Are sales reps unmotivated at work?

Published: Wed, 06/29/22

June 29, 2022

TOGETHER WITH

Welcome back to The Quota. In this week’s edition, we have something special for our readers in our Worth a Peek section, thanks to the generous folks at Postal. Besides that, we’ll tell you about the turmoil among the sales team at Stripe, find out how many reps feel unmotivated at work, and give some advice to a sales manager whose salesman husband doesn’t want her help. Let’s do this!

NUMBER OF THE WEEK

$155,000

The top 10% of highest-paid salespeople earn $155,000 per year or more.

Source: Zippia

SALES ROUNDUP

Here’s what’s happening in the sales world this week:

The Harvard Business Review recently published the results of a years-long study, which focused on the reasons why customers don’t buy. Contrary to popular belief, the most common reason wasn’t that customers were satisfied with the status quo, but that their inability to make a decision is what held them back from making a purchase. The article focuses on the reasons for customer indecision, and what sales reps can do about it. You can read the article here.
According to a recent report, Warner Bros. Discovery is planning to slash up to 30% of its global sales team, starting with buyout offers this week for some members of its U.S. advertising sales force. The company is undertaking the cost-cutting initiative in an effort to achieve $3 billion in cost savings after the Discovery and AT&T WarnerMedia merger. You can read the report here.

FEATURE

"Patrick Collison" by jdlasica is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Stripe Grapples with Growing Pains Amidst Changing Compensation Structure

According to a recent report in The Information, salespeople at payment startup Stripe have been dissatisfied with changes in bonus pay and compensation structure. Last year, they were excluded from the company’s new policy of offering employees the choice of substituting their year-end-bonus for a share of equity in the company, which was recently valued at $95 billion. Additionally, salespeople can only make commissions from a client’s first year of sales with Stripe (that is, the 2.9% and 30 cent fee Stripe earns on every card transaction they process), and some reps have complained that there isn’t enough support to get customers up and running quickly, limiting their potential commissions, and making the ramp period less lucrative than it should be for employees of a company of Stripe’s size.

Mike Clayville, the company’s chief revenue officer, explained in an email to The Information that the reasoning behind the exclusion of salespeople from the new bonus policy was a legal one relating to commissions. After complaints circulated among employees about this decision, Stripe announced it planned to make it possible for salespeople to receive a portion of commissions from equity, according to emails reviewed by The Information.

These growing pains are not new to Stripe, which is one of the most highly valued startups in the world. The company made a big splash 12 years ago when it combined ingenious marketing with a simple and incredibly useful piece of technology, allowing companies to integrate electronic payments into their web and mobile platforms. Other startups like Lyft and DoorDash jumped onto the Stripe train, and as they grew in value, so did Stripe. Consequently, Stripe grew from a company with just over 2,000 employees to over 7,000 in just the last few years, tripling the size of their sales team in the process.

The company has now set its sights on winning contracts from big companies, but that has proven difficult amidst low morale from the sales team due to what they view as unfair compensation, according to current and former Stripe employees.

At Stripe, commissions are based on the volume of transactions clients process using Stripe services. If salespeople exceed their quotas, they can increase those commissions significantly via accelerators. However, salespeople can only earn said commissions during the first year of a customer’s partnership with Stripe. Furthermore, Stripe’s salespeople feel that they don’t have enough customer support to get bigger customers up and running with Stripe in a timely fashion, though according to several current and former employees, Stripe has since made efforts to expand its customer support teams. And while the one-year commission rule is common among software-as-a-service companies, among more mature cloud companies which cater to enterprise clients (like Stripe), commissions are typically uncapped as salespeople often stay with the same customers over time.

A Stripe spokesperson said that for the last two quarters, the percentage of Stripe salespeople who achieved their quotas was higher than the industry standard, but that number appears to exclude new hires who are at the start of their ramp period.

Unsurprisingly, on an employee survey last November, only 30% of sales team respondents said they saw themselves working at Stripe in two years’ time, while the overall company response was double that number.

In that same survey, only 58% of respondents agreed with the statement: “I believe my total rewards (base salary+bonuses+benefits+equity) package is fair, relative to similar roles at other companies.”

In response to all of this, Stripe began taking steps to improve morale and compensation fairness for the sales team. Earlier this year, they announced that salespeople could earn bonuses from a sales performance incentive fund if they successfully signed multi-year contracts with customers. However, the bonus cap—$30,000—was so low that it could be fulfilled with a single contract. When salespeople complained, Stripe raised the cap to $100,000 per person.

When asked about morale among her salespeople, Jeanne DeWitt Grosser, manager of Stripe’s North American sales team, said that people should be grateful to work at Stripe, reiterating that the company still had a good “return on investment” for each salesperson. And while Stripe, a true SaaS success story, shows no sign of slowing down, it remains to be seen whether it will become a sought-after employer for salespeople, or whether it will join the ranks of other software giants that operate like sales sweat-shops – churning and burning through reps, knowing there will always be someone else willing to take their place.

TOGETHER WITH ZOOMINFO

How to Get Started in Sales: 10 Career Tips from SDRs

Let’s face it: listening to yourself on recorded sales calls can be painful. But it’s also a massively effective way to sharpen your skills.

So how can you get over the cringe and start self-coaching? First, get creative about how you approach conversations. Next, look for similar themes in the questions you get from prospects, then prepare a strong response for each one.

Take it to the next level by listening to calls from other successful SDRs. It’s critical to explore all the ways you can learn from your team, especially when remote work means it’s no longer possible to casually overhear a more seasoned sales pro in a shared workspace.

