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Having worked in sales a while back I can attest to how important getting the right sales culture is, and also how incredibly challenging this can be. Companies

by tswartz 11y ago

Having worked in sales a while back I can attest to how important getting the right sales culture is, and also how incredibly challenging this can be. Companies need to align the reps' goals with that of the company, and too often when high quotas are put in place the quality of a sale goes out the window and it's sell the software to whoever can buy it (regardless if they can afford it or use it properly) and let customer support / retention worry about that. It's the, "just hit your quota" attitude which can be very harmful to a company. Best excerpt from the article: >The machine, however, wasn’t nearly as sturdy as this confident talk made it seem. Behind the scenes, operations staff scrambled to help customers enroll in health care, an error-prone and frustratingly low-tech process that involved manually entering data into spreadsheets and sending it to health insurance carriers, according to former employees. Account managers felt like they were constantly putting out fires, or resetting the expectations of customers who had been given a hard sell. >Zenefits’ compensation structure created big rewards for sales reps on the enterprise team, who handled the largest customers, despite the reality that, as Zenefits later acknowledged, its software and processes worked better for smaller companies.

siavosh 11y ago
With SaaS services this is pretty straightforward, especially for small-medium sized companies: you don't want transactional sales. You end up with sales at all costs culture, and the mess is left for the account managers/dev/support teams to deal with and very unhappy customers. Building a good relationship based sales team is hard and slow, and frankly it's very hard to find sales folks who aren't colored by previous transactional experiences/mentoring. This culture creation slows down the trajectory of a start up with high growth pressures, hence why we see this sort of stuff. I've gotten my fair share of heavy handed, transactional sales calls from some other big named startups and it's always a negative experience. I can just imagine a boiler room environment in most of these startups.
officialchicken 11y ago
Zenefits currently handles payroll at my company. The machine isn't un-sturdy, it's become rusty, lost all lubrication, and seized up. They need to fix their software before allowing anyone to sign up and use it. I haven't gone 1 weekly pay period in 2016 without some issue (late, missing, short paychecks, shifting paydays) or another. But I can't convince my CEO to go with some pros (ahem, ADP), yet. But they are very sales-centric and realize they have a problem... so there's some hope for them. Everyone here is pretty frustrated with the situation. And the next time Zenefits fuck up, which I presume will be Friday, I will submit my already drafted ADP-Or-I-Resign-Immediately letter with timeline of their 8+ previous fuckups. Edit*: It's 2016, not 2015... so every week we've use it
- tswartz 11y ago
  interesting that you've had issues with your paychecks... <logs into Zenefits to check>
  - officialchicken 11y ago
    It may be the issues we are having have to do with the fact that we did not use their recommended default values for payroll, e.g. we initially defined the paydays, reporting days, and the requisite 3 days between reporting and actual funds transfer. Now that Zenefits is dictating our accounting for payroll schedule, we may be able to get around many of the software issues we've experienced up to this point. I still get 2-3 emails a week letting me know I got paid, once, and it's confusing always checking if I got double/triple paid too (which also happened). Of course, this may not be 100% Zenefits fault in every case, but the software makes it easy to make mistakes.
- dragonwriter 11y ago
  > I haven't gone 1 weekly pay period in 2015 without some issue (late, missing, short paychecks, shifting paydays) or another. If you want to motivate a change, you may want to research applicable labor law: for instance, in California, failure to pay all wages due, on the posted payday, is not only a violation subject to civil penalties, but also a crime. http://www.dir.ca.gov/dlse/faq_paydays.htm http://www.dir.ca.gov/dlse/faq_paydays.htm http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection.xhtml?lawCode=LAB&sectionNum=215 http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection....
  - officialchicken 11y ago
    Thank you, I'm not a CA resident, but I will look into those links. I wish I would have know that a couple of years ago - I'm certain that info will help some HN reader though.
- api 11y ago
  We use Gusto (formerly ZenPayroll) with zero issues and their UX is far better than ADP. /no affiliation with them
shostack 11y ago
I've experienced this in another side of the world--ad agencies. Very frequently accounts were sold on one thing and since the commissions were tied to closing the deal with the fattest margin possible and were completely divorced from the long-term success of the account, often times accounts ended up with lots of promises, and an understaffed, burnt-out team desperately trying to keep them happy because it was their asses if the account left. When I got to a level where I played a major role in pitches, scoping, and staffing teams, it was definitely a struggle at times to make sure an account was staffed in a way where the fees would support the staffing that aligned with a client's expectations of the work and deliverables they would receive. Ultimately we were able to get to a much better understanding of that through comparing the cost of retaining a client vs. the cost of new client acquisition, making our SOWs much more specific, and making sure people whose success was measured in the longevity of that relationship (ie. me and the people who would ultimately own the account) were involved in the scoping/pricing/contract part of the process with sales. That didn't fully get rid of the friction or differing incentives, but it made sure that there was a healthy data-driven discussion around the potential outcomes of selling in one thing vs. another. Unfortunately it took things getting worse before they got better to bring about that change, but it happened nonetheless. It does require buy-in from the top down though, and I'm not sure that is something that could realistically happen in a heavily-funded company with...optimistic...sales goals.

