Commissions on collection. 8 comp plans. 95% of the time back.

Visdum has been important in helping us provide accurate tracking in terms of calculating the complex commission scheme that we have.

Ernest Fung — Chief Financial Officer, Cyble Inc

01 · The company

A security company whose sales motion doesn't end at the signature

Cyble was founded in 2019 and builds AI-native threat intelligence — dark web monitoring, vulnerability assessment, and digital risk protection for government agencies and enterprises across manufacturing, retail, and financial services. The platform scans more than 20 billion pages and 15,000 cybercrime sources a day. The commercial engine behind it: 70+ reps selling across the US, Singapore, UAE, Australia, and India, organized into Sales, PreSales, and Partner teams.

What makes Cyble representative of a whole class of mid-market companies is a single policy decision: reps are paid when the invoice is collected, not when the deal closes. It's a sensible cash-discipline choice — and it roughly doubles the complexity of every commission calculation, because the commission event now lives in the billing system, not the CRM. If your comp plan pays on collections, milestones, or anything downstream of the signature, Cyble's situation is your situation.

02 · The trigger

Why FY 2024 was the year the spreadsheet model broke

The mechanics had been strained for a while. Deal and pipeline data lived in HubSpot. Invoices and collections were split across QuickBooks for the US, UAE, Australia, and Singapore entities and Zoho for India. Every month, finance pulled from all three, maintained a spreadsheet per geography and per plan, and compiled everything into a master sheet where the commission rules were applied by hand.

The strategic problem was bigger than the hours. Because payouts depended on collections, reps couldn't see how much they'd earn or when they'd be paid — the calculation lived in a master sheet only finance could read. Disputes followed. And the same opacity ran upward: with commission logic trapped in formulas, performance management and forecasting at the leadership level were, in the published study's words, severely limited. A growing team, tier-based plans, and multiple hierarchy levels feeding into commissions meant every quarter the master sheet got harder to trust.

03 · The evaluation

What a collections-based comp model demands from software

Most commission tools assume the commission event is the closed deal. Cyble's evaluation was shaped by the fact that theirs isn't. That single constraint ordered the criteria:

[PH — from the interview: the shortlist. Which platforms were evaluated, what was ruled out and why, and the "behind the door" discovery — the thing the evaluation revealed that a demo doesn't show. Named-competitor verdicts require Cyble's sign-off.]

04 · The decision

The verdict

The decision logic: The capabilities that decided it for Cyble were commissions recognized on invoice collection, native integrations that bring HubSpot, QuickBooks, and Zoho data together, and a customizable dashboard for the CFO. All three sit in Visdum's plan design and integration layer, covered in the platform overview and the integrations library.

05 · The implementation

Tailored to Cyble's use case

Visdum put dedicated implementation resources on Cyble's rollout and tailored its offering to Cyble's use case. The work covered three pieces: integrating HubSpot, QuickBooks, and Zoho; configuring Cyble's 8 comp plans across its Sales, PreSales, and Partner teams, including their hierarchy and tier logic; and building a customized dashboard so the C-suite, particularly the CFO, could track sales performance, CAC, earnings, and invoices collected from the top down.

With the integrations in place, Cyble's booking, collection, and CRM data connect in one system. Data across geographies and platforms is fetched in real time to compute commissions, and implementing and customizing Cyble's complex plans became straightforward. Exception approvals are built in for the minority of cases that need them; for the vast majority, commissions run fully automated.

06 · What success looks like

The vision, already materializing

The published results: 95% of the time finance spent running commissions, reclaimed. 100% payout accuracy. Eight-plus data sets flowing from HubSpot and QuickBooks in real time, with Zoho collections joined in — no master sheet, no monthly compilation.

The part Ernest's role makes most interesting is what transparency did to the dispute pattern. Reps now get their statements inside Visdum with a deal-by-deal drill-down showing the formula behind every line, in their own currency, with CSV export — the calculation that used to live in a sheet only finance could read is now legible to the person being paid. And the same system feeds upward: the customized dashboard gives the C-suite collections percentage, CAC, earnings, and performance heatmaps from the top down — the forecasting view that the spreadsheet era couldn't produce.

07 · Advice to peers

Three questions, answered by the person who made the call

When did commissions become too complex to manage manually?

"As we were building up the business and scaling up, our sales engine became more and more complex. We had added more layers in terms of the sales hierarchies. There were different components of sales, pre-sales, technical sales, and partner sales that were part of the entire sales cycle and had to be compensated based on their efforts. To capture all this into a single commissions scheme and implement it at month end was a highly complex task for finance. Without an automation tool, it led to a lot of inaccuracies as well as disputes with the sales team. The data wasn't centralized, and we had to capture data from different sources."

Ernest Fung, CFO, Cyble

How did transparency change the relationship with the sales team?

"There are very little disputes with the sales team on what the right level of compensation is. We provide full clarity and transparency to them. I think overall the sales team is happier."

Ernest Fung, CFO, Cyble

What does visibility do for reps paid on collections?

"Providing that transparency definitely gives sales both a morale boost as well as a motivation boost. Through their own view within Visdum, they can see exactly their own sales performance as well as the upcoming commissions due to them. This motivates them not only to generate the sales, but also collect on the sales."

Ernest Fung, CFO, Cyble

Below the fold

Full interview transcript — Ernest Fung, CFO, Cyble Inc