This Commission Structure Is Breaking Your Team

Sales compensation shapes behavior, trust, performance, and culture.

But in most companies, commission structures are still a black box.

Sellers do not fully understand how they get paid, what they are losing, or why payouts change. That confusion creates frustration, weakens trust, damages culture, and drives the wrong behavior.

This episode breaks down why commission structures are still broken, how incentives impact performance more than most leaders admit, and why this part of the market is overdue for change.

In this episode, you’ll learn

• Why most commission structures create confusion instead of clarity
• How incentives directly shape seller behavior and team culture
• Why trust breaks when reps do not understand how they get paid
• The hidden cost of unclear payouts and manual commission tracking
• How AI is starting to change sales compensation and incentive management
• What sales leaders need to fix if they want better performance

🔗 Jason AI SDR by Reply
Jason is an AI SDR that helps revenue teams automate prospecting, research prospects, run multichannel outreach, and book meetings automatically. They’ve built one of the strongest multichannel outbound platforms in the market, helping teams go from research to booked meetings in one system.

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🔗 Remuner

Remuner is an AI-powered incentive compensation platform built to align company goals with employee performance. It automates every part of variable compensation plans, gives teams full visibility and transparency, and helps drive stronger execution across the business.

Remuner homepage
https://www.remuner.com/?utm_campaign=Cospodcastremuner&utm_source=paid&utm_medium=paid-sponsorship

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Compensation plans, salaries, commissions, that's everything that we are going to talk about in this episode. And we have an expert about that. You will learn exactly how to calculate yours and how to basically stop guessing within manual work. That being said, and before we start, I want to say thanks and we want to say thanks to our main partner, reply.io, the all-in-one sales engagement tool, that is helping us and walking with us alongside this whole uh bunch of episodes that we are recording. It's uh one of the best in the market, if not the best, for prospecting to closing everything in between. Check them out in the description. You will have all the details there. I want to say thanks to Sergio. Sergio, thank you for joining this uh Confessions of a Seller episode, another episode that we are recording here. Um, Sergio, I will introduce you a little bit, but for sure we will give you the space to do that yourself. He's an expert in compensation commissions. Uh, a lot of uh times, I would say serial entrepreneur. That's the yeah, that's the best way to describe you. COO or former COO at Signaturit, now COO and uh co-founder at Remunner. And well, thank you for joining us and let's chit-chat a little bit. Thanks for having me. And uh very looking forward for the conversation. It's a pleasure um having you here. Kevin, yeah again, thank you for being my host here.

SPEAKER_02 1:19

Of course. Uh I think uh Alan, we had some some good podcasts so far, and uh having our special guest today, it's definitely a pleasure as well from my side. Thank you for coming and uh telling us specifically first, you know, before we got into Remener and what you guys do and digging deeper in the in the different questions we have for you. Uh, we would like to understand a little bit more about you know your person and uh your your your your way as an entrepreneur, right? You uh had multiple startups so far, and we would like to understand where did it start, right? Uh I we saw that you uh started from consulting business. Um of course we did our homework in the case. It's a crazy journey, by the way. Yeah, so we all learned. But we would love to hear, you know, from really early start, you know, to get an understanding what kind of skill sets you develop in your early years, which makes you now like uh multiple uh entrepreneurs in different startups.

SPEAKER_00 2:16

Okay, yeah, thanks for having me. Uh it's a pleasure to be here. Um, so I I don't know what skills I developed, to be honest. I my background is in business, so I started business and I started uh working in a management consulting in BCG, which I think is the standard corporate job that uh most of uh our parents probably do for us. Yeah. And I started there, I learned a lot to be honest, but uh that's probably the opposite of being an entrepreneur. And uh after a few years there, learning a lot, I just realized okay, this is not fulfilling for me anymore. I never get to see the actual impact of what I do. I was 24, 25 at the time, so had nothing to lose. So I left uh that company and I started my first uh entrepreneurial journey. And it uh was a crazy one, uh, one that didn't go well, uh, not financially, but I learned a lot. Um, and um after that experience, I had this kind of moment in which I need to decide, okay, and shall I go back to the corporate, maybe to an MBA, which is what what my father was telling me to do, um, or shall I keep on trying? And for me, at the end of the day, failing it's part of the learning journey. 100%. Yeah, 100%. And that's what I discovered also that I wanted to do, like being an entrepreneur, seeing the impact of what uh what I was doing. And uh yeah, I decided to try again and again and again. Jump in, jump in and jump in. Exactly. And that uh experience drove me, drove me until this point.

SPEAKER_01 3:38

That's awesome. Um, I've been well with Kevin as well. We've been uh hearing you and listening to you and watching a lot of episodes because you've been all over the place as well, and with Remuner and some other things that we will talk later on. And you mentioned something in one of these episodes that caught my attention that it's a Elon Musk phrase. That it's well, if you if you want, you can say it on yourself and and uh explain to me what does it mean exactly and and how that phrase like what taught you alongside the journey that you've been doing? Yeah. I I don't know exactly the the eating glass, you know.

SPEAKER_00 4:10

Like even I know exactly how Elon Musk said about or why I have this in my mind. But for me, the point is being an entrepreneur is probably the worst satisfactory or the worst job that you have for getting satisfactions on a every day. You get along in a medium and long term, but on the day to day, you are only solving problems. And normally the worst problems that you can get in your company end up in your desk. As a CEO, basically. As a CEO and founder. Because there's no one else.

SPEAKER_01 4:37

Absolutely. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 4:38

So you are always solving problems, problems, problems, and uh normally those are not the smaller and easy ones to solve. And at the same time, you need to push a lot the company, the vision, the team. So normally it's a very hard combination, and that's why it's very demanding, let's say, on a short term. So that's why the only way you can get through this even multiple times is if you enjoy that kind of situation on a day-to-day. And that's I think what the Yeah, the eating glass means, right?

SPEAKER_01 5:05

Like you need to enjoy it while doing it. And I love that love that you're saying that because confessions of a seller, basically, this is the name that uh that that we put into the podcast because we want to basically make confessions, right? And every time that we hear someone saying, hey, you are a seller, sometimes it's a bastard profession uh out there. Uh be careful, these guys are going to scam you or something like that, right? Um, and I compare this a lot with being a CEO or being at some point, you're selling yourself, you're selling your company, you're selling your vision to your employees, to your colleagues, to your co-founders, to uh your potential clients. Investors. Investors, really important. So, with that in mind, what are those things along these 10, 15, 20 years of experience, since the moment that you jump into this corporate world until the day that we are right now, that you would say, hey, this is a confession that I have to make for everyone listening. Be careful, CEO is not for everyone, sales is not for everyone, or maybe it is. What what what do you have to say within this topic?

SPEAKER_00 6:04

I think so something that I used to say normally is that being a founder and uh getting into entrepreneurship, founding a startup and so on, is not for everyone, and it's not what we are used to see on press, podcasts, and so on. Yeah, it always seems better than it actually is. Exactly. Because it's much harder than it seems. And normally the stories that we get are the top, let's say 10% or whatever, but are the successful ones.

SPEAKER_04 6:29

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 6:29

That even those when you listen carefully, they've gone through very tough times. But we don't hear the other 90 stories out of a hundred that they didn't go well. Exactly. So, what I always try to say to people is this is very hard. So I encourage you to try if you want, but if you try and you don't feel like this is your thing, that's absolutely fine.

SPEAKER_02 6:49

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 6:49

And go find a job.

SPEAKER_02 6:51

That's exactly what I say to the people who wanted to start in sales, right? I had a team of 10 people, um, uh, people coming out from fresh from the university, and they said, uh, I said, okay, are you willing to make 50 or 100 calls a day and people hang up like 70% uh of the of the times uh the phone and or scream at you or whatever? And they say, Yeah, I I'm willing to do. Okay, let's test it for two weeks. Let's see if if you're uh made for that, because not everyone is made for that. And I think there are a lot of parallels um between that.

SPEAKER_01 7:23

Resilience is the 100% definitely resilience is key man there.

SPEAKER_02 7:27

It's crazy. So, one question what I would love to ask is how many times did you want to drop it and say, Okay, it's enough. Be realistic. Yeah, be realistic.

SPEAKER_00 7:38

I mean, if I need to make a confession, I would say multiple times a day, probably on average.

SPEAKER_01 7:43

Remember, your wife and your kids are watching this, right?

SPEAKER_00 7:46

No, that I mean the hard truth is that you you there's multiple times in which it is so hard that you think, why I'm actually doing this. Then you get all this satisfaction when you see you really reach milestones, you see the impact of what you're doing. That's super powerful, not only from an economical standpoint, which is another thing that I everyone associates entrepreneurship with becoming. A lot of money. Yeah. Yeah, which it might happen. But but that what I mean by impact is also seeing the people that you are helping with your product, with your service, whatever. You see that you can impact people. Sometimes it's a small group, sometimes it's super big. But that impact is what is satisfactory.

SPEAKER_02 8:25

And I spoke actually at a in a in a um kindergarten party of my son to another entrepreneur. Sure, and that it was it it I was talking to him, and they have like a um a company with over 500 people. Um, Stark Future. I'm not sure uh if you know them, they do uh like electric motorcycles. Okay. One thing which we were discussing is it's what is as well rewarding. Imagine you're feeding 500 families, you know, with your with the with the offering you build with with your with your founding uh team. You you're actually really taking care of other families who work in your company. You're changing lives. Yeah, it's you can uh uh help them to to grow as well and maybe doing their own stuff afterwards, right? Yeah, like you did, you know, you just did one startup, you learned something, you failed, and then you jumped into the next, you learned again something, and you get more successful from one try to another. But it's it's really the resilience, I think, which which is a key point.

SPEAKER_00 9:20

And that needs to be part of your satisfactory, like enjoying that journey because it's very hard. And you need if you become multimillionaire, that's maybe something that might happen at the end of the journey. But if you don't enjoy the journey, you're not gonna get to the end. That's 100% for sure. But that's I mean, while you're enjoying that journey, you're not enjoying it, that might just be. Those moments in which you say, Well, I'm what I'm doing here. And um, those are the moments where resilience uh applies. Because even in those moments where your natural instinct is just drop it, yeah, go do whatever else. Yeah uh in those moments, believing in what you're doing, believing in the vision you have, and also being aware of everyone that you have around you, because as a founder, it's a it's a super lonely uh situation. But at the end, you have teams, you have co-founders, you have investors, you also have your family which is supporting you from the personal side. And also being aware of all of this, uh acknowledging this, and being able to be resilient and push even in those moments, um, that's probably the hardest part. But you want to quit the business.

SPEAKER_01 10:21

Absolutely. So, what would be if we have to put it into three uh words or traits of personality, always making this parallelism, you as a as a successful CEO as well, uh, and and sales and sellers, and we will talk about the evolution of sales as well. What would be the three personal traits that you would say CEOs as well from their standpoint, right, and sellers must have at some point in order to go through this crazy life and succeed?

SPEAKER_00 10:49

I think resilience is one that we discussed. I I think the second one that comes to mind is being able to process all the inputs that you get externally and and do not, I mean, have your idea, your vision clear, but then at the same time being able to capture all these inputs that you get from the outside and being able to completely adapt the way you uh frame that initial vision, which in the sales side is probably listening to your prospect and listening. Exactly, active listening, understanding the the person that you have in front as a founder and CEO is maybe understanding your market and the signals that you get. And you might have a super clear vision. I want to go this way or I want to sell this product, and I have these are my three main questions I need to get out of this call. But if you're not proactively listening and adapting in a sales call or in your startup correct V or world, that's something that probably will prevent you from being uh successful. So that's the second one that comes to mind.

