Latest / Cyber Go-To-Market Talk: The Cybersecurity Podcast About Cyber Sales, Marketing & Revenue Growth / 174: How to make sure you are paid with Dan Goodman, CEO of TruCommish

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174: How to make sure you are paid with Dan Goodman, CEO of TruCommish · Cyber Go-To-Market Talk: The Cybersecurity Podcast About Cyber Sales, Marketing & Revenue Growth

0:43
SPEAKER_00: Ever had that situation where your comp plan leaves you confused?
0:46
SPEAKER_00: What should I be selling?
0:47
SPEAKER_00: How do I get paid?
0:49
SPEAKER_00: You look it through it all, it's just complex with all sorts of clauses in there.
0:53
SPEAKER_00: Or you've got the comp plan and you've been paid out on deals, but you're kind of a lot of a suspicious, you got an annoying feeling in your gut that things just don't seem right.
1:04
SPEAKER_00: You're gonna love this episode today with Dan Goodman, the CEO and founder of True Commission.
1:10
SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Sales Bluebird Podcast, where we help cybersecurity companies grow sales faster.
1:16
SPEAKER_00: Whether you're a seller, marketer, leader, or founder, we give you tips, tricks, experiences, examples, ideas, and inspiration from people who know a thing or 10 about building great cybersecurity companies.
1:28
SPEAKER_00: I'm your host, Andrew Monahan.
1:30
SPEAKER_00: Our guest today is Dan Goodman, founder and CEO at TrueComish.
1:34
SPEAKER_00: Dan, welcome to Sales Bluebird.
1:36
SPEAKER_01: Thank you very much, Andrew.
1:37
SPEAKER_01: Pleasure to be here today.
1:39
SPEAKER_00: You know, I am truly looking forward to this discussion.
1:43
SPEAKER_00: You and I have chatted briefly beforehand, and you bring a passion to something that uh goes back to my roots, which is uh helping salespeople make sure they get paid per the comp plan, get their money that they're supposed to be getting, and also understand comp plans, which it seems like every year that goes by adds a few paragraphs to comp plans and complexity to comp plans as well.
2:06
SPEAKER_00: So this is gonna be for me and the audience a really interesting conversation.
2:11
SPEAKER_00: But Dan, before we get to the real meat and bones, let's get to know you a little bit.
2:16
SPEAKER_00: I've got a list of questions here between one and 35.
2:19
SPEAKER_00: Why don't you give me a random number between one and 35?
2:22
SPEAKER_01: All right, we're gonna start off with number 33 in honor of Larry Bird.
2:26
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
2:27
SPEAKER_00: Where in the world would you just love to live?
2:31
SPEAKER_01: Oh boy, where would I love to live?
2:33
SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
2:34
SPEAKER_01: The first time I went to Hawaii in my honeymoon, I was literally debating for about seven days while we were there whether we should just sell everything and then stay in Hawaii and sell seashells by the seashore.
2:45
SPEAKER_01: So that would probably be on the top of the list.
2:47
SPEAKER_01: Although I did go on a fabulous trip to Banff, Canada once, and uh it was literally paradise.
2:52
SPEAKER_01: Uh, if you wanted to sort of get away from the rigmarand and that fresh air and the mountains, it's just a beautiful place.
2:58
SPEAKER_01: So those would be the two I would think about.
3:00
SPEAKER_00: Both those places sound wonderful to me, I'll tell you.
3:03
SPEAKER_00: Living in Colorado, getting away to the heat once in a while is very nice in the winter.
3:07
SPEAKER_00: It's funny when you get to like March, April time, and maybe you get this as well, but get to March, April time, you're like, I'm ready for just a week in the warmth somewhere.
3:15
SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
3:16
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, we try to do that at least once a year before COVID hit, and now it's been a while.
3:19
SPEAKER_00: So Yeah.
3:20
SPEAKER_00: All right, another number of team, one and 35.
3:22
SPEAKER_01: All right, we're gonna go with uh number nine for Ted Williams.
3:26
SPEAKER_01: Okay, so favorite season.
3:29
SPEAKER_01: Oh, without a doubt, summer.
3:30
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
3:31
SPEAKER_01: I mean, summer, uh my two favorite pastimes or favorite things to do in the world is golf and beach.
3:36
SPEAKER_01: If a perfect day for me would be to wake up with a 7 a.m.
3:39
SPEAKER_01: tea time, be done by 11, have a little lunch, spend the afternoon at the beach, and uh thinking about uh entrepreneurial ideas and how I can help people while I'm doing it.
3:49
SPEAKER_00: I think summer for me is pretty good.
3:51
SPEAKER_00: Although I don't, you know, born in Scotland and grew up there, I don't do the real heat all that well, and I don't do humidity all that well.
3:57
SPEAKER_00: But uh you know, give me uh a pretty warm place with low humidity, I'm happy as anything.
4:02
SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
4:02
SPEAKER_01: Well, I'm just right outside of Boston, so we get all four seasons.
4:05
SPEAKER_01: So even in the hot days of August, it's very tolerable.
4:09
SPEAKER_00: Well, the way you've picked your numbers so far, Dan, I'm surprised you're from uh New England.
4:13
SPEAKER_00: I really am shocked.
4:15
SPEAKER_00: All right, one last one between one and thirty-five.
4:18
SPEAKER_01: Let's see, one and thirty-five.
4:20
SPEAKER_01: Who shall we go with now?
4:21
SPEAKER_01: We're gonna go with number 12 for the GOAT, Tom Brady.
4:25
SPEAKER_01: Who?
4:26
SPEAKER_01: Never heard of that guy.
4:27
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, that guy, that guy.
4:29
SPEAKER_00: Um one event you haven't been to in the world but would love to attend.
4:34
SPEAKER_01: One event I haven't been to in the world and I'd love to attend.
4:37
SPEAKER_01: Well, uh, I've had opportunities in the past, but didn't go for a couple of reasons that I regret.
4:43
SPEAKER_01: I've always wanted to go to a Super Bowl.
4:45
SPEAKER_01: And uh seeing that the Patriots have been in about nine or ten of them, I probably should have taken my chance while I had it, because I'm not sure if we're gonna have one anytime soon.
4:53
SPEAKER_01: But we'll keep our fingers crossed, and at some point before my time is done, we're gonna make it to a Super Bowl, whether the Patriots are playing or not.
4:59
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I feel like that's one of those things that you just want to go, right?
5:02
SPEAKER_00: Maybe just once or twice in your life if you if your team's not there or you're you just don't have easy access to tickets, but just go.
