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A Sales Rep is Fighting for His $1.1M in Missing Sales Commissions

A former top sales rep is suing the fintech unicorn Rapyd, claiming the company owes him over $1.1 million in unpaid commission.

May 21, 2024

Good Morning and Happy National Memo Day! In honor of this prestigious holiday, we think it’s a great time to re-brand cold emails to ‘memos’. Sending out cold emails today? Nope. We’ll be sending out important memos to all of our prospects, making them aware of why they should buy our product. Much better. 😃 

In today’s Follow Up:

  • Suing for $1M in missing commission 💰️ 

  • Sales email tip of the day 💡 

  • Sales news around the internet 🖥️ 🗞️ 

  • Sales jobs, job market & a meme 😂 

$1M in Missing Commissions

A former top sales rep is suing the fintech unicorn Rapyd, claiming the company owes him over $1.1 million in unpaid commission.

And as you’d expect, Rapyd is fighting back, accusing the ex-employee of shady tactics to inflate his commissions.

The battle for commissions has been going on for almost 2 years now, and the story keeps getting better.

So as your sales bestie, we had to do some digging and break it all down.

Here’s the deets:

The Background 👀 

Rapyd is a global payments company with explosive growth in the past few years. As of July 2023, the company is valued at $8.3 billion, with more than $806M in funding.

Most sales reps at the company are paid commissions on the new accounts they bring to the payment provider, as well as a small % of their transactions.

However, when those transaction volumes get to be large amounts, so do the commissions…

The Claim 💰

In total, the ex-sales rep says the company owes him over $1.1M in unpaid commissions, stemming from two different deals.

For the first deal, the ex-sales rep says he brought in a client by the name of Funding Societies, which processed over $216M in transactions. As per Rapyd's compensation plan, the rep says they're owed 0.1% on that transaction, meaning a $216K commission check.

Rapyd's CEO, Arik Shtilman, argues the Funding Societies deal was brought in with a "company team selling approach" combined with a VC investment by Rapyd Ventures, which makes it ineligible for the same commission payout.

In the second deal, the sales rep claims that they are owed commissions from two accounts they brought in that had transactions totaling $934M.

But again… the CEO has a different explanation.

According to the company’s CEO, the two clients were participating in a shady tactic called ‘round-tripping’, in which they moved money between their own accounts, not actual business transactions, which is something the compensation plan doesn't cover commissions for.

And once again, the ex-sales rep fired back saying they were legit transactions using Rapyd's treasury products to manage global money flows, which Rapyd facilitated.

Negotiations 🤜 🤛 

Talks to resolve the $1.1M dispute broke down after months of negotiations in late 2022.

The ex-staffer claims the CEO verbally agreed to pay full commissions for the Funding Societies deal during an August meeting. The CEO denies that, saying it must have been a "misunderstanding" and no resolution was reached.

And with negotiations at a standstill, the legal battle continues in court…

Have you ever been stiffed on sales commission?

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Sales Tip of The Day 💡 

Never use the phrase 'never heard back’ in your follow-up emails.

According to a Gong study, using the phrase leads to a 14% decrease in meetings booked.

Instead, try following up by adding value with additional information or social proof.

Sales Around The Web 🗞️ 

✍️ A sales coach says the key to a good subject line is to make it short, sweet, personalized, and related to the problem.

🤖 Someone tested the new GPT-4o against the older AI models and found that previous models write better cold emails.

💻️ The PhD co-founder of Databricks says that he didn’t value sales when he first started the company, but now realizes it’s every founder’s job.

🍕 A sales team broke their company record for sales targets by 25%, and their reward was 7 Domino’s pizzas.

Cool Sales Jobs 💼 

Checking In On The Job Market

Would you take a 6AM Saturday interview? 🤔 

Sales Meme of the Day

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