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Sam Blond

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2024-04-12
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2024-04-12
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  1. “Based off of how much revenue you think a sales rep can generate at maturity. AE range $100 to $250 is like the total comp for a sales rep. So wide range there based on a number of factors.”

    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

  2. “I think for the early ones, I think you probably should have a conversation around just like, what are your comp expectations? You're probably going in with an idea of what you believe is market rate for the higher that you are making. Let's just say like, you know, at maturity, you think this sales rep is going to be able to close something like a million dollars in ARR. We're a mid-market sale and we can afford to pay somebody in this role. Let's call it 200K. We're early stage. Sorry to give them a bit more equity. We think ballpark is going to be like 160K total comp. That's like, you know, where we think it is. Harry, you're the candidate. What are your comp expectations? Well, Sam, today I'm at 180. My company is a little bit bigger. I would, you know, I would take a little bit of a hit there and you go in at 160 and you give them a bit more of the equity off the company. But I think it's not one size fits all. You don't have an idea.”

    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

  3. “Oh, I think the prior company is a really interesting one because I think what's hard about sell me my company, meaning sell me twenty BC, right? You're a 20 BC expert and I'm not. So you know how to pitch this product better than anyone in the world. And they're almost like destined for failure. But they should be exceptional at pitching their existing product. And so if they can pitch you, you know, yes, I would buy your existing product from this person. And that should be an easy exercise for the rep to go through. I like that, 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

  4. “There are always sacrifices. I don't know that there is such thing as the perfect candidate. There are a few things that with these early hires that I would not sacrifice on. I referenced a few of them. There's another one that Jason loves to talk about, and that's, would you buy from this person? So I think what you need to do as a founder is you need to sort of decide what are the areas that I'm open to sacrificing and what are the areas that I'm not. And then solve for the areas that you are not open to sacrifice.”

    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

  5. “Interview them and they spend a bunch of time on interviews with potential sales candidates. And the reality is that these people that you were talking about, Harry, how many of these people do exist? Most of them do not go through a third-party recruiter. They want to go somewhere where their reputation precedes them a little bit. And so sourcing by leveraging your personal network is just of the utmost importance. Now there are a few flavors that this can take shape. The first is you might have been successful technical lead at a prior company. Like go potentially recruit.”

    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

  6. “Here's what I see most folks doing. What I see most folks doing. So, Harry, you are an exceptional founder. You were number one at your class in your class at Stanford in computer science. And you maybe were like, you know, the CTO at a great startup prior to joining, but your background is not sales. Your personal network is not sales. It's engineering. Recruiting your first set of engineers became easy for you. It was just like your Stanford classmates that you were friends with and it was folks that you worked with that rippling prior to starting your company. But now it's time to hire salespeople. You aren't close with salespeople. This is not your personal network. What most or many folks do is they leverage something like an external recruiter. And they have a recruiter send them candidates that they look at their resumes and then they”

    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

  7. “It was fertile. There were countless AEs that I could recruit from my personal network that met this criteria. And so you'd be surprised at how many folks there are. Now, there are also a lot of folks who are less good, meaning they weren't at the top of the leaderboard. But if we just multiply the number of startups that have existed over the last three years times the top two or three sales reps were in the thousands. There are thousands of these people that existed.”

    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

  8. “I think it's the right question. And surprisingly, the in number of these people is quite high. And by the way, there's one thing that you don't necessarily need to solve for here. And that is you do not need to solve for the logo. Meaning this person doesn't have needed to be an early sales rep at a company that ultimately realized a multi-billion dollar valuation. In fact, there's logic to the inverse being true, where if they were a sales rep at a company that had a product that was harder to sell. If your product is easier to sell, they can sort of be freed. They will be more effective at selling. That said, if we think about the number of early stage startups that hired up to 10 sales reps over the last five years, that's a large number of startups and that's a large number of people. When I joined Rex, the recruiting ground 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

  9. “This is about me, but I'll now make it about me. Electronic signature all in one HR Zenovitz was a health insurance broker that had HR software and Brex was credit cards, fintech, bank account. These are radically different types of software. And I think that people who are effective just pick this stuff up pretty quickly. Any follow-ups before we move on to sourcing?”