5:07
SPEAKER_00: It'd be fun to go and experience the whole thing.
5:10
unknown: Yeah.
5:10
SPEAKER_01: I mean, one thing I remember as a younger, I mean, I went to Live Aid in Philadelphia in 1985, and it was the Led Zeppelin Reunion.
5:18
SPEAKER_01: And uh it was an experience that I will always remember the rest of my life.
5:22
SPEAKER_01: Unbelievable.
5:23
SPEAKER_01: These moments are special in life, right?
5:25
SPEAKER_00: Let's talk about uh you quickly, Dan.
5:27
SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna run quickly through what I see on LinkedIn for you.
5:31
SPEAKER_00: Is you've worked at uh at tech companies for quite a while, going way back to the 90s when you're in planning and and alliances and things like that at Nortel.
5:41
SPEAKER_00: Went to Mazou, which was bought by Riverbed and Bizdev.
5:46
SPEAKER_00: And then starting in 2002 onwards, you basically, it seems to me anyway, you spent almost all your work life working on on compensation commissions, things like that, working with sales teams, which kind of brings us right forward to today when you're the founder and CEO of True Commission.
6:04
SPEAKER_00: Before you tell us about True Commission, I'm gonna tee this off with a story.
6:08
SPEAKER_00: So I remember this was probably 2002, 2003.
6:15
SPEAKER_00: I was working at a company, new North American sales leader comes on board, and he's probably got three to five hundred people working for him at this company, right?
6:25
SPEAKER_00: And my impression was he spent the first month in a conference room with some finance folks uh looking at the whole way the team was structured and you know, expenses and revenue to expenses, and all the things you probably look at when you're trying to figure out where we can get more capacity and more yield from the sales team.
6:41
SPEAKER_00: And at the end of the month in the dark room, you know, all hands call was set up for North America for the new sales leader to hand out the new comp plan.
6:50
SPEAKER_00: So we spent you know some time team about the comp plan, and the big headline of the comp plan was I'm increasing your PCR, I'm increasing your percentage commission rate, right?
7:01
SPEAKER_00: And this is like music to our ears, like increasing our rate.
7:04
SPEAKER_00: This is awesome.
7:05
SPEAKER_00: I don't know who this guy is.
7:06
SPEAKER_00: He just walked in the door a month ago, but I love him already, right?
7:09
SPEAKER_00: And uh people were like, this is fantastic.
7:12
SPEAKER_00: And then even on the call, you start to see some of the fine print.
7:17
SPEAKER_00: And uh, although the headline was the PCR went up, what he actually did is he shifted it from paying on gross to paying on net.
7:26
SPEAKER_00: Oh my.
7:27
SPEAKER_00: And the essence of what happened was that your actual you know, money in your pocket went done.
7:32
SPEAKER_00: And I remember at that time thinking, what a terrible move, right?
7:36
SPEAKER_00: What a low way to start your relationship with your new sales team, to try and pull the wool over their eyes, to think that we're dumb as anything, that we wouldn't just figure this out.
7:46
SPEAKER_00: And you lost so much credibility, honestly, in that whole period.
7:50
SPEAKER_00: And even there's people on the call who didn't realize what had happened, and they were saying, Oh, you know, welcome to the teaming.
7:55
SPEAKER_00: This is great to see.
7:56
SPEAKER_00: I'm so pleased you're able to do this for us, right?
7:59
SPEAKER_00: And they were kind of embarrassed afterwards that they were giving them, you know, the kudos on the call.
8:03
SPEAKER_00: So let's put that to one side for a second.
8:05
SPEAKER_00: And why don't you explain what you're doing at True Commish?
8:08
SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
8:08
SPEAKER_01: So, I mean, True Commission started it for me as a passion project.
8:12
SPEAKER_01: I know a lot of uh family and friends and colleagues who have been in sales for a long time.
8:17
SPEAKER_01: I've always been a very quantitative analytical person.
8:20
SPEAKER_01: I'm never one who's ever sort of relied on blind faith and trust when someone tells me something.
8:25
SPEAKER_01: I always sort of want them to prove it to me or to back it up or show me how they got to their conclusion.
8:30
SPEAKER_01: And it's just kind of how I've always been wired with everything in life.
8:33
SPEAKER_01: So in helping friends and family over the years, I worked with them and manually uh helped them identify and recover literally hundreds of thousands of earned but unpaid commissions and resulting bonuses and club trips.
8:45
SPEAKER_01: So I know that this is a big problem for salespeople.
8:48
SPEAKER_01: I know the way things are set up right now is that companies appear to make it virtually impossible in many instances to actually go back and check your pay.
8:55
SPEAKER_01: The number of reps that I talk to at a regular basis who don't even understand how they even make commission or how their comp plan works is just shocking to me.
9:02
SPEAKER_01: I've got an MBA in entrepreneurship and marketing from Babson, and I've always had this bug.
9:07
SPEAKER_01: I'm either one of these guys that's either always on or not.
9:09
SPEAKER_01: There's not really much in between with me.
9:11
SPEAKER_01: It works really well in a startup where you can just pour all of your energy and passion into something.
9:16
SPEAKER_01: Not so much with corporate America, you know, but uh so I've always said, you know, I want to bring this solution to the market for all salespeople to benefit from.
9:23
SPEAKER_01: So it's a question of how do you automate that?
9:25
SPEAKER_01: How do you make it so that any rep in any industry, regardless of comp plan or complexity, can go on and answer a few questions and onboard a comp plan?
9:32
SPEAKER_01: And then how do we get their data into the system to have it identify payers?
9:37
SPEAKER_01: And ultimately what we do is we look at how much you expected to make on a deal when you closed it and compare it to what you're actually paid on it months and months and months later when you paid it.
9:46
SPEAKER_01: And it's shocking how often that number changes, and there's no companies that I'm aware of anywhere that provides any reconciliation or explanation of what you expected versus what you got paid.
9:56
SPEAKER_01: And I think it's outrageous and shocking.
9:58
SPEAKER_01: In fact, it's even worse than that.
9:59
SPEAKER_01: What companies do is that they go and tell the rep, here's a draft of your commission statement.
10:03
SPEAKER_01: You've got 24 to 48 hours to review it and get back to us with any errors, or you lose your chance to do so, which couldn't be further from the truth.
10:11
SPEAKER_01: The legal obligation resides with the employer to get the pay right.
10:15
SPEAKER_01: If an employee at any time comes back to them and points out an error, they're obligated to pay that out immediately.
10:20
SPEAKER_01: And if they don't, they're exposing themselves to triple damages and employment litigation.
