Sales Leader Advice Every Technical Founder Needs to Hear

Like, don't reinvent the wheel. Like, there's sales comp plans that you can download online and just go repurpose. If you're not getting meetings as a founder, don't expect someone that's more junior, less passionate, and unfortunately, probably a little bit less hardworking, to have a different experience than you. It's perfectly reasonable to found a business that you want to grow in Dach or Benelux. and be happy with that like not every business has to be like global unicorn empire in a perfect world you hire two two sales people is sort of because they compete yeah they compete okay hi everybody welcome back to the show i'm pleased to welcome our guest for today we have sarah archer with us sarah is a seasoned sass sales leader say that five times fast, with over a decade of experience in B2B technology sales and operations. She's currently the VP of sales at ChartMogul, a leading subscription analytics platform for recurring revenue businesses. Sarah is based in Germany, between Berlin and Amsterdam, but she's visiting us here in Budapest today to be on our meetup to talk about her experience in SaaS, and we thought we'd grab her and get some of her insights for the show. So thank you so much, Sarah, for being here with us today. Yeah, thank you for having me on. So why don't you kick us off and just give us a little bit about your background. How did you get into sales, software sales, and what brought you over to Europe? Yeah, sure. I suppose like many sales professionals, I sort of fell into it by accident. I was putting rent on my credit card, which is just a classic U.S. American admission. We'll pay for it later, yeah. Yeah, and I mean, it was expensive. rent in the Washington, D.C. area. And I sort of looked at things and said, okay, I... I need to crack on. I need to find a job. And so I landed something really special, which was an entry-level sales job, sort of the right hand to the CEO of a Salesforce implementation partner. And so that business would go to large enterprises all over the United States, Procter & Gamble, Walmart, Budweiser, and sell. Salesforce implementation. So Salesforce would sell the licenses and our business would come in and architect whatever they needed that software to do. And so I was just frankly in boardrooms that I shouldn't have been, you know, taking notes and being sort of the sales assistant to the CEO. And I got a lot of really interesting experience with sales engineering and sales operations, as well as selling services. And so that business was really lovely, worked there for a while. And then the founder and chief product officer said, okay, well, in addition to selling services, why don't we also have some recurring revenue, something that we can count on that is consistent every month. And so we used some Salesforce technology to build a product on the Salesforce AppExchange that we then sold on a much faster cycle into our install base. And so this was really my... my baptism into SaaS, I suppose. And I had a lot of fun running these quick sales processes and talking to more folks and not just saying, hey, we'll build this for you, but rather this is built and would you like to use it? And so that was 12, 13 years ago and I've been selling SaaS. um in north america but but in europe as well because life and personal reasons brought me here in 2016 to the city where i live in in germany it's called munster it's the biking capital of germany and i brought that sales force knowledge over to europe and said okay well i don't speak german so how am i going to find a job in the local labor market and so i said well what do i know better than most folks in Münster, Germany, and that for me was Salesforce. And so I sort of shopped that skill set around and I said, is there anyone here that needs Salesforce technology skills? And I found some startups that did in fact want help in that regard. And so I worked for a startup in Münster and then, you know, did a bit of consulting in North America and Europe still, and then eventually found my way to where I'm at now, which is ChartMogul. That's awesome. What would you say, what are the key differences between selling services and selling SaaS? Yeah, I mean, what I loved about selling services was the relationships were really quite deep. because you would run sales cycles for 24 or 36 months. And I remember like my biggest client was in Chicago and I knew her son's baseball schedule because I would always call her when he was practicing because there was so much we needed to negotiate and work on to get the deal done. But these were multimillion dollar contracts. But SaaS is... you know it's much faster it's lower average sale price um and the relationships can be not always but they can be a bit more transactional um but for me sales is all about problem solving whether it's services or whether it's sales and so i meet someone and i say can i work with you to help you solve this problem and what i like about sas is that i get to help more people um i get to help you know 60 people instead of six people in a year so yeah i think um Just that mindset shift is super interesting. And your career was really kind of built along with the rise of SaaS, you could say. I think here, and everywhere, I mean, it's pretty typical. You see a lot of agencies that will start off in a service business and then realize, oh, hey, we can productize what we're doing. And they build that out. But changing. selling is very different, right? Maybe you could speak to that a little bit. I mean, how was that for you? You basically did that with your first company, you know, pivoted from a service-oriented to a SaaS model. You really enjoyed that transition you were talking about, but what are kind of common pitfalls that you see that you were able to avoid or maybe you learned from, and maybe you could speak to that a little bit? Yeah, I think the learning for me here is that, like, product roadmap and innovation is a really big differentiator. So when you run a services business, it's not to say that you're an order taker, but you can customize everything and everything the customer wants to do, you can bill more for that. And so it's okay to be creative and malleable and kind of move the project or service around to make sure that you make a very happy customer. But in SaaS, the customer doesn't always know what they want and it doesn't behoove you to be so responsive to customers' feedback. Rather, it's important to have a really distinct vision on what it is you're trying to sell to the masses and then to... to act on that vision with a rate of innovation. Because now, having been in this space for a while, I'm a big believer that your product moat is going to be like your lifeblood. And in terms of the feature set, like what you're doing, the uniqueness of that, or how fast you can get the most in-demand features to market? I think like SaaS is, you know, This is like a very old stat, and I can't even give you a good source, but the adage is sort of like the average SaaS business is going to compete with like 9 to 13 competitors. And because it's very easy or it is easier to build software, the feature parity between those