Dyn, a worldwide internet infrastructure as a service (IaaS) provider, has made major moves over the past three years and the company has grown significantly as a result. Year-over-year, the company's revenue has improved 70 percent over the past three years. Just looking at the company's sales team, it has jumped from three people in 2009 to upward of 50 as of this year, and it still continues to grow.

However, that explosive growth has made the management of the sales team much more complex. As a result, Dyn has turned to sales performance management (SPM) software. The company recently opted to integrate Xactly Express, a self-service sales compensation management tool that is designed specifically for businesses with smaller, but growing, sales departments.

Previously, Dyn utilized a basic spreadsheet system to track commissions and other sales information. The manual commission calculation processes were good enough for a small team of three people, but as it expanded, managers were spending more time trying to track sales and calculate compensation. This basic spreadsheet system wasn't cutting it and was creating major complications with the way the team operated.

"We did not have the flexibility to modify our compensation and incentive model," said Joe Raczka, vice president of finance at Dyn. "As our payments to reps became more complex, we had to look beyond the Excel pivot table to incentivize and motivate them effectively."

It wasn't until Dyn began exploring dedicated SPM solutions that the problem became painfully obvious. One finance employee spent half of her work day trying to calculate and work with incentive compensation. This led to additional problems further down the line, with agents challenging the accuracy of their checks.

"The ability to track incentives in real time through Express will be huge for us in terms of both employee trust and productivity," Raczka added. "To be able to track the value of a deal, and the different decisions you can make right in front of you is key to keeping reps above quota."

Dedicated technologies have been proven to be more effective payment management tools than basic spreadsheet programs, with one CFO.com report finding a strong correlation between the use of technology and the ability to execute successful payment initiatives.