Automating payments for the corporate sales force leads to a $10 million windfall for Spiff

Salt Lake City’s Spiff has announced a $10 million round of funding to expand the sales and marketing efforts for its service that automates commission payments for sales people.

Some of the biggest names in startup tech are using the service to pay their sales force, including Brex, Workfront, Algolia and the publicly traded startup Qualys.

The idea at Spiff is to create a new software category around sales compensation management, and it’s gotten buy-in from investors at Norwest Venture Partners, Next World Ventures and Epic Ventures. Seed investors, including Kickstart Album Ventures, Pipeline Capital and Peterson Ventures, returned to invest in the company as well.

“Commissions are a major cause of anxiety for teams who don’t understand or trust their incentive plan and many waste hours every month correcting mistakes or arguing with finance, which hits bottom lines,” said Spiff chief executive, Jeron Paul. “Norwest’s investment will help us automate commission calculations so sales teams have one less thing to worry about in these challenging times.”

Paul, a serial entrepreneur whose most recent business, Capshare, was sold to Solium in 2017, has spent the better part of his professional career developing services businesses for enterprises.

“The world of sales compensation software is long overdue for a revamp,” said Sean Jacobsohn, partner at Norwest Venture Partners, in a statement. “With 85 percent of companies still calculating sales commissions manually in Google Sheets or Excel, I’m excited to partner with Spiff to help transform the way people think about sales compensation and provide  sales teams with a deeper level of  visibility into their commissions.”