SetSail nabs $26M Collection A to rethink gross sales compensation – TechCrunch

SetSail aims to improve the way sales reps are compensated by paying them throughout the sales cycle, rather than a single commission after the sale is complete. Today the startup announced a Series A worth $ 26 million.

Insight Partners led the round with the participation of the existing investors Wing Venture Capital, Team8 and Operator Collective. Today’s investment brings in a total of $ 37 million, according to the company.

SetSail connects to your CRM, email, calendar and other systems that contain signals about the progress of a particular sale and then uses machine learning to examine points in the sales cycle where it would make sense to contact the seller for to reward the progress he has made in manufacturing.

As CEO and co-founder Haggai Levi told me at the time of the startup’s $ 7 million startup round in July, the system advises the individual commission against taking risks:

“If I close the deal, I’ll get my commission. If I don’t close the deal, I won’t get anything. That said, from a behavioral point of view, I would take the shortest route possible to win a deal and take the minimal risk possible. So if there is a competitive situation I will try to avoid it, ”he said in July.

He said the idea of ​​changing the way we think about compensation caught on with sales reps during the pandemic, especially when everyone’s role changed and teams were distributed due to COVID, but he said that Rethinking compensation was certainly a big factor, as was SetSail’s ability to connect to all sales systems to develop these new approaches to payment.

“I think it even goes beyond compensation. […] It also connects to all of your data through an end-to-end platform that helps you understand what is happening between you, your employees, and your customers, and enables you to conduct behavioral research with a machine learning-based one Link remuneration. ” explained.

The company started 2020 with five customers, a reasonable start for an early startup, but ended the year with more than 20, including Cisco, Dropbox, and HubSpot. It now has over 5000 salespeople using the platform.

Despite the growing number of users, Levi has no plans to aggregate data and leaves each customer’s data different in order to create the compensation packages that make sense for them. “We’re trying not to play a data and aggregator role because we want to make sure that each customer’s data is encrypted and secured in a completely different container. The trade-off between getting knowledge between customers and receiving their data is too high in our opinion, ”he said.

The company now has 35 employees, with five more to be hired, starting in the next few weeks, with plans to reach 70 by the end of the year. They think hard about how to hire a diverse workforce. For starters, Levi says the company’s board of directors has two female members. He says that hiring is a challenge for any CEO in general, especially early on, and hiring a diverse group even more so, but he says it’s important to think about it from the start because you’re at least half of it from a gender perspective lose the talent pool if you ignore it.

When the pandemic is over, he will see that despite being spread across San Francisco, New York, and Tel Aviv, he will have at least some personal office presence, but it will likely be a hybrid approach and not require as much office space as you could before COVID rented.