How Haptik supported their unique business model with the right sales compensation platform

Due to the nature of Haptik’s business model where sales commissionable events occur over an extended period of time, tracking multiple such events & ensuring accurate payouts using excel spreadsheets became a challenge. Add to that, the complexity around multiple systems and teams working together, Haptik felt the need to shift to an efficient sales compensation system to build an innovative comp plan design that models the right sales behavior for continued success.

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About Haptik

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HQ: New York, NY

400+ employees

Using Visdum since August 2021

Business Category: Enterprise Conversational AI Platform

CRM: Hubspot

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Haptik helps brands acquire, convert, engage and delight users with AI-driven, personalized, conversational experiences across 20 channels and 100+ languages. 

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With the vision of creating the most compelling conversational commerce platform of the 21st century, Haptik’s Conversational Commerce platform enables brands to design delightful experiences that improve conversion rates across every stage of their customer’s journey. 

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Founded in 2013, Haptik’s leading clients and partners include KFC, Whirlpool, Starhub, HP, Reliance Jio, CEAT, Disney Hotstar, OLA, and Zurich Insurance among others. The company has been featured as a Category Leader across many platforms including Gartner, G2, Opus Research & more. Haptik has raised a total funding of $12.2M over 2 rounds and is backed by investors like Kalaari Capital and Times Internet.

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The Challenge: Spreadsheets were inadequate in accommodating unique sales compensation structure

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At Haptik, sales commissions are tied to three commissionable events - booking, billing, and collection, which occur over an extended period of time. Additionally, these events are captured by the teams responsible across multiple software tools (different tools are used for tracking booking, billing, and collection), including their CRM, Hubspot. This unique nature of Haptik’s business rendered spreadsheets completely ineffective in running an effective sales commission process.

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1. Clunky manual workflows became a logistical nightmare for Finance

As Haptik grew across geographies, managing sales commissions using spreadsheets turned into a nightmare for the Finance team. With 50+ sales reps spread across three different continents (North America, Europe, and Asia), the Finance team needed to support multiple sales reps with detailed break-down of their earnings every quarter. The team found it challenging to compute sales commissions on spreadsheets due to data flowing in from multiple sources based on commission events.

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Additionally, distributing commission statements was an intricate challenge as it was cumbersome to split the master spreadsheet into individual commission statements for each rep and their managers without running the risk of human errors. Add to this, the Finance team consistently dealt with the pressure of ensuring fair and timely payouts while dealing with the complexities arising out of managing sales compensation on spreadsheets.

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2. Sales had little visibility into their earnings

Haptik’s sales compensation structure was set in such a way that reps would receive commissions from opportunities right from booking to billing to collection. This meant that this entire journey needed to be tracked accurately and commissions computed based on the data received from these events.

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Because Haptik’s Finance & Sales Operations teams were using different solutions each for tracking these three events which the sales reps seldom had any access to, the latter were often left in the dark about their earnings. While reps received quarterly payouts and commission statements, these statements lacked the level of depth that the reps desired. The reps also didn’t have any clarity into their earnings in real-time making it hard for them to estimate what they’re getting paid by the end of the quarter. This led to reps spending time shadow accounting and raising more queries for the Finance team to clarify.

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3. Multiple systems meant that data reconciliation was a burden

With multiple software tools for recording bookings, billings, and collections, Haptik’s data reconciliation process was chaotic. Record matching between closed opportunities in CRM (Hubspot) and invoice records in billing was one of the biggest blockers for Haptik. While Hubspot captured sales data, commissions data spread over a longer period of time was harder to translate into individual spreadsheets for each rep, proving to be an uphill battle for all parties involved - Finance, Sales Operations, and reps.

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The Solution: A platform catered to a unique business model

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In August 2021, Haptik moved to Visdum to automate sales commissions, eliminating spreadsheets entirely. Visdum helped Haptik fine-tune the platform to their unique business model, reducing operational burden for Finance & Sales Ops while bringing clarity to sales reps.

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Why did Haptik choose Visdum over others for automating sales commissions?

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Haptik turned to Visdum when they needed a platform that captured the uniqueness of their business model. The platform supports Haptik’s unique comp plan scenarios and allows room for flexibility to accommodate future compensation scenarios. The company was also able to see their data and plans in action through a customized demo, which gave them confidence because they could straight up see the value of the platform.

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Results: Higher efficiency & countless hours saved

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Haptik has successfully automated its sales commission process for 50+ reps spread across geographies, while ensuring that multiple systems no longer put a damper on accurate and timely payouts.

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• A perfect system for a perfectly unique business model: Haptik’s sales commissions are completely dependent on their distinctive business model. With Visdum, the company is able to build and execute an innovative sales compensation plan that models the right sales behavior, ensuring success.
• Reduced operational workload for Finance & Sales teams: With sales commissions calculations and distributions via spreadsheets completely out of the picture, the operations and finance teams no longer had to worry about manual errors or the endless hours otherwise wasted on ensuring that the process runs smoothly. 
• Reduction in queries/disputes: With Visdum’s chatbot feature, queries/disputes between sales reps and the finance team have declined from 18 per quarter to 2 per quarter. Additionally, all queries now stay in one place, ensuring that reps, Sales Ops, & Finance are in complete sync.
• Improved CRM Hygiene & reduced payout time: Haptik’ sales team is more motivated to keep CRM (Hubspot) data updated now that their compensation is tied to it. Sales compensation systems rely on correct CRM data, leading to accurate and frequent payouts, improving seller experience. Haptik’s payout time has significantly decreased from 50 hours to 6 hours.
• Allows for integration & reconciliation b/w multiple systems: With Visdum sitting right at the intersection of the CRM and various tools used for bookings, billings, and collections, the platform allowed for setting of transformation & reconciliation rules to eliminate the need for manual validation.
• Every rep has access and transparency w.r.t their comp plan: Distributing comp plans is no longer a nightmare. With Visdum, each rep, manager, or admin have their own logins, so confidentiality is ensured along with transparency.
• More visibility for reps, managers, and admins: With 100% visibility for all users, admins, and the ability to build reports based on pre-populated leaderboards and dashboards, Visdum guides Haptik towards greater success.

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