This is just one of 10 crucial career-development tips that ZoomInfo SDR Reina Harwood got after surveying her peers. You can explore the full list on The Pipeline here.

MEME OF THE WEEK

Source: Sales Feed

QUIZ

What percentage of salespeople in the U.S. have a bachelor's degree?

A. 26
B. 43
C. 53
D. 37

SALES FAILS

Each week, we bring you the most cringe-worthy sales moments from across the web. To submit your sales fail story for consideration, click here. (Don't worry, you'll remain completely anonymous).

“My first ever sales job was about twelve years ago. I was going to become an electrician, but instead I was offered a sales job working for a local construction company that was owned by these two guys who had run it together for almost ten years. At the time, it was a good opportunity, and I’ve stayed in sales since, so it all (sort of) worked out in the end, but at the time, I had very little workplace experience in general, and less than a month after I started, the you-know-what hit the fan.

The company mostly did high-end remodels, but they sometimes built new houses too. I took over a handful of accounts from a sales rep who left to work somewhere else, so my job also involved some project management at a very high level for jobs that hadn’t been started yet. But a few weeks after my first day, the two owners had an absolute blow-out fight in the office right in front of me.

They were locked in the office for a few hours and I heard them raising their voices, but couldn’t make out what they were saying. Then, one of them stormed out and the other one came out behind him and they were screaming at the top of their lungs. One was saying, “After everything I’ve done for you, this is what you do?” And the other one was screaming back, “I can’t do this anymore, I’m gonna have a heart attack. I’m gonna die. Do you want me to die?” They eventually went outside and kept shouting, until one of them left and the other one came back in and was so distraught that I don’t think he even noticed me.

It turned out that one of the two owners was abandoning the business and going to work for someone else, which was obviously really bizarre since I thought they were really successful. But I guess he couldn’t handle the stress anymore and was worried about his health. In any case, the company COMPLETELY fell apart after that. Customers who gave deposits would call in screaming that no one was getting back to them, and jobs in progress were a total disaster, and I was getting a lot of the punishment from the customers. After a few weeks, I left too, but the remaining owner didn’t even return my call when I told him I was leaving. It was pretty awful, but after dealing with that, nothing that happened to me in sales could ever phase me again.

Anonymous Georgia

GRAPH OF THE WEEK

Source: Instagram Poll -- June 2022

WORTH A PEEK

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ASK THE QUOTA

Want to submit a question and be featured in our advice column? Click here. (Don't worry, you'll remain completely anonymous).

Dear Quota Team,

I’ve been in sales since I graduated from college and am now in my early 40s (yikes!). In that time, I’ve held nearly every sales position there is, from Account Executive to Director of Sales and everything in between. For the last six years, I’ve been a producing sales manager for a mid-sized company (I will leave out the industry for anonymity purposes). And, most importantly, I know that I am good at what I do!

My husband and I have been together for about nine years, and married for four. Until this year, he worked as an implementation consultant for a large HR software company – basically, he helped onboard new companies to his previous employer’s platform. It was a good job, but he didn’t like the fact that no matter how hard he worked, his pay was basically capped, especially since he saw the kinds of checks I would make sometimes, though he never let on that he was insecure about me making more money than he did.

About six months ago, he switched jobs internally and became a sales rep for his long-term employer. Instead of implementation, he is now selling the software that he was implementing. This was entirely his idea, and he talked about it for a while before making the switch (I was always supportive of the idea, but warned him that sales was not easy).

The problem, and it IS a problem, is that he isn’t doing as well as he expected in his new role. I think he thought he’d just waltz in and start closing massive amounts of business, but reality has been a bit of a shock to him. Lately, he seems depressed and unmotivated. Since I have a lot of experience in the space, I've tried to give him advice, but he just gets angry and doesn’t want to talk about it. When he first started the job, we would talk about it after work, but now that the initial excitement has worn off, he will give me one-word answers about his day or just try to change the subject completely.

We’re at a point now where it’s affecting our relationship. I know I can help him become better at his job, but I don’t think he wants advice from his wife, and he’s such a proud person in general that I think he doesn’t want to admit that he might have made the wrong decision by switching roles. It’s super frustrating for me since I’ve seen it all in my career, and I’m convinced that I could help him if he’d only let me. And if he wanted to go back to implementation, I’d be perfectly fine with that as long as it got him out of this miserable funk, but now I’m not sure he’d even do it if it meant admitting he made a mistake. Help me! What can I do!?

Frustrated Spouse

Dear Frustrated,

Okay, this is a tough one, because it’s technically not a sales question, it’s a relationship question, but we’re willing to give it a shot, so here goes:

It takes some people a little while to find their stride, and it sounds like he’s at the point where he’s either going to power through and figure things out, or he’s going to throw in the towel and go back to implementation. If it’s the latter, he can chalk this up to a lesson learned and (hopefully) will have more empathy for his wife and her career.

If it’s the former, however, he will need to develop a thicker skin and learn how to take coaching and criticism. Sales is a constant feedback loop, and you can’t just shut out the world and keep doing something that’s not working, because there’s no hiding the results. A good rep tries to improve, and they don’t sulk around waiting for things to change on their own.

That being said, some people need to learn through experience, and based on his personality, it sounds like pushing him to accept your advice is likely to backfire. This means you can only do a few things: back off, be supportive, and be there to give advice if he asks for it. Doing anything else is likely to cause problems, (because of him, not because of you).

And if he decides that he wants to commit himself and stick it out, you can always send him a link to this newsletter. Just make sure he doesn’t see this specific column, because he’ll probably figure out who the question came from.