YouSaid · the spoken record

Sam Blond

lines on the record: 76
first: 2024-04-12
most recent: 2024-04-12
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Harry, I appreciate the invite so much. I've had a blast as I always do. And let's hang out in person. I'll be in London early June and I expect to see you and spend some time together then.”
2024-04-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: The Biggest Sales Lessons Scaling Brex to $400M ARR, Why Startups are Doing Outbound Wrong and How to Fix It & Why Demand Gen is the Bottleneck for all Startups and How to Solve it with Sam Blond, Former CRO @ Brex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's really insightful and smart. And there are so many of these things that just apply beyond what we're describing around here, but like the little things can go a long way.”
2024-04-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: The Biggest Sales Lessons Scaling Brex to $400M ARR, Why Startups are Doing Outbound Wrong and How to Fix It & Why Demand Gen is the Bottleneck for all Startups and How to Solve it with Sam Blond, Former CRO @ Brex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My experience with many salespeople today, and you know, we've talked a little bit about this remote environment that I think has had influence. But I think today's salespeople have gotten a little bit lazy. And I think they and we, because I consider myself part of this community, couple things have happened. One, we have become overly dependent.”
2024-04-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: The Biggest Sales Lessons Scaling Brex to $400M ARR, Why Startups are Doing Outbound Wrong and How to Fix It & Why Demand Gen is the Bottleneck for all Startups and How to Solve it with Sam Blond, Former CRO @ Brex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you are a mature business and you've gone remote, that's tough to put that back in the bottle. Genie's out. I think if you are starting a business today, I am very biased towards building in person. Both the entire company, but also the sales organization”
2024-04-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: The Biggest Sales Lessons Scaling Brex to $400M ARR, Why Startups are Doing Outbound Wrong and How to Fix It & Why Demand Gen is the Bottleneck for all Startups and How to Solve it with Sam Blond, Former CRO @ Brex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Days of working from home, doing Zooms only to meet with customers, not meeting customers and developing personal relationships those days, I think are going to be a thing of the past, if not already.”
2024-04-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: The Biggest Sales Lessons Scaling Brex to $400M ARR, Why Startups are Doing Outbound Wrong and How to Fix It & Why Demand Gen is the Bottleneck for all Startups and How to Solve it with Sam Blond, Former CRO @ Brex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There too, we talked about one this spring and praying of emails, especially at an early stage, I think is something of the past. The second thing that comes to mind is people are going to start meeting their customers in person again. You know, pre-2020, a lot of customer interactions happened in person. And then 2020 hit, people went remote. And I think, you know, we have not returned to an environment where we are meeting our customers in versions we're meeting our prospects in person. And I think that today, if you're doing that, it's a real competitive advantage. But I think forward-looking, this idea that we never are going to meet our customers in person, we're just going to return to the norm here. We measured conversion rates at BREX when we met a customer in person, we had 3x the likelihood of closing that deal. And if we didn't. And so like the...”
2024-04-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: The Biggest Sales Lessons Scaling Brex to $400M ARR, Why Startups are Doing Outbound Wrong and How to Fix It & Why Demand Gen is the Bottleneck for all Startups and How to Solve it with Sam Blond, Former CRO @ Brex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think where people make mistakes and salespeople in particular make mistakes is like just defaulting to discounting. This is something that happens very late in a deal and it happens with a very clear trade-off, which is driving urgency to close.”
2024-04-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: The Biggest Sales Lessons Scaling Brex to $400M ARR, Why Startups are Doing Outbound Wrong and How to Fix It & Why Demand Gen is the Bottleneck for all Startups and How to Solve it with Sam Blond, Former CRO @ Brex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, with qualifications, early stage startup, if I can describe the environment that I prefer to be in, it's something like we are perceived as the premium product, both because of the quality of our product, but also the price point with which we sell the better product. And I have the ability to discount that product to accelerate deal cycles. So much of sales is psychology. And if you're a buyer, the feeling of getting a good deal drives behavior. You know, there's a saying here, time kills all deals, especially in the early days if providing a discount does things like accelerates deal cycles, prevents people from looking at competitors, and allows you to move on to another opportunity. I do like leveraging it in certain.”
2024-04-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: The Biggest Sales Lessons Scaling Brex to $400M ARR, Why Startups are Doing Outbound Wrong and How to Fix It & Why Demand Gen is the Bottleneck for all Startups and How to Solve it with Sam Blond, Former CRO @ Brex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Here's maybe the glass is half full way of thinking about this is something like not 100% of your really creative or crazy ideas are going to land. And I think it's better to have tried than not tried at all. Something like that. You know, so maybe even like celebrate the failures in a way.”
