Every startup has a founder’s commission spreadsheet
Every startup makes one. Returnflows’ version was better than most: a Google Sheet fed by Zapier from HubSpot, a tab per month, a formula for the accelerator. For the first sales hire it was the whole deal: this is how you will be paid.
It worked, mostly.
But a deal stage got renamed, and the number was wrong for two weeks
A stage in HubSpot was renamed. A Zap failed silently. The first sales hire’s commission was wrong for two weeks before anyone noticed, and fixing it meant a founder spending evenings in a spreadsheet instead of selling.
The hours were bad. The moment of telling a new colleague their commission had been wrong was worse. More tooling would only have added more things that could break quietly.
“We’d set up a new hire’s commission in a Google Sheet, wired to HubSpot through Zapier. It still didn’t work.”
Jeppe Østergaard Hansen, Co-founder
So they replaced the pipeline of tools with a plan that reads HubSpot directly
Prowi connected to HubSpot in the first call and the plan was live the same day. There is nothing to maintain between the deal and the number: when the stage moves in HubSpot, the commission moves in the app.
The rep got what founders rarely think to offer a first hire: the same live view of their earnings a big-company sales team has, on a phone, with a notification when a deal lands.
“We connected HubSpot on the first call and the plan was live before the call ended.”
Jeppe Østergaard Hansen, Co-founder, Returnflows
Which makes the second hire a setting, not a project
Returnflows is hiring more sales people. Each one is a plan setting in Prowi with their own target and start date, and the founders have not opened Zapier since.
The story is small, which is the point. Commission is one of the first things a growing company gets wrong, and it does not have to be.
“It moves when the deal moves. That’s all the rep ever wanted, and all we wanted too.”