Challenge

Brian Degrassi is no stranger to complex commissions payout structures or automated commissions platforms. He has spent his entire career optimizing financial operations for companies big and small, and he is an absolute Excel wizard. Despite his proficiency in Excel, Brian and his teammates were spending at least 2 weeks per quarter pulling together spreadsheets with rows and columns into the hundreds. 

We were using Xactly, which would calculate the monthly commissions perfectly fine. However, in reality, I was doing most of the work in Excel because our payouts structure is a bit complicated. We needed a robust solution that could track our deals and related commissions over time and the interface of Xactly was not set up for that.

He describes the process as: manual, tedious, and lagging.

The downstream effects were significant. We were spending so much time on administrative tasks that we couldn’t focus on the real business problems that we wanted to be solving.

Any business leader is likely to empathize with Brian’s frustration about having so much bandwidth diverted to administrative tasks.

Solution

It was love at first sight between Brian and CaptivateIQ.

I’ve done commissions and finance my entire career, so I have enough experience to know what we need. When I saw CaptivateIQ during the demo, I thought ‘Yes! I always imagined there was a tool out there that could do that! It was everything I was looking for.‍

FLEXIBLE, SMART MODELING‍

Unlike other platforms, CaptivateIQ allows you to input complex parameters so that you can create incentives programs and sales commission structures that work best for your team. There are companies out there that only stick to basic structures because it’s all their commissions platform can handle. But, we don’t believe that the tail should wag the dog! That’s why the CaptivateIQ platform was intelligently built with as much flexibility as possible.

CLEAN, ACCESSIBLE INTERFACE

Transparency is important to Brian so he was always diligent about sharing his Excel spreadsheets with sales reps and trying to make them as accessible as possible. However, the interface was still rather daunting for many members of his team — imagine going through an Excel sheet whose column count goes up to “DZ.” (That’s 104 columns!)

With CaptivateIQ, sales reps can now see all of the information that is relevant to their performance on a single page. They can also easily access previous month’s data with just a click rather than having to go through old emails to find the right Excel file. Brian says that the clean interface of CaptivateIQ has created a greater sense of trust among his team and that they are likely spending less time trying to understand data and more time driving sales. Sounds like a win for everyone.

Results

The Excel and sales management veteran describes his experience with CaptivateIQ as: clean, streamlined, and accurate

It is extremely gratifying to receive the stamp of approval from Brian and his team, especially given Brian’s extensive experience with sales commissions platforms and tools. 

We hope to help many more Excel wizards in the future. If you consider yourself an Excel wizard and you’re not sure how CaptivateIQ can help you, please contact us so that we can give you a demo. We are confident that we can be everything you’re looking for.