How to layer payroll into your go-to-market motion

You are now ready to layer your initial payroll GTM into your existing GTM motion. Our goal is to provide you with an out of the box payroll GTM motion that is battle-tested so you can seamlessly integrate that into your existing motion without adding material friction to your core sale.

There are three natural points in the customer journey to sell payroll:

To maximize your chances of selling payroll, you may be inclined to sell payroll at all three of these potential entry points. But there are aspects that are specific to payroll sales that, even for the smallest, least complicated customers, may challenge that assumption.

Payroll is a technical product. Selling payroll efficiently requires a wide breadth and depth of knowledge around complex topics such as tax jurisdictions, money movement, and benefits. Not every seller on your team will be well-positioned to handle these topics, at least out of the gate. Additionally, even if you have the most experienced individuals selling, the payroll sale can elongate your core sales motion by introducing material additional complexity.

With only one exception noted below, Check recommends that your initial GTM motion for payroll focuses on cross-selling via Onboarding (#2) and cross-selling via Success (#3). This means that your Customer Success Representatives should be the initial team in charge of selling payroll to your customers.

On personnel, we recommend that you start with payroll only being sold by your highest performing CS reps. Those individuals will be your payroll “specialists”, meaning they will be the only people who can build up the payroll case with a prospect, demo your product, present pricing, and close a sale. For the remainder of the CS reps (as well as Sales reps), who we call “generalists”, we recommend you arm them with a one-pager on the key benefits of payroll and train them to do light qualification to pass warm, qualified payroll leads to the payroll specialist CS reps.

This model ensures that you get a lot of concentrated feedback on the payroll sales motion from your best performers and allows you to expand your payroll salesforce over time as you have worked out any kinks in the initial motion. Additionally, to incentivize the generalists to speak about payroll and do qualification, we recommend that you pay them 20% of the commission for qualifying a lead that ultimately goes live, with the remainder of the 80% going to the specialist.

For greater detail on what this motion looks like, please see our Payroll GTM Motion Whimsical flow diagram. Note that this is a shared resource, so if you wish to use this and edit it, please make a copy.

One exception: This applies only to partners for which both of the following are true:

For such partners, Check recommends that your initial GTM motion for payroll is focused on New Sales via Sales (#1) and Cross-sell via Success (#3). This means that your Sales Representatives should be the initial team in charge of selling payroll to your prospective customers, with Customer Success Representatives selling to high intent customers. On personnel, we recommend that all Sales and Customer Success Representatives be trained and fully equipped to sell payroll.

For greater detail on what this motion looks like, please see our Payroll GTM Motion Whimsical flow diagram. Note that this is a shared resource, so if you wish to use this and edit it, please make a copy.