How to Support Founder Led Sales | Benedikt Meuthen | #chadtpodcast Ep. 25

Ben, what's good, man? So happy to have you here today. How are you? Doing great. Thanks for having me, Chad. Man, I'm pumped. I just heard you say all founders should be salespeople. So is that a hill you die on? Is that something you believe firmly in? 100%. I mean, in the end of the day, the revenue function is... In my eyes, and of course, I need to say that as a fractional CEO, but in my eyes, it is the most important part of the company. I rather sell a bad product with a great sales force than a great product with a bad sales force. At the end of the day, that's what it comes down to. I know it sounds tough and I might get some hate for it, but hey, 100% convinced by the words that I'm using here. And therefore, the CEO has to have it down. Yeah, and you mean Salesforce in the traditional sense, like the force of people behind your product selling it, right? Exactly. I don't mean the CRM. Yeah. Well, I feel like people lost sight of that. Somewhere along the way, you couldn't even say Salesforce anymore to represent all the people selling. So this is also something I've been a firm believer in. So I work for you. I've worked for yous in the world for 12, 14 years now. It's my favorite thing in the world to watch sellers get their deals done as swiftly and smoothly as possible. passion to like serve these sellers and early on i noticed that startups i were working for they were only good if they were led by a sales person and or a product person so you had to have some kind of product but if you didn't have a sales person at the helm like good luck you know nobody was making the money here's something i found you can't run a business with the finance person have you have you ever seen that where like the cfo or the vp of finance is trying to take too strong a lead and and things kind of go sideways have you seen that in your experience i've seen that dozens of times and it's it's the classic founder duo i see um in in emea anyways it's oftentimes ex-consultants coming out of mckinsey coming out of bain and company deloitte you name it so they did that couple of years as a junior there and now they're coming out to found their own business and it's oftentimes a product guy and a finance guy and they figure oh that gtm part we're worried about that later we'll figure that out biggest mistake ever yeah you know who made that uh pulp pop culture popular i feel like the facebook movie gave everyone the wrong idea that if you could just get your finance buddy oh he's a finance major and let's just get three thousand dollars and throw some server racks in there you know that's a slightly different story but but in especially in your space and i want you to unpack more of this but in your space where you're actually trying to meet a market and solve needs it doesn't sell itself you know there's a lot of competition out there someone has to understand what the pain points are so i guess i'd be super curious you know and obviously we're biased like you're cro and i and i serve the guys like you but what do you think what are the stories from the trenches that have really shaped your view of leadership or like when you go in you sit down with the ceo maybe that's about to hire you What are the horror stories in the back of your head where you're like, this is something only sales could ever know and this is why you've got to have it in your business? Well, I sit down with a lot of early stage founders. Usually when I start working with them, they are under a million in ARR. So they found just about... product market fit maybe if i'm lucky message market fitting most of the times not though most of the times that's not even what's the difference there actually that's that's good i'm sorry to cut you off i just want to i actually haven't heard it put that way so product market fit is obvious and me as an ops guy and tech guy it makes sense so message market fit uh sounds marketing but how do you view that as a cro well it is marketing but it is also sales and then the verge between which people business development where like which side is that really right but message market fit is if I can prove by numbers by stats by data that to hit that market that has a fit with my product that I established through PMF I get the right wording to reel them in so finding 50 customers as a CEO, as a fresh founder, that's one thing. Great. You spoke to all your friends who used all your network. But do you have the messaging that resonates with the fresh buyers that are not part of your network yet? Can you formulate a subject line that will get them to open an email? Can you formulate a couple of good sentences for a pitch on the phone that you can throw across that's going to interrupt their day and make them want to speak with you? If you don't have that, you don't have message marketing. Yeah, that's funny. Ever since I started this podcast, I feel so validated. And maybe it's just because I choose the guests. But I used to tell wannabe entrepreneurs, I'm like, you're not in business until you made a dollar from someone who's not your auntie, your mama, or your little brother, Jimmy. Because everyone, they get all this excitement from their warm market. And it's like Aunt Susie from wherever was like, oh, here's a $50 she buys, whatever. You're still not in business. Because I love the whole message to market fit. It's clear now as I play back some of the sellers in my head, what's an example of a company that didn't and then as you either work through your own sales process or even from a leadership process, you found a different message and you're like, okay, you guys were trying to say this. It doesn't hit. This one made more sense and now we're closing deals. Do you have any of those? Well, I can't name any names, but there's certainly been startups where i've been involved i was asked to be involved and i checked how they are scaling for a while whether staying in an advisor position because i wasn't sure about the founding teams and what i saw was it didn't matter what you gave them in terms of structure and strategy there were some things that the founders were not willing to move on and one of them was the messaging with which they themselves closed the first i think it was like 17 18 customers And they said, we just have to repeat exactly what we did. The classic trap of founder sales, if you want so. But they were not just stuck on their ways, but they were also stuck on their messaging. In that particular case, messaging just selling into their own BCG network of Boston Consulting Group. And people within there, of course, they're going to read your messages. Now try that with somebody who's not part of your ex-consulting firm you work for. Yeah, I actually have... Just recently, there's a CEO and a president who I really like, and I won't name their names either, but they just hit 24 million MRR, so like 2 million a month. And then, and man, so good. Like they've done something that 0.01% of the population might ever do if they're lucky. But I kept looking at it and I'm like, oh you had really strong connections you know one of them was like had twitter connections the other one was really plugged into big sas companies people were pulling him