Building a Sales Team that Can Go from $0-$50M with Algolia's Chief Strategy Officer

Good morning. It's an honor to be here with this mythical creature, this sales leader that goes from zero to $50 million in the same job. And he's also known for one other amazing feat. He has a whole French sales team and office that only speaks English in Paris. So that's an amazing accomplishment. In itself. So I'm gonna get into it, but this is meant to be interactive, so there's a great app called Slido, www.slido.com, where you can ask questions. So the last 10 minutes, we'll take your questions from, from the audience. So, Gitanjali, pleasure to be here with you. Hypergrowth is a thing that very few people have have truly experienced. Can you walk us through the various stages and some of the great things that you did in sales and then the smacks in the face that you had?

All right. So usually the way I start this session is I ask the crowd which revenue stage they're in. So can you please raise your hand if you are between $0 and $1 million in ARR? Okay, 1 in 10. Okay, 10 to 50, 50 plus. All right, okay, cool. So those are— yeah, so Laura asked me to sort of like bucket our different— yeah, take pictures of that— stages of growth. So myself, I joined the company back in 2013. I was the second employee at the time, the first one in in a non-technical role. And right after I joined, about 3 weeks after, we participated in Y Combinator. I guess you guys are familiar with that program. So when I joined, we were pretty much pre-revenue. I would say that my first year, that $0 to a little bit over $1 million was my first, literally first phase. Between $1 and $10 million, $10, $20 million, and then $20 million plus. Right now we're at about $50 million in ARR. And pretty much the first stage took 1 year, 1 to 10 took 2 years, 10 to 20, 1 year, 20 to 50, about a little over a year. So that was pretty fast. Those were the different phases. Do you want me to focus on any specific thing here?

Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, some of the— so Algolia started out mostly as an inbound long tail company. I look back at our investment memo, it was a $2K ACV when Jason M. Lemkin invested after YC. What's your ACV today?

Depends on the segment. So right, I don't know if I can communicate that. Anyways, so mid-market were about $40K, $40K to $50K ACV. Enterprise were low six figures, so between $100K, $150K. And SMB were at $2K. And actually when we started, I see one face in the room that I recognize, Kurt Freytag, was one of our big customers at the time when I joined. So thank you so much, Kurt, for your help back then.

Awesome. So you were the first sales hire. Talk to me about the sales hires that you made back in the early days and talk to me about how it changed through the different stages.

Yep. My first sales hire was beginning of 2015, so right after we hit the $1 million mark. The very first few sales hires are not, I would say, not your typical reps. They're what we call Renaissance reps. So it's people who can wear multiple hats at the same time. One of them is in the room today. Jean-Edouard, if you can raise your hand. There you go, that guy. Talk to him. It's people who will do everything. Do outbound, they will qualify inbound, they can close small deals, they can close large deals, they can write white papers, they can literally, they will do everything and they like to do that. They really like to do that. So, they're very much entrepreneurial at heart. Then as you grow, the profile starts to evolve and you need a little bit more specialization. You need folks who have, some people who've done it before. So, us, we decided to move upmarket, so really focus our efforts on selling larger deals and go after the enterprise space. And when we started doing that, we started hiring reps who were more focused on that. These people were coming from already a sales background. We made a mistake. We made many, many mistakes that would take a lot more than 30 minutes to go over that. But our first rep that I would call like that enterprise was actually coming from a large group Big failure when this rep joined because he was very familiar to large environments where he had a BDR that was working for him. He had all the sales collaterals. He basically, he had seen something at scale, but he hadn't gone through that sort of growth phase where you don't have everything at the tip of your finger. Our first successful enterprise reps were folks who coming from one of them Marketo, the other one Microsoft. Zamarin, they were the first one in their teams that were the first one to open an office. For instance, my first rep from Marketo, he was the first rep at Marketo in New York. So he had known that sort of chaotic environment where he had to still be an entrepreneur, although he was in the large organization. So very, very specific kind of profile. And now we're entering a phase where we're literally looking for people who have networks. 'cause we have built a structure now that can allow for these people to be successful. So as we were growing, we also had to anticipate the needs of the future people that we would hire. And now the people that we hire, for instance, one of them, Carlo, that covers Italy, came with his network. We empowered him with all the organization and enablement that we've put together, and now this person is successful. So over time, Don't hire resumes necessarily. They may not be the right ones. They may not be the right ones for the stage you're in.