competitors is very same-same. And so it's easy to switch from one CRM to another because they all have tasks and workflow and pipelines. And so what I mean by like... product and innovation being your moat is when you have this really articulate like wonderful vision on why your SaaS product is better than the nine competitors then it's easier for customers to trust you with their business because you have this clarity and it's just like really refreshing and I'm not sure how much sense that makes but yeah no I think that basically it's it's i think it's still listening to what your customers want right and communicating that you're solving their their problem basically kind of coming back to this core principle you said you know you're really trying to solve a problem and how you're able to identify but i guess maybe just one other thing here this is super interesting by the way and you know we're kind of going very theoretical very early but we'll come back to some uh i want to come back to your background too but um you know you talked about not necessarily not always listening to the customers and not being so responsive yeah um because you want to you know you have to kind of have your core focus right but how much do you you i mean obviously i guess you know product um the backlog is influenced by customer feedback and maybe that helps you prioritize what's going to come next but there's also a typical thing that we see where people will get paid to build out the next feature. So kind of a hybrid, maybe, where it's kind of consultative selling, but you get paid to build something that then you can go on and sell to other people. What's your view on that, and have you guys done that at ChartMogul or other places? Yeah, so we've not done that at ChartMogul, but I have done that in other, or maybe we did maybe once or twice at ChartMogul, but yeah, I mean. At ChartMogul's current state, there's very good reason for us to build something specific for any given customer. But it might behoove you at some point in time if you need cash in the door or you need guidance on a specific area of product development that might be a little bit immature. So in previous lives, I've had like a lighthouse customer, like a really great fit customer where they're they want to sort of co-build this part of the product with us. And if that doesn't infringe on the integrity of the product vision, I think that that can totally be prudent and you can get that money straight away because maybe it's the case that, you know, you can bill for this specific thing and then go sell it out to customers. So it's a bit of a hybrid, I suppose, and can certainly make sense depending on where you're at. When does it become a distraction? It becomes a distraction when it is overshadowing your own product vision. I can think of like times in which I've given those lighthouse customers like my personal phone number and then they'll call and really try to like wiggle, you know. something and and it's tempting to say yes but in your gut you probably know you should say no and that's when you kind of need to pump the brakes because it's a bit of a power dynamic right they know you're they're your biggest customer they they want to get what they want to get but yeah you can't let that hand be too forceful What stage did you join Chart Mogul at and where is the company now? Can you tell us a little bit about the journey? Yeah, sure. So I joined Chart Mogul in November of 2018, November 4th. I remember that first fateful trip to Berlin. No, kidding. And yeah, that was some time ago, six and a half years. So when I joined the business was... Yeah, very heavily founder-led sales, and there was a small sales team, a little bit of infrastructure, but to be honest, it was a bit Wild West. How many people were in the company at that time? Gosh, maybe 25, 26. And we had previously raised about 3.7 in seed, and I joined not long after that. And so most all of the team was in Berlin. There was an office where folks were sort of expected to come in and work. And so I did my onboarding there. And on my second day, the woman that had hired me said, by the way, I'm leaving. And so you've inherited my job as well, which was head of marketing. Welcome to startup life. Yeah. And then the CEO looked at me and he said, OK, well, we're glad you're here. Can you please build us a forecasting model? And I said, well, sure, let me look at the data you have. And it's funny because I still have this presentation. I recently opened it. I said, I can't build you a forecasting model because you don't have the data needed in order to do so. But what I can do is implement a new CRM for you. And so I kind of came back to my Salesforce roots and then had to sort of re-architect the entire go-to-market stock. The company was back then pretty much PLG. Did you guys go like a larger customer size then? Or how did the target market change for ChartMogul over the years? Yeah, the target market over the years has just become more focused. So when I joined, we were selling basically to any business with recurring revenue. It didn't matter if you were HelloFresh subscription box. It didn't matter if you were a membership for a newspaper or you were a B2B SaaS business. But over time, we learned that B2B SaaS businesses are our best customers. We collect more cash from them. We have better retention. They have a better product experience. And so while we will take and onboard folks in other segments, none of our marketing dollars, none of our sales focus is on anything other than B2B SaaS. So you started six years ago. You were hired for sales, but immediately got put on forecasting and marketing and all of these other functions. Sure. Tell us about, yeah, I mean, how did you learn into that role? How did you like going from, you know, a big BMF like Salesforce to now a smaller startup, scale up? Yeah. And you're still there, obviously, still happy. Yeah, what was that like, that transition? Yeah, I mean, I sort of think that all the same, many of the same issues exist everywhere professionally, but it's about your level of abstraction and your ability to solve those actual problems. So it was quite fun for me at ChartMogul to pull all of the data out of the existing CRM. ported into something new that I knew was going to sustain the business for the next few years. I really like to build Zapier workflows, and I don't mind making cold calls myself. Getting your hands dirty. Yeah, because, I don't know, it's a job. You just do the work, right? and so my goal you know was to have a a meaningful impact on the sales team that was there at the time and then to see how i could help set the business up for the next few years and so um that's sort of still like i guess what i'm doing the the landscape has changed the problem sets have changed we've built new products we've changed our pricing but i just sort of look at okay well If Chart Mogul is here in January of 2025, what can we do to be where we want to be in the next two years? And how can I choose the right two or three things to work on? And you started, how big was the sales team when you started? Yeah, the sales team was just three sellers. And we are still a very small sales team. The