 Hi everyone. It's a pleasure to be here with you today and to talk to you more about the sales process in early-stage companies particularly as you are working through hyper growth in your businesses. So why am I here to talk to you today about that? Well, a little bit about me. I have been in tech for over 15 years starting in Google back in 2006, right as they were starting out on their journey in Europe with a very small team. Over the years, I've transitioned into Dropbox and I'm in Personio now for the last year and a half where it's a real pleasure to be able to serve European SMBs, providing them with a HR solution for all of their needs within that aspect. Over the years, I have come to realize the importance of SMBs. They are the backbone of every single economy around the globe and yet often their needs are underserved from a technology perspective. But when they get the right solution in place, they can really power through and make a huge impact. I saw that firsthand in my early days in Dropbox where the vast majority of our customers started out as SMBs. I also saw it in Dropbox, also a B2C business that moved in to B2B and I'm really delighted to be doing it again for a third time in my career. Maybe let's start a little bit about our story. Maybe you're not here to hear about me. Maybe you're here to learn about Personio. We've been in the news quite a lot over the last while. This is a photo taken from a few weeks ago where we launched a new category into the marketplace and where we raise a new round of funding. I'm sure for some of you in the audience, particularly early-stage founders, this might be the type of stuff that you're dreaming about or potentially even that it's just so far away. It's not even fathomable. But our story really only started just six short years ago. And maybe let me bring you back on part of that journey because it's the foundation of how you build a salesman. This is the photo of Hano. He's our CEO and our co-founder of Personio. If any of you recognize the background, he is in Berlin meeting our first customers as we started out in August 2015. Now, I think the importance that founders have in the sales process is so important in the early days. All of the founders out there are doing sales one way or another. After all, you're selling the idea to prospective employers. You're selling the idea to your friends and family to get your first round of seed funding. And then from there, you're going on to sell it to investors to get that funding in and to grow to your business. Quite often in the early stage of businesses, it's the founders who are out talking to companies. And please don't underestimate the importance of founder-led sales in the early days. First of all, it shows huge conviction to the market around how you believe in your business. And quite often other companies will want to talk to the founders in the early days directly to hear about the business and the vision and where it's going on into the future. But even in the early days, maybe you don't really have a product ready to go. And so you're not so much selling the product but selling you as founders into the market. So please think about that. I know that you as founders are all out there thinking about how you can go out and do sales. And it's such an important part as you start and on your journey along the sales journey. Of course, as you begin to scale, you will begin to bring in a couple of small team around you. And they should also show up as many founders as you go through what they're doing in the organization and being able to bring information back in to the teams. As you're starting out in the early days and probably forever, the sales product feedback is super important. In the early days, that sales product feedback is probably happening after every single customer interaction you have. You want to know what that customer wants, how they think about your product and what you can do to adjust it. And that's happening on maybe not even daily but hourly basis. As you scale both the product and the sales teams, that journey becomes a little bit different. And actually having a sales team going talk to the product team every single day or every single hour becomes distracting. It's stopping the product team from delivering out into the organization and to actually add value in terms of what they're doing. So think about how you want that sales and product loop to change over time as you scale. Normally it starts with going from those daily ad hoc interactions into something that happens on a more scalable basis. Perhaps sales and product meeting together once a week and then over time, over longer time periods, maybe once a month or so on. And that structured time should be about seeing what are the trends that you are seeing in the market. For example, are customers asking for something very particular? Are they giving you feedback on something that you're missing and so on? Or are you seeing different trends depending on different market segments that you're in? But don't forget about the nimbleness that you had in the early days and make sure that you're still able to have that quick feedback loop around how you operate together. For example, in personio, the way that we do this is we have a Slack channel between our sales and product teams to give that quick feedback in the moment or to ask questions as you go. And so as we grow and we want to be more sustainable in terms of how we think about our time that we put into things, we have less daily interactions, but we still allow for that ongoing interaction where it's needed within the teams without it being too much of a time drag. Now, the last piece of advice I want to give on sales and product interaction is your customers are always going to give feedback around what they need and what they want to see in your product. And that feedback is really important, but as you're thinking about that feedback, make sure that you're not adding a new feature or a new tweak for every single customer that you bring in. For example, in personio, we have been really clear around where we're going as a business. We're a product that serves businesses between 10 to 2,000 employees