Onbo Qi - Troops

In the initial stages of testing sales-assist, Steeve made the decision to compensate everyone on a 100% base structure. That way team members wouldn’t have to worry about variable commissions and could instead prioritize setting a strong foundation. He wanted to encourage feedback loops with product, marketing, billing and legal as well as documenting winning motions that made sense for the team. Individuals are rewarded based on team success, measured on a quarterly basis, rather than their own quota retirement.

One counterintuitive winning motion at Zapier came from creating a feedback loop between customer support (called Customer Champions) and sales-assist. With support being on the frontlines interacting with thousands of users, Zapier looked for ways to pass relevant accounts from support to sales-assist. That needed to happen in a natural way; Zapier didn’t want users to feel artificially pressured or upsold. The company now generates a steady stream of Support Qualified Leads eager to talk to sales.

Step 1 - Understand the customer journeyBefore jumping to a solution, Steeve wanted to gather more data and talk to customers who were experiencing friction. He became Zapier’s first sales rep, a role Steeve held for about six months. His first objective was to learn as much as possible about the upmarket customer’s buying process:Why weren’t they comfortable self-serving into the product?How do they go through the process of buying a product like Zapier? What approvals were required?How did they need to purchase a product like Zapier? Could they use a credit card?Where did customers get stuck or have questions?He discovered things that might seem intuitive for traditionally sales-focused companies. Some folks had to go through several layers of approval and struggled to navigate that on their own. Others were hesitant to put $7,000+ on a credit card and wanted a different billing mechanism. And some just wanted to talk to someone at Zapier to make sure they would be supported through implementation and beyond.