SUCCESS STORY
San Francisco, United States
251-500
Technology
Postman is the world’s leading API platform simplifying every step of building APIs and streamlining collaboration. More than 20 million developers and 500,000 organizations across the globe use Postman today.
Valued at $5.6 billion, Postman’s sales teams are aggressively scaling and as a result, the complexity of their commission plans is also increasing.
Spreadsheets presented an obvious case of poor scalability where they simply couldn't keep up with the exigency of the evolving sales commission process. Every single step was being done manually, right from pulling in data from their CRM and generating reports, to sharing payout information with sales teams.
The most challenging part was the lack of the ability to repeat the process. Every month, they were pretty much starting over. Given their speed of hiring sales executives, bringing in new hires into the system was chaotic. It became difficult to set up their compensation plans on spreadsheets while also factoring in their ramping period. It was becoming an unnecessary hog on the administrator’s bandwidth.
With spreadsheets, measuring performance of their sales team was opaque, and without clear visualization, it was difficult to provide complete data on the impact of their incentive program to key stakeholders.
Hitting a critical growth point, Postman needed a system more sophisticated, flexible, and intuitive than spreadsheets.
Postman administrators build plans with ease and perform various functions to seamlessly handle commissions for large numbers of sales reps. Everstage is truly no-code and the UI is extremely intuitive, allowing administrators to promptly work on the platform without any dependencies. Everstage runs commissions for Postman accurately and offers complete transparency of commissions to their sales teams.
With an out-of-the-box integration with Salesforce, Postman eliminates the hassle of having to manually pull in data to calculate commissions.
On top of that, instead of switching from their CRM to another platform and checking their commissions, sales reps can access Everstage within Salesforce itself. It saved them clicks and the trouble of managing another login.
“It felt naturally like Everstage would be a much better partner than any of the other companies we evaluated. Given that we’re growing so rapidly and that our needs are changing so often, we wanted a partner that would listen to us and adapt to those changes. It was clear that Everstage was going to do that.”
The administrators, managers, and sales reps at Postman have access to their commissions data at all times. Since everything is visible on-demand, there is lesser confusion and absolutely no dependency on the administrators for payout information. If they do reach out to administrators for any changes, they are confident that reps have done their background work on Everstage and it saves several cycles of investigation.
Real-time visibility aside, sales reps at Postman can also get insights on how much they can make in commissions for pipeline deals they could close in the future. Postman uses Crystal, Everstage’s one-of-a-kind sales commissions forecasting module, that offers advanced deal structure modifications in their payout predictions. Reps can make an informed decision on which deals to prioritize and close to hit their quota or accelerators.
Just being able to see the compounding of their work and how it is increasing their paycheck every month is a great motivational factor. Without seeing what you’re getting, it’s hard to sell more.
Since Postman first partnered with Everstage, their sales force has grown by 300% as the company has seen continued success in the market. Everstage has been able to handle the heavy lifting with absolute ease.
It improves the efficiency of Postman’s commission process and as a result, the administrators get significant time savings. What once used to be a multi-step process is all automatically processed and ready for analysis within Everstage. The level of accuracy has shot up as well.
“Everstage has made our lives so much easier and allowed us to focus on other things. When it comes to bringing new hires into the system, it was a three-step process before whereas now I just add them into Everstage and I don’t have to do anything else. Everstage pretty much takes care of everything and there is no room for errors.”.
Postman can now offer their sales reps with real-time visibility of their quotas, attainment, commissions, and payout status. Unlike spreadsheets, Everstage factors in all plan components including scenarios like multi-year deals, annual accelerators, and more to provide accurate payout data.
“My experience with Everstage has been phenomenal. I can proactively go into it and see what I am getting paid well ahead of the commission being cut. It calculates all scenarios: if you sell a multi-year deal, whether it is paid upfront or annually etc. Corner case scenarios that test the comp plan have always been calculated correctly on Everstage.”
This granular visibility of commissions not only built trust in the commissions system but also increased motivation of their sales team. Therefore, they were able to drive desired behaviors. There was a 21% increase in sales team attainment in H2 2022.
“I like to see what the breakdown is of my commissions on Everstage. It shows you how much you get paid specific to your base commission, how much is your quarterly accelerator, multi-year accelerator and more instead of just one lump sum.”
Gerry uses Crystal, Everstage’s commission forecasting module, to predict his payouts even before closing deals. For him, it serves two purposes. One, he can see how much he will be making in commissions. Two, he knows exactly which deals to pursue in order to reach his quota. This brings about some creative thinking on how he can get these deals across the line to assure quota attainment and maximize his commission payouts.
“Time kills deals. The longer the deal is sitting in the pipeline, not moving forward, the lesser chances there are of closing it. Budgets move on. People leave companies. Leadership changes. Crystal is a good snapshot view to help solve potential hurdles that prevent us from closing deals.”
The advanced commission forecasting and on-demand visibility into accurate commissions data has helped Postman keep up the morale of sales teams. Postman noticed that the number of multi-year deal closures in H2 2022 had also doubled.
