CEO Insider + Peak XV: “The 5 Lessons No Founder is Prepared For Beyond $100m ARR”

Our program is about to begin. Please welcome to the stage Hande Çilinget, co-founder and CEO at Insider, and Peter Kempes, search partner at Peak15 Partners. Thank you.

Thank you so much, everyone. Um, so today we're going to talk about the 5 lessons that no founder is prepared to when scaling your sales team beyond $100 million. And at Peak15, formerly known as Sequoia Capital India Southeast Asia, we've been very early investors and insiders. So we were kind of like there when these lessons came up. But before we go to those lessons, if you think back about those early days, I think when we invested, you were at about $5 million ARR. What, what was some of the early advice that you remember from those early days that you've taken with you at that point?

Sure. I think those two advices were from the very familiar names for you, because one of them is you, and the other one is actually from Shailendra, one of the founders of Peak15. And there are a couple of conversations really stuck to me. You know, when we first started to talk about how to scale a company, and how to be a progressive technology and SaaS company. And the first one is actually from Shailendra, and especially about the, about the evolvement of the companies, because everything evolves, right? People evolves, companies evolves, processes evolves. And he's told to me that ambition evolves to purpose, intelligence evolves to wisdom, Capability evolves to effectiveness. Control evolves to delegation. Insecurity evolves to trust. And entitlement evolves to gratitude. And I think today that's why we are going to talk about some like, you know, sales teams and processes, learnings, and how we evolve the things at Insider by giving also few examples from our daily life.

Gotcha. I think interesting, those, those evolutions are very focused on, on the founder itself and the persona of a founder. Today we're talking more about sales. There was one more point you said you want to talk about, one from Shailendra, and you mentioned one from me. I'm very curious, what did I say that you—

yeah, yeah, I was coming to that actually. What you told me is, you know, most, you know, important The most important and precious things in life you can't measure. Think about those things. For example, can you measure love? Can you measure like, you know, culture? So that type of like things, most valuable things in life actually cannot be measured. This is what you told me. So that's why I think today while we are talking about like, you know, points or let's say lessons learned about how to do sales. We are going to both talk about measurable things and immeasurable things.

Gotcha. The things you can measure and the things you cannot measure. And one of those things, if you think about it, is how you structure your sales and how your— the behavior of your sales team. And that brings us actually to, you know, we're going to talk about curveballs basically. What are the curveballs, the things you are not prepared for? And the first one is when you learn the difference between doing sales and playing sales, what do you mean with that?

Okay, I think that's a little bit difficult to explain, but makes sense when you think like, you know, how it's— how you apply it to your daily lives. So the thing is, most of the time sales leaders or CEOs are confused about leading indicators and lagging indicators. I think most of you guys already heard about the leading indicators in sales and lagging indicators in sales. And for example, as a CEO in the very early days of Insider, I was thinking about mostly being focused on the leading indicators. What are those leading indicators? Sales pipeline, how many calls our SDRs are doing like every day, every month. But once you concentrate on those, most of the time you miss your lagging indicators. Which is revenue. You should better try to also focus on how to understand really what are the bottlenecks, why you can't reach the revenue targets. If you just focus on a specific measure, if you put a measure as a target, then it's not like a visible or strong measure anymore. So that's why you should be concentrating on Lagging indicators, revenue itself, try to understand your customer, try to understand how to make this revenue. And at the end of the day, what is the bottleneck about lagging and leading indicators is they can be played. And we all do that. As a CEO, I may do that. Salespeople do that. Your SDRs or account executives may do that. They would play with metrics if they are going to just concentrate on how many calls to do, how many leads to generate. So instead, you should be pretty much concentrating on lagging metrics, the results itself. Of course, there is also a theory of input and output metrics. No one can say that input metrics are correlated to output metrics. What you put as an input will convert to an output for sure. So of course you should be able to measure your input metrics via dashboards, but dashboards, even at that scale beyond $100 million of ARR, they are not like, you know, best indicators of, you know, doing the sales. So that's why I think you should be eliminating the manipulation through numbers, and then you should be focusing on, pretty much focused on both leading and lagging indicators.

