Every month, QuotaPath collects nominations from our customers to name a Quokka of the Month. We’re thrilled to announce our QuokkaPath April winner below. To nominate a teammate, see past winners, and learn more about this initiative, check out our dedicated QuokkaPath page.
It takes new employees about 12 months to reach peak performance, per data from Gallup Analytics.
For Tyler Winterstein, a senior accountant, it took less than six months.
That’s according to his teammate, Derek Peterson, who serves as Senior Vice President of Operations at Opendorse.
Derek nominated Tyler, our QuokkaPath April winner, for the huge impact he has made in his short amount of time since joining Opendorse.
“Tyler joined Opendorse roughly six months ago and has been crushing it for our team,” Derek wrote in his QuokkaPath nomination.
In addition to his finance responsibilities, Tyler led the implementation of QuotaPath for the athlete endorsement and marketing platform.
“We were not maximizing this tool before Tyler grabbed the baton and started running with it,” Derek said. “It’s like that a lot when it comes to Tyler, and I’m very appreciative of him.”
Thanks to Tyler, Opendorse’s revenue and finance teams get to fully enjoy an automated sales compensation process a la QuotaPath.
“It is amazing to be receiving this recognition. But, I couldn’t have done it without the help of the QuotaPath team,” said Tyler.
More specifically, Tyler recognized our Director of Account Management James Millard. “Whenever I had a question or issue, he would help me right away. This is definitely the biggest reason why I was able to reach my goal of implementation.”
Please join us in congratulating April’s Quokka of the Month!
Tyler, here’s to you for taking ownership of an initiative that had an immediate effect on the organization.
Get to know QuokkaPath’s April Winner:
Tyler, a student-athlete, attended Nebraska Wesleyan University, where he played baseball as an infielder
He recently became a new homeowner — congrats!
He collects golf balls from the courses he’s played across the country
Sounds like going above and beyond is par for the course for Tyler.
Nominations are now open for May’s Quokka of the Month. To recognize your teammate, answer six short questions and learn more about our QuokkaPath in the video below.
As part of our series highlighting leaders who replaced manual commission tracking with QuotaPath’s automated commission tracking, we turn to RoverPass’s Director of Sales Kristen O’Hara. Her story differs from the other two, as she joined RoverPass after they bought QuotaPath. To fully optimize the platform, she reshaped her team’s compensation plans to drive sales performance and better align with QuotaPath.
A good sales compensation plan encourages the right sales behaviors and gets your ideal customers through the door.
When one — or neither — of those things happen, a new comp plan may be in order.
That’s why Kristen O’Hara’s first priority upon her arrival at RoverPass in July 2021 involved redesigning their compensation plan.
Prior to her joining, RoverPass reps earned commissions based on earned revenue. This approach required heavy manual manipulation and significant work in spreadsheets. It also failed to incentivize positive sales behaviors, Kristen said.
“We weren’t getting the right fit customers in our door, and it was impacting our ability to onboard,” said Kristen.
Additionally, the company had purchased QuotaPath a month before Kristen signed on. Due to the comp plan design, however, the revenue team hardly made use of it.
Then came Kristen’s comp plan makeover.
Today, RoverPass, a campground reservation system and online booking marketplace, has five compensation plans. Kristen modeled these plans for four sales development reps (SDR), a market manager that oversees them, two account executives (AE), and a sales manager.
“We created a plan that incentivizes volume and targets the right customer — not just the biggest dollar customer. The new plans focus on when the deal closes rather than when the property goes live on the site.”
Kristen O’Hara Director of Sales, RoverPass
Kristen’s move to change up the comp plans also solidified QuotaPath in RoverPass’s sales tech stack.
“Re-modeling the plans to fit in QuotaPath is the best thing I’ve done,” said Kristen. “I used to spend a day running commissions, now I’m done in an hour through QuotaPath.”
Plus, her reps now have full visibility into their existing and potential earnings and in real-time, thanks to QuotaPath’s integration with their HubSpot CRM.
Life’s been good since automating commissions through QuotaPath.
To learn more about her QuotaPath experience, we asked Kristen a few more questions.
Meet Kristen
Kristen O’Hara fell into sales when a friend invited her to run their business development team. At the time, she had been working in operations, branding, and marketing. Yet she made the shift and has continued in sales for five years now. Today she leads a growing sales team at RoverPass as Director of Sales.
As a sales leader, Kristen focuses on hiring the right people and then providing them with the right tools, support, and opportunities for advancement.
What other changes did you make to your comp plan?
Kristen: We also changed from having territories and just AEs to having AEs, SDRs, a lead-based model, and no territories. The new plan consists of monthly, quarterly, and annual commissions. Using QuotaPath’s integration with HubSpot, the monthly data feeds over from HubSpot and directly into QuotaPath. This allows reps to track where they’re at, know how much they’re going to make at any given time, and forecast what they should shoot for to hit target.
Sounds like your team is scaling. What type of growth are you experiencing?
Kristen: RoverPass is well over 40 employees now, and on the sales side, we continue to grow. We’re hiring fantastic people that exemplify our company values. We’re also moving people up quickly. The SDR role specifically receives training to be an AE within six to 12 months of onboarding through a 4-step process.
How has QuotaPath been the right tool for automated commission tracking?
Kristen: The best value about QuotaPath is it just does its job seamlessly. It’s taken so much weight off of me. It gives the reps the ability to see where they’re tracking very easily when they log in. We don’t even have to train them on it. Reps can jump in and figure it out on their own. It’s so easy to use!
Could you ever go back to running commissions in a spreadsheet?
Kristen: No. As a software company, there’s software to make your life easier. Take advantage of that when you can. I love QuotaPath. My entire experience has been really great, and the account management team is amazing!
