You’ve had a solid quarter. You hit your sales quota, signed big-name clients, and consistently closed deals.

Then you see your sales commission check and it’s inaccurate. Very, very inaccurate.

Wait… what?

Where is all the money you earned? You go on a wild goose chase for answers. Who’s in charge of compensation anyway? Sales ops? Your Sales Director? Someone in the C-suite? Are you really prepared to complain about your pay to a senior member of the company?

Maybe the mistake is yours. You’ve been tracking your sales commissions in a spreadsheet, but you’re no Excel whiz. You’re a closer. Did you botch one of the equations? Come to think of it, management tracks sales commissions with spreadsheets too. Did they make an unfortunate typo or forget to add your latest deal?

For salespeople, these situations are far too common. Inaccurate paychecks are unfair, demotivating, and create unneeded tension. Finding answers is difficult, and can drive talented salespeople to look for new jobs. In fact, pay is the No. 1 reason people quit their jobs.

Here are seven common reasons why sales commissions are inaccurate.

Spreadsheets are riddled with errors

Many companies rely on spreadsheets to calculate sales commissions. But spreadsheets are notoriously unreliable. One study found that 88% of spreadsheets contain discrepancies. The culprit? Manual data entry. The error-prone process results in inaccuracies that lead to major consequences. Back in 2012, a typo by a London Olympics staffer led to the erroneous sale of 10,000 extra event tickets that had to be refunded or exchanged. Harvard economics professors suffered a spreadsheet error that reversed key results of an academic study. JP Morgan arguably had the worst spreadsheet mishap — once losing $6 billion due to a copy/paste error. If those institutions are susceptible to errors, so is your organization.

Sales commission plans are a low priority

CEOs identify talent retention and attraction as priority for 2020. But many executives don’t focus on compensation plans as a major motivator. Managers may even argue that salespeople should close deals for the good of the company, not to earn commissions! Managers and executives are focused on the next pay period, not the previous one — and if there’s a discrepancy, don’t expect a quick solution.

Determining who’s in charge of comp isn’t easy

When there’s a problem with your compensation, it’s difficult to get answers. Who owns the sales commission process? In a smaller company, that responsibility might fall on top executives. In a larger organization, operations, sales managers, or even finance could be in charge. Finding answers can be time-consuming and takes you away from what you do best — selling.

Fragmentation

Sales compensation plans can vary widely from department to department — or even salesperson to salesperson. In some organizations, every salesperson has an entirely different comp plan! Even if the basic format of the plan is the same, exact commission rates might not be identical. Such fragmentation leads to confusion and frustration.

Comp plans are delayed

It’s already March and plenty of companies have not yet released sales comp plans. With no metrics to shoot for, salespeople are unsure how to achieve bonuses and earn more pay. That creates friction and impedes motivation. If you don’t know your quota, how can you shoot to exceed it?

Comp plans change

The only constant in comp plans is that they change. If you’re lucky, your plan only changes once a year, but if people are consistently demolishing quotas, expect management to increase quotas to match attainment. When there is change in management — say a sales director leaves the company — their replacement is left with a legacy comp plan and is likely to make changes. Sometimes these changes are warranted; other times they feel unfair — like someone moving the goalposts further away while you’re still playing the game.

Comp plans are treated like a chore

In many organizations, comp plans — and commission calculation — are viewed as a burden for management. That’s a mistake. Instead, they should be treated as a strategic lever to motivate and retain top talent.

Lack of transparency

Managers typically track commissions on a spreadsheet that’s inaccessible to staff. It’s nearly impossible for salespeople to find errors. That lack of transparency leads to uncertainty and demotivates salespeople striving hard to reach goals.

QuotaPath helps companies solve the inaccuracy problem by calculating and automating commissions in a quick, easy way. Automated data makes the QuotaPath process far more accurate than manual data entry. Transparent calculations build trust between executives and salespeople. Easy-to-understand statistics and dashboards keep salespeople motivated to hit goals and excited to have clarity around pay. If you haven’t checked us out, it’s free to sign up and start tracking your commissions today.

It’s that time of year again! In a couple of weeks, your office is likely to be a flurry of college basketball, brackets, Cinderella stories, and buzzer-beaters. While this can serve as a huge distraction late in the quarter, I have a great way to keep the energy high while motivating your SDRs to some last-minute wins.

March SDR Brackets

I ran this competition every year that I managed an SDR team and it’s a lot of fun, while also being a good way to keep up the momentum during a traditionally slow time.

Set the rules

It seems straightforward, but make sure all the rules are clearly laid out and strictly adhered to. I always had a very easy to understand set of rules: whoever sets the most outbound demos over a 2 day period wins and moves on in the bracket. We resisted complicating it with stipulations about the demo having to occur, awarding points for effort, etc. because we wanted people focused on the task at hand. Take whatever the core goal of your SDR team is, and base it on that: meetings, demos, cold calls, discovery calls, etc.

Build a bracket

In a perfect world, the number of SDRs on your team would be divisible by 4 when making a bracket, but (at least in my experience) that never happens. How do you make a bracket when you have 19 SDRs? Good news, there are a bunch of websites that can do this for you: here’s my favorite one.

