The adage “One size does not fit all!” holds true to its core when it comes to sales commission planning. Most organizations dread the thought of sales commission planning and designing an effective plan is a strenuous task that gives a sinking feeling to most. But sales compensation programs remain pivotal to the success of most sales focused organizations, helping to align business interests to those of the sales staff and sales team. Hence, it’s a delicate balance of budget and retention.

We have seen that a faulty plan can have a devastating effect on the business and there could be multiple causes for it to go wrong. One of the biggest reasons why these plans fail is because they are designed and executed manually.  Manual commission plans rely on excel spreadsheets and become extremely complex with the number of  variables involved. So not only do they take much longer to process, but they are also extremely prone to errors. Few reps try to build a spreadsheet to track their earnings and quota attainment, but it’s too complex, gets out of date quickly, and is very manual. This makes the system very opaque and if no one knows how much they’re earning or how their performance ties into those earnings, their motivation to reach their targets will take a nosedive. On the other hand, if the sales plan is too simple, then it will not serve the purpose either. Hence, the cookie-cutter approach doesn’t work in sales commission planning. Every organization needs to customize their own plan for the behaviors they want to encourage in each role by understanding the nuances of their own business.

When Siva was leading the global RevOps for Freshworks he was stuck with the same problem. He had realized that an effective sales plan needed to be automated, transparent and flexible. So he started looking around for off the shelf solutions that could be customized for his business but was surprised to discover that almost all vendors in this market had inflexible solutions that were not suited to the day and age that we are in. After banging his head with multiple solutions and facing no luck, he along with a few other colleagues on the Revops team, decided to jump ahead and change it once and for all. And that’s how Everstage was born!

Everstage is a modern, no-code platform to automate commissions and motivate sales teams with real-time visibility and insights on their commissions. Everstage enables reps with real-time tracking of  commissions and performance data. With Everstage statements, reps will know the exact commission they got paid for each deal. They will also be able to clearly attribute commissions for different plan criterias and spiff (Sales Performance Incentive Fund) programs. Reps can now do what they do best, which is SELL, and will not have to spend their valuable time shadow accounting their own commissions. Every rep gets their own dashboards to track ongoing quota attainments and commission payouts, driving their trust through transparency. RevOps leaders can finally drive incentives the right way too. They can create incentive plans instantly with Everstage's easy-to-use plan builder, simulate before launch and track them: all without writing a single line of code.  

At Elevation, we are big believers in the philosophy that best innovation comes from the people who have had to deal with the problem themselves every day. When we met Siva and Vivek in 2021, we were swept away by their insights and relentless pursuit to solve this very complex problem in sales commission planning. They want to unlock the power of incentives and ensure that sales organizations never go back to manual planning.

We couldn’t have asked for a better founder-market fit in this journey.  The Everstage team is taking a unique approach to incentive planning  and has added some very interesting features in the last year such as  visibility of instant commissions on Slack, contract management and incentives gamification. For example, sales reps can input different scenarios and see how that will affect their payout estimates. While they are still early in their journey, the team has been able to work with companies like Postman, Chargebee, Nitro etc. to name a few who are deploying Everstage and scaling at a fast rate. With Siva’s extensive experience in building and scaling GTM teams, we know it’s just the start of a very exciting journey.  We are thrilled to partner with Vivek and Siva and lead their Series A and welcome our partnership with our friends at 3one4 Capital.