Gotcha. And so you mentioned, you mentioned in there this concept of when you start, it's good to measure something, but when it becomes a target, it stops being a good measure. That's basically Goodhart's Law. And if you think about doing sales in the early days, in the early days of your journey as a company, the early days of sales, everyone is working, everyone is hustling, everyone is just doing and closing and executing. But not measuring. And very often that measuring comes later, and it has to be included, it has to be done. But there's this risk in that, which is people start playing it. And you're talking about leading indicators and lagging indicators measuring that. One thing that we've seen, and, you know, obviously we're not a sales organization but a venture capital firm, so it's different. But even there, when you speak about, for example, portfolio companies, it's very easy to give a rosy picture. Just as like a sales guy will give a rosy picture of his or her pipeline. And so even in our culture, there's something that we call get real. When we give an update on a company, it's called a get real update. Why? Because we're constantly reminded that you have to be balanced, you have to be honest, and we don't like what in sales they sometimes call the sunshine pump. Everything is rosy, everything is, is bright lit by the sun, etc. But just get very real, and that is in the culture and in how you measure things, right?

Yes, absolutely. And maybe one more important about doing the sales and playing the sales. You know, most of the time, you know, especially after a certain stage, sustainability and making repeatable is so important. So concentrating on both lagging indicators as well as leading indicators helps you to understand your customers and build really repeatable success in sales.

Gotcha. And, and actually, let's talk about that a bit, because doing sales versus playing sales— some of these things, whether it's culture or how you report or how you structure your dashboard or how you look at leading indicators versus lagging, you want to build that into your sales process. And you want to think about your, your playbook for doing sales, um, and structuring that in a repeatable fashion, which is actually what brings us to the next curveball, which is When you realize that toothpaste is the secret to sales success. Now, when I first chatted with you guys about this, I was like, what the hell are you talking about? What's, what's up with toothpaste? So before you talk about how it ties to sales productization, talk about toothpaste and why it's relevant here.

Sure. Imagine that you go to a supermarket and you probably see like, you know, too many options in toothpaste for the toothpaste brands and all the toothpaste brands. Brands, maybe 20, more than 30, whatever. And all of these actually different brands and different like, you know, features concentrating on the consumer needs, trying to understand you expect, you know, whiter teeth or like, you know, more healthier teeth or whatever, and do the sales accordingly. This is what we called a productization, right? And this concept also works for sales processes. In order to understand, you know, how to optimize your sales pro— how to optimize your products and how to like, you know, sell this, how to create different modules, you need to first understand your customer needs. And this is what we called also productization— different modules, different prices with the different features based on your customer segment. So this is actually productization of the sales processes. But we have this— or we can say that productization through customer insights. I think you are going to say something.

Yeah, like again, basically if you think about the toothpaste, just to add to that, like 80% of the formula is the same. It's your core product or your core capability. But then you understand your customer segments and you tweak that for each segment. The core is the same, but instead of taking that core product to all customers. And the same thing, you're gonna understand your customer, the use cases, the needs, the objectives, and tweak that into something for Advanced White, something for Sensitive, something Complete Care, then etc. And so what you're saying is when it comes to your product in SaaS, it's the same, as in I'm not just taking the same product to everyone, but I tweak that. Is that for use case or for industry sector, or how do you How do you actually do that in SaaS?

Mostly, actually, it's created for separate industries or separate verticals. You actually have this productization approach for the different verticals because it's obvious that airline companies may have different needs or expect different features or create more return on investment from these features. And maybe banking industry has different needs. So generally it's through different verticals. You did this differentiation and productization approach based on the verticals. But I think this approach not only applies to product itself, but it's also for the sales processes. You need to also create kind of a process that's going to be called product design. Maybe you can have like a— more addition into that.