Final Thoughts
We know separating from your trusted spreadsheets can be difficult. Re-designing a comp plan can pose an even bigger challenge. Good thing we can help with both.
To our sales leadership out there, do we have a tool for you! This week, QuotaPath released our latest upgrade to our real-time leaderboards, Team Attainment Leaderboards.
Take that in. Team. Attainment. Leaderboards.
These new, interactive leaderboards provide leaders with a way to easily visualize and forecast team attainment using conditional color formatting. Now, managers can quickly identify areas of opportunity and be more strategic with their coaching and time as a result.
Team Attainment Leaderboards
With Team Attainment Leaderboards, create up to five leaderboards and goals for a given team.
Got an SDR team that’s measured based on meetings booked? Great, set their leaderboard to populate based on the number of demos scheduled.
Then, for your teams tracked on contract value or annual recurring revenue, base their leaderboards on currency.
We also made it possible to create leaderboards from different data sources within QuotaPath, like Plan, Path Shared Quota, or Field. This means more flexibility to build out visualizations fit for your team. For example, if your SDR team is compensated on demos booked and on closed/won bookings, you can create two leaderboards. One that runs based on meetings set and the other from closed/won bookings.
Visualize attainment
“Scaling sales organizations want the ability to visualize attainment in a way that allows them to understand success or failure ‘at a glance,’” said Co-Founder and Head of Product Cole Evetts.
Our latest changes deliver that — and more.
When reps can easily see where they stand and where their forecasted deals could take them, these gamified views help motivate reps to push forward. Our latest updates provide the clearest, most intuitive reporting UI for reps to date and are much more than a real-time statement report.
Plus, the new dashboards support leaders with robust reporting to drive the right behavior and results. It’s data they can actually use and turn insights into immediate action.
“Sales teams are so excited about the new Team Leaderboard functionality,” said QuotaPath Director Sales Sam Manley. “Our prospects have told us how much value it would add for them to be able to see percentage attainment views across their sales reps in a leaderboard style view.”
This update marks QuotaPath’s latest effort to give reps and sales leadership more ownership and insight into their performance and pipeline.
“Traditionally, ‘commission tracking tools’ aren’t built for sales but for finance,” Cole said. “By investing in a great experience for reps, we have the ability to actually bring ‘commission tracking’ into the sales enablement category, bridge the gap between company and personal financial goals, and provide sales leadership with another tool to drive behavior and results.”
The details
Now, in Team Leaderboards:
Create Attainment Leaderboards based on currency (annual recurring revenue) or based on numbers (demos booked)
Set leaderboards from different data sources within QuotaPath
Gauge quota and percentage of quota attainment using Attainment Index View with conditional color formatting
Set multiple leaderboards within a team, each with its own goal
Forecast your team’s pipeline
Existing customers, sit back and relax. Upon your next login, you’ll notice the new leaderboards. Go in and adjust them according to your team!
“I’m confident that this functionality will be a game-changer for sales leaders, sales reps, RevOps, and executives across the board!” Sam said.
We’re excited to share our latest effort in arming sales leaders with enablement tools that drive behavior and results. To start motivating your team using our real-time, interactive attainment leaderboard, schedule a time to chat with us.
A VP of Sales is a vital part of your management team and is integral to the success of your company. They are responsible for hiring, training, and developing members of your talent pool and making sure they have the skills and team to help your organization achieve its key performance indicators (KPIs).
With this in mind, it’s essential to hire the right person for the position, and for that, you need to offer the right sales compensation package.
In this article, we explore some options to offer a prospective VP of Sales that will fit their expectations as well as the needs of your business.
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As with any position of such importance, there is no “one size fits all” package for compensating your VP of Sales.
Rather, consider the following factors when building your package:
Track record — Have they a proven record of achieving targets and retaining the best sales team?
Years of experience — Will this be the person’s first time as a VP, or will it be their 8th?
Size of employer — Larger employers have larger sales teams, and typically compensate to reflect that.
Years of tenure at an employer — A new employee often has lower compensation expectations.
Employer’s industry — Niche industries often need to pay more for experienced VPs.
Industry knowledge and connections — Those who bring a larger network and industry knowledge to your organization may deserve a higher package than someone who does not.
Method of compensation — Salary, bonuses or stock options? Different combinations suit different companies and candidates, as we shall explore later.
Location — If this person lives in an area with high living costs, they’ll expect their compensation to match.
VP of Sales compensation structure
As we indicated earlier, there is no one-size-fits-all structure for compensating a VP of Sales, but some basic guidelines apply.
Usually, a package includes a base salary and some sort of bonus or commission-based element, depending on the stage of the VP’s career and the industry they work in.
For SaaS (Software as a Service) organizations, the salary and bonus figures depend on the organization’s size, how many sales managers and reps they employ and the geographical area they work in.
3 examples of a VP of Sales compensation package
Choosing the best compensation package for your VP is closely related to the size of your company, its needs, and your growth goals. This may change over time and should also relate to the expectations of the type of candidate you wish to attract.
To help, we sourced three VP of Sales compensation package examples based on commonly adopted compensation structures.
1. A stretch plan for startups: 50/50:25+
If you’re running a start-up, growth is vital, so you need a package that incentivizes growth. However, you don’t want to offer too much and jeopardize your organization’s profitability. So a good package to offer at this stage can be made up as follows:
50% base
50% commission
25% of all revenue above the total revenue target goes to the leader (accelerator)
To make this work, you need to set your goals early on and ensure they’re realistic. If you pitch your targets too low, you may needlessly lose a chunk of revenue — although your VP will be happy! Too high, and a good VP of Sales will recognize this and become demotivated.
