What Is Spiff? A High-Level Overview of Salesforce’s Sales Commission Platform
Makenzi Cotton
Sales teams thrive on motivation and clear incentives, but designing an effective commission plan can be complex. In fact, only 28% of surveyed salespeople believed they could meet their sales targets in 2022. Spiff comes in by implementing a compensation plan that rewards reps for closing more deals. But what is Spiff? Spiff from Salesforce is an incentive compensation management (ICM) platform designed to automate even the most complex commission structures. By eliminating manual calculations, Spiff ensures that sales teams are compensated accurately, efficiently, and in real time.
In this post, we’ll go over the key features and benefits of using Spiff and why you should consider hiring a Spiff partner to implement such a robust program.
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Introducing Spiff: Salesforce’s Commission Platform
As mentioned earlier, Spiff is an industry-leading ICM system that automates the commission process. After Salesforce acquired the tool in February 2024, Spiff has become an increasingly popular tool for organizations with complex reward structures.
Creative incentive programs — such as SPIFF (Sales Performance Incentive Fund), SPIV (Sales Program Incentive Coucher), and sales compensation plans — are additional ways to fuel salespeople to close more sales. Business leaders utilize both short-term and long-term incentive programs to boost sales productivity; however, calculating these intricate rewards manually can become difficult and hinder an organization’s scalability.
Introducing an ICM system like Spiff empowers your finance team to quickly and accurately commission based on the individual sales rep’s performance. Utilizing this single source of truth allows:
- Your finance team to automate the commission process
- Your sales team to see their sales progress and commissions earned in real-time
EBQ’s quick insights:
- We typically see medium to large businesses invest in an ICM to reduce commission lag times
- Spiff costs $75 USD/ per user/ per month
- We highly recommend users utilize a CRM implementation partner to maximize their Spiff utility
Key Features
In comparison to other ICM competitors, our Salesforce experts are drawn by these 7 key features that make the commission process more efficient, transparent, and effective:
- Enhanced analytics: Spiff delivers real-time reporting based on current sales activities.
- Powerful automation and workflow capabilities: Spiff’s automation can accommodate nuanced accelerators, tiers, and triggers that will impact each salesperson’s commissions differently.
- Third-party tool integrations: Other than Salesforce, Spiff can connect natively with tools such as payroll, ERP, and HCM.
- Commission calculation and estimates: Allows for data-driven estimation of how the sales reps will be compensated in the future.
- Customized rep statements: Empower sales reps to track their own sales activity and its impact on their compensation.
- Centralized comments: Allows for a centralized platform for your sales, leadership, and finance teams to raise questions and concerns.
- Automated expense reporting: These expense reports will also be in compliance with ASC 606 and IFRS 15 guidelines.
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4 reasons why EBQ recommends Spiff
Spiff simplifies commission management by reducing manual effort, improving accuracy, and cutting administrative costs. You might have considered hiring additional financial professionals to keep up with the increased sales productivity and commission calculation.
Before you make any drastic hiring decisions, you can reduce this downtime and even keep overhead costs lower by implementing Spiff to automate workflows so your team can focus on high-value work.
1. Reduce commission review and reward processes
Accelerators, tiers, and triggers work together to push your sales reps to hit their goals. However, factoring in each sales activity and calculating their final commissions every pay period will be taxing on your finance team.
By leveraging Spiff’s ability to automate nuanced commission workflows, hundreds of commission calculations can now be done in seconds. With its integration with your payroll platform, you can quickly reward your sales team for their efforts and prevent payroll delays.
2. Reduce administrative overhead
Building a team of finance professionals is an expensive endeavor. Not only do you have to pay a competitive salary, but you also have to account for their benefits, tools, and even onboarding downtime before they reach full productivity.
Spiff reduces administrative costs by leveraging real-time data to automate commission calculations. You can now rely on fewer people to periodically check Spiff’s workflows and address any concerns from the platform.
3. Improve finance-sales team alignment
Salespeople and finance professionals get overwhelmed and frustrated when they have to open independent spreadsheets, cross-reference them, and manually calculate each commission estimate. Besides, there’s no saying if the spreadsheet these reps are referring to is the most updated file.
Spiff improves alignment by integrating all sales and finance data into one platform — thus allowing both teams to check their progress at any given moment. By having everyone reference one single source of truth, you can ensure the utmost accuracy and visibility across all departments.
4. Better sales projection
Budgeting for a fair compensation program is often one of the most challenging aspects of leading a sales team. A more nuanced approach will inevitably lead to even more confusion down the road.
Spiff’s power to project sales commissions based on current activity using AI is unmatched. These insights allow for better sales projection down the line based on hard data — not estimations.
Where EBQ comes into play
Spiff’s impact depends on expert implementation. Without the right setup, you risk calculation errors, misaligned data, and inefficient workflows—all of which can lead to frustrated sales teams and inaccurate payouts.
By partnering with EBQ, you can:
- Leverage our Salesforce expertise: With over 900 Salesforce projects under our belts, we have truly seen it all. We’ve worked with every industry from health and wellness to SaaS, so we are confident in our ability to create a customized Spiff solution for you with low downtimes.
- Ensure flexibility and accuracy: Every platform requires regular optimization to ensure maximized efficiency, and Spiff is no different. Quickly pivot sales priorities with the help of our Salesforce experts.
- Maximize out-of-the-box options and functionality: Spiff offers a lot of built-in functionality to handle even the most sophisticated sales structures, but you need a guide like us to navigate through every option available.
- Integrate Salesforce and third-party tools seamlessly: Ensure every data point and field are mapped correctly to leverage Spiff’s automation tools. From there, we can make sure every connector is firing correctly to reduce overall downtime.
- Meticulous workflow setup with ease: From advanced approval workflows to printing out robust statements, Spiff can truly do it all. We set up every workflow and automation on your behalf so you can focus on what matters most.
TLDR; Spiff is only as successful as your implementation
Spiff is by far the most robust commission platform on the market today, so it takes an expert to maximize the system. Without the right expertise, you risk missing out on key features that could optimize your commission processes. By partnering with a Spiff expert like EBQ, you gain the knowledge and hands-on support needed to unlock every advantage this sophisticated ICM tool has to offer.
Unlock the full power of Spiff with EBQ. Our Salesforce experts ensure seamless setup, accurate commission calculations, and ongoing optimization—so you get the most from your investment. Visit our Salesforce Consulting page to learn why thousands of organizations choose to partner with EBQ.
About the Author:
Makenzi is a Revenue Consultant at EBQ. She specializes in Salesforce Solution Engineering. With experience managing 100+ projects and streamlining 340+ workflows, she drives TOF growth and improves SQL-to-MQL conversions. Her expertise regularly delivers 200-300% ROI for organizations.
