The Challenge
Nitro was using spreadsheets to calculate their commissions, and they had to dedicate a lot of resources to validate payouts
Nitro decided to automate their commissions process because it was very time-consuming for their Finance and Revenue Operations teams to calculate commissions manually for over 100 payees. Processing commissions in spreadsheets took significant time and required lots of validation from multiple teams. So, they had to dedicate a huge portion of their resources towards validations during every payout cycle. It would take them about over 10 days to just validate payouts and then send them over to payroll.
The sales compensation plans at Nitro are fairly complex, with most plans having two or three components. They also utilize MBOs in a few of their plans to incentivize qualitative work that can't necessarily be measured in their CRM, Salesforce. Creating these plans and managing frequent changes added to the workload. Nitro was looking for a commission partner that would help them ease the stress of payout processing while also providing their sales team with transparency of their earnings.
The Solution
Nitro automates commission processing with Everstage while keeping commission-related data in one platform for their sales team
Logic-based, no-code plan designing
Yasmina Emara, the Senior Compensation Analyst at Nitro and Everstage’s power user, joined Nitro recently. She took up the task of designing their commission plans, and configuring them. Everstage’s plan designer requires no coding knowledge and therefore, she was able to quickly learn the ropes and set up all the plans by herself without any support from the Everstage team. As the plan designer is designed for flexibility and scale, it barely took a few minutes to build and upload MBOs as well.
Building trust with an engaging payee experience
Nitro provides their payees with a detailed breakdown of their commissions, and their quota attainment in a user interface that is simple yet engaging. The data is accurate and brings together all commission-related information in one single platform. The visibility that the payees have helps them plan their quarter better to reach their targets.
Yasmina also compares the payee experience at Everstage with the legacy software she used in her previous organization. With the legacy software, salespeople found the data quite difficult to consume because there were just so many numbers on one page, and they didn't really know where to find the information they required.
Besides access to real-time quota attainment and payout information, the sales team at Nitro can also forecast their commission payouts based on the opportunities in their pipeline. It helps salespeople define their next steps, and make informed decisions on the opportunities they could pursue in order to reach their goals. Additionally, it eased up a portion of Yasmina’s bandwidth that went into doing these calculations herself for the sales reps.
Allowing reps to submit the queries in Everstage is another huge advantage for Yasmina. She doesn't have to scroll through her inbox for queries. Payees have been utilizing the feature regularly and it makes answering questions more efficient, since there isn’t a lot of back and forth in Everstage.
The Result
Nitro now plans and administrates their incentive program with significant time-savings, and gets increased returns from their incentive program
Increased credibility in commission processing
Nitro facilitates better collaboration and alignment between teams, including Sales, Finance, and HR. Finance and HR teams utilize Everstage for reporting and additional validation before payroll processing. The accuracy and the credibility of the calculations on Everstage helps teams seamlessly move commissions to payroll.
7 days saved monthly during payout cycles
Nitro automated the entire commission processing busywork with Everstage. Yasmina was able to save a significant amount of her time on a weekly basis as well as during payout cycles. As the only person taking care of commission processing end-to-end at Nitro, she is now able to focus on strategic projects instead of spending too much time on busywork.
Higher ROI from their incentive program
Nitro observed certain avenues where Everstage had been beneficial in limiting their spending. Everstage automates commission processing end-to-end reducing administrative overhead. As a result, Nitro didn’t need more than one person to oversee commissions, and they had the rest of the team focusing on other areas. Secondly, Everstage was Nitro’s single source of truth for all performance and payout-related data. Yasmina was able to derive meaningful insights that helped her design plans for the year more efficiently.
