CaptivateIQ in San Francisco offers their flagship sales commission management product designed to enable companies to manage and tailor mission critical sales incentive compensation programs for their workforce.
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PayScale MarketPay
Score 9.3 out of 10
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PayScale MarketPay is a compensation survey data aggregator that supports merit and structure modeling, report writer, and pricing wizard.
In terms of setting up special incentive programs, it might be better to have those paid out directly. Sometimes the system needs to be manually updated if for say a special service is sold to a pre-existing company. On our end we have to create "new customers" to reflect these new structures of incentives. It still works on CIQ, but it would be helpful for something on the site to allow us to modify this directly.
If you have someone in your organization well-versed in compensation and compensation analysis, PS MP is a great fit and they will be able to onboard and leverage it very quickly. Moreover, if you have roles within your organization that are fairly standard and akin to similar roles in other organizations, you will get a lot out of the majority of matches that PS MP suggests. However, if you've made your roles a little bit more nuanced or "outside of the box" you may have difficulty finding a sufficient match and have to make concessions. If you are in a region where PS MP might not provide enough data, you may need to do a bit of extra leg-work and analysis on your own to settle on where your pay ranges and the like should be. Given the cost of PS MP, it's worth considering based on your workforce and your commitment to compensation analysis and the conversations around it whether it's truly going to provide adequate ROI.
Employee Self-Service: CapIQ include self-service portals for employees. This allows them to access their compensation details, track their performance, and understand how their pay is structured.
Error reduction - Manual calculation of incentives and bonuses is prone to errors, especially in organizations with complex compensation structures involving multiple variables, such as sales targets, performance metrics, and different payout rates. These errors can result in underpayments, overpayments, or discrepancies in compensation, which can lead to dissatisfaction among employees.
Real-Time Updates: In dynamic environments, compensation plans may change frequently due to shifts in business goals or market conditions. Compensation incentive software can quickly adapt to these changes, ensuring that compensation calculations remain accurate even as plans are updated. CapIQ allowed me to track my incentives live.
Detailed view of the market rates for roles within the organization provides the ability to pay our employees at our chosen rate with confidence.
Updated data to ensure that we are keeping pace--you're not stuck with outdated data that some annual salary surveys provide.
The market available for analysis are robust, and we're not simply looking at a single city, region, or country. You can usually get as grand or as granular as you like in reviewing available data.
Reporting is challenging. Even exporting payouts requires selecting a date, so if I want a full year of payouts for the entire team, I have to run 12 reports and combine the data. They have a reporting function, but it also requires a significant setup, and I have yet to figure out how to combine data from all of our plans with different columns.
Tracking down changes from prior periods can be tricky. This usually happens due to user error (whoops - admin set up something not quite right), but it might be nice to easily see what changed or why there is an increase or decrease from a prior period impacting the current payout.
There is a bit of a learning curve--if you're looking to get others involved who are not fluent in compensation data and analysis, it can be complicated and involved. It could benefit from additional tips and walkthroughs for newer users outside of the support that PayScale provides through your designated PS employee/account manager.
Being a Canadian company, the data isn't always as robust as it is for American companies. Larger cities are almost always represented and while you can often get data for the smaller areas, the data is not sufficient enough to always provide the best confidence (e.g. 5.0 reports vs. lower rated ones).
It does not work for every job, and you may find that you need to stretch definitions a bit as you may have roles that don't fix the exact mold that they are closest to in PayScale. This is especially true in insurance, where the role of underwriter or claims adjuster may differ significantly based on the organization's business.
I give this rating because I think that this works really well, and it helps our teams see things faster and we are able to keep up with pay outs, I give Captivate a 10/10 because I love the format and how quickly we are able to see the payouts
We used support during our initial setup regarding statment errors. They were quick and concise to respond and help us solve our issues regarding this. They also directed us to the office hours that enabled us to learn of new features and upcoming announcements.
Support is great as PayScale provides you with a dedicated staff member similar to Account Manager that helps ensure you stay on track and you get what you need out of the product. Additionally, onboarding support is provided where needed, and you never feel as though you're not close to the support you need. PayScale support is great!
Spiff is super sleek and a top contender, honestly, though the price point difference between Captivate and Spiff took Spiff off the table quickly for us. Sales Cookie: we used it for a bit as Captivate didn't have a Hubspot integration, but we quickly outgrew the software and needed a more complex solution. Xactly just doesn't have a great user experience and level of customization needed for our plans. All of this to say, Captivate absolutely wins every time on value for cost and functionality compared to other solutions we have vetted.
We haven't used any similar products, as the organization previously relied on salary surveys completed within a group of similar companies and market surveys. The downside of such surveys was the limited or not relevant datasets and the timing of them as they did not keep pace with the market and were always essentially 6-12 months behind the curve.
Positive: Ability to better understand where our pay is relative to the market and ensure that we are paying competitively and attracting the best possible talent.
Positive: We can have more informed compensation conversations with staff about their pay and why we pay the way we do. We can define our compensation philosophy and build a plan to move forward and ensure we keep staff informed.
Neutral Impact: While PS MP can be robust for certain jobs, using it as a unified platform within the organization is not without its challenges as some jobs just don't quite fit the data provided and we need to make some concessions. While there are benefits to the data, the additional work and less confidence makes those benefits a bit of a wash in the end.
Negative: There has been no negative impact of using PS MP overall to this point.