Yeah, listen, you like what we see in different portfolio companies is many sales teams do it very differently, but in some you see this sales guy is working on his own deck and that sales guy is taking this approach and everyone is doing something different. But kind of like standardizing that, making that repeatable, transparent, is very important. And one of the things I've seen in Insider a lot is you have a very clear process there's very clear rules about how do you approach your first meeting, how do you prepare for that meeting, what do you do if that meeting goes well, how do you do discovery. Like, I give you an example. Whenever, like, I've introduced companies to potential prospects, to, to Hande or to Sarah, your co-founder, and within days a sales rep would call me and start interviewing me. I'm like, why are you— like, they would be basically interrogating me on everything I know about that customer. Because that's part of their playbook, to be extremely prepared before going into that meeting. And the same is true when it comes to sales enablement, which I think very— like, many SaaS companies are underinvesting on sales enablement, which basically means that your sales reps are doing a lot of stuff themselves, figuring it out themselves, developing their own decks, versus with you guys, like, your internal sales enablement portal is like nothing I've seen anywhere in our portfolio in terms of how deep that is. And so maybe talk about that. You talk about that, the SDR to AE ratio, like how does that tie into this?

Yeah, I think in very early days of the companies or in software SaaS companies, one of the first questions is being asked is about the ratio of SDR and account executives. But I think one more important question comes in, which is what is the ratio of the enablement and account executive, you know, people and team? Why? Because the sales processes or sales funnel or sales team itself or the success being created becomes more repeatable thanks to the enablement teams. They teach their expertise or they teach their knowledge to your team, the other people. And you need that anyways because when you hire a new person, they are not maybe generally coming from the SaaS industry or they don't have knowledge about how to do sales in your products. You have your sales engineers, you have your account executives, and then they all need to understand your products plus how to do better sales. So that's why enablement teams, like a university, constantly and always trying to print and also create the documents which are going to be pretty much insightful and helpful to train your sales teams. And this is always an ongoing process, right? It's not like a one training, two training, three trainings. It's an ongoing process and your enablement teams should be always fostering your account executives about optimization of the sales.

And I think maybe it was, it wasn't given any introduction, but Insider has offices in about 25 countries. Countries, and so the sales teams are very dispersed as well, right? And as you scale to about $100 million, which is where you roughly are, you know, if you're all in your, in your Bay Area office or in a central location, you automatically start emulating each other. But if you're such a distributed organization and you're so global already from day one almost, then this is even more important. But conscious of time, let me move on. So, you know, we talked about doing sales, playing sales. The importance of process. But you can have a wonderful process, you can be doing sales and measuring it at the same time, but ultimately it's about the people as well. And we've had a lot of conversation about what people do we hire, and this is where I think curveball number 3 comes in.

Sorry to interrupt, maybe before the people, I have forgotten to mention one more important thing about, you know, curveball second, which is about, you know, ICP or not ICP. And I'm going to be very much transparent about this because I still believe that best deals are the most transparent ones. We have a kind of a controversial talk about it with Peter regarding the ICP. It's a never-ending story, right? ICP or not to ICP? To be honest, most of the advices regarding the ICP is you should have your ICP from the very first day. And actually, this is what you think, right?

Yeah, like when you— when we think about ideal customer profile, we think very much in the early days, we say, we tell companies to make sure that they know where they are, that they can be very pointed and very focused.

And this wasn't the case for Insiders, exactly, because we refused to define our ICP from the very first day. And then we have decided to win the markets. We didn't have any, like, you know, the, you know, selectivity about Choosing our, you know, customers. We try to cover all the industries and accelerate the growth and then be more specific about our ideal customer profiles. Insight is almost 8 years old, uh, it's $100 million of ARR with more than 120% net revenue retention rate, and we just defined our ideal customer profile— guess what? 2 years ago. Yeah, just 2 years ago.

There might not be a right or wrong, there's different approaches, but it's all good. So I was just talking about process and how important that is, but the other point that we talked about is you, you may have a wonderful process, but ultimately it is the people that you hire, the people that are in your sales teams. And again, this is where you guys have a bit of a different approach or a curveball, where you started realizing that top performers are made, not hired. What do you exactly mean with that?

Well, if you are going to hire a new person, you know, what you are looking for is of course, you know, expertise or experience, which is sometimes a disadvantage in technology. Because if they are selling in Adobe, if you are selling in Oracle-type companies, legacy marketing clouds, you may not be— they may not be able to sell in your own company. Because it's a different product, you know, different approach. So, you know, in the very early days, they may not be also very keen to join your company because they don't know you. So that's why instead of trying to bring the A players in the very first days, you find the right people with a, you know, right mentality, right culture fit, and then you grow these people through your enablement team through your, through a sales university. For example, in our company, every week we have 3 universities and, you know, lectures that we are running.