SPEAKER_01 11:43

And um, I don't have a third one uh right now, but uh resilience uh resilience again. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Make sure yeah, I agree, I agree. Or consistency at some point. That is basically what you are saying: that it's hey, I want to quit 10 times a day, but I will keep doing this 11 times a day, right? So so at some point you are there.

SPEAKER_00 12:01

I think some sort of optimism as well, because in sales you get so many no's uh and and I I usually tell this to my team. Um, you're gonna make 500 calls a day. You're gonna get 90% no's or whatever. Even more, yeah, at some point. Yeah. But the next call, after a no or nine no's in a row, the next call might be the one that you get a yes. And when you start a conversation, you need to be as optimism as the call number one of the day. It's crazy. If you let those no's affect you, um then you're not made for it. Yeah. And as a founder, it's the same. You get so many problems, so many negative inputs that you still need to be optimism, uh, optimistic and think about the future, believe in what you're doing, and also try to get that optimism around you with your team and so on. Even though sometimes uh it's very hard. It's hard.

SPEAKER_01 12:50

So we always um speak with Kevin like in order to solve something or in order to create something, there must be a trigger, right? Or or an idea or something that triggered you or happened throughout your life in order to say, you know what, I need to solve this. And that's what we see even in movies. Maybe in the US, they have this culture of solve a problem that you have and you will become this successful entrepreneur. So before jumping into what Remonur is, what it what is that you're doing, guys, and talking about sales as well within the company, we would like to understand how you got there, right? Like, can you walk us through your story, personal story, failures, uh tips that you would say, hey guys, go through this or try to avoid that stuff uh and how you get from uh jumping into a consulting world two or three years there up to remonner today? Yeah, I'll try to keep it short. Man, take your time.

SPEAKER_00 13:37

Take your time and 12 years of my life. I will be we will be interrupt interrupting you and asking you some nuggets, but but go ahead and and so uh when I quitted um Boston Consulting, uh I started creating my first uh startup uh with two friends from university, which was a complete mistake because we were three people exactly the same. Uh we were not complementary, we were like uh three same cut from the same pattern, let's say. Um that company was not successful, but it was a huge learning. I did all the usual mistakes that you hear and and and uh and you can read about not having a shareholders' agreement, not having a clear vision, not um all of that.

SPEAKER_01 14:15

It's part of the journey at the end of the day, right?

SPEAKER_00 14:17

I I I don't like to call myself C entrepreneur, you usually say I'm just full of scars. All right, nice. Those are the uh because usually I think as a human being, you only learn when you really fail.

SPEAKER_01 14:27

100%.

SPEAKER_00 14:28

And failure for me, it's it it it it's nothing negative. It's uh it's not normally you say you always win or learn. And uh failure is part of the learning. Correct. But anyway, so that company didn't go well. Um after that, uh I ended up in the food delivery space. Um, almost by an accident, I would say. I was in that moment deciding, okay, shall I go into corporate again and uh forget about being uh being an entrepreneur? And I got that opportunity completely random.

SPEAKER_01 14:55

Um and so let me interrupt you there. Sorry to interrupt you. So you mentioned, hey, we started this company with two other colleagues, friends from the school or university in this case. I would like to understand, or if you have in your mind, because you're saying, hey, I'm full of scars, those scars marks us, right? Then in the future, don't do this, do that. What are the two or three things that you would say, I learned this the hard way, and there's no way I can hit myself again with that same stone?

SPEAKER_00 15:20

Number one, 100% clear, is uh do not pick co-founders based on friendship or family. Pick co-founders based on sharing professional values or understand that you can or you have experience working together. And that also is linked to try to pick complementary co-founders. I'm I told you I'm I have a business background. My two other founders in that startup also had business background. So we had no one in the company, at least in the co-founding team, yeah, who had any knowledge about technology. And we're trying to build a technological startup. Yeah, difficult, big mistake. Second one, also linked to that, is always, always, always sign a shareholders' agreement. Even if you only are three founders and no investors, I see very commonly that we are friends, we're gonna well, so we'll see, we'll figure out then uh when the next uh VC comes. And usually, shareholders agreement is uh it's a hard conversation to have because you are discussing with your friends in a moment that you're starting full of optimism, everything is gonna go well, you're gonna eat the wall, and you're discussing we need to do it.

SPEAKER_02 16:24

We need a side agreement.

SPEAKER_01 16:26

We didn't, we didn't.

SPEAKER_00 16:27

So basically having those hard conversations early in the process, right? If if you have a good shareholders agreement, you're not gonna read it never again in the future. But it needs to it needs to be there. And and it's discussing hard conversations. Like what happens if I know you get a new girlfriend and want to move and live on the other side of the wall.

SPEAKER_01 16:44

What do we do then? Whatever the external factor could be, or even inside the company, right?

SPEAKER_00 16:49

There's multiple things that can happen and you need to try to build one. And if you don't know exactly how to do it, call a lawyer. And exactly. Lawyers know how to do it.

SPEAKER_02 16:59

And uh no, no, but that's one of the things because it's like yeah, a lot of uh founders don't think about this like topic, right? They say, like, yeah, let's start it, that we can figure it out on a later stage, but maybe then it's too late, right?

SPEAKER_01 17:12

Yeah, we are dying of optimism when we are entrepreneurs sometimes. And this happens more often than not when you're working with friends. That's why the phrase, and I I listened to this from my father like several times, and correct me if I'm wrong, you have more experience and expertise. But he always told me, like, hey Alan, the best um the best companies or the best partnerships are the ones that are small numbers uh uh under and the number two. It's like just by yourself, right? Like because you will solve a lot of problems. I disagree a little bit with that, but the statement is make sure that if you're going to do something, do it in the right way, and not just because you're friends, do it with the right people, right?

SPEAKER_00 17:50

And and being friends and being uh colleagues or co-workers is a complete different thing. Correct. And in some cases, you might have both at the same time, but being good friends with someone doesn't necessarily mean that you're gonna be good co-workers. At the end of the day, there's a lot of tensions through the journey because it's hard, and having co-founders with the right setup is super useful because then you don't feel that lonely as a founder, but it has some risks and you need to make sure to mitigate those. And I've seen a lot of people struggling with this when when things go let's say not as good as you expected, and uh some random stuff happens and and yeah, it happens.

SPEAKER_01 18:29

So basically, if we have to summarize them, at least the top two is basically make sure that you choose the right people, and the second one, shareholder agreement. Yeah, which is linked. It's linked, right? It's linked. Okay, so let's go back to let's go back to the story. You ended up Okay, so that's scar number one. It's car number one. Let's put it in that that confession. It's car number one.

SPEAKER_00 18:51

So after that, you say, okay, what should we do next? So we we that company didn't go well. We ended up uh shutting down the company, and uh yeah, as I said, suddenly I was without a job. We I I had an experience that at the time was hard. Now I I I see it, and I it was probably one of the biggest moments of learning for me. Okay, but at the time it was obviously hard. And you know, I was in that situation, okay. Shall I, you know, listen to my father and go back to the corporate world? Uh which um, yeah, I was uh I was having a let's say initial promising career there. Maybe go and go and do an MBA, which is the standard path in this kind of consulting companies, or shall I keep on the entrepreneurial uh path? And I in that moment, in that moment, randomly, accidentally, I I got an opportunity to join a food delivery company in Spain at the time. I'm talking about food delivery 100. So before Delivery, before Global. So when the food delivery was all about the moment in which food delivery was seeing in a digital platform the menus of restaurants that already deliver to you. So pizza, sushi, Chinese restaurants, but it's not the nowadays like where you have DoorDash, Global, or delivery. So it was prior to that. I was joining a Spanish player in the food delivery that was recently acquired by Rocket Internet, which is a huge uh German company from Berlin. And uh yeah, they were acquiring this company and I and I joined them. And it was uh a little bit random, but um, for me it was another validation of okay, I want to keep on the on the digital world. And it was a very short um experience because I wanted to start something from scratch again. But uh, but it was amazing. I learned a lot. It was my first exposure to a marketplace, which at the time it was uh all about marketplaces. Yeah, and um, it was a great experience. And also randomly, accidentally, through that, I I got to meet with who then became my co-founder of Corner Job, um, which is probably the the first uh experience I had that took a lot of time. We raised a lot of money.

SPEAKER_02 20:52

Can can you explain a little bit for the audience what was Corner Job doing and then uh that uh that they can identify them a little bit better too?

SPEAKER_00 20:58

So corner job is a blue-collar job marketplace um for uh gig workers. At the time it was not called geek workers, but uh all these kind of uh sectors where you have people working in shifts, um essentially blue collar, yeah, which is not super high-skilled jobs. Uh it was a marketplace, it was uh mobile only. Um so essentially it was for people to find jobs very instantly in 24 hours and companies to find workers. We're based in Barcelona, uh, but we're operating in Italy, France, Spain, and Mexico. Uh we co-founded the company with the Wallapop co-founders. Um so it was kind of a Wallapop for jobs, which in some countries uh the audience might know what a Wallapop is. Yeah. And essentially it was a four year uh story. We raised more than sixty million euros from top T VCs in Europe, including Norton. And uh yeah, that was an amazing experience. And uh if you look for connetjob.com, it's still a that's a big number for for that period of time, right?

SPEAKER_01 21:54

Because I mean, we are talking about VCs right now and the and the money that we are or they are putting we are putting. I'm putting.

SPEAKER_00 22:00

That was 2015, 2016. That's crazy. Now you see 30 billion rounds. That's crazy.

SPEAKER_01 22:08

That's crazy. So I want to understand in until we get into Remuner and so on, connecting this story and connecting your personal story as well with confessions of seller and mainly the sales life, the revenue life, the sales ops, sales, um, salespeople, in each of these roles, corner jobs and so on, were you also selling? Were you mainly doing strategy, go to market, a little bit of everything when you are co-founding? What was your experience within the sales market and how you see that evolution from a seller or from a sales perspective, go to market motion since 2015, 2014 until right now?

SPEAKER_00 22:44

Yeah. So in the food delivery company, I was mostly doing operations. Okay. So it was nothing to do with sales. Okay. In current job, I was co-founder and COO. Um so I was not directly selling myself. Uh, but as the company grew, I had to set up the revenue operations team, and we had a massive uh sales team because even though it was a marketplace, the revenue was coming from companies uh that was that were advertising their jobs in the platform. Correct. And the revenue model were it was not a SaaS, but let's simplify, it was like a SaaS. Um so we had the standard inside sales, SDRs, accounts, so the standard selling motion, and I was not directly being the one uh facing the customer uh done very key accounts, but I was very close to all of the instruction. I had to set up the revenue operations team, which at the time I it was not even that clear that that role was the revenue operations. Uh exactly.

SPEAKER_02 23:34

And uh they throw you into this uh scan. I was the COO, so I had to figure it out.

SPEAKER_00 23:40

And at some point, uh I remember having um account executives in Milan, in Paris, in Madrid, and in Mexico City, and then having inside sales all in Barcelona. And I remember having account managers distributed, a customer success team centralized in Barcelona. And at some point I realized, okay, this is uh we need to make here. We need to put some structure here, implement a proper CRM, and that was RevOps. And I hired the whole RevOps team, which I don't even remember if we called them RevOps at the time, but CRM implementation team. Yeah, but we got a Revops manager in each of the main cities where we had teams, uh, a whole structure in the headquarters here in Barcelona. So I remember setting up, and all these organizations were reporting to me.

