Salesforce has announced plans to acquire Spiff, a platform that automates commission management for sales teams. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Founded in 2017, Spiff serves up a low-code interface designed to make it easy for businesses to create a sales compensation plan that automatically updates based on personnel meeting their pre-agreed targets. With native integrations for the common enterprise CRM and ERP systems, Spiff says it can handle the most intricate commission structures, including whatever conditions may be in place to trigger payments, while sales representatives can see what commission they’re due in real time.
The Salt Lake City-based startup had raised north of $110 million in its six-year history, including cash injections from Salesforce’s very own venture capital firm Salesforce Ventures, which invested in Spiff’s Series B round in 2021 and led its $50 million Series C round earlier this year.
Once the acquisition closes, which is expected in the first few months of 2024, Salesforce says that Spiff will be put to work within its Sales Performance Management software, a CRM-connected product that connects customer and sales team data.
It’s worth noting that the two companies have a history that goes beyond the previous equity investment, with Spiff making itself available on the Salesforce AppExchange for several years already.
The deal also constitutes the latest in a line of ecosystem companies that Salesforce has eventually brought in-house. Back in September Salesforce acquired Airkit, a low-code platform for building AI customer service agents. Not only did Airkit’s founders have a previous exit to Salesforce, having sold a big data startup called RelateIQ for $390 million in 2014, but Salesforce Ventures had invested in Airkit over several rounds since its founding in 2017. And similar to Spiff, Airkit was also available on AppExchange.
So it’s clear that Salesforce continues to see tried-and-tested ecosystem companies as a safe bet for its M&A endeavors, with “low-code” playing a key factor too.
