Booking, billing, collection. Payouts in 6 hours, not 50.

Haptik's sales commissionable events occur over an extended period, so tracking them and ensuring accurate payouts on spreadsheets became a challenge. Add the complexity of multiple systems and teams working together, and Haptik needed an efficient sales compensation system that could carry an innovative comp plan design.

01 · The company

Haptik, a conversational AI platform selling across three continents

Haptik helps brands acquire, convert, engage, and delight users with AI-driven, personalized, conversational experiences across 20 channels and 100+ languages. Its conversational commerce platform lets brands design experiences that improve conversion rates at every stage of the customer journey.

Founded in 2013, Haptik works with clients and partners including KFC, Whirlpool, Starhub, HP, Reliance Jio, CEAT, Disney Hotstar, OLA, and Zurich Insurance, and has been named a category leader by Gartner, G2, and Opus Research. The company has raised $12.2M over two rounds, backed by Kalaari Capital and Times Internet, and has 400+ employees with headquarters in New York.

02 · The trigger

Why three commissionable events broke the spreadsheet

At Haptik, sales commissions are tied to three commissionable events: booking, billing, and collection. Those events occur over an extended period, and each one is captured by a different team in a different software tool, alongside the CRM, HubSpot. That structure rendered spreadsheets ineffective for running the commission process.

The scale of what Finance was managing:

Computing the numbers was the first problem. With 50+ sales reps spread across North America, Europe, and Asia, Finance had to produce a detailed breakdown of earnings for every rep each quarter, with data arriving from multiple sources depending on the commission event. Distributing those statements was its own challenge, because splitting the master spreadsheet into individual statements for each rep and their manager was cumbersome and carried a risk of human error, all while Finance carried the pressure of paying fairly and on time.

Reps were left in the dark. Their commissions ran from booking through billing to collection, but the tools tracking those events belonged to Finance and Sales Operations, and reps seldom had access. Quarterly statements lacked the depth reps wanted, and nothing showed earnings in real time, so reps could not estimate what they would be paid by quarter end. That sent them into shadow accounting and generated more queries for Finance to clarify.

Underneath both problems sat reconciliation. With separate tools recording bookings, billings, and collections, matching closed opportunities in HubSpot against invoice records in billing was one of the biggest blockers. HubSpot captured the sales data, but commissions spread over a longer period were hard to translate into individual spreadsheets, which made the process an uphill battle for Finance, Sales Operations, and reps alike.

03 · The evaluation

What Haptik needed from a commission system

Haptik's requirements came straight from the problems above.

04 · The decision

The decision logic: Haptik's commissions depend on events that land months apart in separate systems. A platform that could not reconcile those records automatically would have left the biggest blocker, matching closed opportunities to invoices, exactly where it was.

05 · The implementation

Built around the booking, billing, and collection model

In August 2021, Haptik moved to Visdum to automate sales commissions and eliminate spreadsheets entirely. Visdum was fine-tuned to Haptik's business model, which reduced the operational burden on Finance and Sales Ops while giving reps clarity.

Visdum sits at the intersection of the CRM and the tools used for bookings, billings, and collections. Transformation and reconciliation rules run between them, which removed the manual validation that had been the process's biggest blocker.

The access piece: Every rep, manager, and admin has their own login, so comp plans reach the right person with confidentiality intact and transparency alongside it.

06 · What success looks like

Payouts in 6 hours and two queries a quarter

Haptik has automated its commission process for 50+ reps across geographies, and multiple systems no longer stand in the way of accurate, timely payouts. Payout time has decreased from 50 hours to 6. With Visdum's chatbot feature, queries and disputes between sales reps and Finance have declined from 18 per quarter to 2, and every query now stays in one place, which keeps reps, Sales Ops, and Finance in sync.

With commission calculations and statement distribution off spreadsheets, the operations and finance teams no longer worry about manual errors or the hours that used to go into keeping the process running. CRM hygiene improved as well, because the sales team is more motivated to keep HubSpot data updated now that compensation is tied to it, and accurate CRM data is what accurate, frequent payouts depend on.

Every user now has full visibility, with reports built on pre-populated leaderboards and dashboards. The result is a commission system that matches Haptik's business model rather than working around it, and that can carry an innovative comp plan designed to model the right sales behavior.