Seed your SDRs

You can either randomly assign the seed numbers or you can base it on previous performance. I’ve done both and I think I prefer randomly assigning seed numbers. If you have your best SDR competing against a chronic underperformer, it causes demotivation and possible sandbagging. However, if you want to reward a top performer with a first-round bye (for you non-sports people that means you don’t have to compete during the first round of the competition), you can seed based on performance.

Hype it up

You can see a photo above of the bracket that we made for this competition in 2017. If you can’t tell, it’s BIG. And it hung on the wall in the sales pit. Everyone knew it was going on, even all the sales reps. I was in a bit of a cost-cutting mode during this particular year, so as you can see top prize was $150 with a prize for 2nd and 3rd place. I encourage you to put a good amount of prize money (or rewards like headphones, flights, days off, etc.) toward this competition. I could even see doing something like $25 for each round you win so everyone feels like they have a shot at some cash.

If you can get your team to buy in on this competition, it can build a great pipeline for the beginning of Q2. I encourage you to try it and really get into it. Buy a whistle and ref uniform! Send out regular updates to the entire company! Oh, and if you need a way to track your team’s attainment — not just in March — you can check out QuotaPath. With our Teams functionality, you can increase transparency when it comes to commission and quota attainment for everyone on your team.

Good sales training programs can be a highly effective way to improve the performance of your sales teams. In fact, a study done by CSOInsights, the research division of Miller Heiman Group, discusses how top-rated programs have been shown to increase win rates by 10%. This can be a drastic increase in sales productivity for many organizations. With that in mind, we have compiled a list of 6 top-rated sales programs that just might be what your organization is looking for.

Note: QuotaPath is not affiliated with any of the sales training programs in this article.

Driving to Close: John Barrows Training

The John Barrows Sales Training Program is a great one for new sales hires in B2B companies. It focuses on two main topics: filling the funnel and driving to close. ‘Filling the Funnel’ is a program that tries to optimize your team by focusing on improving the quality of meetings with decision-makers by utilizing methods such as process, techniques, and structure. ‘Driving to Close’ is a program that tries to improve the quality of the interactions that your reps have. This includes learning ways to handle various scenarios such as negotiating a deal or objection handling.

Cost: $495 for individuals

We reached out to Victoria Weber, Client Development Manager at Methodify, to get an idea of her experience going through the JBarrows Sales Training program. Here’s what she said about it.

“Going through JBarrows Sales Training early on in my career completely reframed my mindset around client interactions and became a lasting part of my consultative sales approach. Having a repeatable methodology supports a great customer experience and helps me avoid common pitfalls like listening with “happy ears”.

5 key takeaways:

1. Set an upfront contract at the beginning of each meeting to ensure that expectations are agreed upon by all parties.
2. Decide the next steps before ending a call and send a summary email as soon as possible to establish accountability.
3. Confirm communication frequency and channels to avoid becoming a nuisance.
4. Yes is the best and no is the second-best answer in sales. If a prospect is comfortable saying no, you can avoid wasting time chasing down a “maybe” or dark prospect.
5. Do not “check-in” or “touch base” with potential customers. If you want to be viewed as a valued partner, have a reason for reaching out and be intentional with communications.

The sales profession is ever-evolving, so I still keep my finger on the pulse with posts from John Barrows on LinkedIn, YouTube, and podcasts, as well as content from his colleague, Morgan J. Ingram. They empower all reps to #keepdialing and #makeithappen!”

Sandler Training

Here is another sales training program geared towards B2B sales. Sandler Training is one of the more established, award-winning programs on this list. They teach salespeople how to avoid improving their sales efficiency by taking control of the customer conversation to drive results. Sandler also has programs to improve collaboration and communication through leadership strategies.

Cost: Varies

Hoffman Training

Hoffman Training is a one-day workshop training program that is useful for both sales reps and sales managers. Their workshops typically cover a variety of topics useful for new sales hires and even more experienced sales reps. They can cover everything from building a sales pipeline to teaching your reps techniques to increase response rates and optimize sales calls.

Cost: $595 per workshop

Richardson Trianing Program

One of the best aspects of the Richardson Sales Training Program is the ability to customize for the needs of the individual or organization. They focus on creating engagement with the participants to improve learning. Participants receive coaching and feedback throughout the training. This program is great because participants are able to apply the lessons they learn immediately during the training.

Cost: Varies

Dale Carnegie Training

The Dale Carnegie Sales Training Program promises to help sales reps with improving relationships with leads, identifying unmet needs for prospects, improving lead conversion rates, and creating customer loyalty. It’s grounded in fundamental lessons learned from Dale Carnegie’s influential book “How to Win Friends and Influence People.” For some other interesting reads, check out our blog post about our favorite sales books.

Cost: $249 virtual and varies for in-person training

Winning by Design

Winning by Design is another popular sales program that thinks about sales and customer success as more of a science. They have a 3 step approach to training your sales hires. Step 1 is assessing the revenue engine of your company and how your sales process works. Step 2 is designing your sales playbook using a data-driven approach. Finally in Step 3, they give you actual coaching on ways to improve your process.

