Salesforce Spiff is a commission software that combines the familiarity of a spreadsheet with automation at scale. It is designed to streamline workflows, enable easier communication, and instill a high level of trust across all stakeholders.
$900
per year per user
Xactly SimplyComp (discontinued)
Score 5.9 out of 10
N/A
Xactly SimplyComp is a sales incentive compensation planning application to support sales teams with accurate commission, and team performance tracking.
Spiff was the most user-friendly of all the systems evaluated and had some built-in features not ready yet in other platforms (like ASC 606 Reporting). Spiff also had a great sales process and has offered incredible support throughout implementation and use.
I liked the level of service spiff provided, as well as the option to not use a spreadsheet oriented interface. QuotaPath and captivate were both reasonably compelling. Xactly seemed terrible for SMB companies, their pitch was basically that you could buy a base model and …
Spiff can serve well organizations that regularly pay OTE and performance-based incentives as it takes away the pain for users to track their OTE pay. It is also very convenient to access past reports for comparison or whatever purpose you may need it for. The build-in ticketing system also allows users to easily raise inquiries and for admins to have a single inbox for inquiries that they need to address.
It's fine if your comp plans are really simple. It should have no problem multiplying ACV by a rep's BCR and maybe having a SPIFF or two. If you have accelerators, decelerators, complicated hierarchies, constant "exceptions to the rule", and need a platform to be flexible...SimplyComp simply won't be able to help here. Any "solutions" they implement will be short-term bandaids that will have to be addressed again sometime in the future
Reporting of financial statements is simple and easy to navigate.
Plans can be customized to meet multiple different types of bonus/commission schedules.
Salesforce integration further improves the automation of commission reporting.
Administrators have the ability to add/remove plans as needed limiting the need to work with a support person everytime a change is made to the commission plan. This has been particularly useful in our company as we are still trying to develop the appropriate commission plan structure so we are frequently making changes to the existing platform. Our administrator has had no issues making changes as needed and can typically get them done quickly.
Although reporting has been improved, it's an area that I feel could use more development (which they are doing).
Exports are good but to make them great, being able to customize the formatting and data that shows and which data doesn't show would be a great improvement.
The backend can be somewhat confusing with statements and obligations and which should be used when and so on, just as one example. With that being said they are very willing to teach and also just do the updates for you if needed, but if it was a little more intuitive without that help would make it better.
The platform is incredibly complex for non-basic commissions plans and setting things up is painful and time consuming.
Importing functionality is improving, but still subpar, requiring a lot of manual entry for customer plans.
The time lag to actually calculate commission (after a user clicks the "calculate" button) is long, leaving one sitting and waiting for the software to do its thing.
For our non-US team members, we wanted insight into USD and local currency commission. SimplyComp doesn't support this.
I enjoy using it and it is easy to see where you stand, the issue is still no live tracking, or at the very least, twice daily updates. You have the update in the morning, but I would like to see where I stand at the end of the day as well
Overall, the use cases of Spiff have been helping us to address important problems when it comes to commission calculation: (1) Accuracy of the commission calculation, (2) Transparency over how the commission is calculated, (3) Automation of commission calculation, which in turn saves us significant amount of time and energy and allow us to focus more on more important tasks
In all my time using Spiff, I only recall it being unoperational (outside the times when there is scheduled maintence. During those times, Spiff does a good job at communicating when their services will be offline and why). The times when I do get a small error, 9 times out a 10 a simple refresh of the browser will fix the issue.
Pages load quickly, dashboards update numerous times throughout the day, and the integrations are seamless and operate without a hitch. On occasion, commissions will be delayed in calculating corrctly by a day or so, but that is quite rare. I don't find that delay to be a huge hinderance anyways.
I needed my account to be set up and there seemed to be some technical issues with onboarding and a customer service rep made herself immediately available to liaison with our IT department to get me up and running. I did not expect them to tend to our request with such urgency.
Our Implementation Consultant was fantastic. She made herself available, scheduled for in advance to accommodate our schedule, and was very helpful on our calls. She happily executed work on our behalf behind the scenes to help move our implementation along. The Customer Support team was mixed, as is expected with Support teams. Nothing horribly bad, but nothing to write home about. SimplyComp is a newest product for Xactly so everyone is still learning it
The training was conducted by our Spiff Account Manager and they would even create recorded videos we could send to the sales team so when they log in, they would understand how to use Spiff. Account managers at Spiff are a huge reason why I like that company.
It is a night and day difference between Sheets and Excel. The fact that it is integrated with Salesforce and calculates commission as you close deals make it super transparent and efficient when it comes to tracking your performance and commission. Spiff takes the manual work out of the equation. Reduces human error and increases collaboration.
This is the first time I've used a software for commision only. I've usually just used Salesforce to calculate my sales numbers and then do the math myself. This is nice to know the exact number but I don't think a lot better
We have a fairly large Enterprise sales team (200+ people and growing). Back when I first started at my organization this number was actually around 100 people. We've doubled in size since then and we have had zero problems adding these additional users.
It is nice that you can see your current commissions, and if you are in a specific bracket and know you only need one more house sale to go up, SF Spiff helps you to really push to get that last sale by the end of the year. For example, my broker starts 60% / 40% of each sale, but when you make specific commissions, you up that bracket and lock in the new rate, so I am now at 80%/20%.
I feel SF Spiff also has a negative impact that you cannot compare to other agents because I think that would give more of a push for others to do better because no one wants to be the worst agent
Positive impact is our reps are able to view their commissions much more clearly in SFDC. We are also able to calculate 95% of our commissions more rapidly (and have to spot-check the rest).
Negative impact was the onboarding process and "learning as we go" rather than having a set process document for getting us live.