10:24
SPEAKER_01: So that's just an example, just like your former sales leader presents you this new plan about how your rates are going up, but it's getting paid on two-thirds of the base that it was being applied to before.
10:35
SPEAKER_01: And it's the same thing that they do everywhere, all the time, in so many instances to intimidate reps, to not ask questions, to bullying mentality.
10:43
SPEAKER_01: I've heard reps tell me stories when they ask for data to be able to check.
10:47
SPEAKER_01: You know, hey Andrew, don't you trust us?
10:49
SPEAKER_01: Andrew, aren't you a team player?
10:51
SPEAKER_01: Andrew, why is there no one else in the company that's asking for the same same information that you are?
10:55
SPEAKER_01: And now you start to question like, geez, maybe I shouldn't ask.
10:58
SPEAKER_01: You know, maybe my job's in jeopardy.
10:59
SPEAKER_01: You know, it's your money, it's your right.
11:01
SPEAKER_01: You earned it.
11:02
SPEAKER_01: It's your obligation to yourself and your family to make sure you're being paid fully and accurately.
11:06
SPEAKER_01: And that's why I created True Commission.
11:09
SPEAKER_01: You know, for too long, reps have been taken advantage of, companies make it difficult to check, and they have to rely on blind faith that they're paid fully and accurately.
11:17
SPEAKER_01: And this causes a lot of mental anguish for people.
11:20
SPEAKER_01: When you make sacrifices every day for the benefit of your company against your family and your friends and your hobby and your life to make money to provide, and you're questioning now whether they're holding up their end of the bargain, if they're paying you fully and accurately, it wears at you and it impacts your life and your outlook on things.
11:36
SPEAKER_01: So I've seen this go on for too long.
11:38
SPEAKER_01: I'm trying to fix the problem and help people with this.
11:40
SPEAKER_00: And it seems like to me that one of the issues at the heart of this is the comp plan has become more complex.
11:47
SPEAKER_00: There's more details to it and all the rest of it.
11:49
SPEAKER_00: Why has it got to the point where it is so complex?
11:51
SPEAKER_01: Well, it's funny when you mentioned it, sometimes you mentioned the beginning of your intro that sometimes they'll add a couple of paragraphs.
11:56
SPEAKER_01: I was going to jump in and say, actually, they'll add a couple of dozen pages.
12:00
SPEAKER_01: I've seen comp plans literally recently.
12:02
SPEAKER_01: One's a 36-pager, I got another 28-pager, I got another 25-pager.
12:07
SPEAKER_01: I got it plans that don't even have commission rates in them, that you have to go to multiple sources to then calculate rates at different tiers.
12:16
SPEAKER_01: I mean, they literally make it impossible.
12:17
SPEAKER_01: You need a PhD in comp plans and commissions just to figure it out.
12:22
SPEAKER_01: And the problem, Andrew, it's even worse.
12:24
SPEAKER_01: The problem is getting worse over time.
12:26
SPEAKER_01: When I was looking at plans 10, 20 years ago, they were much more manageable and much more easy to understand.
12:32
SPEAKER_01: But what's going on now instead is that I believe that commission software is playing a role in this.
12:38
SPEAKER_01: And now while I love commissioned software and what it does, it saves accounting clerks hours of manual efforts, but it does very little for the rep.
12:45
SPEAKER_01: And so now companies feel emboldened that they can now create these crazy ass comp plans that they would never even have thought of before because they're now paying six figures to commission software companies to build out the back end and putting the responsibility and liability on them.
13:00
SPEAKER_01: And guess what?
13:01
SPEAKER_01: Some of these plans are so crazy and complex that the back end is not matching the front end of the plan.
13:06
SPEAKER_01: And there are massive errors going on in both directions.
13:08
SPEAKER_01: And we're seeing it regularly from salespeople that we're working with.
13:12
SPEAKER_00: It seems weird to me that sales leader would let this happen, right?
13:15
SPEAKER_00: Because the whole idea of having a comp plan is that you motivate the sales team to do a certain behavior, right?
13:22
SPEAKER_00: You want them to sell these products more than these ones, or you want them to hit quarterly rather than annually, or you know, you set it up to so it motivates the behavior, the outcomes that you want.
13:32
SPEAKER_00: And yet if I'm a seller and I'm looking at my comp plan and I can't figure out how I'm going to be paid, how is that going to motivate me?
13:38
SPEAKER_00: I just don't get it.
13:39
SPEAKER_01: I think there's a lot of pressures on the sales leaders coming in multiple directions.
13:43
SPEAKER_01: So you have the CFO and the CEO and the RevOps leaders who are trying to reduce the overall cost of sales and they're trying to do it incrementally in such a way that there won't be a mass exodus of productive employees from the company.
13:54
SPEAKER_01: But you know, the bottom line is whether you're a VC backed firm or publicly traded, you know, beholden to your investors and you're trying to drive revenue and profitability.
14:03
SPEAKER_01: So, you know, one of the ways that they try to do this is to tweak the sales and compensation plan to get to the bottom line, you know, without upsetting the cart, so to speak.
14:12
SPEAKER_01: So I think that plays a lot of roles.
14:13
SPEAKER_01: And then also what I'm seeing now is that there's a lot of younger sales leaders sort of of this generation that kind of get it.
14:18
SPEAKER_01: It wasn't that long ago that they were AEs and understood the pain associated with you know pay transparency and understanding comp plans.
14:26
SPEAKER_01: I think it's very positive.
14:27
SPEAKER_01: They are acting in a very good way in terms of wanting to support the rep and helping them understand the comp plan and how to work it best to maximize their pay.
14:35
SPEAKER_01: But ultimately, there are some of the older leaders from you know, the old timers that you know think things a certain way and uh look at reps potentially as disposable or a means to an end or a commodity that they you know plan to sort of use for a period of time, get the most out of them, and then they'll move on or move on from them.
14:51
SPEAKER_01: Um so I see that happening a lot, and there's uh changes that are taking place.
14:55
SPEAKER_01: There is some hope that people are getting it, but uh there's still a lot of people that have that old school mentality.
15:00
SPEAKER_00: All right, let's get down to brass tax here then, Dan.
15:02
SPEAKER_00: So give us an example recently where you worked with someone and they found some money they they weren't being paid on, or they they got a bonus that they didn't know they qualified for.
15:12
SPEAKER_01: Oh boy, I got so many examples to go from.
15:15
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I'll give you a really simple one if you want.
15:17
SPEAKER_01: I mean, something as basic as an open order report, right?
