14-day commission cycles, down to 2. Eight plans, four teams.

With the business evolving constantly, sales compensation policies at FarEye needed to align to those changing needs, which was inefficient to track on spreadsheets. FarEye shifted to Visdum to adopt an efficient and accurate sales compensation system, empowering its Finance, RevOps, and Sales teams.

01 · The company

FarEye, a last-mile delivery platform that scaled fast

FarEye is a low-code, Intelligent Delivery Management Platform designed for a better delivery experience. Its platform turns deliveries into a competitive advantage, and retail, e-commerce, and third-party logistics companies use its combination of orchestration, real-time visibility, and branded customer experiences to simplify complex last-mile delivery logistics.

FarEye started in 2013 with 35 employees and 10 customers. Today it is a global leader in last-mile delivery, backed by $150 million of funding and serving 150+ customers across 30+ countries, with 800+ employees and headquarters in Chicago, Illinois.

02 · The trigger

Why mid-year policy changes broke the spreadsheet

As FarEye expanded, the sales organization branched into multiple teams: sales, pre-sales, partner, inside sales, and resellers. That alone made sales compensation more complex. The harder problem was that the commission plans themselves had to change mid-year to stay aligned with the business, through quota and variable revisions and deferred incentive structures. Handled by hand on spreadsheets, those changes led to frequent miscalculations and incorrect payouts.

The scale of what Finance and RevOps were managing:

Updating spreadsheets to accommodate mid-year policy changes was extremely challenging. With mid-year kickers, spiffs, exceptions, or overrides in play, the operations teams often found themselves in the blind, which made spreadsheets ineffective for sales compensation. The RevOps team also struggled to maintain data hygiene, because AEs and BDRs seldom updated the CRM accurately.

Finance could not distribute detailed incentive statements, because spreadsheets could not produce them, so reps had no visibility into their payouts. That break in communication was starting to build mistrust between the Finance and sales teams.

Reps felt it directly. They received incentive statements at the end of each quarter, then spent hours shadow accounting to check their own payouts. Spreadsheets seldom accounted for mid-year adjustments such as kickers or spiffs and did not track deferred payments, so reps could not stay on top of what they were earning or what was still coming. They also had little visibility into how Finance arrived at the numbers, because spreadsheets could not capture a detailed incentive breakdown or show how a commission rate was calculated.

03 · The evaluation

What FarEye needed from a commission system

FarEye's requirements came straight from the problems above.

04 · The decision

The decision logic: The hard requirement was never calculating one plan correctly on one day. It was absorbing mid-year quota revisions, spiffs, kickers, and deferred payouts without the process falling apart, which is exactly what spreadsheets could not do.

05 · The implementation

Live since November 2020

FarEye shifted to Visdum in November 2020 to automate sales compensation, eliminating the spreadsheets, giving Finance and RevOps a way to manage and track commissions efficiently, and letting sales reps track their earnings in real time.

Adoption across three teams needed to be effortless. Visdum's OneLogin integration gives Finance, RevOps, and Sales single sign-on, so there is little friction logging in and the data stays secure.

06 · What success looks like

Eight plans across the whole sales organization

FarEye today runs 8 commission plans for 70+ commissioned sellers across its entire sales organization: Sales, Pre-Sales, Partner, and Inside Sales, with two variations each for individual contributors and managers. The commission process now takes 2 days instead of 14.

Mid-year policy changes such as spiffs, kickers, or deferred payouts are now straightforward for Finance to track, through Visdum's flexible incentive plan designer. Finance used to field a substantial number of rep inquiries about commission payouts; that volume has declined significantly and resolution time has dropped from weeks to 48 hours, because the communication between Finance and sales is transparent.

Reps have their commission rates and plan breakdown at their fingertips. Near real-time updates help them forecast their pipeline more accurately and keep them motivated to hit their goals, and mid-year policy changes are easy to follow, which removes the need for shadow accounting or confusion about payouts. CRM hygiene improved alongside it, because the sales team is more motivated to keep Salesforce data updated now that compensation is tied to it, which makes the operations teams' job considerably easier.