SPEAKER_02 24:20

So and this was all before the remote environment. Uh I was much before that.

SPEAKER_00 24:25

That was 2016, 17, 18.

SPEAKER_02 24:27

Interesting. And how just a side question. As the salespeople were really spread all over the world, how did you be able to, you know, I think for salespeople, motivation is a really tough, tough uh topic. Some people are mod are able to motivate themselves, some they need some uh some some kick in their asses. Um maybe we can kick uh cut this out. But uh but uh they just you know um how how how did your company were able to you know have this culture still um and and the the the team running and then getting to the goal all together?

SPEAKER_00 25:03

I don't know. I at the time I was not aware of all all these kind of things that you were saying that I'm now aware after all these years. At the time we we simply were having uh managers in each of these different teams trying to do their management uh job of uh motivating people. With all that I know now, for instance, the way we were using sales compensation at the time was very poor. And it was not motivating at the time. But uh obviously myself, eight years ago, I I didn't know a lot of what I know now. But uh but yeah, it was it was hard. And uh I remember it it was not exactly a SaaS business, so it was a little bit more of a transactional because they would be posting and so on. So if there the sales process that we had was not that long with a huge discovery and so on. So it was a little bit different, okay, but it still was a lot of um transactional conversations there. We're handling uh we're managing a lot of volume, uh um like millions of offers. It was more about, I think, more about making sure that operationally the the team was able to make sure that everything was working rather than pure selling big checks of yearly contracts as in SaaS, uh which that was my experience afterwards. But I at the time I was not aware of uh everything I know now.

SPEAKER_02 26:21

Perfect. So corner jobs, um and then what happened after, right? You you you mentioned you you you you you had an exit.

SPEAKER_00 26:30

Exactly. So the company is still alive today. Uh we sold the company to Eurofirms. Eurofirms is uh a temp agency, the biggest one in Spain from uh Spanish uh owners. And right after that, I it was four years, very, very intense. Uh I was in my mid-20s, so I was still quite uh quite young, um mid-late 20s. Um I didn't know exactly what I wanted to do. Um I had the idea that I didn't want to continue once the company was you know integrated into a acquired, let's say. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 27:00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 27:00

So yeah, I didn't know exactly what to do. And uh my my idea was okay, let me take some time, breathe, and understand. But yeah, some of my investors uh really pushed me to meet uh one company that at the time was very small but growing, which was Signaturid, uh digital signature company. So I I met uh Juan, who was the CEO and founder, and um yeah, I was I I I fell in love with the company, with the product, with the culture, with the ambition. It was a pure B2B SaaS, uh which at the time in Barcelona there were not that many B2B SaaS. Barcelona was more about consumer and so on. So I don't know. I I just felt uh it was the right match.

SPEAKER_02 27:38

Maybe for the audience as well. So signature is uh kind of a it's a docu sign for Europe. Exactly. So it's uh docu sign for Europe, pretty successful. Slightly better you experience than DocuSign. Exactly. It's not exactly what you're just selling. Not sponsored, uh but we just we want to mention them. So it's a great company from Barcelona. Uh and uh yeah, it's it's it's it's still growing. Um I have good friends working there, and um it's a massive monster, man. It's became a massive monster, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 28:04

Absolutely. It's uh yeah, yeah. It's uh it's one of the greatest success in B2B from Barcelona, and it's not that well known. Uh there's uh many other names in Barcelona, like uh travel perfect factorial and probably signature. It doesn't have the let's say the fame, the brand that's the personal brand, let's say. Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 28:24

So so let me recap a little bit. So the original and the first question was like, hey, every great entrepreneur is solving something, and that's why they build new new stuff, and that's why at some point you build Remnur. Um so you are walking us through the story here, and what I'm listening right now, and it looks like we are getting there, it's like, okay, this happened to me. Then we then I jump into corner jobs, we made the exit, um, then I jump as a COO. Uh first I wanted a break, that didn't happen. You jump, you jump as a COO at Signature It. And it looks like, and you mentioned before that, hey, at that time when Kevin was asking you, I had no idea what the sales things or the sales motion was happening. But I then I understood that money, as you have in your hoodie, drives behavior and drives motivation and drives a lot of things. What happened in Signature from a sales perspective, from a growth perspective, from a go-to-market perspective in your both personal and professional career that then put you in the position that we are right now, and then we will jump into that.

SPEAKER_00 29:24

Exactly. So Signaturit is a B2B SaaS. So it was my first experience there. So there is where I actually saw how uh B2B SaaS teams are structured, and I had a lot of issues dealing with compensation for these teams in Signature.

SPEAKER_02 29:40

Um could you give us an example? Like what what what was like where you said, oh my god, yeah, this how is this possible? How how did that happen? I mean, how did it go through through our Excel sheets?

SPEAKER_00 29:52

I have I have uh I have multiple ones. Um go ahead, go ahead. Make the confessions. Yeah, uh it's gonna be long, huh? Go ahead. We have done. No, I have I I have I have two particular moments. Um one is I at some point I suddenly discovered that our historical top performer, uh AE, was month after month complaining about not having the right visibility, transparency. And at the beginning I was like, okay, yeah, he's always complaining, blah, blah, but he's still delivering. But one day I I came to his desk and I saw a lot of yellow post-its around his screen.

SPEAKER_01 30:30

What he's closing, what he's doing.

SPEAKER_00 30:31

I asked him, What is all of this? I said, These are my commissions. This is my my accounting of commissions. Wow. And that was the moment like for me was like, wow. My top performer is spending time in tracking commissions, not because he's complaining, but he's spending a lot of time on this, and and his trust on us as a company is eroding. And at the time I thought, okay, all sellers uh are motivated by money. And guilty, I did this, I do the same.

SPEAKER_02 30:58

Still, you know, and I maybe we need to talk about it, but that's a problem. You can be a client. Yeah, I can I can tell you as well. Quick story to to to interrupt you. I had a one when I started as an SDR uh at Autodesk, which is a multinational company um from San Francisco. I had a sales guy who actually taught me at the beginning how to sell. And uh I was looking at him. I said, I asked him, Robin, what are you doing? I said, like, yeah, I'm calculating calculating my commission if it's right. And it doesn't match. And he was doing it every single month, and he wasted so much time, which he could have spent for the for for closing deals or prospecting or whatever, right?

SPEAKER_01 31:38

So I and here not we are not just, I think that the the analysis that you're doing, it's even bigger, uh, like and deeper. Like we are not just talking about me as an AE or as an SDR putting a couple of hours to understand if I'm getting the right amount of commission paid and so on. It's it's more transversal across the culture, across the real trust. Right now, what we are seeing in the B2B SaaS market, that it's the tenure of or the percentage of turnover within the companies and how companies then on another side, because we will talk about your different stakeholders inside how and how you sell them, like how they save time, they save money, they make this more aligned to the sales stages and the sales uh length. Um, I think that there is a there is a huge thing around commissions that it's not just like, oh, you have sellers, well, put 50 base salary, 50 commissions and go do your job, right?

SPEAKER_00 32:34

Like it's crazy. The confession that all sales managers should loudly say about commissions is that commissions are a pain in the ass to manage. Okay.

SPEAKER_04 32:41

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 32:42

Because that's great. Because that's that's true. Um all sellers care about money and care about commissions. And when they're closing a deal, they're not super happy because they're reaching quota. They're super happy because they're getting their commissions, their individual goals, which they have. And that drives me to the second confession about Signature, which is not that much about spreadsheet and how we track commissions, it's more about change management when you design compensation. So at Signaturid, when I joined the customer success team who was responsible for the all renewal business, so it was they were named Customer Success, but they were account managers in reality. They had a compensation plan, compensation scheme that made absolute no sense. So when I tried to change it, but they were super used to it. When I tried to I tried to change it, and we actually changed it, it was like a revolution for the team. They were complaining, almost they were, you know, saying they want to leave the company and so on. And I told them, guys, trust the trust this, it's gonna work. And then the top performers, after one quarter, they came to me and apologized.

SPEAKER_01 33:46

They were making more money at the time.

SPEAKER_00 33:47

Because they were making more money. And that was another moment in which I realized, okay, this is not about good or bad, this is about change management. Because you are touching one of the most sensible topics for them. That's crazy. Not properly communicating, not properly designing, uh, not giving them the right visibility, transparency, communication, that might kill completely the relationship with them. And that's something that is not easy to manage, that most people do not know how to manage. And that's why for most senior executives in sales, managers, heads, directors, VPs, sometimes it's a pain in the ass. And you don't have a lot of knowledge about it. So normally what you do is you simply copy what you have learned when you were an individual contributor, whether that's good or bad.

SPEAKER_01 34:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 34:27

And normally that's not good.

SPEAKER_01 34:29

That's awesome. And I have one question there. Like and you can explain to us before we jump into this topic specifically that it's what are the based on your experience, Sergio, what are the three uh specific ways or the most common use ones to create a compensation plan uh within if we want to put it as an example, B2B SaaS uh tech, for example.

SPEAKER_00 34:49

Yeah. What one thing that I I always say is um uh there's no benchmark or template that you should rely on when creating compensation plans. Because compensation plan is heavily dependent on the context. The context being what are your sales channels, what is your business model, what is your uh ACV, what is your uh sales cycle, what is your mood as a company, are you growing or looking for profitability? What is your culture? There's a lot of things that impact.

SPEAKER_04 35:16

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 35:17

So I always try to avoid giving general uh advice and recommendation. I and yeah, and I always say, do not trust templates, benchmarks, and so on. Then obviously, there's some good practices that you can try to follow and and relate to those. Uh but for example, in B2B SaaS, for instance, there's this famous OTE ratio, which is okay, depending on how much um you make as a as a seller, how much you need to bring. And those are numbers. But we've recently uh seen the guys at 11 labs, they're not following the benchmark, they're doing much, much more, and that's working for them.

SPEAKER_01 35:54

I noticed that that poster are you talking about a post. Yeah, the 20x. That's crazy. Yeah. I think that there is another problem there. Sorry, don't forget your questions. Yeah. I think that there is another problem then on top of the compensation plan, that is what you're saying, that then then you have your manager or whoever it is coming top down and saying you have to close X, Y, Z amount of money. It's like, hey, this quota is impossible to attain due to this context within the market, within our mood, within whatever it is. And then the compensation plan jumps into a second layer and it's like, hey, there's no way I can you are driving behavior, good behavior on myself, because I mean there's no way that we can make it happen, right? Uh and that's not what you think about. But but that's more of a planning in the case. It's con it's connected, right?

SPEAKER_00 36:36

Like compensation plan and how we define the quota. It's always connected. Uh yeah. I I usually say go to market planning, which is a super hard thing to do, and most companies do not maybe know how to do it exactly. Is first is setting up the overall, let's say, target of what you want to do. Which most companies do top-down. Let's say, okay, we need to get 10 million. Yeah. And then you need to get okay, those 10 million is to actually transform or convert into actual quotas for people. Reverse engineer or something like that. Or what do how what do they do? Normally the right approach is do top-down, which is okay. The board, the CEO, the investor, whatever. They say, okay, overall we need to get to that point. But you need to also do the bottom-up, which is okay, based on productivity, conversions, and so on, with the exact team that I have now, considering sales channels, territory, mix of products, outbound inbound, and so on, that's what I can deliver. And normally there's a gap. Normally the bottom-up exercise doesn't really match the top-down example. Top-down, we need to get to 10 million, bottom-up, we can deliver eight reliably. So then with with that with that scenario, you need two options. You say, okay, I'll add 20% or 25% to all the quota. Exactly. And uh people will fall behind and let's see what happens. Or normally, that actually translates into the second part of the go-to-market planning, which is capacity planning or headcount planning. Normally, when there's a gap, the way to uh close that gap is actually get more people into your teams. And then there's ramp-ups, a lot of things. The third one is territory planning, territory mapping. Depending on your business, that might not apply to you. But in some companies which are huge field sales-based, that's important. And as an outcome of all of this, then you get compensation plan at the end. But if you start by compensation plan and then reverse engineer it into the quota or something like this, normally it doesn't work well. It won't work.