2024-04-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: The Biggest Sales Lessons Scaling Brex to $400M ARR, Why Startups are Doing Outbound Wrong and How to Fix It & Why Demand Gen is the Bottleneck for all Startups and How to Solve it with Sam Blond, Former CRO @ Brex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you were in some of the exec meetings where we discussed it, you might have been like, this is going to be great, but it was.”
2024-04-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: The Biggest Sales Lessons Scaling Brex to $400M ARR, Why Startups are Doing Outbound Wrong and How to Fix It & Why Demand Gen is the Bottleneck for all Startups and How to Solve it with Sam Blond, Former CRO @ Brex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's two costs there's the hard costs hundreds of thousands if not low millions of dollars when all is said and done in terms of remodeling the restaurant, the rent, just everything that goes into it. But Harry, it's the opportunity cost that was so much higher. It is hard to run a restaurant. It takes resources from whoever we put in charge of running the restaurant. They have to hire people. They have to manage those people. That was the biggest mistake that we made at Brexit.”
2024-04-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: The Biggest Sales Lessons Scaling Brex to $400M ARR, Why Startups are Doing Outbound Wrong and How to Fix It & Why Demand Gen is the Bottleneck for all Startups and How to Solve it with Sam Blond, Former CRO @ Brex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And Harry, running a restaurant is hard. It's also expensive. It is distracting. And, you know, in hindsight, that was a big mistake. We should have focused on building a credit card company using our dollars to acquire things like customers and not remodeling a hundred year old restaurant that was in dire need of a remodel.”
2024-04-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: The Biggest Sales Lessons Scaling Brex to $400M ARR, Why Startups are Doing Outbound Wrong and How to Fix It & Why Demand Gen is the Bottleneck for all Startups and How to Solve it with Sam Blond, Former CRO @ Brex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, Rex is a corporate card, a credit card. And if you think about American Express was our biggest competitor when we first launched. We were mostly taking market share from American Express folks that used their business or corporate card. And American Express is really famous for airport lounges. You know, they've got these like centurion lounges at a bunch of airports. And around the same time, Capital One was launching these capital one cafes. And we decided at a very early stage. We were less than 100 employees. We decided that we were going to open a restaurant and lounge. And so we opened in South Park in San Francisco. We opened a Brex lounge on top of South Park cafe, which was a restaurant.”
2024-04-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: The Biggest Sales Lessons Scaling Brex to $400M ARR, Why Startups are Doing Outbound Wrong and How to Fix It & Why Demand Gen is the Bottleneck for all Startups and How to Solve it with Sam Blond, Former CRO @ Brex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the campaign cost something like $300,000 over three months. We were everywhere. That just made everything easier for us. You know, we talked about outbounding. I can't tell you the number of responses to our outbound emails that were I see your billboards everywhere. And they probably don't respond to the email in the first place if they don't see our billboards everywhere. So one, customer acquisition became so much easier because of the brand awareness from that campaign. But where he goes bigger than that, like in fundraising became easier because of that campaign. We sort of became famous because of this billboard campaign that we were all over San Francisco. And so for $300,000 it was really effective.”
2024-04-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: The Biggest Sales Lessons Scaling Brex to $400M ARR, Why Startups are Doing Outbound Wrong and How to Fix It & Why Demand Gen is the Bottleneck for all Startups and How to Solve it with Sam Blond, Former CRO @ Brex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so the most successful campaign, and I'll be break specific, the most successful campaign we did at Brex was the billboards. I think it's the type of thing where our mind share within our target buyer went from zero. When Brex launched in twenty eighteen, when I joined Brex, we didn't have a website. I went to the website and it said coming soon. We had no PR. We didn't announce any of our funding rounds. We were in stealth. So it was almost impossible for our target market to know who Brex was. So, you know, market mind share of Brex was like near zero. And when we launched, we did a bunch of things, including announcing.”
2024-04-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: The Biggest Sales Lessons Scaling Brex to $400M ARR, Why Startups are Doing Outbound Wrong and How to Fix It & Why Demand Gen is the Bottleneck for all Startups and How to Solve it with Sam Blond, Former CRO @ Brex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tons of engagement because you see when somebody joins a new company, everybody likes it. It's like, you know, I joined this new company. It's an announcement. Everybody likes it. Congratulations on joining the new company. And they're paying 50 bucks each time somebody does one of these with hundreds of likes in some instances because they join a new company. How much more effective is that $50 than paying LinkedIn $50 to service an ad that says rippling all in one HR in IT?”
