Reina: Startups scale GTM faster by hiring experienced enterprise salespeople
Carles Reina · CRO Confidential: 0 to $600M in Under 4 Years. The ElevenLabs GTM Playbook with Carles Reina · Sep 9, 2026 · at 15:18
Former ElevenLabs VP of Revenue Carles Reina reflects on go-to-market scaling mistakes and organizational lessons while discussing sales strategy with host Sam Blond.
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“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 companies, when, in fact, you could go much quicker on the go-to-market side by having a lot more very senior people and having a mix of it, right? So people with 20 years experience In your teams that come with a lot of connections that have been selling for the past 15 years, and they know when you talk to a specific company, they know the procurement people, all of the stuff is a more of a relationship problem item that you can essentially factor in by having very senior people in the team, right?”
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More from Carles Reina
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“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…”
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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.…”
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“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…”
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“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…”