Every week?

Of course, every week. Leadership University, Sales University, and Customer Success University. And we are talking about how to do sales, how to like, you know, improve your leadership skills. Again, this is also, you know, endless journey, leadership. Maybe another session that we should be talking about it. And Customer Success University that we learn how to really create a value for our customers. So that's why in the very early days of Insiders, we tried to find the right people with the right mentality, but of course with high potential. That's so important. That's something that you can't compromise from, high potential people. And we trained them and then just like the, you know, logic of A players bring A players, but B players bring C players. A players started to born and grow with Insider, and they've started to bring other A players outside. And there is a golden rule mentioned by Jason M. Lemkin couple of times, and we should be never like, you know, forgetting about this. This is so critical. It recommends that, and I think it perfectly applies advise to companies like us, 50%, like, you know, of your leaders, you should be growing them, like, you know, internally, interim leaders, interim sales directors, leaders, or whoever. And 50% of your revenue, they should be coming from your existing customer base. I think that's a golden rule.

Gotcha, gotcha. And so the debate, because you said that we had a lot of debate about it with you and specifically with, uh, with Sarah, the co-founder, who's the chief revenue officer as well, is where we often said like, hey, it's good to hire company— good to hire salespeople from companies that have been on a very strong trajectory, that are, you know, whether it's Salesforce or whether it's Slack or whether it's Google or whatever. And the hiring philosophy at Insider has been very different. You know, I would call it you're trying to hire rough gems, and many of them are diamonds in the rough, if you like. And many of them were young or Many of them didn't even have sales experience but were in customer environments, so they were previously, they were buyers. But all of them needed to be trained. And so all these sales academies have been big. I remember at some stage I was in Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia where Sarah was doing, I think, 5 or 6 days in a row of onboarding. So, you know, if you come to an organization and there's not just like a 2-hour intro and here's your laptop and go out there, but 5, 6 days of roleplay and training and product training and sales process training and tool training. And like, one of the things as an investor we care a lot about is what are your average sales cycles, what is your time to ramp a new, a new salesperson when they, when they come on. And, and one of the things that we love is when we see sales cycle compression, sales cycles getting shorter, or ramp periods getting shorter. So this onboarding is very, very important. The sales enablement and training to to bring these, what you might say are on paper might be B players, you turn them into A players. It's all about what you're doing to cultivate, right?

Absolutely. What is the North Star metric of SaaS companies nowadays? Think about one metric, North Star metric. What is that? I think net revenue retention. And net revenue, if you look at the, like, you know, clients with a higher, you know, lifetime value you will see that they are the ones who have the strongest onboarding or most successful onboarding. That applies to also people. For your customers, strong onboarding leading to strong retention. Strong onboarding of your people leading to optimized sales cycles, shorter ramp-up times. Normally, in SaaS, it's accepted at 9 months, by the way, but inside, it's 6 months. Thanks to our, like, you know, strong onboarding team also. So onboarding is so critical for, like, you know, higher return from your clients and also from your people, of course. And then it really affects the, you know, sales cycles in a very positive way.

Gotcha, gotcha. Let's move on to the next one. We talked about sales process and then hiring and specifically specifically developing and training and enabling the people to perform well. But sales doesn't stand on its own. At some stage you realize that it's not just the sales guys going out there, but the marketing function is incredibly important, uh, and demand gen is very important. Which brings us to Curveball 4, which is when you start investing in demand gen, you're either too late or too early. Like, like, explain to us why you've experienced that and, and what is driving that dynamic.

Sure. From $100,000 to $1 million to $100 million of ARR journey, in the very first years, you just very much focused on the sales. Because marketing works when you have like a proper sales processes. And marketing comes in and it starts to contribute to the demand gen sales prospects generation and also demand generation. However, without having a proper and at the same time strong sales processes clearly defined and clearly created, marketing doesn't work. So you don't have to pour money to your marketing in your early stages before, I think, reaching like $30-40 million of ARR. By the way, this scale or this level can change according to company, but that was the fact about Insiders. But you shouldn't be late to take marketing to the game, otherwise your branding stays behind your competitors, and then your demand gen starts to not support the sales. Then sales becomes like like also a little bit stuck. So that's why you shouldn't be— it shouldn't be too early, it shouldn't be too late. You should try to understand when a marketing can be a real flywheel, at which scale, and then it's where you are going to see the effect in the, for example, lead generation. Marketing will start to foster your, you know, prospects and start to bring like, you know, maybe even 30 or 40% of your, you know, sales leads.

