PostHog Handbook Library / Growth

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# How we work

Auto TL;DR

## At a Glance

This long page covers these main areas. The list is generated from the article headings, so it updates with every handbook rebuild.

1. Roles
2. Technical Account Executives
3. TAE Territory Review
4. How commission works Technical Account Executives
5. Performance expectations for Technical Account Executives
6. How commission works BDRs
7. Team lead quota
8. Travel to see customers

> This page covers more of the operational detail of how the New Business Sales team (Technical Account Executives and BDRs) generally works - for a broader overview of roles and responsibilities, visit the overview page. If you're looking for how the Technical Account Manager team works, see their How we work page.

### Roles

We have three types of roles:

- Technical Account Executives - closing new business from inbound and outbound leads and expanding their usage of PostHog in the next 12 months
- Technical Account Managers - expansion from existing customers, closing new business from product-led leads
- Business Development Reps, aka BDRs - generating leads for new business, including via cold outbound

#### Technical Account Executives

TAEs work with:

- People who email sales@ directly
- People who book a demo via contact sales
- Other triggers we see in product, supplemented by data from Clay

Cold outbound leads generated by our BDRs are routed to TAEs to work with too. Customers move off of a TAE to a TAM or CSM 3 months after closing on a prepaid contract (usually annual) - you have to ensure they are well set up, not just contract signed!

##### TAE Territory Review

In addition to the weekly sprint planning meeting on a Monday, we do a weekly territory review standup on Wednesday. A Technical AE is picked at random, and we spend 30min going through:

1. Brief, mid-week announcements (if any)
2. For one random Technical AE as chosen by the wheel of names - SFDC Hygiene check — is the deal value, stage, and close date accurate? Are the next steps up to date? No story time here, just data.
3. Biweekly, we review all larger ($50k+) opportunities across all Technical AE. For each opportunity, the person reports and discusses:

- Opportunity value and close date - why this value? when do we think it will close?
- Progress towards exit criteria of the current stage
- Concerns and questions about the opportunity

1. On alternate weeks from the larger deal review, we run wheel of names again (excluding the Technical AE selected for the hygiene check), and the selected Technical AE reports and discusses the opportunities in their pipeline, including:

- Starting with later stage opportunities, discuss opportunity value and close date - is the value solid? and what confidence do we have in the close?
- Progress towards exit criteria of the current stage
- Concerns and questions about the opportunity

> The objective of the meeting is to hold each other to account, provide direct feedback, and also support each other. It is a great place to ask for help from the team with thorny problems - you should not let your teammates fail.

### How commission works - Technical Account Executives

General principles

- When thinking about commission, we want to particularly incentivize:
- Landing new customers
- Quickly expanding them into new products using the relationship you've developed in onboarding them as customers.
- We aim for a 50/50 split between base/commission when calculating OTE by default.

> This plan will almost certainly change as we scale up the size and complexity of our sales machine! This is completely normal - we will ensure everyone is always treated fairly, but you need to be comfortable with this. For now we are generally trying to optimize for something straightforward here so it’s easy for PostHog (and you) to calculate commission. Fraser runs this process, so if you have any questions, ask him in the first instance.