and we focus for European SMBs only. Of course, it's tempting to think about going to the US and serving that market there or moving up market. And maybe we will over time, but that our focus right now is within the European landscape and it's allowed us to be really efficient, to keep our product team really focused and to make sure that we have the right processes across our organization to scale the organization without having to change everywhere we go along the way. So you have your first deal, you have a company, hopefully you have a product ready to go. Setting up your sales team should be set on a foundation of three core principles, which I have found to be true again and again. And it starts with people. People are the most important asset to any business. After all, it's not companies that create the value, it's the people in that company that create the value. Next up is processes. What are the type of processes that you need to put in the early day that's going to allow you to scale and scale efficiently in the long run? And then third up is systems. How are those systems empowering you to get more insight around what's happening within your business and to be more insightful and efficient as an organization? So let's go through these one by one. Let's start talking about people. I think there's kind of three stages of people in the organization when you think about how you're scaling as a business. There's super early stage, those many founders that I spoke about. There's growth stage and then there's more scale up and growth. And in general, you're going to need different types of people at different stages of the organization. In the very early days, you're going to need people who are very curious, who are very entrepreneurial and likely have high IQ that can take a lot of feedback back from the market and give that back in to the product team. In an ideal world, that type of person has already done some type of sales role before. Why? Well, because as founders likely you don't have a very strong foundation in sales as well. So allowing them to go out and do sales allows them to be much more self-sufficient without you having to train them along the journey. Of course, some sales people coming in might have sold a product similar to yours in the past. And that can be super helpful if they have already done that. They already know the landscape. They understand the customer needs to a certain extent. And then on top of that, they probably have some contacts. And those contacts may help accelerate deals in the short run. But as you're thinking about those type of experienced salespeople, please don't forget about culture. It's such an important thing with those salespeople in the early days. They are going to set the foundation and the tone for the type of sales organization you are going to have long into the future. So make sure you feel really confident. Not only are they great salespeople, but that they're also great cultural fits for your organization. As you begin to scale and you think about maybe a couple of salespeople that are out in the market and more about a sales team, you need a different type of profile of person in your team. More than likely you're thinking about how do you do more innovation and experimentation within your current team or how you go to market. Taking in people from other organizations from diverse backgrounds is likely going to give you more of that culture of experimentation and thought within the team. But at this stage, it's also important to think about how you target and compensate your team. Quite often salespeople are out on their own outselling a product and they have individual sales targets. But I really recommend in this growth stage that you think about compensating the team within a team target rather than individual targets. Why? Well, firstly, it gets the team focus as a team. It's not an I win, you lose situation, but the team really feels like they all win together. And with that they're sharing learnings, they're sharing insights in the market, they're sharing best practices, and they really feel like they are all in it together. And those learnings can be amplified and the experimentation culture should be able to be worked through quicker rather than people going off and doing stuff and silos and not bringing it back in to the team. As you move to larger stage scale-up, this is a photo of our team from a couple of weeks ago, have a think about the type of profile that you need at this stage. I think there's an ideal profile of person. I call it my girl deluxe person at this stage of business. It's somebody who's worked in a company that's larger than you are already and ideally has already worked in a company smaller than yours already. But not a lot of people go from very large to very small companies and then suddenly land in their perfect sweet spot of business. If you can get them, great. They're going to be brilliant for your business because they understand the nimbleness that you need at that early stage but they also understand where you're architecting towards over the long run and they're not going to be unsure where you're going or if processes change or things adjust that they don't understand what's happening. In the reality, given so few of those people exist, my advice is to think about getting a mix within your team, that you have both early stage people in the team and then people that have come from larger companies and that they can bring that level of learning and sharing across the team to understand where you're going towards and you can balance across the larger company stuff as well as the more nimble pieces that you need within the team. Last piece of advice on larger scale companies, don't get taken in by big logos. It's easy to say oh but this person has worked in X or this person has worked in Y that's three years ahead of us or has done amazing things in the market. Make sure you really get to know that person for who they are rather than the logo that's on their CV and what they've actually done within their team. So over to processes. Often people think about processes as big company stuff and in some ways it is. But for me when I think about