15:19
SPEAKER_01: So the companies don't provide open order reports.
15:22
SPEAKER_01: What's an open order report?
15:23
SPEAKER_01: When you book a deal, you're expecting to get paid on it.
15:25
SPEAKER_01: Well, what happens if you never get paid on the deal that was booked?
15:28
SPEAKER_01: You don't know because the company doesn't provide a report of your bookings.
15:32
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I guess some people say that you should track this yourself.
15:34
SPEAKER_01: I mean, some people do, some people don't.
15:36
SPEAKER_01: Some people who are working in high transaction volume settings makes it really difficult to do that.
15:41
SPEAKER_01: We worked with a rep.
15:42
SPEAKER_01: He had uh 35 deals that he had booked through the first nine months of the year.
15:47
SPEAKER_01: There are seven that were still open, meaning that they were booked but never paid on.
15:51
SPEAKER_01: Four of them are current, less than 30 days.
15:52
SPEAKER_01: So that's just, you know, current, that's not an issue.
15:54
SPEAKER_01: But there happened to be two of them who were literally more than six months old.
15:58
SPEAKER_01: One of them was close to$100,000 that that rep was owed a$13,000 commission on.
16:03
SPEAKER_01: So when he, if you saw the look on the rep's face when that popped up into our system as part of the open order, he's like, oh my God, I can't believe that.
16:10
SPEAKER_01: I thought for sure I was paid on that.
16:12
SPEAKER_01: I I I this is unbelievable.
16:14
SPEAKER_01: Sure enough, he checked and there was an issue and the deal hadn't been paid on, and he went back and got reimbursed from his employer with a manual check.
16:21
SPEAKER_00: Well, that's uh open order report.
16:23
SPEAKER_00: That's stunning that that would happen, right?
16:25
SPEAKER_00: Where someone wouldn't be able to see line by line what they'd be paid on and not being paid on.
16:29
SPEAKER_00: I'm wondering if there's any examples where, due to the complexity of the comp plan, that the rep just wasn't able to figure out what rate they're supposed to be paid at on different things, and you're able to decipher that for them.
16:41
SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
16:41
SPEAKER_01: Let me just go back and touch on the open order report.
16:43
SPEAKER_01: I just want to add one more thing to that.
16:45
SPEAKER_01: There are ways that the open order report are very valuable to the rep.
16:48
SPEAKER_01: So it could be something as simple as the deal was canceled and you want to take it off the open order report because nothing happened with it, so it's no longer within your sphere.
16:55
SPEAKER_01: It could be that the company never invoiced the customer, but the work was done.
16:59
SPEAKER_01: I've seen that happen many times shockingly.
17:01
SPEAKER_01: It could be that the deal was credited to a different rep by mistake instead of to you.
17:06
SPEAKER_01: Or maybe it was credited to a house account.
17:09
SPEAKER_01: I've seen all of these examples play out.
17:11
SPEAKER_01: And there are ways that the rep is not getting paid on the deal that they booked and should be paid on.
17:16
SPEAKER_01: So the question is, is so when a rep is given a commission statement and they got 24 to 48 hours to get back to them, that only lists what's on the commission statement.
17:24
SPEAKER_01: How do you know what's not on the statement that should be?
17:27
SPEAKER_01: The open order report is very important to track and follow, and that we're finding reps money left and right by using that tool.
17:33
SPEAKER_01: So another example that we worked with, so we worked with uh several reps now who work for sort of a large marketing automation company.
17:40
SPEAKER_01: They have the most complex comp plan that I have ever seen.
17:43
SPEAKER_01: It is set up in such a way that it's literally impossible for any rep in that company to check their pay.
17:48
SPEAKER_01: They get paid a variable rate on every single deal they sell.
17:52
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
17:53
SPEAKER_01: So every deal they sell has a different commission rate applied.
17:56
SPEAKER_01: They work in a low transaction value, high transaction volume setting.
18:01
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
18:02
SPEAKER_01: There are five variables that impact the rate, things like payment terms and discounting and so on and so forth.
18:08
SPEAKER_01: Underneath those five variables, there are 19 sub-variables for a total combination of over 500 different rates that could be applied per deal in a low transaction volume setting.
18:19
SPEAKER_01: So we went through and we built out that entire instance.
18:23
SPEAKER_01: It added enormous functionality to our application.
18:25
SPEAKER_01: It took my CTO literally two weeks to build this entire thing out.
18:29
SPEAKER_01: And you know what we found out?
18:31
SPEAKER_01: Is that the commission software company that this company has paid six figures to didn't build out their back end properly.
18:37
SPEAKER_01: We are finding massive errors going in both directions.
18:40
SPEAKER_01: But for one rep we worked with who provided the information, we found close to$20,000 in unpaid commissions over a 12-month period.
18:49
SPEAKER_01: So we're working with the rep and their company to provide transparency and visibility around this.
18:55
SPEAKER_01: Right now we're in the process of the rep going through and validating the errors that we found with their accounting department one by one.
19:00
SPEAKER_01: It's a very time-consuming and tedious process that they would never be able to do manually without automation.
19:06
SPEAKER_01: What we've done is we've used automation to identify, you know, two dozen deals out of 500 deals that appear to be a problem.
19:14
SPEAKER_01: If they had to go through manually and check this deal by deal by deal, it would literally take weeks and weeks of their time to do so.
19:20
SPEAKER_01: So that's why we've created true commission to help salespeople, providing them this pay transparency and identifying these pay errors on their behalf.
19:28
SPEAKER_00: Then I'll be honest with you, that sounds completely nuts to me that there's such a complex comp plan that 500 variables, that's completely crazy.
19:38
SPEAKER_00: I just can't believe that someone would think that's a great idea.
19:41
SPEAKER_00: I mean, maybe their thinking is, hey, we'll just give it to the comp plan company and they'll just figure that out.
19:46
SPEAKER_00: And maybe they just trusted it.
19:48
SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
19:48
SPEAKER_00: But uh it seems weird that they would even let that come to be.
19:51
SPEAKER_01: Well, I mean, I think it's up to the commission software company to push back a little bit too.
19:55
SPEAKER_01: I mean, they should be experts in putting together these comp plans and understanding it.
19:59
SPEAKER_01: I'm not so sure that they are.
20:00
SPEAKER_01: I think their forte is really saving at accounting clerks hours of time and taking revenue or gross profit from an invoice and then multiplying a commission rate off of a comp plan and then summing up those totals to tie into what your commission is being paid.
