Sam Blond

“And at Brex, we started with things like activations. So like number of logo customers that we signed up, you know, there are a lot of like SDR incentives that were around like meetings, that sort of thing. The moment that we switched reps and then eventually …”

“What works for 11 Labs at 20 X quota, meaning if you are paying a rep a 100,000 dollars a year, they need to generate two million dollars a year. That works for 11 Labs. It does not mean that we pattern match that to all other startups the way that we might, t…”

“We can adjust it in quarter to you know, make it more motivating for the team. The last thing that you want is like approaching the end of the quarter in reps, like trying to get to 20% of their number, like talk about a depressing sales environment to be in.”

“This Monaco one that Sam Blond did, I mean, they closed seven figures in their first five days and they have 60 days of people lined up”

“Unless they've got like four customer meetings, five customer meetings on their calendar, every single day you don't need more reps. That's not your bottleneck. It's something else.”

“So I think ultimately you are spending far more time leveraging external recruiters because of the process that I just described than if you're able to leverage your personal network and find some people that you know were top performers at a prior company.”

“The best candidates don't really use external recruiters. The best candidates oftentimes want to go somewhere where their reputation precedes them.”

“The result that most people conclude in this environment is we need more sales. We need to hire more salespeople. That is the wrong answer. More salespeople oftentimes will focus on the middle of the funnel. And so if you have a limited number of opportunities…”

“Focusing effort in the form of resources. So people, and then focus on demand instead of on the existing funnel will produce more revenue for the business than focusing on what I would again describe the middle of the funnel conversion rates.”

“I think so many companies focus on generating new customers by focusing directly on those customers, but you already have an army of potential quote unquote salespeople in your happy customer base. And again, like the status quo here is to Thank you, email, no…”

“And my diagnosis or the concept that I recommend here is from day one, be prescriptive on how to buy your product. And as you are introducing a potential customer to your business and product, you're going to do something like show them a product demo, hopeful…”

“Onboarding at Brex and what I would recommend for other folks, onboarding isn't dictated by a period of time. It's not like a 30 day process. Onboarding is a milestone based process. And until a customer is fully onboarded, they're living with that implementat…”

“The reality is the importance of picking the right company it just really defines one's career. I attribute so much of my success to joining the right businesses. Now, like, I was able to perform within those businesses, and, you know, for context, we're talki…”

“The way I start is hire two individual contributor account executives. Those are sales reps. Always start with two.”

“I don't like hiring SDRs prior to hiring a sales leader. Because they need a lot of hands-on management.”

“You should have a handful of non-friends and family revenue-generating customers, and a process that you believe is repeatable in terms of generating more of these customers.”

“If you as the founder cannot close customers and generate revenue people that sort of specialize in sales will definitely not be able to. There is no one better qualified to acquire your first set of customers than you as the founder.”

“Oh, I think the prior company is a really interesting one, because I think what's hard about sell me my company, meaning, you know, let's, let's say you sell me 20 VC, right? You're a 20 VC expert, and I'm not. So, you know how to pitch this product better tha…”

“If the performance isn't there, you sort of default to, okay, what is the effort and the attitude like? And if either are lacking, this is either like a zero time or one time conversation with the person around performance.”

“If you make the right hires, there are metrics that you should start seeing improve almost immediately, regardless of how long the sales cycles are.”

“And I just believe that demand masks a lot of other potential problems and almost all startups. The bottleneck to growing faster is demand. We are constrained by the number of opportunities that we are creating. We are misdiagnosing this as a conversion rate p…”

“Salespeople should absolutely be responsible for controlling their own destiny in a way, generating their own demand that often manifests through outbound. I think this is true on day one. This should be true on day 1000.”

“When we were a relatively mature startup so let's call it 50 to a hundred million dollars of annualized revenue. One of the things that we noticed was that the AEs were sourcing far more of their own revenue than their SDR counterparts.”

“And I've talked about a champagne campaign that I did at Brex where we sent founders a bottle of champagne early on and, you know, congratulated them on a recent fundraise. That's differentiated. It received a ton of responses.”

“At a ten-person startup, Harry, you're the founder, you're gonna be in this meeting, the two sales reps are gonna be in this meeting, and then maybe we have, like, somebody in growth, that person's gonna be in this meeting. So we've got four people in this mee…”

“I think if you are starting a business today, I am very biased towards building the in-person both the, you know, the entire company, but also the sales organization.”

“Today's salespeople have gotten a little bit lazy. And I think they and we, cause I consider myself, you know, part of this community. Couple of things have happened. One, we have become overly dependent on marketing, SDR, anybody to source our own leads. We a…”

“We made decisions based on a spreadsheet. We had a historical data on rep effectiveness in 20, 20 and 20, 21 in finance plugged the number going from 10 reps to 14 reps into the spreadsheet. And the spreadsheet said this was what was going to happen when we go…”

“When we started at Brex, We were a financial tool for smaller companies. We would go after founders because they didn't have finance people just yet. And for more mid-market companies, we could be purchased by folks in finance or accounting. And we generally s…”

“The lowest hanging fruit to influence growth is generating more pipeline. The idea that if you are able, if you think about Splunk at this point is a much more mature business, but for many earlier stage startups, if you just do the math on this, if you're abl…”

“When we actually measured At Brex, when we did a customer onsite, and the conversion rates of customers that received an onsite versus customers that we tried to close inside, and it was three x. The customers that we met in person had three x the conversion r…”

“When we added all of these new SDRs into the mix, not only were they less effective than the more tenured existing reps, they actually made the existing reps far less successful because we had to tap into this TAM base that people were less likely to convert.”