whole sales team is now six. Revenue operations, which sits with me because of my background. We moved account management from customer success to sales, which is another topic. And then I have, again, three salespeople. Well, I want to come back to that for sure. But maybe just to finish on this, because we were talking about this earlier. It sounds like you're still very hands-on and engaged, and you're not the kind of VP of sales that just has your minions do the work for you. How is that, though, just, I mean, you know, you started, you know, we heard your background, kind of how you learned and kind of were and continue to be hands-on. How is it different, though, hiring and managing people and running the team? Yeah, well, because we've always kept the team quite small, it's been my job to hire really sharp folks that can self-manage to a degree. Of course, now we have an office in Korea. I have a team in... in Greece, in Latvia, in Amsterdam, all the way to Vancouver. So because we're so distributed, I can't sit on top of everyone's head. Like I need to hire people that, you know, have an appetite for some coaching, some problem solving together, but can largely manage their book of business on their own. And so... Yeah, just hiring folks that fit this profile was a big learning curve for me, but it just makes your life so much easier, right? And so I'm quite pleased that the team can kind of operate on their own. Yeah, and I imagine as you said over the years, as you have more products and maybe change strategies slightly, going from PLG to maybe more of a direct outreach kind of approach, the profile you need changes, right? Yeah, dramatically. Yeah, maybe you can tell us a little bit about that. I mean, did you hire somebody specifically for a strategic direction, or are you looking for people who are kind of jack of all trades, can do a lot in the function? Yeah, so this advice isn't universally true, right? There's the disclaimer, but I'm a big believer that sales teams... in the past few years have been a little bit overprotected. Meaning like, okay, imagine you work at a 40 person within a 40 person sales team and you sell in a pod so you have like a sales development rep you have an account executive that's you you're the account executive you have a sales engineer you have an onboarding specialist you have a csm so what does the sales executive actually do like i genuinely don't know and i understand like i sold with a sales engineer sometimes you you need a village to get a big deal across the line but what i mean by this is like sales people don't want to be over specialized it's it's it's good that my account executives they can do cold calling and prospecting they can run demos without sales engineers and they're not permitted to kick their support questions over slack and expect someone's going to solve their problems and so around like hiring profiles specifically i'm looking for someone that's going to be able to read the dev docs that's going to be able to you know work with postman or build his app workflow and so um these kinds of sales reps i think um you know the industry will call for more because um when we talk about profitable, efficient growth. You can't have three people on a $20,000 contract. Rather, you should just challenge your sellers to be a bit more of everything, I guess. I love that. No, yeah, you run a tight ship. That's great. I think that's a great discipline and a great mentality to not get complacent and a really interesting perspective. It only came from the fact that Originally, our hiring profile wasn't right. We were hiring really good salespeople, but they weren't technical enough. And we're selling largely to SaaS founders who've written their own Ruby applications. And so when they come in and they ask a sales rep, how do I send this data to you on the import API? And the sales rep doesn't have an answer to that. They immediately lose any credibility. And so... We actually changed our hiring profile and we hired reps to do the same hiring exercise as our product managers. And so I had to reframe the whole recruitment process to say, if you want to do technical sales, this is a great place to do it. It will be hard. You know, you don't have to write JavaScript, but you'll make more money in the end professionally if you challenge yourself a little bit more here. And so, I mean... We're not like crazy technical, but it really came from realizing our previous reps, they didn't have enough technical skills. And so my initial thought was to solve it with sales engineers. And I was like, oh, I'll just bring sales engineers in and voila. But we just didn't make any cost sense. And so I said, I guess I'm going to go to try to find account executives who. you know, can read these dev docs. And so it's not a super easy recruitment profile, but it's doable. Yeah, I was going to say, I mean, I imagine the talent pool for that is probably maybe, I mean, you found people, I guess. We know somebody in particular, and we'll talk about him in a moment. But maybe just coming back to this, because I have a feeling it might be related, but why did you move account management from customer success to your team? Well, not related from a technical skill set perspective, rather a commercial skill set perspective we have an 11 person customer success team wow and um yeah they sit on a queue of like a thousand tickets a month with a one hour sla so they're they're very reactive they're they're like very hands-on um so account management was sitting under that function but it was largely commercial negotiations so renewals And, you know, we've done some things over the years with our pricing that's required some very difficult conversations with customers. And so we said, well, the negotiation skill set sits with sales, not success. And so we moved account management underneath of the sales function. Got it. OK. I was wondering if it's kind of related to this empathy and being able to speak the language of. the customers and you know the success team is maybe like you said more focused on just getting Well, kind of getting through the tickets, but maybe not building the relationship side as much. Yeah, I mean, for sure. A renewal isn't always a renewal, right? Sometimes it's a resale. And so having to go in and do the discovery and the relationship building, that's just more of the conversation we have within the sales function rather than, you know, how does this integration impact this set of customers? And so it just felt like a more natural fit. So maybe now is a good time to jump over to. why we have you on this show because um as our viewers know we're trying to feature founders and investors and experts who have something to do with this part of the world the emerging europe and central eastern europe so why are we why are you here sarah what's your connection yeah well i'm here um in part because a few years ago at chart mogul when i was trying to figure out the hiring profile i hired uh leo eldick who has been building this sas community um sastanac right yeah sastanac exactly um from zagreb and i think he's probably in the car right now they're doing a sas road show and it starts here and so i i've flown in to do