processes and metrics it's really about setting the right foundation for how you can scale your company in a successful way. My advice in the early days, keep it super simple. Focus on very basic things like what is your forecast or your outlook look like for the next month and out into the next six months so you have a view on your business. And look at metrics like pipelines so to understand how many customers are coming in that you're talking to actively within your pipeline and that you can work through that. Over time you can build up those processes and metrics over time and you can make them more sophisticated, much more complex and much more insightful around how to drive your business. But do that at a stage that's right for you and at the pace that you feel is right. And then also use the OKRs to set those stretch goals. So if you know that your team can bring in a certain amount of revenue let's say the stretch goal, the next quarter round on OKR to see how much more that you can bring in quarter on quarter. I'd also recommend going out to talk to similar businesses in the market to yours. It's not that you necessarily want to copy everything that they've done, probably some things won't be right for your business. But by talking to other businesses you can learn from them around what has worked for them and what hasn't worked for them and what are the right processes and metrics to install in your business. And then lastly is to think beyond just closed MRR and think about other metrics that are important in your business. Closed revenue is great and pipeline is good but in some ways they're quite backward looking metrics and they're not telling you where you look into the future. Metrics like conversion rates of your pipeline, the average touch points or the average time it takes to close a deal and things like average revenue per account are going to give you a much more forward looking view on your business and the health of your business into the future. So think about how you want to bring those in over time and how they can help steer your organization. When you have a strong performance team, sorry, when you have a strong metrics and process team in place it makes it much easier for you to create a high performing sales team. Now for anyone that has worked in sales before you'll know already that it's a very metric driven business. It's pretty clear someone's either brought in the revenue or they haven't. And so that's what makes it really clear to be able to drive it forward. Using some of the metrics that I suggested before is going to help you guide through some of that. And you can start at very basic levels. Looking at who are your high performance on your team? Who are the weaker performance on the team? But I'd advise you don't just stop at that. Try to understand more. Why is someone performing better than somebody else? Is it down to the market they're working in? The segment of accounts that they're working in? The industry that they're focusing in? Or is it down to a certain scale they bring into the organization or a certain way that they're interacting within the market? As you begin to learn about that and share that knowledge into the team you can bring the performance up of the full team. And over time by setting this performance culture you set the right foundation for a sales team that can scale on into the future as you onboard new people and it's very clear what they need to do to be successful in the long run. And everyone's not learning everything from scratch. The last part of my ABCs is systems. Now this slide here is actually a very old slide. It's back from 2019. But I picked it specifically because I remember the first time looking at this thinking wow that is a super fragmented landscape and then more tech space. I can imagine as a founder when you're just setting up your business and you're trying to think about where you start from a systems perspective and you look at something like this it probably seems crazy and almost out of reach in terms of where to start. But there's been an interesting trend particularly on the sales side over the last couple of years where sales was really about getting a CRM and starting. The whole landscape has become much more fragmented and much more siloed in terms of the individual tools that teams use across the organization. And I think there can be a certain amount of FOMO in terms of how you think about tools. Well this company down the road is using this maybe I should use it too. My suggestion as you think about how you think about tooling is starting with the basics. Think about the CRM that you want to use in the early days and the type of marketing solution that you want. They're really important to start early days first of all so that you have a system of record for everything and that becomes your source of truth of where you go but also that it sets a foundation of where people go and operate from. Over time as you want to build up your sophistication of systems and tools think about things from a very basic level. I always ask myself when I'm thinking about bringing in more systems and tools into our team is it going to make the team do a better job? Is it going to make them touch more customers on a faster basis? Is it going to improve our conversion rate? Is it going to help us reach a set of customers that we haven't been able to reach before? Or is it going to give us more insights or analytics around what's happening within the organization to help us make better decisions? If you can answer yes to some of those questions and you feel that now is the time that you need something it's probably a good time to go ahead and assess the right type of solution for your organization. But don't get distracted. There's a lot out there so make sure that you focus on the right questions and focus through what you want to do within your teams. All right. I've spoken through the foundations of setting up a sales team. I can imagine many of you are setting out your businesses and thinking about where you want to go. Maybe you want to be global businesses. Maybe you want to be entirely domestic. But for most businesses, internationalization is a really important