Cost: Varies

Sales training programs are a great method of professional development for sales teams. At QuotaPath, professional development is one of the core principles of our employee experience. To make sure our team is always learning, employees get a yearly allowance for any learning and development programs or conferences they are interested in. Another way we are dedicated to building high-performing teams is by creating a tool that empowers sales teams. Sign up and easily get your team set up on QuotaPath.

Sunday, March 8th marks International Women’s Day. The UN’s webpage for the day describes it as, “…a time to reflect on progress made, to call for change and to celebrate acts of courage and determination by ordinary women, who have played an extraordinary role in the history of their countries and communities.” That sounds empowering!

The women in the Philly QuotaPath office decided to get together for lunch and have a casual chat about our experiences, accomplishments, and struggles, both large scale and daily. But when asked the question, “What does this day mean to you?” no one could really answer. It was a bit of a cricket situation before we all disclosed that none of us knew the origin of the holiday that’s celebrating everyone in the room.

In some countries, it’s just another day on the calendar yet others celebrate it more seriously, some even declare it a public holiday. Melanie Taube, Head of Creative Marketing, lived in Russia for a period of time and shared a lovely story about how much her father did on this day for the women in his life — delivering beautiful flowers to his daughter, wife, and colleagues. For others, the only parallel was the Women’s March in 2017, just one day after the presidential inauguration, where women across the globe came together and marched in protest.

It was neat because we all had so many shared experiences. What particularly rang true was how we all felt supported by QuotaPath. Marguerite Hamilton, Software Engineer, got emotional talking about much it meant to her and her new family for the time QuotaPath offered for maternity leave, and how much she appreciated the considerations as a new mother returning back to the office. Several of us in the room, in our own form and fashion, said that we felt comfortable bringing up issues with our CEO, AJ Bruno, and other members of the leadership team and that we trusted that things would be addressed and followed through. This made me feel proud to work for an organization that cares so much about all of us, collectively and individually.

We talked about a few of our greatest accomplishments and a powerful theme here was not to be afraid to carve your own path and ask for what you want (promotions, title change, more responsibility, salary increases). Alongside this topic of accomplishments, Mariclare Hall, Director of Product, told us about a black trans panel at the William Way LGBTQ Community Center she recently attended. When a member of the panel was asked about their greatest accomplishment they answered with, “Being alive.” It was a great reminder that we should all be aware of our privilege.

But the truth is, it’s still challenging being women (and any/all marginalized group) working in a male-dominated industry, such as the tech industry. Many of us felt that throughout our careers, we’ve had to work harder to be respected, trusted and listened to. Zoe Wolfe, Software Engineer, said that on her first day of Computer Programming class the professor asked her if she was sure she was in the right place – she was the only female student in the 20 person class. She’s also one of the brightest and most driven college students I know.

While there’s still great progress to be made for gender equality and equity, it felt nice taking a step away from our busy calendars to share lunch and conversation with a room of powerful, intelligent, and thoughtful women. (I would even say it even felt cathartic!) We questioned why we hadn’t done this before and made a plan to have more intentional gatherings with each other. With that, we at QuotaPath wish a happy International Women’s Day to all the badass women out there who are putting in the work, building businesses, driving change and innovation, mentoring others, balancing work and families, and all the million and one other things you’re all doing to stay happy and healthy!

If you’re using Salesforce® as your CRM, you know that they provide have some standard ‘opportunity stages’ out of the box. However, most sales organizations customize these stages based on their business needs.

This is one of those problems that end up having a much more complicated answer than one would hope for. You have to balance the need for good, actionable data with the desire to keep it simple. If people can understand rules, they can abide by rules. Sure, you could hire a Salesforce consultant to help out with setting this up, but that can be expensive. Instead, focus on what is important for your Salesforce instance and your sales team.

When setting your Salesforce opportunity stages, keep these rules in mind

1. Make it easy to understand
2. Make it very clear what each stage means
3. Automate as much as you can

These are the Salesforce opportunity stages I recommend

Demo Scheduled

If we’re thinking top of the funnel, I believe that an opportunity should be created whenever a meeting is booked. The stage for this should be something like “Demo Scheduled” or “Meeting Set” or something. This allows you to see how effective your team is at scheduling meetings. If a demo ends up being cancelled or the contact no-shows, you should move this Salesforce opportunity to Closed/Lost. The temptation is to delete it, but it’s important to keep the data for your analysis later on.

Demo Occurred

Next, we should have a stage that indicates the demo/meeting happened. We’ve used “Demo Occurred” at my past organizations. This stage should be automated. For example, as soon as a ‘Demo’ activity is logged on the opportunity, Salesforce moves it to this stage. An opportunity can certainly skip this stage and move further down the pipeline. It is important that Salesforce recognizes that the opportunity hit this stage at some point. This allows you to track sales opportunity flow through the funnel.

Qualified, etc.

Next, we have any number of intermediate steps on the funnel. This could be as simple as 1 (‘Qualified’) or could have 10 steps along the way (‘Trial’, ’Qualified’, ‘Negotiating’, ‘Verbal’, ‘Contract Sent’, etc.). It really depends on how intense you want to get with the segmenting of your pipeline. At a minimum, I would recommend 2 additional steps in here (‘Qualified’ and ‘Verbal’). That way you have a few intermediate steps between demo and close. Make sure you set clear guidelines around what each of these stages mean (more below).