and her in and i and i'm just looking at the scalability of it and i didn't see how the messaging was gonna like break past that it and maybe it wouldn't matter so i don't i guess i don't want to pick them apart one one example i do have is uh i worked for rubric when they were pre-ipo rubric is cyber security And I love this story because I'm an IT traditionally by trade from the U.S. military, 12 years in the U.S. military as a break-fix IT. So what Rubrik had, and now to be clear, Rubrik is $1.2 billion post-IPO, and I don't speak for any of these logos, so none of these are earnings claims, et cetera. But they had a backup solution. they were essentially backing up your data which is a really unsexy business model but because they got away from traditional tapes and that created a logical air gap between your data and how to access it so what happened is when ransomware hit the market like really as a rash they discovered that like they were the best protection against ransomware because your data wasn't, as everything was being encrypted, your data wasn't even there. There was a gap between you and the data. So then when the message shifted to where ransomware protection, they just skyrocketed to the moon and became a unicorn, IPO successfully. The CEO's name is Bipple. He's still all over. uh cnbc you know on all the money channels and that stuck it struck in my it stuck in my career because as an it i still knew like you're a glorified backup system but the messaging changed and now it was worth billions to the market um i am curious you said that let's talk about your growth story unless you have a comment on the rubric thing but i want to hear about uh desperate desperate where you jumped in at 400k and drove that to essentially $10 million. So what did that look like? What was that growth story for you? And then how did that feel as a sales leader? What did you have to do? Who did you have to get on board? What other company leaders did you have to kind of get the toe line to make that happen? That was a wild ride. So buckle up for this one. I was an enterprise account executive with Asana before. Asana or Asana, the learning platform or the? The workplace management. Yeah, yeah, they're great. Asana. Yeah. So I was an enterprise account executive with them and I got recruited from the two founders of Despert at the time. Great product for the time. And I could say, all right, there's money to be made now in this market because it was a product that perfectly matched the COVID days, the lockdown days. We weren't full anymore. We were selling desk booking software. We could minimize the office usage. Great timing on the market. plus they offered me my first head of sales role so i was all on board and i said all right let's make that happen what i found was founder that did founder sales with two people that he hired for sales that had actually never done sales before no real crm set up no stages we're starting at zero first maybe 50, 60 customers in. Do you see that as a founder's trap? I actually, I love these founders, but sometimes you're like hiring your buddy who is a senior manager and then you bring them in and you're like, here's our new VP of sales. And I'm like, oh, dang. It happens. In this case, I was lucky. They brought me on board and I had... Again, I was lucky because I had the right mentors above me. I always made sure throughout my entire AE career to keep in touch with all my head of sales, all my managers. So probably for the first half year of being in the head of sales role, I was more on the phone with my mentors than I was speaking to my teams because I needed to learn the job fast and avoid many mistakes. Great part is we got amazing funding at that time. We had a seed series where we raised 6.5 followed by an A series where we raised just over 13 million. So budget was there for scaling, but I still needed to write the playbook, set up the system. So I was ref ops, CRO, VP sales, head of sales, enablement, everything in one person as you are in these stages. There is no real split between these roles. But one of the first hires I made sub one million still was the sales ops. Yeah, I was just going to ask you at the end of this, why am I important? But let's come back to that because I do want to – so now you're sub-1 million, and so you're wearing all the hats. Makes sense. I have a lot of friends, personal friends that run $6 million businesses even. They're wearing all the hats, and every time I look at them, I'm like, dang, you guys got to be exhausted. So how did you get from one to like the next – most challenging was probably three or four where do you agree where do what was the hardest thing to do next well in terms of hiring or in terms of growth stages growing the business hiring the people staffing it all of it well it was first make a decision in which order want uh do i want to hire and of course i had to present a case to that to the boards to the c levels to the two founders so i wanted to be very i just wanted to be right about it so my first two hires were one future head of business development that's going to head the bdr team but bring the proof herself that she can do it in outbound first and one sales ops to help me with the tooling because i knew if i'm stuck in the tooling i'm not gonna have time to build build a great sales motion i i know what i want but i don't have the time to build it the other part was i need to sacrifice either a bottom of funnel or top of funnel i have to have a narrow focus here and i knew we're getting very good inbound leads at the time so top of the funnel was not the problem i wanted to straight away get into conversion so to set up an outbound channel i said we have a long runway until the outbound channel needs to be up let that be handled by someone who knows it just as well as me and i focus on purely conversion right now that's so good and that's how i built my system so that's for my first two hires do you think i found that uh people I guess some founders get lucky because they did what they liked doing and they're fortunate that what they like doing is what they needed to do most. Like I have a guy who runs a business. He's just very good at networking and closing deals. He likes doing it and his business is growing. But when you chose between top of funnel and closing, the bottom of funnel, were you... putting aside certain preferences or emotions there because it sounds like a very rational decision like did you did you assess that with some kind of data i mean you gave us the data but like was that a hard decision to make because you prefer one over the other uh it wasn't it wasn't that hard because i also asked myself like what's my role here what do i need to do and for me at this stage of a startup sub 1 million it's experimental time i need to find which message resonates with which target groups set a very narrow ICP, which we didn't have in the beginning. ICP was kind of like every company that has an office, but that's not really an ICP, right? So I needed to work on that. And for that, I needed to be in contact with prospects. So I was the AE in the beginning. I was selling the deals together with the founder, together with the other two sales guys that were already there, enabling them, training them, teaching