So how has your day changed from, you know, YC, Mountain View to two sales offices? And are you still closing?

So my days haven't changed. Okay, let's be honest here. When you sign up for hypergrowth, especially, and you have to go after the US. When I started, our very first target country territory was the US, even though we didn't have an office. So what it means is that we had to look like a US company, although we were in Paris. You'll see in the first column, US phone numbers. We, at the time, we used a service called Aircall. You guys probably know about it. They gave us a 415 number, 415, that's the area code for San Francisco. So in my signature, I had a US phone number. The people would call me, Kurt, you had no idea we were in Paris at the time, right? And we were doing support at like every hour of the day or night. I remember getting, Julien getting on the call with Kurt at I think 1 in the morning, Paris time. Never mentioned it, he never felt it. I never felt the difference. But what that means is that you literally have 2 days in a day. You have 2 days in a day. I can't tell you exactly what time it is in San Francisco right now because I'm so used to that. You get in the Paris office around 9:00. The peak of your day starts around 3:00 PM because that's when New York wakes up. Around 5, the San Francisco that wakes up, you have all your one-to-ones and your meetings between 5 and 8 PM Paris. You get back home, you have dinner, and then around 9 PM San Francisco has lunch. And then after that, they have their afternoon. So you work with them. And you end your days around 1 in the morning. So you do that for a few years. There's no miracle here. That's the recipe that works. Our reps did the same, especially the first ones who had to work on US accounts. They worked on the US accounts from Paris. It worked. We managed to go through hypergrowth, but what it meant is that a lot of people had to sacrifice some here and now to begin to achieve that.

And you have a sales team still in Paris and still in San Francisco. How did you split that originally and how do you split it now? And maybe tell the story. I know you used to have a spreadsheet of sales. Salary transparencies, if you can talk about the benefits of that and how that grew as you scaled.

So as I was saying, so we started everything in Paris. So the Paris team covered all countries. Then we started to hire in San Francisco. For a while, everybody was working on all accounts. So it was round robin, so which means that an account signs up, next in line gets the account. We did that for about a year, a year or two. And then at the time when we had scaled a team that was big enough in the US, so probably about 5, 6 people, we divided the world in two parts. So EMEA and the US. EMEA covers all Europe, Africa, Asia, and US covers all Americas. So one head of sales in the US, one head of sales in EMEA. And then inside each of those two zones, we use Ron Robin again. And now we're at a stage where we have carved territories and stuff. But it's something like territories is something that we did only about 18 months ago, so at around $20 million.

Talk to me about, from the outside it looks great in hindsight, the story, but talk to me about the times when you felt almost an existential crisis for the sales team.

Yesterday and the day before and the day before. So existential crisis, I think there was a big shift at about probably around between $10 and $20 million. When up until then you're still riding the wave of you're a trending company, there's a lot of inbound and everything is cool. You feel like you are, you know, king of the world. Except that when you sign up for hypergrowth, you realize very quickly that the leads that you get in are not necessarily the leads that you need because that hypergrowth, especially when you decide to go enterprise, needs to be fed by larger deals, larger and larger deals. Large companies don't necessarily go on your website and don't sign up. It's literally a shift. You're crossing the chasm. For those who don't know that book, please read it. I really advise you to read Crossing the Chasm because it's a paradigm shift. The fact that you're new actually becomes negative. The fact that they don't read TechCrunch, they don't read Hacker News, they don't read all that. So you completely need to change your go-to-market. And that also includes the fact that You need to start an outbound team. You need to scale the go-to-market team to feed that new next wave of deals. And for us, that happened probably around the $20 million mark. I wish we had anticipated earlier and done it before, but for us, that was really the huge— I felt like we were going through teenagehood in order to become adults as a company.

And what are the— I know you're great that you started modeling the business earlier and you may build a financial model. You said you stayed in your pajamas for a week and built the first model for the company. Where are the areas that constantly surprise you in the model or you're constantly under-budgeted for or things that you didn't foresee in the model, but besides people going out on maternity and paternity leave that surprise you?