If you’ve made it this far, you need to know the most important thing about setting stages. Ensure that you set very clear, unambiguous guidelines around what each of these stages mean. E.g. ‘Qualified’ means: 1) that you’re talking with a Director level+. 2) They confirmed that they are looking to buy a solution. 3) You have a follow-up call scheduled within the next 2 weeks. These will depend on the organization itself, so I can’t give you firm guidelines around this, but don’t waffle on these.

Closed/Won & Closed/Lost

Finally, we have a Closed/Won and Closed/Lost stage. These are fairly self-explanatory. Closed/Won if the client signs a contract (or your equivalent). Closed/Lost if you no longer have a chance to win this deal. Again, make sure that Closed/Lost has a very clear definition.

Automation is the way forward

Now that you have the stages set up, you should put as much automation into the funnel as possible. For example, once you log a Demo activity on an opportunity, it should automatically move the stage from ‘Demo Scheduled’ to ‘Demo Held’ stage. Once you send a contract, it should automatically move from whatever stage it’s in to ‘Contract Sent’ stage, etc.

Salespeople generally do not like CRMs. They would rather spend time closing deals than updating stages in their CRM. Make it easy for them, automate it for them, and explain WHY they should update their stages.

A clean CRM is a good CRM. The first step to a clean CRM is to ensure that everything is well-defined and laid out clearly for everyone. I can’t promise that you’ll have a pristine CRM if you follow my advice, but it’s certainly a good start. Plus, with QuotaPath’s Salesforce integration, if you have well laid out stages, you can easily automate your commission calculating for everyone in the organization!

I am a self-proclaimed SaaS tool aficionado. I could go on and on about email sequencing tools (Outreach, Salesloft, Groove, Apollo), call recording/coaching software (ExecVision Chorus, Gong), chat bots (Simpu, Intercom, Drift), and all of the niche sales performance management solutions out there (QuotaPath, Xactly).

Instead of playing favorites and talking about the tools I use every day, I’m going to offer some tips on what to think about when building out your organization’s tech stack.

Understand your organization’s needs

This is probably the most important thing to think about when building your company’s tech stack. You will need to straddle the line of being proactive and reactive, which typically is dependent on the solution the tool provides. When it comes to prioritizing your tech stack, a good approach is having constant communication with your stakeholders.

Talk to reps and management to understand what inefficiencies they’re currently dealing with or how they feel they could be doing their job better. You’ll likely find that there are commonalities in the responses you get. Take those and prioritize accordingly.

If your team expresses a need for something and you act on it, it will help immensely with my next point–ensuring organization-wide buy-in.

Ensure organization-wide buy-in

Something I learned when building out the tech stack for the Customer Success team at my previous company was that it’s imperative to have buy-in from everyone.

From individual contributors to directors, each team member should understand how the solution you’ve chosen addresses the current or future pain the organization may deal with. Throughout the implementation process, it is important to ensure management is encouraging their team to adopt the new solution. Also, leverage the vendor’s resources, as it is just as important to them to have a seamless onboarding and organization-wide adoption.

It’s a marathon, not a sprint

You don’t need to build your entire tech stack at one time. In fact, you should do your best to avoid implementing multiple solutions at a time.

Introducing your organization to multiple new tools and processes at one time could cause tool fatigue. Tool fatigue leads to confusion and frustration for everyone in the organization. Reps and managers won’t know what tool does what, taking them away from closing deals or servicing their customers, and you’ll be met with a barrage of questions about the new tools.

Don’t be afraid to take a chance on an up-and-comer

One of my favorite things about building a tech stack is finding the newcomer to the space and watching them grow into a unicorn. It almost feels like buying a penny stock and watching them become a Fortune 500 company right before your eyes.

There are many benefits to choosing an up-and-comer over an incumbent. One being, you’ll typically get a better deal, since the company is trying to grow its customer base. You’ll also have a greater voice in influencing the company’s product roadmap and get early access to cutting-edge features.

Sure, there are risks to choosing an up-and-comer, but if you’re able to take some risks in your tech stack, it may pay massive dividends in the long-run.

Allocate your budget wisely

To tie together some of my previous points, remember that you don’t need all of the shiniest and most expensive tools to have the tech stack that makes the most sense for your organization.

Do your homework throughout the buying process. You can find the up-and-comers in the space and save some money. Also, understand the features that would provide the most value for your organization–you don’t need to overbuy a tool that gives you functionality that won’t be used.

Lastly, negotiate and buy at the right time. There will always be wiggle room in the buying process–try to get a price that makes sense for your budget.

What’s the ROI?

I’ll leave you with one last thing to consider when building out your organization’s tech stack. Ask yourself, ‘what is the ROI of introducing this tool?’

If you aren’t able to figure it out yourself, ask the vendor to provide you with reference customers and ask them how using the vendor added value to their company. If the ROI you come up with isn’t substantial enough, it may not make sense to add that tool to your tech stack right now.