SPEAKER_01 38:20

So basically, there's no golden formula, there's no one way to say, hey, you should be doing this because uh this is one happened this way. You didn't discover it, yeah. It's crazy. It's crazy. I mean, I mean, my my guess and my assumption, and I know that the answer is uh it's a no, but the most impacted people within compensation plans are mainly the ones that are customer facing, but the most easy example is salespeople, CSMs, or or salespeople, basically.

SPEAKER_00 38:49

How do you but that's one that's one super uh important thing? Account exec so people that is customer facing for new business, as the R and account executives, those are the ones that we tend to think more. Exactly. And those are the ones that are probably more comparable from one company to another. But the ones that are taking care of the existing business, account manager and CS, that's a much more complex problem. When you think about how do we set targets, how do we split the book of accounts, which would be uh territorial management in a way, yeah, and how we then set up the code. Can you elaborate?

SPEAKER_01 39:23

Can you make a parallelism within sales direct for new new logos or expansions and normally AMs?

SPEAKER_00 39:28

Normally first thing is who takes care of expansion. There's companies in which the account executive also takes care of the expansion. That's probably not the most common in SaaS, but there's companies that still have this model. And then you have account managers, which is in most cases the ones that take care of the expansion. Correct. But expansion meaning things that go up, but also things that go down. So you have upsell, exactly, contraction, downsell, churn. Correct. But normally in most companies, the decision making and the people that take care of the economics of your contract are not the ones that are using and experiencing or not the value of your product. And the value and experience with your product is the most is the thing that correlates the most with the actual expansion zone. So how do you make responsible one or accountable one person who may or may not be in contact with the champions and influence the product? And there, there's also a lot of economical issues, which is okay, you do you set targets on net new, which is expansion minus contraction. And that means I don't care how much expansion or contraction you get, but only the net. If it's possible, or you split the targets, and if you split the targets, you stand you you need to set some goals in each of them and maybe weights. So it's uh pretty complex. Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 40:41

Yeah, there are two there are yeah, go ahead.

SPEAKER_02 40:43

Yeah, yeah, I because one one thing which I'm I'm still actively as well selling for uh as an enterprise seller, and um what I realized in the last 10 years in many companies the the compensation plans are so difficult to understand, right? It's like you look at it and you were like, Okay, uh, can I speak with the person who made this compensation? Oh, at first I go to my manager. You need an MBA to understand. Exactly. If you need an MBA or if you if if then I went to my manager, I asked, okay, could you explain me the compensation? Maybe we take the person who actually made the compensation plan and she explains to you. So if your manager is not able to explain it, then there's already a problem, right? Because and um I I read once uh a quote uh where it was saying like a compensation plan, if you don't understand it the first time and you read it, it's too complex.

SPEAKER_00 41:33

Um would you agree? Or what yeah? I have the gin tonic rule.

SPEAKER_02 41:37

Okay. Which is tell us this. Uh, what is the gint tonic rule?

SPEAKER_00 41:40

The gin tonic rule is if you cannot explain your compensation plan after three gint tonics to your colleagues, then that's not the right thing.

SPEAKER_02 41:47

I love that one.

SPEAKER_01 41:48

I love it. For sure we're going to make a clip and we're going to make it viral, man. Like the gin tonic rule. That's good. Uh but that's but that's true. I mean that's like an elevator pitch being drunk, you know? Like you need to understand what you sell.

SPEAKER_00 42:01

I mean, if you don't like let's put some numbers. Yeah. Normally let's make an example. Normally, as a seller, you get roughly 50% if you're uh let's say reaching your target and so on, you you might get, I don't know, roughly 50% of your salary um based on the compensation. Yeah. Okay. I think in the world that we live, most people work because of the salary. They don't work for free. So that's an important piece. Agree. If you don't know what you need to do every single day to actually get 50% of your income, then you have a problem because you don't know exactly how to behave. And you might listen to your manager, even your CEO in all hands, giving you super nice speech speeches. But at the end, you are only moved by the money. And that's why I say money drives behavior. And if you don't understand how the money will come to you, how are you expected to apply the right behaviors? And that's essentially compensation plan. And that's what I always say. Compensation plan is probably one of the most, if not the most, powerful managerial tool you have as a company. And it's probably one of the most underrated ones because it's hard to measure, it's hard to define. You need to consider all the context and change management, it's very hard. And that also comes together with compensation. It's not only calculating.

SPEAKER_02 43:15

I think I asked well, last time I I think it was a couple of weeks ago, I shared like a post on LinkedIn which was really like heavily discussed and was about why people are working in sales. People are working sales to earn money. You can say whatever you want. Don't lie, please. If someone says because I want to help my customers, I said, okay, great, but why why are you working in sales, right? So it's really about earning money. Um because it it's a it's a fantastic profession to do that. So and um uh I think you you you confirmed it. Uh, if it's it should be easy to calculate even after free chain tonics, a hundred percent. It has to be easy to explain. Yeah, at least to explain. Yeah, calculate is another part. Yeah, we have revenue for that.

SPEAKER_00 43:54

Because I've seen I I've seen other companies doing completely opposite, which is okay, I understand. My team needs to understand. Super easy to understand it. Super easy. And then it works. Your team can understand it, but then you're not influencing the behavior you want. Quick, simple example. If you want your teams to sell multi-year contracts, for instance. But you don't want to overcomplicate the plan and you just say, okay, I'm going to pay you 10% off whatever you close, regardless if it's multi-year or not, then you're not influencing the behavior. Exactly. And then you might go there and every single one-on-one and tell you guys, no, remember, multi-year. But multi-year is much harder to sell than one-year contract. What are they going to do? They're not going to close multi-year games. Sure. So let's be careful with oversimplifying things. And that's why I'm saying it's important for them to understand and be able to share how it works. Calculation stuff, it needs to be covered somehow. Which in some cases it's even also something that is complicated because they try to do it with spreadsheet, and eventually spreadsheet might work. Yeah. I might might um explode.

SPEAKER_01 44:53

Might explode, exactly. So I have two stories super high level that I want to connect with the next uh topic that is jumping from Signaturate into Remunner and officially talk about how this world is uh behaving in terms of money and how they use the money. But basically, I remember when I was uh a sales director at Revolut, one of the questions that I was asking when I was interviewing people and hiring, and we were hiring maybe I'm saying the wrong numbers, but uh more than 300 people per month. Uh I became like an HR guy basically instead of a sales director, but basically or a manager. And one of the questions outside of the real things that we need to evaluate was like, hey, uh are you here for the money as well? Because in the financial world and selling something that is disruptive, you will make a lot of commissions. Yeah. It was hard to explain the commissions, but um, you will make a lot of commissions, right? And whenever someone in my team says, No, I'm not here for the commissions, like it's like a red flag for me. Don't lie to me. I am a seller as well. I want you to be the best seller. You need to know your numbers, you need to understand how to sell, you need to understand psychology, neuroscience, all the tricks and hacks in order to influence someone, but you are doing it for the for the money. And the second thing that you mentioned, Sergio, that I think that is relevant and super key is the behavior. It needs, and I listened uh in in different episodes on another podcast that you were invited, that it's really important to align compensation plan, compensation plans to whatever, if you are talking about sales, whatever the sales motion happens, right? Because if not, you are even incentivizing or not selling multi-year deals or selling or not selling if you are capping or not capping, for example, uh your compensation into hey, you know what, I will push this deal to next week or next month because that will pay me a commission or not. So getting there. I don't know if we are missing anything about Signature, but if not, how did you jump into Remuner? What is Remuner? And what was the main vision and idea behind it and what is happening today?

SPEAKER_00 46:56

Okay, so to finish with Signature because it's linked with with Remuner, is at Signature It, which is now doing hundreds of millions of ARR, we were growing massively. We were acquiring other businesses, and as a COO, obviously RevOps was part of my teams. Um, and I had to deal with compensation. And the two examples I shared with you before were at the early days of Signature, but as we were growing and growing, compensation was a problem that was never fixed, it was always coming back. So at the time I realized and learned most of this by hand and suffering all this pain. And at some point, I was looking at the market to try to find something to buy a solution. To buy a solution, exactly. And what I realized is that there are solutions, first thing, which I didn't know at the time. But I also realized that most of the solutions out there only focus on one thing only, which is killing the spreadsheet, meaning automation, calculation, and so on, which is a big part of the problem. But my frustration as a COO was not being able to drive the right behaviors and impact positively the ROI of the company. Because we were at some point we're paying a lot of money in commissions. And I always had the impression that I'm optimizing much more my Google Ads budget than my commission budget. Correct. And my commission budget was the biggest variable cost assignated to it. And I had no tools to do it because doing that needs to or requires from you that you change and adapt compensation plan, you gamify the experience, you set up speeds, you constantly are innovating on the incentives as the company also grows and changes the direction and the goals. Okay. And I had no tool to support it. And it was super hard. So that was the moment I realized, okay, this is a huge pain I'm personally having. What I'm seeing in the market is not really delivering what I would expect. They're covering a huge portion and respect for them because they're that most of these companies have been there for a long time. But in my view at the time, I saw there was that there was part of what I was looking for that uh it didn't that they were not solving.

SPEAKER_01 48:48

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 48:48

So fast forward, a company uh gets sold. Um, and as part of this growth, I decided to step up after four years, very intense four years, plus the four that I had a corner job. Uh, I already had my first uh son born, so I decided to take finally one year off. Nice. And uh after two months, I I was already bored at home. So I started researching uh a lot of topics. And most of the topics that I started researching were things that I suffered in the past. And number one was compensation and commissions. And when I was looking at options, the market, and I was speaking with a lot of companies here in Europe that were customers from from Singapore, I realized that still a huge amount of companies, even big enterprises, publicly listed companies, are still handling the commissions with spreadsheets. And that was the moment that I realized okay, there's a huge opportunity in the market. I have a clear vision and understanding of the problem, which is that compensation is not only about calculation, it's a much broader problem. It is a huge tool to impact the company performance that nobody or a lot of people do not completely understand and optimize properly. And at the same time, because that was early 2023, one thing was launched, which called which is called ChatGPT. And at the time I didn't know exactly how, when, but I I remember testing it and thinking, wow, I've been in the tech space for a lot of years. I've seen a lot of hypes go on there and come. I was uh as I explained to you, I I come from the marketplace era, then the SaaS era, and then I saw the crypto era also. And uh I remember testing this and thinking, okay, this is really transformational. So at the time, I didn't know exactly how, but I thought, okay, this is gonna change a lot of things. So it might be the right time to try to tackle a problem that I think is super crucial. The opportunity is massive because almost every company I was speaking with in uh Europe was not having a proper solution to do that. And I was feeling there was anywhere. And that was the moment we decided to go.