I know it will sound stupid for most of you, but I did not anticipate for the fact that people would have babies. I know it's stupid because we start at like the average age of the team a couple years ago was probably like 23, 24, or 25. But then people start to build families and they take 4 months off is not something that we had initially put in the model. I know it sounds stupid, but when you again put those hyperscale model together, everything is super tight. So literally 4 months of a rep off means that it's 4 months of non-closing, plus when the reps come back, it's another probably 3 or 4 months of ramp. So you're literally losing half of the number of that rep. And in case, you know, in the case, it's a great thing, they're building family. But again, it's one of the things that we didn't necessarily anticipate. Participate. It's just a funny story, but now we do. And I used to call that a baby buffer now in our model.

And one thing I think that Goli has done really well is grow the sales team and maintain a good engineering culture as well. And one of the things— your hiring process used to have reps sort of present to all the engineers. Do you still do that? And what other recruiting things have you done that you think are unique and interesting?

I think we stopped doing that maybe 6 months ago, but we still have engineers who interview salespeople, sales candidates. But yeah, the way we would do that is we would have just for the reps who would come on site, we would have one exercise where literally we were organizing a mock-up call where it was the first call between the reps or the candidate and a prospective account of Algolia. In that case, it was Gap. and we were acting as the CTO of Gap and whatever, another title, and we would do that in front of the entire company. So engineers would sit and literally look at the candidate and hear the candidate's answer to the question. We did that for a few reasons. Our target audience is technical, so we needed to have the buy-in and understand how the engineers felt about that candidate. But also it was for us an opportunity to teach engineers about what is sales. Because we really wanted to make sure that we had good cohesion between our sales organization and our engineering organization so that both worlds really understand each other. Again, we sell to a technical audience. We really wanted to make sure that we acted as one company and that people would understand each other.

And how have you scaled your values? Over time?

That's a tough question. Again, like through— we interview on values during our recruiting process. So there's questions that we ask and there's a few sessions that are really dedicated to that. It's by sometimes making hard decisions on some people who may be successful but don't really fit the value of the company. And those people, although they're successful as individuals, they have negative impact on many other folks. So ultimately, it's a negative sum here. So I guess by doing that, yeah.

Awesome. And talk to me about the systems that you're put— so it seems everyone in the room has some experience with these earlier stages. But talk to me about the systems that you're putting in today, the playbooks and The territories and the TAM understanding.

Oh, yeah. So that's the last column. So this— we're literally going through that right now. One thing that I wish we had done before is put together an enablement program. Because we're moving from a phase where we could still rely on a few individuals who had the legacy knowledge to a world where, again, we're hyperscaling our headcount. Right now with 350 people, a year ago we were about 150 people. That tribal knowledge is in scale. So if I have one piece of advice to share with you is anytime there's knowledge that you think could be valuable for others, write it down, put it, put it somewhere. Because people don't last forever in companies, and when you have folks who've been here 4 years and who leave and you haven't extracted their knowledge, that's a huge, huge loss. So, enablement program, playbooks, all of that, I know it sounds boring for a lot of you probably, like, at the stages you're in. It did sound boring for me a couple years ago, but now I wish I had done it a little earlier. Again, scale, the structure needs to scale, and that's why you need all that knowledge to be stored somewhere. Another thing that we're going through now that I wish we had done before is deeper territory understanding. Again, because you come from a world of inbound where everything is coming to you sort of like magically, you don't necessarily need to do that. But when you start to be a lot more proactive about creating pipeline, because again, you double your sales team year over year, pipeline needs to double. Us this year, we need to create $250 million of pipeline. It cannot come from nowhere. So we have to understand our territories. It needs to be a lot of work on accounts that we go after and all that. Again, may not resonate necessarily, but it's something that we're doing today and that I wish we had done a bit before. One other piece of advice, try not to be too top-down in your model. Everything works in Excel magically, and especially for the folks who are engineering-first companies, everything works in theory. But the second you start to execute, you realize that there were so many, many things that you didn't anticipate for. So again, top-down plan is great. When you hyperscale, you need to go top-down, but you need to back it with a really solid plan.