To bring things full circle, I have the pleasure of talking to QuotaPath customers and users for the majority of my day. Oftentimes we hear that these companies formerly relied on spreadsheets or other cumbersome manual processes when calculating commissions. Most are thrilled to adopt a new sales performance management tool like QuotaPath into their tech stack because it helps them dramatically reduce time and automate the commission process. If you haven’t checked us out, it’s free to sign up and play around. Let me know what you think and if there’s anything I can help you with!

Tell me about your journey that lead you to QuotaPath?

So many Paths! (no pun intended). I studied Design and Public Relations & Communication in college. I started my career as a designer at a large agency working with well-established brands across all sorts of industries. From there, I went and worked in-house at a SaaS company as a product designer and asked to transition to marketing when that team was created. I am happiest when I’m able to work on several projects and contribute broadly, not just delivering on design, but also copywriting and overall strategy.

I was freelancing full-time when I saw that Ralph (Head of Design) posted a part-time marketing role in the Philly Design Slack channel. I had heard a lot about Ralph, we’d worked at and interviewed at several places around the same time, but never synced to working together. After 5 years of our paths almost crossing, I wanted to meet him. So I reached out and asked if he’d like to get lunch.

The Marketing Designer role looked interesting because I was freelancing at the time and some part-time, steady income sounded great. We got lunch and hit it off. After that, I did the design challenge, which I really enjoyed because I was able to combine data visualizations skills I had from my intern days, illustration, branding and creative marketing. It was kind of a perfect storm of things for me.

What was your interview process like?

The interview process was an informal lunch at The Foodery in Rittenhouse, Ralph and I chatted about design, personal interests and the role at QuotaPath. I believe the other side of the story to be Ralph leaving feeling confident that I’d fit the role and he wanted to hire me — and I felt the same, I wanted to work with him. The process remained casual. The meeting with Ralph face-to-face for an impromptu interview was followed by a phone screen with Darby (Product Marketing Manager). And then a call with AJ (CEO) and with Graham (Head of Growth). Everything was done remotely, so that was really nice. The process felt quick.

Tell me about QuotaPath’s design challenge.

The design challenge was to create a social ad and a product email. The prompt had suggestions on copy but it was pretty open-ended and there were a couple of options for me to choose from depending on what sparked my imagination and my vision creatively.

The ad prompt had messaging that said, “Eat sushi in Japan, not the gas station.” So I designed a sushi roll that had been turned into an illustrative earnings chart. I like that opportunity because I felt like I could really display my creative chops, and illustration was something I was interested in developing skill-wise. For the email, I have a lot of experience from my time working at an email marketing company and agencies. The copy was about a pretty standard product update, so I jazzed it up by creating a .gif for the ad which had a little bug getting squashed. I’m still proud of both of the executions and would like to roll the concepts into something else someday! But next time, with a better understanding of the brand and guidelines.

What’s your favorite part about the culture at QuotaPath?

The people. I’m pretty sure everybody else answered similarly when asked this question! But really, everyone is so friendly and passionate and a little bit different from me, so I feel like I’m always getting a new, interesting perspective that challenges my way of thinking. And that’s true for conversations on a professional and personal level. I’m constantly learning stuff from others, and I love that.

Explain your role at QuotaPath. How does your skill set fit onto the marketing team?

So tying this back to when I had bounced between agencies and SaaS software, I feel like Quotapath gives me the opportunity to contribute a lot and grow. Design is something that comes naturally to me – I can whip things up quickly. But, I also think I have more strategic value to add in copywriting, coming up with campaign ideas, and other marketing knowledge that I’ve just absorbed through various channels. Design has always been a priority, but I enjoy doing those other little things.

With our mighty startup marketing squad, I think we complement each other and have a great balance of diverse skillsets. We somehow manage to get lots of sh*t done and people don’t realize how lean our team is. I was at a conference in December, and someone had asked to meet with me for a mentorship opportunity. She thought I oversaw a creative team of about 20 people and was shocked to find out it was just three of us behind everything QuotaPath produces marketing-wise.

What’s the communication style on the marketing team?

It’s pretty fluid. I feel like I talk to them all day, every day. Though Slack and in person, video conferencing. We’re very in touch.

What about the tools you use on the marketing team?

So many tools! I use the Adobe Creative Suite, Sketch, Slack, I take notes in Evernote, listen to Spotify all day, use Zoom to connect with and see our remote friends, calendar, HubSpot, Asana, Clubhouse, etc. It’s a large stack, but staying organized helps me produce the best work I can.

Also books, which is a different kind of tool. I’m reading “Obviously Awesome” right now. It’s a great read, but I wish I could read faster. It’s hard to carve out time for that. And not to forget, a pen and paper. I bought sketchbooks for the first time in a while when we were redoing the onboarding emails. I always think I can do everything digitally in Illustrator, but it’s really way more effective for me to start on pen and paper.

What excites you most about the work QuotaPath is doing?

I see a lot of potential in the tool. When I was contract and freelancing, I was using it to keep track of my own pipeline and income. I was able to level-set easily against my monthly income goals. Having not been exposed to anything sales-related prior to working at Quotapath, I didn’t know about this whole world. It’s pretty fascinating though. I enjoy what we call “hacking” or “breaking” Quotapath to find other uses for it. I think it is so powerful and can be helpful for all kinds of people who may not be in traditional sales roles. I think anybody who uses spreadsheets, or markets or sells in some way, can find value in it.