2. Equity package: 70/30: equity
A package with a solid salary base can attract experienced VPs who want a predictable income. And, of course, a commission element keeps them motivated. A good split for that will go like this:
70% base
30% commission
Stock or cash bonuses for milestones above target
The stock or cash bonuses also motivate your VP to bring on team members who can contribute strongly to your revenue. This gives them a good connection to your organization and keeps them invested.
3. Year-over-year comparison
This highly-motivating package compares revenue, net profit results, and gross profit. You then calculate bonus payouts to align with the gross profit for each category over the previous year. If your business doesn’t grow, there’s no bonus for your VP of Sales. You can scale this model to suit the needs of your organization and also inspire your VP to build a team well-suited to helping the company grow.
Create Compensation Plans with confidence
RevOps, sales leaders, and finance teams use our free tool to ensure reps’ on-target earnings and quotas line up with industry standards. Customize plans with accelerators, bonuses, and more, by adjusting 9 variables.
Best practices for building a VP of sales compensation package
When building your compensation package for a VP of Sales, start with a pre-determined and clearly laid-out quota and annual plan. This may involve:
Setting an annual budget for sales hiring and expenses.
Modeling the numbers to ensure the gross profit your VP brings in will outweigh the cost of their role.
You should also be aware that the strongest VP of Sales candidates will require a large OTE salary. It’s also a good idea to offer a guaranteed draw (full bonus), as you would with a new sales rep.
Of course, once you have the right VP of Sales compensation package in the first year, the journey isn’t over.
As your company grows, your VP of Sale’s role will grow with it, so it’s best to revisit that package annually to ensure it still meets the needs of both your organization and your valued VP of Sales.
Organizations have to get sales compensation right in 2022.
A whopping 47 million people voluntarily left their jobs last year in search of better wages, benefits, and working conditions. That’s the highest quit rate to date, as reported by the Labor Department.
Sales teams definitely felt the hit.
Last year, sales rep tenures, which, let’s be honest, have always been short, dropped even more to just 18 months. For reference, that number was closer to 2.5 years 10 years ago.
Meanwhile, average on-target earnings (OTE) for account executives and sales development reps jumped between 5 and 15 percent year-over-year based on region and experience. We anticipate those numbers to continue to climb in 2022.
Are the shortened tenures and larger OTEs correlated? We think so.
Dooly, a platform that helps sales reps maintain pipeline data hygiene, found that, of reps surveyed, 51 percent said they would ditch their team for higher pay.
To address increasing sales rep attrition rates and OTEs in a hyper-competitive job market, leaders must adjust.
That means designing sales comp plans that: pay well, reward over performance, motivate reps, and are easily understood.
Learn how to set quotas with competitive OTEs that align with your business goals and attract high performers. Take our recommendations for compensation plan best practices, variable plans, ramp-up methods, and quota frequencies.
Calculate and track sales commissions more accurately — and in less time. Or, skip everything and head to the resources index for free tools to help your approach to sales compensation management.
Account executives with zero to three years of experience see OTEs on average of $100K while SDRs are seeing OTEs between $80K and $90K. (Betts 2022 Compensation Guide)
2. Reps trust compensation plans created by RevOps the most.
And even better when you add milestone bonuses. Although these types of plans are more complex to track and calculate, they drive performance and reward overperformance. In our survey, we found that nearly 80 percent of comp plans featured accelerators. (Benchmark Report: How to build compensation plans for your sales team)
4. Design comp plans that you can easily speak to.
Simplicity, consistency, and uncapped commissions are your friend. Make sure you communicate any changes or new plans to your team, explain how the company will support them through these changes, and allow them a space to ask questions.
5. It’s time to automate your sales compensation process when:
you have plans to scale your team, your current process slows you down and is silo’ed, and you and your reps lack visibility into real-time attainment and earnings. Get ahead of the problems by implementing a solution now.
Performance-based pay is one of the strongest ways to motivate your team. But if your salespeople aren’t totally clear on what variable pay means, this tool could lose its power.
To help get the most out of your employees, you need to create a compensation package that inspires action. Step one: Use variable pay to energize your team. Step two: Make sure they know what variable pay actually means and why they should be enthusiastic about it.
What is variable pay?
The term variable pay refers to compensation tied to, and dependent upon, your performance. The more you sell, the more you make. But that can be confusing for people not used to paychecks that fluctuate from week to week.
Variable may include:
Commission
Project bonuses (individual and/or group)
Time-period bonuses (based on time-related goals, like sales per quarter)
Holiday bonuses
Profit-sharing initiatives
With all those factors in play, the water can become muddied quickly.
Here’s why it’s important to educate yourself and your employees about variable pay and all it entails.
It’s a major part of how to compensate salespeople
On average, commissions — aka variable pay — make up about 50 percent of each salesperson’s pay. Some jobs may offer a base salary as well as incentive pay. Those two numbers together form the pay mix. In some cases, that base pay may be fairly hefty. This is especially true of experienced salespeople and those in high-demand markets like SaaS. But entry-level salespeople may only get a few hundred dollars a week. To make a livable wage, those employees still need to achieve their goals and make commissions.
Standard commission rate rules emphasize a 50/50 split between base salary commission. That means your sales team could potentially double their income by meeting their quotas. By understanding the relationship between base salary and commission, and when a sliding scale may be appropriate, you empower yourself and your team.
It can increase performance
Variable pay can help you get better results from your team. But it’s a tool. Like any tool, it’s only as effective as the person using it. There is a right way and a wrong way to incentivize salespeople. Experts like to use the example of the carrot versus the stick. If you incentivize using the carrot, you’re encouraging positive performance based on the possibility of a reward. Think of a rabbit running toward a carrot. Win the race, get a snack.
