Customer stories from the world’s leading revenue teams
Olo Leverages Everstage for Sales Team Trust and More Strategic Time
Headquarters
New York, The United States
Company Size
500-1k
Industry
Restaurant Technology / SaaS
<2 weeks
to self-onboard and run comp independently
0
discrepancies when the first annual accelerators paid out
Olo is a New York-based restaurant technology company whose open SaaS platform handles digital ordering, delivery, payments and guest engagement for more than 800 restaurant brands across approximately 90,000 locations, processing over 3.5 million orders a day. Keyler Fulton is Olo’s Senior Sales Compensation Analyst, responsible for everything from plan design through to the statements its sales team reads.
The Challenge
Keyler runs sales compensation within Olo’s revenue operations team that works between Finance and Go-to-Market. She joined the team already having run sales compensation on two different platforms in her previous experiences, which gave her a clear sense of what she wanted from a third.
The first was CaptivateIQ. Getting compensation out of it meant being able to work inside it, and that turned out to be a far bigger undertaking than it looked from the outside.
The second was Forma AI, which ran on a vendor-managed model where the provider’s team handled the commission runs. That removed the learning curve and replaced it with a queue. When a single number needed changing, she says the turnaround could reach 48 hours, long enough to miss a payroll run, and the team fell back on outside models that were more work than running comp in a system.
When Keyler joined Olo, she inherited Everstage. The system was already in place, so her attention went straight to what she wanted to build on top of it. Sales enablement was the first ambition she set: getting reps into their own statements, lifting adoption across the sales floor, and making the platform something the sales team used for itself rather than something the comp team operated on its behalf.
The Solution
Keyler started by learning the system well enough to stand behind the numbers coming out of it. She traced how the plans had been built and checked the calculations against what she expected them to produce. Having spent close to a year learning her last platform, she expected this to take months.
Two weeks to a working baseline
The configuration held up. Rather than unpicking someone else’s build, Keyler was able to follow it, and start working on it, which meant the verification step did not become a project of its own.
What surprised her was the pace. She was operating the platform independently far sooner than she had planned for, and that changed what she could take on next.
A self-serve model for sales
With her own baseline in place, Keyler turned to the sales team. The aim was for reps to answer their own commission questions from their own statements, rather than routing every one of them through the comp team.
She trained sales to go into the platform and find their own numbers. Adoption followed quickly, and the statements became the first place reps looked rather than the last.
Plans built without waiting
Olo runs a set of plans that are similar to each other but not identical. Between AE tiers there are different BCR rates, and each variant has to be configured separately. On a vendor-managed model, adjusting a rate meant raising a ticket and waiting for a service team to pick it up.
On Everstage that work stayed with Keyler. The planning feature is the one she singles out when asked what she values most in the platform, because it is the one she uses without needing anyone else.
Support through the payroll window
Keyler works with a dedicated Everstage team rather than a general support queue. Everstage’s support specialist is involved in builds as well as fixes, so the people who know how the configuration was put together are the ones who answer when something needs attention.
Payroll is when compensation questions surface and when they cost the most. That is the window the arrangement is built for.
The Results
Today, Olo’s reps read their own statements, Keyler’s inbox is quiet, and the accelerator structure the business designed is running as intended.
Questions that no longer reach the comp team
Compensation is a function people contact when something looks wrong. As Keyler puts it, they are not typically coming to you when things are going right. By that measure, the clearest signal at Olo is how little now reaches her.
Reps are in the platform daily. What remains are clarifications rather than disputes, and they are settled from data that is already on the screen.
Numbers that hold up at payout
Olo wanted quarterly and annual accelerators measured next to one another, with the annual accelerators taking over from the quarterly ones once they kick in. It is a structure the business had designed deliberately, and it needed the platform to carry it without a workaround.
The first reps reached their annual numbers this year, and the payouts were verified to have zero discrepancies.
Time back for strategic work
The hours that went into crunching numbers and chasing down answers for reps now go elsewhere. Keyler is working on 2027 planning and on bringing forecasting dashboards to leadership.
She describes the gain as time rather than speed. The comp system does not need managing in order to produce correct numbers, so the hours it used to absorb go to work that looks forward.