If you could give advice to anyone who is looking to grow their career as a designer, what would it be?

Make sure to look at and absorb things, really study design in the real world – why and what things work, why certain decisions were probably made. Look at billboards and display ads, movie posters, books. I find it interesting to notice and point out those principles because they repeat themselves so often. A strong foundation like that will really set you up for success in whatever you want to do. It’s a low effort way to absorb constant inspiration because design is literally everywhere.

Tell me about your best experience or day at QuotaPath.

My favorite days are when something ships and I get to track the response to it. Whether that’d be an email campaign where I’m checking open rates and click-through rates obsessively. Or, when I finally figured out how to link all our systems to attribute sources our users come from. I love watching the #new-user Slack channel. The Girl Scout cookie post by AJ kept me buzzing for 2-3 days. I like understanding what’s resonating and getting a better understanding of salespeople and the content they’re looking for. And of course, seeing something I had a hand in being successful is always really exciting.

This is a touchy subject and one that no one likes to talk about. Ideally, if you follow my advice on interviewing salespeople you won’t be in this predicament very often. But no matter how careful you are with your sales interviewing and sales hiring, you’ll end up with a bad hire from time to time. Or, even worse, a good sales hire who has gone downhill.

Let me start by saying there are a lot of laws around firing people. No part of this blog should be construed as legal advice. Ensure you know all the laws in your area before firing someone. Also, as you’ll see below, I’m not one for euphemisms. So don’t expect any “letting go”, “moving on”, etc. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t show compassion and sympathy for someone being fired. It’s a gut-wrenching experience all around, so the more you can ease the pain by following these steps, the better off everyone will be.

Understand that firing someone is a failing of yours

As a manager, if you have to terminate someone you hired it is a failing on your end. You either didn’t provide them with the sales training they needed to be successful, didn’t explain to them well enough what it takes to be successful, or shouldn’t have hired them in the first place. This isn’t an excuse and doesn’t mean you SHOULDN’T fire them. Instead, it allows you to learn from the experience and find ways to improve your sales management skills. After every time you do fire someone, you should do an exercise where you review where the failings were and how you can prevent them in the future.

Never surprise them

A trope in movies is when our protagonist is called into their boss’s office only to be fired without warning and for seemingly no reason. This happens in real life too and is one of the least professional things that a sales manager can do. Someone who is fired should be given fair warning and the opportunity to improve well before it actually happens. In sales, this is fairly simple: if they’re struggling they should be put on a Performance Improvement Plan (often called a PIP) with clear, measurable goals. This Performance Improvement Plan should also explain the outcome if they don’t achieve the goals laid out.

Be direct, don’t sugar-coat it

“Unfortunately, I have some bad news: we have to terminate your employment at COMPANY.” Those should be the first words out of your mouth when firing someone. Not “it’s been great working with you but…” Don’t lead with “so this is hard to say, and it’s not something I want to have to do…” Get to the point, you can give them reassurances and explain all the reasons why (which they should know) afterward. If you lead out with these mealy-mouthed excuses, you’re prolonging the point and building the suspense. It also gives them false hope that this is simply a reprimand and not an ultimatum.

Time it correctly

No one wants to get fired and then have to walk out onto the floor surrounded by their peers to clean out their desk. It’s humiliating and demoralizing for the team. Try to plan it around a team-wide meeting, the end of the day, or a time when no one will be at their desks.

Be transparent with everyone

This is twofold. First, make it clear to the person being fired exactly why they will no longer be working for you. They should know all the reasons because it will allow them to focus on improving those things to prevent this from happening again. Secondly (and again, being aware of employment laws) you should inform your team that the person no longer works on the team and that they are welcome to discuss with you 1 on 1. If you hold off or let people guess as to what happened, rumors will begin flying.

Again, this is an uncomfortable situation for everyone involved, but if you handle it professionally and with compassion, everyone should walk away respecting the process. I’ve even had people come back to me months after firing them thanking me because they were able to find a new job that aligned with their skill sets better.

Raise your hand if you’ve ever encountered a bad situation with your compensation. If you work in sales, you probably have a story or two (or ten!). We asked the sales community what some of their less-than-ideal experiences were when it comes to sales compensation plans and commissions. Some of the stories were shocking, while others are far too common. All of them resonated. Some common themes we saw were:

• Lack of trust
• Lack of transparency
• Poorly designed sales compensation plans
• Being paid incorrectly on commissions

We know this is a sensitive topic, so all of the responses will remain anonymous. Let’s dive in!

Lack of trust

One salesperson didn’t get their new comp plan for the year until March. This didn’t happen just one time, but many times. “It really sucked for the sellers.”

After being told to trust the sales org, this rep experienced incorrect payout 60% of the time. Most of the time they’d get paid their next commissions without the previous being fixed.

This one’s a doozy. Someone was once told they were going to get a ~$4,000 cash bonus for killing it this quarter but instead, they got a Domino’s pizza… “Expensive pepperonis!”

