Commission Tracking Tool Reveer Aims for Partner Data Sovereignty

Commission tracking software platform Reveer is helping technology advisor partners streamline the copious data their businesses ingest.

Reveer brings data about partners' commissions into their customer relationship management (CRM) software, allowing them to identify variations and problems in their commissions and more deeply analyze their technology sales.

The platform is emerging in the channel after its 2022 founding. It's the brainchild of Colleen Passolt, who has been auditing commissions for the last 12 years at her firm, TelePass. The platform integrates with HubSpot, Zoho, and is finalizing its integration with Salesforce. It's available as a subscription to partners.

Reveer's Colleen Passolt

Reveer intends to develop a partner program in the upcoming years as it picks up adoption, Passolt and investor Ronald Berry III told Channel Futures.

The Complexity of Commission Tracking

Passolt said her years of commission auditing showed her agents' lack of visibility into their commissions. Like a salmon swimming upstream, commission payments must flow through multiple entities and tools from the supplier to the sales agent.

Generally, the supplier/vendor initially sends the payment to the technology services distributor (TSD), which is technically the agent of record on most deals. The TSD collects and tracks the commission, in most cases using a solution called RPM Telco. The TSD distributes to the agent its apportioned commission and delivers a monthly commission statement to the agent. However, unless the agent subscribes to RPM software, they will see limited insights into how a supplier's residual commission stream varied from month to month. And for those agents that owned an RPM license, they saw limited integration of RPM into their CRM.

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Complicating matters even further is the fact that TSDs and partners must account for how suppliers measure and distribute commissions differently.

“There are so many nuances. Every single supplier out there has their way of doing things and what data they're going to provide," Passolt told Channel Futures. "My vision is that Reveer isn't going to be set one way; it's going to be able to pivot for different suppliers.”

With Reveer, partners can view the real difference between what they expect the suppliers to pay them (data historically visible in their CRM) with the actual payment number (coming into the CRM via Reveer).

If partners see a variance, they can reach out to the supplier for more information or involve their TSD partner in a commissions audit.

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“It's going to allow them to see holes in what they're expecting be paid on versus what they're [actually] being paid on. And that will save them time and money," Passolt told Channel Futures. "Once they see where it is, we can get those disputes out and make sure they get paid faster. Obviously, there are ways they can do that manually, but it's supposed to be more of a seamless, automatic way instead of having to go through a spreadsheet and analyze it."

Illinois-based Rise Technology Advisors is one of Reveer's first customers. RISE co-founder Eric Ludwig said it was easy to find the value in the tool.

“If you're not doing anything currently [with tracking commission variations], Reveer pays for itself, because it finds errors. And we all know that errors happen all the time," Ludwig told Channel Futures.

Passolt said Reveer intends to create further integrations with TSDs and partners.

While TSDs run proactive inquiries (as well as requested inquiries) into sales commissions, Reveer is set to increase partners' own knowledge of their commissions stream.

Source: Reveer

The Rise of Partner CRMs

Reveer is hitting the scene at a time when more and more technology advisors own a CRM platform. Ten years ago, many agents would have operated primarily on spreadsheets; now, Ludwig says many of them consider their CRM and its data the "crown jewels" of their business.

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FlyWheel's Ronald Berry III

Ronald Berry III, CEO of HubSpot-focused firm FlyWheel Consultancy, agreed that CRM adoption has picked up among tech advisors. Berry estimates that about half of them are using Salesforce and about 40% are using HubSpot, with "other" accounting for about 10%.

Rise co-founder Ed Wu, who handles many of his firm operational processes, said partners have caught onto the importance of data in their business. That's one of the reasons CRMs have become common.

“That speaks to the maturity of the TAs: both the competitiveness in the market and the need to evolve with clients to build these kinds of sustainable, long-term relationships," Wu told Channel Futures. "Dare I say – in years past, it was more transactional and kind of churn-and-burn. In my opinion, you’re neither building a valuable business nor anchoring fully to your clients if you can’t help them provide better access to their data.”

However, many agents don't pull the full value out of their CRMs, Passolt said. Namely, not everyone is using their CRMs beyond tracking customer opportunities.

“If they're just using it as a tracker, that's not what a CRM is for. A CRM really needs to be able to flow from opportunity through sold deal, through to commissioning and back into forecasting. It really should be your life in there," she said. "And I see a lot of data that's entered in and then it just sits.”

Owning Your Own Data

A flurry of announcements around software platforms and tools is occurring at the vendor and TSD level. For example, some of the world's largest carriers have embraced integrations with CableFinder to streamline the quoting and pricing process for agents. And TSDs have invested serious money into sales enablement platforms that partners use to educate themselves on technology and to vet suppliers.

As portals and platforms proliferate, Berry said tech advisors still want to run their own hub for all of the increased data that's coming in.

“Even if the TSDs have a great portal, [agents] can just live in their own centralized CRM and Reveer rather than having to go into each TSD portal independently every single week," he said.

Wu said partners like Rise regularly advise their customers on the importance of data sovereignty and ownership. Expanding the CRM data insights is an exercise in eating one's own dog food.

"For us, owning our own data is as important as anything. I don't want to ever have an instance where we're siloed or cut off from our own contract and revenue data," Wu said.