CaptivateIQ

Kommentare: CaptivateIQ moved us out of spreadsheets into a reliable platform that helped make our lives easier operationally as well as form a Sales user experience. RepairPal had been running the Sales team's commission calculations out of Excel spreadsheets for as long as anyone here can remember. Which worked for making sure the Sales team got paid on their standard plan but did not allow us much if any customizability.
It was a real challenge for us to pay SPIFFS, payroll adjustments, etc. Changing our comp structure was weeks worth of work instead of hours or days. And it wasn't a great user experience for the Sales team. Who ended up having to go through PDFs every month to try and find out what they had been paid. When I had initially started evaluating tools we'd looked at Exactly SimplyComp. But it became pretty apparent early on that we weren't their target buyer. Our sales team had 6 people on it and when we evaluated SimplyComp, it was challenging to replicate our plan. When CaptivateIQ reached out to us, it was very apparent that they understood our needs, struggles and had a wealth of experience working with all kinds of commission plans. We did a proof of concept trial with a free implementation and I could not be more pleased with the results. What used to take 2 people hours to do, is done in 15 minutes. Saves me time, saves our finance guys time and keeps the sales team happy.

Vorteile: Flexibility;
I have a hard time imagining a commission structure CaptivateIQ couldn't replicate. Customizable statements;
Show the sales team what they need to know. How much they got paid and when. Nothing more nothing less. Ease of use;
Fairly easy to self serve if you have a good understanding of excel formulas and SQL.
Takes us about 15 minutes to run commissions now where it used to take us hours. Customer support;
Every time I have reached out for help, I have gotten a response the same day. That’s particularly impressive given the size of CaptivateIQ.

Nachteile: I believe you can buy one at extra cost, but there's no built-in test/sandbox instance. Makes me a bit nervous testing things out in our production instance. But there are ways to ensure none of your important data is touched, so not a huge con by any means.

Kommentare: The main problems we were looking to solve with Captivate were improved accuracy of our calculations, increased transparency of the commissions process, and reduced time to calculate. I think we've realized all of the above and I’m not sure how we’d scale or handle our current plans in Excel.

Vorteile: In 2019 we migrated from 3 compensation plans that could be managed in Excel to more complex plans with multiple variations. We needed a system that could provide a better audit trail as well as visibility into the calculations to ensure the math checked out. CaptivateIQ has been huge for us. I find it very valuable for sanity checking calculations and avoiding discrepancies. Any time there are discrepancies we can take a deeper dive into the calculations and see what’s contributing to the error which brings peace of mind. I appreciate how the calculations in the plans are laid out step by step and it’s very logical. Nothing is nested, so this makes it incredibly easy to follow along. The biggest win has been transparency with our sales team. Previously we didn't have the time to create individual statements for our reps which often caused additional lost time when they had questions about the calculations. The individual statements have significantly reduced the amount of support we need to provide post-calculation.

Nachteile: As someone very comfortable with spreadsheets, formulas, and data analysis, I find the concepts in Captivate and tool straightforward to use. That said, it’s going to take some of my team members a little longer for them to learn given they don’t have the same level of experience. Our implementation specialist was helpful though in explaining the concepts and getting our team more comfortable with the tool. Our implementation was a success, but my only feedback is that I would have preferred to plan a whole day session vs several 1 hour sessions over a number of weeks. This would have made our time to implement substantially faster. In future updates I'd like to see more work on auditing tools to help us chase down discrepancies or errors quicker, and additional control or flexibility on the presentation and layout of the individual commission statements.

Kommentare: It’s been the great..of course the product, but I really enjoyed working with the support staff as well. Not only great guys and A+ service, but they have both been in finance roles where they ran commissions at companies so they’re great resources.

Vorteile: The product truly automates what used to be one of the most annoying manual tasks for us
The sales, implementation guys, and support team are all fantastic
My reps finally have visibility to their commissions without having to ask me or my admin
Data syncs directly from my CRM
I was able to change my reps’ plans to have a better (but more complex) plan because I didn’t have to worry about how we’d calculate it each month

Nachteile: The ui needed some improvement but one of the recent updates was a huge boost..it looks very slick now

Kommentare: I’d definitely recommend CaptivateIQ to those looking for a way to automate the commissions process and save a lot of time. The CaptivateIQ team was amazing in helping me get set up quickly and when it’s all set up and it gave me some peace knowing I’ve got a vetted system to payout commissions to my team.

Vorteile: I was one of the early customers on CaptivateIQ and can definitely say the tool has evolved a lot. We were traditionally handling commissions in Excel and as the CEO of the company, I was spending a lot of time calculating payouts and sending them to my team. CaptivateIQ helped automate much of the hard work so all I needed to do was refresh the data and click process. My reps then had all the details into how they were getting paid for the month and I had a peace of mind that everything was calculated correctly. One of the things I valued most from CaptivateIQ was the team behind the product. Their experience and familiarity with various commission plans and working with imperfect data helped me think about better ways to streamline my comp plans. They were also very responsive and helpful when it came to questions I had about my plan or the system.

Nachteile: After their funding I saw a rapid improvements to the product, which at times meant I was seeing something a little different in the UI. Now things are more consistent and stable so that has improved. For statement reports my team receives, I’d like see the ability to PDF them automatically. I also believe they can improve some of the reporting UI but I’m told that is in their update later this year.

Kommentare: I think the system is great. We have harder than normal commission plans in my opinion and CaptivateIQ delivered. I would definitely recommend it to others looking to make commissions less painful to manage.

Vorteile: We were previously managing commissions in Excel and it was starting to take up more time to manage given our growing team. We looked at CaptivateIQ and we were skeptical they could handle our commission plans but they pulled it off. Their system is very flexible and was able to handle things like ramp, draw, and more for us. I also like their rep reporting section. Unlike other solutions, which were forcing us into their set templates, CaptivateIQ’s was very customizable and we were able to tailor each plan.

Nachteile: Their documentation is lacking within the product but they have a great services team that was able to help get me trained so not a big deal.