Lack of transparency

After a number of suspicious months, one Senior Business Development Executive asked their accounting team for the information used to calculate commissions. The reply they got was, “We don’t give that information to salespeople.” They felt they had been lied to during their onboarding about the “transparency” in the commission process, especially since they were the #2 seller in the sales organization.

One Enterprise Account Executive experienced a lack of visibility or communication around being paid out on a large deal. They were paid 30 days late on it.

An entire sales organization of over 100 sales reps got their bonus “ACH debited” from their personal account after the company found a clerical error. The worst part? It was one week before Christmas! “The bottom line was that the lack of transparency is always a morale killer for a sales team.”

Poorly designed sales compensation plans

One manager talked about their experience with a comp plan that had decelerated commission percentages as sales increased. This led to the sales team selling against company interest. “Why bother to close that deal on the last day/week of the month/quarter. If you hold it until the calendar turns, you get paid more on it.”

Doing 110% of their number, only to find that the following year’s comp plan was doubled and the % of each deal halved.

One Account Executive said they org “always” had an excuse for the lack of sales compensation plans. And when they finally rolled it out, quotas had doubled.

Being paid incorrectly on commissions

One rep was told that they were not going to get paid what was on the compensation plan because they totally blew their quota out of the water, more than anyone could have imagined.

We hear about this one happening all the time… If this rep was not keeping track of their own attainment in Google Sheets, they would have missed out on a lot of money from being shorted on their paychecks. “Luckily, they were always happy to right the wrong.”

Unfortunately, these stories are real and happen in sales organizations all the time. A lot of them are reasons for why people seek out a tool like QuotaPath to help calculate and automate commissions. Thanks to everyone who submitted answers! As we’re building features, we want to help solve your specific pain points, so we’d love to hear them.

It calls to question a core tenet of business, but there is a lot of research around whether interviews matter in predicting on-the-job performance. It sounds so bizarre, but companies like Google (which claims that college grades don’t matter), news sources like Bloomberg and NYT, and dozens of academic papers argue that unstructured interviews are no better than flipping a coin at determining whether someone will be successful at their job. The good news about hiring for salespeople is that there is a very clear determiner of success: quota attainment. I believe that if you look for these 5 traits (in no particular order), you’re more likely to hire people who will close more deals.

Curiosity

Good salespeople ask good questions and are actively listening to see if the answer can help them close a deal. It would stand to reason, then, that salespeople who are naturally curious about how the world works are good at asking questions. Focus on how curious someone is by asking them questions about what they’ve been researching or what they’ve learned recently. Alternatively, look on their resume for experiences that are not naturally related to salespeople like a coding boot camp or a certification on yoga instructing.

Example sales interview questions:

• What’s something you learned this week?
• What’s your favorite fun fact?
• Teach me something I don’t know.
• What’s going on in the news right now?

Self Awareness

Salespeople are notorious for being overconfident, bordering arrogant or conceited. That’s why I always look for sales candidates who are very aware of their own strengths and weaknesses (without asking them “what’s your greatest weakness?”). Sometimes, by stepping out of the formality of an interview and asking them how they think the interview is going or asking them what they think of the interview process, you get a candid view of their self-awareness. If they are nervous and they tell me they’re nervous, I’m much more likely to look past the nerves than if they totally ignore it.

Example sales interview questions:

• How do you think this interview is going?
• What will you do if you don’t get this job?
• Do you think you’re the most qualified person for this job?
• What advice would you give yourself walking into this interview?

Coachability

This is a trait that is often repeated as an integral part of good salespeople. If a salesperson comes into a new job refusing to learn your sales methodology, they will become a lone-wolf. Even if they’re successful, this can wreak havoc on your organization as a whole. Not that every person needs to sell the same way, but they need to be open to guidance and feedback. In addition to asking questions about coachability, I’ve found the best way to determine someone’s coachability is to do an exercise where they make a fake cold call to you, you give them feedback, then they do it again. See if they took your feedback seriously.

Example sales interview questions:

• Tell me about a time you were wrong about something and changed your mind.
• When was the last time you did a call review?

Passion

Passion is very important for a high performing seller. Of course, you’re looking for someone who passionately cares about the customer’s needs, someone who passionately cares about your company, someone who passionately cares about hitting quota and making commission checks. However, every sales candidate will tell you that they’re passionate about those things. Instead, I like to see what else they are passionate about. If they can’t get excited about something they care about, I know they won’t be able to get excited about making cold calls!

Example sales interview questions:

• What are you passionate about outside of work?
• What does a perfect weekend day look like to you?

Past Success

This is the most controversial quality I look for in a salesperson because it can be the most misleading. Just because someone is good at selling accounting software doesn’t mean they’re good at selling escalators. However, someone who is focused on being the best seller on the floor is much more likely to see success than someone who is comfortable being middle of the pack. You have to be careful with this, though. I always joke that if you ask a sales candidate where they ranked at their last job, 90% of them will say #1. Instead, I look for a concentration of quota attainment on their resume (bonus points if they can prove it via QuotaPath!). If they have their attainment against quota, it means that they were focused on how well they were doing instead of comparing themselves against someone else.

Example sales interview questions:

• How did you stack rank among your peers at your last job?
• Why weren’t you #1?
• Why weren’t you in last place?