by tswartz 11y ago

siavosh 11y ago

With SaaS services this is pretty straightforward, especially for small-medium sized companies: you don't want transactional sales. You end up with sales at all costs culture, and the mess is left for the account managers/dev/support teams to deal with and very unhappy customers. Building a good relationship based sales team is hard and slow, and frankly it's very hard to find sales folks who aren't colored by previous transactional experiences/mentoring. This culture creation slows down the trajectory of a start up with high growth pressures, hence why we see this sort of stuff. I've gotten my fair share of heavy handed, transactional sales calls from some other big named startups and it's always a negative experience. I can just imagine a boiler room environment in most of these startups.

officialchicken 11y ago

Zenefits currently handles payroll at my company. The machine isn't un-sturdy, it's become rusty, lost all lubrication, and seized up. They need to fix their software before allowing anyone to sign up and use it. I haven't gone 1 weekly pay period in 2016 without some issue (late, missing, short paychecks, shifting paydays) or another. But I can't convince my CEO to go with some pros (ahem, ADP), yet. But they are very sales-centric and realize they have a problem... so there's some hope for them. Everyone here is pretty frustrated with the situation. And the next time Zenefits fuck up, which I presume will be Friday, I will submit my already drafted ADP-Or-I-Resign-Immediately letter with timeline of their 8+ previous fuckups. Edit*: It's 2016, not 2015... so every week we've use it

tswartz 11y ago
interesting that you've had issues with your paychecks... <logs into Zenefits to check>
- officialchicken 11y ago
  It may be the issues we are having have to do with the fact that we did not use their recommended default values for payroll, e.g. we initially defined the paydays, reporting days, and the requisite 3 days between reporting and actual funds transfer. Now that Zenefits is dictating our accounting for payroll schedule, we may be able to get around many of the software issues we've experienced up to this point. I still get 2-3 emails a week letting me know I got paid, once, and it's confusing always checking if I got double/triple paid too (which also happened). Of course, this may not be 100% Zenefits fault in every case, but the software makes it easy to make mistakes.
dragonwriter 11y ago
> I haven't gone 1 weekly pay period in 2015 without some issue (late, missing, short paychecks, shifting paydays) or another. If you want to motivate a change, you may want to research applicable labor law: for instance, in California, failure to pay all wages due, on the posted payday, is not only a violation subject to civil penalties, but also a crime. http://www.dir.ca.gov/dlse/faq_paydays.htm http://www.dir.ca.gov/dlse/faq_paydays.htm http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection.xhtml?lawCode=LAB&sectionNum=215 http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection....
- officialchicken 11y ago
  Thank you, I'm not a CA resident, but I will look into those links. I wish I would have know that a couple of years ago - I'm certain that info will help some HN reader though.
api 11y ago
We use Gusto (formerly ZenPayroll) with zero issues and their UX is far better than ADP. /no affiliation with them

shostack 11y ago

I've experienced this in another side of the world--ad agencies. Very frequently accounts were sold on one thing and since the commissions were tied to closing the deal with the fattest margin possible and were completely divorced from the long-term success of the account, often times accounts ended up with lots of promises, and an understaffed, burnt-out team desperately trying to keep them happy because it was their asses if the account left. When I got to a level where I played a major role in pitches, scoping, and staffing teams, it was definitely a struggle at times to make sure an account was staffed in a way where the fees would support the staffing that aligned with a client's expectations of the work and deliverables they would receive. Ultimately we were able to get to a much better understanding of that through comparing the cost of retaining a client vs. the cost of new client acquisition, making our SOWs much more specific, and making sure people whose success was measured in the longevity of that relationship (ie. me and the people who would ultimately own the account) were involved in the scoping/pricing/contract part of the process with sales. That didn't fully get rid of the friction or differing incentives, but it made sure that there was a healthy data-driven discussion around the potential outcomes of selling in one thing vs. another. Unfortunately it took things getting worse before they got better to bring about that change, but it happened nonetheless. It does require buy-in from the top down though, and I'm not sure that is something that could realistically happen in a heavily-funded company with...optimistic...sales goals.