them how to demo properly. They hadn't done it ever before. And yeah. just getting data from the market together with my brilliant sales ops guy at the time vaja was his name absolute legend at uh at hub sport he's a hub sport wizard and without him that wouldn't have worked so then okay so let i do want to unpack that just for the vanity sake i i know everyone will always know i'm biased because i am sales ops uh traditionally and i know the value it brings uh intangibly and then i know the value it brings uh economically as well like i know that i have saved companies 200 000 to millions of dollars on deals i just know it and it doesn't sometimes you don't realize that until after the deal was closed but what did you what do you cherish the most in an ops guy and then how do you distinguish between that ops guy or gal and like this is just some sales admin some sales admin or sales assistant well there's a huge difference between it i i some people look at a sales ops as like a task monkey per se right right give them the cleaning up of excel files like have them tidy up the data in the crm that's not what a sales ops is to me and that's not what refops is to me sales ops is is to me the executional part of the systems that i design put into practice at a faster and more scalable way that i can do it plus Seeing what I don't see if me and myself agree on absolutely everything There's a problem If we agree If I say this deal is coming and they say based on 100% and insights everything I see in the system It's not great. Now we got a case to ask you and we might find some gaps in the deal Yeah, I had a CFO If they just agree with me on everything, why do I need them? I had a CFO And man, I respect it. She was getting so much pressure from the PE, from the private equity firm. And I get it. And their number, I just knew. I was looking at seven years of empirical data. And I was like, your Q3 is going to come in here. And at the end of this year, you're going to land about 112 or 115 million. and she just kept coming back she's like i need that to say 150 million and so i would go back i would go back to the vp of sales and um oh what was his name i will call him steve i'm like steve you're freaking killing me like if you want me to put all these stupid white space padding in the crm whatever but like I'm just telling you, this is not crystal ball stuff. You're going to land at 115. And I would bet my bonus on it. And so I think that I've also valued that traditionally for sales leaders. I feel like sales leaders don't use their ops guys enough for that. Because your ops guy doesn't, isn't, while they do have a bonus normally, they're not like worried about their million dollar deal closing. They're not trying to like fudge a line for commission. They should be looking at a sales leader and telling him or her. really straight. One, we're going to push back on each other. We'll do this in closed doors, but like you're the leader. So when you make the decision, I'm your ops guy, I'm going to support you. But secondly, like this is ludicrous. You're talking like space numbers, stuff in the clouds now, and you should know that that's stupid. So I don't know. I feel like I catch flack for that sometimes, but that's part of the value of having these guys. Absolutely. And this sales office, I actually did train him myself. at the time we were a young star we i mean we got funding afterwards when we hired him there was no funding so what i wanted was the sales ops the budget we had for this additional role at the time said working student so i went on the hunt and i found myself a working student where i like i just tested his technical expertise he hadn't seen hubspot before but the first three months of him working with me i worked him through the entire hubspot academy i sent him to every webinar every course he can do I think two weeks after being in, he knew more about HubSpot than I do. And he was just such a quick learner. And I told him from the get-go, look, I don't want you to be a task monkey. What I want you is to correct me when I'm wrong and to think around the corner and tell me what I don't see. He built me so many dashboards and explained me so many views I hadn't seen before. And said, like, Ben, I know you're looking at this, but really what you're looking for is here. And that's what I needed. Yeah, they had... One of the companies I was with had a very large deal with PepsiCo through a partner. And I kept looking at the product usage data, which is not, I was doing that because I had an admin task. I had to complete for them every month to get like a revenue number. And I just noticed, I'm like, oh, hey, what's that? Like month over month, the product usage was going down. And so I remember calling up that VP, that senior VP and be like, hey, just as an FYI, like. they're rolling off i don't know if they've told you this or not yet but but uh the the data clearly shows you that this this account's going to be gone within six months um you know i i do want to talk about how long ago was that first hire do you remember five years ten years sooner about five years ago so i am i'm applying a lot i'm between um w-2 jobs right now and i love these interviews to be clear this isn't a woe is me story but a lot of startups are attracted to me lately and i and i want to help so much and that but then i'll talk to them i was like talking to a company out of the uk just yesterday morning and then i look at the salary they want to offer and i was like how how do you think you're going to get this for 99 uh k us dollars I was like, there's no way you can't get entry level for less than 130 or 120. And your job description essentially says, do everything Ben just said to do. It's like, own it, be the strategic advisor, do all this stuff. So I think that one's a struggle for companies that really need the role, but they don't understand how much it actually costs. You got to see that there's a huge difference between the American market and the European market in tech salaries in general. yeah he did say it candidly at the end and i feel bad for him because i actually i prefer working with the amea teams and the uk teams um so much more than working with california teams sorry all you tech giants out there but uh i don't know i don't know like i it's on the one hand it's like i love you guys so much i'll take a pay cut maybe put a huge incentive package in there but on the other hand what what coaching would you give to those companies that are saying we need the role one solution is higher in higher in region like i love the sales ops professionals in dublin in uk one of one of my old managers was just messaging me she's amazing like if anyone could hire her i'd say she's worth every dollar and she and you know unfortunately they just get paid less than they do in the us but what do you tell these companies now when they're trying to hire this why quite easy actually the companies i work for are so junior they don't have a ref ops or sales ops on their screen at all they don't even think about it when i come in as an advisor it's one of the first things i tell them to get and when they say like look but then we didn't even budget for it no worries get a fractional person fractional sales leaders fractional refops