2024-04-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: The Biggest Sales Lessons Scaling Brex to $400M ARR, Why Startups are Doing Outbound Wrong and How to Fix It & Why Demand Gen is the Bottleneck for all Startups and How to Solve it with Sam Blond, Former CRO @ Brex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This adds on LinkedIn. When new employees onboard to their customers, they onboard through rippling, and at the end of their onboarding, you know it's W four I nine payroll all that stuff benefits at the end of the onboarding process they do an NBS survey how would you rate your experience with Rippling? The folks that say nine or ten they send them an email and it says if you post on LinkedIn about your onboarding experience with Rippling we will give you $25 or fifty dollars visa gift card just hashtag Ripling hashtag sponsored something like that and so you have thousands of posts on LinkedIn that are sort of organic where a new hire at a company is saying just joined company X onboarded through Rippling awesome onboarding experience you know hashtag Rippling hashtag sponsor in all of these posts they get”
2024-04-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: The Biggest Sales Lessons Scaling Brex to $400M ARR, Why Startups are Doing Outbound Wrong and How to Fix It & Why Demand Gen is the Bottleneck for all Startups and How to Solve it with Sam Blond, Former CRO @ Brex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In none of this stuff, and again, you do this with every channel. I'm actually, I'll give you one more example because I think Harry, you seem to like the outputs of some of this stuff. But the way you get there is late night Whiteboard session, we're sponsoring Saster. Everybody come with your top three ideas of things that we can do to stand out at the conference. We're doing Outbound. Everybody come with your top three ideas of things that we can do differently than everybody else for Outbound. I'll give you one more. Hate advertising. Actually, there's two outfits. Everybody just pays LinkedIn and Google and Twitter and they pay him a bunch of money to like service some ads. Okay. Rex, we went offline. So everybody's doing online advertising. We put billboards all over San Francisco. We did offline, very contrarian. We had a concentrated target market geographically. My favorite one, though, that was super effective. What Rippling has done, they have a campaign right now where instead of paying LinkedIn money to surface.”
2024-04-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: The Biggest Sales Lessons Scaling Brex to $400M ARR, Why Startups are Doing Outbound Wrong and How to Fix It & Why Demand Gen is the Bottleneck for all Startups and How to Solve it with Sam Blond, Former CRO @ Brex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pay for the sponsorship. And we actually brought this idea to SASTR. And Sastor was like, that's free money for us. We didn't even have this sponsorship before. Yes, we have these room blocks. We can tell the hotel, like use these key cards. We ordered the keycards.”
2024-04-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: The Biggest Sales Lessons Scaling Brex to $400M ARR, Why Startups are Doing Outbound Wrong and How to Fix It & Why Demand Gen is the Bottleneck for all Startups and How to Solve it with Sam Blond, Former CRO @ Brex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not expensive. They walk in our booth. We have a magician that is using like, you know, Brex cards to do tricks. We're giving away $25 gift cards. He's incorporating the Brex pitch into his magic tricks. Everybody who's around our booth for these $25 gift cards. We had all the billboards that were around the Saster conference. We bought them and paid them also on the walk from the hotel to the conference. You're seeing Brex billboards. When you check into your hotel, your key is a Brex credit card. When the hotel gives you your key, it's a break. You use your key like four times a day to go in and out of your room and you're using a Brex credit.”
2024-04-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: The Biggest Sales Lessons Scaling Brex to $400M ARR, Why Startups are Doing Outbound Wrong and How to Fix It & Why Demand Gen is the Bottleneck for all Startups and How to Solve it with Sam Blond, Former CRO @ Brex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Around the room, Sam, what are your top three ideas? Okay, Harry, what are your top three ideas? We go to each person, everybody comes with three contrarian or different ideas on how to do outbound. We discuss them all. We select the ones that we think are the best, and we go out and we try them. And you do this with outbound. You do this with events. I remember the first time we sponsored SASTER at Rex. We had late night whiteboard session. We get everybody that we think is, you know, contributing to this meeting in a room. Everybody come up with three ideas. What are the things you want to do differently? We don't just show up to Saster with a $100,000 booth and some pins to give away to people. We show up. We add task rabbits outside of the event in Breck's t-shirts ending up breakfast burritos to every single person that walked in the vineyard. So the first experience that they have at Saskar is they get a break.”