part of any go-to-market strategy. Why? Well, because it opens up a huge amount of time that's otherwise unavailable to you. Now, I'm aware that every company will have their own internationalization approach and that's largely going to depend on a number of factors. It's going to depend on how large is your domestic market. So, for example, an Irish person like me has a much smaller domestic market than some of my counterparts who sit in the US and they may want to focus on a local solution for a much longer period of time. But it's also going to depend on things like the type of product you have. Some products, you know, you bring out into the market and you can bring out on a global basis almost straight away. Other products are going to require much more localization as you go into every single market. So, have a think about what it means for you and don't get distracted with internationalization too early. Make sure that you do it at the right stage for your business. Internationalization can be tricky because it takes you away from your core focus and around what you have started out to do. So, doing it at the right time is a really important success factor within any organization. In Personio, we focus entirely in the European landscape. And we think about internationalization across a number of key metrics that we look at across the business. Metrics like digitization of that market, the size of the time, how competitive the market is, what we think about in terms of other opportunities that are there, and then our readiness to go into that market. And then from there we create a weighted aggregation of all those metrics and make a recommendation for which are the next markets that we go into. As you think about internationalization, there's a couple of things to think about. Usually you've started with a domestic team. And the temptation can be that you start to bring your domestic team and bring them into internationalization. My recommendation is that you create an entirely separate team to focus on internationalization. They're effectively starting from scratch again and they're going to be running at a different pace. They're going to have different requirements and probably have different metrics around how they run as an organization. So keeping them separate and not distracting from your core market can keep that efficiency within the business while also allowing you to start into new areas and new territories. And then the last piece for any businesses that are office-based is about how you think about where you're going to locate your teams. There's lots of ways that you can think about this. Of course you probably want to be close to your customers and to have those conversations. But the risk can be as you begin to internationalize that you go too fast on stuff and that you start going into markets too quickly and fragment all of those learnings. With some of that you can actually slow down your business in the long run. So short term you might get out talking to customers but those learnings around internationalization slow down. So I often recommend for businesses to start in hub models. Maybe it's in your domestic market if that's possible or maybe it's in one central location that you can have all of those teams together. And you'll probably have seen from Personio for example any but even though we have scaled across a lot of markets over the last while we actually only have a very small number of offices across Europe to make sure that we're keeping people in tight locations and that they can learn and share from each other and still be nimble until we scale to a greater amount in some of those markets. I mentioned earlier about listening to your market and listening to your customers and I think whether you're an early stage company or a later stage company that is super important. I think it's fair to say over the last two years the world has changed so much particularly in terms of what businesses require from a technology perspective. And we have done this even at 5000 customers listening to what our customers have needed to bring out a new solution into the market called People Workflow Automation which is basically supporting the HR teams to not just focus on HR tasks but to allow employees to be efficient across many processes across the organization and reduce down friction across systems within the organization. So I'd advise you as you continue to scale never to stop listening and if there's something that the market asks you for to go out and think about how you can deliver that in. It can be really compelling and very competitive from a sales perspective. So in summary I think there's four key things about how you think about scaling your organization. First is to listen to your customers and listen to your market. Think about what they need and what they're asking you for. They give you great feedback and customers will always tell you how they want to be sold to if you listen to them. But don't feel like every piece of feedback they give to you is something that you need to you need to drive. You need to be core to what you're doing as a business and not make sure that you're tweaking and changing as you go. Second of all is think about people. Think about the right people that you need for your organization and think about the different people that you need at different phases and don't be afraid to make that call as the organization changes. Third up is processes and metrics. Start with the basics and then begin to build them up. They're going to help your company scale, be more efficient and to allow you to onboard and make the teams much more scalable in the long run. And then last up is systems and processes. There's a lot out there for you to take on board. So start with the basics, build it up and measure your impact through OKRs. I hope you have enjoyed this presentation today. If you'd like to learn more about Personio, please feel free to join us. We're just down the way. We're at Boots 6B6 and our team there can share more with you. And I hope that you have got some, you've got some learnings from this and I wish you all best of luck as you think about scaling out your businesses. Thank you.