20:13
SPEAKER_01: I think that the commission software should be working in a consultative basis with the company, with the RevOps folks, and putting together and recommending a plan that's fair for everybody and provides transparency and works, and you know, you don't have these uh challenging issues.
20:27
SPEAKER_01: The goal here should be for refs to understand the plan and be able to execute against it for the benefit of the company and themselves.
20:34
SPEAKER_01: And unfortunately, it doesn't happen all the time.
20:36
SPEAKER_00: That's that's part of that's part of the key thing, right?
20:39
SPEAKER_00: It's designed for a reason, but it's only gonna deliver on that reason if people understand how they're gonna get paid.
20:45
SPEAKER_00: And so it's weird that they would confuse everyone.
20:47
SPEAKER_00: You know, I remember um back in the day, whenever I was given a comp plan, the first thing I would do is pull up Excel and build the model, right?
20:55
SPEAKER_00: So I could figure out how I was gonna get paid, right?
20:57
SPEAKER_00: So I what I'd want to do then is I'd want to say, all right, you know, this is last year's comp plan or you know, last period's comp plan, and and this is this year's, you know, how does it differ?
21:07
SPEAKER_00: And if I sold what I sold last year, if I sold a million dollar deal, what would I get paid?
21:11
SPEAKER_00: And things like that.
21:12
SPEAKER_00: The time that I would probably waste these days building that, it'd probably take me days if I even could do it, trying to figure it out.
21:18
SPEAKER_00: And I'd probably get it wrong.
21:19
SPEAKER_00: I can't imagine the productivity killer that this really provides.
21:22
SPEAKER_01: Well, I know, funny.
21:23
SPEAKER_01: Well, Andrew, you you we did not discuss this ahead of time.
21:26
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I don't think you could have teed up the next question any better for me with my golf analogies.
21:30
SPEAKER_01: I mean, what you just described is an issue that all sales reps suffer through.
21:34
SPEAKER_01: You know, every year, and the the the application of this is really plentiful.
21:38
SPEAKER_01: So I'll give you one right now.
21:39
SPEAKER_01: Every year, you know, you knocked it out of the park last year, Andrew, you made president's club, you hit quota and then some made a boatload of money, your manager comes to you, you figure that you're gonna get a Vata boy, great job.
21:49
SPEAKER_01: He hands you a 25-page compliment and says, Andrew, I think you're gonna like this more.
21:54
SPEAKER_01: I think you'll make more money off of it.
21:56
SPEAKER_01: You look at it, it's apples to oranges.
21:58
SPEAKER_01: Everything changed.
21:59
SPEAKER_01: The rates changed, the tiers change, the escalators change, the kickers, the structure, the categories.
22:03
SPEAKER_01: You have no idea if you're gonna make more or less.
22:05
SPEAKER_01: It's literally blind faith and trust that your manager is asking you to take.
22:09
SPEAKER_01: And it's not right.
22:10
SPEAKER_01: So we have created the comp plan comparison tool.
22:14
SPEAKER_01: So you can go in, take last year's plan, take this year's plan, and we'll turn it from apples to oranges to apples to apples.
22:20
SPEAKER_01: We'll tell you for the same level of performance how much more or more likely less you'll earn in real dollars and percent terms compared to last year.
22:28
SPEAKER_01: And if you want to make as much as you did last year, we'll tell you how much more you'll have to.
22:32
SPEAKER_01: Sell just to make as much as you did last year.
22:34
SPEAKER_01: So that's one application.
22:35
SPEAKER_01: A second application of this, if you're a rep that's looking to leave your company for whatever reason and you're interviewing somewhere, and before you make that leap and leave and leave your pipeline and your company and understanding how everything works and everything you've built up, maybe you want to plug in your data into that new plan and see if it's really better than where you're leaving from.
22:53
SPEAKER_01: Because you know what?
22:54
SPEAKER_01: Sometimes the grass isn't always greener.
22:56
SPEAKER_01: And our system will tell you that at various levels of performance, how much more or less you'll make on the new plan.
23:01
SPEAKER_01: I got two other use cases for you that we've come up with recently.
23:03
SPEAKER_01: If you're a sales manager, you know, talking to a young sales rep and you've got a new plan, you want to go over it with and explain it to them.
23:09
SPEAKER_01: So where they should be focusing their time selling more and earning more, understanding how the plan works, where the escalators come in, so on and so forth.
23:16
SPEAKER_01: You can use this tool as a manager and run through different scenarios with the rep to show them that if you sell more in this category or this category, where your escalators and where your crossover tiers, and how you can maximize your pay and performance on the plan, get some unique insights into it more than just handing someone a comp plan and telling them to figure out on their own.
23:34
SPEAKER_01: Now, the fourth use case for it, if I'm a RevOps leader, and now's probably the time that they're doing this, and I'm looking to tweak the plan from year to year to see if I could maybe slightly reduce the cost of sales, but still give the reps opportunity to earn more in certain areas where the company values.
23:49
SPEAKER_01: I can use this to run scenario analysis as I'm determining the comp plans that I'm looking to roll out to see, you know, how it impacts certain reps in certain departments based on certain product lines, and see as a roll-up for the entire company how slight changes can impact the bottom line.
24:04
SPEAKER_00: That to me is powerful.
24:06
SPEAKER_00: So I remember probably four or five years ago, I went into a startup as the head of in sales operations and enablement, right?
24:13
SPEAKER_00: Working for the CRO.
24:15
SPEAKER_00: And the amount of time I wasted building comp plans on spreadsheets and things like that, and of course, user error comes in here and there.
24:21
SPEAKER_00: But what I was trying to do was exactly that, right?
24:23
SPEAKER_00: I was trying to figure out you know, if we're trying to get this outcome for the board, and we're trying to optimize the sales team, the dollars for this type of dollar, that's what the board wants.
24:32
SPEAKER_00: How do we construct a plan that's gonna do that?
24:35
SPEAKER_00: And what I realized was there's lots of unintended consequences, right?
24:38
SPEAKER_00: If you make changes here, then things happen over there, right?
24:42
SPEAKER_00: And knowing what those are so that you can say, well, you know, if I was a seller, how would I feel about that, right?
24:48
SPEAKER_00: Is that gonna really hurt me or am I not too bothered about it?
24:51
SPEAKER_00: Or just understanding all the different nuances was so helpful.
24:56
SPEAKER_00: I'll tell you that I I wasted uh you know weeks of my life trying to figure this out and do it all on spreadsheets.
25:02
SPEAKER_00: We didn't have the money to go and spend hundreds or thousand dollars on a on a comp plan tools themselves, right?