2024-04-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: The Biggest Sales Lessons Scaling Brex to $400M ARR, Why Startups are Doing Outbound Wrong and How to Fix It & Why Demand Gen is the Bottleneck for all Startups and How to Solve it with Sam Blond, Former CRO @ Brex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, for each different channel, I love to do just a whiteboard session. You know, Outbound is one example. So let's take the outbound example, but this applies to so much more. And then I'll give specific examples of outputs this process has produced. So with outbound, we want to be different at a 10-person startup. Harry, you're the founder. You're going to be in this meeting. The two sales reps are going to be in this meeting. And then maybe we have like somebody in growth. That person's going to be in this meeting. So we've got four people in this meeting. We are going to do it's up at eight o'clock on Monday evening meeting. It's the end of the day. We're going to do a whiteboard session. This meeting can go until midnight. There's no end in sight because it's the last meeting of the day. Okay, everybody come in with your top three ideas on what you suggest we do that is different from what everybody else is doing in Outbound. Okay.”
2024-04-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: The Biggest Sales Lessons Scaling Brex to $400M ARR, Why Startups are Doing Outbound Wrong and How to Fix It & Why Demand Gen is the Bottleneck for all Startups and How to Solve it with Sam Blond, Former CRO @ Brex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What I'm seeing is the tools today are making the category of outbound or the function of SDR or AE more effective. They're streamlining a lot of manual process. The same way that something like outreach did a number of years ago. Ari, when I joined Echosign as an SDR, Marquetto existed, but I was manually sending all of these emails one at a time. I like copy and paste it and then I'd like put in somebody's name and then I'd hit send. But it was a very manual process and along comes outreach and I'm able to send like a hundred.”
2024-04-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: The Biggest Sales Lessons Scaling Brex to $400M ARR, Why Startups are Doing Outbound Wrong and How to Fix It & Why Demand Gen is the Bottleneck for all Startups and How to Solve it with Sam Blond, Former CRO @ Brex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think there's within different businesses, you have different segments of customers and you can approach acquiring one customer very differently than a significantly larger customer that generates more revenue. But what you can't do is scale that down. And so I used this example of we sent bottles of champagne. It was $40 a bottle. You know, it's expensive. Like after delivery, maybe we're upwards of 60 bucks. You can't spend that on customers that generate $100 a month in revenue for your business. And so if you think about the world or your company in terms of multiple businesses based off of the segments, you just target customers differently depending on how much revenue they're going to be able to generate. It's certainly not one size fits all.”
2024-04-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: The Biggest Sales Lessons Scaling Brex to $400M ARR, Why Startups are Doing Outbound Wrong and How to Fix It & Why Demand Gen is the Bottleneck for all Startups and How to Solve it with Sam Blond, Former CRO @ Brex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the approach to acquiring customers and how much you can spend on that, it needs to be influenced by your ACVs. And to your point, Harry,”
2024-04-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: The Biggest Sales Lessons Scaling Brex to $400M ARR, Why Startups are Doing Outbound Wrong and How to Fix It & Why Demand Gen is the Bottleneck for all Startups and How to Solve it with Sam Blond, Former CRO @ Brex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a process. So that's on who you are targeting. Now, the way that you target them, I think you really want to have contrarian, really demand gen efforts, but specifically contrarian outbound efforts. I've talked about a champagne campaign that I did at Brex where we sent founders a bottle of champagne early on and congratulated them on a recent fundraise. That's differentiated. It received a ton of responses. You just want to come up with something that is different from what everybody else is doing that stands out. It oftentimes can come in the form of some physical delivery, a handwritten note. You just want to be different.”
2024-04-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: The Biggest Sales Lessons Scaling Brex to $400M ARR, Why Startups are Doing Outbound Wrong and How to Fix It & Why Demand Gen is the Bottleneck for all Startups and How to Solve it with Sam Blond, Former CRO @ Brex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Community is sort of tight knit. So I just think the way that we are doing Outbounder, who we are targeting is wrong. Think about the world in terms of concentric circles and closeness to the business. At Brex, we started with personal networks. We moved to investor networks. We moved to YC companies. We moved to former YC companies. We then put billboards up all over San Francisco and we targeted companies that were headquartered in downtown San Francisco that we walked past our billboards. These concentric circles just keep getting further and further out until you get to the point where you have such a brand that you can email the VP of HR. You are no longer a nobody company. You are rippling. And VPs of HR at 250 person tech companies, they know Rippling and the probability of getting a response to that email is just significantly higher, but you don't get there on day one.”