SPEAKER_02 50:45

So this this was during month two of your career break, or when when did this happen?

SPEAKER_00 50:51

No, no, that was that was a no no, that was a process. Uh so the after two months, I was already starting to research. And that research process, which took some some months, yeah, and all of these things were happening uh at the time. Also during that year, uh it ended up being one year of uh full time off time off. But during that year, I also was uh advising other entrepreneurs. I've been a business engine for a long time, so I was I was also taking care of the family, I was doing other stuff. But there was one thing that I always kept on doing, which was uh having conversations with companies and so on, and also with uh with former colleagues from from Signaturit. And when I discovered all of this, and uh I remember one day having lunch uh with who today are my two co-founders, and uh they were still former SVPs at uh at Signaturit, and and they were telling me we we want to do something else. And I was sharing all of this, and they they knew the problem as well. And that was the moment uh I think it was over a year and two months or something like this since I left Signaturit that we decided, okay, there's something here, and and that was the moment that we started. This is now three years ago, or no, this is two years ago and uh it was summer when we really decided it was September 23, more or less, when we really started Ramuna. And the the all the thinking, research, we I started more or less summer, spring, summer 22. November 22 is when ChatGPT was launched. Uh and uh yeah, the final kickoff, let's say, was September 26.

SPEAKER_02 52:17

You started the company, uh I think a really important topic uh with um two two co-founders. Um so you I guess you didn't do the same mistake how you what you did in your first startup, or exactly one of the confessions, right?

SPEAKER_00 52:31

My two co-founders are are my friends. I would say even more than friends now, but I've been working with them for more than 10 years. I hired them as VPs in the early days of corner job. They are family right now, yeah, basically. Yeah, but but we didn't get together as friends and then became co-founders. Exactly. We were co-workers. We've been working for four years at corner job, and then when I moved to Signature, they they came with me as Signature. So we've worked with for so many years, we've gone through a lot of things, good and obviously also bad, that now we know each other so well that now we're more than friends, obviously. But we are complimentary, so we're we're not the same kind of pattern, and um, and we share 100% all the values in terms of how we see the professional side of things. And then on the personal side, we're also friends.

SPEAKER_01 53:19

They've been in my wedding and and you know part of your your life, completely part of my life.

SPEAKER_00 53:24

But the relationship didn't start as friends or family turning co-founders, it was more co-workers turning friends, family, and co-founders.

SPEAKER_02 53:33

So I think to to get now to Yeah, let's let's wrap up everything until this point. You finished signatory, you had your career break, you um uh you then collected different ideas, what you would like to do, you identified one pain point, not just signatory had, many other companies had, which was sales compensation, right? Um at that point, you you found the people you wanted to start with. I think it's it's uh with with were really complementary in in the journey you you you discovered. Um you got to the point where you said, okay, Reminer is our next goal. Um could you maybe explain for the audience? Um give us your elevator pitch, right? It's uh what is Reminer doing for everyone who we talked a lot about um conversation plans, etc. But tell someone who doesn't have a clue, maybe it doesn't even work in sales, um, what is Reminer, right?

SPEAKER_00 54:29

Okay. One important thing before that, my second uh child was born two months after starting Remuner, which is also very important for contextual analysis.

SPEAKER_02 54:40

I I I know what why you say it because it's a tough, tough one. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I relate.

SPEAKER_00 54:44

Yeah, thanks to my wife from here because uh she's been a like fundamental piece of uh keeping all of this uh crazy life we have. Uh but Remuner. So Remun is uh is a platform that helps companies manage uh customer-facing high frequency incentives uh for teams that are um facing their customers in a way that is efficient, that is transparent, that is visible, that is easy to use, and it that it creates really transformational impact on the company performance. Awesome.

SPEAKER_01 55:17

So, right now let's jump into more technical stuff within your experience as well. I would like to have like uh backfire questions as well. I have like a lot of things in my head. When you decided, it's clear the idea that when you decided jumping into this, it's like, okay, we have a huge pain. I already had this pain. Your co-founders, they already understood this. Okay, let's do it. Who do you sell it to? How do you sell it? Let's let's connect this with the with the world of sales as well, in a in a motion of reminis as well, or remunner in Spanish. Um so first let's start there, and then I want to jump into more how do you see the evolution of the seller and the rev-ops and the sales ops um paradigma that we are talking right now. So yeah.

SPEAKER_00 55:59

Okay, so we sell to mid-market and small enterprise uh companies in sectors and industries that are sales heavy, let's say that have a lot of people that are customer facing, either if it is field sales, so people on the ground visiting their customers face to face, yeah, either if this is telesales from the more transactional customer, uh customer care, customers, um uh the telesales, let's say, kind of approach to a more um consultative uh big enterprise SaaS where you you have account executives that is uh also remote selling, let's say, and also POS uh point of sale selling, which is more retail and this kind of thing. So companies uh in the yeah, mid-market, small enterprise, even some corporates, some of them might have uh operations in multiple countries. We're based in Barcelona, we operate all from Barcelona, but we have customers in the Middle East, in all the big countries in Europe, in South America and North America as well. And we have a few things in AIPAC, but that's not uh where we are stronger.

SPEAKER_03 56:59

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 56:59

And um, yeah, in terms of industries, we we cover digital, SaaS, uh of course, but we also have customers in financial services, insurance, real estate, retail, uh pharma, uh, medical device.

SPEAKER_01 57:10

Uh so basically every single type of company that goes uh along these criteria that you're sharing that at some point have compensation plans or commission based.

SPEAKER_00 57:19

It's companies that have customer-facing roles with high frequency incentives, high frequency being less than one year. Correct. So if you have a sales team that are only compensated with a yearly bonus, probably you don't need us. If you have teams that are compensated at least partially on a monthly or quarterly, uh, that's probably where you need us. And I'm uh when we say customer facing because it's not only about sales, but uh yeah.

SPEAKER_01 57:45

Everything around customer facing roles. Exactly. So now that you mentioned that, can you make a parallelism on how you are if we can share some strategies or ideas or or how you see this happening? Frameworks, yeah. Or frameworks and the I am the framework guy. Frameworks, strategies, technical stuff, or tactical stuff. Like who are what are your buyer personas? Because I understand that you can sell it to HR, to finance people, sometimes to RevOps. How do you see that evolving and why the RevOps uh creature or appears, let's say?

SPEAKER_00 58:17

Yeah, so the the the issue or the issue or the or the context we have when we're approaching a customer is that there is not a chief commissions officer in any executive team. Yeah, so normally the compensation problem is something that is one or two layers uh below that, and you need it really need to understand. And another thing we have is I don't know, if you sell to accountants, normally accounting is always in finance.

SPEAKER_02 58:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 58:40

Uh compensation, you might find it in different roles in different companies and in different industries. Like in your case, it's signature COO. It was a headache for you. You know how they think, you can target them. And in Signaturi, there we had a RevOps team who was owning this, and the RevOps team was reporting to me as a COO. And you might find another company where RevOps is under CRO, others where it's under CFO, and others who might have a senior VP of RevOps reporting directly to the CEO. But in digital, in tech, you normally have a RevOps. But if you think about a retailer, fashion retailer, they pay commissions to the people that are on the shops, but there's no RevOps in fashion retailers. So normally you have either the sales or the business side of things. You might have operations slash revops slash commercial excellence, or you might have finance. Those are typically the three uh functions that might be our buyer. But then depending on the company, depending on the industry, there's more one or the other, they might change. And uh that's part of the discovery that all the companies selling out they need to do at the beginning. That's also part of the discovery we need to uh to do. But unfortunately, most of the companies do not have a chief commissions officer, or at least that would be a good, a good role to to yeah, to create. Or at least someone that really takes care of this at a at a C-level suite. Because it's as I said, it's it's probably the biggest viable cost you have if you don't sell physical goods. And if you sell physical goods, probably it's this it's the biggest viable cost outside of the COC. The cox, yeah, exactly. Um and no one in the C-suite is really 100% owner and responsible of optimizing that cost.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:16

And one point which maybe we we didn't consider yet, and uh I think every salesperson out there can can resonate with is you know, of course, you are angry when your commission is not right, but there are many scenarios where the company pays too much commission out, and you lose the company loses money, actually. Um so if you can streamline. And when you pay less and we complain. Yeah, because we complain a lot, right?

SPEAKER_00 1:00:41

I've seen companies paying millions in commissions by mistake, being identified later on when they implement tools, and even the seller is gone already, like the money is gone.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:52

Yeah, and you cannot really I mean and you cannot ask it, ask it like give me the give me the 25k again, but as a company, can you blame the seller? No, it's your mistake as a company.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:04

Exactly. And sellers of course, that's correct. Some some say, hey, you you paid me too much, a couple of thousand, but usually it doesn't happen, right?

SPEAKER_01 1:01:11

Yeah, because both sellers are unicorns. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So your your I would say that basically your biggest competitor is basically spreadsheet and it's Microsoft. Exactly, right? It's Excel and not another company doing exactly what you're doing. No, no, no, because this old status quo is killing productivity, is killing all the things that we are saying here. Exactly.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:33

That's our biggest competitor is Microsoft Excel or spreadsheets, and companies trying to create some sort of internal system developed, made by themselves, which is super rigid, not flexible, not working.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:45

Like an excellent of testosterone.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:48

Exactly, man. It's it's crazy. So, what would be understanding who you sell to, how you sell it, what you solve? Can you share some success stories and some crazy maybe BS failure stories from clients? You don't have to name them if you want to name drop some for sure. But meaning that, hey, I've seen this crazy stuff. And when we implemented this, we saw this shift, like going from A to B.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:11

Do you have some? Well, there's one example of uh companies paying millions because there were some mistakes uh on spreadsheets. I've seen companies having massive spreadsheets connected one to each other in one single computer somewhere. It's risky. That that person going on a sick leave and the company being two, three months without being able to pay.

SPEAKER_04 1:02:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:31

I've seen companies migrating CRM and then all the models were this all the Excel models were destroyed because they were not working, and they've been with thousands of sellers, thousands of sellers paying for months. Okay, we're gonna pay some average because we don't know exactly what we need to pay you. Wow. I've seen all of this. That's crazy. These are not uh, you know, SMBs. Yeah, these are big companies. Big companies. And that's more on the again, management and calculation standpoint, on the pure complaint definition, communication, and motivation. Uh I see crazy stuff. Crazy stuff.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:05

Like the guy I told you before, he at one point he was like, he got two uh two less commission payout um uh the month if for the month before, and he realized he said, I'm not gonna work today. I'm waiting until my commission is paid. And uh he was like this. He said, I'm not gonna work. Money drives behavior. Yeah, until my commission is on my bank account, I'm not gonna work. I'm gonna sit here and not gonna do anything.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:28

And you can multiply that times.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:31

Okay, he was like extreme, but it's inside of every salesperson, right? Of course, we are all sneaky uh guys on one uh point to you know trick the system ha somehow. But on one point, of course, if you close the deals, you want to get paid. And you want to get paid a fair amount and the amount you earned, right?

SPEAKER_00 1:03:49

Normally, one thing I also say is that top performer sellers are professional compensation plan hackers.

