In the world of enterprise sales compensation and total rewards, convoluted spreadsheets and rigid legacy Incentive Compensation Management (ICM)  players have long been the only options in a historically stagnant space. Enterprise compensation teams have been forced to compromise speed and efficiency for legacy tools that can support their unique complexity and data volume. Yet, as these businesses look to the future with an increased focus on efficiency, they’re realizing that this costly compromise isn’t sustainable for their business health. 

Fortunately, the days of compromising between speed and scale are over. CaptivateIQ is building the future of enterprise commissions with SmartGrid™, the only real-time commission engine built for enterprise scale. SmartGrid is our proprietary real-time ELT & calculation engine that powers our modern modeling experience. With our latest innovations, SmartGrid can now both support the magnitude of enterprise commissions with the ability to load up to 50M records of data per sync, while operating in real-time, taking just 12 seconds to process calculations with 10M+ source transactions. As a result, businesses like Affirm, Gong, and Figma have turned their commissions program from a cost center into an efficiency driver.

How SmartGrid is shaping the future of enterprise commissions

So how are Enterprises becoming more efficient with SmartGrid? 

Go-live and adapt plans in a fraction of the time:

Enterprises often have multiple  data sources, each with massive amounts of data. Whether it’s a game of telephone with a vendor’s services team, or manually jiggering data into a rigid import template, the process of gathering and preparing enterprise data to be commissions-ready is costly, tedious and tiresome. 

Enter our SmartGrid ELT engine, which delivers  real-time data management through native data connectors and no-code transformations. With this Extract-Load-Transform approach, customers can bring in data how they want, when they want it, and manipulate it to their unique needs without code and in real-time. SmartGrid ELT enables CaptivateIQ customers to go live in record time — often less than half the time of leading legacy tools.

We can now implement our own changes to the compensation plan and are more likely to tweak things or make small improvements knowing we don’t have to involve data engineering. Using this system has made it more feasible to roll out small changes incrementally without investing a lot of time.

— Tatiana Silverman, Director of Compensation & HRIS, Nolan Transportation Group

Adapt to market changes in seconds:

In an ever-changing business market, having the ability to stay ahead of the game with agility in your incentive program is critical to running a highly performant revenue organization. Yet legacy tools can often tie their users down with blackbox solutions they can’t manage themselves or slow processing engines that delay payouts. 

With the SmartGrid calculation engine, our customers can model scenarios in real-time, allowing them to make changes up to 6x faster and see the impacts immediately. With a no-code interface, admins can build any plan or scenario, no matter the complexity. With this power, any incentive program can be future proofed against the inevitable dynamics of the business.

We needed a solution that was agile, and could be owned by finance professionals that were very comfortable in spreadsheets. We’re a small but mighty team that manages comp for 400+ sellers.

— Michael Duncan, Director of Revenue Operations, Gong

Run complex commission calculations in minutes:

Every second counts when it comes to big, hairy enterprise processes. Yet legacy technology often leaves comp admins waiting hours or even overnight for commissions calculations.

CaptivateIQ's SmartGrid calculation engine removes the waiting game of commissions processing with ultra-fast processing, so you can process your payouts immediately and move on with your workflow. For example, payout processing for enterprises with over ten million source transactions takes just six minutes to complete. The result? A commission solution with a lower total cost of ownership, and a direct impact on your bottom line. 

The two biggest things that CaptivateIQ helped us with were to eliminate the 7-10 days process of calculating commissions and giving employees visibility. Calculations are now literally a click of a button. And every employee can see a live status or past commissions.

— Nader Saad, Senior Director of Finance, RPM

Empower reps with anytime earnings visibility:

While every incentive program is designed to motivate sellers to perform desired behaviors, it can only be effective if it’s visible and clear to reps. Homegrown or legacy commission solutions often don’t offer reps  real-time visibility into their performance, reducing the impact of the incentive program. 

CaptivateIQ's SmartGrid calculation engine gives sellers real-time visibility into their past,present and future earnings. They can even leverage real-time commissions and pipeline data with our What-if Earnings Calculator to model potential earnings. This all leads to a more motivated and productive sales force, as we’ve seen with seller productivity boosts of up to 10%.

Payees no longer need to wait for one to two weeks after month close before seeing expected payment amounts. They now have the option of previewing updated pay statements in real-time as deals close.

— Sean Emberley, Sales Operations Analyst, Planview

Operate more intelligently with real-time reporting:

While the purpose of incentives may lie in motivating sellers to perform, the true potential of commissions lie in the intelligent operations the data can inform as a result. Yet, delivering insight into the key metrics such as cost of sales, sales yield, attainment and more, is easier said than done. Blocked by blackbox solutions and delays in data processing, leadership can’t derive the insights they need to make decisions in a timely manner.

With our SmartGrid calculation engine, comp analysts can deliver leadership real-time insight into the metrics they care about, with ease. Whether that be performance metrics for sales leaders, commission spend insight for finance, or anything in between, real-time reporting in CaptivateIQ enables businesses to operate smarter and action commissions data, leading to better business performance and health. 

This additional time frees up space for analysis to see how our sales teams are being commissioned, to see if they are being commissioned the right way, bringing the right revenue. The extra time means I can ensure that our commission plans are really designed to be aligned with our company goals.

— Alex Wu, Financial Analyst, Showpad

 The only real-time commission engine for enterprise scale

Our customers aren’t the only ones taking notice. Because of SmartGrid, CaptivateIQ received the highest score possible in the calculation processing and data management criteria in The Forrester Wave™: Sales Performance Management Platforms, Q1 2023 report, as well as being recognized as having an execution roadmap that “delivered an enterprise-grade solution” with “a complete incentive compensation product that is robust enough to support the most complex requirements.” 

Learn more about the future of enterprise commissions

Curious to learn more about CaptivateIQ’s proprietary SmartGrid™ ELT  & calculation engine, and how we’re building the commission solution fit for modern Enterprises? Take a call with someone from our team to learn more about how CaptivateIQ can help get commissions right for your business.

Want to see SmartGrid live in action? Register for our upcoming demo spotlight webinar.  You can also learn more about SmartGrid™ and everything it can do for your business here.