2024-04-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: The Biggest Sales Lessons Scaling Brex to $400M ARR, Why Startups are Doing Outbound Wrong and How to Fix It & Why Demand Gen is the Bottleneck for all Startups and How to Solve it with Sam Blond, Former CRO @ Brex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we're going to start going after companies that are in your personal network. We've also raised a seed round from a number of different investors. We're going to leverage the networks of our investors. We've got 10 employees. Our engineer, they were at three companies before they joined our company. They've got a bunch of connections that they can reach out to at other early stage startups. Let's leverage their personal networks. Okay, now we're starting to acquire some customers. Some of these customers are really happy. How can we leverage these customers to generate additional customers? Hey, Harry, your VP of HR at this company, do you know anybody else who could leverage our product to realize some of the same value that you are realizing? Because, you know, the HR.”
2024-04-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: The Biggest Sales Lessons Scaling Brex to $400M ARR, Why Startups are Doing Outbound Wrong and How to Fix It & Why Demand Gen is the Bottleneck for all Startups and How to Solve it with Sam Blond, Former CRO @ Brex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Started at our 10 version startup. Nobody knows who you are. So you're sending an email to, let's use your example, the VP of HR at Brex, 22-year-old SDR, 10-person startup. It's the 12th email that they have received today, trying to pitch them on a payroll or whatever product they're pitching them on. And it goes right into the trash. Most startups are doing outbound wrong. I think the way that startups should be approaching this first is on who you are targeting and then how you target them. So who you are targeting, think about the universe in terms of concentric circles. You want to start with the sort of like closest concentric circle to your business. So Harry, we're still this 10-person startup. Okay. You, Harry, in Europe, you're the founder. You have a personal network that is a bunch of other founders.”
2024-04-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: The Biggest Sales Lessons Scaling Brex to $400M ARR, Why Startups are Doing Outbound Wrong and How to Fix It & Why Demand Gen is the Bottleneck for all Startups and How to Solve it with Sam Blond, Former CRO @ Brex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The right question I love outbound. I love sales outbound. What you're describing, Harry, is a form of outbound that I think is not effective. Let's approach it like this. What I see most early sales reps, SDR teams, startups. What I see most folks doing is they purchase CRM, they purchase Zoom info to get contact information, they purchase outreach to have email sequencing, and then they write like a, you know, version of the copy that pitches their product a little bit. And then they drop the universe into seven email sequence outbound cold email. And Harry, these are going like we're a tin person startup. Nobody knows who we are. Harry, you are 22 year old SDR that just.”
2024-04-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: The Biggest Sales Lessons Scaling Brex to $400M ARR, Why Startups are Doing Outbound Wrong and How to Fix It & Why Demand Gen is the Bottleneck for all Startups and How to Solve it with Sam Blond, Former CRO @ Brex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Number one is closing revenue. There's no higher ROI than an AE spending their time closing deals. Number two, sourcing additional revenue. And so if they aren't spending 100% of their time, let's call it 45 hours a week, closing deals. Whatever that excess time is going towards, it is less ROI positive than sourcing their own deals. So I think they should be doing so.”
2024-04-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: The Biggest Sales Lessons Scaling Brex to $400M ARR, Why Startups are Doing Outbound Wrong and How to Fix It & Why Demand Gen is the Bottleneck for all Startups and How to Solve it with Sam Blond, Former CRO @ Brex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ability of the SDRs to decide which accounts to go after. We said these are the accounts that you should go after. These are the people you should reach out to in these accounts because we know conversion rates by persona. We also changed the model by which STRs were compensated. They were originally compensated on opportunity creation. We moved it to revenue. Eventually, STRs began sourcing more revenue than their AE counterparts. Now the AE counterparts, they didn't change. They were still sourcing the same amount of revenue, but SDR is caught up. And we get none of these insights. We drive none of these changes. If we don't have AE's sourcing their own revenue, such as one example of why I think it's important, but ultimately, I think that, you know, it's a missed opportunity to not have AEZ. If we think about ROI on AE time.”