Yeah. And that is something we've seen where initially 5 to 10% of sales was driven by marketing and now it's close to 30 or 40%. I think one thing that's interesting as well, when we, you know, you've experienced it bottom up as an investor, we've seen it from the metrics down. When you guys were from $5 to $50 million, your LTV to CAC ratio was about 10 to 15, which is insanely high. And you guys were very proud of it, and we were proud of it. And then at some stage we realized, hold on, we're leaving massive money on the table. We're massively underinvesting. Like, the rule of thumb is for LTV to CAC to be about 3. What you love to see is companies that are 4, 5, 6. But anything above that, you're basically saying you're not investing enough. So we said, like, spend more. Like, at those, those days, you guys were also mostly profitable. And so we said, invest more, invest more in sales, invest more in marketing, think big. And then during COVID you, you organized a conference and like, maybe talk about how that happened.

Sure. As far as I remember, the idea actually came from you, right? Maybe in those Reshape events that we run every year and almost more than 13,000 people joining from different industries. It's kind of an event that we really shape the industry in terms of like, you know, trends in marketing software in SaaS. And then I remember that we were discussing whom to invite as a keynote speaker, and I think the idea came from Peter. What about, you know, President Barack Obama?

Maybe. I cannot claim credit for that. Someone in your team.

You have—

I wish I could.

You have always the mentality of raising the bar, so maybe with the help and support of this mentality We thought like, why not to invite, you know, President Obama? I sent a letter to him, he liked the story, and you know what? It wasn't like a keynote which decreased our LTV/CAC ratios because we haven't paid anything for that. In life, most of things about, I think, story, like the companies, storization is so important. Then we told him the story, then he accepted to come because Insider is quite unconventional story. We raised from this part of the world and then become global, unlike the other SaaS companies raised from the rest and trying to become global. So that's why he liked the story and he joined us. So sometimes really sky is the limit. Raising the bar mentality is so important. And you should be also working on your branding as well as digital marketing. Because, you know, then like people, especially when you go into the more competitive markets, start to hear about your brand, also try to start to associate it with something. And this will be important, I think, spend and pour some money on this by accepting the fact that there will be maybe lower LTV/CAC ratios, which is acceptable.

Yeah, agreed. Cool. Let's get to the last one we talked about. Process and salespeople and marketing and demand generation. But one important thing is what's actually the role of the founders and the CEOs? And that's the last curveball. When you recognize that a founder quota cannot be delegated, what do you mean with that? And like, people often talk about there's founder sales and then it becomes sales-led, as if at that stage the founder is no longer important in the sales process. But you guys have a different view on that, so maybe share a bit on that.

Well, again, this is an unconventional story in many ways. And one of the reasons of that is we are 6 co-founders. I remember one of the panels that's run by Jason M. Lemkin a couple of years ago in Southeastern Europe. And then he was really surprised to hear that. And that was the year that we first met. He was really surprised to hear that we are 6 co-founders. And yes, it's hard to manage. But at the same time, it's so great because Founder's involvement is necessary in like all the stages, and one of them is sales. You should have your own invisible quota, and then you, just like Jason M. Lemkin always mentions, get into this jet, shake that hand. This human interaction, and especially if you are one of the founders of the company, CEO of the company, personal interaction is going to be pretty much helpful to build this network and sometimes for the last touch for closing the sales. And most of the time closing the sales is the most difficult part. That's why it requires lots of, you know, co-founders' touch. I believe that all the co-founders should be pretty much mobile, traveling all around their offices, motivating their people, Reminding them why, and then of course meeting with the, with clients, you know, even like every week. For example, at that scale of the company, most of the time I'm pretty much confused about the conflicts between the departments or discussions between the departments. For example, I'm just trying to understand whether the product is really good or not, for some feature or another debate. The best way to learn also is actually from customers. Customers. So both in sales and customer retention, you should be talking to your customers. And for closing the sales, you should be having this last touch.

