Building a Sales Team That Can Go from $0-$50M with Algolia
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The document outlines the evolution of sales tactics and challenges across various revenue stages, from YC to $1.2M ARR to $20M+, detailing employee growth and key strategies implemented. It emphasizes the importance of anticipating future skills needs, the necessity for early hiring of sales operations and leadership, and the impact of company size on go-to-market strategies. Additionally, it discusses mistakes made, such as delays in forming customer success teams and the unexpected challenges posed by personal circumstances of sales representatives.
Building a Sales Team That Can Go from $0-$50M with Algolia
- 2. Sales Tactics and Challenges at Different Revenue Stages YC to $1.2M ARR $1M – $10M $10M - $20M $20M+ Dates 2014 2015 - 2016 2017 2018- Today Employees 4 to 10 employees 1 sales person From 10 to 70 employees by end of 2016 From 70 to 150 by end of 2017 From 150 to 350 employees Best Thing Sales Did • US Phone Number • Get on planes • 5-figure deals • First 6 figure ACV • Started to create segments and specialize roles (SMB, MM, Ent, BDR) • Built new revenue functions (CSM, Partner, etc.) • Territory implementation Thing You Wish You Did Earlier (aka, Walls You are Likely to Hit) • We started the CSM team too late, same for Sales Ops (I was the Sales Ops person until 10M ARR). • Implement SFDC earlier • In our hiring, anticipate the needs 12 – 18 months ahead in terms of skills, especially in leadership (a 10M quota sales leader is very different than a 20M quota one) • Deeper TAM understanding • Scale an enablement function • GTM per territory (territory planning, account mapping). • More playbooks and processes for better predictability Mistakes/Broken Things • Hiring a good San Francisco resume • Hire a GC early: was pretty much the legal person on deals until end of Q1 2017 • Didn’t anticipate the reps having babies would impact our sales capacity… (anecdote that actually had an impact) • Around 30-40M, GTM needs to adapt, especially as you go upmarket. Inbound can’t feed your sales cap. anymore, need other sources of pipeline and you need to anticipate building the support org for it
- 3. Major Breaking Points • 50 people – gossip • 60 – 100 people – mgmt layer • 300 people/$40M revenue • GTM changes • Outbound driven • Enterprise • Growing up • Coding everything • Salary transparency spreadsheet;P
- 4. Hiring and Team Building • First sales people • BDRs • Mid-market reps • Managers • Enterprise reps • Sales engineers? • Recruiters? • Interview process • Firing
Editor's Notes
- #3: 50 people gossip. Create a communication cadence Threats: 60 – 100 culture shock, no mgmt. 4 execs and rest of company, some mgmt. How we positioned some topics Second threat – 300 - $40M in ARR, go to market changes, outbound driven, pipeline generation starts to complexify, more enterprise, more adult, Twilio, Fastly went through it Playbooks, intelligence of a few individuals made the company, have to put on paper, enablement Curse of talented, smart people – feed the fire, how to operationalize, build a plan for next 12 months, define the roles that you have open, allen moved to enablement – first one doing these ops Connect with folks in the future, former CRO of Tableau, rep 12 and great it to $800M ARR What are the walls I’m going to hit, what do I don’t know today that I should be aware of – too many cooks in the kitchen on one account 300 would be a nightmare, anticipating what you don’t know from others Initial hires – coach them on the same process, continue on the same process - humility in values – suck at the future Things will always go wrong and do damage control – example, quite early build a team of BDRs – gonna have an HR problem – keep under control Top down sales growth, sales capacity, attrition, delicate
- #5: Idea here is to rapid fire tips and tricks and lessons for each of these characters we talked about in our discussion such as ratio not hiring too many BDRs because you’ll have HR issues – time permitting
- #6: Time permitting, can explain high level and where the model tends to be off in the beginning and now.
- #7: Also time permitting. A good photo here or bullets would work. Think it will interesting to the audience. Or how to sell to the US not from the US.