2024-04-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: The Biggest Sales Lessons Scaling Brex to $400M ARR, Why Startups are Doing Outbound Wrong and How to Fix It & Why Demand Gen is the Bottleneck for all Startups and How to Solve it with Sam Blond, Former CRO @ Brex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Than their SDR counterparts. Even though they were full cycle, they were also closing this revenue. So you have an SDR who is spending 100% of their time on outbound and an AE who is spending, let's call it 50% of their time on outbound. And the AE is sourcing more closed revenue. It shouldn't be that way, Harry, right? But it was. And the reason behind that is because AEs had their opportunities converted at higher rates and the opportunities that they were generating generated more revenue. And it's because AEs had this intuition around what a quality opportunity looked like, which companies would spend more on their card, and so they were sourcing higher quality, higher revenue generating opportunities than their SDR counterparts were. Now, of course, we took this information. We made a bunch of changes. We sort of took away.”
2024-04-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: The Biggest Sales Lessons Scaling Brex to $400M ARR, Why Startups are Doing Outbound Wrong and How to Fix It & Why Demand Gen is the Bottleneck for all Startups and How to Solve it with Sam Blond, Former CRO @ Brex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Certainly in the early days, and I would argue as companies progress as well, you know, if you only have two AEs, those AEs have to be responsible for generating some of their own demand. That often takes form of outbound, but they can come up with clever ways to generate demand outside of the outbound. But 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 one thousand. I'll tell you a quick story about Brex, where I think, you know, it really illustrates the importance of this point. When we were a relatively mature startup, so let's call it 50 to 100 million dollars of annualized revenue. One of the things that we noticed was that the AEs were sourcing far more of their own revenue.”
2024-04-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: The Biggest Sales Lessons Scaling Brex to $400M ARR, Why Startups are Doing Outbound Wrong and How to Fix It & Why Demand Gen is the Bottleneck for all Startups and How to Solve it with Sam Blond, Former CRO @ Brex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This vertical of technology, the segment of startups because of the branding association and the focus that we have. We took the innovator's dilemma approach, which was we went after a small segment of the market, very differentiated product, gained huge market share, and expanded from there. And so, you know, at least in that example, it was really effective.”
2024-04-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: The Biggest Sales Lessons Scaling Brex to $400M ARR, Why Startups are Doing Outbound Wrong and How to Fix It & Why Demand Gen is the Bottleneck for all Startups and How to Solve it with Sam Blond, Former CRO @ Brex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's interesting, the thing that really differentiated Rex in the early days was the underwriting model, where we used the cash balance to issue credit versus a personal guarantee from a founder based off of their personal credit, which is the way that all of the credit card companies did before Brex. We actually weren't the first to do that. Divi, who was a competitor at Rex, they started before Brex and they used the same underwriting model. But Divi sort of approached the market as we're going to be a corporate card for any type of business. In Brex launched as the first corporate card for startups. So we were really explicit in our branding around what we were, we were a corporate art, and who we were for. We were the first corporate card for stardust. And because of that, we gained really meaningful market share in the”
2024-04-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: The Biggest Sales Lessons Scaling Brex to $400M ARR, Why Startups are Doing Outbound Wrong and How to Fix It & Why Demand Gen is the Bottleneck for all Startups and How to Solve it with Sam Blond, Former CRO @ Brex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“to growing baster is demand. We are constrained by the number of opportunities that we are creating. We are misdiagnosing this as a conversion rate problem. And our resources and our focus are being mapped to where we are misdiagnosing the bottleneck, which is the middle of the funnel. We have more salespeople than we do people focused on opportunity creation. Our focus is on the deals that are in the middle of the funnel with all of this resourcing and attention should be on generating new demand because that is the bottleneck to growing faster.”
2024-04-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: The Biggest Sales Lessons Scaling Brex to $400M ARR, Why Startups are Doing Outbound Wrong and How to Fix It & Why Demand Gen is the Bottleneck for all Startups and How to Solve it with Sam Blond, Former CRO @ Brex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And they're salespeople, so they're sort of waiting for more opportunities to come in because their focus is on closing the deals. And we don't have anybody in marketing and I'm a founder. I've got all this other stuff going on. If I'm spending one hour a day customer facing as a sales person, I'm clinging on to the limited number of deals that I do have. That creates an environment where I am incentivized almost, Harry, to tell you as the founder, you know, this deal actually has a good chance of closing, even though it doesn't. Because I've got to tell you I have some form of pipeline. I can't tell you we're going to close nothing this month. But if I had more opportunities, if my calendar was more full of demos, we would be closing more revenue. And I just believe that demand masks a lot of other potential problems, almost all startups.”