25:07
SPEAKER_00: So it would have been great to have this to go through the options and then be able to present to the sales team, you know, here's how to let's go through some scenarios, right?
25:15
SPEAKER_00: Let's do it live uh using the tool.
25:17
SPEAKER_00: That would have been awesome uh for me three or four years ago.
25:20
SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
25:21
SPEAKER_01: I mean, as part of the tool, we have a graphical chart that will show you, you know, sort of the break-even line, you know, the water line in essence.
25:27
SPEAKER_01: That's basically last year's earnings at different performance levels going up from zero to say two million dollars.
25:32
SPEAKER_01: And you can see how much more you'll lose in the beginning.
25:34
SPEAKER_01: And then once you get over sort of a million and a half or way on the higher end, you can see that you'll actually make more in the plan.
25:39
SPEAKER_01: But you know, if you only did 800,000 the year before and you got to get to 1.6 before the plan gets any better, it's it doesn't seem quite as good as you'd think.
25:47
SPEAKER_00: No, that's right.
25:48
SPEAKER_00: So one of the things that I was thinking as you were talking was that, you know, with plans being so complex these days, how on earth does TrueComish work with a plan?
25:59
SPEAKER_00: You can't just have a plug some numbers in and we'll work it out for you, right?
26:02
SPEAKER_00: You must have to do custom work or something.
26:04
SPEAKER_00: Is that how it works?
26:05
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean, so we, you know, we have a three-pronged approach at True Commish to really help salespeople in every setting.
26:10
SPEAKER_01: The first is direct to consumer, and that's sort of the scenario that you're talking about.
26:14
SPEAKER_01: We want to be able to make it a fully automated solution so rep can go in there, answer questions about their comp plan, and our system will be able to basically recreate the plan and have that available within our system.
26:24
SPEAKER_01: And then to be able to load up your information, what you expected to be paid in your bookings report or your closed one deals out of your CRM, and then also what you're actually being paid on, your commissions, whether that's out of a commission software or out of an ERP invoicing system.
26:37
SPEAKER_01: And once you do that, you know, we'll be able to find those errors for you in no time at all.
26:41
SPEAKER_01: You know, as far as the complex comm plans, right now we are working with uh individual reps to customize the app further and to add functionality for some of these complex situations.
26:51
SPEAKER_01: You know, our goal is to be able to make this fully automated for say 85% of everybody who goes on can answer questions about the comp plan and our system will be able to absorb that and take that information into account.
27:02
SPEAKER_01: Um, we are doing customized work for folks.
27:04
SPEAKER_01: If it helps enhance the app further, we'll do that for people at no charge.
27:07
SPEAKER_01: We'll provide full customization implementation for them and help them get their data sets in there.
27:13
SPEAKER_01: And uh, we've been doing that for quite a few folks lately.
27:15
SPEAKER_01: In fact, for five folks in the last, say, three weeks or so, we've helped five out of five reps identify uh more than five figures and unpaid commissions, ranging from 11 to$20,000.
27:25
SPEAKER_01: And one of those was those reps that I had to shared with you in the story.
27:28
SPEAKER_01: Another thing that we're looking to do is um go into the enterprise.
27:30
SPEAKER_01: And we're not looking to go where people already are, we're looking to really help the sales rep within the enterprise setting.
27:35
SPEAKER_01: So it's really two places in there.
27:37
SPEAKER_01: One is to sell the solution directly to the sales manager.
27:40
SPEAKER_01: Every month when commissions come out, there's a line out his door from reps complaining about pay errors, complex pay plans, lack of responsiveness from accounting.
27:48
SPEAKER_01: This literally destroys motivation, loyalty, morale, productivity, key employee retention.
27:54
SPEAKER_01: If we can eliminate that conversation and have a manager gift a free True Commission account, there'll now be an independent third-party verification service called True Commish, letting you, Andrew, as a rep know that you're being paid fully and accurately and that we as a company stand behind that.
28:08
SPEAKER_01: And if true commish identifies any deals that there are potential issues, we will work with you and True Commish to make sure that you're paid fully and accurately.
28:14
SPEAKER_01: So no more bitching and complaining about pay areas, about complex comp plans, about everything.
28:18
SPEAKER_01: We'll gifting you a free access to True Commish, they will help you resolve all this so you don't have to spend your time worrying about it.
28:24
SPEAKER_01: Another thing that we're looking to do in the enterprise is to sell this to the chief people officer or EVP of human resources and have this offered for larger organizations as part of a benefit package.
28:33
SPEAKER_01: Similar to like a free or discounted legal Zoom account or a 401k match, they can offer this to salespeople in the organization, knowing that they are proud and they stand for true pay transparency so that this isn't an issue if you're either joining this company or thinking about moving on to somewhere else.
28:49
SPEAKER_00: If you're the CPO, you're worried about the liability of not paying your people properly, right?
28:53
SPEAKER_00: That's not something to ignore.
28:55
SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
28:55
SPEAKER_00: I'm kind of curious, Dan.
28:57
SPEAKER_00: So you know someone sends you the comp plan that they've just been given.
29:01
SPEAKER_00: What are you looking for that you go, here's the things that I'm just looking for that aren't going to be bad or whatever?
29:06
SPEAKER_00: What's the kind of red flags that you you kind of look for in the first pass?
29:10
SPEAKER_01: So, I mean, in general, I mean, like if you're joining a company or you're getting a new comp plan for the year, I mean, we're happy to help advise on that, to help you interpret what it means, to kind of, you know, in some instances you can look at a 25-page comp plan and have no idea how you make money.
29:24
SPEAKER_01: You know, if there's no commission rates in it, how do you figure out how you're gonna get paid on a deal?
29:28
SPEAKER_01: And it's kind of shocking to hear this, but I can tell you we've seen it, not just once or twice either.
29:33
SPEAKER_01: So, you know, it's very frustrating that you know, reps have to go through that and deal with that.
29:37
SPEAKER_01: Did I answer your question on that fully, Andrew?
29:39
SPEAKER_00: Well, I'm just wondering if there's like clauses you look for and you go, okay, where's the drawbacks?
29:44
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean, there's one huge clause that jumps out every time is you've got this long document that tells you everything, and then there's a little clause at the end that says, oh, by the way, the company can change their mind anytime they want.
29:53
SPEAKER_01: I mean, a clause like that literally makes the contract invalid anyway.
29:57
SPEAKER_01: You can't have a contract that lays out all these terms and stipulations that the two parties agree to, and then have one party can then say, oh, never mind, I can change my mind whenever I feel like it.