this panel and um you know learn a little bit more from the founders and then operators here and i don't know they go from here to seven eight cities across central and eastern europe and so um my relationship is sort of through leo who said hey sarah um you know in this region there are a lot of really phenomenal technical founders and product owners But we'd like to maybe learn some more around sales leadership or sales operations. And, you know, would you be willing to come and do some content around that? So I did a conference in Zagreb last year where we presented some cool data about how SaaS businesses grow to 10 million in annual run rate. And then we also did a revenue day workshop for... group in in Belgrade that was a ton of fun like hands-on stuff about how to build comp plans that's a topic that people tackle me about because they're like sales comp is awful and I'm like yeah yeah I know it is but that's okay we can figure it out so yeah that's what brings me here awesome well thank you and I'm sure Yeah, we're all happy to continue benefiting from your wisdom and expertise. I mean, that's a great topic, actually, the sales component. I mean, what are the hot takes from that effort? Yeah, well, the thing that you've got to remember about sales compensation in general is that it is likely your only group of employees that's paid a base variable component. So you're... Your product team, your HR team, they're just paid salary. Maybe they have something of a performance or a 10-year bonus that happens on an annual basis. But in sales, as much as 100% of your compensation can be based on your performance, but more typically something is like a 50-50 split or a 60-40 split where 50% of your compensation will be paid out in full. sort of no matter what and then the remaining 50 percent of your compensation is dependent on how you perform how you perform some is in your control some is not in your control and so um it's quite um stressful for people to not know how much money they're going to take home to their families and maybe something changes geopolitically or economically and it impacts that take-home pay and so yes sales comp is a very hairy topic what are your I guess suggestions for navigating that and how does it vary depending on the stage of the company let's say yeah I mean it sounds like a hairy topic but at the end of the day like salespeople have been paid commissions for a very long time. I think it's known. Yeah. If you're going to go into this career, you kind of expect at least part of this. Yeah. And so I think where founders start to get tripped up is they're like, whoa, this is a bit much. And so my first piece of advice is like, don't reinvent the wheel. There's sales comp plans that you can download online and just go repurpose. The variable part of a compensation plan is just to drive the incentives you want as a business. And so if you're in early days and you don't really know how much revenue you're going to make in a quarter, that's fine. Maybe you need to focus on something like logo acquisition. And you can pay a sales rep 100% of their variable compensation if they go out and close 10 new customers, for example. So you don't have to overcomplicate it. But you just need to know your own business insofar as what incentives do you want to drive? And then your salespeople are just your mercenaries. They're your hired guns to say, I've given you the goals. If you accomplish the goals, you'll make the money. And then the last piece of advice I would have here is if you don't know exactly how to compensate your salespeople. Don't sign an annual variable compensation agreement is much better if you can sign quarterly agreements because then you have some flexibility. If your incentives change, your goals change, your go-to-market strategy changes, then you can change the sales plan. Of course, correct as you go. Yeah, exactly, exactly. It does mean you have to negotiate compensation with your sales reps basically five times a year, but that's okay. Negotiation is a good skill to have. if you're in sales it's the name of the game so yeah that's it every everyone's negotiating all the time what would be your advice for regional early stage founder who've been doing founder led sales and thinking about you know hiring out their first sales people building up their sales team how should they approach yeah so the first piece of advice i have is that um if you're not getting meetings as a founder don't expect someone that's more junior less passionate And unfortunately, probably a little bit less hardworking to have a different experience than you. So, you know, you should have some volume of meetings. Like the golden rule I have is just like two net new meetings a day for a sales rep, for a founder is probably a bit less. But, you know, if you're at capacity as a founder and you're thinking, OK, I have. money that I can spend on salespeople and I'm ready. In a perfect world, you hire two, two salespeople. It's sort of... Because they compete? Yeah, they compete. They compete and then you can understand what constitutes good because one in a vacuum doesn't tell you that much because you might be like, oh, they're killing it. But what if it's actually just mediocre? So if you can hire two, that's great because you'll probably have about... a one-third success rate with your first few sales hires like one will wash out entirely maybe one will be quite good and then the third you'll have to move into a different function of the business like you'll find out that they're better in in marketing or they're but they're better in customer success or something so um yeah you just hire someone um that's going to work really hard uh be ambitious and and and um you know be introspective enough to know what's working what's not working but um don't don't go hire someone like quite senior you don't you don't need it you can just you just want to hire hard-working ambitious people that when is the time for to hire a senior exec a vp of sales yeah so well if you do hire two three people as a founder at some point you're no longer going to have um capacity or knowledge to to manage them effectively so when they're coming to you with questions like how do i negotiate this statement of work and you don't know the answers like it might be time to start thinking about sales leadership and you don't need even a vp really you kind of just you can do with like a like a senior team lead or a director and but that person needs to understand kind of your vision for the commercial arm of the business and then you know what is it going to take to get there um so so yeah it's tricky but when you don't have knowledge or capacity to to effectively manage them anymore and then it's time to to maybe look for a leader in the bunch or or externally what's your advice for funders a few stages behind them who are kind of need to learn into this and you know never sold anything being technical being product people but but they have to do the first sales how they can learn into sales Yeah, I mean, I think like sales as a function has some discomfort for most people. I mean, to be honest, when I started my sales career, I was like, this is gross. I don't like this. I