Item: Spiff
Rating: 10
Author: Wendy West

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Spiff is used for all of our GTM incentive compensation plans including sales and professional services. It provides automated calculations as well as transparency which we were previously missing. Statements are now readily available and are no longer delivered via cut and paste spreadsheets for each individual & team. It has streamlined our user review process, shortened the audit time, and helped to receive exception requests and/or data issues earlier during the audit helping us to submit accurate accruals and actual payments. It is also providing us with the data necessary to begin developing a database for costs and performance, providing up to date info to leadership as well as future modeling.

Pros and Cons

Calculation transparency vis the Trace functions
Team Lead/Manager access to up-to-date info on all Team members
Continual improvement of the platform has provided increased efficiencies for Admins

Downloaded Statements are difficult to read and do not provide the right pieces of info for users to find it helpful
Dashboard or high-level metric cards for Team Leads to see Team results would be a great enhancement

Return on Investment

Audit time cut 50+%
Delays in issue escalation reduced, enabling corrections to be included with associated payroll instead of a cycle or more behind

Usability

Overall the tool is user-friendly and intuitive. The articles in Spiff University have been helpful in walking me thru questions and figuring out issues I run across when playing with rules and calculations. I've found 30-minute demos for our end-users are more than adequate as they are able to maneuver around on their own very easily. Formula reading/writing in Spiff is also similar to Excel/R so one can quickly adapt.

Trust in the Compensation Process

I think that it has increased user trust in calculation results by showing them the specific details of each obligation. It has also provided a sense of empowerment with the ability to access their progress 24-7 with daily updates - I think this is the feature they appreciate the most.

Key Insights

Do you think Spiff delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Spiff's feature set?

Yes

Did Spiff live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Spiff go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Spiff again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Microsoft Excel, Salesforce CPQ

Likelihood to Recommend

From my experience I feel Spiff can handle just about any Comp Plan that is thrown at it. And I also think there are multiple ways in which problems can be solved thus adding to its flexibility for complex issues as they may arise. In some cases we have payout rules that do all of the math previously contained in Excel and other cases in which we decided to simply use a table for results and targets. We've had positive feedback from our end-users and have been able to add metrics as requested. Having a tool that Admins can build upon and create/modify rules and databases is exactly what we were looking for to be as self-sufficient as possible. We've already experienced a redesign to one of our plans this year and I was able to create new rules with new requirements while still retaining and including 1H results. Also, having been a part of both a partial and full implementation (at 2 different companies) I have nothing but high accolades for the Spiff teams I worked with in both instances!

The only thing I'd change is the name :)

Overall Satisfaction with Spiff