Contentful

Contentful, the leading content platform for digital-first businesses, helps over 30% of the Fortune 500 and thousands of brands around the world create and manage digital experiences for their customers across any channel.

It enables greater speed and scale than traditional content management solutions. Contentful unifies content in a single hub, structures it for use in any digital channel, and integrates seamlessly with hundreds of other tools through open APIs. Companies such as Chanel, Bang & Olufsen, Shiseido, Peloton, BP and many others rely on Contentful’s platform.

The Challenge

The sales operations team at Contentful had been using Xactly, but they struggled with several issues. Xactly’s challenging user experience was frustrating the sales reps and admins and resulting in low adoption. The data in Xactly was tied to the naming convention and workflows in Salesforce, which prevented admins from changing the names to be more in line with compensation labels than sales terminology. Finally, Xactly’s multi-currency support and reporting was limited, and sales operations could not produce the correct results nor the reports they needed to collaborate with FP&A.

“Because commission tools are accounting tools, the sales operations team had to manage a system that was not their core functional expertise,” explains Adrien Del Bonta, Director Sales Operations, Contentful.

“The custom objects in SFDC were a constant struggle when using Xactly which was embedded in SFDC at the opportunity level. With multi-currency turned on in SFDC, the amount is real time, but it could not map the correct amount into Xactly. As a result, we could not get the formulas to work properly to calculate the business development team’s commissions.”

They ended up resorting back to spreadsheets to adjust the amounts based on US dollars for countries outside the US, which was not scalable given their rapid company growth. The paper management alone across 17 plans was very inefficient and extremely time consuming. While each plan is in the US or EMEA, the plan execution is different based on currency, documentation, SPIFs, and hierarchies.

The Solution

They decided to undertake a search for a new commissions software solution. Important criteria for them were a solution that was easy to use, fast to implement, would allow them to model future comp plans, and a strong partnership relationship with the vendor.

After evaluating three providers, Performio stood out for its intuitive user interface, comprehensive reporting, automation of commission calculations, and its ability to handle multi-currency.
In addition, they felt they would get the best level of professional service and customer support with this partnership, something that had been lacking with Xactly.

The Results

“The level of partnership during our implementation and post implementation has been wonderful,” confirms Del Bonta. “We make frequent changes to comp plans, offer SPIF’s every quarter, and add new teams and roles quite often. The thoroughness of the professional services organization to truly understand our comp plans, provide helpful training and problem solve to find solutions to our challenges has made all the difference.”

Prior to Performio being rolled out, the sales operations team was spending two weeks per month handling commissions and comp plans. In addition, there was growing complexity and volume of plans due to their rapid growth. Today, their Performio admin rolls up to the finance team, freeing the sales operations team from this responsibility.

“Performio is a much more automated solution than Excel and can calculate the plans much faster,” says Diana Estrada, Sales Compensation Analyst. “The admin training was a great experience and ticket time resolution has been really good. There is excellent communication across support, professional services, and our team. There is always a solution to any problem or challenge. Not only that, our reps love that they can review their dashboards and see what their payouts would be if they hit their targets.”

Across their 200-person sales team, 60% are in the US and 40% are based in Europe. It is very important that reps have all the details of their commissions that they can access in a secure and private way.

“If I can’t explain the plan easily or if a sales rep does not know how he or she makes money, and the tool is getting in the way of communicating that information, then it is probably not the right solution for an organization. The feedback from our sellers has been very positive and they love how easy it is to use and that they can find all the information on their plans, targets, and payouts in Performio. They never wanted to log-in to Xactly because it was difficult to use and not intuitive,” says Del Bonta.

Today, as Contentful continues their path of rapid growth, they rely on Performio’s sandbox to plan and test new comp plans. The results from these modeling exercises are made available to the finance and sales operations teams to support future plan changes.