168 hours of comp work, down to 6. Zero errors since launch.

With Visdum, WebEngage moved its team off tedious spreadsheets to a far more efficient way of handling sales commissions, giving greater transparency to sales reps and reducing operational time significantly.

01 · The company

WebEngage, a marketing automation platform growing on every axis at once

WebEngage was founded in 2011 and is a customer data platform and marketing automation suite that makes user engagement and retention effective for consumer tech enterprises and SMBs. It enables 800+ consumer-facing companies to engage and retain their customers, and those companies send more than 30 billion messages a month through WebEngage across WhatsApp, Email, SMS, Push Notifications, Facebook, Google, and other channels.

In August 2022, WebEngage raised $20 million in a Series B round, pushing the company valuation to approximately $100 million, and its operating revenue doubled over the last fiscal year. The company has 300+ employees.

02 · The trigger

Why quarterly plan changes made spreadsheets unworkable

WebEngage grew exponentially, with constant new product launches, new hires in the sales team, and new geographies to target. That evolving sales strategy meant the comp plans had to change too, which called for systems and processes that Excel spreadsheets could not provide.

The scale of what Sales Operations was managing:

Sales Operations had become a critical function responsible for aligning every GTM team, and moving off spreadsheets was becoming the condition for that team to succeed. The sales team used Salesforce for detailed insight into its pipeline data, but there was no way for compensation data on spreadsheets to flow into Salesforce without manual updates. Those updates took time and energy, and carried a high risk of errors.

The timing problem was the clearest symptom. WebEngage wanted to bring agility into its sales culture and close monthly, but it was paying commissions quarterly because the calculations were too cumbersome to run more often. Solving that conflict was mission-critical for the company.

The rest of the damage was relational. With data scattered across multiple platforms and complicated calculations behind it, Sales Operations could not give reps 100% visibility into how their commissions were calculated. Reps found it difficult to follow up with Sales Operations on adjustments to their comp plans, and because the process was manual, there was often no record of those requests anywhere. Together these factors eroded transparency and trust between the Sales and Sales Operations teams, which created further problems for management to deal with.

03 · The evaluation

What WebEngage needed from a commission system

WebEngage's Sales Operations team concluded that spreadsheets could no longer sustain the needs of a growing team, and started looking at alternatives. Its requirements came straight from the problems above.

04 · The decision

The decision logic: The gap WebEngage needed to close was between Sales and Sales Operations, not only between spreadsheets and a platform. Validating real payouts during the evaluation answered the accuracy question, and the rep-facing commission breakdown answered the trust question, which is what the friction had been about.

05 · The implementation

Designed and deployed in under three weeks

In June 2022, WebEngage moved to Visdum to automate sales compensation end to end, eliminating the manual back and forth between Sales and Sales Ops so the sales team could focus on driving revenue growth. WebEngage designed and deployed its entire sales compensation process on Visdum in under 3 weeks.

The Salesforce integration runs in both directions. Compensation data flows into the CRM and CRM data flows back, which makes the platform an all-in-one destination for team leads, sales reps, sales operations, and human resources to draw actionable insights from.

The rep-facing piece: Reps get visual dashboards with a complete breakdown of their commissions, plus an earnings calculator that forecasts the sales pipeline accurately, so they can view their progress against quota in real time.

06 · What success looks like

Four plans, 60+ sellers, zero errors reported

WebEngage today runs 4 complex commission plans for 60+ commissioned sellers on Visdum, with 0 errors reported since launch. The Salesforce integration keeps the data accurate and clean, and sales representatives get 100% visibility into their comp plans. The commission process now takes 6 hours instead of 168, and the monthly payout takes 2 hours instead of 3 days.

The alignment extends past the commission process itself. Visdum lets WebEngage align Solution Engineering, Technology & Partnership, Inside Sales, and Direct Sales around the same data. CRM hygiene improved as well, because the sales team is more motivated to keep CRM data updated now that compensation is tied to it, and accurate payouts depend on correct CRM data.

For reps, the clarity changed the day to day. They have greater clarity on their commission plans and quotas, they can see where they stand against their quotas in real time, and they decide for themselves how and when to double down on targets. They no longer calculate and tally their commissions by hand or reach out to Operations for clarification, and the Sales Operations team no longer has to worry about miscalculations.