How WebEngage shifted from spreadsheets to an aligned sales commission process, bringing visibility & transparency for sales teams

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

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About WebEngage

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Founded in 2011

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300+ Employees

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Business Category: Marketing Automation

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WebEngage is a customer data platform and marketing automation suite that makes user engagement and retention simplified and highly effective for consumer tech enterprises and SMBs. WebEngage enables 800+ consumer-facing companies to engage & retain their customers. These companies send out more than 30 billion messages per month using WebEngage across channels like WhatsApp, Email, SMS, Push Notifications, Facebook, Google & more. 

WebEngage attained a funding of $20 million through a Series B round in August 2022, pushing the company valuation to approximately $100 million. These developments contributed to a substantial two-fold increase in operating revenue over the course of the last fiscal year.‍

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Champions at WebEngage

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The Challenge: Spreadsheets proved futile

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As a dynamic, fast-growing SaaS company, WebEngage grew exponentially. This was coupled with constant new product launches, new hires within the sales team, and new geographies targeted. This evolving sales strategy needed sales comp plans to change, requiring systems and processes, which was impossible to achieve with excel spreadsheets.‍

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‍While all this was happening, Sales Operations at WebEngage emerged as a critical function with the responsibility of aligning all GTM teams. With over 40 sales reps with diverse compensation packages and compensation plans changing every quarter, moving away from spreadsheets was becoming apparent for the Sales Operations team to be successful.‍

‍While the sales team at WebEngage used their CRM (Salesforce) to get detailed insights into their sales pipeline data, there was no way for the compensation data on spreadsheets to flow into Salesforce without manual updates. These manual updates not only were time and energy extensive but also highly prone to risk of errors. WebEngage wanted to introduce agility into their sales culture. While they wanted monthly closures, they were paying out commission quarterly (because of cumbersome calculations). Solving this conflict was mission-critical for the company.‍

‍Additionally, with data scattered across multiple platforms and complicated calculations, Sales Operations couldn’t provide reps with 100% visibility into how their commissions were calculated. ‍

‍It was difficult for sales reps to follow up with the Sales Operations teams if they needed to get any adjustments made to their comp plans and often, there would be no record of this data anywhere due to the manual process behind it. ‍

‍All these factors collectively led to lack of transparency and trust between the Sales team and Sales Operations team, creating more problems for management to deal with.

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The Solution: Choosing a winning sales compensation software

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In June 2022, WebEngage pivoted to Visdum to automate their sales compensation process end-to-end, eliminating the manual back and forth between Sales & Sales Ops, and enabling the sales team to do what they do best - drive revenue growth.

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The WebEngage Sales Operations team realized that spreadsheets could no longer sustain the needs of their growing team and that’s when they decided to look for alternatives. The team needed a solution that would quickly bring their entire team aboard and fix the growing gap between Sales and Sales Operations teams arising out of unending friction. While they looked at other alternatives such as EverStage, Visdum stood out as a clear winner.

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Why did WebEngage choose Visdum over others for Sales Compensation?

During the evaluation process, WebEngage was able to see their data and plans in action and validate the accuracy of their payouts in Visdum. This gave them confidence because they could straight up see the value of the platform. Visdum’s modern UI, comprehensive dashboards and reports, and detailed commission structure breakdown for reps, struck a chord with WebEngage’s sales and sales operations teams. 

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Results: Empowered teams & efficient processes

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WebEngage has streamlined its complex sales commissions process, ensuring higher accuracy in compensation calculations and more visibility for reps, driving up sales team productivity and revenue growth.

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WebEngage today runs 4 complex commission plans for 60+ commissioned sellers using Visdum. There have been 0 errors reported since their launch and a seamless Salesforce integration ensures that their data is accurate and clean, while their sales representatives get 100% visibility into their comp plans.

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The Impact: 

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Faster implementation & onboarding time: WebEngage was able to design and deploy their entire sales compensation process on Visdum in under 3 weeks.  

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Aligned Teams: With sales compensation data flowing into the CRM and vice-versa, the platform acts as an all-in-one destination for team leads, sales reps, sales operations, and human resources to draw actionable insights. The different teams that WebEngage is able to align using Visdum are - Solution Engineering, Technology & Partnership, Inside Sales, and Direct Sales.

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Improved CRM Hygiene: WebEngage’s sales team is more motivated to keep CRM data updated now that their compensation is tied to it. Sales compensation systems rely on correct CRM data, leading to accurate payouts.

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More visibility for reps leading to higher productivity: WebEngage’s sales reps now have greater clarity w.r.t their commission plans and quotas. With visual dashboards that show complete break-down of commissions and an earnings calculator that forecasts sales pipeline accurately, the sales reps are more motivated than ever to hit their goals. One thing that truly empowers the reps at WebEngage is the ability to view their progress in real-time. With the ability to see where they are against their quotas, reps have greater control over how and when to double down on their targets.

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Increase in accuracy of compensation calculations: With accurate data flowing in from Salesforce and algorithms in place to provide detailed break-down of how commissions for each rep is being calculated, the Sales Operations team at WebEngage no longer has to worry about miscalculations. Subsequently, sales reps don’t have to manually calculate and tally their commissions or reach out to Operations for clarifications.