The Meeting of Sales and Scaling | Jetlore Founder & CEO Eldar Sadikov

be more versatile, and that's the general trade-off that you go through as you build a company. You hire more versatile people in the beginning that can do a lot of things, that can, you know, do a demo themselves, that can— that hopefully have some technical aptitude and also, like, can change their pitch as they go and, like, you know, pivot on it quickly. I'm back in my memory lane. 2015 is probably the time when we actually hired our salespeople. So the frequent question is like, when do you hire your salespeople? Well, the answer is that like, I think you should be able to close first 5 to even up to 10 customers yourself, or at least like they should, you know, you don't need sales magic to close them. And, you know, once you have the first 6, 7, and you said this is why they bought it, and this is kind of like how the process was like, then you can hire salespeople because then you can say, okay, I'm talking to XYZ in these companies, here's the reasons why they buy it, and you know, here are the objections that they gave me in the beginning when I signed them up. So 2015, first salespeople. And this is when I start saying, talking about scaling, because scaling is, um, you can't get to scaling until you have 10 customers or like at least close to 10 customers. Um, when we talk about enterprise, when we talk about lower end and like SMBs, when you, you need like hundreds, if not thousands of, of, of SMBs to really say that you, you're ready for scaling. Um, before that, you know, you don't really have a case for it. And so, um, so, um, scaling was, was as follows. We hired our first, I think, trying to remember, I think we had 2 salespeople if I'm not mistaken. And I think one of them did not work out. So it was effectively, uh, we hired 2, then we hired a third one. One of them didn't work out. So then we ended up staying with 2. And these 2 salespeople essentially helped us ramp up to about 14 customers by the end of 2015. And what can I tell you about first salespeople? I mean, sales is tough, and I think sales is the blood flow of any business. So like, I would say it's just as important as great product or great technology or great whatever. Like, it's one of the core 3 types of things that you can do as a B2B company. But I think the key thing in your first salespeople is that they need to be more versatile, and that's the general trade-off that you go through as you build a company. You hire more versatile people in the beginning that can do a lot of things, that can, you know, do a demo themselves, that can, that hopefully have some technical aptitude and also like can change their pitch as they go and like, you know, pivot on it quickly. If you look in, as you scale up, you try to start hiring specialists that just do one thing well rather than being versatile. Because versatile, if you need more, a lot of versatile people, that doesn't scale well essentially. Versus in the early stages, you want very versatile people. As you scale, you want like specialists that can basically, where you can just create rinse and repeat type of process. That's when you go from just having one salesperson doing everything to a salesperson, sales engineer, account manager that actually manages current accounts. And you start getting this kind of like specialization in this process. And then you can get to the point of like sales ops and things like that, that people that manage commissions and manage your sales force and like, like actual CRM and so on and so forth. But in the beginning, you want very versatile, very kind of entrepreneurial people that can pivot and iterate quickly. The other thing about scaling is that as you ramp up your first customers, you also— signing the customer is just half of the story. You have to also integrate that customer and you want to make that customer an avid advocate for you so that they could tell that story to the market. And the first customer integrations, I was doing it myself. I was literally like sending out the steps to the customer, like, this is what you need to do to like integrate, this is the steps, and like, you know, helping them debug it and doing all of that stuff. But the next thing that you, When you get to 14 customers, the thing that you realize is that, oh my gosh, that means I have to renew 14 customers the following year. And you start realizing that people change in these organizations. And we're talking about enterprise now. Like, you know, obviously it's gonna change if you building out like mid-market, let's say, playbook. But either way, like you quickly realize that the next year you're gonna face a lot of renewals and you need a way to tell the story. If people that you used to work with left the company, how do you tell them a story about the success that you've built, that you've had last year? They would say, I don't know anything about it. Whoever tested this probably was wrong about it. I don't trust these numbers. This analytics team is not here anymore. You know, I, nobody can, can, can validate this, so go away. Like, and essentially what you need to do is really like not only develop a playbook for integrations, but also develop a playbook for, building a success story with the customer and nurturing of that customer. And so I think that for any B2B company, the second or equally most important thing after sales is probably building out customer success and developing a playbook for integrations and customer success. Because whether you're building a CRM, whether you're building a, customer survey system or, or, you know, A/B testing software or whatever that might be, you have, you have, you need to have a customer success team that will be constantly helping the customer to integrate, helping the customer use the product and, and, and continues to build that success story. So because we were able to build our first customer success team, and I can't remember, maybe it was 3 people by then, we were able to ramp up to 30 customers by the end of 2016. So we went from 14 to 30, which is more than doubling in one year. And this was probably like, if I, if I, if I, if I go back in my memory, this was probably the most like exciting year that we had as a company. Just like it felt like we were growing every day. I almost felt like at the time what we should have done is actually raise a lot more money to go faster because we were experiencing such a good ramp up.