have to pay my bills. It probably took me two or three years to really say, oh, actually, I like this and I'm quite good at it. So the first thing you need to do is like change your mindset a little bit because, you know, you've built this product and you think that it. is worthy of people's attention and ultimately their credit card details. But, you know, you're trying to convince them why it is what you've built is useful or will help them in some way. And so, yeah, if you can change your change, your mindset, not that you're selling, but you're inviting people into a conversation about something so compelling that, yeah, maybe this would make my life easier or maybe this would help us accomplish something faster than your problem solving together. Versus me trying to come in and consult you about a problem that I don't even have much awareness about. So it's a good book to sell as human. And it's all around this idea of changing your sales mindset. And the argument is like, we're actually all selling all the time. It's like a skill that anyone can develop. It's not you're just born extroverted and a good salesperson. But rather, you're convincing people to do things all the time. honey can you wash the dishes can you take the dog out trying to get your boss to pay attention to a new idea you have you're always doing some convincing so what communication skills can you work on to really hone these skills and then now you're translating this into selling your product so yeah this kind of circles back to something else i wanted to go into that what you were saying in the beginning about kind of communicating the value of the product and and this being the moat and it kind of brings into my mind this kind of kind of the relationship between sales and marketing let's say and what do you from how much do you inform the marketing at chart mogul and this messaging topic and how do you train your salespeople on how to communicate and maybe you could speak to this a little bit too how important that this communication piece i think you're right is that's what selling is all about but yeah well i think that chart mogul's marketing and communications is driven by our product vision um and our product vision is about what we want to deliver to our customers um and so Yeah, it's quite interesting, like, if you look at our marketing content, the primary thesis, actually, to take a step back, when Nick Franklin, our founder and CEO, first raised his seed round, one of the first hires he made was content. Content and brand and people tell us a chart mobile all the time. They say oh We thought you were much bigger than 65 people And it's and this is before chat GPT so you were putting out content before it was I can you not in 2014 we published a one-page SAS metrics cheat sheet and it still drives leads for my sales team more than 10 years later And so the vision of the ChartMogul content strategy in those early days, like literally a decade ago, was let's make content that helps SaaS founders build SaaS businesses. And so we just made all this SaaS content around how do you calculate churn? And if I'm not mistaken, it was all ungated. it's been gated and ungated over the years which is why I struggle to remember there's always a dialogue about that but um yeah it was it was building this content strategy that was sort of in line with our product vision um and you know both of those things are really meant to be tools for founders to say okay well should I build another you know should i build a second sas product right that's something that our our analytics product can help you um you know discover and make a decision but it's also something our actual written content or our video form content um can also help you think through so um it's definitely not the case that me sarah sales has a ton of influence on our um content marketing strategy but um i'm more of sort of a contributing player And then those leads, I mean, yeah, they're producing leads for your team, obviously, which then you go out and take. And you talked about this piece of content. And, yeah, I wanted to go into this a little bit, too, because you're a very data-driven person. What's your favorite metric, I guess? New business MRR. It's a dopamine hit. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, looking at. um new business and reactivation uh quarter over quarter is probably what i obsess about most um for obvious reasons but um yeah it's it's it's interesting like uh you sell a good mix of um a good mix of like monthly and annual plans but like looking at looking at things on a weekly basis kind of helps you know build that momentum and um yeah it is true it's like Spend a lot of time in ChartMogul. Yeah. What are some of the other metrics on that cheat sheet that you guys published 10 years ago? Yeah, so there's some basics around customer lifetime value and revenue retention, which is a really tricky metric in general. Average revenue per account. fun three-letter acronyms. Maybe you can speak about ChartMogul, whatever you're able to share, but I mean, you guys look at, you know, seven-day actives or 30-day actives, or how do you handle this topic? Yeah, I mean, activation is the most challenging part of our funnel, I would argue, and it's because we're a product-led motion with a very technical product. I was talking to someone about this earlier, because I think the question he asked me was, um what do you wish was over in sass and his answer was product-led sales or plg he said he said plg he's like i'm over it he was like it's over hyped i'm over plg and i was like okay tell me more about that um and the the bottom line was so many founders will go this product-led growth route because they're like, we'll build it, they'll come, they'll convert. I can tell you they will not convert. They might come, but they will not convert. And it's because there are very few SaaS products that are actually easy and frictionless enough for people to properly convert on their own. You know, think businesses like, I don't know, like Loom is probably a fine example because it's like... It's quite easy. It's non-technical. You usually discover it because somebody sent one to you. So you kind of get it right away. It's got this high reality. And ChartMogul's not that, right? And so it's like you've got to integrate your data. 40% of the time you can't use an integration. So you have to build a custom integration. And so from a funnel perspective, we have big leads coming in. And then it's quite funny because you'll say, do you want to help getting set up? Or do you prefer to evaluate on your own? And the vast majority of our signups say, no, no, I'm good. Leave me alone. And then we ask the same question on the back end of the trial. So we say, hey, we recommend you talk to someone. And they're like, no thanks, take me to my trial. That's the button they click. No thanks, take me to their trial. And then I get in and I see things and they're like, actually, I'd like some help, please. And so, yeah. on the activation front like that's what we're looking at and we're building a lot of alerts and to look at behaviors that are taken over the course of the first 24 hours in the trial um and then the sort of