20Sales: ElevenLabs: Why We Set a 20x Sales Quota | How to Structure Sales Compensation Plans | Customer Success: 'Total BS' or Growth Engine? | Building an AI Sales Machine: What Tools & Tactics Must CROs Adopt Today with Carles Reina
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
The Twenty Minute VC
4.4 • 693 Ratings
🗓️ 11 April 2026
⏱️ 85 minutes
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Summary
Carles Reina is VP of Sales at ElevenLabs, where he was the first investor and fourth employee. Carles has scaled the revenue org from Day 1 to over $350M in just 3 years. Carles is also an active investor with investments in ElevenLabs, Revolut, Happy Robot and more.
AGENDA:
00:00 - Is the Traditional CRO Dead in the Age of AI?
01:01 - Building the AI Sales Machine: Agents that Actually Generate Revenue
08:35 - Will AI Shrink the Sales Teams of the Future?
09:51 - The ElevenLabs Masterclass: Why We Set a 20x Sales Quota
11:00 - How to Structure Explosive Sales Accelerators
12:15 - Why You Should Stop Paying Commission on Pilots
14:00 - Customer Success: Is it 'Total Bullshit' or a Growth Engine?
16:15 - The 'Global-First' Fallacy: Why You Need to Open Every Market Now
17:23 - Why Startups Are Wrong to Ignore 20-Year Sales Veterans
19:15 - The Pipeline Construction Secret: Liquidity vs. Whales
24:30 - Forecasting the Unpredictable: How to Hit a $1B Revenue Target
31:55 - The Substitution Threat: Is AI Voice Just a Commodity?
34:10 - Verticalization Mistakes: Lessons from Scaling India
38:40 - The 'IBM Effect': Does Brand Actually Shorten Sales Cycles?
40:15 - Extreme Expectations: Why ElevenLabs is a Hard Company to Work For
42:15 - Internal Leaderboards: How to Use Public Competition to Drive Results
44:20 - Hunting the Obsessed: Identifying the 'Inner Psychopath' in Hires
46:40 - The SaaS Apocalypse: Will Companies Build Their Own CRM?
48:30 - Formula 1 Branding: The Mindset Behind the Audi-Revolut Deal
50:15 - Dinner vs. Conferences: Which Marketing Channels Actually Scale?
52:45 - Designing Un-Salesy Content: How to Run a Legendary Summit
54:20 - CVC Strategy: Turning Corporate Investors into Distribution Channels
01:01:45 - The Globalization Nightmare: Why You Can't Sell in English Everywhere
01:06:45 - Operator-Investors: Can You Be a High-Performer and a VC Simultaneously?
01:11:30 - Unit Economics in AI: Why Good Early Numbers Might Mean Failure
01:18:25 - The Next Wave: Why Foundational Model Consolidation is Inevitable
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | We had two employees that in February had already achieved the entire full year quota. |
| 0:04.8 | Customer success needs to be a money generation function for the business. |
| 0:09.4 | The role of a CRO is fundamentally thinking about not the revenues today, but the revenues of tomorrow. |
| 0:15.2 | Let's do the things that no one is doing. |
| 0:17.2 | That is what makes me passion. |
| 0:18.3 | And that is what a good CRO, I think, needs to be doing |
| 0:20.9 | because we're not here to do easy stuff. It's like the fastest product in terms of revenues that we've ever had. It's just insane. If you want to do something, budget is never going to be a problem. This is 20 VC with me, Harry Stebbington. I'm so excited to welcome a dear friend Carlos Reiner. Carlos is the CRO at 11 Labs, one of the fastest growing companies on the planet. |
| 0:40.5 | He was also one of the first investors there. |
| 0:42.6 | He scaled the revenue org from zero to over 350 million in ARR. |
| 0:47.8 | This is a masterclass in scaling sales in an AI first world. |
| 0:52.9 | On top of that, Carlos is also an incredible investor |
| 0:55.9 | with his own solo GP fund Bowerab Ventures, which has backed the lights of Revolut and of course |
| 1:01.1 | 11 labs in the early days. But before we dive into the show today, a quick shout out to a company |
| 1:06.4 | I've been genuinely blown away by and have been tracking closely, Rocks. I've been watching this team |
| 1:11.4 | closely and the speed they're operating at and the level of applied AI talent they've assembled. |
| 1:15.8 | It's honestly remarkable. Rocks is pioneering revenue agents for the global 2000, |
| 1:20.8 | plugged into your data warehouse and CRM and delivering board level ROI in just 90 days. |
| 1:27.0 | These sales and revenue agents handle the end-to-end sales process for large enterprises |
| 1:31.8 | from research prep to deal risk, outreach and opportunity management. |
| 1:36.5 | So sellers spend more time with customers and less time in tools. |
| 1:39.9 | This isn't another productivity app. |
| 1:41.8 | Christ, we've all had enough of those. |
... |
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