Sales managers who use the stick try to motivate their team using threats. “You’ll be fired.” “You’ll lose your bonus.” That may work in the short term, but the long-term lacks effectiveness. Studies show that negative feedback rarely leads to improvement.
Let variable pay be your carrot. If you choose to use commission-based compensation, it’s important to give employees the opportunity and information they need to succeed. Finally, periodically review employee performance and provide consistent feedback. This is where writing down an employee performance review comes in handy.
Clearly state expectations and the specific targets each team member needs to hit. This should be an objective, quantifiable goal.
Let those team members know exactly what they’ll get if they meet those goals. Again, this should be quantifiable. Think “$100 per sign up” instead of “a monthly bonus.”
Give employees opportunities to sell. For an incentive to work, both the goal and the reward need to be realistic and achievable.
Variable pay isn’t just for salespeople
We’ve talked a lot about how variable pay pertains to salespeople. That’s because incentive-based compensation is so prevalent in sales. But it can also incentivize your executive team, marketing department, and partners. You can create goals based on almost anything, including:
The entire company’s performance
Number of sales-qualified leads (SQL)
Number of partner deals
This type of “gamification” can fuel growth throughout your organization. The same excitement that drives sales can help other departments achieve their goals and raise your company as a whole.
Variable pay is complicated
You’ve probably caught onto this already, but variable pay is rarely cut and dry. Even the simplest plans can be difficult to understand. Say you decide to give your salespeople 10 percent commission on every deal they close. Seems easy enough, right? But here come the hurdles:
Which deals count?
When are commissions paid out?
If multiple salespeople work on a deal, how is the commission split up?
What happens when a deal goes south, or a customer quits/requests a refund? You need a set way to handle these “clawbacks.”
These scenarios should all be addressed during the compensation plan design period and evaluated over time.
Call it incentive compensation, bonuses, or variable pay — it’s all a way to motivate employees to meet individual and organizational goals. Master how to use variable pay, and you may see an increase in conversions, improved employee morale, and happier clients, too.
Need help tracking your commissions? QuotaPath takes the guesswork out of commission tracking with software that calculates incentive pay quickly and accurately. To see the platform in action, chat with a teammate today.
Meet our first-ever QuokkaPath winner, March’s Quokka of the Month, Robert Candelaria!
Nominated for his recent promotion and following the obliteration of his monthly quota, please join us in celebrating Robert.
Robert works as a sales development representative for our customer Pathwire, a Sinch Company, that offers cloud-based email products such as Mailgun, Mailjet, and Email on Acid.
Within 9 months of joining Pathwire, Robert earned the promotion from market development representative to SDR. Then, in his 10th month, and first as an SDR, Robert steamrolled his monthly target by more than 200 percent. All of which he got to track in real-time using QuotaPath. 😉
Go off, Robert!
When he’s not handing off smoking hot leads to sales, the SDR comes up with new outreach strategies for the team.
For instance, to add a level of personalization to their cold email efforts, Robert inputted a variable that pulls the prospect’s company’s name into the subject line.
He also refined his messaging to create urgency.
“People do not like to waste money. I crafted my messaging to speak to companies hitting email overages,” said Robert. “Then I followed it with a call-to-action to find a day to discuss their account.”
Additionally, Robert put together tailored email campaigns segmented to hit prospects with pain points specific to their market needs.
“By utilizing tools that I have access to, I could distinguish the messaging based on what companies were in the market for, which would decide what message was to be sent to who,” Robert said.
And that, my friends, is how you sprint past quota.
Congrats again, Robert, and thank you for sharing your story!
Want to nominate a teammate for April’s? Submit your nominations.
What’s QuokkaPath?
QuotaPath launched QuokkaPath in 2022 to celebrate our users!
The name nods to the Australian animal the quokka, which earned internet fame for its adorable smile.
Like a pack of smiling quokkas, we’re happiest when our customers succeed!
That’s why every month, we ask our customers to nominate someone from their team who has gone above and beyond to support a customer, coworker, or prospect. Then, a Quokka Committee within QuotaPath selects a winner.
Our “Quokkas of the Months” earn permanent spots in our Quokka Hall of Fame. Plus, the winners and those who nominated them receive a quokka-filled swag pack.
How it works
Customers can nominate someone as many times as they want
At the end of the month, we pick a winner, then reach out to our main QuotaPath contact at the company to verify the winner.
At the end of the month, we reach out to both the nominator and the winner and ask for an address and a couple more details.
Then, we yell it from the rooftops! AKA our social media channels, and highlight our monthly winners in a blog just like this!
So, go ahead and nominate that mentor, that teammate you can always count on, or that leader who just gets you. We want to celebrate them!
Remember, this is just for QuotaPath customers. But guess what? You too can become a customer of our intuitive, easy-to-use, and accurate sales compensation management platform. To learn how QuotaPath tracks commissions and motivates reps to excel, like Robert here, schedule a chat with our team today.
We promise you’ll be met with a quokka-esque smile!
QuotaPath Senior Account Executive Alex Brennen was about to close the biggest deal in the company’s history.
In revenue size, and in the number of users, the deal would push Alex across her quota target, help the sales team hit its monthly goal, and set a new precedent for future deals.
If you’ve ever been in sales, you know the type of thrill, accolades, and especially nerves, a deal such as Alex’s can generate.
Yet it wasn’t pride, commissions, or potential loss of the deal that crowded Alex’s thoughts.
Instead, Alex remained steadfast to uncover and deliver on customer needs. And, set up steps to ensure that, should the deal go through, a smooth handoff from sales to our customer teams followed.
At the end of October, Alex rang our closing bell in front of a line of colleagues, who waited to shower her with high fives in celebration of closing the deal. Then, when onboarding took over, to their delight, they found no surprises or false promises from Alex’s sales process.