    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

  10. “Segment that they are selling into to be similar. The last thing that I will mention that people over index on, where people overindex is domain. And so if we are taking something like, let's just take EchoSign, which is electronic signature product. If Jason had solved for hiring people from either DocuSign, which was like the direct competitor, or from like a company that generates documents, like similar category. So they just understood the space a little bit better. It could talk the talk. That would have been the wrong trade-off because it's already so hard to find an exceptional, early stage track record of performance sales rep if you are sacrificing or making a trade-off on somebody who is senior domain, your sort of definitionally trading off somewhere else. That is the wrong trade off to make.”

    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

  11. “Things that I would solve for. Next on the list is they have to have a track record of success. Sales is objective. You want to hire the best possible person that you can. If they're coming out of an environment that had eight sales reps, you really hope that they are one or two. And we're going to talk about how to solve for that in the category of sourcing. So track record of performance, early stage startup experience. You want somebody who has seen similar deal sizes with similar company sizes specifically. So if you are a very transactional sale, selling into companies less than 100 employees, you do not want to hire somebody who is a field sales rep coming from deals where they closed a deal every six months and these deals were six figures. So you sort of want like the deal size meaning the ACB and the customer.”

    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

  12. “Profile the things that I would solve for and then one specific thing that I would not, and then we'll get into sourcing. The things that I would solve for early stage startup experience. If you are hiring your first AE, first AEs number one and two, they need to have seen an early stage startup environment. Do not hire from an extreme example be Salesforce, but gosh, even today, don't hire from a rep who came from Ripling and joined Ripling when they were 500 employees. The experience that they're going to have on warning into that environment is radically different from what they will experience onboarding into your environment. And so I would qualify this as something like one of the first ideally 10 AEs at a startup in the earlier the better. So early stage startup experience is, you know, top of sort of like pro.”

    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

  13. “To bring on a salesperson. But look, if you as the founder cannot close customers and generate revenue, people that sort of specialize in sales will definitely not be able to. There is no one better qualified to acquire your first”

    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

  14. “You're not full of shit. You're absolutely correct. And good point on the sequencing here. So I jumped right into when you are ready to hire, but what are the signals that you are actually ready to hire? You should have a handful, a non frizzen family revenue generating customers, and a process that you believe is repeatable in terms of generating more of these customers. The reason that I say handful is because it's not the same for businesses that differ from one another. If you're in a very transactional business like Brex was, Brex actually had tens of customers before bringing on their first sales rep. Now, if you're more of an upmarket enterprise-like product, your ACV is six figures, you may actually only have two or three paying non-frenzied family, what I'll describe as more enterprise-like customers before you're ready.”

    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

  15. “First sales leader are oftentimes what I recommend. Once you have a sales leader in place, you can then start to do some specialization like hire an SDR. I don't like hiring SDRs prior to hiring a sales leader because they need a lot of hands-on management.”

    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

  16. “The way I start is hire two individual contributor account executives. Those are sales reps. Always start with two. There are a bunch of reasons why we won't go on too much of a tangent here as to the reasoning. Once you have two successful individual contributors in CET, you probably want to take a parallel path of hiring more individual contributors and hiring your first sales leader because once you have two successful folks in place, you're sort of qualified to bring in a great sales leader. I joined Xenifitz, there were two successful sales reps. When I joined Brex, there were two successful sales reps. The recruiting process of a sales leader is going to take time. You don't want to entirely stall the business as you are taking the four to six months possibly to find the right sales leader. And so these parallel paths of continuing to hire individual contributors and hiring your”

    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

  17. “Compared to other areas of the business where you have a 10x performer and it's hard to know that or certainly harder than it is in sales. And so that's what comes to mind. Like, of course, you want to be in an environment where the business is doing well, but it doesn't mean that the role becomes easier or your success is more guaranteed or anything like that because you still need to be the best. If you want to get promoted faster than anybody else, if you want to make more money than anybody else, you need to be number one. And it doesn't matter if you are at a startup that is less successful or the hottest, fastest growing startup there is, those dynamics still exist.”

