Frequently Asked Questions

My sales teams are always complaining that their incentives are inaccurate and delayed. How can I solve this?

Clearly communicating incentive calculation and timelines for incentive disbursals and diligently sticking to them is the key. Compass makes this entire process real-time.

My sales teams can never access their incentives in real-time. What can I do about this?

Calculating incentives and maintaining data as local files makes it difficult for sales reps to access it in real-time. Having an app like Compass that ensures real-time accurate data makes it easy and rules out inaccuracies.

My entire sales team feels they are not recognized and motivated. But we do give out rewards to the ultimate winner. Is there anything we can do differently?

Having a ‘Winner takes it all’ approach to running sales contests often leaves your low performers demotivated. To overcome this, run various programs that all your sales reps can participate in and give them milestone rewards. But publishing multiple programs doesn’t have to take you weeks. With Compass, publish custom, complex incentive programs in under 10 minutes.

I run sales contests every month. How can I calculate ROI on it?

There’s more to sales contests than just the incentives that you release. Delayed and incorrect incentives heavily upset this equation and you can never calculate intangible costs like the wages paid to the resource who calculates and disburses incentives as one of the responsibilities. With Compass, this becomes as easy as a breeze.

How can I inform my sales team about the contests they are eligible for?

Sales contests are rolled out and are communicated over Whatsapp and emails, which ultimately reach the reps a week later. This means they’ve lost traction right in the first week. With Compass, you have a single source of communication and you can schedule upcoming programs for reps to refer to, so they can plan accordingly.

Can I run quick contests on Compass?

Yes. Absolutely. Compass has ready game templates that you can choose from and publish a program under 10 minutes without any coding.

What is incentive automation?

Automating the entire process of incentives, right from collecting data to disbursal of incentives (as a combination of cash and/or rewards) is incentive automation.

What is gamification?

Gamification is the process of adding games or games like elements to an everyday task, so as to make it engaging.

How will incentive automation help me?

Incentive automation rules out the need for manual intervention, thereby removing inaccuracies and delays. It also helps you focus your resources on building and selling your core product rather than employing resources for mundane tasks.

I have been using Excel for incentive calculation. Why should I shift to Compass?

Spreadsheets were never built to calculate incentives but to automate simple mathematical calculations which had more math than logic. With Compass, you can easily build logic with a number of variables where your only input is defining the variable. Compass takes care of the rest.

I have a 10 member team. Will Compass work for me?

Yes absolutely. At Compass, we have built a product for the growing sales teams to become future-ready and our only aim is to ‘Democratize sales commissions’

Is Compass for a specific industry? I have a 50K member team spread across geographies. Is Compass the right fit for me?

The best products are the most dynamic ones that work for various industries and different sizes of organizations. Compass is industry, geography and scale agnostic.

We run complex incentive programs for our sales team that need manual calculations. This is a tedious and painful process. Can Compass be deployed for such a scenario?

We’ve got you covered. No matter how complex your incentive programs are, Compass can handle it all.

I have a small sales team but a huge customer support team. Can Compass help me?

Yes. Compass is built for all sizes of teams. If you want to motivate behavior, Compass is for you.

I want to motivate my team to sell different products. Can I do that with Compass?

Compass lets you run programs with filters that can be set for one or more products, so that you are well equipped to steer the organization as you planned.

As a team manager, can I see how my team is performing in real-time on Compass?

Yes. With hierarchy and role-based access, team leads can view the performance of their teams, real-time.

No matter how many rewards I give out, my team is never happy./I spend a lot of time, money, and effort on procuring gift vouchers but my sales team never uses them.

You know how it feels to get a pair of socks for Christmas when you were hoping to get the latest playstation. That’s exactly how your sales reps feel when you give them random brand vouchers they will never use. Compass lets them choose from a catalog of 16000+ options and helps you reward meaningfully.

How can I motivate my sales team to perform better?

Motivating sales teams is a complex process and has got a lot to do with communication rather than giving out random sums of money at the end of a tenure. With Compass, you can unleash the power of your A team through gamification, instant gratification, peer-to-peer competitions etc.

My sales team is not very competitive. What should I do?

Sales teams lose their sense of competition when life becomes monotonous. To break the monotony, provide value to your employees and run engaging sales contests for them, with meaningful and timely rewards.

I have a CRM in place, what do I need Compass for?

It is not uncommon for organizations to consider managing sales commissions and incentives on CRMs. CRM handles the CRM tangent very well and is used and loved by companies across the globe but it doesn’t handle commissions and incentives well, simply because it was not built for that.

Will I have to re-enter data from my CRM for Compass to work?

Not at all. Compass has robus integrations with the world’s leading CRMs such as Hubspot, Salesforce, Leadsquared and Close.io so it is easy peasy. With a one-click integration, you can experience the magic of Compass.

Can Compass pay with authentication? Is it safe?

Yes. Compass is a complete incentive automation solution. Apart from enabling fair, error free and transparent incentive calculations, Compass takes care of user authentication and all security measures like GDPR or ISO and handles geographical tax implications and compliance.

I have an in-house system for incentive calculation. Why should I consider Compass?

Most in-house incentive calculation softwares are not agile, compromise heavily on data security and legal compliance and are prone to vulnerability. Also, most in-house solutions are limited to calculations, never truly automate and in most cases, are glorified spreadsheets.