Alex’s approach to her work with customers and teammates exemplifies what it means to “Lead with empathy,” — one of QuotaPath’s five core values. And it’s why, at the beginning of the year, we recognized Alex as a winner of our new Value Awards.
The Value Awards
Following a freshening up of our core values last year, we introduced the Value Awards in early 2022 at our companywide kickoff. This annual event allows Navigators (what we call one another) to nominate and celebrate their peers who consistently embody our five values.
“At QuotaPath, it’s everyone’s responsibility to hold each other accountable for living our values,” said Carrie Carroll, QuotaPath’s Workplace & Employee Experience Manager. “Strong values help create and enhance connectivity and trust across the team. That’s why we opened up the nominations to the entire company and made it peer-driven.”
See our newly updated values below. By changing the wording to make them more action-driven, we aim to make it easier for our Navigators to recognize when our values are being upheld.
QuotaPath Values and Culture
What it means to be values-driven
In addition to celebrating our Navigator winners, we embrace a values-driven culture and embed it into everything we do.
When it comes to hiring, for example, we have adopted a value-based hiring approach. This helps our candidates get a clear idea about how our values align with their own. That way, we both make sure we’re a match. Value-based hiring promotes authenticity with candidates. It creates space for people to live out their values at their own guidance.
When we’re interviewing under this approach, we look into how people execute projects and interact with customers and colleagues. Are they building trust with their teams and colleagues? Are they staying curious and trying new things with their projects?
“Instead of looking for people who ‘fit’ a certain culture, we want to work with people who live out our values in different ways,” said Angie Nelson, QuotaPath’s Recruiter.
Value-based hiring also allows for conversations about company culture and teamwork, and encourages new ideas and schools of thought, Angie added.
Values exemplified with our customers and one another
Additionally, our values drive our relationships with our customers. For instance, in 2022, we launched our QuokkaPath initiative to allow our customers to nominate members of their team who are excellent mentors, teammates, and share in our values. We then select a winner from a pool of nominations and celebrate the winners across our channels. Oh, and we delight them with quokka-inspired swag packs.
Internally, we fill our Slack channels with cross-collaboration, support for one another, opportunities to connect with people outside of our immediate teams, and post “water cooler” questions to get to know one another.
At the end of the week, the entire company jumps on a Zoom call to share our wins and offer shoutouts for our fellow Navigators. Last week’s shoutouts, for example, included a stream of praise for our RevOps team, our Director of Customer Success, and our Chief of Staff who hopped into deals, calls, and data to better support our company efforts throughout the week.
These events, whether big or small, foster connections internally and grow our community with our customers.
To see how we incorporate our values into our product philosophy, schedule a time to chat with us.
2022 Value Awards Winners
Lastly, please join us in celebrating our winners and honorable mentions from the 2022 QuotaPath Value Awards.
Lead with empathy
Honorable Mention: Darby Dupre (Marketing)
“Darby always encourages people to look out for themselves and is a huge advocate for mental health and self-empowerment in the workplace. On top of that, she’s always looking out for how to best connect with our customers and serve their needs.”
Winner: Alex “Simba” Brennen (Sales)
“With her prospects and teammates, Alex is always willing to put herself in others’ shoes and offer genuine feedback and support.”
Stay curious
Honorable Mention: Andy Keil (Product)
“Andy brings a creative and experimental mindset to product development. He is always willing to try new ideas and approaches. He constantly thinks of ways to optimize the product and improve the experience for customers, and his curiosity is the key to that.”
Winner: Melanie Taube (Marketing)
“Melanie is always willing to experiment and push the boundaries of marketing, brand voice, and design. She will hear something in a meeting, and then come back to the next one with ‘out of curiosity, last night I looked into x, y, and z.’ She is a strong example of someone who regularly explores new skill sets.”
Navigate with data
Honorable Mention: Meg Rodriguez(Customer Success)
“Meg has taken the lead on so many fronts since joining QuotaPath and at every step of the way she is seeking out ways to ground her thinking and decision making into data.”
Winner: James Truty (Engineering)
Why he was nominated: “Raw data is James’s food. It keeps him alive and allows him to perform the tasks he is responsible for. I can’t think of a response he’s ever given that wasn’t backed up by some empiric data.”
Build trust
Honorable Mention: Venu Kunche (Product)
“Part of being a great Product Manager is building trust with those you work closely with. Venu asks team members how to improve the process and takes the suggestions to heart. He works hard to test various approaches and take setbacks with grace.”
Winner: Josh Kamenicky (Customer Success)
“Josh will always be upfront and tell you what’s on his mind. Every single customer that he works with trusts him. His soft skills and ability to relate to everyone he interacts with is rare and should be celebrated.”
Promote inclusivity
Honorable Mention:Sam Manley (Sales)
“Sam is always supportive to the team and helps drive a positive workplace. She makes everyone feel included and ensures no one is left behind.”
Winner: Angie Nelson (Recruiting)
“Angie brings inclusivity to her day-to-day and is focused on ensuring that we are all creating an inclusive environment. This is evident in who we hire and how we interview.”
Navigator of the Year
Winner: Zoe Wolfe (Engineering)
“Zoe pays attention to the person/coworker as much as the task. She puts herself in others’ shoes. Then she takes that perspective with her own and provides insights into how we can make QuotaPath a better place.”
Congratulations to all of our winners!
Interested in learning more about life at QuotaPath? Check out our page here.
Muck Rack’s Financial Planning and Analysis Manager Katie Cooper stayed loyal to spreadsheets until she had enough.
“At the end of the day, the result was great. As long as everything was updated and formulas weren’t broken, spreadsheets did the job,” said Katie.
At the time, she and her team also leveraged HubSpot’s CRM platform to manage their sales cycles.