And last question before we'll let the audience ask questions again on slido.com. How do you scale yourself?

So I read a lot. And one thing that I started doing very early is anticipate, because you— okay, I won't curse, but anticipate all the shit that will happen because it will happen. It will always happen. The only thing that you have control over is anticipate, know about the things that are going to happen and when they're going to happen. So one thing that I started doing very early is to identify who were my peers in larger companies. Like, for instance, when we were Series A, I would try to talk to folks who were at Series B stage Series C, and right now it's more about folks who went through an IPO. And what I need to understand is what are the walls that we're going to hit because we're going to hit them and how should we anticipate for those. And that's for me, that was my way of doing it. Again, knowing what's coming up, buckle up and try to make sure that the organization is as ready as possible to go through that.

And I'm just personally curious, I talked to some of your early salespeople. And you had an opinion from them, you had an opinion that no sales engineers or things like that, that the salespeople could cover it. Has that opinion changed?

Absolutely not. I still think that a salesperson should be able to talk about a product in an intelligent manner. That hasn't changed.

Awesome. Cool. Let's go to questions from the audience if we can. Thank you. All right, you ready for that one?

We gotta get— okay, cold emails and cold calls. So there's one question: what's your take on cold emails and cold calls? You have to do it, but doing just that doesn't work. You need to warm up your— the territories and your accounts. So for instance, putting together webinars, LinkedIn campaigns and all that. I've personally never replied to a cold email. I don't know about you. Okay, let's raise hands here. Who has replied to a cold call or cold email positively in the past year? There you go. Not that many. Reason why you probably answered is because it was the right moment, but you need to warm up. That's when actually answering to the other question, that's where you need the sales team to work very, very closely with the marketing team. Marketing is here to support air coverage for the overall revenue organization, and that includes the folks who do those outbound calls or outbound emails. What amount of funding did you take to support each stage of the previous table? So it's public. Our Series A, so seed round was $1.2 million. That was back in 2013. Series A, early 2015, $18 million. $30 million, and Series B early 2017, that was $54 million.

I think the fourth question there illustrates the point. How did you get native French sales team to sell successfully in the US?

So during the interview process, all the interview process is in English. Extremely important. If you have American or English native speakers in that process, it's even better. And then from a day-to-day standpoint, French is not allowed in the open space in our office. And the way we enforce that, I tried to make it funny in the early days where I bought French— I don't know if you people know that, but you know those moo box, boîte à meuh for French people, where you flip them and it makes that funny noise? I would buy one for every non-French employee who would join the office. That would be like a welcome present. And what I would tell these people is anytime you hear French coming from anyone, and that includes the founders, in the open space, you flip the box. And very quickly, we gamified basically that mechanism. And very quickly, literally took maybe a week or two for people to stop speaking French on the floor. Now I want to test something else where I want to put a jar in the middle of the office, and every time I hear French, 5 euros in the jar. But it's a constant battle. But yeah, it's extremely important because right now we have probably 17 different nationalities in the French office. All our communication on Slack is in English. Even our DMs, direct messages, right now it's become completely natural. But there's no way we would have scaled at that pace if we had not done that.

I think the second question is asking, how did you structure in the early days? So it's clear from this chart how you structured later, but how was structure in the early days?

Structured in— that's which question is that?

It's the second one. I'm just summarizing.

The second one is structure for sales and product market fit. So we didn't structure much. I guess the initial structure that we did, so the first reps would do everything first call all the way to closing. The next stage was we hired more junior people who would do the first call and work on SMB accounts, and we would have the more senior work on mid-market and enterprise accounts. The stage after that, we carved out a mid-market team, so we had SMB, mid-market, and enterprise. And for the more junior role, we had people who would just take care of the inbound, more senior people who would take care of outbound. So literally we had 5 stages. In the sales organization, which is also something that you need to do to anticipate because people, one year in, will ask you what's next for me. So you also need to build a path for this, for these people.

And how did you structure sales compensation initially?

So my first year I didn't have commission, which means I was on full base. Based on what I closed, I set the target for the first rep, 50-50 split.

