The Challenge
The Finance team spent a significant amount of time manually processing commissions, and spreadsheets didn't provide the necessary transparency to leadership and their sales team.
Hackerrank was processing their commissions across 50 different spreadsheets and it led to heavy busywork for the Finance team. Their previous system was highly-prone to errors as their commission plans were fairly complex, and their sales team was on deferred commissions. Tasks such as quota modifications and commission adjustments were difficult to manage in spreadsheets, and there were challenges with alignment between teams like Finance, Payroll and HR.
Leadership did not have clear visibility into performance insights or any way to gauge the effectiveness of their incentive plans. As a result, there were difficulties in making conscious decisions during annual planning.
Due to the lack of transparency in their payouts, sales reps did not feel comfortable with the numbers presented to them on spreadsheets, and it led to a high influx of queries during payout cycles.
Krishna, the Senior Director of Finance didn’t want to risk having payout errors and overpayments due to an opaque commission calculation system that didn’t offer any transparency to the sales team, and decided to automate their commission process.
The Solution
A streamlined commissions process
Hackerrank’s commission plans were complex and Everstage was customized as per their needs. Live since 2022, Everstage has been able to provide all the improvements they needed in their incentive program with white-glove support services as well as maintain high accuracy of their payout calculations consistently.
Everstage’s flexibility also helps Hackerrank adapt their incentive program to their current needs. Managing quota modifications is challenging on spreadsheets but Hackerrank can now very effortlessly move from one quota to another at any given point of time in just a few clicks. Moreover, Hackerrank finds it extremely easy to make manual adjustments to commissions and also add a remark so that it becomes a tracker not just for the Finance team but also for the sales reps.
Insights to improve their incentives program
Besides streamlining Hackerrank’s commissions process, Everstage offers actionable insights for the Finance team with the help of custom dashboards and reports to keep tabs on the costs associated with the incentive program and provide visibility of spends to leadership. Hackerrank generated quarterly reports that would compare the quota achievement with the incentives paid for it vs. the incentives that were set for a given compensation plan for the entire year.
Additionally, when processing commissions, the Finance team also had to provide the accounting team with accruals. Earlier, they would make tentative accruals but with Everstage, the system calculates the precise numbers on time, based on the inputs received from their CRM. This made it easier to process commissions and provide accurate data to the accounting team.
Deal-wise breakdown of payout information
To cater to the sales team and offer them full visibility into their earnings, Hackerrank leverages Everstage's detailed statements that are available at a deal-level. Given that the sales team receives deferred commissions, having the understanding of how much of their payouts were received and how much were deferred brought a lot of confidence in the system, and the sales teams gets precise information with a drill down of which deals contributed to their pay check.
The Result
5x faster commission processing
The implementation of Everstage had a significant impact on Hackerrank's commission management process. It has contributed to higher efficiency in commission processing, as the numbers that came out of the system were trustworthy, leading to better alignment between teams.
Informed decisions during annual planning
The insights that are derived from Everstage are now leveraged during quota planning for the upcoming year. The leadership and the Finance teams can clearly define the money paid out, and use the performance insights of their sales teams to optimize their commission plans for higher profitability and smart spending. Custom reports which require a lot of effort in building were seamlessly generated in Everstage, thereby cutting down the annual planning time by half. Everstage has also helped improve CRM sanity, and it was able to flag discrepancies in the data that were promptly fixed.
Built trust with the sales reps
The transparency of payouts offered by Everstage has given sales reps the confidence that the numbers they get to see in the system are accurate. When sales reps have questions, they could always come back but the number of queries have reduced by 99% which means the trust in the system has improved from what it was earlier.
