The News: Salesforce has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Spiff, a provider of automated incentive compensation management (ICM) software. Spiff features a low-code interface that is designed to help organizations easily create sales compensation plans that automatically trigger payments based on pre-agreed targets.
While terms of the deal were not disclosed, the acquisition is set to close sometime during the first few months of calendar year 2024 and will be integrated within Salesforce’s Sales Performance Management software, a CRM-connected product that connects customer and sales team data.
You can read the release from Salesforce on its website.
Salesforce to Acquire Incentive Compensation Management Provider Spiff
Analyst Take: Salesforce announced it had agreed to acquire Spiff, a provider of low-code automated ICM software that allows organizations to set up sales compensation plans that automatically update based on sales professionals meeting their pre-agreed targets. The software contains native integrations for the common enterprise CRM and ERP systems, and the Spiff platform is capable of handling intricate commission structures. Moreover, the platform allows sales representatives to see what commission is due to them in real-time.
Spiff, a Salt Lake City-based startup, has raised more than $110 million since its founding in 2017, including an investment from Salesforce Ventures, which invested in Spiff’s Series B round in 2021 and led its $50 million Series C round earlier this year.
According to the company, the acquisition will help chief revenue officers (CROs) to better align financial and sales operations teams while letting them self-manage complex incentive compensation plans. Further, gaining visibility into incentive compensation structures and how they are tied into specific products or programs will help organizations better analyze and understand the factors driving top-line revenue growth.
Spiff to Provide Transparency, Flexibility, Ease-of-Use, and Visibility to the Commission Process
Spiff’s platform is designed to make it easier for organizational leaders to set up and automate complex commission plans while providing more visibility to sales personnel. Spiff is designed to leverage the familiar spreadsheet-like interface with automation technology to enable compensation and incentive plan compensation plans to be created quickly while ensuring payments can be made as soon as KPIs or goals have been achieved.
For organizational leaders and sales professionals, the setup, administration of, and payment of commissions can be fraught with complexity and opacity. In a world where organizations are struggling to attract and retain successful talent, the ability to provide real-time visibility into incentive payments is key to keeping salespeople abreast of their performance and motivated to reach their goals.
Acquisition Follows Years of Availability on the Salesforce AppExchange
Spiff has been available on the Salesforce AppExchange for several years, and the acquisition of Spiff ensures that Salesforce customers will have access to the technology through Sales Performance Management. Salesforce has taken this approach in the past, acquiring companies that were in its ecosystem. Most recently, Salesforce in October announced it would purchase Airkit, a low-code platform for building AI customer service agents, whose technology will be folded into Salesforce Service Cloud.
These deals continue a trend of Salesforce making acquisitions to round out the company’s technological capabilities, such as acquiring collaboration hub Slack in 2020, data visualization company Tableau in 2019, and integration platform as a service (iPaaS) vendor MuleSoft in 2018, each of which provided the CRM vendor with additional functionality that the company was unlikely to be capable of building itself.
The integration of Spiff’s technology within its platform likely will pay dividends beyond offering greater user functionality. As Salesforce continues to deploy AI across its offerings, the ability to incorporate compensation and incentive data within its algorithms will help customers derive further insights into the factors that impact the sales process, from the top of the funnel on down.
Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.
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Author Information
Keith Kirkpatrick is Research Director, Enterprise Software & Digital Workflows for The Futurum Group. Keith has over 25 years of experience in research, marketing, and consulting-based fields.
He has authored in-depth reports and market forecast studies covering artificial intelligence, biometrics, data analytics, robotics, high performance computing, and quantum computing, with a specific focus on the use of these technologies within large enterprise organizations and SMBs. He has also established strong working relationships with the international technology vendor community and is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and events.
In his career as a financial and technology journalist he has written for national and trade publications, including BusinessWeek, CNBC.com, Investment Dealers’ Digest, The Red Herring, The Communications of the ACM, and Mobile Computing & Communications, among others.
He is a member of the Association of Independent Information Professionals (AIIP).
Keith holds dual Bachelor of Arts degrees in Magazine Journalism and Sociology from Syracuse University.