Yeah, it's interesting how you talk about that because I think it's not about taking over from the salespeople, it's not about doing it instead of, but very complementary. And sometimes it's, can you open a door that, that they can't? Sometimes it's like they've run a sales process, but can you give that last nudge. Yeah, but generally to— and they say emphasize, but it must be to empathize with customers, to truly understand your customers, which is not just helpful from a sales perspective but also from a product roadmap perspective, from an overall strategy. And so whenever I, on WhatsApp or otherwise, like ping, ping on the— like, you know, I wouldn't say 80%, but very often it's, sorry, I'm in a customer meeting, or Sarah, the co-founder, like still on a weekly basis ask me to intro this customer or endorse somewhere or find a way in. Or there's lots of hustle, and we've seen in other companies where at some stage the founders stop hustling, and it's actually a good thing that you guys continue to do that.

And I think it's something very human because think about, you know, people around. If you look at them in face, what you will see— there is a text in here, there is a writing here. What's written there? Make me feel important. They would like to feel important. They should feel important. So get into the chats and check this, check that out.

Makes sense.

Cool.

With that, we've covered the 5 curveballs. We have 2 bonus ones, but there's also a mic for Q&A. So maybe let me pause first and see if there's any questions from the audience. There's a mic here. You can go up if you're not too shy and ask questions. If there's no questions, we'll cover 1 or 2 more points. But let me pause for a second, see if anyone wants to ask a question to Hamdi or myself.

We can— maybe we can— okay, someone is coming.

How big is your sales team today?

How many sales representatives do we have today, right?

Yeah.

Okay, great question. We have 45 sales representatives today, let's say account executives. But we are a little bit behind the ideal, like, you know, number, which is an opportunity for us because it means that if you are going to hire more, I think we can get like, you know, more new acquisition. We are struggling a lot about like, you know, hiring because we are so selective, but that's the current numbers.

And then out of the 45, how are they compensated? Is it on total contract value or is it on revenue recognition?

Sorry, I couldn't hear that.

How are they compensated? How are they compensated? What's the compensation, the comp structure?

Okay, so they have their, of course, their own base salary, and they have like bonuses, quarterly bonuses based on their, you know, their realizations. But there's also debates, uh, you know, around whether there should be a limitless bonus or, you know, limited bonus Should they earn more when they sell more, or there should be a limit? It's a discussion nowadays, but in our model, you can call our sales representatives, account executives will continue to earn, you know, when they continue to sell. And I think this works. This works.

And you said, you said realization. You mean a performance against target? And is that target for sales rep purely new ARR, or is it new ARR plus expansion ARR?

Yeah, we have also called for salespeople both in new acquisition and expansion MRR. But again, ideally we should have more expansion managers because when your base becomes really huge, then you need more new people who is pretty much focused on the expansion. So currently, So for us, it's a little bit like, you know, combined. But ideally at that scale, we should start thinking about like, you know, having different people for expansion and also different people just concentrating on the new acquisition. That works better.

Before we go to the next question, one sec. Maybe one thing to add. You asked about the number of salespeople. One of the things we found, because we obviously have a portfolio of 400 companies globally, where the number of salespeople that we see in companies coming out of Australia or India or Southeast Asia or whatever, or you guys have most of your people in Turkey, tends to be very small compared to US companies. US companies ram their sales teams much, much faster and very quickly start getting— like, there's companies that are in similar ARR scale that have 150 or 200 salespeople, and these guys have about 50. One of the things that we have seen though is when we first invested, average ACV per account was about $25K. Now there's multiple deals that are well over $5 million ACV. And so you see, you know, you see more senior sales folks coming on, you see much larger deals. And so you're obviously trying to do more with very few people, but it also ties in your cost structure is much lower as well. And so profitable from, from, from many, for many, like Yesterday, David Saxon, Jason M. Lemkin were talking about the burn multiple, and like, 1 is great. These guys are well below 1, and one of the reasons is like they hire junior folks but then train them. They hire fewer sales folks. We'd love to have more of them, but still. Anyway, let me go to the next one.