30:05
SPEAKER_01: You know, the other thing that is really horrific is when there are caps on earnings and when they invoke things like waterfall clauses that you're sort of out-earning the expectation of the comp plan.
30:14
SPEAKER_01: The bottom line is that the company is making between 80 and 90% of any revenue or gross profit that the rep generates, with the rep getting anywhere between 10 and 20% of the commission.
30:23
SPEAKER_01: So if a rep is making a million dollars on a deal, well, you know what?
30:26
SPEAKER_01: The company's probably making eight or nine million dollars on that deal.
30:29
SPEAKER_01: So that should be a good thing for everybody.
30:31
SPEAKER_01: And it's horrible when things like jealousies and other things, you know, impact decision making that can really have a detrimental effect on the company and the culture and the morale and the organization.
30:40
SPEAKER_01: I've seen it happen many, many times and heard multiple stories about things just like this, and then mass exodus and the company going from what was a profitable company doing a good job to, you know, really in the crapper in no time at all.
30:52
SPEAKER_00: So use a phrase that I've not heard before, waterfall clause.
30:55
SPEAKER_00: What does that mean?
30:56
SPEAKER_01: So that's like they'll put that in the in the plan also, where you know, basically if you out-earn the plan, if there's a scenario that comes up that the plan didn't account for, the executive team didn't envision, okay, that then leads to the rep quote unquote breaking the plan and then making like outrageous globs of money associated with a deal because of that.
31:18
SPEAKER_01: The company will come in and say, you know, nope, we're going to invoke this clause.
31:21
SPEAKER_01: In some instances, I've heard that they've literally paid the rep no money.
31:24
SPEAKER_01: I mean, they could be due, you know,$300,000 or$500,000 and they get paid$10 in the dollar or 20 cents in the dollar, or not at all.
31:32
SPEAKER_01: And uh, you know, word gets passed around quickly, both within the company and outside, that this is how they're acting and behaving.
31:37
SPEAKER_01: And and I believe me, this is not that unusual.
31:40
SPEAKER_01: If you people have been coming to me with a lot of stories and questions, you know, since I've kind of appeared here on LinkedIn and uh with this process, and uh I've heard it a dozen times already.
31:48
SPEAKER_01: It's shocking.
31:49
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I try to think of my past what I've seen.
31:52
SPEAKER_00: I've definitely seen uh something about a clause that says you can't make more than the CEO.
31:57
SPEAKER_00: How you qualify that given that they have so many options, I don't know.
31:59
SPEAKER_01: But uh Well, if I was a CEO and I had a sales rep making more than me, I would uh uh celebrate that.
32:05
SPEAKER_01: That means that they're bringing in eight to nine times what we're paying them out.
32:09
SPEAKER_01: It means that the company's doing well.
32:11
SPEAKER_01: Our product is in demand, we're pricing it well.
32:14
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I'm with you on that.
32:16
SPEAKER_00: And and uh the other one I've seen is uh maximum payouts on deals, right?
32:20
SPEAKER_00: So they you know, there's always gonna be the rep, the SE, the manager, you know, whoever else has to be paid on it.
32:26
SPEAKER_00: And they want to make sure that the the percentage maximum is not more than whatever.
32:30
SPEAKER_00: And I think uh what I've seen that really kind of stretched my head at that is it's the rep that takes on the the limit and everyone else still gets paid their amount.
32:37
SPEAKER_00: It's kind of interesting.
32:38
SPEAKER_01: It's a really good point.
32:39
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean sometimes you might have support folks that you can bring in.
32:42
SPEAKER_01: Well, maybe it's an inside sales rep or a tech support people person.
32:46
SPEAKER_01: And if you utilize that resource, their portion of the commission will come out of only the reps piece, not even prorated across the entire deal for the company as well.
32:55
SPEAKER_01: So I've seen that a bunch as well.
32:57
SPEAKER_01: So, like, for example, if the SE or if the rep is gonna an engineer or someone, a sales engineer is gonna get two points on it.
33:03
SPEAKER_01: So instead of the rep making twelve on the deal, they only make ten, yet the company is still making their eighty-eight.
33:09
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
33:09
SPEAKER_00: So if I'm sitting here as a rep, I've just got my new comp plan and I want to engage with you then, what do I do?
33:15
SPEAKER_01: Well, I mean, if you've got a fairly straightforward plan and access to your data, you can go right onto our app today and utilize it yourself.
33:22
SPEAKER_01: The address is app app.trucomish, t-r-c-o-m-m-i-s-h dot com.
33:29
SPEAKER_01: It's a free service right now.
33:30
SPEAKER_01: Any rep can go on there, load up their information, and within minutes, our system will identify potential pay errors that you can research and get reimbursed for.
33:38
SPEAKER_01: If you have more of a complex plan and our system doesn't appear to be able to ingest your plan automatically, or you have questions about it and need some assistance, we're more than happy to uh jump on a Zoom with you, understand your requirements, understand your comp plan, help you get that into the system if need be, or show you how to do that.
33:55
SPEAKER_01: We also have videos that provide an overview of the service, an overview of how to onboard comp plans into our system, an overview of how to get a bookings report out of your CRM and run that report if need be if you don't already have access to it.
34:06
SPEAKER_01: And then also how to export commission information out of either commission software or how to upload the information from an Excel file into our system.
34:13
SPEAKER_00: So as a rep, I could probably most of the time I'll probably just use the standard system, but sometimes there might be an outlier things that you're like, I don't I don't kind of get how this works, and just to contact you for that.
34:23
SPEAKER_00: If I'm a sales manager, take your use case, right?
34:26
SPEAKER_00: I'm fed up with the the complaints and the questions every month.
34:30
SPEAKER_00: I don't know, same deal, or is it a different way to engage with you?
34:33
SPEAKER_01: No, different way.
34:33
SPEAKER_01: So that um would be some direct uh involvement with us.
34:36
SPEAKER_01: So please reach out.
34:37
SPEAKER_01: You can go to our website and reach out to us there at www.truecomish.com.
34:42
SPEAKER_01: Reach out directly to me on LinkedIn, Dan Goodman, Daniel Goodman with True Commission.
34:46
SPEAKER_01: I'll pop right up.
34:47
SPEAKER_01: You can email me, dgoodman at TrueCommish.com.
34:50
SPEAKER_01: We're very responsive.
34:51
SPEAKER_01: It's our passion right now to help salespeople.
34:54
SPEAKER_01: This is a new category, a new service that is foreign to folks everywhere.
34:57
SPEAKER_01: And uh we're really excited about what we're bringing and how we're helping salespeople.