But as Muck Rack’s revenue team scaled to 20 reps, the financial planning and analysis manager struggled to keep up manually.
At the end of every month, Katie had to build a list of every deal sold, pull data from HubSpot, cross-reference the data twice, and make sure that every payment over $1,000 was correct. This entire process took a week to complete.
“We only had eight sales reps and two account managers. The entire commission process took a week to complete each month. I ran it in a big Excel sheet that I stored in Dropbox and had to re-create a new version of every time.
It was not the way to live.”
Katie Cooper FP&A Manager
Before switching to QuotaPath, the tricky part for Katie involved maintaining a spreadsheet for every sales rep. She felt she couldn’t provide real-time transparency without oversharing information, so they all had their own versions of a master sheet. Additionally, if a sales rep got promoted and their pay structure changed, then that’s back to square one with formulating a new spreadsheet. And it wouldn’t be a true spreadsheet if a formula didn’t occasionally stop working. Which isn’t hard to fix, but who wants to have to deal with another corrective step?
Even though Katie formulated a way to make spreadsheets “do-able,” she grew convinced that spreadsheets weren’t the most efficient way to work.
There had to be a way to automate this, she thought. Then in December 2020, Katie changed her entire sales commissions workflow by implementing QuotaPath. Now, a team of 70-plus relies on QuotaPath for attainment and earning transparency powered by QuotaPath’s HubSpot integration.
Meet Katie
After earning a fine arts degree from The University of Utah and an MFA from The Accademia dell’Arte, Katie began her career as a sales coordinator. Next, she became an inside sales rep for a small local tech company. Then in 2019, Katie started at Muck Rack as the sales operations manager. Last year, the public relations media platform promoted her to a financial planning and analysis manager role.
What Katie enjoys most about her job: “Every conversation I have with people at Muck Rack is so encouraging. The company is full of people who believe in the markets we are serving, our product, and how we are building something to serve public relation professionals and journalists communities.”
Why make the switch from spreadsheets to QuotaPath?
Katie: It made sense to pay for an actual software that has a scalable system and is easy to reference for everyone involved. Now, I can send a link in a Slack post when commissions are approved every month. Furthermore, everyone follows the same instructions on how and where to find information that’s specific to them within QuotaPath. Before, I had to tailor directions for every person.
How has QuotaPath changed your workflow?
The tool allows me to seamlessly automate everyone’s commissions into one platform so that sales reps, customer success managers, SDRs, and revenue management can view their own commissions in the tool. This makes it easier to troubleshoot when needed. It’s easy to reference and the information is made to be transparent for the entire revenue team.
A major game-changer for me is the ease in which I can onboard a new team member…and with our rapid growth, efficiency and accuracy here is a must. Assigning a plan, quota, and rate in QuotaPath saves me about a half-hour per employee.
You mentioned it took you a week when you had less than 10 reps. Today, your sales team is closer to 70. How long do commissions take now?
January’s commissions took me less than six hours from start to finish.
Lastly, imagine your spreadsheet’s retirement party. What does it entail?
This is definitely more of a party for myself than my spreadsheet. My commission tracking spreadsheet is no more. I don’t want to see it again. I am kicking it out. Here’s some gasoline. A candle. Then I can sit back in my lawn chair and relax in the glow of a bonfire.
Final Thoughts
Now that Katie is done with commission spreadsheets forever, she doesn’t ever plan to look back. Separating from your trusted spreadsheets can be difficult. However, let us help send your commission tracking spreadsheet into retirement by switching to QuotaPath.
Like the scaling sales organizations we support, we too have grown.
In fact, last year we grew our feature-set capabilities by 100 percent!
“In 2021, we listened to our users and added a massive amount of new value for our current and future customers,” said QuotaPath Founder and Head of Product Cole Evetts.
These changes occurred in stride with our evolving ideal customer profile.
In 2018, for instance, we launched to address the core issues of the compensation process for small, growing organizations with simplistic properties and requirements. We focused on the reps because there was no solution out there that enabled reps to dynamically track and forecast their commissions. Now, we’ve expanded our product capabilities so that we can offer more to our existing customers, support larger organizations, and include all compensation stakeholders.
Product additions like new integrations, deeper insight capabilities, and greater in-app cross-collaboration have helped us level up to include teams with increasing compensation complexities.
Despite these technical upgrades — and many more en route — our product and engineering teams remain fully committed to providing impactful and enjoyable experiences for our end-users.
Check out the major changes below and how we continue to think about making sales compensation a better space for all.
Maintaining simplicity and managing greater complexities
We understand the importance of being able to connect the tools you use to create simple, automated workflows that you can trust. So we listened to our customers’ requests and invested in integrations.
We launched our most requested feature of 2020 early last year with our native HubSpot integration. This added another data stream for our sales customers that run their sales funnels through HubSpot’s Sales CRM, like Tribe Dynamics.
We also launched an integration with Close and improved upon our real-time data syncs so you’re always in the know with the CRM sync status indicator.
The release of Inbound API opens the doors to almost any CRM that exists to pull in deal data to QuotaPath.
Plus, our new Maxio and Outbound API allows for finance teams to build, automate, and track commissions in QuotaPath and then sync to Expense Recognition by SaaSOptics.
We also released features to support more complex compensation structures. QuotaPath’s cumulative quotas mean we can now support period-to-date attainment against monthly and quarterly cumulative quotas.
Lastly, we introduced global currency options and support over 150 currencies.
Hats off to everyone at QuotaPath who played a role here and our amazing partners!
HubSpot Cards enables HubSpot CRM and QuotaPath users to see Earnings in HubSpot
Increased insight and collaboration
We continue to focus on surfacing meaningful insights and strengthening how teams collaborate for a smoother compensation process.