are trending all over the place left right and center over my linkedin i encourage two refops uh in my system that worked for companies where they weren't happy i said Just go by yourself, just freelance. Okay, coach me, Ben. Hang on, coach me one second. You can do it live. I am an ops guy. I've been an ops guy for so long. I am, like, when you start talking to me, I just start solving problems. The owners of this building, we automated their whole customer service with Intercom. Shout out to Fin AI, doing an amazing job. The other owner is a commercial real estate guy. I'm today, right away, building out open claw bots that will run his CRM for him. but like i just start solving it so what i never do is sell the service and it's so terrifying to be a high paid w2 guy to all of a sudden have that just loves solving problems and now i need to say hey man i love doing this all you have to do is pay me five to ten gig a month and i'll do it part-time for you like how do you what do you tell these guys because i because think about that now in your world i would be a founder now that's not a salesperson right i'm a poor little product guy trying to figure out how to make money where do you where do you start it's the same as you start with every business you build whether you're just a freelancer doing that for yourself or business you start by going out into the market and seeing what you can actually offer and in this case it's frankly quite obvious what you can offer there's a target group of companies let's say sitting below five million ar that all need your service and all haven't thought of having that problem. So it's creating awareness, go on LinkedIn, speak about that topic. I get the majority of my leads coming in through LinkedIn. I actually just started going hard on LinkedIn. These same topics as you, you know, I just speak about GTM and revenue motions and everything that I get to build in companies and that attracts the right customers to me. I rarely do any outbound sales. It's all about traffic. It works for me. If it works for me, it works. You know what's so funny? A headhunter recruited me, a PE portfolio company out of New York. And they were like, hey, we got this commodities company. They're 120 million. They've never had RevOps. They need you. And I got in there and I built out all their solutions. And then I was just really looking at the CEO and CRO. And I was like. you guys are paying you're not getting your money's worth you're paying me too much and i was like you could get what i'm doing for you now after i built it to be clear there's there was definitely a value add in those first three to six months but after a year i was like dang you guys are paying me a ginormous salary and it's like just wasting money um because a managed service provider that's what i call them in my world msps which would essentially be a fractional an agency that's doing fractional work of some capacity they'll do this for you for 2k to 5k a month and uh so i sold them on it and and resigned and and uh went on to do some consulting work for some of the sas companies um but in the back of my head now i'm like i'm that i'm that i need to be that company that's like look you guys are paying too much for this expensive dude like Come on board and let's work. The market is out there. I mean, we're consolidating roles into each other through AI left, right and center. The job market in the GTM space is massively going to change. And regardless whether we like that or not, so fractional roles are on the rise now. I would say I'm quite... Lucky that I got into it early. I think so. I see many new people jumping on that space right now. I see a new competitor of mine every other day. But when I speak to them, I don't think they find quite as easy to start. Well, they're not good. You know what? Okay, so that's another problem. Here's sales coaching again. Okay, the problem with ops guys and product guys is I'm not saying a salesperson doesn't have integrity. What I am saying is that a product guy and an ops guy will be too literal. I will... I will I am not going to go on LinkedIn and say some bizarre outlandish claim unless I could show you a video of it. But then I see everyone being noisy and they make these claims and they would be technical competitors. And I'm like, you're not good at what you do. So and that's unfortunate, right? Because let's say you have great product to market fit. You're lacking message to market. You have zero and you're not doing any sort of. problem awareness generation what do you tell those guys where it's like no stop stop selling yourself stop being so literal or like don't be so serious like do you know what i mean like do you ever meet the guy that just talks himself out of the deals because he one keeps talking and or two never ask for the money and then you with the sales skill how do you say you're the company's not going to make 10 million dollars if you keep doing that like what do you tell that person i'm with you on some parts of that question i'm not with you and others because i think times are shifting um i know exactly the big number guys on linkedin you're talking about with a look i'm gonna change your revenue model and you're gonna have a close rate of 80 within six weeks kind of guys whatever nobody believes that anyways i stay away from claims like this on my website on my linkedin you're not gonna find it you're not gonna find any offer i ever sent to uh to to a client that includes a outrageous claim like this i just don't do it and here's the feedback i receive from my clients They chose me exactly because of this. That's so good. They said we spoke to five fractional CIOs. Four of them promised us heaven and heaven on earth within three weeks. You said now it's going to be a tough first six months and we have to make some hard calls. That's why we chose you. That's so good. Okay. Well, then let's go back to the tough calls. And you were sub one million. You got to a million. We're still on the journey to 10 million. What are some of the things that mattered to the business, especially the things that you apply to your clients now like what are the takeaways from growing at the 10 million and now you're talking to your your uh ideal client profile and you're like these are the things you got to do if you actually want to make it the 10 million or and you even mentioned 25 million like the things that you want to do if you want to make it all the way to 25. yeah well 25 different story not that case i don't think desperate is Cried there yet, but well on the way, just without me at this stage. Well, let me just say to the whole audience, so $10 million. So I know I'm in a world where the largest deal I ever sat on was $23 million. That company was a $700 million company. They're $1.2 billion now. I was consulting for a large AI company just before this, in the billions, before they even went public. So people look at $10 million like, oh, you've only got a $10 million company? Are you a... Are you out of your mind? Have you ever once in your life grown a $500,000 pound or euro company? Like $10 million is so astronomical and so successful, especially in ARR. Yes. It's not revenue. It's not runtime revenue. You've got reincurring revenue. That's the highest glass you