Not worth it. Go someplace else. - "Sales" Collaborata Employee Review

It's a family-run start-up. They offer $0 base salary, high commission percentages and progressive escalators, “equity” in the company, and no benefits. They have been trying for several years to get VC funding which in theory would provide for some kind of base salary and actual equity but they seem far from getting a lead investor. The problem with this 100% commission gig is they don't pay any commissions until the client pays their invoice. In practice, months pass before a salesperson will earn anything. If you've ever sold custom projects, they can take a while to develop the larger more profitable deals. In the case of Collaborata, the sales cycle is even longer. You spend months trying to find and develop a custom research concept that has to be researched by a third-party research company... that has to agree to Collaborata's terms. When you pass that hurdle, then you have to find two or more companies that have: 1. identified the same or similar information gap, 2. have a flexible time frame to start the project AND receive the deliverables, and 3. money has been budgeted to "buy" into these unexpected projects. Assuming you find two or more companies with interest, they have to agree on the semi-custom scope, be willing to share the cost, willing to share insights, trust how their collaborators will use that information, and trust Collaborata won't sell the same project to a direct competitor. It's a very manual, opaque process with no technology to help with match-making or trust-building. Once a project is "funded", meaning invoices have been sent but the clients haven't paid, then the project kicks off. Depending on the complexity of the project, another 2-6 months will pass for the research to be done by the third-party research firm. Once it is delivered and assuming they are happy with the project, then another 30-60-90+ more days could pass for the client to pay, depending on invoice terms and payment delays. In practice, when it came time to submit commissions on projects that had launched, I was told they would not pay commissions "in advance" and it was a "risk" their start-up wasn't willing to take. What was worse, when the >>clients<< delayed their payments, the family declared that sales were only "earned" in the month when the client paid. The implication: at the end of the sales year, when clients were late on their payments, the commission escalators reset for the new sales year. That meant they would only pay at the lower commission rate instead of the higher rates in the months when the projects were actually sold and invoiced.