That's really valuable, right? Because you can say you closed it. I did it. Yeah. So any pushback?

No, no, no, that was fine. So 50-50 split. And today we're still on a 50-50% mechanism for all the closing positions.

And has the quota gone up, gone down, changed?

Gone up.

Gone up. Got it.

Yeah, it always goes up because you want to constantly increase the productivity of your sales team. So $1 that you pay for a rep, How much do you get back? So you do that by increasing quota is one of the mechanisms. Our quota today are half a million for SMB, 1 million for mid-market, between 1.5 and 1.8 for enterprise. And that's new ACV.

And what was the size of your sales team along these different phases, roughly?

Along the way, so me 2014, end of 2015, I had I think 5 people. End of 2016, about 10. And if I look at today, we have 50 account executives globally, half US, half Europe, and about 25, 30 folks in the BD team and SD team.

And what about the support, these other functions like sales ops and enablement?

Sales ops, we have a little under 10 people today. The ratio that we use is 1 for 17 people. In the revenue org. So one sales ops or one ops person for every 17 individual contributors on the team. So there's some ratios like that as well that you should be aware of. CSM, we have one CSM for $2 million of book of business, between $2 and $3 million of book of business. Sales engineering, it's one for about 2 to 3 account executives. So that's kind of how you build the model. So you start with a target, then that defines sales capacity, number of reps, number of SEs, number of CSMs, number of BDRs. So that's kind of like how you do that.

And the model always works perfectly, right?

100%.

How would you advise European companies looking to set up an office in the US? East Coast versus West Coast, or when is the right time?

Awesome question. So if you have sleeping problems, you can do West Coast. No, more seriously, really, really think about it. It may sound like a detail, but having 3 more hours of overlap, meaning opening a New York office, can change your life and the life of your people. It's very hard to work efficiently with people if you have less than 4 hours of overlap. San Francisco, to get 4 hours, you need to extend the Paris days super late. Because people in San Francisco, they won't wake up at 4 in the morning. So bare minimum, they will start their days around 7, between 7 and 8. But you need those 4 hours. Then it depends on where your market is. So our market is mostly on the coast. If most of your market is on the East Coast, No-brainer. If you need to be really close to investors, so maybe the West Coast is a peak as well. But those are the variables that I would look at when deciding East versus West. The other thing is the West Coast is insane in terms of competition for talents. People literally, you cross the street, you have a job. Like, not even cross the street, I think they cross it for you. People will leave jobs after 6 months if they get a new offer for somewhere else. So also take that into account. You have the knowledge there in San Francisco, there's the skills, but it's very, very, very, very competitive environment.

And there's a little bit of difference in the interview culture, right? Like in America, everyone's great at everything and how do you pierce through the ability to interview there?

Oh my God. Yeah, it took a while though because like the first time you interview people, you feel like they're the The best obviously at what they do, and after a while you realize that they answer the same way all your questions, so you start adapting your questions to them. Yeah.

How'd you get through that? I'm like serious, because I saw my Armenian co-founders go through this. I fell for it.

One thing, for instance, the same here, but like every time I look at the LinkedIn resume, if I see like succession of 10 years under 1 year, I'm like, there's something. And there's obviously always a good reason. But you just need to dig. There's one thing that folks do a lot in the US. I don't know if it's that common here. It's back channel. So find someone who knows the person. It's something that is quite usual. I know it's not legal in France, but it's something that you can do a lot in the US.

Good, Tana. I think we covered some of this. What was your playbook at the low ACVs?

What was my playbook at the low ACV?

Yeah. Early stage, like what was your playbook? Did you—

Didn't have playbook because like we had no references, so it was tough. I guess in the early days, we were very heavy in terms of in pre-sales on the technical proof. So building demos, that's something that really worked. We had no logos to communicate on at the beginning, so we had to prove ourselves. So we would literally do full-fledged implementations for some customers. I remember Crunchbase, we built Crunchbase when we tried to go after that brand. So we were being very generous in our pre-sales.

Gitanjali, thank you so much. It's amazing to watch your journey. Congrats.

Thank you, everyone.