So while a good interview process can’t guarantee you’ll hire only top-performing sales reps, it will certainly help weed out the quota-missing, PIP-needing sales reps we all dread working with.

Have any additional traits of top sellers I’m missing? Send them my way: graham@quotapath.com.

If there’s one thing we will always preach at QuotaPath, it’s the empowerment of sales reps. It’s ingrained in our DNA, product philosophy, and even the way we run our business as a product-led company. The release of our newest feature, MyPath, is built with that same rep-first mentality. It’s an exclusive digital space for reps to track what matters most to them in their career. From daily tasks to long-term savings goals, MyPath empowers sales folks to map, track, and own their sales journey.

MyPath, a tool to empower sales reps

Working in sales means a lot of tracking and measurement: Tracking earnings and quota attainment, metrics like average deal size and win rate, measuring effectiveness of KPI’s like close rate, conversion funnels, and sales cycle.

There are also more personal metrics to track and measure: career aspirations, yearly goals, savings and financial goals, workplace satisfaction, and overall historical career data. Perhaps you’re saving up for an engagement ring or you’re tracking your earnings to make sure you can plan that trip to Bali. While these things remain top of mind for reps, they aren’t usually spoken about out loud.

Enter MyPath. While QuotaPath helps bring clarity to a sales rep’s compensation plan, MyPath allows reps to own the results of their career performance and bridge the success they have in their career to the goals they set in their personal life.

Sales reps deserve the ability to connect effort to reward

Unlike salaried roles in other departments, the success of a salesperson is tied directly to earnings, so more deals = more money. With so much focus being put on the end result, it can be easy to lose sight of the effort to get there. Reps need a way to visualize the motivational aspect of their earnings and how it directly represents success. MyPath allows reps to tangibly see the fruits of their labor, which is not only satisfying but a good indicator of skillsets and strengths.

Sales reps need a way to track achievements

There are a lot of goals that can take longer than one month or one quarter to achieve: saving for a house downpayment, closing $1MM, earning a promotion. MyPath gives sales reps the ability to visualize and keep track of these types of goals. This is currently being addressed in good organizations, just in a disorganized way. Longer-term goals are set but without a way of record-keeping. Sales influencers often talk about the early days in their career and the struggles they experienced, but there’s no record of it. MyPath is a sales rep’s source of truth for accurate earnings and career data that is uninterrupted by changes in roles, promotions, and moving companies.

Sales reps deserve to have a little fun

Life is all about finding meaning in the micro-moments. Working in sales is a hustle and grind and can easily feel like a hamster-wheel environment. Through delightful animations and a Mercury Retrograde tracker, MyPath adds fun and uniqueness to the day-to-day.

Salespeople are master jugglers and multi-taskers, so they’re always looking for ways to automate, organize, and ease their day-to-day lives, both at home and at work. MyPath gives reps a personalized dashboard to organize with the type of information they want to see, all while remaining totally private to them.

Long-term, we envision a portable version of MyPath that reps can take with them from job to job, carrying important career statistics like earnings and attainment, personal goals, a portfolio of logos, notes, and more as they advance through their careers. If you’re not using QuotaPath as your commission management software, sign up for free. And be sure to check out how MyPath can be customized to work just for you.

Salesforce®. If that word sounds familiar, makes you anxious, or is simply a reminder that you need to go update the close dates on your Opportunities, this post is for you.

So, what do QuotaPath and Salesforce have to do with each other? First, let’s break it down:

• Salesforce is best in class for managing prospect relationships, communication, lead tracking, opportunity conversion, and ultimately allowing sales reps, managers, executives, and organizations to measure whether or not they are successfully generating revenue.
• QuotaPath is best in class for tracking earnings and attainment. We empower sales reps, managers, executives, and organizations to understand commissions and bonuses to ultimately measure if they are effectively rewarding their team in a way that successfully generates revenue.

We have a similar mission for our sales software — to help sales reps and businesses to thrive. We’re excited to deliver this integration and we know our users will be too.

Introducing our first CRM integration: Salesforce commission tracking

QuotaPath can now import deals automatically from your Salesforce instance. Whether it’s Opportunities, Demos, Events, Products, or a custom widget that your director of sales ops made up, we can sync it.

This integration allows for one single source of truth for both your attainment and earnings – no more dual entry in multiple tools. You, your manager, and sales ops will all be looking at the same bonus or commission. Less confusion, more time setting demos and closing deals.

We’ve designed our Salesforce integration wizard to be simple and intuitive for sales reps. There’s no complicated logic or code required to get connected. You’re in control. If it takes more than 5 minutes, just let us know and we’ll give you a hand.

The best part? QuotaPath’s integration with Salesforce is totally free. As a product-led company, we strive to make QuotaPath accessible and useable for everyone in a sales organization, from reps to execs. It shouldn’t cost an arm and a leg to automatically sync deals from your CRM to your commission tracking software.

And our Salesforce integration is only the beginning! Next, we’ll be working on integrating other popular CRMs so that you can automatically import deals into QuotaPath. If you haven’t done so already, sign up for QuotaPath and start the seamless sync to your Salesforce instance.