The commission engine that changed their go-to-market mid-year

Revenue they would have missed

One quarter into their new commission system, Riverside Insights noticed something in the dispute data. Sellers kept asking the same crediting question, over and over, about the same kind of deal.

In the old spreadsheet world, that signal didn't exist. Each question was just another email. But with every request captured in Pigment, the pattern was obvious, and it pointed to a choice: either the field needed better enablement on how crediting worked, or the incentives themselves were aimed at the wrong thing.

Riverside decided it was the incentives. They shifted crediting midstream to reward the newer product they wanted sellers pushing in the market. Sales of that product picked up. Revenue followed. Sellers got happier, because their plans finally paid them for the deals the business actually wanted. And the selling team got more cost-efficient, because reps stopped chasing deals that were never going to pay well.

A go-to-market correction that used to be a next-year conversation happened mid-year, in the first quarter on the system. That's the win this page is about. The rest is how Riverside got the foundation that made it possible.

Where they started: operating on ambiguity

Rewind to before the build. Riverside Insights ran commissions the way most growing companies do: spreadsheets, manual data pulls, and a payout that landed once a year. Zero integrations. Every number was pulled and calculated by hand, and sellers saw where they stood exactly once, at annual payout time.

The mechanical problem was real. Manual calculations are slow and error-prone, and every new rep multiplied the spreadsheet complexity. But when Joe Mark, Riverside's VP of Growth, describes the starting point, he doesn't lead with the spreadsheets. He leads with ambiguity. Sellers couldn't see how they were tracking. Finance couldn't see comp costs until the year was already over. Questions turned into disputes, and disputes turned into hours of forensic spreadsheet work that nobody fully trusted.

Riverside wanted to grow its sales team. The commission process was the bottleneck in the way.

A foundation to build from

We built Riverside a complete commission engine in Pigment. An integrated data set replaced the manual pulls. Calculation logic was built for each plan's specific dynamics, because their plans genuinely differ by role and a single generic formula was never going to hold up. Six weeks from data to first payment calculated.

We also moved disputes into the system. When a seller requests credit for a deal or questions a calculation, that request now lives in Pigment with an audit trail: what was asked, what management approved, and why. At the time this felt like a housekeeping detail. It's the feature that surfaced the crediting pattern at the top of this page.

The result is a shift in operating integrity. Not integrity in the moral sense, but in the structural one: the same numbers, calculated the same way, visible to everyone who needs them, every day. When a calculation is wrong, there's one place to fix it. When a plan changes, there's one place to change it.

A new operating rhythm

The change in cadence is what made the go-to-market win possible. Sellers went from seeing their numbers once a year to checking them daily. Payouts moved from annual to quarterly. And the path from accounting close to commission payment, which used to take a month or more, now takes less than a week, so finance reviews comp costs on a rhythm that actually matches the business.

The Q2 close was the proof point. It was the first close where the sales team had visibility into the numbers as they landed, and it ran smoother and more efficiently than any close before it. Better than Riverside had imagined, in Joe's words. Worth the operating investment.

Finance got something new too: comp costs as a percentage of revenue, visible for the first time. And when Riverside wants to model a new comp structure, their own team does it. No consultant required.

A partner to build with

The crediting shift wasn't a one-off. Because the audit trail shows exactly which definitions drove which behavior, Riverside went back and updated the data structures underneath their plans, so the next correction will be even faster to spot and make.

That loop (see the theme, adjust the incentive, measure the result) is what a commission system is actually for. The calculations are table stakes.

It's also why the partnership matters as much as the build. The dispute workflow, the crediting structures, the audit trail: none of that was invented for Riverside. It came from years of building commission and go-to-market systems for other sales teams, and knowing which pieces earn their keep once a real sales team starts using them.

Riverside is now looking at where else Pigment can work for them, and we're in that conversation too. Capacity planning is on the table. So is territory and quota planning. Once you have clean, trusted go-to-market data in one place, the second build is cheaper and faster than the first. That's what a foundation is for.