can make. Yeah, I just think it's big. It's a different game. I plan and numbers are smaller. Deal sizes are smaller. Growth comparably is small, although it's at a higher multiple because these large companies, they don't grow at a five, six X year over year anymore. Right. Yeah. So it's just a different journey. And I love that initial startup to scale up phase. That just gets me excited. In the beginning, it's just. a bunch of guys in one room with one big mission and no idea what they're doing and forming that into a well-performing well-oiled revenue machine that's amazing i i wouldn't want to do anything else but to answer your question before that the journey from um essentially zero to ten to me there's three different phases in that there's zero to one million finding product market fit finding message market and building the revenue engine that's good that will get you That experimenting part of the way will get you to 1 million. To get to 5 million, you need a sales motion that actually works. So you need good sellers that can execute on that sales motion. And you need to have your stats and your data right to control that. But to get from 5 to 10 million, you don't just need good sales reps. Typically in the game where I am, that's where you also need great impact of the product. Because from here on forward, net retention is key. Yeah. So from there at the 5 million mark, I started hiring for account managers that would exclusively do upsell support to support customer success. What did you call that team? Customer success? Is that what you call them? Customer success? Yeah. Okay. So customer success, they do the onboarding, they drive the customer through adoption, through impact, and then hand over to an account manager that actually does the commercial upselling part. Yeah. Okay. So I agree. Well, just to be clear, I agree with you. I do think we're in a strange world where one to two people could get to 4 million, but I think that your numbers are still accurate. Those will be rare little unicorns that can actually run all this AI stuff and know what they're doing. So 5 to 10, though, so you had dedicated upsells, customer success. Was there anything, did you experience anything where it's like... We made a wrong decision on the system we chose or the process we chose and we're bottlenecked into something or we're like a heavy manual process and you had to rip that out to get from five to 10. Like there's other stuff in five to 10, I think. I think system-wise in that case, there were less errors that I made compared to who I hire because that was new for me. That's so good. With the right people you get a lot more done and I hired some great people But there are also some people that I hired and they didn't perform regardless of how much I adjusted the system to suit their style of selling and whatnot Which I shouldn't have done with done it from the beginning of the base, but in in the US where you base Sales reps that don't perform. Well, they're gonna have a relatively short time in uh in the company it's more of a higher and fire culture in europe it doesn't work that way with all our laws behind it you can't just get rid of somebody that easy that doesn't perform sometimes you have to hold them in the company for years or you really have to get creative in how you go about it um and i held on for people by pure hope for too long because i said like oh they convinced me in the interview one and a half years ago so much like one day they'll come around the corner and they'll be a top selling rep because i wanted that to be true we could do a whole we could do a whole show and like the the the cultural differences matter and i don't i don't even mean in like a virtue signaling way um i had when i had offices in sydney tokyo dublin and denver it's like that tokyo uh culture the japanese culture totally different uh world and you had to you had to work within it and then the amia culture which i loved totally different world and you had to work within it one weird example to me is like i don't think i'm your cliche american but for sure i'm american there's a competitive streak right in sales where it's like you could you could start blasting people and um Not shaming them, but like throw all these little challenges out. And people really respond to that well in this young, fast American selling culture. When you put that in the Dublin office or the Leeds office or the London office, they almost get a little like they're a little bothered that you would think that to put someone on blast like that. And it doesn't feel like sportsmanship. And I was like, that's really fascinating because this is. of a real management tool on the u.s side but like it is not being received well on the other side of the pond here what have you dealt have you ex are you mainly are most of your clients mainly uh uk and emia at this point or do you see the differences in the u.s companies too Most of my clients are in the Dach market, so Germany, Austria, Switzerland. But I also work with a lot of international companies that want to come onto that market. Because when you land in EMEA, if you're a US company asking yourself, where should I land? Well, probably it's going to be the UK because you don't have EU regulation and they speak your language. Great, you start selling there, but that market is not going to last you too long. Eventually, you will want to go in Europe's biggest economy. which is Germany, or as a region, it's the Dach region, Germany, Austria, Switzerland. And that's where stuff becomes real tricky. And I see one after another American company fall flat on their face and waste hundreds of thousands, if not millions on massive mistakes entering that Dach market. It's almost hysterically funny to watch how they fail. Not because I want them to, but it's exactly for the reason you said. They believe their culture will work. in a different culture one-on-one and we call that cowboy sales i know in the in in in the us you sell through velocity you sell through speed and execution in europe we sell through proof yeah very very very different system of selling yeah different sales cycles different deal structures i consulted for daimler for mercedes-benz and that was actually my first um eye-opener to like and again all these things are cliches on one level but you know it was just a strong preference for precision and being real clear on what you meant and what you were asking you couldn't just like come out there and like throw some ambitious goal out and be like let's all rally around it go get it you know that's that that's that whole sort of cowboy selling but my point on the german austrian and um i mean even the nordics is not as hard or difficult in my opinion but but uh yeah i see americans go in there you don't appreciate English is a Germanic language, right? So it's like, oh, we share some roots. No. Yes, maybe you can deduce what kindergarten means, but the structure that's been preserved so far in Dutch, German, and some of the other languages there is wildly different. And if you don't appreciate what it means to lead there, to earn respect there was a big one for me. how to get in and break down those markets, you really just look like one of the loud cowboy Americans that's like flailing