My incentive calculation system gives me just the final amount to be disbursed. Is there a way I can automate it?

A calculation tool can help you with the final incentive calculation. It cannot go even a step beyond that. It keeps incentive calculation independent of incentive payouts. To process payouts, you will have to manually release payments through the bank or through gift cards, which leaves plenty of opportunity for manual errors and delays and does not allow you to connect with APIs or payment getaways to process payments.

With Compass, you can consider any or all types of incentive payouts like bank transfers, reward catalog of more than 20000 digital gift cards, prepaid cards, experiences, and wallets across 80+ countries, credit notes or good old bank transfers. Payouts can be managed across multiple geographies and currencies seamlessly.

I have 50 people working in the Sales ops function who create programs, calculate incentives and disburse them but the sales team doesn’t seem to have real-time information about it.

On excel sheets, even its online versions, unless someone is manually updating data every minute, the sheet quickly becomes outdated. Excel sheets are not connected to live CRMs and ERPs and hence cannot be updated real-time. As a result of this, there is no transparency or visibility of data. Apart from motivating your sales team, Compass provides complete transparency into the actual calculations behind the numbers and your team can trust the numbers they see because they have visibility into how they’re calculated

We are a start-up starting out internationally and want to outsource incentives. Can Compass do that for me?

Yes absolutely. At Compass, we would love to be a part of your next leg of growth and automate your incentives while you focus on building the next stage of your enterprise.

I have a fleet of sales guys who work on the ground and do not have access to their laptops all the time. Can I have updates for them on an app?

Yes. Compass is a light app under 10 MB that is easy to access, use and is real-time.

My sales contests seem to lose traction after a while. What can I do?

To make contests work, your sales team needs to be aware of it and be able to track it in real-time, over the tenure of the contest, routed through a single channel. Compass helps you publish programs in under 10 minutes and track progress real-time one single channel.

All my sales reps and team leads maintain data locally on spreadsheets and come to me with different reports every single time. Which one should I trust?

Excel is a blank canvas with two dimensions. It cannot handle complex calculations coupled with layers of logic. And you will have to resort to using 10s and 20s of nested ifs and indexes to arrive at the final value. God forbid one of them goes wrong with one of those 20, there you have 20 different reports! With Compass, you have a single source of truth that you can rely on for any information, at all times.

The data for incentives are stored in multiple sets. Is there any way to connect them?

Compass can easily access and connect data from multiple data sets to give you the final result, without any manual intervention.

Splitting commissions between sales reps for a closed deal is a nightmare. How can I automate it?

Any time you have split commissions, the inevitable question is – how to split? If you always split evenly, then splits are pretty easy to deal with. Otherwise, clear rules are needed, so that splits can be dealt with in a systematic manner. What’s worse is when you have to manually calculate commissions for each rep. It is incredibly important to have a system like Compass in place that lets you define and communicate the splits for such deals beforehand, to avoid losing sales reps over the commission.

We have a policy that allows us to pay commissions to our sales reps only when we receive our dues. How can I handle this exception?

A lot of organizations have policies of paying commissions to their reps on realization and not accrual. In this case, the timeline of accrual v/s realization is pretty different. 

This makes it important for the organization to have real-time commission calculation software that can account for such changes with retrospective effect. Otherwise, you’d need to locate old spreadsheets and find who got paid what on each deal!

It is mandatory for all sales reps to achieve 70% of their quarterly quota for us to release their commissions. Can Compass configure this for me?

Many organizations use commission structures with retroactive payouts. Payouts are only triggered (retroactively) once certain conditions are met. It can be very painful to deal with if all calculations are to be done manually. You require a robust system like Compass that can look up past data without having to manually run this command and calculate the final amount to be paid.

We run sales contests for our sales reps locally which might not be run for the sales teams across the country. How can I make sure that their booster incentives are paid on time?

In such cases, it is important for organizations to have a robust system that can calculate differential sales commissions for the participating and eligible cohort and the usual one for the rest of the team. Manually calculating these incentives can be extremely tedious and time-consuming, leading to manual errors.

Can Compass account for tax liability?

Tax calculation is a crucial aspect of incentive payout and has to be accounted for diligently. Thankfully, you no longer have to worry about calculating it for each rep because Compass can configure it within minutes.

ASC 606 and a few like it are as complicated as they can get. Is there a way to handle it?

Accounting for tax liability and legal implications of processing incentives like ASC 606 is a crucial aspect of the commission payout process. With business tools built for mathematical calculations that have a simple input process, output mechanism, it is virtually impossible to account for such nitty gritties. It does not allow you to configure tax implications, let alone those based on slabs or geographies, and make financial reporting and legal compliance independent of incentive calculation and payouts.

User authentication and security measures like GDPR or ISO are crucial and its absence may put the company at significant risk. Compass is built exactly for this.

I have to be an excel expert to configure this program on Excel and I am not. How can I make it easy?

Compass is a no-code platform that lets you choose from interesting templates and configure logic and publish a program within 10 minutes without being an expert at Excel. If you can think about it, you can build it on Compass. It is that easy.

Why is my in-house calculation platform not working?

Most tech teams will deliver a “working solution” fairly quickly. However, as additional requirements like adding cumulative tiers, split commissions, product and geography based competitions are added, your in-house solution may start falling apart. It makes your in-house-built incentive calculation software a glorious spreadsheet at best. But Compass is built for incentives and it truly automates them.