SUCCESS STORY
SUCCESS STORY
Darwinian Ventures (DV) comprises experienced experts in turning new technology products into thriving businesses. They focus on building sales teams and early revenue and have adjacent expertise in fundraising, marketing, customer support, and products to support this focus.
What do they do?
Darwinian Ventures is a fast-growing go-to-market (GTM) agency, having launched the GTM motion at 50+ companies. They specialize in setting up GTM functions for early-stage B2B startups - growing their revenue from $0-$1M+ within a year. They also help these companies raise venture capital. Their incredible success has resulted in having dozens of active clients today, who continue to work with them in both the early and later stages of their journey.
Each sales representative at Darwinian focuses on one or a few clients - meaning different commission structures for each sales rep. Each rep specialises in either ‘meeting booking’ (think SDRs), or ‘deal closure’ (think AEs).
At the end of each month, DV team invoices their customers based on performance. Only once the invoices are received from the customer, can the DV sales reps be paid their commissions.
Darwinian Ventures had a manual commission process on spreadsheets with significant complexity. In order to continue scaling, they needed an all-encompassing solution.
With ElevateHQ, Darwinian Ventures was able to automate the entire commission management process, improving accuracy, process compliance, and earnings visibility.
Considerable time was being spent on commission calculations, given that invoices are paid at a later time while commissions are earned earlier. This gives rise to two distinct challenges:
1. Determining the invoicing amounts for each client was time-consuming
This typically involves a combination of metrics, including the count of scheduled meetings or successfully closed deals.
This is different for each client as the commission plan changes. So, DV’s finance team had to maintain a separate calculation for each client, their corresponding commission rates, and the corresponding sales rep’s performance, and calculate the amount to raise an invoice for.
2. Determining commission payout to reps based on invoice paid
This is dependent on the client's settlement of Darwinian's invoices. Once an invoice is raised, the finance team has to manually check which invoices were paid.
Once the audit was done and an account of all paid invoices was taken, the money had to be allocated amongst the team. This includes the sales rep assigned to the client, the project manager, the partner and the company itself.
This was time-consuming, given the team hierarchy at Darwinian Ventures.
There’s a set team hierarchy at Darwinian Ventures:
This results in commission roll-ups; a project manager manages multiple sales reps, and a partner manages multiple project managers. The commissions earned must be allocated to everyone in the chain.
While this contributed to the commission calculation complexity, it also contributed to approval complexity.
The finance team had to manually sync with each stakeholder to get the commission approved before payouts - this was time-consuming.
3. Limited visibility using spreadsheets
As everything was maintained in spreadsheets, the sales team had limited visibility of the earned commissions. They had to wait until the end of the month to know which invoices were paid and which deals were taken into account for commissions.
The project managers also had limited visibility into their earnings, as roll-ups occurred only after invoices were paid. It wasn’t the best experience for the sales team with spreadsheets.
ElevateHQ got Darwinian Ventures up and running within a month. From designing the complex commission plans to setting up automated approval workflows, ElevateHQ mapped the process end-to-end within the platform.
Darwinian Ventures uses Hubspot to track all internal deals, and spreadsheets to track customers’ deals & meetings. Quickbooks is used to manage all the invoices. Commissions are earned based on deals (Hubspot + Google Sheets) while it’s paid out on paid invoices (Quickbooks). The finance team manually checked which invoices were paid and mapped them to the corresponding deal to calculate commissions.
Therefore, a critical requirement was to combine data from these three different systems.
ElevateHQ reconciled these data on a single platform, thus eliminating 2-3 days' worth of manual effort that went into this process each month.
With a set hierarchy, getting commissions approved from the stakeholders (sales reps, project managers, partners) required manual effort from the finance team. There were a lot of email exchanges between the stakeholders and the finance team to finally pay out the commissions.
ElevateHQ set up automated approval workflows that triggered action from individual stakeholders once commissions were frozen. This has eliminated the manual effort and the unnecessary time spent by the finance team.
DV sales reps had to wait until the end of the month to look at their commission slip. With ElevateHQ’s real-time dashboards, reps are now able to see their commissions in real-time.
It is easier for admins to see and understand from a UX-friendly dashboard than looking at cells in spreadsheets.
Reps now get a complete view of all their metrics - quota attainment, total commission earned across periods, a complete breakdown of their commissions, etc.
As a fast-growing agency, DV onboards clients at a blistering pace. However, every client will come with a new commission structure.
Setting up new commission structures every time used to take up to 2 weeks. This was not a scalable approach, as a considerable amount of time and effort was spent on this.
At ElevateHQ, we’ve templatized these commission systems and it now takes only 2 days to onboard and set up a new client.
With this approach, Darwinian Ventures can now scale quickly and onboard more and more clients.
ElevateHQ took only 4 weeks for DV's commission plans to set up and run.
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