This is a YouTube video titled "Impact and Customer Success Stories of the CRO Readiness Program" created in March 2024. The content is a monologue or presentation-style discussion focusing on a case study of a professional services company that restructured its sales compensation plans to improve profitability and enable growth. The speaker explains the challenges faced, the analysis performed, and the successful implementation of new strategies to align sales incentives with company goals. The video is part of a channel that generally features conversations on Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) topics, but this excerpt is a single-speaker narrative without dialogue.
There's a couple of good instances of companies who've gone through this process. One in particular comes to mind. This is a ostensibly a professional services organization. It's roughly an 85, $90 million business. They've been in business for over 25 years. And like most companies that have been around for that long, they've established a lot of old habits that they started from a long time ago that they just kept in place mainly around their sales organization. Where because it's a primarily relationship based business, they've had the ability to keep salespeople on place for a very long time who built really nice big solid books of business with customers and developed deep relationships with them. And in order to get those top line revenue growth over the last 10 or 15 years, they created a very aggressive compensation plan for these people where they make a lot of money if they close deals. And it worked, right? I mean, these people have now closed, you know, millions of dollars, you know, in deals. But what the problem is is that this particular program we were able to identify is a salespeople were essentially making too much money. It was affecting, massively affecting the company's profitability. And if the company wanted to grow to 150 or $200 million business, you know, obviously that exponentially just was not sustainable. You can't have people making that kind of money with those compensation plans because you're giving too many, too much of the money and the revenue away to salespeople at the same time too. You know, you want those salespeople to continue to be incentivized, particularly if they've incentivized that way for such a long time. So this is a conundrum, right? This actually goes to the whole culture of the whole organization because the whole organization was set up this way. And so this company came to us because they were ready to expand, maybe even make a couple more ex acquisitions. But they recognized that without recalibrating the way that they developed these compensation strategies for their sales organization, that it was never going to work. And because they knew this, like most companies, they just kept on kicking this issue down the road because they never want to deal with it, you know, and the fear of course, was if they made a big change, they'd lose their salespeople and maybe lose some key customers. So this was sort of a thing where they created almost like a prisoner's dilemma for themselves. So part of the analysis that we made was that first of all, there was a lot of issues related specifically to a lot of the specific Accounts and the ways in which a lot of these companies were managing the specific accounts. We also determined that there's a lot of ways in which the organization could deploy other sales enablement teams, like for example, SDRs or even customer success managers would be able to assist in helping some of these deals close. That would allow these salespeople to not only keep nurturing their existing customers, but give them the incentive to go get new ones. Right. While they had other teams to help them. And this is a very, very uncomfortable process for these people. As you can imagine, this is not an easy thing for them to go through because they didn't really want to bring this to market. So aside from us doing the analysis, and really, literally, we literally took their existing compensation plans and we reworked them with a whole new strategy, a whole new rollout, and a different way that we could, let's say, structure these plans that would make the impact less on each individual sales rep, but also provide the organization with a way to create a new foundation for how they can deploy going forward. And then we also deployed a. We called a communication strategy. How do you roll this out? How do you talk to your people about this? How do you deploy this? What's the right way? Introduce this to people because you know that they can have an emotional reaction. And this, all this was done with a newly hired chief revenue officer whom came to us and said, look, you know, I'm, I'm sort of, I can't do any of the things I want to do until I solve this problem. Right? This is going to unlock our ability to actually build out a customer success organization and build out a better marketing organization. And so this was the initial finding and initial plan that we did and we, we rolled it out and it was very successful. The impact on the organization was mitigated. Most of the sales reps were on board. They understood the reasoning behind it. A new level of transpar was brought to the organization that wasn't there before. And right now, H1 looks like it's going to be profitable. And the majority of the people who are impacted by this have been given incentive plans where they see now how this is going to make sense for them. And despite the fact they may take a hit, they're going to continue on. So this is like one example of without our program and the analysis that we did, they would never have been able to unlock this particular issue and provide them with the means with which to be able to build out much more robust revenue operations.