Variables

- Your quota is set for the year and then divided by 4 - this means you don't have to cram deals into the end of a quarter.
- Commission is _uncapped_ and paid out on a sliding scale based on the % of your quota you hit. Hit 100% quota, get 100% of commission. 0% for 0%. And 200% for 200%.
- Quota is based on $ amount sold, not credits/product usage, so you can't in theory sell a $500k deal with an 80% discount and claim the full $500k to your quota, for example. Ways to hit quota:
- The invoice payment amount for any pre-purchased credit deals in the first 12 months after they become a paying customer.
- If the purchase is a renewal of an earlier credit purchase (i.e. at the end of the first year) then you'll get recognised on the difference between the initial purchase and renewal purchase.
- ARR from monthly customers for the first _12 months_ after you sign them up as a monthly customer as long as you are the primary account owner.
- For multiyear contracts, we will true the quota ARR up to the year 1 equivalent amount as you'll have given a deeper discount but there is more committed revenue for PostHog which is a good thing.
- The way we work this out is by taking the annual credit purchased by the customer and applying the standard 1 year discount to it.
- Your quota will depend on your OTE
- Commission is paid out quarterly, and is subject to clawbacks if the invoices remain unpaid.
- We want you to secure upfront payment - which helps PostHog and helps you.
- If you close an annual contract with monthly payments, you will still get recognized for the full commission amount, but the actual payout of your commission will be quarterly.
- We want you to ensure the customer has paid, and we don't want AEs to throw invoice chasing to a finance person
- This means you should make friends with the finance person on the customer's side, and ensure all payment paperwork is in order to allow for the customer to pay.
- For monthly customers, commission is only paid after all 3 invoices have been paid
- Commission is still paid out quarterly even if the customer pays monthly
- Overdue invoices from the current quarter will be excluded from commission payouts, with the cutoff being the 14th of the calendar month following the quarter (January, April, July, and October)
- Invoices that are issued in the final period of the current quarter, but are due at a date beyond the 14th of the calendar month following the quarter (January, April, July, and October), will be paid on the good faith assumption that the customer will pay on time and you will assist in securing timely payment. If the invoice becomes overdue in a future quarter, it will be subject to a clawback in that quarter.
- If we have to give a customer a big refund, we’ll deal with your commission on a case by case basis or via clawback.
- Commission payments are made at the end of January, April, July, and October. Fraser will send you an email that breaks down your commission and explains how you did.
- In your first 3 months, you'll be paid 100% OTE fixed. You can find more info on how quotas work in your ramp period in the new hire FAQ

#### Performance expectations for Technical Account Executives

There are cultural and role-based expectations for TAEs at PostHog. We also now have enough data to define minimum performance exceptions for TAEs relative to the annual commmission targets.

After your ramp period, you should expect to have a performance conversation with your lead and Ben if:

- You are under 80% of your annual quota, _and_
- You have finished two consecutive quarters under 70% of your quarterly target

These standards are likely to change as the TAE role evolves. Any changes will be reflected in the handbook. We will always consider any relevant context when having these conversations with you - quota does not exist in a vacuum!

### How commission works - BDRs

General principles

- When thinking about commission, we want to particularly incentivize:
- Generating high quality leads
- Getting people in who fit our ICP, ie. are easier for us to sell to
- We aim for a 70/30 split between base/commission when calculating OTE by default.

In your first 3 months, you'll be paid 100% OTE fixed. You can find more info on how quotas work in your ramp period in the new hire FAQ

> This plan will almost certainly change as we scale up the size and complexity of our sales machine! This is completely normal - we will ensure everyone is always treated fairly, but you need to be comfortable with this. For now we are generally trying to optimize for something straightforward here so it’s easy for PostHog (and you) to calculate commission. Fraser runs this process, so if you have any questions, ask him in the first instance.

Variables

- Quota is based on the number of sales qualified opportunities you generate - basically when an account moves into the Opportunity stage in SFDC
- Your quota is set for the year and then divided by 4 - this means you don't have to cram meetings into the end of a quarter.
- Commission is _uncapped_ and paid out on a sliding scale based on the % of your quota you hit. Hit 100% quota, get 100% of commission. 0% for 0%. And 200% for 200%.
- Commission is paid out quarterly.
- There is no guaranteed commission during ramp, as the ramp period for BDRs is much shorter than for TAMs/TAEs.

### Team lead quota

From your first full quarter as a team lead in Sales, you will move to a 60% base 40% commission split in reflection of your new player/coach role. This will be based on your team's quota attainment although you will still have your own individual quota target.

> Your individual quota will be lower than others in the team as you'll be spending more time on managing the team, but we still want you to demonstrate the sales individual contributor skills to your team. You should aim for 80% team management, 20% IC work, and the quota will reflect that.

