Palette sells a sales commission tool for modern sales teams

2 years ago 285

Meet Palette, a software-as-a-service startup that is going to be particularly interesting if you’re also running a software-as-a-service startup. The company has built a modern tool to design, manage and optimize sales commission plans for your internal team.

Earlier this year, the startup raised a $6 million funding round led by Bain Capital Ventures. Liquid 2 Ventures, Twenty Two Ventures and Kima Ventures also participated in the round, as well as several business angels, such as Mathilde Collin, Nicolas Dessaigne, Julien Lemoine, Nick Mehta, Allison Pickens, Thejo Kote, Kyle Porter, Adam Pettit, Danny Zorotovich and Peter Kazanjy.

What makes Palette different from other commission management solutions is that it integrates with a lot of different sales products. For instance, the product can fetch data from all major CRM platforms (Salesforce, Hubspot, Close.io, Sellsy, Outreach and Pipedrive), several billing services, like Stripe, Chargebee, QuickBooks and Xero, and also raw SQL databases.

Once your data is centralized in Palette, the product can act as a single source of truth. You can set up several conditional rules and start testing various scenarios until you land on the right commission plan.

At any point in time, sales team members can connect to Palette and see how many deals they’ve closed this quarter and if they’re on track to hit their quota. This way, they don’t have to keep track of their progress in their own Excel spreadsheet.

When it’s time to issue payouts, you can export your commission data as a CSV file. It can be imported in major payroll platforms, such as Gusto, Rippling, Payfit and ADP.

Palette co-founder and CEO Jean-Edern Lorillon names Xactly, Captivate IQ and Spiff as potential competitors. But the reality is that many companies still rely on Excel spreadsheets to calculate commissions because they run into limitations.

For instance, if you sell a product with different tiers and add-ons, you may end up comparing apples and oranges. Similarly, if your customers pay more when they use the product more, you want to reflect this usage-based pricing in your commissions.

In other words, Palette wants to build the sales commission platform for companies with customer success managers and ongoing sales operations. The startup targets mid-sized companies with 100 to 1,000 employees. Some companies using Palette include Nextech AR, EverCommerce, Gorgias, Mews, Kandji and GetAccept.