The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 165 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 1 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
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…”
Blond: San Francisco Still Retains Unique Tech Talent Density
“All of that migration built in, there is still a unique talent density in San Francisco, unlike any other place.”
Blond: Growth-stage venture investing is nearly nonexistent in late 2022
“On the growth stage side many of the best companies raised a lot of money last year, and given what's happened in the public markets, it's difficult to justify, certainly an up round and maybe even the valuations at which, Those businesses raised, and many of …”
Blond: VC quality bar was definitionally lowered in 2021
“I think generally speaking almost definitionally, the bar was lowered. There were, there was so much more capital being deployed in so many more companies last year compared to this year at every stage.”
Blond: Market correction is healthy by redistributing talent to winning companies
“I would argue, That this, let's call it a correction that is happening right now is probably healthy for the ecosystem broadly, because you know, there are likely great people at some of these companies that aren't going to make it and so distributing some of …”
Blond: Brex shifted sales quotas to gross margin dollars
“At Brex, we changed the quotas from sort of like a revenue-based quota to a like gross margin dollars-based quota.”
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…”
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…”
Blond: Domain experience is largely irrelevant when hiring tech sales leaders
“The reality is, I think that with few exceptions, the domain experience largely becomes irrelevant over time. And Smart people learn businesses. And so actually solving for like a track record of performance into quality hire over someone with this specific ty…”
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…”
Blond: Brex pegs sales compensation to local cost of living
“We work with our people team and they have different cities and they peg them based off of a It's all cost of living related. And so you mentioned if there is an AE in San Francisco with a 250,000 dollar comp band, what we do is if we're hiring them in Denver,…”
Blond: Brex scales accelerators by percentage, paying higher nominal dollars in SF
“When people overperform, an extra 10% is 10% on each of those. So if somebody gets an accelerator at the 250,000, they may make two 75, and in Denver they make two two 20. So it's 10% of what your salary is and not necessarily the hard dollar value. So the per…”
Blond: Referral hiring lowers risk through mentorship but hurts diversity
“The person that makes the referral really takes that person under their wing and makes sure that they're successful. We get the reflection on them and like all of these positive, I think or not, I think I'm pretty certain that it doesn't help diversity.”
Blond: Remote early-stage teams miss out on critical spontaneous problem-solving
“There is so much value to having the early team be in an office together. I think not just developing relationships, but also the, like, You know, eight o'clock at night, everybody's still in the office. Oh, this thing came up. Let's all jump in the room and w…”
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 …”
Sales Teams Must Adopt AI for Demand Gen to Stay Competitive
“These three different steps here, score my database for me, overlay intent signals on top of my score database. And then tell me what I should do to break into these accounts based off of the information that exists in these scores and intent signals. Models a…”
Sam Blond Predicts Unified Platforms Will Consolidate AI Sales Tools
“I think there will be a sort of like unified platform that comes together that takes all of these sort of disparate piecemeal processes and basically combines them. So you can effectively say like, this is my TAM. I want meetings. And the output can be, these …”
Blonde: Having the same top problems for consecutive quarters signals failure
“If I were to list our top two or three problems, it's the same top two or three problems that we had like a quarter or two ago. That's not okay. And so that was my big takeaway as you were sort of like re answering the same question through the lens of today v…”
Blonde: Brex AE-sourced outbound generated exponentially higher ACVs than SDR-sourced pipeline
“The AE sourced opportunities converted at a significantly higher rate to customers, and they generated far more revenue. So the ACV of AE sourced outbound opportunities was significantly, almost exponentially higher than the SDR sourced opportunities.”
Blond: Salesforce and Outreach Are Merely Reactive Data Repositories
“My experience with these systems is I would describe them as like reactive data repositories where when you buy Salesforce or when you buy Golong or when you buy outreach, it really requires the user to input data and instruct the system what to do. And much o…”
Blond: AI Cannot Replace Human Creativity in Bespoke Sales Campaigns
“I don't think that a, I can yet replace like the creativity that I see in one-off campaigns. And I think about some of the most effective campaigns that I have Produced myself or observed different companies making. These are like humans coming up with somethi…”
Blond: Automation Tools Increased Rather Than Decreased SDR Headcount by 2020
“The size of the SDR teams in 20, 20, many years after these products were introduced was significantly greater than the sort of like size or investment made in SDR in 2012 when they first came to market, something like that.”
