Sam Blond
46 statements across 18 episodes · 21 bullish · 9 bearish · 2 people on the record · first statement Mar 18, 2021 by Sam Blond · said 18 times in 10 episodes since 2022 · across every show →
On the record as a speaker too: Sam Blond's record, appearances and statements → this page counts the times other people say the name.
Mentions by year
brought up most by Jason Lemkin (18)
tap a year for its mentions
2026 3 mentions in 1 episode
2025 4 mentions in 3 episodes 1 per episode
- AI, Sales + GTM in 2026: This Changes Everything with Jason Lemkin and Owner CRO Kyle Norton
- What Happens When AI Kills Your SaaS Growth? Live Q&A with SaaStr CEO and Founder Jason Lemkin
- 9 Things You Can Do to Grow Faster This Year with SaaStr CEO and Founder Jason Lemkin
- every mention in 2025, scene by scene →
2024 5 mentions in 3 episodes 2 per episode
2023 4 mentions in 1 episode
Everything said about Sam Blond, oldest first
Mar 18, 2021 positive
Blond: Brex ties 25% of top rep's comp to team performance
“So we just added in addition to managers and in addition to these buddies, we now have a team lead or a coach that is the top performing individual contributor on our team. 25% of his number is now tied to the performance of the team. And because of that, it's…”
Mar 18, 2021 neutral
Mar 28, 2022
Mar 28, 2022 neutral
Blond: Brex shifted from monthly to quarterly and then annual targets
“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…”
Mar 28, 2022 positive
Blond: Achievable targets drive faster growth than aggressive stretch goals
“Your business will actually grow much faster with the winning culture and it's counterintuitive. If you set a target that is higher you may think that that's going to drive more behavior and ultimately drive higher performance from your team. But if you're mis…”
Mar 28, 2022
Mar 28, 2022 positive
Mar 28, 2022
Mar 28, 2022
Oct 27, 2022
Blond: Sub-70% margin companies should report gross profit internally over ARR
“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…”
Oct 27, 2022 bearish
Blond: Headcount slowdowns are compressing SaaS net dollar retention
“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…”
Oct 27, 2022
Oct 27, 2022
Oct 27, 2022 neutral
Blond: 2022 SaaS slowdown not driven by budget cuts on new sales
“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…”
Dec 7, 2022 negative
Blond: Zenefits Erred by Branding Around Fast Growth Rather Than Product
“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…”
Dec 15, 2022 bullish
Dec 15, 2022 bullish
Jan 3, 2023 positive
Blond: Hitting sales quota just places reps in the top 70 percent
“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…”
Jan 3, 2023 positive
Jan 3, 2023 positive
Blond: Hiring promoted leaders from hypergrowth startups yields zero hiring misses
“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 …”
Jan 3, 2023 positive
Jan 27, 2023 positive
Blond: Guaranteed draws during onboarding can make or break sales hiring
“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…”
Apr 5, 2023 negative
May 9, 2023
Jun 27, 2023 positive
Blond: Zenefits raised its 2014 ARR target from $10M to $20M
“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.…”
Jul 12, 2023 negative
Lemkin: Full-stack AE model does not work for most SaaS companies
“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…”
Jul 19, 2023
Sales reps should spend three to four hours daily facing customers
“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…”
Jul 19, 2023 positive
Owner.com's growth bottleneck is customer onboarding, not demand generation
“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…”
Jul 19, 2023
Jul 19, 2023 positive
Account executives must source their own revenue to stay busy
“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…”
Nov 23, 2023 positive
Sam Blond: Brex paired SF billboards with champagne to drive outbound
“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…”
Jan 4, 2024 negative
Blond: Rapidly scaling SDRs at Zenefits tanked performance of existing reps
“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.”
Jan 31, 2024 positive
Blond: In-person sales visits tripled customer conversion rates at Brex
“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…”
Jan 31, 2024 positive
Blond: Doubling sales pipeline is far easier than doubling conversion rates
“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…”
Mar 20, 2024 negative
Sam Blond: Spreadsheet-based sales hiring caused productivity to regress dramatically
“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…”
Mar 20, 2024 positive
Blond: Early Brex SDRs Were Barred From Scheduling Demos Below Director Level
“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…”
Jun 21, 2024 negative
Jun 21, 2024 positive
Blond: Prioritizing demand generation drives more revenue than optimizing conversion rates
“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.”
Jun 21, 2024
Blond: Sales reps must be prescriptive about onboarding paths from day one
“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…”
Jun 21, 2024
Blond: Customer onboarding should be milestone-based rather than time-based
“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…”
Jun 21, 2024 positive
Blond: Companies Should Invest Real Resources in Customer Advocacy Sales Forces
“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…”
Jun 21, 2024 negative
Blond: Hiring More Reps in a Demand-Poor Environment Hurts Conversion
“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…”
Jun 21, 2024 negative
Sam Blond: External Sales Recruiters Take Far More Time Than Network Sourcing
“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.”
Sep 9, 2026 positive
Blond: Switching Brex sales incentives to revenue drove massive per-rep growth
“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 …”
Sep 9, 2026 neutral
Blond: Startups should not blindly copy ElevenLabs' 20x sales quota
“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…”
Sep 9, 2026 positive
Blond: Sales leaders should adjust quotas mid-quarter if reps fall behind
“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.”