35:01
SPEAKER_01: And I get great gratification in helping them recover money that they earned but never received.
35:06
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I bet you do.
35:07
SPEAKER_00: And I you know in some ways I'm just shocked that it's taken the industry this long to have such a good service available to reps, right?
35:15
SPEAKER_00: Uh this is something that you know you kind of scratch your head and go, why didn't someone do this 10 years ago?
35:19
SPEAKER_01: Well, Andrew, I'll tell you, I really think that society has changed a lot.
35:22
SPEAKER_01: And that I think that reps are more in a position now to stand up and question things and evaluate their lives and want more balance in their lives.
35:30
SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's happening throughout society.
35:32
SPEAKER_01: I mean, there's been a shift in the power dynamic from the employer to the employee.
35:35
SPEAKER_01: There's been a demand for, you know, remote work, the great resignation, quiet quitting.
35:40
SPEAKER_01: I mean, all of these things are happening and coming to the surface.
35:43
SPEAKER_01: Like with policing, for example.
35:44
SPEAKER_01: You know, people are now they're now wearing body cams, and that led to more equality and fairness in the Black Lives Matter movement, you know, and fighting down bullying and uh things like that with the Me Too movement.
35:55
SPEAKER_01: People don't want to stand it for it anymore.
35:56
SPEAKER_01: Before they were quiet or afraid to question, you know, the pandemic has changed the way people view their lives and they want to live it to its fullest and not be afraid to challenge things and stand up for themselves and get what's theirs.
36:07
SPEAKER_01: And true commish is is the right solution at the right time to enable this change for salespeople and to bring true pay transparency.
36:15
SPEAKER_01: So this game no longer exists of hiding information and not providing access and leaving it up to the rep to figure out if they find it or not.
36:23
SPEAKER_01: It's just wrong.
36:23
SPEAKER_01: It's their pay.
36:24
SPEAKER_01: They earned it, they deserve it.
36:26
SPEAKER_00: That's a great way to finish up the conversation.
36:28
SPEAKER_00: I really admire what you're doing.
36:30
SPEAKER_00: I think uh you bring real passion to this and also experience.
36:33
SPEAKER_00: You know, you know what all inside out.
36:35
SPEAKER_00: So you seem like the ideal person to bring this to market.
36:38
SPEAKER_00: I'd really encourage sellers and managers, you know, this seems like the right time to have complete transparency and figure this out.
36:45
SPEAKER_00: I encourage you all to get in touch with Dan and work with him and his team.
36:49
SPEAKER_00: With that, Dan, I wish you every success for this year and into next year as well.
36:53
SPEAKER_01: Thank you very much, Andrew.
36:54
SPEAKER_01: It was a pleasure.
36:55
SPEAKER_00: Well, what a great conversation with Dan.
36:58
SPEAKER_00: I just wish I had half the passion and energy that Dan brings to what he's doing right now.
37:03
SPEAKER_00: You can really tell from the way he talks and his knowledge and experience, he knows this stuff inside out and is really on a mission, on a movement, creating a movement to try and make sense of all this and bring real transparency to what we do.
37:17
SPEAKER_00: For me, there was a number of takeaways, frankly, but let me leave you with three thoughts that I had at the end.
37:22
SPEAKER_00: The first one is this is coming out in early December of 2022.
37:28
SPEAKER_00: This is the perfect time to look at how you've been paid so far this year and make sure that everything is accurate and up to date, and uh you're getting the information and the pay that you expected or you've understood how you're being paid.
37:43
SPEAKER_00: If I were you and you're in any way uncertain, or you've got a really complex plan, I would just go straight to True Commission right now and just figure out if things are on track.
37:53
SPEAKER_00: And if you're listening to this in the new year as new plans start coming out, then what a great way to look at uh the old versus the new to see if you're better off, worse off, indifferent, change, whatever it might be, with a new plan versus the one that you had before.
38:08
SPEAKER_00: The second takeaway I had really was you know it's amazing the consequences of complexity.
38:13
SPEAKER_00: You know, at the end of the day, you know, paying salespeople doesn't need to be complicated.
38:18
SPEAKER_00: Um, and I get why companies get drawn into the idea that they're really trying to optimize everything and make sure the expenses are being used appropriately to drive the right retinue.
38:29
SPEAKER_00: I get it, right?
38:30
SPEAKER_00: But when things get so complex that even the company that builds your plans is getting it wrong, you've really got to scratch your head and go, are we doing something wrong here?
38:40
SPEAKER_00: Maybe I'm a little bit old school in this, but you know, to me, a complex plan 20 years ago was you know two or three different pay rates and that was it.
38:47
SPEAKER_00: Two or three different uh commission rates depending on what you were selling.
38:51
SPEAKER_00: And now it seems like things have gone way out of control for many different companies.
38:55
SPEAKER_00: And I'd really encourage any leaders to looking at this to say, look, your plan should motivate people to do the things that you want them to do.
39:02
SPEAKER_00: If they can understand and see the things that you want them to do, you are shooting yourself in the foot.
39:08
SPEAKER_00: The other thing that comes from complexity is they will try and dissect your plan, right?
39:12
SPEAKER_00: They will try and create their own spreadsheets and they are wasting your time by doing so, right?
39:18
SPEAKER_00: They're gonna do that and work it through and spend a whole morning or a day modeling out a comp plan that didn't need to be so complex in the first place.
39:26
SPEAKER_00: So if you find yourself leading a team or leading a company where it isn't obvious, clear and obvious how someone gets paid and how they make money, I really encourage you to kind of take a step back and say, well, you know, are we doing the right thing here?
39:39
SPEAKER_00: And the third thing that um I would have as a takeaway from this was the real life examples that Dan had.
39:45
SPEAKER_00: And I'll tell you, you know, he shared a lot on the on the podcast, you know, when I've talked to him offline, he shared more and more detail and you know, mentioned a couple of names and things like that.
39:54
SPEAKER_00: And you know, it's just shocking to me, right?
39:56
SPEAKER_00: That uh it seems like more often than not, there are sales people out there that go to them that uh are getting discrepancies highlighted in what they should be paid.
40:07
SPEAKER_00: So it's just interesting that that's the world that we're in.
40:09
SPEAKER_00: You know, good sales leaders aren't doing that on purpose, but it's gonna be not unaffecting the complexity that uh they're rolling out there.
40:15
SPEAKER_00: So these results are real and uh they're happening right now.
40:19
SPEAKER_00: So listen, with that, I hope you enjoyed this episode as much as I did, and we'll look forward to talking to you next time.