weird unique thing my team's doing is calling like calling those um trial signups which you don't expect when you sign up for a trial of figma you don't expect a sales rep to call you um but my team calls and they say hey did you see this or did you see that and can we help you get set up and so um yeah that's the area of the funnel that we've been looking at a lot how do you justify how much time you spend on certain deal size and potential clients depends how the quarter is going um well we only assign about 15 to 20 of our trial signups to our sales team and the rest is um unassigned and is meant to be a total self-serve motion, they can raise their hand and still find someone to talk to if they get put in that bucket. But the short answer is we use size as a litmus. So if you're above a certain revenue threshold, you get assigned to a sales rep. That sales rep tries to be aligned with how you want to buy, but their eyes are on your trial to see are you doing things that are going to result in a purchase decision. So it's not perfect, but it works quite well. And the thing that you can do is set up these little workflows in the background so that when an action is taken, you can say, oh, yeah, actually, I know you need help or I want to reach out. That's really interesting what you're saying about PLG, because I do feel like it's a bit of a hype. I've had this. have seen this too but that sometimes you know companies would be like well it's really hard to sell so we're gonna like shift to a plg and just self-serve and like oh like that's gonna make it easier or and i think it just makes it it's a different strategy i mean you probably have more content people than sales people i guess right and when that's what you're doing um but what's your i mean obviously you guys still have a very strong product-led self-serve motion yeah um yeah i mean i think this we've touched on it a few different ways but this navigating that line between and you said size i think is a is a great metric but um i imagine there's course correcting and yeah like you said you know how the quarter is going but is there anything else on there that you can give as advice to somebody who's trying to figure it out and they're still looking for that sweet spot or trying to decide yeah how much should be plg versus outbound and, yeah, kind of figuring that out. Yeah. I was talking to a founder of a London-based software business. They get, like, I don't know, 1,200 trials a month. They don't have a sales team. Wow. So it worked for them. Well, I was talking to him at a conference, and I said, what would it mean for you to have someone that sits on top of these leads and calls them? And he was like, I don't know. And I was like, well, would it impact conversion? And then the other question is like, would it impact conversion measurably? And I got up with him a few weeks ago and he said that it was just like an aversion to sales. You know, like sales is a dirty word kind of thing. And he took two and a half months himself as the founder and he called every trial sign up. And so, I mean, I think like if you don't know, you need more data. and you can get that feedback directly from the mouths of your customers if you talk to them. You can also do things like run that survey that I described. So we were trying to figure out how many people actually want to talk to us. So you can add things to your sign-up workflow. You can experiment there. You can call your customers directly or message them through Slack or however you like. But you need more data, I guess. What was, are there any takeaways you can share from that effort that he did? I mean, did he decide that he wants to hire people now or? Yeah, yeah. Interestingly, he's just like, of course, I'm like, just go hire a salesperson. I'm like, what's the worst thing that happens? And, you know, you don't want to fool around with people's careers or lives. But the truth is sales is a performance sport. So if you hire someone and it's not working out, like you can be, you can be very upfront. Right. Like, actually, it's kind of interesting when I hired Leo, who runs Sastanac now, I didn't hire him to work inbound liens. I hired him to do full time cold outbound. And when I hired him, I said, this is a new program. Like, I don't know if it's going to work. I said, but we need to try something different for our go to market motion to grow faster. And so we're going to run a cold outbound program for 12 months. And if if it. Like, here's what constitutes success. Here's what's good enough based on our investments in the program. And then if it doesn't meet these criteria, we're going to have to scrap the whole thing. And so in startups, in the startup world, like, you can hire people and say, like, here's the vision, here's the program. And by the way, like, this isn't going to be a, you know, a cush. government job for four years. Like we're building something really hard. And so that was quite interesting because in the end, we pulled the plug on that outbound program. It didn't make sense. And then what we did is we decided to invest all of those resources in new and different growth marketing techniques. And so that was a couple of years back. But yeah, the origin story of how I met Leo is like, I was like, want to do this cold outbound program with me for 12 months? So it was a bit of a wild ride. we see a lot of companies i i think it was a pretty much common sense that it's easier to build from this region like bottom up PLG companies because you don't have that sales force to build up that enterprise sales and everybody was and or historically like Prezi, Ustream, Logmin also Shaper 3D fall all into this category but now the second generation of startups like Shaper, Sion also which was started pretty much mid-market PLG now going upmarket and focusing more on enterprise so what do you think? on this transition what are the pitfalls and the best practices and when the company is going up market yeah um so when you ask me a question like this my brain immediately goes to like people process tools and so if your go-to-market motion is shifting in any fundamental way like the first question i would ask is do i have the right people in the right seats like do they have the skills and knowledge to be credible to this kind of buyer um Of course, you know, your sales process itself might change. Perhaps your enterprise customers are going to expect that you come on site and do product demos and in-person things, or maybe you need to complete more advanced security questionnaires. And so you'll have to kind of think through these things as well. And then, yeah, I mean, tools is a bit cliche to like lump it in there as the third thing. And maybe it's become a little bit like less of a thing. where if you have the right people and processes, they kind of find their way. But yeah, you might need to add things like, I don't know, a digital sales room or some new or different enablement tactics so that your reps are aware of everything they need to be to effectively. sell to you know can you do the two well parallel or once you start to focus on enterprise you'll be gonna come on enterprise software or can you like i guess great companies did that