In a panel at SaaStr Europa’s Cantina Stage, moderators and founders discuss the challenges of building a sales organization for fast‑growing startups. Speaker A argues that internal candidates, having grown with the company, can navigate horizontally across engineering, product, and sales, enabling faster execution and better process adoption. Speaker B warns that external, high‑profile sales leaders often try to copy their previous playbooks, which can misalign with the startup’s unique customer problems; interviewers should test for innovative, customer‑obsessed thinking. The conversation also covers practical hiring tactics: involving early top performers in the interview panel to reduce flight risk, “layering” senior hires over existing staff to signal career progression, and using the first few customers as de‑facto sales champions. Both speakers invite founders to reach out for further sales mentorship, emphasizing their experience as former operators turned investors.
Chapters
company early. For example, in my case, I joined early, so the person that sat next to me was just an engineer. You fast forward for 4 years, now they have 100 engineers rolling up to them. Well, when the external sales leader comes in, they say, hey, we have some customer requests. How do we create a process to flag this with engineering and product, and let's have a monthly meeting? Well, because I had the experience of connective tissue and organizational clout, I could navigate horizontally and say, hey, I'll just text the VP of Eng and have them join the customer call. So I'm not against process, but your internal candidates will be able to navigate the organization horizontally, be more effective, faster, execute faster. So consider that when you're weighing promote from within or hire externally.
And the, the 8th tip is to ban the copy and paste. So in the same vein, here comes a day where you need to hire your first sales leader, and you feel super lucky to have this amazing intro from one of your investors, like sales leader, renowned, renowned company, like A-player, whatever you've been dreaming of. You meet them and you literally believe whatever they tell you because they're confident and they're good. The thing is, if you're lucky enough to be able to close this candidate, let me tell you that when they join, there's a high risk that they actually copy and paste their old playbook into your company. And this is not what you're looking for. What you want is an innovative mind, a creative mind, who's gonna be so obsessed with your customers and with the problem that you're solving, who's gonna craft everything based on your company and not their previous companies. So test that in the interview. Challenge, even though they're amazing sales leaders, very well-known, and make sure you challenge them.
We're running up on time, so last 2 tips are first, the layering process over early joiners. Include them in if you're going to hire over them. It's a much different experience to say, hey, we're bringing in a senior leader, it's your new boss, than to say, hey, we're going to bring in a senior leader who we think you can learn from, great career progression, and we want to include you to be in on the hiring panel. That's one way to make sure your early top performers don't become flight risks.
And final tip, let's tease you a bit. Your best salespeople are not your salespeople initially, they're your first few clients. And if you want to know how to build true champions and like true championship out of your clients and make sure they're the ones selling the products on your behalf, you can come to us and we can discuss it.
Please reach out to us if you want to talk about anything sales-related. As former operators, we feel we miss being in the game. We're, as investors, we're on the sidelines. And so if you'll invite us even into the game for an hour to talk about this stuff, we'd love to hear from you.
Thank you so much.
Okay, here we go. Okay, hello everyone, I'm Eleanor, deputy editor at Sifted, which is the FT-backed publication covering European tech and startups. I hope you all have had a little bit of coffee to wake you up after your lunch slump because we've got a very awesome conversation coming up right now and hopefully talking about a bunch of questions and kind of common anxieties that I hear from founders when I talk to them all today. So I'm here today with Christina, who's co-founder and CEO of Clodara, which is a management software for— to help companies manage their sales