around on the floor. And then all the executives in that area know that he or she's just going to. flash out in like six months and be gone and so again i agree with you it's i i know that posture you're talking about where it's like it's not that i want to see him fail but it's almost like this again in that precision mindset the knowingness that this person will be in and out in six months and be noisy for a minute and if we just hold our principles like he or she's gone uh and i don't even have a solution for that besides like hiring Hire local. Hire someone who speaks the language of the customers you're trying to sell to. It starts there. Adjust your marketing to what's important in this. Yeah, we'll take their feedback on the marketing for sure. Take their feedback. Get the right certifications. Make sure your data is actually hosted on European servers. Huge topic with the Cloud Act. All email-wide companies are more and more going away from US data hosting they want their data hosted on european servers and i'm not talking an aws server in frankfurt that's still an american server we want european server structure which does not mean that american tools can't sell we love our american tools in europe of course we do um but we want them we want our whole uh or data hosted in our country and in germany this is huge and some companies come over here they're like oh no we do all our data hosting over there or in dublin or wherever yeah it's um again some some people get over sensitive it's funny because americans are so wild and some of the things that they'll say but then they'll get real sensitive if you're like Maybe an Italian doesn't want to speak to someone speaking English. Sorry to break it down to you, but they would much rather hear a different accent on the phone than someone from California. I struggle with this because... A lot of companies try to, US-based companies, they try to reconsolidate to centralize command and control and then also their money. And they lose that aspect of it. Like if you want to break into the European markets, you have to work through the channel partners there. You have to work through trusted resellers and distributors. It just is the only way you grow it there. And I feel like a lot of... american leaders that have only been american-centric they don't they miss the ball on that um okay so we got so what else so five to ten ten million how did you then maybe bring us to the end of that how did you decide this was wildly successful i'm so happy with what i did here and now i want to go on to the next chapter of things in my sales career and then also just for the people that are early in their sales career how did you go from you went from ae you told us that story now you're the the sales lead um did you ever pick up CRO role before fractional or what was your journey into CRO and then how have you seen other people do that successfully or what encouragement would you give to the young seller right now that's like one day I want to be CRO or CEO all right well there's a lot of a lot of questions I want but let me let me tap my best yeah however you like to unpack it go for it well first of all what do I recommend young sellers quite the opposite of what I did I had a very fast journey BDR to AE to enterprise AE, head of sales, VP sales, CIO, like I climbed up the ladder as you're supposed to, but now I say you're not really like take your time, learn the craft in one position. And there's a very particular reason why I tell that because you just asked in the beginning of your question, how did you know it was time to leave? Well, I didn't, my body forced me. I had a burnout at the time and in my mid 30s, which is... definitely too early to have a clinical burnout yeah it could work for a year uh i'm fully back i'm doing my doing my job just as before just a little different uh but yeah my body forced a heartbreak when my mind wanted to keep going and that was a massive important learning so take more time in each position don't put yourself in this in this position where where this is going to be you because i see Honestly one in five sales leaders statistically falling into this trap throughout their career and often younger younger than you expect so to your last question have i picked up fracture work or how did that work well that's all intertwined with each other doing that journey one to ten million i started picking up some consultant jobs on the side other startups wanted to know about our secrets and as long as they were in competitors i was fine to consult them about whichever other topic so i did that and in the end of the day way too much work for one person as it goes burnout and me asking myself the question damn what can i uh still so work I can't see myself going back in a full-time employment and that's when one of the luckiest calls of my career happened and the lead investor of Desperate at the time gave me a call and said Ben I love what you did that's I love how you built that company we got 300 more others ask companies that's I'm waiting for that call Ben I'm waiting for that call how about you go out there and do that for some of our other clients And that's what I did. And they gave me the starting couple of tickets. Were they private equity or like venture capital? What kind of company was that? Venture capital, yeah. Very cool. I'm seeing more of that. I could plug in more to it. I have to lower a level of arrogance. This market, because I want to talk about your ICP next, but there's a lot of PE out there. I think they know that companies need this. I actually, the same PE firm put me in front of two companies. So really, at the end of the day, it was the PE company that embedded me, not even the company that hired me, if you think about that. I think that's a good plug-in for anyone considering Fraction. Go to someone that is financially invested in your success by way of the other companies winning. So then where you're at now... Two parts to this question. I know we unloaded a bunch of another one and only got to a portion of it, but what is your ideal client? And really, just in real words, who do you like working with? Who do you love stepping into? And then what does that look like? I'm reading your... your linkedin bio right now and we'll just uh say a couple of them because i want to lead that question you talk about the work typically includes like revenue diagnostics discovery and demo architecture pipeline structure um a clear 90 day sales roadmap so talk about who you love to work with and then what does it look like to him or her you're sitting down in the boardroom for the first time and you're like hey let's have some serious conversations like what are you trying to do and what does that look like for him My ideal customer is that startup that wants to become a scale-up in the B2B SaaS space. So I look for companies usually between half a million in ARR to 2.5 million. Wow, half a million. I was going to ask you if you had a floor. So you actually would go in at 500K? Absolutely, and I've gone in below a couple of times, but then it just takes too long to get to where I provide my biggest value. So I want them to have some sales. Ideally, they have their first one, two sales reps on board. The sales is still founder-led. They