like figma and others who are both like mid-market but also serving more and more enterprise i'm just curious if you can be great at both of it can you be great at both probably probably you can although it's it's probably rare I think it's easier to go from a higher sale to a lower sale than it is from a lower sale to a higher sale because the more enterprise the deal, the more politicking and the more signals you need to be aware of because it's very easy for a big deal to get blown up in a meeting that you're not a part of. And so, yeah, I think maybe unlikely to be. Maybe it's rare to be good at both of these things. I imagine it's probably also, I mean, different ICPs, right? And the product, what you're selling is also different. I think that, I mean, but yeah, I don't know how much you can speak to this about your vision or, I mean, yeah, how... How do you adapt the product for an enterprise customer? I mean, there's all these other things that you need that don't even relate to the core function, but it's like the data handling policy and security and all these kinds of things, permissions. I would imagine that plays into it also. Oh, I mean, what happens is like a CEO will look, you'll land a big customer. Yeah. And then everyone's like, oh, big customer, this feels great. I want that feeling again. And so sometimes what will happen is you'll look at a sales leader or a sales team and say, go get me more customers that look like this. Or sales, go sell to the enterprise. But you're right, it's a team sport. It's like, first off, your contracts have to be up to snuff. You've got to have more negotiation prowess, your security compliance. your finance and billing practices as well. These bigger customers are gonna ask for more concessions. They're gonna ask for flexible billing terms. They're gonna push you around and you need to figure that out. But I think it comes maybe first and foremost, again, from a product point of view is like, is your product really able to service customers at this level? And if no, like... There's not so many reasons your sales team should be selling. I mean, we made this mistake at ChartMogul. We wanted to sell to bigger customers. And so we sold pilots that rolled over into longer-term agreements. And they were fun deals to close. And we were able to collect some cash and keep some of those customers happy. But if you looked at retention over a certain average sale price, you'll see the lifetime value on those customers. it's not quite as nice as some of the customers who bought, expanded, and grew naturally with the product. And that's really a testament to the fact that when we sold to those bigger customers, the product didn't satisfy all of their requirements in the way that they'd wanted. And so they thought, yeah, Chord Mogul is quite nice, but also our BI team can build something more sophisticated and we can get it just to our liking. So what do you think about growing SaaS businesses relative to geography? Is there a geographic impact? It depends on what it is you're selling. And it also depends on your ambitions as a business, right? So it's perfectly reasonable to found a business that you want to grow in Dach or Benelux and be happy with that. Not every business has to be global, unicorn, empire. you know that requires a founding team that can say we're happy just as is um chart mogul is a horizontal sass play so we're mostly selling in english to sass founders who um you know are comfortable buying in english so we haven't had to localize any of our efforts because localization is just a beast right it's not that you just sell the product in another language we're talking documentation pricing customer support marketing material um and so um i i suppose that you know you take these two things and you say okay well what kind of business do we want to be and what are we selling and then you can make some decisions about um geography it works well enough uh at chart mogul we've been doing it quite we've done remote since pre-pandemic so i think we had a little bit of a leg up um on covid but i also am seeing a resurgence of businesses return to in office um and you know if i had a go-to-market motion where i needed 15 sdrs to sell into you know their territory um i would want to be in office um if i weren't managing you know senior sellers who run the full life cycle themselves i would want to be closer um in geography and um you know in in world view i suppose but um yeah we'll see definitely a lot more a lot more folks are in the office these days in in london in And I'm seeing trends occasionally with remote businesses who will have a centralized sales force for at least a period of their development. So maybe they're trying to hit a special growth target or they're trying to figure something out about their go-to-market motion. And so they'll have all 25 of their salespeople. I don't know. in Valencia for 24 months, and that's just what the job requires. I don't know how sustainable that is because, yeah, I think most folks want more flexibility in their life, so a hybrid approach might be the answer there. Yeah, I mean, I imagine, you know, having 25 people in a room trying to do sales calls, probably not very practical either, right? I don't know. I started my career in the pit. Yeah? It's like traditional sales environment. I had to make 100 call days. Wow. and you would sit in a you would sit and people calling on either side of you and that's quite like a call center call center sales basically yeah yeah more or less but you get a lot of feedback and a lot of learning opportunities really really fast i hated that job i didn't last very long yeah um but it leveled you up in some way a hundred percent because the machine is built that way yeah right they're like put 30 people in a room you know. Ring the bell and it's a big deal. Ring the bell, yep. And we did forecast meeting every day at 7 a.m. and at 1. And if you weren't in the, the leads were also first come, first serve. But if you weren't in the room for the forecast meeting, you wouldn't be permitted to make calls that day. I mean, it was a bit of a show. Different time, maybe, but do companies still do this? I mean, is that? Well, culturally, I don't know that you can get away with it. But, and gosh, I sound like, I'm hearing myself say this out loud and thinking, oh, you sound like an idiot, Sarah. But it's a bit of like going back to the basics, right? Where, you know, I go to the forecast meeting with my team and I say, have you tried calling them? Right. You know? Yeah, I think we're getting soft. It's like what you said. I'm inspired to have a little bit renewed rigor and kind of, yeah, discipline around this because it is, you know, sales can be a grind. I mean, you got to do the hard work. Well, I just, yeah, and I'd rather have the no than, like, enroll the lead in the sales loft sequence and sit on my, like, just pick up the phone. Anyway, I digress. Well, this was great, Sarah. Thank you so much. I'm definitely feeling inspired with some great takeaways for some of our startups here. Yeah, thank you for your time and for your candor and have a great trip on your tour. Yes. Thanks so much for being here. Appreciate you having me in.

