Ben Robinson, SVP of Sales at Zeel@Work, talks to Brent about his innovative approach to connecting sales and account management to support faster account expansion and higher enterprise deal values with a team selling approach.   

To encourage all of his sales team to do broad and deep sales discovery, Ben revamped the compensation formula to reward any upsell deal closed within 12 months of an initial sale, even after the account has transitioned to an account manager.

So, typically, if a new business account executive gets 6% of a net new logo close, they could get 3% of any upsell within that first year.

This motivates new business account execs to spend more time uncovering all of a prospects needs, even if they know that some opportunities were not going to close with the first contract. It also encourages them to capture and hand off really good notes to the account manager. 

→ Average deal sizes almost doubled and they’re seeing stronger collaboration across teams. 

Initially, Ben got push back from senior leadership. “My CEO’s first reaction was: ‘Isn’t that double dipping? You’re paying two people on the same sale.’” 

But when the average deal size took a large jump and NPS improved by almost 10 points because customer relationships were now more strategic, the CEO loved the results.

A great example of how doing what was right for the buyer also yielded a much better business result!