How we work

This page covers more of the operational detail of how our team generally works - for a broader overview of roles and responsibilities, visit the overview page.

Main metrics for each role

• Technical AE: new and expansion revenue in your book of business
• RevOps: overall revenue from $20k+ segment
• Technical CSM: logo retention

Other metrics we generally care about:

• Closed - won % from demo
• Time to close
• Lead volume in each segment
• Weighted pipeline

Book of business

Each AE is assigned ~10 existing customer accounts to work with. Additionally, you will manage inbound leads as they are assigned to you in your territory. Overall, the hard cap on existing book + new leads is 20 accounts, so staying extremely focused is important.

Each CSM is assigned ~50 existing customer accounts to work with.

Simon and Charles will also review everyone's accounts each month proactively to make sure that the balance of accounts across the team makes sense.

Handing-off customers from Technical AE to Technical CSM

We want to ensure the expansion potential of a customer has been thoroughly exhausted before moving to a Customer Success Manager for steady-state retention. When you want to move a customer off your book you should talk it through with Simon. Here are the things we will be looking at:

1. Have you tried multiple times to make contact with all of the active users in an account?
   • An Active User is someone who has been seen in Vitally in the past month
   • When you reach out, demonstrate how you can help that person out, be specific to their role/usage of PostHog.
2. Are they using all PostHog products?
   • If they have been customers for a while they may not be aware of new products like Surveys and Data Warehouse. Look at their usage and see if there are any obvious cross-sell opportunities.
   • Could they benefit from some of the advanced capabilities and training/support available in Teams/Enterprise?
3. Is there an opportunity to cross-sell to a different team?
   • Have a look at what they are tracking with PostHog. If it's an app then maybe get in touch with the marketing team to talk about Web Analytics or No Code Testing
   • Are they a multi-product company? Find out if there are other teams who aren't using us who could benefit from PostHog today, and then use your current users as an internal reference.

If the answer to any of the above questions is 'no' then it's likely that there is more work to be done with a customer, but we will use a common sense approach here.

A customer being negative/difficult to work with isn't a reason to remove them from your book. It's your job to turn them around to being a happy customer (AKA be their favorite).

Weekly sales standup

In addition to the weekly sprint planning meeting on a Monday, we do a weekly sales standups on Wednesday (Europe) and Friday (US). A Technical AE is picked at random, and we spend 30min on each going in depth through:

• What is your path to quota this quarter? Talk through your oops closing this quarter.
• Which accounts are at risk? Look at red health score or sentiment in Vitally.
• How is cross-adoption going in your existing accounts? Check against Vitally goals.

Turns are taken randomly so that you are incentivized to turn up to every meeting fully prepared, in case you are selected!

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 team mates fail.

New sales team hire ramp up

• Day 1
  • Read the whole sales playbook (and updating it throughout as you learn more)
  • Get using PostHog - start making insights and dashboards
  • Assigned your customers
• Week 1
  • Reviewed your account list and prioritized/asked questions about them internally
  • Delivered a standard demo to the PostHog team and got feedback
  • Introduced yourself to your customers
  • Shadowed new inbound demos
• Week 2
  • Contributed to customer calls with backup from an existing team member
  • Understand how to work PandaDoc, HubSpot, Vitally, Stripe, Metabase (ie. contracts, billing, reporting)
  • Built a plan for which customers to prioritize
  • Completed 1-1s with anyone relevant at PostHog
• Month 1
  • Leading customer calls and demos on your own
  • Have evaluations in flight with support from team if needed (AE)
  • Had contact with everyone in your book of business in some form
  • Starting to solve technical problems for your book with occasional help (CSM)
• Month 2
  • Closed your first Medium annual deal (new or conversion to annual) (AE)
  • Leading evaluations on your own (AE)
  • Identified some opportunities to add to your book from self-serve signups who aren't paying yet (AE)
• Month 3-4
  • Closed multiple contracts by this point (either new or expansion/renewal) through the whole process (AE)
  • Independently working with your entire book to solve tricky technical problems with minimal assistant (CSM)