"Sales is all about problem solving."

In Episode 2 of The Emergents Podcast, hosts Mary Alcantara and Csongor Biás sit down with Sarah Archer, Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) at ChartMogul, to unpack what early-stage SaaS founders need to understand about sales, PLG, compensation, hiring, activation, and building a go-to-market function that actually works.

Sarah has spent more than a decade in B2B technology sales and operations, from selling Salesforce implementation services in the United States to leading sales at ChartMogul, a subscription analytics platform for recurring revenue businesses.

This conversation is especially useful for technical founders who are strong at product but late to learn sales. Sarah explains why sales should be seen as problem-solving, why PLG rarely means customers will simply convert on their own, why founder-led sales comes before hiring a sales team, and why the first sales hires should be ambitious, hardworking generalists rather than expensive senior executives.

The episode covers the transition from services to SaaS, product vision, sales compensation, account management, activation, customer conversations, upmarket sales, remote teams, and the discipline needed to build a revenue engine.

Guest:
Sarah Archer - CRO, ChartMogul

Hosts:
Mary Alcantara - Partner, Interactive Venture Partners
Csongor Biás - Managing Director, Startup Hungary

Powered by:
Startup Hungary / Interactive Venture Partners 

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Timestamps:

00:00 Welcome and introduction to Sarah Archer
00:31 How Sarah fell into software sales
03:42 Services sales vs SaaS sales
05:13 Product vision and the services-to-SaaS transition
08:52 When customer-led product work becomes a distraction
10:29 Joining ChartMogul and rebuilding the sales stack
12:46 How ChartMogul narrowed its ideal customer profile
15:36 Hiring self-managed, technical salespeople
17:56 Why early sales reps should not be over-specialized
21:07 Why account management moved into sales
22:42 Sarah’s connection to the CEE SaaS ecosystem
24:33 The reality of sales compensation
28:12 When founders should hire their first salespeople
30:20 When to hire sales leadership
31:26 How technical founders can learn sales
33:27 How content and product vision support sales
36:21 Sarah’s favorite SaaS metrics
37:34 Why PLG does not mean users will convert themselves
39:57 How ChartMogul handles trial activation
42:32 Why founders should call trial users
45:31 Moving from PLG to enterprise sales
50:54 Geography, remote sales, and localization
53:59 The discipline of old-school sales
55:39 Final reflections

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Subscribe on Spotify:
https://open.spotify.com/show/1CNlqJuudxjki89eY7nRMU?si=44F45q7AT5ybiIxCdO4ZkQ

Follow Startup Hungary on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/company/startup-hungary-io/

Follow Startup Hungary on Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/startup_hungary/

Follow Interactive Venture Partners on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/company/interactivevp/

Follow Sarah Archer on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/smarcher18/

Visit the Startup Hungary Website:
https://www.startuphungary.io/

Visit the Interactive Venture Partners Website:
https://www.interactivevp.com/en/home.php

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#sales #saas  #startups  #startuphungary #venturecapital