Scaling a company isn’t only about revenue growth, it’s about scaling processes without losing fairness, transparency or speed. In this use-case of Paessler, we’ll show how BI enabled the rollout of a scalable incentivization and performance review process for Sales and Customer Success - starting from “nothing centralized,” evolving into an in-house reporting solution and ultimately reaching the point where we moved to a dedicated software product after two years with clear requirements and proven learnings.

Target Audience: Developers, Business Analysts, Data Analysts, Decision maker
Prerequisites: BI tools knowledge
Level: Advanced

Extended Abstract:
As organizations scale, complexity grows faster than headcount. Teams evolve, responsibilities shift, and yesterday’s “good enough” reporting becomes a bottleneck. At Paessler, this became especially visible during a major business transition toward a subscription model and a more ambitious growth strategy. In that environment, BI is most valuable when it acts not only as an end product, but as an enabler for alignment, transparency, and repeatable decision-making across stakeholders.

In this session, we share a Paessler case study of how the BI team built a Power BI solution to support performance tracking and incentives across Sales and Customer Success under significant time pressure, without implementing a dedicated external compensation tool. The core challenge was not dashboard design. It was creating a model that stays reliable while the organization changes: onboarding and offboarding, team switches, and evolving goal structures. The solution unified inputs from key business systems such as CRM and ERP alongside structured planning inputs, and introduced historization (as-of reporting) to preserve a consistent view of what was known and reported at specific points in time.

To drive trust and adoption, we focused on transparency, traceability, and lightweight governance so results remain explainable and questions can be resolved through a clear review process. The outcome was a BI product embedded in day-to-day operations for Sales and Customer Success, while also giving HR and Finance a dependable shared foundation for payout-related processes and decision-making.