Disclosure
Reina: ElevenLabs set a 20x quota-to-base ratio with uncapped commissions
“The entire logic was very simple. It's like, look, if you want to have a base salary of a hundred K, you're going to need to bring two million dollars in revenues every single year, right? You have uncapped commissions. It's like OTE out of the gate is going t…”
What-if
Reina: ElevenLabs would have neared $1B ARR with earlier senior sales hiring
“And I think those two items, if we had done it much sooner, then for instance, we would have already passed a billion dollars in revenue, for instance, right? Or like getting close to that billion dollars in revenues.”
Disclosure
Reina: ElevenLabs paid zero sales commissions on POCs, only recurring revenue
“For us, we established that like we would compensate, we pay commissions on recurrent revenue contracts, but not in one offs. So if you sign a POC and you pay for like two months or like three months or like two weeks, you would not Get any commission on that.…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Reina: ElevenLabs account executives achieve 300% to 600% quota attainment
“To this point in time right now, like three and a half years in after I started selling the first product, I can tell you we have like account execs doing 600% quota. We have account execs and it's not uncommon. We have account execs doing like a lot of them d…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Reina: ElevenLabs GTM team averages 167% quarterly quota attainment
“The average quote attainment on a per quarter basis is across the entire go-to-market team is a 167% every single quarter.”
Insight
Reina: LLMs struggle in sales because they only produce within-distribution results
“I do still believe that, like, AI agents are not that good today actually at doing something that is very relationship driven. But they're getting much better at it, right? So, like, the problem is when you look at LLMs, they look at the distribution site, and…”
Assertion Supported
Reina: ElevenLabs scaled from $0 to over $600M ARR in 41 months
“And when you look at the stats, for instance, we went from Zero to a hundred million dollars in ARR in 20 months. Then we went from a hundred to two hundred million dollars in another 10 months. Then we went from 200 to three hundred and thirty million in anot…”
Insight
Reina: GTM teams must test 100 ideas because one hit yields $100M ARR
“I always used to tell the team all the time, I only need, you need to test a hundred things. I only need one of those 100 things to actually work to give me another hundred million dollars in ARR, right? I only need one. I don't need five. I don't need 20. I n…”
Insight
Reina: Startups scale GTM faster by hiring experienced enterprise salespeople
“I think, like, this common understanding among starters, you want to hire young people that are hungry, that are very driven, energetic, and all of that stuff, but it also means, like, you're starting most of the time from scratch, tackling, like, tackling com…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Reina says he told reps $1M ARR added $33M to valuation
“And I used to people, for the one million dollars in revenues that you bring, it's around thirty-three million dollars in extra valuation for the business.”
Opinion
Reina: Closing large enterprise deals requires meeting clients in their offices
“Selling is a relationship problem. Like you're not going to be able to sign a big deal. With a company, if you don't go and camp in their offices, if you don't meet them, if you don't actually like understand the problems, the constraints, the concerns, all of…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Reina: ElevenLabs gave tens of thousands of grants to capture market demand
“We ended up giving, like, tens of thousands of grants in a very short time frame that essentially pulled all of the demand from the market into 11 apps, and we used that as an excuse to also later on upsell them.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Reina: Over 10% of ElevenLabs' enterprise revenue came from startup grants
“So for a very, very long time, like, over 10% of the enterprise revenues that we're generating Were essentially coming from the Grants program.”
Disclosure
Reina: ElevenLabs used AI CSMs for long-tail upsells while crediting human reps
“By having an AI customer success manager to focus on the app sales for the long-tail account, like the SMBs and the mid-markets, we could actually automatically unlock revenues and we will pay commissions to, like, the account owner of those companies, right?”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Reina: For nine months at ElevenLabs, only one person sold enterprise
“For the first nine months of 11 Labs after launching the first product, it was only myself selling to enterprises, like literally, right?”
