RevOps Co-op Weekly #57 - The Right Way to Think About Commissions & Annual Planning with Siva Rajamani
We chatted with Siva Rajamani , CoFounder & CEO of Everstage about RevOps, how to build a thoughtful commission plan, what to do when year end planning comes around, and so much more!
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The Right Way to Think About Commissions & Annual Planning with Siva Rajamani
We chatted with Siva Rajamani , CoFounder & CEO of Everstage (a community partner) about RevOps, how to build a thoughtful commission plan, what to do when year end planning comes around, and so much more!
More about Siva’s areas of expertise from LinkedIn. “B2B SaaS, Scaling GTM, Revenue Growth, Business and Revenue Operations”. He’s served as Director and Head of Revenue Operations at Freshworks and has a ton of consulting expertise on top of that. A worthy expert!
Interviewing is Sebastien van Heyningen , President at Central Metric.
Sebastien van Heyningen
Here we go! Let's get this started.
Siva Rajamani
Great to be here! 🔥
Sebastien van Heyningen
Hey Siva! Thanks again for joining us and taking over the AMA hot seat. You’re Co-founder & CEO of Everstage so....Let’s start with this.
How and why did you decide to build this company? And how does it relate to RevOps?
Siva Rajamani
Great question! Previously, I ran the RevOps globally for Freshworks - I saw the journey from $30M to $200M and scaled the team to 25 members. But there were several areas in the RevOps journey that I realized were broken. One of them was commissions. It was this recurring busywork that we were looking to automate. We were surprised to discover that almost all vendors in this market had inflexible solutions that were not suited to the day and age that we are in. So I, along with a few other colleagues on the Revops team, decided to jump ahead and change it once and for all!
Sebastien van Heyningen
Amazing! So often, the best technology and innovation comes from the people who have had to deal with the problem every day. Kudos to you for taking the initiative to help solve it yourself.
The Freshworks experience will be helpful when we cover how to hire and scale a RevOps team. Before we get to that, I'm curious to hear it from you...What is your definition of RevOps?
Siva Rajamani
RevOps to me is the central function that unites all the different customer-facing teams together and drives the strategic revenue goals of the company. RevOps, therefore, is the custodian of GTM data, the team that plans for the revenue goals and helps orchestrate the policies, processes, and initiatives required to get to those goals.
Sebastien van Heyningen
Beautifully put! I think it's really interesting that everyone's answer to that question is different (albeit very similar). It goes to show that this function is new + evolving quickly & different in every instance.
Let's jump into our first topic: Commission Planning. You've built a platform that automates this process, but what about the inputs? Do you have an overarching methodology when it comes to building a commission plan? And if so, how does it change for different roles? (SDR, AE, CSM)
Siva Rajamani
The first step, like many other things, starts with the goals you are looking to achieve. There is an overarching revenue number, but that gets broken into specifics based on the role that you are looking at. Like generating qualified leads for an SDR, generating revenue for an AE, and managing NRR and churn for a CSM. Those are the core goals that weigh the most in any commission plan. But then, there are the secondary goals that help define the QUALITY of that revenue. For example, in an AE's case that could be a component of a multi-year deal bonus, etc.
Defining the primary goal along with the secondary (quality) goal gets you the components of the commission plan.
The next step is the part around motivation - which is to define quota/targets and define bonuses or tiers for overachievement. That helps you drive performance.
The final part is adding guardrails like clawbacks in case there are things to be taken care off in the business.
So in that sense all plans are similar and contain these 3 steps. But based on the business model and the stage of the business, the actual commission plans can really be different.
🗣 From the Community
#04_revops-questions
11/2/21: Hi everyone - I’m currently manually calculating and filling out compensation for the 20-ish person BDR org I run.It’s a little tedious and I always have fomo about transposing numbers incorrectly. At what maturity stage do companies typically pivot to using something integrated w/ SFDC like Xactly etc? Read 7 Replies.
11/4/21: Hey team - We're currently using Monday.com as our project mgmt tool for our customer success team. Looking to integrate some data capture in SFDC . Has anyone here had any experience integrating the systems? If so, how did you go about it? Read 5 Replies.
#08_tools-and-software
11/2/21: Hi, can anyone recommend a simple tool/plugin which enables us to import leads/contacts from LinkedIn Sales Navigator to SFDC with a few clicks and without too much effort of copy/pasting data? I know the LinkedIn Enterprise Edition and ZoomInfo Plugin can do that, but both are bit expensive for a simple job like that. Thanks a lot 🙂 Read 8 Replies.
