve our revenue goals through effective commissions planning in 2021, says Connor.