do have some funding, and I love working with a pretty wide or horizontal use case, so I can cover a lot of time. or a lot of different companies in that ICP. I don't like working with too narrow markets. I had a couple of startups where their entire addressable market was just 2,000 companies worldwide. Yeah, so you don't mean narrow by like product offer. You mean narrow as in not enough targetable, total addressable market or like serviceable addressable market? Yeah, I like scale. So to me, that needs to be there. So I look at C2 Series A venture backed. b2b sars companies that still have founder-led sales and i look at joining them on the journey to 10 million that's that's very much the point yeah didn't you say before we hit record actually i did want to come back that you said that if the founder doesn't stay in sales to a certain number they'll never hit 25 i think that's where i had the 25 in my head do you remember what that was and does that is that something for you i said a founder should be should be in sales himself until 1 million ar at a minimum to really learn and get the market feedback and learn proper sales if they're not from coming from that background from From 1 million to 10 million, they should at least partially be in sales, which does not mean managing the team because that's not their expertise. It means still running small deals themselves or being involved as a co-seed to the AE just to stay on board. If I see founders not doing that, I often see them replaced with a CEO who will do that by the board later on in the journey. Is that lights out for that founder or do they just take an early exit and they have a smaller multiple? They just get a seat on the board early. You look at some of the most successful founders. Look at Mark Benioff. We talked about Salesforce earlier. This guy is still selling. Go to Dreamforce. See how he walks up to CEOs of other companies. He's still selling. Yeah, I actually said I'm not bad. I said I'm bad at sales, and I don't think that's correct. Like a lot of founders, I'm probably bad at outbound. And also, it's an arrogance thing. I feel like it's beneath me. And I've done this before. I've sold sailboats and other things, like hundreds of cold calls. But I have noticed that any good founder, when he or she gets on the call, that deal is closing. If there's budget and authority, that deal is closing. all founders do sell i just think maybe they're not doing all the prospecting motions like a like a setter or business development rep would do and that's fine and that's fine yeah they don't cover the entire entire funnel so early as early as 500k um and they're in they're in either a first round or second round then who are you talking to first and what is the difficult conversation that you're having with them like what are the most important few few conversations with them Well, I'm usually talking directly to the founders, directly to C-Level at this stage. Sometimes they already have a head of sales in place that would likely be junior, so need the support as well. And then they'd be involved. And the tough conversations I'm having usually work around this systemizing of the chaos that they do and them not liking it very much. Because there's this painful transition period from startup to scale up. When typically I always tell them 30% of your staff will leave. It'll be people you like, it'll be all the people that come in here and say like, oh, this workplace is like family. Yeah. They're not cut out for it. Not for the scaling. They're not cut out for it. They're going to leave. Typically, and I know that's a bit bold move, but typically one, two months into any gig, I give the CEO a list and I say, six months down the road, these people will not be in the company anymore. You could do something about it now, or you could still pay them for six months and watch them leave yourself. Well, a lot of them are... Nobody likes this. This is maybe also a very American-centric view because we can terminate much faster, but a lot of them... are incentivized against your success they have a nice job they're making money that they're okay with and if their workload goes up that was a net negative for them they are not interested in carrying more um they want to do as little as possible to keep collecting that money and they want to enjoy that family feel and that and that we're all buddies feel yeah i've seen that many many times in the sort of cliche good good to great phase phase uh they're just Their strongest resistance is some of these people that you thought were super loyal and faithful and with you from the beginning. It's because it's just not in their best interest to see it go to the next level. Well, that's when they start doubting, which is understandable. That's human. But that's when a CEO starts doubting, when they weigh personal emotion up against the scale and ultimately numbers and revenue. And that's where they struggle. That's where I have to have hard conversations. And that's where I need to ask the CEO to let certain people go that are not willing to grow with us into that next stage and cover that position that they would need to cover or simply don't bring their expertise. And that's tough. I realize I don't make myself a lot of friends throughout the company with that, except maybe the board and the VCs. Yeah, maybe that's the value of it. But that's part of being a revenue leader. If you're a revenue leader and everybody in the company likes you, you're doing a terrible job. Yeah, they had a – I worked – man, sometimes I'm on the fence of whether I should say names or not. I worked for a $40 million antivirus company, had a wonderfully talented CEO. His name was Dick Williams. some physical technology product before but my point is he was well into his career well there was a bunch of c-suite at the company that had a thousand employees already and we would call them fod friends of dick like the only reason they were there is because they were friends of the ceo and that was hurting certain growth points as they were trying to go from 40 million to 80 and i just remember thinking like Good for them. They've got these tremendous C-suite salaries and bonuses, but they didn't successfully IPO, and the economic environment was one factor in that. But even when they tried again, they had to replace the CEO, put in another one, and his only job was to get the company sold. So I guess my point in that is if you're a company leader and there's 1,000 people getting their paychecks, you're building. You're building more than just those few people. At some point, you have to ask yourself, what am I in this for? Am I in this so that we can all just have a cushy little paycheck for now? Or do we really want to see this thing go to some tremendous exit? So I think it hurts the company more than it helps it. One pushback I would have if I was working for your ideal client, I would ask myself, okay, he's fractional CRO. How is he going to lead five? let's see i'm making numbers up how is he going to lead five full-time sales people but he himself is fractional which sounds like it's synonymous with part-time so what do you do with the time allotments or your commitments to these companies or how do you explain that structure and the value