2024-04-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: The Biggest Sales Lessons Scaling Brex to $400M ARR, Why Startups are Doing Outbound Wrong and How to Fix It & Why Demand Gen is the Bottleneck for all Startups and How to Solve it with Sam Blond, Former CRO @ Brex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What I find is the environment that exists for most tech startups is what I would describe as a lead whore environment where you look at the calendars of the salespeople. Harry, you just hired two salespeople. We're this phase of the company where it's now you and two other salespeople. And I pull up the calendars of your two salespeople and they are spending an average of one hour a day customer facing. This is whether it be new demos that they are taking or”
2024-04-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: The Biggest Sales Lessons Scaling Brex to $400M ARR, Why Startups are Doing Outbound Wrong and How to Fix It & Why Demand Gen is the Bottleneck for all Startups and How to Solve it with Sam Blond, Former CRO @ Brex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bottleneck to growing faster as conversion rates. And for almost all startups, the bottleneck to growing faster is actually around demand gen, opportunity creation. And if you think about just sort of simple version of this, if everything else remains constant and you are able to 2x the number of opportunities that you are creating, you have effectively just doubled your sales. And doing the same thing on conversion rates is much more difficult to do. Meaning, you know, 2xing conversion rates is far more difficult than focusing on generating more demand or focusing on opportunity creation.”
2024-04-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: The Biggest Sales Lessons Scaling Brex to $400M ARR, Why Startups are Doing Outbound Wrong and How to Fix It & Why Demand Gen is the Bottleneck for all Startups and How to Solve it with Sam Blond, Former CRO @ Brex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know, I did some consulting between Xenophots and Brex, and I talk with founders as part of my prior role at Founders Fond regularly. And the conversation almost universally goes something like this. Harry, we're sitting here in late March. Let's just pretend the quarter ended. And we missed our revenue target. And when I ask, why did we miss our revenue target? Almost universally, the answer is something like we had a couple big deals that had those big deals just closed we would have hit our plan. And, you know, unfortunately they pushed and we missed. But like, you know, I'm sort of diagnosing our problem with. We didn't close company A and company B that were in the pipeline. And the reality is that I would say for four out of five startups, maybe more, what they are effectively diagnosing the problem.”
2024-04-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: The Biggest Sales Lessons Scaling Brex to $400M ARR, Why Startups are Doing Outbound Wrong and How to Fix It & Why Demand Gen is the Bottleneck for all Startups and How to Solve it with Sam Blond, Former CRO @ Brex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where one person is negatively impacting the broader team. And I have probably rehired or hired people where this concern had been flagged, where it's like, you know, they hit quota, but there is some serious baggage that comes along with this person. It's like, oh, they hit quota. We need to hire 10 people. Come on, like join. And so, you know, that's one example, but I think it's pretending things that were concerns in the interview process didn't really exist because like either they were coming from this place or being sort of blinded and then those things oftentimes come to manifest and bite me.”
2024-04-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: The Biggest Sales Lessons Scaling Brex to $400M ARR, Why Startups are Doing Outbound Wrong and How to Fix It & Why Demand Gen is the Bottleneck for all Startups and How to Solve it with Sam Blond, Former CRO @ Brex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Your brother has very high expectations because you're crushing. I think my biggest hiring mistakes were pretending that concerns that I had in the interview and hiring process didn't really exist. In sales in particular, it is performance-based, but it's also like the team dynamic is so important, like this concept of building a winning culture and having people that are positive influences on their peers. You cannot have folks that sort of sit around and complain about the product or complain about marketing or whatever the like complaint of the day is because it rubs off on their peers and before you know it you have just like an unhappy sales floor.”
2024-04-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: The Biggest Sales Lessons Scaling Brex to $400M ARR, Why Startups are Doing Outbound Wrong and How to Fix It & Why Demand Gen is the Bottleneck for all Startups and How to Solve it with Sam Blond, Former CRO @ Brex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You only get one chance to make a first impression. It generally doesn't get better, which I think sort of piggybacks off of your comment, Harry. And if you're having performance expectation conversations really early on, I think that is a bit of a red flag.”