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…”
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…”
Blond: Implementation Is Your Only Guaranteed Window for Customer Attention
“Implementation is this Point in time and only one point in time occurrence where you have the attention of the customer and the opportunity to get them to take the actions that you believe will make them more successful as a customer. It's really difficult to …”
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…”
Blond: Never scale marketing or sales headcount before establishing efficiency
“You don't scale either of those channels or people until you are happy with the efficiency of those people and processes.”
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…”
Startups should always hire two salespeople or SDRs simultaneously
“When you're hiring your first sales person or your first SDR, you should always hire two.”
Startups should hire a director-level leader as their first marketing hire
“When you hire your first marketing person, don't hire somebody really junior. You should hire someone in the, we could say director level or above something like that, but someone that can come in And operate in an environment with ambiguity where they know wh…”
Blond: 80% of Brex's revenue came from outbound sales
“About 80% of Brex's revenue came from sales outbound.”
Blond: Billboards significantly increase outbound email reply rates
“The probability of people replying to an email after they had seen our billboards and knew what we did Was significantly higher than the probability of somebody who has no idea who we are or what we do replying to an email that they received.”
Top-of-funnel SDR quotas drive quantity while down-funnel quotas drive quality
“The way that I think about this is the further up the funnel you go, which sales qualified opportunity is towards the top, what you are solving for is more quantity over quality. And the further down the funnel you make the SDR performance measurement, like wh…”
Sam Blond: In 80% of SaaS companies, the bottleneck is pipeline
“Most folks sort of gravitate to or diagnose the bottleneck to growing faster being the middle or the bottom of the funnel, that they aren't converting deals. And in four out of five instances the real diagnosis is that it's actually the top of the funnel.”
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…”
Most SaaS businesses missed their H1 2023 revenue targets
“We missed the revenue targets that we projected in like Q four of last year, where we thought we would perform in 20, 23. I think that's probably more common than not for SAS businesses in the first half of this year.”
80% of SaaS companies misdiagnose demand bottlenecks as conversion issues
“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.”
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…”
Rippling gifts $25 to high-NPS users who post on LinkedIn
“And what they do is they give an NPS survey At the end of that onboarding. So when I joined Founder's Fund, I onboarded to Rippling. And the NPS survey, I mark it, whatever I mark it, based off of my experience onboarding, I probably marked it a 10. And then I…”
Brex's SF billboards significantly boosted outbound email reply rates
“That was really effective, and it was also really helpful with our outbound, because when we sent an outbound email to somebody whose headquarters was in downtown San Francisco, the probability of them replying was significantly greater, because they had seen …”
Blonde: Senior sales leaders must be expected to recruit in-network talent
“When you hire a senior sales leader, there should be some expectation that that senior sales leader has the ability to source, recruit, and hire people in network that have a low risk of success and high probability of, or low risk of failure, high probability…”
Blonde: Top Founders Spend High Percentage of Time Customer-Facing
“So many of the best founders at the best companies spend a high percentage of their time customer facing. And that happens on day one and it happens on day 1000.”
Blond: Grant equity to customer champions who act as standalone advisors
“If this person wasn't a customer, would they make for a good advisor? And if the answer is yes, then make them an advisor as a customer and compensate them with that equity.”
Blond: Founders hiring early AEs should tap personal networks over job postings
“When you're ready to hire your first IE, leverage your network, whether it's former colleagues, friends, investors like, you know, don't gravitate towards putting a job posting on your website and seeing who's sort of like, Comes in.”
Sam Blond: Acquire paying customers before hiring dedicated sales reps
“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.”
Blond: Startups should hire their first RevOps leader at 2-8 sales reps
“The company is two to eight sales reps, which is maybe the range with which I would suggest making this higher, you know, any, anywhere between two and eight.”