In 2021, we made it possible to upload additional deal data so that you can create payout schedules according to invoice dates, contract terms, and billing periods. Our Deal table enhancements provide those insights and more for at-a-glance views.
On the collaboration front, Deal Flagging and Plan Verification recently went live. These two avenues enable leadership, admins, and reps to communicate in-app regarding compensation.
Payouts allows for teams to audit, confirm and process payouts.
Building cross-departmental alignment
We made serious advancements to establishing QuotaPath as a single source of truth for sales reps, managers, operations, and finance.
Earnings Approval aligns key stakeholders by reviewing commissions for accuracy before you freeze earnings to close the books.
With Payouts, teams can audit, confirm, and process payouts, without relying on spreadsheets. This magnifies cross-departmental alignment through surfacing clear audit trails of commission data. Reps know exactly what’s on their paycheck and the deals that comprise it. And, being able to represent complex pay schedules saves time and headache.
Additionally, to help our finance and accounting teams with their ASC-606 compliance, we launched Ledger. With Ledger, teams can create expense schedules for their revenue teams’ earnings, including complex variables like daily proration and unique schedules between deals.
More streamlined and efficient onboarding
In collaboration with our customer success team, we improved the speed and efficiency in delivering onboarding to new customers.
First, we significantly improved our sign-up flows by adding accessibility and security to the login process.
Secondly, we learned a lot about how complex comp plans can become and added Rate and Quota Manager to easily customize quotas and variable rates for reps in one plan. This provides flexibility for more scalable plan building.
We introduced Official Teams to include our new Team Manager role in QuotaPath. Now, managers can access their team’s Earning and Attainment Leaderboards to easily track performance.
We also streamlined the setup of Teams so that you can create more teams, more efficiently.
Keeping your data safe
None of these additions matter if we can’t promise the security of our customers’ data. That’s why we earned our SOC2 Type 1 Certification. We also added two-factor authentication, improved our terms and conditions, and updated our workflows for annual contracts and billing automation.
Plan Verification allows for in-app compensation plan sign-off.
Package changes
It’s nice to stop and reflect on how much we’ve grown while getting excited about everything we have on deck.
As part of our evolution to deliver great experiences as you scale, we’ve made adjustments to our pricing. Our free offering is staying put! And, we will maintain our straightforward, transparent pricing with no implementation fees.
For smaller teams, we’ve added the QuotaPath Startup Package.
“The SMB market is underserved in this category and in need of a solution,” Cole said. “For this reason, we’ll maintain a budget-friendly, easy to use, and low barrier to entry option for those organizations .”
Our QuotaPath Scale Package pricing increased by $10, following our product feature-set that surpassed 100 percent growth. This offering includes Ledger, payout scheduling, attainment leaderboards, Plan Verification, Deal Flagging, and more.
The future is bright
We’re proud of everything that we delivered and accomplished in 2021, and we’ve got even more in store this year. Join us as we continue to support scaling revenue organizations with their sales compensation needs!
QuotaPath customer Blackthorn shares its successes after adopting QuotaPath’s Salesforce integration. Photo Credit: Jake Rauscher, Blackthorn.io.
Blackthorn, a native Salesforce app that manages events and payments, relied on Salesforce formulas to calculate sales commissions. It was a workable solution for a small sales team until they began to scale.
As the sales organization added sales development, customer success, and partnership teams, the complexities in commission structures outgrew Salesforce formula capabilities. Blackthorn had been handling Salesforce administration internally without a designated admin on staff. Since every change to quota required a new formula, the frequent changes of a scaling startup became a “formula frenzy.”
Further aggravating the situation, Blackthorn loves monthly kickers and end-of-year accelerators to drive performance, which called for more formulaic adjustments.
For maximum impact from these additional incentives, reps need to be able to easily track their progress against them. But the Blackthorn sales team had to review four different Salesforce reports when trying to determine how close they were to reaching these incentives. So, they were never quite sure if they had qualified or not.
Blackthorn had reached a point where, as VP of Sales Joe St. Germain said, “Formulas could not handle the complexity and scale as we expanded our teams and departments.”
Updating formulas had become so cumbersome that CEO and Co-Founder Chris Federspiel started searching for a solution. He hoped to find a solution that integrated with Salesforce and did not require a heavy lift to implement.
In the time since, Blackthorn’s revenue team has experienced significant time savings while providing clear visibility of compensation tracking for reps and management alike.
Setting up new quotas with Salesforce formulas used to require at least five to 10 hours of work per quota. Now in QuotaPath, it’s a simple update that only takes a few minutes.
Additionally, checking quarterly quota calculations and correcting errors previously took two to four hours per rep and per quarter. With QuotaPath, the team has found peace of mind with the consistent accuracy in their commission calculations and knowing that any adjustment takes a few clicks.
Team performance has also seen a boost. Increased visibility for Blackthorn’s reps through QuotaPath’s reporting has helped drive record sales over the past three months.
Below, the VP of Sales takes us through his QuotaPath experience, including selection, onboarding, ease of use, and increased visibility.
First, what is Blackthorn and who is Joe?
Blackthorn partnered with Salesforce in 2015 to offer a native app that makes managing events and payment processing easier. Higher ed, healthcare, and nonprofit organizations use Blackthorn’s tool to manage event processes like running event phone registrations, creating landing pages, and handling mobile organization. Its payment processor supports companies with mobile and subscription payments. Blackthorn gives companies full control of business processes through automation, configuration, and customization with no coding required. That’s two products that Blackthorn reps get to cross-sell.
The company now has 70 employees, 20 of whom make up the sales organization.
Joe leads as VP of Sales at Blackthorn and oversees the sales and business development. He joined Blackthorn in 2019 as a senior account executive. He has since climbed the leadership ladder, advancing to director of sales in 2020, and VP of Sales in 2021.
