Comment By: Paul Reiman
Published: January 14, 2024
Last week CompTool announced new innovations to simplify survey management.
TLDR: If you are starting a journey of market pricing using surveys, CompTool and their survey marketplace can be a very cost effective solution to ensure your desired level of market alignment.
What Was Announced
In addition to a go-to-market partnership with WorldatWork, CompTool's founder Justin Hampton announced two key things:
1. The launch of the CompTool survey marketplace, where customers can browse, buy, and seamlessly integrate survey data from a selection of leading compensation survey providers.
2. A free version of CompTool's benchmarking capabilities for customers using surveys in CompTool's survey marketplace, paired with a "Freemium" version of the Squirrel job posting pay database.
How This Adds Value
This rollout can create an impact in the following ways:
- Simplify sourcing new market data by allowing compensation teams to browse job libraries (with job descriptions) to see what surveys can provide appropriate job-level data
- Decrease time and effort in loading surveys into a market pricing platform
- Decrease - or even eliminate - costs associated with managing surveys and linking survey data to internal jobs
Particularly for organizations using the marketplace vendors, this solution can eliminate the costs of traditional third-party market management tools while providing a simplified data management experience.
What's the Catch?
No catch, but some limitations. With any free offering, you can expect certain functionality limitations before needing to upgrade to a paid version.
In this case, the two key current limitations on the free survey management tool are:
1. The survey must be supported in the CompTool marketplace. This does exclude certain vendors, though we have confirmed the marketplace is expected to expand from the current list. We're pleased to see that 2 of the major survey vendors named in our CompTech landscape (Culpepper and Empsight) are marketplace participants, and are eager to see more in the future.
2. The free survey management capabilities stop at the job level. Understandably, CompTool doesn't take on employee-level data on the free version, given the liabilities and complexity associated with housing employee-level data. This does mean that certain CompTool features we love, like detailed market alignment analytics and salary structure impact modeling.
What's Unique?
These capabilities and product offerings compare to other providers with survey partnerships and "free" services, but there are a few things we see as unique here. First, the integrated data purchasing experience of the marketplace and "no upload required" nature of data availability speeds along the process considerably compared to traditional approaches, which required separate contracts with data providers and often cumbersome data upload templates. Second, the free survey management and benchmarking capabilities can legitimately be a full solution if the business requirements fit the limitations cited above.
Category Thesis: Market Management
As pay range transparency expands across markets, it's increasingly critical for organizations to have confidence in how they align to market. Market Management tools help organizations use market data to build structures/bands that align with your desired positioning. A number of companies have been less-than-satisfied with the innovation and expense associated with legacy players in the Market Management category, and we see thoughtful innovation being deployed by a number of innovators in the category.
Closing Thoughts
CompTool's mission is to help compensation teams be more productive, in many cases by lowering the cost of the technology they use to manage survey data, and this announcement is on-brand for Justin and team. We view this as a valuable opportunity for certain companies to improve their market pricing practices with betters data and a more efficient data experience.
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Disclosure | Conflicts
Novo Insights sees itself as an independent provider of insights on the Comptech market. The technology research space is filled with conflicts and questionable practices, so we openly share details of our relationship with any vendor on which we comment.
Was Novo Insights paid to create this post? No, we do not accept fees from any vendor to publish content naming them.
Does Novo Insights receive fees from CompTool for referring business to CompTool? No, we actively decline all referral fee arrangements from all tech providers to ensure we remain neutral.
Has CompTool provided business to Novo Insights? Yes, we are often referred to potential clients by providers in the CompTech space, and CompTool has suggested our services to potential clients just like many other tech providers.
Are there any other relationships or entanglements between the organizations? Novo Insights uses CompTool on behalf of some of our clients using our Compensation as a Service offering, just as we use competing tools with other clients. In some cases Novo Insights is the contract holder for CompTool's service.
Further questions about our independence are welcome.
