Customer stories from the world’s leading revenue teams

The Challenge

Jasper is a company built on trust between its people but its commission process was quietly undermining it. Outside sales commissions were run entirely on Excel spreadsheets which couldn't keep pace with a growing, 100% employee-owned sales organization. According to Joe McDonald, Executive VP of Sales at Jasper, the manual process produced mistakes on a near-monthly basis which chipped away at reps' confidence in their own paychecks.

Behind the scenes, the picture wasn't any better. Jasper's inside sales and commission administration ran on a rigid, homegrown system that required a developer from the IT department any time a plan needed to change. Every adjustment involving a new rate, a new rule or a new market condition meant pulling in finance, payroll, sales leadership, and software developers all at once, just to get one change live. Business analysts knew what leadership wanted to build, but lacked the flexibility to get there on their own.

The manual calculations went deeper still. Every commission run meant manually working out prorated days, selling days in the month, and bonuses and special conditions by hand — details that had to wait until the very end of processing before they could even be added in.

The cost showed up in unexpected places. Jasper's sales leadership regularly wanted to run contests and incentive pushes for the sales team that keeps them motivated. But without a reliable way to track, the team often gave up on the idea altogether before the contest ever launched.

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“We were a growing company still doing commissions on Excel sheets, and I think a lot of people can relate to that. Obviously, when doing commissions on Excel, we had a lot of mistakes. I would say we averaged at least one per month.”

Joe McDonald

Executive VP of Sales

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The Solution

Implementation Handled In-House

Jasper have suffered with third-party implementations in the past that added a layer between them and the people solving the problems. What set Everstage apart was that the implementation was handled directly by Everstage's team along with Jasper's business analysts, learning the nuances of their commission structure rather than handing that work off elsewhere.

Cole Lehmkuhler, the Business Analyst on Jasper's People Services team who led the implementation, notes that this in-house model meant problems got solved immediately with no hoops to jump through.

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“When you're dealing with something as important as commissions, it's great to have that in-house support, because we can get to the problem immediately. There are no hoops.”

Cole

Business Analyst, People Services

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Building Without Dependency  

Jasper wanted a tool that gave them control of the commissions system. Joe McDonald points to independence as the single biggest differentiator: the ability for Jasper's own team to build, test, and launch plan changes without opening a ticket or waiting on a vendor. 

That independence had to work for more than just administrators. Jasper's outside reps aren't too tech-savvy and the system needed to be simple enough that they could log in, find what they needed, and trust what they saw without a learning curve getting in the way of adoption.

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“The biggest thing was the independence of Everstage. The ability to make changes on our own without calling Everstage or placing a ticket to get an answer. The ability to make changes, play in the sandbox, test other commission programs, without having to reach out every single time. That's the biggest differentiator for us.”

Joe McDonald

Executive VP of Sales

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Strategize And Adapt as Needed 

Beyond the plan-building flexibility, Everstage gave Jasper's team a set of tools that changed how they actually worked with their data. Databooks replaced Jasper's old reliance on static reports, letting analysts pull up any rep, date range, or product line in seconds and manipulate the data the way they would in Excel — the format Jasper's team already knew well.

Time Machine gave the business analysts a way to model change before committing to it. When leadership floated a new plan idea, Joe’s team could run the current plan side by side with a proposed version, using real historical data, and see the line-item impact immediately. Turning a hypothetical into a data-backed decision in minutes instead of weeks.

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“Leadership will come to us and say, 'What would happen if we want to implement X, Y and Z?' We simply put the current plan on the screen, run Time Machine for last month by making changes with the proposed plan to see the results. It's amazing how quickly we can see the differences at a line-item level.”

Cole

Business Analyst, People Services

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The Results

From Operational to Strategic

The most immediate shift was time. Where Jasper's team once handled constant day-to-day maintenance on their homegrown system, plan administration is now compressed into a few focused days each month. Hunter Helming, Business Analyst for Inside Sales, estimates the manual workload has been cut down by at least half, freeing up roughly a full day of work every month.

What matters more than the hours saved is where that time now goes. Instead of being consumed by manual upkeep, Jasper's analysts are spending their reclaimed time on the work that actually moves the business forward: rethinking plan design, modeling new structures, and building a deeper understanding of how their own commission plans function.

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“A lot of the time I've saved from eliminating manual processes is going toward the future. Looking at how we want to do commissions, updating plans, building new plans. I have a much better concept of our plans in general, just from building them ourselves. It's made it a lot easier for us to strategize.”

Hunter Helming

Business Analyst, Inside Sales

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Transparency That Impacts Rep Performance

For the sales team, the biggest change is visibility. Reps can now see their commissions calculated line by line, by invoice and in real-time, something they never had access to before. If a rep believes they earned less on a given customer or product, they can check it themselves before escalating the question up the chain.

That transparency has changed behavior, not just reduced friction. Cole and Hunter both describe reps who, once they could see exactly which products carried higher commission rates, began shifting their conversations to sell more of those higher-margin lines. Hunter's inside sales team has seen the same effect show up as a measurable lift in day-to-day productivity, driven in part by reps being able to see how they rank against their peers in real time.

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“They're not having to wait until the end of the month and then go back to their manager to figure out what went wrong or where they miscalculated. Everything is right there. It's something they can self-manage.”

Phoebe

Business Analyst

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Reinforcing a Culture Built on Trust

As a 100% employee-owned company, trust is the operating principle behind everything the company does and is not just a talking point. Joe frames Everstage's impact in exactly those terms: the monthly errors that used to chip away at reps' confidence are gone, and with them, so is a recurring source of friction between the sales team and the company they own a piece of.

That same reliability has also made it possible for Jasper's leadership to bring back something they had once given up on: sales contests. With commissions now easy to track accurately in real time, the "carrots" that leadership had shelved years earlier are finally back on the table.

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“We already had the trust of our associates. But by adding this, we're gaining additional trust as we bring better tools for them in the field. And Everstage is one of them.”

Joe McDonald

Executive VP of Sales