There are five different quota-carrying positions at Blackthorn: account executives, business development reps, customer success, partnerships, and sales leadership.
This means there are 10 different complex compensation plans, that include kickers and accelerators, and are tied to monthly customer payments.
Selecting an “out-of-the-box” solution
Although Joe has become an evangelist of QuotaPath across his sales team, it wasn’t Joe who initially introduced Blackthorn to our platform. It was CEO and Co-founder Chris Federspiel. Chris said he checked out a handful of commission tracking software and sales performance management providers before selecting QuotaPath.
“QuotaPath had the best ability to configure criteria without having to write SQL queries or run big data exports,” Chris said. “It was a click-through path that gave us what we needed with little training.”
Sold on speed
During the sales process, QuotaPath had promised Chris fast onboarding, implementation, and time to value. To both his and Joe’s delight, our onboarding team got Blackthorn up and running in less than two weeks.
That includes the total time it took to sync Blackthorn’s Salesforce CRM, set up every plan or “Path” for reps, and map out commissions. Training for the entire team came in later weeks but within the first 30 days.
“We figured onboarding would be quick based on what QuotaPath told Chris, yet we were still happily surprised that it worked out the way it was sold,” Joe said.
Plus, the QuotaPath onboarding team has been helpful and responsive to questions within the same day.
Easy additions
Before QuotaPath, if Joe had to add a new quota, which was happening every two to three months, he’d assemble a small task force. For example, when Blackthorn added a partnerships team last year, Joe corralled sales, a Salesforce admin, and a department leader to set up the new quota.
Not anymore.
“Now I can do it myself and directly in QuotaPath without having to create a formula,” Joe said. “It’s saving us five to 10 hours of work for every new quota.”
Adding his team’s monthly kickers and end-of-year accelerators have also been easy, accurate, and effective in QuotaPath.
Complex comp plans…no problem
While Joe began to relish in the time he got back from no longer having to mess with formulas, his reps began to see the benefits from new visibility into their quota attainments.
“Our reps realized they could run scenarios and see how much they could earn from our monthly kickers,” Joe said.
This led to big pushes from reps as they moved to fully maximize the accelerators set by Joe. QuotaPath’s ability for reps to run “what if” scenarios also broke down how much they would need to book monthly to lock in an extra 2 percent per deal toward the end of the year.
This added visibility led to record sales the past 3 months.
Sure, there’s a number of factors that can lead to record-breaking sales months, but Joe was quick to credit QuotaPath.
“Our team has had record sales months the past three months,” Joe said. “QuotaPath’s visibility has given our reps a little extra boost to go out and get as much as they can.”
If you would like to see wins at your organization similar to Blackthorn’s, schedule a time to chat with a team member.
This is a story about a Director of Finance who retired his sales commission tracking spreadsheet in favor of QuotaPath and its Salesforce integration.
For Josh Seltzer, Simplex Health’s Director of Finance, the spreadsheet will always have a special place in his heart.
“I’ve seen everything from sharing Excel spreadsheets across departments to SharePoint and Google Sheets to spreadsheets that talk to each other. And, now we’ve got smart spreadsheets with code plugins and logic gates,” Josh said while reflecting on his 10-year-plus tenure in finance.
The spreadsheet is, as Josh put it, “a really easy database.”
However, despite his fondness for spreadsheets, Josh quickly flagged its flaws. The errors pile up as spreadsheets pass between teams and as newer sheet versions replace older ones.
“On top of that, we have to put together a million different inputs that can become very ad hoc,” Josh said.
Simplex Health, a health tech startup that focuses on the prevention and reversal of lifestyle-driven chronic health conditions, adopted QuotaPath in Spring 2021.
Upon sending his spreadsheet into retirement, there were no hurt feelings.
“We’ve come a very long way since adding QuotaPath,” Josh said. “As long as I set up our commission plan rules correctly, QuotaPath just works. I don’t have to worry about it.”
We asked Josh a few more questions to understand Simplex Health’s move to retire their commissions’ spreadsheet. (We also asked him to imagine and describe what his spreadsheet’s retirement party would include.)
Meet this Finance Leader
Josh Seltzer used his accounting degree from Temple University to work up the finance ladder at IBM, inVentive Health Clinical, The Avoca Group, and RADIUS Corporation. Then in February 2020, Josh joined Simplex Health as Director of Finance.
“What I like about my job is that I am able to influence strategy. I can’t help our patients the way our dietitians can,” Josh said. “But I can build out the infrastructure and the roadmap for the corporation so that we can continue to serve our patients.”
What were your team’s final “last straws” to replace spreadsheets with an automated system?
Josh: For a while, we didn’t have a CRM. Instead, we ran reports from our electronic health record system (EHR) and paid commissions based on patient appointments from our EHR. When we added Salesforce, we began downloading manual-intensive reports for this. I’d create a report for every single sales rep. Someone would have to review it. Then I’d download it, report it, digest it, and translate it to a dollar figure. There was a lot of going back and forth and manual lift.
How has your job been since retiring your commissions spreadsheets with QuotaPath?
Less back and forth and more transparency. Reps can see what’s happening behind the curtain in a timely manner. They don’t have to wait for me to build the spreadsheet, put it into a static report, and then set up a time to discuss it. There are no waiting gaps.
Harsh, but fair. Lastly, how’s your commissions spreadsheet spending its retirement years?
It’s just trying to get the most out of its days until it’s permanently vaulted.
We recognize that it can be difficult to part ways with your sales commission tracking spreadsheet and hope stories like Josh’s can offer a glimpse into the other side. Are you ready to throw your commission spreadsheet a retirement party? Talk to one of our teammates today.
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