Hi, Irosa, founder of Marketrix. So I'd like to know now, I mean, you have 6 co-founders, right? So I'm sure you initially initially you have driven a founder-led approach, right? Founder-led sales approach. At what point did you decide, okay, now— because transitioning from a founder-led sales approach to the team of SDRs, at what point do you decide that this transition needs to be made?

That was actually not a decision because it was like a must. Because from the very first day, I think, as well as the founders, you should start to build your own sales team. I think that's not a decision that you can give on the way, founders selling or you are going to have like a more sales team-driven sales processes. I believe that from the very first day you should start to build your own sales team. But that's like something special, specific to us. It may actually vary according to the company, according to investment, for example. In some Cyder has completed its Series D round a year ago, almost a year ago. And from the very first day, we were pretty much focused on growth, but we had to start to build our sales team. So yes, as founders, we were always involved, but at the same time, we decided to start this like, you know, building proper sales teams from the very first day.

Thank you very much.

Thank you very much too.

Actually, the viewpoints around that change a lot. Some people say— I read like last week someone saying like, oh, only start hiring salespeople when you're $10 million ARR. Like, frankly, we have a lot of founders that like are amazing engineers and leaders, but they need help in sales as well, right? And so we often see companies like start hiring their sales team much sooner, but it might still be kind of like founder-led, sales-supported, like like one of the key questions we ask is at what stage do you start closing more than 50% of your deals where the founder has never met the customer or has never been, etc. So it's a— it's not as black and white sometimes. Yeah.

Hi, the session was very inspiring, especially for women leaders like us. My question is on sales enablement. You asked— you said something about productizing sales, and I think he He said you have the most amazing sales portal, sales enablement portal. So being in product marketing, I would love to know if you have some best practices or some tips that helped your salespeople productizing your sales.

Okay, cool. Let me think about this, but maybe one thing coming to my mind, one of the best practices. Sales enablement team is not, you know, only built or just carrying the mission of training or education of the, like, you know, our salespeople. They also inspire them in many different ways. You know, when they are doing the sales, sometimes creating like a, you know, little competition around, or just inspiring them, or just creating this vibe like, you know, who is the winner, which country is the best. They also do lots of work on this. So, you know, salespeople are pretty much competition-driven people, I suppose. So that's why they are trying to create a vibe where countries are like, you know, competing to each other. And then the winners or the best sales, like, you know, or highest MRR acquired this month. So that type of also vibe blended with some creative efforts. I think also increase the inspiration of the sales team. That's the first thing coming to my mind as one of the best practices when it comes to that sales enablement.

I give you an example, right? I mentioned earlier how I'm being interrogated as a board member when I made a customer introduction. So there's a specific format or template that they use for that, which is on their, on their portal. There is a lot of information about a big focus on what they call objection handling. Like if you, if you pitch to a customer and they say, yeah, but what about this, or what about that? And so massive training and enablement around objection handling, a lot of stuff around competitor battle cards. But also what I find really interesting is that, like, when I walk around offices of portfolio companies, you see a lot of salespeople working on decks. One of the things they showed me is almost like, okay, here's the different industries, here's the 4 or 5 main use cases or pain points, And in that matrix, there was almost like a pitch deck for each of those. So if I go into airline and it's mobile conversion that's an issue, this is the deck. Again, just like the toothpaste, 80% is the same, but the language is different, the case studies are different, the, the focus on, on, on mobile is different. Some of the language tying it into business objectives in airline industry are different versus somewhere where the key, the key issue is card abandonment in e-commerce, like, the deck is different. And so you're trying to make sure that salespeople spend as much time as possible with the customer and not shoot, where can I find this information? Oh, I need to create this deck, or I need to think about how I deal with that question. All of that is taken care of. If you think about more complex RFPs, what are the RFP templates? If a customer is thinking about running an RFP I remember at some stage you guys did a very, very detailed white paper on how do you write— like, they basically told customers or helped customers building an RFP in marketing automation or in mobile conversion, obviously influencing those customers to, to ask what you have to offer, which is the smart thing to do. But all of that is part of that enablement.

Yeah, thank you, thank you so much.

Cheers. Hi Andy, Peter, thanks for all the valuable lessons you share with us.