SPEAKER_04 1:03:54

Yeah, like a really good thing.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:56

They they get a compensation, they try to understand how it works, and now they try to maximize how they can make money. I think it's that and that's why if you build the comp plan properly, you are driving behavior from your top performers.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:07

I I actually found a maybe I hope my manager is not listening, but um, I found we can block him.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:13

Cut it, cut it now.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:14

We can block him. I found a gap and I explained her. I said, hey, look, but I think if we do like if you do a non-ARR deal with the company as a POC, and then after a couple of months we close, we have because the non-ARR commission is the same as the AR commission. So it doesn't really matter, but it's double business for us, right? And she said, Oh, that's interesting. And I get paid the same, you know, it's fantastic.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:40

I've seen I've seen account managers earning like I've seen account managers making their company lose money and earning commissions because of a design compensation.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:51

Wow, I I was one of those. I was one of those, and I changed that behavior. Tell us the story, please. I will tell the story, but but let me let me I mean, these are all confessions, I guess. And and let's take the time to share the confessions because basically what happened in this company that I was working with, I was the AE. And I think that, and this is something that I train and I coach when I when I train sales teams that is say, hey guys, if you want to become a top performer, the first thing that you need to do, besides being the best, and and we can deep dive there, it's understanding your numbers, know your numbers, meaning not only the compensation plan, but KPIs, how they are drive, uh driven, how they are basically impacted, and and so on and so forth. But in this company, basically what happened is that we were paid based on contracts signed. And this is F crazy. Why? Because the behavior drive there or driven there was hey, 31st of January at 11 p.m. at night, I was sending emails to Mexico that was 6 p.m. Sign this contract with a 50% discount because I don't care. I will get paid because of that. Wow and I will hit quota. Then that contract, whoever knows, I mean, never gonna. Got into the processing process. The payment never went through, but I got my commission. So I was making a lot of money that the company is not even receiving in their bank account, multiplied by X time sellers. So when I was promoted to sales manager, the first thing that I did. But you didn't say anything while difficult company. No, I said it. I said it. I said it. I said it. I promise. But yeah, that was a long time ago. When I started watching this, I was like, you can see the power of how powerful this is in terms of behavior driving. Because it's like, hey, I'm against this ethical. But if the gap is there, I mean, should I expect to send the email tomorrow instead of today if I will get paid today? Man. It doesn't make sense. So what happened is that after I became a sales manager, my whole team, that was my former colleagues, AE's, like, hey guys, you will hate me, but this needs to stop. We are stealing money from the company. I mean, we are going to lose our jobs. So I changed that. And I say, and and we were fighting with customer success a lot. It's like, hey, uh, this is the contract, this is yours. Handover, that's the whole process. Me is aligned incentive. Me is aligned incentive 100%. And let's jump into that topic. But basically, to conclude the story, I said, hey, first of all, we are going to pay commissions just on signed contracts and only when the money jumped into the bank or got into the bank. So the money needs to be in the bank. And the commission will be calculated. It was a simple, maybe wrong, but simple at the time. And it will be paid 90 days from now, so quarterly. So we will have to wait until that starts compounding and we have the rollout. But it will get only paid if during those 90 days we don't have a churn from that client. So for sure, they hate me. They uh well said everything that I could listen about my family and more. Probably the CFO loved you. The CFO, the founder that you know, the guy uh and and my boss at that time that was the P the VP of customer success and COO as well, was like, hey, this is really smart. And it's like, no, it's not really smart. I'm stealing your money. I think that I'm not smart enough, but but this is okay. So what happened is that we became best friends with customer success. We were joining onboarding calls. We were joining the three weeks on board after uh onboarding call. We were running calls with the client after signing them, like, hey, anything that you need, anything that I can help you with. And that was like a huge change in behavior. And the comp the manager was saying, like it's written, yeah, money drives behavior.

SPEAKER_02 1:08:34

Exactly, man.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:35

It's a perfect. What we noticed 90 days later, or maybe six months later, after we got a little bit of snowball, let's say, effect, that sellers were performing better. We had a um uh like a healthy behavior within the company and the teams, and the money were flowing no matter what, but we were closing as good sellers, not just sending contracts out there with 50% discount just to get the money, right? Yeah. So with that in mind, and that crazy story, you mentioned um misalignment. What are the biggest or the most crazy cases where you see, hey, this is so easy to identify, why are you doing it this way, where there is a misalignment within the compensation and the rest of the company? Normally it's about goals.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:18

So, what are the goals of the company and what are the goals, not that the goals that you set to your team, the goals that you are putting behind the compensation plan? Meaning where you put them. In your example, they were probably not trying to incentivize you on signing contracts alone. They were incentivizing you on bringing revenue to the company. But what was the goal in your acquired in your compensation plan? It was not revenue, it was signed contracts. So, what were you delivering? Signed contracts. This is probably the biggest mistake that can take different shapes, forms, and different examples, but that's that's one of the biggest ones that I've that I've seen. Also between teams. You were talking about uh handover, the way you established clawbacks, which is how we as a company make sure that if you brought something that is not whatever, converting churning, um, how do we retroactively impact you? Or the the fact that you included a gap of 90 days to make sure that the money was flowing in. So all of these kind of things need to be adapted. And and that needs to be created together with the goals of the company. Because if at a certain point the goal of the company is grow at any cost and there's no cash flow issue, maybe as a company, you don't need to wait to get the cash in to actually pay the customers. Exactly. I would say advice to make sure that the money the contract. No, no, no, the contract is valid. Like contract signed, maybe it's not enough. Exactly. But yeah, obviously it's a legit, legit one, yeah. Yeah. And every company is a little bit different, what that might mean. But sellers want to see money and they want to see it as fast as possible. Exactly, right now. So waiting for the collection might not be the way that you motivate the most your team. Yeah. So if you're in a growth mode, maybe, and signature we had a time that we were doing this. Paid as fast as possible. Pays as fast as possible if you don't have cash flow problems. Correct. But at some point, that company will mature and then cash flow will become more and more important. And in that moment, if you don't change the compensation plan, you will get bankrupt. You will be bankrupt, basically. So these are examples some simple examples of things that misalign incentive or goals for the company and goals for these uh individuals. And I always say, put the money where your mouth is. If you want them to bring revenue, incentivize revenue. If you want them to bring quality revenue, whatever that means, incentivize quality revenue.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:37

That's crazy. And what would you sorry, man? No, no, what would you recommend? Um I guess that the answer would be it depends, right? Uh but if you have to bet on something or based on your or your experience, it is better to pay commissions quarterly, monthly, every semester. It depends on a lot of factors, I guess. But yeah, but what do you see? What drives more behavior or out of your experience now?

SPEAKER_02 1:12:03

Because you're helping even company to design those.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:06

Um, I can give you um and the audience, please do not take this 100% for granted. But I can give you some some guidance. I think the frequency in which you pay out and measure teams, the easiest way is to try to match it as much as possible with the sales cycle that you have. Okay. Considering always in mind that the more frequent you pay your sellers, the better for motivation. Okay. So that also you need to take into account and also considering the cash flow. But a quick example. If you have a super transactional uh business where your sales cycle is, let's say, 20 days, paying your team on a quarterly basis, it doesn't make sense. It doesn't make sense at all. If you have a super enterprise business where you probably have six to nine months uh sales cycle paying monthly, it probably doesn't make sense unless you set up yearly cumulative targets that you advance partially on a monthly basis, but you actually threw up at the end of the year with a yearly quota. So in in the first example, you might set monthly targets and it makes sense. And probably they're not gonna send back a lot of deals, which sandbagging is a huge side effect of sales compensation. If you have an enterprise business model, you might go for yearly quarters and then pay on a quarterly basis, uh, sorry, on a cumulative basis, correct, and apply some accelerators there once the year-to-date quota has been achieved. Because also uh there's a there's a lot of misuse of accelerators as well when you combine sales cycle with frequencies and so on, because you might have side effects in the sandbagging, but also in actually paying more on a unitary basis on the sales because you are misdesigning the decelerators and accelerators. That's crazy. And that's common mistakes I see a lot in tech in B2B SaaS. Um, and again, example being someone that has been an individual contributor in a company who is more targeting SMBs or small short cycles that suddenly become uh um manager on the enterprise side and then they apply the same kind of incentives into enterprise or at the other way around or the other way around. So you always need to try to understand the it's important. It's important and the same company in growth mode or the same company once they are PE backed where they're looking for Evita, you need to change it.

SPEAKER_01 1:14:21

Basically, the compensation plans are dynamic at some point, every nearly every whatever the timeline.

SPEAKER_02 1:14:27

Specifically about the SPIF topic, right? Because I think like salespeople are hunters, uh, hunters need spiffs, uh, in my opinion. And I I realized it with the SCRs, right? SCRs maybe don't get the highest commission in some companies, they do, but um uh but they definitely they are hungry when they see, okay, we get like I don't know, 5k who um schedule the most meetings. All that is also part revenue can add into the absolutely okay.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:55

But what I always tell uh I see a lot of customers coming to me and saying, we want to gamify the experience. And I always tell them, that's right, but that's not something that you can get only from what tool. From a tool, not reminiscent. Gamifying the experience is also based on design of your complaints. If you have a 20-day, I'm gonna put a super extreme example. If you have a 20-day sales cycle and you set a yearly target, only paid on a yearly basis, but I want a super gamified dashboard for the sellers, that's not motivating for them. Yeah. The the speeds, all the different challenges that you can do, and you can be super creative there. Those, and especially if they are not something that they might see coming. So if you try to innovate and change, that's what really drives the motivation and the gamification. And then having a tool that that helps them visualize and engage with that, that's a booster. But the design of the comp plan is the is the is the really the secret source of all of this. And I see a lot of companies not really changing that. Why? Because it's a pain in the ass. Because change management could be a good idea. I'm I'm sure that every time that your manager came to you and shared this is your new comp plan, your first reaction is shit, they're gonna they're gonna steal money from me. They're gonna scam me. They're gonna scam me. That's the first reaction they always have.

SPEAKER_01 1:16:08

Even if it's not in recession, you need to help us, you need to do that.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:15

Like we received our comp plan on time this time this year, like January. That's another topic. This is really, really, really great. Um, and I look, I I looked at it, I was like, huh. But it's better than last year. How is this possible? I was like, so we are always thinking on the negative side. I was reading through it, I said, there must be something wrong on that.

SPEAKER_01 1:16:33

Trying to find the hole. Where's the black hole? So this is interesting. And can you walk us through a clear example what happens from A to B or A to C or Zero to One? Imagine that I am a client. You can put the example of whatever the type of client that you want. I come to you and say, hey, Sergio, team, remunner, help me. This is what I have. How do you jump in? How do you assist us? How do we implement uh with in which tools or with which tools do you connect? Like walk me through.

SPEAKER_02 1:17:02

Exactly. One one part I uh I would love to add here is is it like fully SAS or is it as well like a kind of service you you give, right? Because a lot of companies there are like, okay, but our system is broken, we don't know, right? If you can add that part, that would be great.

SPEAKER_01 1:17:19

So let me let me rephrase the question forever, like for all together, so we can we can uh use it as well. Like from A to C, like how is your process towards jumping into a client and helping them? And what is exactly the services or motions that you go through in order to make them work?

SPEAKER_00 1:17:35

So normally when we first engage with a customer that wants to improve this, the first piece of discussion is the actual compensation plan, which in some cases is not one, it's multiple depending on the team. So first one is understanding the comp plan and also understanding if they're open to receive feedback and maybe change and adapt. There's companies that they they do not want this, there's companies that are much more open, and there's companies that come to us and say, okay, this is completely broken. Do whatever you want. But that's step number one, the the definition and the design. And when I'm having these kind of conversations with a company, the first thing I have, I ask is tell me the context. Let me know what kind of business you have and everything that we discussed before. Like an audit, first audit, let's say sanity check about how you can. I cannot really help you if I do not understand the big picture. Correct. If I I'll just give you a template account executive code.

