Fullcast + Commissionly: A Conversation with Pete Shelton, CRO at Fullcast

Business. Yes, that's business. Business. Yes, that's business. Business. Yes, that's business. Business.

Welcome to Go to Market, a podcast for RevOps, sales, and marketing leaders to dive deep into industry insights and best practices. Go to Market is sponsored by Fulcast. My name is Amy Cook, and I am so excited to introduce one of my favorite people, Pete Shelton, Chief Revenue Officer of Fulcast. Pete, how are you?

Good, Amy. Good to see you.

Great to see you. And it was great to see you earlier today in an event that we were running it— running to. So thank you so much. Today is a big day. We just launched our new commissions, Fulcast Commissions platform. We've gone from a territory quota and capacity management platform into a full sales performance management platform, including commissions. So thank you for all of your support in getting this done. Uh, with this announcement, I wanted to talk with you more just about what it's like to be a CRO and what insight you have into commissions because you've been doing this for a lot of years, right, Pete?

Yeah, about 20 years now, always in software. Or high-tech and always in sales, everything from individual contributor through first, second, third line leadership and CRO, different size companies. 20 years flies by.

Well, you only look like you're 30, so I don't know how you've done it for 20 years. So that's good genes. So tell me though, a little bit more about your background. You and I have worked together for about a decade, so I know a lot about your background, but for all of our listeners, Can you just give them a walkthrough of your career and how it's progressed?

Yeah. So when I graduated college, was working in project management, saw that salespeople made a lot of money and had, you know, got to have fun conversations with customers, solve problems. So I took a sales job just to get into sales and made a call one day on a company. They hired me on the spot. That's how I got into sales. In high tech. And then from there it was startup and then went to the opposite end, end of the spectrum at a 10,000+ you know, software company. And then back to a startup with you where we grew Simplice, back to a bigger organization, and then here at Fulcast, which I'm really excited about.

Me too. And you've done both product and services, correct?

Yep. Yep. Two, two organizations have been pure 3 have been pure software and 2 have been services. So way, way more different than people think when it comes to selling. But yeah, all high tech.

Well, I learned that too. I came from, as you know, a marketing agency background for 15 years, worked with you for many years at Infosys and at Simplus, all in the consulting space, in the services space. And so this, Fulcast is my first product company. And it took me a minute to get my chops, even though I've done services for a lot of high-tech products. Actually running a product company is different, and the commissions are different, and everything's different, right? So Pete, you've been a CRO for a lot of years. You come up through sales, through product, and also for services. What are some of the challenges as a CRO that you've experienced?

Yeah, absolutely. Good question. You know, CROs are looking to motivate their sales team, right? They're looking to put incentives in place that either drive to a company direction or motivate individual people or everything in between. What most people don't realize is the backend and how hard that is to administer and the math and the rules and the logic and the reporting needed to be accurate because commissions have to be accurate, obviously. And so, you know, you're just trying as a sales leader, you're just trying to motivate people and then you get pushback from revenue operations because you're breaking some of their backend processes without even knowing. I think that's the number one challenge.

That is a big challenge. Just having worked on some of this as a service provider and being involved, what I'm seeing is you've got to be best friends with the IT team who's running your software, with the RevOps team. With the individual sellers, with the marketing people who are affected, and with finance. And it's a very challenging and complex sale, especially in product oftentimes. And, you know, the stakeholders who are involved are a lot more varied than I had thought. And so it's got to be challenging to get everyone working together to make that happen.

No, it absolutely is. You know, sales, sales wants to drive a strategy that makes sense. And then one layer under on the revenue operations side, now they have to work with every single division within the organization, maybe minus marketing, to execute on that. And so if you understand from a sales perspective, if you understand the backend of how it's all going to come to life, then you form this really tight partnership with revenue operations. If you don't understand it or you don't care, then a lot of times your initiatives can't get pushed forward because the people aren't backing you that need to do this work on the back end to make your strategy come to life.

That makes a lot of sense. So obviously we have launched the Fulcast Commissions platform. And what, just as a practitioner and as somebody who runs commissions, And then as representing Fulcast, what can Fulcast do for you personally as a CRO that is unique or differentiated?

Yeah, there's two things. I think a lot of people have seen commission reports with thousands of lines and you're hunting and trying to figure out what happened the previous quarter or month, either for yourself or for your team. Fulcast Commissions makes that part really, really easy. Click of one button and I can understand the 7 ways a specific deal paid for a rep or for me. Or I can go back to any type of view I want. From the highest level dashboarding perspective, it's really intuitive and easy to see all the different ways that you're getting paid. There's lots of good data that's going in on the back that then will help inform future comp plans. Then when I want to roll future comp plans out or SPIFs, or I want to put MBOs in place, or I want to do things that are unique, I— with Fullcast, I know I can roll that out in same day typically. The logic that's built back in the backend of Fullcast Commission is flexible enough that we don't break everything every single time we want to add plans. And I've already added plans. We rolled out Fullcast Commissions for my team 6 weeks ago. The day it went live, I rolled out 2 new plans and there was really good reason for it. And we were able to get it out in about an hour, but that's not always the case. And there's other things that I've got in mind I need to do The nice part is I know I can do it without a bunch of backend work or breaking the current plans that I have.

I love that. So the agility, the flexibility, and the visibility.

Yeah, that's a good way to say it.

I love it. I might need to use that in a marketing message. You articulated it well, Pete. I love it. Well, Pete, thank you so much. I know you are so busy. I know we've got a new product launched and I know that you're running crazy, but it is always such a pleasure to connect with you and thank you so much for your time.

Business. Guess that's business. Business. Guess that's business.