How commission works - Technical AEs

General principles

• AEs are responsible for selling to qualified leads, getting them properly using the product (ideally annual contract), and continuing to be the main point of contact for retention, expansion and cross-sell. Specifically, AEs should grow accounts either by selling in new products or expanding existing products into new teams. This means they have to nurture customers, not just throw them over the fence to a CS person to deal with.
• When thinking about commission, we want to particularly incentivize:
  • Closing annual contracts - better retention, de-risks PostHog financially.
  • Cross selling new products - all-in-one is how we will beat the competition.
• 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 as the additional $ you are expected to add to your book of business - ie. any new revenue counts.
  • For example, if you start a quarter with $700k in ARR and are set a target to grow this by $200k ARR, your commission is based on your attainment towards the $200k figure.
• This means you can hit quota by a combo of bringing in new business and expanding existing.
• It also means that you are less likely to totally neglect existing customers because if they churn, it hurts your overall ARR figure.
• Commission is uncapped and paid out based on:
  • X% of ARR for new annual deals sold
  • X% of ARR for expanded annual deals sold
    • This stops overselling in the first year
    • Your quota is based on expansion potential here, not the whole contract
  • X% of ARR for monthly customers
    • We'll factor in your overall change in monthly accounts
  • X% of ARR for monthly customers that convert to annual
    • The % is taken of the whole annual contract
  • 0% of ARR on any overages at the end of an annual contract
    • This is because we don’t do overages in our current model
  • Your specific commission % will depend on your OTE and quota size
• Commission is paid out quarterly, and in any case after an invoice is paid
  • This incentivises securing upfront payment, not just annual contracts with monthly payment every time.
    • If you close an annual contract with monthly/quarterly payments, you will still get recognized for the full commission amount, but the actual payout of your commission will be quarterly.
  • We also don't want AEs to throw invoice chasing to a finance person - you should make friends with the finance person on the customer's side too
  • For monthly customers, commission is only paid after the first 2 invoices have been paid (ie. you don't get commission due to a random spike)
    • To clarify, this means the first 2 invoices the customer has ever paid, ie. you still get commission from 'your' month 1 if you inherit a paying monthly customer
    • Commission is still paid out quarterly even if the customer pays monthly
  • If we have to give a customer a big refund, we’ll deal with your commission on a case by case basis - in the future we may introduce a more formal clawback
  • Commission payments are made at the end of January, April, July, and October - at the end of each quarter, we'll monitor how many invoices actually get paid in the first two weeks of the next quarter. Fraser will send you an email that breaks down your commmission into the above 4 buckets and how you did.
• In your first 3 months you will not have a set quota but are expected to retain your existing book and have closed at least one Medium deal (either totally new or converting an existing customer to annual) - you'll be paid 100% OTE for this period.

Your quota and assigned customers are likely to change slightly from quarter to quarter. In any case, your quota will be amended appropriately (up or down) to account for any movement. We will also be flexible in making changes mid-quarter if it's obviously the sensible thing to do. If you inherit a new account, you have a 3 month grace period - if they churn in that initial period, they won't be counted against your quota.

How contractual bonus works - Technical CSMs

CSMs are responsible for ensuring that a larger book of existing customers - both annual and monthly - continue to use PostHog successfully. They nurture customers and are product experts - this isn't a role of just going back and forth between customers and support engineers, or collecting feedback.

This plan will also almost certainly change as we scale up the size and complexity of our sales machine! As above, we will always ensure folks are treated fairly when we make changes.

Variables

• Your OTE comprises a 90/10 split between base and contractual bonus.
• Bonus is paid based on logo retention above 90%, and is capped at 100%.
  • For example, if you have 90% logo retention, you get 0% of bonus. For 95% retention, it's 50% bonus, and for 100% retention, it's 100% bonus.
• Bonuses are paid out quarterly, and in any case after an invoice is paid
  • Bonus payments are made at the end of January, April, July, and October - at the end of each quarter, we'll monitor how many invoices actually get paid in the first two weeks of the next quarter. Fraser will send you an email that breaks down how you did.
• We count a customer as having been retained in your book if they are still spending > $500/month with us, so if for example you have a customer that was spending $20k+ annually who then scales down to $10/year, they obviously won't count as retained even if they are technically still spending money!

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 and Technical CSMs. 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 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 Max 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.