SPEAKER_02 1:18:24

That won't work.

SPEAKER_00 1:18:25

That won't work.

SPEAKER_02 1:18:26

So back in your consultant business, kind of yeah, unfortunately.

SPEAKER_00 1:18:30

Helping is the new selling that they sell, right? As a company, we don't sell service or consulting. This is part of the implementation we do with them. Um and and the result of all of this work is not a pack of slides that they will put in a, you know, it's an actual delivery. Exactly. It's an actual agreement between them and us. Okay, this is what we want to implement. Then next step is okay, we need to connect Remuner with your raw data source. And text tax, exactly. And tech tax, exactly. And that depends a lot on the industries and um also on the companies. The simple example in tech is the CRM Salesforce, HubSpot, whatever they have. Um, and in some cases the financial system. Because if we're going to take collections in consideration, for instance, for compensation, that's normally information that is not on the CRM. Yeah. Collections, you mean the money in the cash in from the customers. Got it. Okay. If you want to hold, like the example that uh Alan shared uh before, if you want to hold the commission until we collect the money from the customer, we need to know this information. And normally that information is not in the CRM, which also generates another problem for the seller, which is a side effect, which is lack of visibility. I know what I've closed, I know what the company has collected. I have no idea when or what I will get. We will get there with REM as well, but but awesome, cool. And that's by the way, the uh yellow post-its from MacOS. Exactly, exactly. But um exactly. So define the comp plan, uh-connect the data sources, we have connected with all of this system so we can pull all this data, and then we create the structure in the system users, teams, hierarchy, all the rules in the compensation plan. And from that moment, the system starts to calculate all of this in real time so that the seller that is on the other side, which we haven't maybe spoken to him at Apple till this point, they start seeing all of this in real time. So they see in if I am now in the middle of a month, I can see how I am performing and how my performance today is actually already translating into whatever money I'm earning today. And I can also see the gap of how much I can make. They have like an access to a dashboard.

SPEAKER_02 1:20:29

That's a feature I specifically like. Yeah, because I always think about okay, how much commission I actually gonna get if I close those three enterprise deals with an accelerator, with multi-year contracts.

SPEAKER_00 1:20:41

So this is something you I would say more. When you are preparing an economical proposal for a deal, normally you have a few options that as an account executive you can play around. Yeah. Multi-year, whatever. Multi-year discount here, this product there, or or even you have you I know you I need to get the price down to this, but if I can't touch the price in one way or another that affects my commission, you will do it. Yeah. And you're not thinking about a company goal.

SPEAKER_01 1:21:04

That's behavior being driven 100% based on compensation.

SPEAKER_00 1:21:07

Exactly. But normally, as an account executive, or you you comply with the gin tonic rule, or or you are not able to do that easily. Yeah. And with Remuni, what we do is that you can do that super easily. And that's Remu, which is our agent. Exactly.

SPEAKER_02 1:21:20

So basically, yeah. Can you repeat that? Because I think that's super interesting for all salespeople out there, because you can really easily calculate, manipulate, and not manipulate, calculate um what is the official outcome uh of if you close this specific deal, right?

SPEAKER_00 1:21:35

Yeah. So if you're a seller using Remu, you can go to your app or your dashboard in Remuner and make that simulation, or you can chat with Remo AI, which is our agent, and ask Remu, okay, if I close this deal with A B C conditions, how much more I can make? And and the the agent will run all these scenarios and these maths and come back to you and say, whatever, you're gonna make a thousand or whatever it is. Um so because what we want to influence at the day at the end of the day, what we want to value or to bring value to our customers is not only on the pure calculation, which is a mess, it's complex and it we add value. It's complicated, yeah. But what we want to do, and remember that that's the goal of ours, is make sure that the money that this company is spending is driving your behavior as an AE in the same direction that I want. If I am putting a speed behind a multi-year deal, I want you to be aware of that when you are preparing the economic proposal for that particular customer.

SPEAKER_03 1:22:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:30

Because that's the moment that you are making critical decisions. Exactly. And those are not controlled by the company. Those are controlled by you and all the other individuals in the team. So once all this setup is done, all the sellers have access to the platform, to their own performance. They can track and audit what my account executive signature was doing on deposit. But at the same time, you can engage in these kind of simulations and plan more strategically what you want to do aligned with your goals. Another thing that we do is we we let you put your own personal goals in the platform. If you want to bring your key to Disneyland at the end of the year, you can put your goal there. I want to save 10k, and you will see how when you close a deal with Apple or whatever company, you are getting closer, not only with the company goal, but also to your personal goal.

SPEAKER_01 1:23:17

Again, so back to gamification, right? That's yes. So basically, this is interesting, and this lets this leads me to the AI and REMU. And I can connect this to your first epiphany if I can call it that way, in back in 2023, 2022, 2023, where you saw or or or tested ChatGPT and say, hey, there's something here, this could be transformational. AI. What's the role of AI overall, but mainly for Remu and Remuner? Um, how do you see this in the next, I wouldn't say five years, because this is evolving so fast that in the next six months to 12 months, and how do you see Remunner implemented into the companies saying, hey, I want you to be like a LLM uh compensation plan tool that I just can say, hey, this is the type of uh compensation plan that I want to create, and boom, I will have it there. Like, can you walk me through how do you see AI within the the next so the the um one thing that I tried to explain is Remuner, we are uh born in the AI era, but we are not an AI native company.

SPEAKER_00 1:24:21

Okay. Meaning if AI dies tomorrow, Remuner will still work. Why? Because the cost of what we do are still numbers. We are calculating things, and the maths behind your comp your complan is not done by AI. Correct. This is our core engine who is able to do that. The way we see things is AI is transforming the way all of us will interact with technology. And on a consumer side, I'm sure you haven't looked at or searched at Google anything in the last two years. You're now asking ChatGPT or whatever agent you you're using. The way we see things is that the in the enterprise B2B software, that's gonna eventually happen as well. And it's probably gonna take much, much more um longer, but it will. So the way we see AI in our uh business, it's more it's the um let's say transaction or or translation layer, if you wish, between the core technology that Remur has built and the user that is on the other side of the screen, the microphone, the whatever interface you have now, and the way to deliver that value in a much more easy way. Compensation is a super complex topic, it's a very heavy, number-heavy problem. Yeah and therefore it's normally not something that you enjoy going through a lot of numbers, running a lot of formulas and so on. We don't. And AI is that translation, similar to the example we said before. When you ask Remo how much more will I make if I sell this deal, Remo is not doing the simulation itself through AI. Our core engine is doing that AI. Remo is only being the translation layer between your question in natural language and our system. That's that's how we see technology. And you mentioned creating plans with AI. This is something we already have.

SPEAKER_01 1:26:10

So you can build compensation plan purely chatting in natural language, like in a in a testing sandbox environment and something like that, and then you can deploy it or exactly like you you can act on remouner platform through the standard B2B SaaS software dashboard on your web or through AI.

SPEAKER_00 1:26:27

But AI is not then doing the maths, AI is just acting on the same port. Okay.

SPEAKER_02 1:26:32

Could you share with us some some feedback you got from users, right? Um, who were like using your your your solution for a couple of months. What was like their feedback after the initial implementation phase?

SPEAKER_00 1:26:47

Um KPI impacts as well, like changes. I have a few exam I have funny examples. I remember one CEO that uh once told me, like, we've implemented Remooner, and now I see more the Remooner screen in the office than HubSpot. What's what's going on? And uh and I said, I your people care about incentives, believe it or not. That's a pretty good one, yeah. We we we did also a survey, uh standard NPS survey to our users, and one of the things that we usually uh ask is, okay, what can we improve and what would happen if we disappear tomorrow? And the the answers to that second one were funny, like I would die. No, no, no, please. I even had one customer calling me and saying, like, this is not for real, no? So normally the feedback is very good. Um, and particularly from the seller's perspective, they are so used to not having the right transparency on compensation that normally it's super welcomed. Yeah. It's and and it's perceived as a super good effort from the company side.

SPEAKER_01 1:27:46

Yeah, relationship that you're building. And can you share some if at some point, if not, we will move into another direction. But those high-level numbers that at some point you are uh driving towards your Clients, whatever the KPI that you're measuring in this case, and also you're measuring this NPS that you're saying, hey, I will die if you disappear tomorrow. What's your churn rate if we can yeah?

SPEAKER_00 1:28:11

So on the first on the first point, um it's sometimes very hard to measure impact because we don't have a control group. We cannot do an A-B test. Yeah, there's no way. And in sales, you know, there's a lot of factors that impact. So you can never really scientifically measure okay, pre and post-reminer, that's the impact. Because if that company has increased the budget of marketing or decreased the market the budget of marketing, all of this has impact. So we have a combination of quantitative and qualitative impact. Okay. And normally we see, depending from the starting point, but we might see all the way from 0.5, 1% productivity increase up to 10%, 12%, 13%, 15% upside or uplift on pure results. And those results are normally sales or revenue. And uh even a 0.5% increase in a company that's doing multi-million. That's a lot of money.

SPEAKER_01 1:29:03

So basically, same skills, same people, same execution, just different behavior based on the compensation plan. And pure transparency.

SPEAKER_00 1:29:11

Back to the example before, pure understanding. Yeah. Like giving your sellers the tools to understand what they need to do to make it.

SPEAKER_02 1:29:20

Ellen, can you repeat those three points again?

SPEAKER_01 1:29:22

Um basically same people, same skills, um, same execution, and uh transparency. And transparency. Uh those are the things that at some point, if you have the right compensation aligned with the right setup.

SPEAKER_00 1:29:35

But normally the the biggest impact we see is exactly what you said, plus fixing the complement design. Which in most cases we see it's uh maybe not broken, but 100% not as efficient or optimized for what they want to achieve. And the combination of both things, which is fixing or optimizing the complement design, plus a tool that gives transparency, visibility in real time, that's the winning combination. And with that, we've seen massive impacts on the upside that we can deliver for the company in terms of performance. And in customer-facing roles, performance is almost always linked to revenue, sales, or economical value for the company. And that's the biggest impact that we can deliver. On top of that, we can also measure, and that's a little bit more easy to measure, which is more on the efficiency side.

SPEAKER_04 1:30:25

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:30:25

As you know, in companies that are calculating all of this in spreadsheets, they have teams spending a lot of time. Yeah. They might have mistakes, paying millions extra. And all of this is something that we can also uh measure and and we do. We we we have seen that we can save up to 90-95% of the time that was usually spent dealing with commissions. That's crazy. Yeah. So and the and the what is important for me is not the savings, is that the the piece that we do not completely automate is the one that is more strategic, which is more thinking design. And that's something that we cannot, as a tool, we don't want to automate. We don't want to just suggest you a template. That's the one that drives more behavior at some point, right?

SPEAKER_01 1:31:07

That's the most important thing. Yeah, the most important thing.

SPEAKER_02 1:31:09

I think the peace of mind, not just for the salespeople, but also for, you know, like for for for the person, like in your case, as COO at a signatory, the peace of mind that there is a solution in place, it works, it doesn't make mistakes, right? And it's good revenue at the end of the day, right? People nowadays somehow trust more the answers of AI or uh like than my manager. Than uh the manager or the company is giving them the results, right? Or uh of course you mentioned it's not it's the engine of your solution who delivers the results, not the AI. But if they get feeling comfortable chatting with Remu and you know saying, okay, this would be okay, can you help me if I sell like a three-year deal?