Can you speak up a bit?

Okay, here, okay. And I was, I'm very curious about how was the process on the beginning, on the early days of Insider. I'm from Brazil, so I know you guys had a strong headquarters there and you are doing very good in Latin America. And I want to know in the early days is— I know the founding team is from Turkey, so how do you choose a region, specific region, to build your sales process and your go-to-market strategy? And how to build all of that in a different country, different culture, different people? Very curious about that. And again, thank you very much.

Thank you very much for the question. By the way, Brazil, and especially LATAM, is actually one of the fastest-growing markets for Insider. Actually. The market has a great potential. So thank you very much for the question. Well, the selection of the regions or where to start was a little bit tricky for us because we were thinking that we should go Asia first, not only because of its potential, also because of that maybe being less competitive compared to US. But we were wrong because I believe that nowadays, especially on the last 10 years, non-US revenues pretty much important for legacy marketing clouds or our competitors. So I remember some of the RFPs we joined in the region, like Singapore Airlines and some of the others. Every big, like, you know, marketing clouds, our competitors were already there. So that's why, that was the, to be honest, first logic why we have chosen Asia. We were thinking it might be easier and faster to grow there because of being less competitive, but we were wrong. It was already very much competitive. And then the other regions, actually, we decided to continue with Europe and then actually LATAM because that was like, you know, expected trajectory, right? First Asia, great potential in mobile. By the way, everyone will think that the US is the leading mobile market in the world, which is not the case. Even if you compare to, you know, mobile active users, Asia is the like, you know, biggest not only— not because of having like a very much improved, you know, mobile markets, because of like, you know, income levels. People cannot afford computers, so instead they use cell phones. So the great explanation of that is desperation is the motivation. They don't have like, you know, computers, so that's why mobile market itself is so improved. That was the reason. The potential being less competitive, or assuming that it's less competitive, was the reason that we have chosen Asia. And then we continued with Europe. It was an expected path. And for Brazil and especially LATAM, there are a couple of reasons. The country and then all the region has a great potential. One of our investors also has partners from LATAM. So many reasons came together. This is why we have also followed the whole Americas as our new region for the last 1.5 years almost. So that was the, like, you know, a brief story.

I'd like to add one thing though, and this is interesting. In Insider, there's a saying called, this is Insider, this is different. And because they approach a lot of things differently, it's not a company coming out of Silicon Valley taking all the standard playbooks, but like figuring a lot of things out, first principles. We've actually had a lot of debates, like when we have in other portfolio companies, people are thinking about, hey, I want to go into a different market, and they, they write a business case or do a lot of work. And sometimes we had board meetings and Ander or other co-founders would say, oh yeah, by the way, we opened up in Sweden, or we opened up in Spain. And we're like, oh, we didn't know, why? Oh, we met someone who was amazing and we think that they can build a team. And we're like, why would you do that? And the argument was like, I can add one more guy in the UK or in Singapore or in the US or in LATAM, but we have a team already. This one one person in a new market might actually be much more effective and have much more, like, basically market opportunity to go after, which is a very different approach than you see in other companies. But it's this hustling, like, early-stage attitude, which is why we're now in 25 countries. But, um, that's pretty much right.

If you have a repeatable sales model that you built, like, you know, strongly in the early days, then when Once you find the right people in one country or one region, then actually you can sell to, or you can also give a start in this country. Because you have already like a working engine there, just you need to replicate it. Once you find the right person, then you can actually give a go.

Gotcha. With that—

Just a quick follow-up. Can we take a picture after that? It's for my girlfriend. She's a strong admirer of your work.

Thank you very much. Thank you. Of course, why not? What about having all together? We are going to turn back with Peter and having all together photos and also separately with you. What do you think? Are you in? Perfect.

We're at the end of time. Thank you very much, folks. I'm the community manager at Insider.

You know the API logic always be hiding. I would like to meet her. Maybe we can think about potential.

Thank you so much, everyone.

Thank you. So let's take a photo together. I'm going to turn my phone. To hear. Let's do something that we are going to all remember. Let's raise our hands. Hello, Suster! 1, 2, 3!

Thank you, thank you so much.

Thank you, thank you.