Spiff: Hacking Motivation
I couldn't be more excited to announce my next startup: Spiff. Spiff is on a mission to inspire, enable, and reward peak business performance. We're starting by moving commission spreadsheets to a modern, elegant platform. But we won't stop until we have rolled out motivation tools for every employee in your company.
If you have a commission spreadsheet pain, please request a demo today.
Motivation science has unearthed important insights over the last decade. But our motivation tactics haven't changed. It's like our town just got electricity but we're choosing candlelight.
Motivation Science
Research has revealed the importance of both intrinsic and extrinsic motivators. And it has shown that different motivators work for different people. You can read our full article here.
Spiff has big plans to offer personalized motivation to all of your employees, but we are starting with commissioned individuals.
The current best practice is for Finance to roll out complex commission spreadsheets every year to commissioned reps. These spreadsheets don't scale.
At Spiff, we're hastening the evolutionary process by replacing these dinosaurs with an online platform. Spiff's platform is:
- Fast. Reps get real-time access to the information that's supposed to motivate them. They don't have to wait till the end of the month, or even the end of the day. It's updates at the click of button.
- Adaptable. You can update commissions in minutes not months.
- Personalized. Each rep gets a personalized portal.
- A lot more. We make it easy to optimize your plans and celebrate key sales wins.
Commissions For All
In the last company that I built, Capshare, I came to the conclusion that key elements of the entrepreneurial dream are breaking down. Most startups offer equity. And most people believe that this equity will grant them riches and treasures beyond their wildest dreams if the startup succeeds.
But, looking at the big picture, we actually see that equity distribution in startups, even successful ones, is highly unequal.
Software is eating the world and making far too few millionaires, billionaires, and trillionaires. In the US, CEOs make 354x what the average worker at their company does. Millennials don’t want to work for companies like this.
One of the big ideas we have for Spiff is to roll out incentive pay to everybody. With the right tools, there’s no reason you can’t roll out pay-for-performance plans to all of your employees. We believe everybody can share in the company’s most important successes. We think Spiff incentive-based pay can become the startup equity of the future and every business can do it. Let us know if we can help you roll out a broad-based plan at your company.
Join The Fight With Us
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers, For he today who sheds his blood with me shall be my brother… --William Shakespeare, Henry V
Since we're on LinkedIn, it seems appropriate to mention we are hiring! We’re looking for a few good people of diverse backgrounds to join us at Spiff. Startups are never easy but they forge amazing friendships. If you dream in commission spreadsheets, give us a call. Even if sales commissions aren’t your thing, we believe in the power of diversity and we need folks from all backgrounds.
We try to live by the principle that we will hire world-class employees no matter what--even if we don’t have budget. We do have a budget, by the way. More on that soon. But even if we didn’t, we’d find a way.
We’re a hard-working, fun-loving group. We’re rolling out a company-wide commission plan. We love foosball after solving hard engineering problems. We’re crazy passionate about the art and science of software development.
Our founding team is awesome:
- Mike Ries, CTO--He was the interim CTO for a while in his previous job at MX.
- JP Maitre, Head of Product--He was the Senior Product Manager over AncestryDNA.
- Albert Candari, CXO--Albert was the Director of UX at Instructure.
- Travis Ashby, CRO. Travis founded and sold Oozle Media before Spiff.
- Casey Crouch. The early technical co-founder of Spiff, and one of the best developers I’ve ever known.
- Also, lil’ ol’ me.
In addition, to salary, traditional benefits, and commission, we give 1% of our revenues to Spiff Up. Spiff Up is a new kind of employee benefit. It gives every employee the ability to contribute to causes they care about.
Anyway, if you are passionate about our space or you’re a world-class talent or both, please reach out!
Creator | Adventurer | Entrepreneur | Musician | Leader | Driven by faith and family. One exit done. More on the way.
5 年If I wasn’t in the middle of my current startup, I could find myself really excited about this! So many problems with the current way things are done. Glad to see you guys tackling this with a killer platform. We’ll be needing Spiff at Seek in 2020 for sure.
Market Development Executive
5 年Great idea Jeron. It is difficult to keep a team motivated when they don't participate in the same success. It's even more difficult if you're compensated on something that only your managers get to measure or that's so complex to measure that you can't track your performance day-by-day. Good luck man!
Data Strategy & Governance Senior Director at Freddie Mac
6 年I’m trying to do the same think at Freddie. This is definitely motivating! Unfortunately, there are companies out there that continue to emphasize and augment the reliance on excel based solutions. The challenge I found is the gap in corporate culture that exists between the older and younger generations. The younger workers are more willing to change and accept better tools and platforms where the older workers tend to focus on maintaining the old. How do you overcome some of these challenges? Would love to connect and talk about some opportunities for innovation at Freddie Mac in the corporate finance division.
CEO of Start Studio (custom software design and dev firm) + Venture Capitalist at Beehive VC
6 年Very cool. Excited to see it.
Making Medicare Simple
6 年One of the great frustrations of salespeople is having to earn their money twice: Once when they make the sale. The second time when they have to wrestle it out of the hands of accounting because compensation systems are manual and complex. Salespeople want to chase down the deal, not run in tar. Great job making things easy!