Simpli.fi’s CFO knew this manual incentive compensation process would need to be replaced as they continued on this path of aggressive growth...
Simpli.fi is a leader in programmatic advertising and agency management software delivering integrated omnichannel workflow that helps media buying organizations perform more effectively and efficiently. Simpli.fi’s primary clients are independent advertising agencies as well as multi-location brands, local media groups, networks, and trading desks with over 130,000 active daily campaigns run by more than 30,000 active advertisers.
Simpli.fi was on a path of rapid growth and was adding 50 - 60 new team members per year, the majority in the sales organization. The finance team began to reach a breaking point where managing commissions manually, for more than 30 sales reps, was becoming too cumbersome. Whenever a manager made a change to a commission plan it would require a lot of effort to fix and would affect multiple statements across each team member.
Simpli.fi’s CFO knew this manual process would need to be replaced as they continued on this path of aggressive growth. The finance team evaluated a few of the top incentive compensation software providers and compared their features and implementation options.
“I was concerned that if we went with one of the larger, legacy software providers that each time we needed to rewrite a plan, we would get charged hefty fees for customizing the software,” said Andries Marx, CFO, Simpli.fi. “In our growing business we make frequent changes to our comp plans and often make small changes, to help drive sales performance. I didn’t want to have to rely on or pay for an expensive consultant every time we needed to make changes as we evolved our plans.”
The price point of Performio was very favorable and they estimated saving $25k a year on administrative overhead alone that they would get back through automation. This was in addition to the other positive ROI benefits including reduction in payment errors and improved sales team morale as a result of better transparency.
“I got to the point where it just made clear sense to invest in a software solution to manage our comp plans and automate the process,” said Marx. “One of our principles is running a lean organization as we scale, so calculating an ROI is very important. I also wanted a solution that was easy to implement, without a lot of fuss, and a system that would be scalable as our organization grew. Selecting Performio seemed like a win-win situation for us.”
After they implemented Performio, the commissions process went much faster. The time it took to process commission payments was reduced from 4 - 5 days per month to 4 - 5 hours. Other successes included adding targets in Performio for the sales team so they could track their individual performance. With the visualization on their dashboards they could see the amount of business they did each month. Managers could monitor their team’s performance and view YTD stack ranking across the team.
“We could have reviewed sales team performance in Salesforce, but Performio gave us a cost effective workaround vs. hiring a consultant to customize the dashboards,” said Marx. “It was a positive surprise that we could track our KPI’s within Performio and elevate the visibility of those KPI’s for the salesforce.”
Today, Simpli.fi has doubled the number of users of Performio. The Chief Revenue Officer now has visibility into regional sales performance across the entire team. Sales reps are happy with having one single source of truth for their sales performance. It is also now much easier for managers to have clear visibility into their team and to track performance of sales reps and commission payouts.
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