2024-04-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: The Biggest Sales Lessons Scaling Brex to $400M ARR, Why Startups are Doing Outbound Wrong and How to Fix It & Why Demand Gen is the Bottleneck for all Startups and How to Solve it with Sam Blond, Former CRO @ Brex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's funny. The number that was coming to mind for me, it almost doesn't matter how long the cycle is with these early hires in particular. I think 30 days. And Harry, you're probably closer to Reich with your week. You know, many folks say a quarter. Many folks say 90 days. That seems way too long for me.”
2024-04-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: The Biggest Sales Lessons Scaling Brex to $400M ARR, Why Startups are Doing Outbound Wrong and How to Fix It & Why Demand Gen is the Bottleneck for all Startups and How to Solve it with Sam Blond, Former CRO @ Brex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Creative outbound campaign, and we're like, I'm joining calls with Harry, with Square. We've got a demo with Square today, the CFO that Harry broke into the account. And now I'm the founder CEO. This is an important call that I'm joining like high five to Harry for breaking into this account. Squares now in the pipeline. This was a real call. And so even if your cycle times are long, there are sort of obvious metrics that should be improving, a sort of easy one is around opportunities and pipeline that you are tracking.”
2024-04-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: The Biggest Sales Lessons Scaling Brex to $400M ARR, Why Startups are Doing Outbound Wrong and How to Fix It & Why Demand Gen is the Bottleneck for all Startups and How to Solve it with Sam Blond, Former CRO @ Brex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I grew up in a world where people were in the office five days a week. And yes, it was easy to tell. Who was working hard and who wasn't? You know, especially in sales, one, there's the like, when are they getting in and when are they leaving? And then there's also the, gosh, this person, I hear them on the phone all the time. And you could just sort of like see and hear the activity levels, especially in sales. You know, some folks today are remote and that is a new challenge. I think Harry though, 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. Some of those metrics will be things like the number of opportunities that we are working. Harry started two weeks ago. Harry, he immediately started pounding the phones. He came up with this like really...”
2024-04-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: The Biggest Sales Lessons Scaling Brex to $400M ARR, Why Startups are Doing Outbound Wrong and How to Fix It & Why Demand Gen is the Bottleneck for all Startups and How to Solve it with Sam Blond, Former CRO @ Brex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is effort is this person working hard setting the bar for what hard work looks like? And then the third one is attitude. Is this person reflecting positively on their peers? Are they coming into the office motivated with a smile on their face, positive about the environment? How do they handle change, those sorts of things? And if number one doesn't exist, meaning 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.”
2024-04-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: The Biggest Sales Lessons Scaling Brex to $400M ARR, Why Startups are Doing Outbound Wrong and How to Fix It & Why Demand Gen is the Bottleneck for all Startups and How to Solve it with Sam Blond, Former CRO @ Brex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On objective measurements of success. Going to be different for every company, but you want to be transparent about here are the things that are important over the first 30 days. Here are the sort of like milestones that we would like you to achieve in your first 30 days. Many of them are going to be objective. Some of them are going to be subjective and just, you know, if you're as a founder watching them sell, is this person picking this up quickly or not? It's slightly subjective. And then as we mature, there are three things that I look for in terms of measuring the success of a sales hire. This is true for the first hire, and this is true for the 10th hire, the 100th hire. The first is performance. Super objective. Sales, you know, it's how much revenue is this person generating? Where do they stag break on the leaderboard? The next two require no skill and are more subjective.”
2024-04-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: The Biggest Sales Lessons Scaling Brex to $400M ARR, Why Startups are Doing Outbound Wrong and How to Fix It & Why Demand Gen is the Bottleneck for all Startups and How to Solve it with Sam Blond, Former CRO @ Brex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, this is why the startup experience is so important. Hopefully the rep comes in understanding a little bit of what they need to be successful in an environment where there isn't a lot of structure and there is a lot of ambiguity. You know, you as a founder can be confident. Here's your computer starting day one. I'm going to teach you as much as I know about what has been effective for selling here. But what ideas do you bring to the table for us to generate and close more revenue? Hopefully setting them up for success by giving them access to any information that they need. And then the sort of like next iteration of this area is how do we then measure performance and success of this new hire? You know, ultimately it's going to be around generate revenue, their ability to generate revenue. I think during 30, 60, 90, you probably do want to have agreed to.”
2024-04-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: The Biggest Sales Lessons Scaling Brex to $400M ARR, Why Startups are Doing Outbound Wrong and How to Fix It & Why Demand Gen is the Bottleneck for all Startups and How to Solve it with Sam Blond, Former CRO @ Brex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source