“The outbound one Brex sort of famously did a champagne campaign where we were sending bottles of champagne as part of outbound crazy high reply rates with that. When most folks were going paid online advertising, Brex did paid offline advertising. We had a geo…”

“The bottleneck in four out of five companies that I speak with is opportunity creation. It's demand gen. And this is oftentimes misdiagnosed as conversion rates.”

“What I like to see is something like two new demos every day on a sales reps calendar. And what that means is a sales rep is doing something like Four customer calls every day. So if we think about a sales reps day, there's something like eight hours in the da…”

“Owner.com. Jason introduced me to the company. Jason's an investor. Their bottleneck is implementation. They have a lot of demand. They have a lot of customers that are signing up. And right now it's just taking too long to onboard those folks that are raising…”

“For most companies, AEs really should be sourcing their own revenue. There's almost never going to be this perfect equilibrium where you have exactly the number of demos and opportunities that you're working. That mean that as an AE, you're filling eight hours…”

“He talked about how even Brex, which is, which was still relatively SMB for a long period, how the AE's had to do half of their own deals through outbound, and so he really described, in a way, a full stack AE, right, and people talk about that, and I think th…”

“One of my favorite Parker stories is I joined in late 2013, so my first full year was 2014, and about a quarter in, we were shooting for a revenue target of ten million dollars by the end of the year. We started at something like half a million dollars of ARR.…”

“The advice I always provide, ah, to folks is assuming you're doing sales led growth you wanna have a few paying customers before you hire dedicated salespeople.”

“At Zenefits, I pushed off hiring anyone in this function for too long. I didn't have an appreciation for it.”

“You can really de-risk that through either you know, you're hiring your first two sales reps, put them on a draw for 60 to 90 days, and a draw means pay them their full commission. If you're paying somebody like 150,000 dollars a year, that means that their co…”

“And one thing that is counterintuitive in this environment of layoffs and slow to hiring is that I'm actually seeing more companies looking for a sales leader.”

“I'm not aware of a single miss I, I've seen tons of misses on, we hired from a big company. I haven't seen a single miss where we hired from the hottest tech startup of the sort of last generation. We hired somebody that grew their career there to come in and …”

“First is, like, solve for the quality of company and not OTE especially earlier in your career.”

“Philosophically, the advice that I give to folks is you want 70% of the team over quota. And so if you're defining your success by being your by being over quota, what you're effectively saying is I'm going to be in the top 70%. And that's not that good. There…”

“It's a company that is now valued at something like over eleven billion dollars. That was a valuation as of, like, May of this year, so this is like a fairly current valuation after a lot of the correction.”

“The revenue growth, hundreds of millions of dollars of ARR and so much more, but I know that it was a lot of really hard work to get to where we are today and probably a lot of hard work left as well.”

“Embracing this identity around sort of like fast growing tech company raised a bunch of money. That was a mistake. And I think the right thing to do or what to try and do is associate your company with what you do. Had we been known as, you know, the best heal…”

“At Brex, we changed the quotas from sort of like a revenue-based quota to a like gross margin dollars-based quota.”

“What Rex did, and what I'm recommending to founders, again, depending on the business, let's just say businesses that are less than 70% gross margins, instead of at the all hands and having the headline number be, we're at ten million, a hundred million, whate…”

“Fortunately for Rex in Rex's case, the sales reps were driving several million dollars of top line revenue.”

“I am not seeing much influence on a company's ability to sell their product, to acquire new customers. And I am not hearing, you know, one of the biggest Problems today in our business is that potential customers are cutting budget, and they're not able to buy…”

“Companies are hiring less today. And so the net dollar retention for within a customer base for a company that licenses software and their revenue is sort of directly influenced by the headcount growth or something like that of their customers, that is slowing…”

“When you really need to set your first target is when you have dedicated salespeople who are focused on revenue.”

“Initially, you want to set targets on a monthly cadence. There's no advantage early on to setting, ah, targets that are farther out into the future. You want to set monthly revenue targets.”

“I set the target with 90% confidence that we're able to hit it.”

“Brex launched in June of 2018. We had monthly targets for June, July, August, September, October, November, December. The year of 2019, we switched to quarterly targets. And so we said at the beginning of 2019, where do we want to be in the month of March? Whe…”

“We started these monthly revenue targets in June of 2018. The first target that we missed was November of 2019.”

“Philosophically you want some consistency with those targets, but also you want something like 70% of your sales team over target or over quota.”