To calculate the team quota, we combine the quota of all team members with proration applied if they are still ramping:

- For fully ramped team members we add 100% of their quota to the team quota.
- For team members who begin the quarter still in their first three months in the role we add 50% of their quota to the team quota.

Example: With a flat quota of $250,000 and 3 fully ramped people, and 1 ramping, the team quota would be $875,000 (($250,000 * 3) + $125,000)

> If someone leaves the team, we may recalculate the team quota depending on how their accounts and opportunities are reallocated to others in the team. If someone joins the team, we don't change the team target, and don't count their contribution towards the existing target, to keep it simple.

### Travel to see customers

You are likely to need to travel a lot more than the typical PostHog team member in order to meet customers. Please make sure that you follow our company travel policy and act in PostHog's best interests. We trust you to do the right thing here and won't pre-approve your travel plans, but we do keep track of what people are spending and the Ops team will follow up with you if it looks like you are wasting money here. We are not a giant company that pays for fancy flights, accommodation, and meals so please be sensible.

### Working with engineering teams

We hire Technical AEs. This means you are responsible for dealing with the vast majority of product queries from your customers. However, we still work closely with engineering teams!

Product requests from large customers

Sometimes an existing or potential customer may ask us to fix an issue or build new features. These can vary hugely in size and complexity. A few things to bear in mind:

- Engineers at PostHog talk to customers. It's much better to bring engineers onto calls to speak to a large customer to talk to them directly than just do the call yourself and copy and paste notes back and forth. This is especially useful if a) the team was already considering building the feature at some point, b) it's an interesting new use case, or c) the customer is really unhappy for valid reasons and could churn.
- Provide as much internal context as you can. If a customer sends a one-liner in Slack, don't just copy and paste into a product team's channel - find out as much as you reasonably can first, ask clarifying questions up front etc. Otherwise the relevant team will just ask you to do this anyway.
- We already have principles for how we build for big customers - if you have a big customer with a niche use case that isn't applicable to anyone else, you should assume we won't build for them (don't be mad!)

Finally, if you are bringing engineers onto a call, brief them first - what is the call about, who will be there. And then afterwards, summarize what you talked about. This goes a long way to ensuring sales <\> engineering happiness.

Complicated technical questions

You will run into questions that you don't know the answer to from time to time - this is ok! Some principles here:

- Try to solve your own problems. Deep dive the docs, ask PostHog AI, ask the rest of the sales team first - a bit of digging is a valuable opportunity for you to learn.
- Similar to the above, don't just copy and paste questions from Slack with no context. Add some commentary - 'they have asked X, their use case is generally Y, I think the answer might be Z - is that right?'. Do some of the lifting here, rather than putting all the mental load on an engineering team.
- If you open a ticket in Zendesk and know which team the ticket needs to go to, make sure to select "escalated" on the ticket so that it will bypass support and go straight to that team.

### Working with customers in Slack

Most of our customers use Slack, and it's a great way for us to be responsive to them. Qualifying customers and prospects can get a shared Slack channel, and you should set one up as early as it makes sense in your relationship with them.

We share channels via Slack Connect and add SupportHog so that both PostHog and the customer can raise support tickets directly from a Slack thread — react with the :ticket: emoji or mention `@SupportHog`. This syncs the conversation into Zendesk so our Support and Engineering teams can work on customer issues in a familiar context.

See Shared Slack channels with customers for the full setup steps, including channel naming, who to invite, and how to support customers who use MS Teams instead.

> It's your job to ensure your customer issues are resolved, make sure you follow up with Support and Engineering if you feel like the issue isn't getting the right level of attention.

Canonical URL: https://posthog.com/handbook/growth/sales/new-business-how-we-work

GitHub source: contents/handbook/growth/sales/new-business-how-we-work.md

Content hash: `fd733cc352e34bd7`