How Hubilo automated sales compensation to align with their dynamic business needs

Hubilo’s rapidly expanding business and sales team needed a flexible sales compensation solution that’s easy to adapt to, understand, and use. In October 2021, the company chose to shift away from spreadsheets to Visdum’s simplified software to align their sales commission policies with their dynamic business needs.

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About Hubilo

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HQ: San Francisco, California

Employees: 500+

Using Visdum Since: October 2021

Business Category: Event-tech software

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Founded in 2015, San Francisco-based Hubilo started its journey as a virtual networking platform for event attendees before evolving into a major player in the event-tech / hybrid events industry. Hubilo works with some of the top brands – United Nations, Roche, Informa Markets, Tech in Asia, Fortune, AWS, Siemens, Cognizant, Veritas Technologies, GITEX etc. 

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Having grown 10.5x In 2021, Hubilo raised $125 Mn in a Series B round with plans to invest and expand into markets like the US, UK, EU and APAC.

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The Challenge: Need for a dynamic sales compensation strategy for a dynamic business

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As the business grew, hiring accelerated across roles (SDRs/BDRs/CSMs/PreSales), and geographies to accommodate high demand and a dynamic market. For Hubilo’s Finance & Revenue Operations teams, handling complex sales compensation scenarios using excel spreadsheets was soon becoming increasingly difficult.

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1. Evolve Sales Comp Structures with the dynamic business: With Hubilo's strategic expansion across different regions, there was a pressing need to evolve sales compensation mechanisms. The organization's need for advanced mechanisms such as team-based bonuses, multi-year spiffs, and accelerators far exceeded the capabilities of Excel, limiting the flexibility and scope of comp plan designs and their ability to align the right sales behavior.
2. Computations were manual, cumbersome & time-consuming: Creating that master spreadsheet with complex interconnected logic of multiple roles, geographies and a large team was a huge challenge. 
3. Distribute Commission Statements: Dividing that mastersheet into individual sheets for each payee to give them clarity and transparency was an insurmountable task fraught with errors and inaccuracies (often leading to overpayments or disputes). Finance teams and sales teams were wasting valuable time in validating and resolving payout issues. 
4. Partner Commissions: Hubilo also had a network of partners that were involved in selling on their behalf. Each partner had a custom commission plan that also needed a computation process, adding another layer of complexity to an already complicated process.
5. Operational Risk: The entire computation process was dependent on one specific individual in the finance team who had the complete knowledge of the macros and the links that the master spreadsheet had. This was a huge operational risk.
6. Audit and Reporting Concerns: To stay compliant with ASC 606 and IFR15, finance teams were capitalizing costs on sheets based on their accounting policy, producing amortization reports and creating and posting journal entries. Since this was again a non-standard manual process, it was not audit friendly.

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The Solution: Choosing a software that aligns with dynamic business needs

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In October 2021, Hubilo successfully pivoted to a fully automated sales commission process with Visdum, enabling the company to run a sales commission process for 60+ reps and saving their Operations team hundreds of hours.

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

The customized demo that the Visdum team delivered showed Haptik their own sales compensation plans in action with sample data that was representative of their own business. This gave the Hubilo team confidence in Visdum’s ability to execute. Quality of support also was a critical factor for the Hubilo team as their finance team was relatively new to Sales Compensation Software and given the dynamic nature of their business, was expecting ad hoc interventions.

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Visdum’s robust bi-directional integration with Salesforce showcased the flexibility of the platform as the drag & drop capability made it easier for users to manage the data flow and also supported custom fields, objects and queries. 

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In Visdum, Hubilo saw a reliable system that could handle comp plans for multiple roles and support retention metrics, while catering to their rapidly evolving needs.

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Results: End-to-end sales compensation automation to accommodate a growing team

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Hubilo has successfully transitioned to a fully automated sales compensation system that efficiently handles 20+ comp plan scenarios for 60+ reps across multiple roles and geographies.

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1. Efficient Plan Development: If the business demands it, then complex comp plans are now more straightforward to design, enabling the use of advanced strategies without implementation challenges and headaches.
2. Automated Data Management: Integration with Salesforce has eliminated manual data entries, saving considerable operational hours. Prior to Visdum, data retrieval, transformation, validation and reconciliation were all managed through Excel.
3. Seamless Distribution: Compensation distribution challenges have been addressed and streamlined. Visdum now automatically creates a commission statement once the earnings have been validated and approved,
4. Transparent Earnings for Representatives: Sales representatives receive detailed commission breakdowns and have access to essential reports and analytics to monitor their deals.
5. Automated Calculations: Dependency on specific individuals for calculations has been removed, with Visdum ensuring consistent accuracy.
6. Compliance and Reporting: Hubilo is now fully ASC 606 compliant with Visdum's capabilities to automatically capitalize commission costs, and produce detailed audit-ready reports and summarized journal entries without any additional effort..‍
7. Enhanced Insights for Management: Sales leaders and managers now have clear visibility into both current and potential earnings of their teams, essential for effective management and motivation.

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