Salesforce to Acquire Spiff
Today Salesforce announced it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Spiff, a Sandy, Utah-based compensation platform for revenue and sales organizations that automates complex commission processes. Spiff has created a new class of incentive compensation management (ICM) software that motivates sales through an intuitive low-code UI and a powerful processing engine to drive commissions automation at scale.
Specifically, Spiff Designer, its latest product, automates commissions for Finance and Revenue teams. It eliminates the last major mental-model gap that keeps spreadsheet-centric users from embracing financial automation. Spiff Designer pairs the familiarity and ease-of-use of a spreadsheet with the scale, power, and speed of automation enabling finance and sales ops professionals to build and manage their commission programs more effectively and efficiently.
The terms of the acquisition have not been disclosed.
After the acquisition closes, the Spiff organization will join Sales Cloud, working to enhance Salesforce's Sales Performance Management solutions by providing customers with a trusted platform "to increase visibility, supercharge selling and unlock growth," according to the Salesforce announcement.
"CROs and financial leaders know the importance of compensation in driving rep behavior. The challenge these leaders face is in how to align these compensation plans to desired outcomes—all while navigating data across siloed-point solutions," says Ketan Karkhanis, EVP & GM, Sales Cloud. "Spiff connects what sellers want—transparent compensation—with what sales leaders want—compensation planning built into CRM that aligns behaviors to strategic outcomes," continued Karkhanis.
The addition of Spiff to San Francisco-based Salesforce will empower CROs to better align with financial and sales operations teams to easily self-manage complex incentive compensation plans and understand the factors propelling revenue performance to drive top-line growth.
"I'm excited about the future of Spiff and about what this means for the world of SPM and ICM in general," says Jeron Paul, CEO of Spiff. "We have always taken pride in Spiff's pace of innovation and I'm grateful for the opportunity to make an even deeper impact on the space as part of the Salesforce ecosystem."
More than 70 percent of Spiff's customers use Sales Cloud as their CRM.
Paul commented on the Salesforce acquisition on LinkedIn and thanked both Spiff's longtime customers (which include Lucid, Weave and ExpertVoice) and his family:
"When we started Spiff ~6 years ago, Salesforce was our dream acquirer. The Salesforce team members we have worked with over the last ~2 years from Salesforce Ventures to the business and M&A teams have validated that we had the right dream."
He continued:
"I believe entrepreneurs shouldn’t celebrate funding rounds since they can take your eye off of creating value for your customers. As much as we feel we have accomplished over the last six years, we’re just getting started. So I feel similarly about this transition for Spiff. We still have so much to accomplish for our customers and our long-term vision. Here’s what we WILL celebrate: joining Salesforce will help us turbo charge our ability to meet our customer’s needs even better going forward. We know you have choices and earning your ongoing trust is our biggest priority. Salesforce’s #1 value is Trust which aligns perfectly with our most important Spiff Pattern, 'We put customer trust first.'"
In May of 2023, Spiff announced the closing of a $50 million Series C investment led by Salesforce Ventures, covered by TechBuzz. Lightspeed of Menlo-Park, CA, participated in the round. Lightspeed also led Spiff's Series B investment in June of 2021. Norwest (Palo Alto), Kickstart Fund (Cottonwood Heights, Utah), Album (Lehi), and others also participated in the $50 million Series C round.
Gavin Christensen, Founder and General Manager of Kickstart Fund, an early investor in Spiff, shared insightful comments on LinkedIn about the Spiff acquisition.
Salesforce said the acquisition is expected to close in the first quarter of Salesforce's fiscal year 2025, subject to customary closing conditions.