11/4/21: Since Salesforce's Einstein Activity Capture is basically garbage, I'm curious to know if anyone has a favorite app/extension to capture reps' Gmail inbox activity inside Salesforce Leads and Contacts.. Read 9 Replies.
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🐦 This week in #RevOps Social
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📅 Upcoming Events
Slack AMA with Cliff Simon - Tuesday, November 16 @ 9am PT (12pm ET)
Tune into #03_general as we chat with with Cliff Simon, VP of Sales and Revenue at Carabiner Group. Get your questions in about creating a recurring Revenue Engine, designing a RevOps tech stack, and scaling a business from 0-10M.
RevOps Hangout with Everstage! Virtual Networking - Thursday, November 18 at 2pm PT (5pm ET)
Come and meet other folks from the RevOps Co-op. Share your ideas, get some great tips, and make new friends. This week we will be in small round-robin groups on Gatheround. Co-hosting will be Siva Rajamani with community partner, Everstage.
Hangout Topic: Compensation Planning - Sales Comp, Marketing Comp, and Customer Success Comp Strategies
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📚 Your curated #RevOps reading list
Types of B2B Market Segmentation: Why Segmenting Helps Grow Revenue | Atomic Revenue
B2B market segmentation is as important to growth as it is to B2C. All businesses ‒ whether B2B or B2C ‒ should leverage segmentation as a means to identify waste and open up new opportunities. It is not just about marketing, it is a method to determine the messaging and missed opportunities; to create a solid, data-driven plan to go after those opportunities, and ultimately, increase revenue production.
For a better understanding of B2B market segmentation, in this blog we’ll discuss:
What B2B market segmentation is and why it’s important.
The types of B2B market segmentation and how to define the opportunities in each.
How to measure outcomes once you utilize market segmentation.
Creating a Best-in-Class Trial Experience | Gainsight
The trial experience is your springboard to sky-high product growth. But to be effective, it takes planning. Your trial experience can either launch prospective users toward faster product adoption, or it could give way, collapse, and cause new users to drop off. We’re here to help you create a trial experience that will grab ahold of users, push them toward long-term product adoption, and catapult growth. In this article, we dissect the elements of effective SaaS trials and lay out a formula to create a best-in-class trial experience.
How Revenue Operations Empowers SDR Success | LeanData
On the Revenue team side of the house, as a function, we have nearly non-stop conversations regarding the need to align Marketing and Sales. It’s a topic at every site with a blog, every conference with keynote speakers and panels, and at most every company’s strategic go-to-market (GTM) planning sessions as we head into 2022. Traditional alignment issues between Sales and Marketing generally fall into two buckets: 1) Sales wants more leads, and 2) Marketing wants to ensure the leads it has so painstakingly – and expensively – sourced are followed up with by Sales. The embodiment of this alignment between Sales and Marketing is, of course, the SDR.
🎧 RevOps Podcasts
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In enterprise sales, you can’t save the quarter with last-minute prospecting. It just doesn’t work. To be successful, you need to have a relationship with the customer. You need to understand them and put them at the center of your strategy. And that takes planning and alignment across your organization. In this episode, Michelle Sidwell, SVP, Enterprise at SalesLoft, shares how she ensures that her team is aligned and invested in customer relationships.
Breaking Down the Issues With Multi-Touch Attribution Reporting | The Data Room
Multi-touch attribution gets a lot of attention from marketing teams, but how much of it is necessary? For all of the hype around attribution models and technologies, Scott Stouffer argues that focus could be better spent on more productive activities. Join Scott in The Data Room as he explores the issues with multi-touch attribution reporting.
Driving Product-Led Growth Through Data Insights with Aseem Chandra, CEO and Co-Founder of Immersa | The Revenue Engine Podcast
As more companies are shifting from sales-led to product-led, what are the primary considerations businesses should be thinking about before deciding if product-led is right for them? And what is the right data strategy for product-usage models?
In this episode of The Revenue Engine Podcast, Aseem Chandra, a long time marketing and product leader from Oracle and from Adobe, and currently the CEO and Co-Founder of Immersa, shares what he is seeing in the market and how integrated data insights is more critical than ever before.
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🚒 Weekly RevOps Meme
For all those supporting sellers out there!
Thanks, Sebastien van Heyningen - "Quality over Quantity."
Funnel IQ is an operating system for your GTM team that provides end-to-end, full funnel analytics and insights that keep marketing, sales and customer success teams aligned and working seamlessly together to drive more revenue growth for your business.