SPEAKER_01 1:31:54

They feel more comfortable. I want to make three more K. What should I do? How should I target this? How should I approach it?

SPEAKER_02 1:32:01

Particularly when you chat there with Remu in the evening.

SPEAKER_00 1:32:03

When you see that you actually close a three-year deal and you get and you get the uh extra money. Yeah, that's crazy. So and all of this is a huge effort for companies. Like you said uh before, we got the comp plan on time. In time. Yeah that transparency and visibility effort for the company when you establish a tool like us, which uh does not allow for non-transparency. That's a huge effort for companies.

SPEAKER_02 1:32:25

Uh we had like one once uh there was uh in one of my companies, we get the comp plan at the end of Q1. I like, how is it possible right now? Quarterly? Yeah, it doesn't matter. And the commission worked quarterly. Okay, yeah. Yeah, we apply the competition plan for last year until the end of Q.

SPEAKER_01 1:32:42

I was like, okay, but I I think that I need to create my own compensation plan with some accelerators and something like that. But I compensate myself. Yeah. So before we jump into the we have a section that is these cars. Okay. We will get there in two or three minutes. We have some gifts for you as well for visiting us, and I think that this will be the first, but not the last one. What would be your from the moment that we started talking? You mentioned a lot of things that are happening within this evolution of how we treat money, people, trust, transparency, um, compensation plans. How do you see, or what do you see happening in Remner, in your life, in the space of sales uh and compensation plans connected to that in the next three, five years?

SPEAKER_00 1:33:28

Yeah. I have my own view, which I'm a bit comp maybe radically go ahead. I'm I'm not Elon Musk, so I'm not gonna, you know. But what I see is AI is transformational. And I think AI is going to also transform how companies do go to market and sales. And I do not believe AI will replace humans. I think sales is gonna be always a human job. Okay, but I think AI will make uh humans much, much, much more productive in their job and will transform the way those humans actually deliver the execute the job. And in that context, I see there's one role, which is RevOps, that can only become more and more strategic and have more and more weight in those organizations. And I think RevOps, to a certain extent, I think for many years has been seen as the CRM admin guy. Yeah. So not delivering any part of the super undervalued. Exactly. But I see the top companies out there, they already have super senior BP RevOps. And RevOps is the only function that has the overall understanding of the whole ecosystem. Yeah. You mentioned an example before. I fixed this in AE, I broke this in CS. Normally, that view is sitting within RevOps. Yeah. And so I see RevOps getting more and more and more importance, uh, relevance, even budget decision-making power in companies. And I used to say that the current RevOps managers are the future go-to-market leaders.

SPEAKER_01 1:34:57

That's exactly what I wanted to ask you. I mean, RevOps, I always identify it from a sales perspective as well, that they are connected with go-to-market engineers, what we uh listen uh nowadays. So why do you think this, or when and why, in 60 seconds, if you have to put it in some way, why this RevOps figure uh started to be more important and and when this happened?

SPEAKER_00 1:35:20

What is the transformation behind that? I think it's been something progressive over time, and I I think it's going to continue like that. But AI is accelerating that because AI and the transformation that AI can create, that forces companies to see the whole go-to-market more as an ecosystem rather than a pure siloed or organization. Like before, uh few years ago, outbound was the pipe generation. Now pure outbound cold calling doesn't work anymore. You need to do that together with uh multi-channel. So it's getting all more and more complex, and AI is playing a role, and they are the only ones that have this transversal view, let's say, of the whole ecosystem, and that are naturally more tending towards system process data, which is what at the end of the day drives the success when you implement AI technologies.

SPEAKER_01 1:36:10

I love what you're saying because we were talking about this for a long for a long time, and also in these episodes, and it's a topic that we tackle. That it's and correct me if I'm wrong, Sergio, but AI is changing the way I mean AI is solved, it's solving right now a problem that was a solution back in the days in 2018, that was solutions or technology solutions that will help you in outbound within data, within quality of whatever enrichment. But then what happened right now is that everything is fragmented or siloed, as you're saying. So AI is going to bring this solution or bridge that gap within, okay, let's go into one unique ecosystem, and this is where the RevOps figure appears, right? Uh, it's key. I think that this is, I mean, we are aligned into that into that debate.

SPEAKER_02 1:36:56

We had a whole episode about this, almost like having really like a automating the workflow, not automating the no, not automating the full system. Exactly. Yeah, the workflow. The workflow, not the task. That's the most important thing.

SPEAKER_01 1:37:10

So let's jump into the into the uh gifts first. Yeah, let's do the gifts actually. We have a gift and then we play a little bit. Let me walk out through the camera. It's a small, simple thing, nothing fancy. But you being in the confessionary right now. So this is uh confessions of a seller. Amazing mug for you or bottle. So we didn't enjoy it.

SPEAKER_00 1:37:32

For you or for your kid, or for yeah, yeah, it's gonna be for me in the office. We also brought some presents for you.

SPEAKER_01 1:37:38

Ah, we have some presents, man. I will and we didn't put in Shin Tonic yet.

SPEAKER_00 1:37:42

So I think you like the money drives behavior.

SPEAKER_02 1:37:45

I would love that one.

SPEAKER_00 1:37:46

I think you can bring that to the gym. Man, I will to the next episode as well. To the next demo that I have to explose a cloud.

SPEAKER_01 1:37:51

Pretty pretty good.

SPEAKER_00 1:37:52

You can bring that to your manager.

SPEAKER_01 1:37:54

Uh yeah, let me put this on, man. That's a good one.

SPEAKER_00 1:37:57

Money drives behavior because I think that's that's uh the tagline of uh today's episode.

SPEAKER_02 1:38:03

As German, I have to say, here in the studio, it's pretty cold.

SPEAKER_01 1:38:06

German. So we have a German guy, and we didn't start it in this way, but let's let's finish it this way. We have the German guy, we have the Spanish guy, we have the Argentinian guy. We can make like a football international team. Yeah, I think it's like the beginning of a joke. Yeah, it's the beginning of a joke, exactly. 100% sitting in a podcast studio with that. Exactly. Two gearies and and one Spanish local guy. Okay, so thank you very much, first of all, for joining us. It was really, really like um, I mean, I'm learning a lot. I I think that uh in order to conclude and to jump into the next topic, compensation plans are a pain in the ass for everyone that it's out there having this type of conversations within commissions. Even when you are applying to a role, it's like, oh, this is how much they're going to pay. I will get OT this OTE. This is like the topic, right? Like they we will get this commission. Uh, but then you never know how it's calculated, you never know what happened behind the scenes, and you get frustrated, right? So yeah. Let's let's do the let's jump to the cards. So let's explain what it is and how we will.

SPEAKER_02 1:39:07

So we actually didn't explain you before what are the cards about. You asked us at the beginning, we didn't tell you because uh we want some price, you know.

SPEAKER_00 1:39:14

So maybe there's a lot of money out there.

SPEAKER_01 1:39:16

It's a compensation plan for us.

SPEAKER_02 1:39:18

Yeah. So we have this confession of a select card, so we have different kinds of um categories, and uh, we have uh one question which you have to answer with yes and no, uh yes or no and why. Okay, so I will start with the first one.

SPEAKER_01 1:39:34

One thing that I would add to that the yes or no is easy, or maybe not, the why should be in 60, 70 seconds, not more. Okay, I'll do my best. Yeah, category compensation.

SPEAKER_02 1:39:47

Wow, um what a coincidence. Commission only roles still make sense.

SPEAKER_00 1:39:54

Yes, but it depends on the industry and that's awesome. Real estate being one example.

SPEAKER_01 1:40:01

Perfect. Yeah, he knows the game.

SPEAKER_02 1:40:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:40:03

So let's move into the next one. So, okay, so this category is role and organization structure, and it says sales culture matters more than compensation plans.

SPEAKER_00 1:40:15

No, compensation plan is part of your sales culture, and your sales culture needs to be an input when you design compensation plan. I like that one. But compensation plan drives much more behavior than culture.

SPEAKER_01 1:40:28

I think so. Basically, culture is a consequence of how you align everything on top of the compensation plan.

SPEAKER_00 1:40:34

A great culture on top of a great compensation plan, it accelerates results. But a great culture on top of a very bad compensation plan, it culture will not generate anything.

SPEAKER_02 1:40:45

Really good one. I think a lot of sales leaders out there they need to listen to that. They have to listen to that. Yeah. Um category compensation. Uh higher OT drives higher performance.

SPEAKER_00 1:40:58

Uh not necessarily. No. It depends.

SPEAKER_01 1:41:04

I mean, uh Yeah, but now you have to say yes or no.

SPEAKER_00 1:41:07

Yeah, then I would I would pick no. Okay. And back to the planning discussion. If OTE is outside of anything right rational, it will drive frustration instead of motivation. So it will not drive more performance. So if you are still in in the right range, it might actually drive, but you need to make sure that you are in that sweet spot.

SPEAKER_01 1:41:25

Yeah. So basically, if it is not achievable or the the what we call the smart objective, right? And if it is achievable and something that I think that I can make there.

SPEAKER_00 1:41:34

Normally I always try to make companies think about sales individual productivity. If you are not a new company out there and you have some historical data, look at the real productivity of your sellers and cut it by a few dimensions. Uh product, channel, geography, and you will find some quite good, reliable metrics there. If you get that productivity, which is Euros slash time, euros per day, euros per week, euros per month. And if you get that back up into the quota, that's more or less a very reliable uh number. If your OTE is, let's say, plus, minus 10, 15% there, you are good. If it's two times that, forget it. It's not true. And that productivity can be changed. The productivity is at least your baseline. With AI, we are seeing productivity growing. But that's a very good starting point to actually understand exactly.

SPEAKER_01 1:42:26

Okay, makes sense. Next one. Yeah. Then we have one more. One more and then AI and go to market category. You just answered this one, but I think that yeah, it will be interesting to have it in on tape. Will AI replace average sellers in the near future?

SPEAKER_00 1:42:42

No. I think I've just been. I I only see AI being able to um replace very transactional conversations of customer-facing roles, which most likely are not sales related, okay. More support functions. When you call an airplane because your flight is delayed, these kind of things I might I see AI replacing. Okay.

SPEAKER_02 1:43:05

Great. Um category sales, I think it's a really interesting question, and looking forward to hearing your feedback. Um, most revenue problems are leadership problems.

SPEAKER_00 1:43:17

Yes. Yes. Uh considering that a lot of the design of everything we shared is leadership responsibility. That's awesome.

SPEAKER_01 1:43:26

All right. Well, um, I think that we are coming to an end. How did you feel? It was amazing.

SPEAKER_00 1:43:31

I I really enjoyed it. Um, it was fun. So I don't believe it's it's gone so very fast.

SPEAKER_01 1:43:38

Yeah, we've we've been here like more than one and a half hours. And I know if the audience is still there, but uh the the audience, I don't know where they are, and the people behind the scenes, I don't know if they are still there. But again, Sergio, thank you very much for joining us. Um, a pleasure to have you on someone like you with your experience, with your uh peace of mind to explain complex things and and break it down. I think that that's B BCG. Maybe yeah, explaining a lot of uh complex things into simple stuff for uh really normal guys like we are. We are just sellers.

SPEAKER_00 1:44:06

I'm also normal guy in Spanish, but normal guy.

SPEAKER_01 1:44:09

But again, thank you very much. And yeah, uh, thanks to you appreciate it for hosting me. Thanks, guys. Thank you.