Spiff begins ‘massive overhaul of core sales commission engine’ following $50M Series C

Spiff, providing sales commission software, secured $50 million in Series C capital and the launch of Spiff Designer, its newest model builder for finance and revenue teams.

Salesforce Ventures led the round and was joined by a group of investors that included Lightspeed, Norwest, Kickstart Fund and Album. With the new investment, Spiff raised $117 million in total funding to date.

Spiff Designer offers hundreds of prebuilt commission models and features, like type ahead, error handling and testing, so that the sales professionals can manage their own commission programs without relying on developers.

It’s just one of the improvements and integrations, including within Salesforce, that Jeron Paul, founder and CEO of Spiff, discussed with TechCrunch nearly three years after covering its $10 million round.

A company born out of the global pandemic probably has some battle scars, but Paul said the past three years have “been an awesome learning journey” for Spiff. Over that time, the company grew 800% and though it has had product market fit for a while, he noted that now “there is this wonderful inflection point where you can really start to feel that you’re either not just meeting a problem that hasn’t been solved, but you’re actually starting to delight customers.”

“We’ve seen a lot of commission plans change,” Paul told TechCrunch. “Incentives end up driving a lot of the behavior of your go-to-market motion, so when you hit recessions, and whatever we’re in right now, that go-to-market motion changes a lot, which means your commission plans change a lot.”

Sales commission is a big market, so it’s no surprise that Spiff has come up against some competition in the past few years with other startups, including Palette, CaptivateIQ and Everstage, attracting venture capital attention. However, Paul said competitors and legacy offerings aren’t “able to be nimble and change quickly, or allow people to change their own commission plans.”

That approach seems to have paid off. Since its last raise in 2021, the company doubled its customers, which Paul said is nearing 1,000, while also doubling its workforce to about 275. In the past 12 months, Spiff grew its revenue 100%, though Paul notes much of that growth happened in the last quarter due to customer delays in closing deals.

Paul described Spiff as having gone through an evolution that took it from its origins as a fully custom-coded commission platform to a self-managed platform. With the funding, it will undergo a “massive overhaul of its core commission engine” as it moves toward the use of more artificial intelligence for an almost no-code or natural language offering for more ease in managing commission plans.

Spiff is working toward profitability, but Paul said he wasn’t ready to “completely take our foot off the gas.”

“Our goal here is to drive Spiff carefully toward becoming a more efficient business,” Paul said. “There’s a really rapid pace of innovation that you’re going to see, and Spiff has its eye on a very, very big prize.”