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
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
The Twenty Minute VC
4.4 • 637 Ratings
🗓️ 12 April 2024
⏱️ 74 minutes
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Summary
Sam Blond is the former CRO at Brex, where he led the company from near $0-$400M in ARR and a $12.5B valuation. Before Brex, Sam was VP of Sales at Zenefits, where he led the company from $0-$70M ARR in 2 years and a $4.5B valuation. Sam joined Founders Fund as a Partner in 2022 and recently left to focus more on operating.
In Today's Episode with Sam Blond We Discuss:
1. Lessons From Scaling Brex to $400M ARR & Zenefits to $70M ARR:
- What are the secrets that very few people know, that led to the success of Brex and Zenefits?
- What was the single worst sales investment Brex made? What was the best?
- What are Sam's biggest tips to people picking the rocketship they will join?
2. Who, What and When to Hire:
- When is the right time to hire your first sales rep?
- Should the founder be the one to create the sales playbook?
- What is the right profile for the first sales hire?
- Does it matter if the new hire has domain experience?
- Why does Sam always advocate to hire through network and not recruiters?
3. How to Hire the Best Sales Reps:
- What are the questions Sam always asks in interviews with sales hires?
- Does Sam do case studies with candidates? What is he looking for?
- What are the biggest green and red flags a candidate can show in an interview process?
- What are the biggest mistakes founders make when hiring sales teams?
4. How to Have the Best Performing Sales Team:
- What are the three ways to measure the success of a rep in the first 30-60 days?
- Why does Sam believe most startups are doing outbound wrong? What should they change?
- Why does Sam believe demand gen is the bottleneck for all companies?
- What can be done to solve the demand gen challenge?
- How does outbound change in a world of AI?
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | where people over index is domain. If you are hiring your first AE, first big AEs number one and two, |
| 0:08.5 | they need to have seen an early stage startup environment. There are three things that I look for |
| 0:15.9 | in terms of measuring the success of a sales hire. For almost all startups, the bottleneck to growing |
| 0:23.2 | faster is actually around demand gen. Opportunity creation. You are listening to 20 sales with me, |
| 0:30.2 | Harry Stebbings. Now 20 sales is a monthly show where we sit down with the best sales leaders in the |
| 0:34.6 | world to discuss how they build and scale the best sales teams today. |
| 0:39.1 | Joining me in the hot seat is Sam Blonde, former Sierra at Brex, where he led the company from |
| 0:44.8 | zero to $400 million in ARR and a $12.5 billion valuation. Before Brex, Sam was VP of sales |
| 0:52.5 | at Xenophis, where he led the company from zero to 70 million in ARR in just two years and a four and a half billion dollar valuation. |
| 1:01.0 | Sam then most recently joined Founders Fund as a partner in 2022 and recently left to focus more on operating. |
| 1:08.3 | But before we dive in, have you ever wondered why spending |
| 1:11.1 | company money is so broken? Employees want to follow the process, but they're confused and |
| 1:16.5 | frustrated. It takes forever to get anything approved. It's so tedious to get anything paid, |
| 1:21.9 | and folks in procurement, finance and other stakeholders are just as frustrated too. Duplicate |
| 1:27.1 | spend, unauthorized contracts, surprise vendors, late invoices, missing receipts and documentation. |
| 1:33.3 | It just doesn't end. |
| 1:34.3 | Altogether, it makes the spending feel out of control, wastes time and money and increases risk. |
| 1:40.3 | It shouldn't be this hard. It doesn't have to be. |
| 1:43.3 | Airbase makes it easy. Airbase is the only |
| 1:45.6 | procured a pay software that beautifully combines enterprise with employee-friendly ease of use. It |
| 1:51.1 | orchestrates upstream intake requests all the way through to the downstream processing |
| 1:55.4 | of invoices, expense reports, credit card transactions, and reconcile that seamlessly in your ERP. |
... |
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