00:16:55 · Guillaume Moubeche
[00:16:55] S1: I'll say I'll say good job to Carles, the CEO and the and the team. I'm no longer operational anymore. I'm just the founder, so so it's always nice to to hear this thing. But I'm actually, like, also curious because I've heard like something about the quotas at ElevenLabs where you have people just doing this kind of huge quotas. Can you maybe like share a bit like some of the numbers behind it and also how people are compensated for this kind of quota? Yeah. So we had this like... It became quite famous, this 20 x rule. Right?
00:17:28 · Carles Reina
[00:17:28] S0: Yeah. So like your quota is 20 x your base salary. So if we come one day and say, we like hire you and we pay you a 100 k base salary and another 100 k commissions, like... But it's uncapped commissions, so 200 k OTE, then you're gonna have to bring $2,000,000 a year. Right? Or €2,000,000 or pounds or whatever it is. It doesn't really matter. Right? And that was because for the first nine months, I realized I could sell all the time and I... I've never been paid commissions as a developer labs. For me, was all about the equity and all that stuff. Right? So I realized, like, if I was able to do it by myself, like, reaching and passing those 2,000,000 only by myself, then 2,000,000, 3,000,000, whatever, like, 20 x quota, there was no reason why someone was not gonna be able to actually do that. Right? And I told the team is, like, the first two that I hired, they were like... Both of them were like, oh, what? It's 20 x? That is not what the market is actually requesting. And I'm like, guys, don't worry. We're also fair as a business. Right? Like, I understand. If the market situation changes or if you're not able to reach it because the number is like way too crazy or anything happens, we will keep it fair. We've always kept things fair until it relapses. We're not like one of those like companies that goes crazy. We're crazy in many ways, but not in this. Right? And I see that like the two that I hired were like, okay, I'm not sure, but like, let's do it. And they took the leap of faith and they'd realize like, shit, we can make a ton of money. We can actually get paid a lot on commissions. And we structured the commissions in a way that like from zero to a 100% of your quota, you will get paid five percent commission rate on anything that you would sell. And not only that, was that like, we would encourage you to do like a land and expand model. So that like, if you sold to a company, it doesn't really matter the company, a contract that was like, I'm just making that up, $30,000 a year. And that company then migrated to being managed by customer success or account management. Then for the first twelve months, you would still be accruing commission on anything that was upsold by the customer success or account management team.
00:19:31 · Guillaume Moubeche
[00:19:31] S1: Okay.
00:19:32 · Carles Reina
[00:19:32] S0: So they're like, literally for twelve months, you have guaranteed commissions on that, at least 5% if you're zero to a 100%. What we saw is that like a 100% quota was like easily achievable and people were like starting to smash it. So we put accelerated with that, like, if you go from a 100% quota to a 150% quota, we will give you 7.5% commission. Anything above a 150% quota will give you 10% commission. Nice. Hence, people were really motivated to go above and beyond. And I was extremely happy because I was like, look, I need to hire less people. And if I need to hire less people, I can hire less middle management. And this is like a combination of things. And people are much more engaged because they make a lot more money. So it was a kind of like a will that was spinning and spinning faster and faster and faster to the point that, like, the average quota attainment rate is like an average of like a 167% more or less every quarter. Right? I'd assume. Which is great. It's amazing because then it tells you that, like, you can keep adding account execs without saturating the market, and the quote attainment rate doesn't actually drop. If it drops, then we have a problem. So we kinda overhigh it at that point. But that is something that we didn't realize, like, that we didn't see, like, for the past three and a half years. Right? And so that 20 x rule became the standard thing. But I can also say, like, in some markets sometimes has been, like, really tough to reach those 20 x quota. Essentially, we're giving, like, quota relief to, like, the team members involved in that market. So, again, like, even up until today, you adapt it. You keep it fair. You wanna make sure that, like, the team is motivated on both ends. And putting a target that is, like, ambition and ambitious enough, and they just need to work really hard, but putting a commission structure that is like rewarding does like that extra push. And if it doesn't really work out because it's like a number of things, hey, like, the company has your back. You don't have to worry about anything. Right? So it's like putting those incentives, checks and balances.
00:21:19 · Guillaume Moubeche
[00:21:19] S1: And regarding like the different verticals, I'm always curious to understand, like some verticals, I would say that you find your product market fit extremely quickly, like you have the right messaging, everything clicks, it's easy to sell and you can go all in, and other verticals sometimes are a lot harder to penetrate and it's hard, you know, to get the first customers, sometimes it's like enterprise with SLA, with like all these complex like processes. How exactly do you balance very complex verticals that would take a lot of time versus like the one that are easier like to target? Like, you have a global strategy of where you want to be per vertical or how exactly was that structured? Initially, in
00:22:02 · Carles Reina
[00:22:02] S0: the form of commission and, like, sales cycles and expectations and quota, we didn't actually split it by industry or by, like, vertical or even by market. Right? And I think that was a mistake. When I look at it, like, from today, it's like looking back, like, it was a mistake because, like, the team members were only incentivized of actually going and selling to the developer ecosystem, like going and selling to like those like markets that actually were moving much quicker. No one was really incentivized into going and selling like properly into the banking space, the insurance, like the telcos, the utilities, the healthcare providers, so on. Right? So what we ended up doing is like classifying, like, we ended up doing a segmentation, SMBs, mid market, like, oh, SMBs incorporate, mid market, enterprise and strategic. The strategic team members had like a complete different setup. Right? So if you're trying to sell to a very large corporation above 10,000 employees, hey, we need to find a way because you're not gonna be able to actually sign a contract. I wish you were able to sign a contract in six months or in three months. Yeah. That'd be fantastic. But the reality is, like, it's gonna take longer. Right? So, like, we will incentivize you and we'll guarantee some level of commissions so that, like, you're able to start doing that. Right? So that was one end. And also, like, we will expand it and make sure that, like, we put incentives and all that stuff. But we did it much later and something that we should have done early on. And then, you know, like, sellers, like, we are sellers in nature. Right? Like, we wanna go to whatever it's easiest to actually, like, get your commission. So I think, like, it makes sense. Like, if the incentive is, like, equally spread across all the different industries, then you will go to the place that actually you can make the highest amount of money, like, the quickest possible. Hence, like, we were not properly incentivizing those verticals. Of course, that changed a year ago and then we started having a lot of crazy success in some of those complex industries, as we call it. But some of the markets also matured quicker.