    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

  18. “I think any sales environment, there is going to be a lot of nuance that leads to huge discrepancy in performance. You know, there are, of course, sales environments where selling the product is more challenging. There are sales environments where the sales cycle is significantly longer. There are sales cycles where the AEs are controlling work. Their investment through outbound versus taking obliques from marketing and inbound. But what happens seemingly universally, even at the best companies in the world, like Xenophots in 2014, is there are outlier performers that perform at something like 3x to the bottom performer. You get a team of like 10 people even when you're in an environment where the product is flying off the shelves, there is still this huge discrepancy of performance. And I love sales because it's 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

  19. “It and it didn't matter what Parker was building. What he was actually building was all-in-one HR. Doesn't sound it is not sexy. I just wanted to join this guy's company because he was going to build a hundred billion dollar business. We didn't realize that outcome with Xenovitz. He's going to with Rippling. So, you know, solid intuition there.”

    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

  20. “So much of the success of a really early stage company is predicated on founder or founders. And their ambitions and aptitude to building a big business. And I remember, this was further in my career, but when I joined Xenophots, I think I was 29 years old and I was fortunate to have Jason again from EcoSign, who had moved on from Adobe. He was introducing me to a number of startups, and I started to sort of pattern match around what I believed an exceptional founder looked like. By the time that I met Parker, Parker from Zenifitz, Jason had signaled one that like, you know, Parker is incredible. They're raising a very competitive round at Xenefits. This could be the one, something like that. And I met Parker. He was in the best way possible, just different from everyone else. And I knew.”

    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

  21. “I think at on the stage, there are companies that are 100 to 500 employees, let's say. There's a lot of signal around those companies. The trajectory with which they are hiring, the sort of like what I'll describe as heat around fundraising that exists for those businesses, the revenue growth that those companies are experiencing. And so you can join a 100-person company as the 10th sales rep. You have a lot of sort of historical signal to go off of that you're picking a company that is a rocket ship, to use the cliche. We'll have to come up with a better word. You know, earlier stage, it's much more subjective, right? The things that I mentioned there around fundraising events, employee headcount growth, revenue growth, those are all things that are objective. The subjective side of things and what I think I was able to get right at Xenophon's and a”

    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

  22. “I didn't at the time appreciate how hard building a successful startup. And, you know, I took a handful of interviews when I first joined a company. And, you know, EchoSign gave me an offer. Maybe I had offers from other people. And I probably looked at like, you know, the comp or something like that. One of the things was how far is the commute to make my assessment on which firm to join. And, you know, the reality is the importance of picking the right company, it just really defines one's career. I attribute so much of my success to joining the right businesses. Now, like, I was able to perform within those businesses. And, you know, for context, we're talking about echo sign, xenophobits, and then Brex on the sales side. So much of my success was predicated on the success of those businesses. I don't know that I had an appreciation.”

    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

  23. “Around when did I sort of figure out that tech sales was for me, something like that, I would say that pretty quickly I was able to start differentiating myself from peers doing the same thing. The feeling of being successful was addictive. It was pretty evident to me early on that I had found something that aligned well with my skill set that eventually evolved into a tech sales career.”

    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

  24. “I attribute a couple data points of luck to being in sales and in tech sales in the first place. So I graduated from University of Missouri in 2007 and wasn't considering but for my brother being in the Bay Area doing tech sales. As a graduate of the University of Missouri, that's not even on your radar. And so I got a job as an SDR at the company called EcoSign. So I sort of lucked into getting into tech sales in the first place because of my brother. And then I lucked into joining a successful business-like EchoSign that allowed me to progress my career. I didn't know what I was looking for at the time. Unfortunately, I found Jason Limkin, who's a friend of both of ours that was leading this company, and joined as an SDR when it was effectively being run out of a garage, an actual garage in Palo Alto.”

    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

  25. “Ari I'm pumped to be here. Thank you for having me. Last time we did this was, I think, a month or so after I joined Brex in 2018. The world is quite different six years later as we sit here.”

    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

  26. “Where people over index is domain. If you are hiring your first AE, first AE's number one and two, they need to have seen an early stage startup environment. There are three things that I look for in terms of measuring the success of a sales hire. For almost all startups, the bottleneck to growing faster is actually around demand gen. 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