Growing a food delivery business is tough enough without your sales incentive program working against you. But that’s exactly what happened to one of Canada’s biggest food delivery companies. They were scaling fast, adding new territories and partners left and right, but their Sales performance management solution was stuck in the stone age.
Sales reps were frustrated. Finance was drowning in manual reconciliation. And leadership had no real-time visibility into performance. The company knew it needed more than a temporary fix. It needed a sales performance management solution that was automated, integrated, and built to scale.
That’s when A5 stepped in with a modern, Salesforce-based approach to incentive compensation automation—turning a painful process into a performance driver.
Challenges
Here’s the mess they were dealing with:
- Spreadsheet chaos everywhere: Different teams were using different Excel files to track the same incentives. Good luck trying to reconcile that at month-end.
- Manual everything: Sales reps would submit their claims, then wait weeks while someone manually verified each entry. Meanwhile, they had no idea if they’d actually get paid.
- Approval bottlenecks: Every payout request had to go through multi-step manual email approvals. Things got lost, forgotten, or just sat in someone’s inbox.
- Zero performance visibility: Reps were flying blind. With no real-time SPIFF tracking dashboard, motivation dropped and disputes rose.
- IT dependency: Want to launch a new incentive campaign? Better file a ticket and wait for your turn. By the time IT got around to it, the campaign was already outdated.
The whole system was held together with duct tape and prayers. And as they grew, it just got worse.
The Solution
Sales Performance Management
Instead of slapping another band-aid on the problem, we worked with their team to build something that actually made sense for their business.Â
A5 implemented a cloud-based sales performance management solution and not a simple out-of-the-box SPM tool. We spent time understanding how their sales team really worked, what motivated their reps, and where the biggest pain points were, to implement Salesforce SPIFF to bring out a unified solution.
Here’s what we built:
- Real-time automation: We connected their Sales performance incentive program directly to their Salesforce data, using Salesforce SPIFF as a solution. Now when a rep closes a deal or hits a milestone, the system automatically calculates their incentive.This enabled fast, accurate sales incentive payout automation in Salesforce.
- Dashboards that people actually use: We gave sales reps a simple personalized dashboard where they can see exactly how much they’ve earned and what they need to do to hit their next milestone — bringing Salesforce sales incentives to life in real time. Managers can see their team’s performance. Finance can track payouts and forecasts.
- Approval workflows that work: Instead of simple email chains, we built proper approval workflows in Salesforce — enabling effective sales operations automation that keeps things moving. Requests move through the right people automatically, and nothing just gets lost.
- Self-service campaign management: Sales Ops can now set up new incentive programs themselves. No more waiting for IT or trying to explain complex commission structures to developers. This approach exemplified Salesforce sales ops self-service management in action.
- Audit trails: Finance finally has a complete record of every incentive earned and paid — critical for any robust Salesforce incentive compensation management solution. Compliance reviews went from nightmares to routine.
Results
The transformation was pretty dramatic:
- Payouts went from weeks to days: Automated approvals and real-time calculations meant reps got paid faster — thanks to streamlined SPIFF payouts. Happy reps can now sell more.
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- Sales team motivation shot up: When people can see their performance and earnings in real-time, they stay engaged. The gamification aspect really worked to amp up performance-based sales rewards.
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- Finance stopped pulling their hair out: No more chasing down data or reconciling conflicting spreadsheets. Everything was in one place with a clear audit trail.
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- Sales Ops got their time back: Instead of spending hours verifying manual submissions, they could focus on designing better incentive programs — enabled by sales incentive automation.
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- Way fewer disputes: When the logic is transparent and automated, there’s less room for arguments about who earned what.
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- IT could focus on real work: No more ad-hoc requests for commission calculations or campaign setups.
This company’s incentive program went from being a source of frustration to actually driving sales performance. Their reps are happier, their operations are smoother, and their finance team can sleep peacefully at night.
The key wasn’t just Salesforce. It was how A5 implemented a scalable, business-first sales performance management solution that gave teams across Sales, Ops, and Finance what they needed to move faster, stay aligned, and grow with confidence.
If your SPIFF program is causing more problems than it’s solving, let’s talk. There’s a better way to do this.
