Revenue intelligence and sales compensation software

Forecasting the quarter, and working out what each salesperson has earned

It is Monday morning at a company in Pune that sells payroll software to hospitals. The sales leader has to tell the chief executive how much the team will sell this quarter. One of the deals is the Chennai hospital from Market Segments 14.2 and 14.3. All the deals in progress together are called the pipeline, and they live in the CRM. (More on CRM in Market Segment 14.1, CRM software.)

At the end of every month, a second question comes up. The finance team has to work out what each salesperson has earned for the deals that closed last month. That payment is the salesperson's commission.

This Market Segment is the software for both jobs:

Revenue intelligence

reads the pipeline: the deals in the CRM, the calls, the emails and the history. From them, it forecasts the quarter's number more honestly than the salesperson's own guess.

Incentive compensation management

turns the plan, the quota and the closed deals into each salesperson's commission. A quota is the amount a salesperson is expected to sell. This calculation is complex enough to employ whole teams. And when it is wrong, salespeople argue about it, and some leave.

Revenue intelligence reads the pipeline in the CRM to forecast the quarter, and incentive compensation management turns the plan, the quota and the closed deals into each salesperson's commission.

Every company named here has posted software engineering jobs in India. Famous companies that don't actively hire software engineers in India are left out.

Planning the quota itself is covered in Market Segment 11.3, Financial close, FP&A and tax software (in Industry Vertical 11, Finance and accounting software). There, Anaplan's sales-performance module is the largest product in this category.

This Market Segment has one sub-segment, with four companies. Three of them have teams in Bengaluru or Pune, and one company, Clari, accounts for most of the job postings.

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From the forecast to the commission

From the forecast to the commission

Back to Monday morning at the payroll company. The first three companies help the sales leader see which deals will really close.

Clari

with engineers in Bengaluru, has posted more jobs than any other company in this Market Segment. It is the revenue platform that made the forecast a product. It reads every deal, call and email, and scores how likely each deal is to close. Then it adds up those scores into a forecast that the leader can compare with what the team says. Beside the forecast sit conversation intelligence, which records and analyses sales calls, and deal inspection, a close look at each deal and its risks. Clari's Bengaluru centre is one of its largest. In 2024 it merged with Salesloft, which puts the sequence and the forecast in one company. (More on Salesloft in Market Segment 14.3, Sales engagement platforms and AI SDRs.)

RevSure AI

founded in Bengaluru, with engineers there, predicts the pipeline from the other end. It attributes every opportunity, the industry's word for a possible deal, to the marketing that produced it. That way, marketing's share of the forecast can be seen. (More on marketing attribution in Market Segment 34.3, Ad verification and marketing measurement, in Industry Vertical 34, Adtech.)

MaxIQ

a small Pune company, sells revenue intelligence and forecasting built around the customer's journey. The journey runs from the first touch, the first contact with the customer, to the renewal, when the customer signs up for another year.

Clari scores how likely each deal is to close and adds the scores into a forecast that the sales leader can compare with what the team says.

The fourth company handles the commission:

Xactly

with engineers in Bengaluru, is the incentive-compensation company. Large sales organisations calculate and explain their quotas, plans and commissions in its system. Underneath is benchmark data from thousands of compensation plans, so a company can compare its plan with others. In our example, Xactly would work out what the salesperson who closed the Chennai hospital deal has earned. (More on how the commission is then paid, through payroll, in Market Segment 12.1, HR, payroll and workforce management software, in Industry Vertical 12, HR tech.)

The forecast the model makes.

The sales forecast was always a negotiation between what the pipeline said and what the sales representative believed. AI models now read the pipeline, the calls and the history closely enough to make the forecast without asking anyone. Clari's product is the clearest example in this category of the Monday meeting becoming a dashboard.

That is managing the pipeline: the forecast of what will close, and the commission for what did.

Who they hire

Who these companies hire, and for what, is on What CRM and sales tech companies hire for.

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