proposition to them aside from just the cost does that question make sense oh that makes a lot of sense and in the end of the day If you think of your typical seller in a software company, how often do they sit with a CRO? Yeah, that's so good. You already flipped my objection. Yeah, hopefully never. That is so good. Since I'm not just covering in this instance, I'm the CRO, the VP sales, the head of sales all in one. So how often do they sit with the head of sales or their direct team lead? I would hope a little bit more often, but still. Not that many hours a week. Well, I guess I just mean like if you're getting to the big dogs, you're probably in trouble or you just closed the biggest deal of your life. Yeah, I understand what you mean. On the leadership side, there'll probably be a weekly cadence, some training, maybe some role playing, et cetera. Exactly. My goal is not to stay in the company forever. My goal... is to find a full-time head-off, VP, CRO, when I leave that company. So I stay six months, nine months, 12 months, and I develop these startups to the point where it makes sense for them to have a full-time me in place. But it doesn't make sense for startups at this size to have it in the beginning. So there's this gap in the market, and I love serving precisely this gap. No, you're convicting me. These guys that were trying to offer me $99K, I remember thinking like, i'll do something creative for you and i will help you hire your full-time person at that lower rate like you can find them but uh i'm just talking to the wrong people i think um i'm so what how about just from the cro wisdom um i want to leave the audience with before we go to like how they can all find you I want you to talk to the people that want to do something amazing with their careers or their lives. Two people, two people I want you to talk to. The young sellers that want to do something tremendous with their lives. Actually, I know people that are in sales and they're doing it because they really value their job. They think they make an impact. So what are the things that you tell them early on to focus on, to really go for the stars here? This is how you do it. This is what you'd recommend career path. And then on the other side of that. There are a lot of people who want to be founders. It's a scary proposition. So what do you tell those guys too? Like you have a great idea. The market deserves to hear what you want to tell them. So what's some parting wisdom or nuggets that you would give to both sides of those? One person climbing the ladder and another person that wants to change the whole world with their service or product. Absolutely. So to young sellers and people who want to climb the corporate ladder in the space that I'm in, I say, use your talents outside of work. What do I mean by that? You know how to reach about any company, get them on the phone, speak to C-levels, get them to read your email. How is it you only use that for your employer? Find other companies that are interesting. Find people that are 5, 10 years ahead of you in the career path that done exactly what you want to do and actually outbound call them. And I did that. I spoke to companies that were early in their founding stage when I was just a BDR myself and I said, The product you're building is amazing, and if I wouldn't have an amazing job already, I'd work with you. They later became clients of me when I was doing my first consultant gigs. I have five, six mentors in very different fields that I do. I mentor young SDRs and E's myself that come to me with that value proposition and say, Ben, I just want to learn. Can we sit together once a month for a 20-minute call, and you tell me what I should focus on this quarter? absolutely so do it so to young sellers find the right mentors use your systems not just for your company use them for yourselves so good and now the founders yeah and to founders I say a good good dragon should have three heads okay you need your product guy You need your operations and finance guy, and you need your DGM guy. I'm so proud to be included in that. Look at you. I've always loved CROs and sellers. You guys are my favorite people. Okay, so you need a product guy. You do because it's got to work. You need a salesperson because you have to go to market, and you need an ops person that keeps this whole thing glued together. What else do you tell them? Well, I think that's the biggest piece where they go wrong in the beginning. What else do I tell them? Well, what about – so think about – think about going because i appreciate that 500k is your floor and um i also appreciate that that first million dollars you make and to be clear i've never even created a million dollar business but i've seen it and found it it's the hardest thing you'll ever do that first million and then after that it's it i i believe that you the the um economics of scale start working in your favor so what are they you know they're going to hit some things what do you tell them like you're facing this your family's laughing at you your wife's worried about Here's an example. One founder said when they started their business, the one that I consulted for with Daimler, they said they used to sit in the coffee shop. He had three daughters at the time, and he's like they would joke wondering how he's going to put his daughters through school. That's a real fear. I think of that even between jobs right now. I'm good. I'm fine. I can take my time, but I have three kids. It's like, oh, there's a mortgage that needs to be paid. So what are you telling these founders? Because they have real lives too. Oh, and autonomous, like what made you believe you need to figure this out by yourself? That's good. That's so good. Because I speak to countless founders on the phone that I can't support yet. They're not yet my target demographic. They're not at the 500,000 ARR mark. They might be pre-revenue. uh they might be sitting at their first 20 customers they might be light years away from being able to work with me but that's my early stage pipeline they call me and there's guys like me out there guys like you out there that if somebody asks randy hey can i have 30 minutes of your time i know you achieved something it did something that i have not done Can you please share some wisdom with me? Can you please drop some wisdom to me? That will say, yes, you need to be bold. If you're not bold, don't be a founder. But if you're bold enough to be a founder, speak to the people who've done it before. And yes, people will laugh. Yes, it's going to be hard. But if you get the right advisors on your side, if you get the right team, people playing in your team, you don't have to know it all. You don't have to be good at it all. You just have to be good at one thing. That's so good, Ben. Tell everyone where they can find you, anything you want to give them. Tell us about that and then how they can get in touch with you and work with you. The easiest and most straightforward for everybody to get in touch with me, follow me and connect to me on LinkedIn. Benedict Newton, looking forward to hearing from all of you. If you want to hop on my website, we can put that below the podcast episode as well. That's bm-sales-solutions.com. Super easy, super straightforward. If you want to bring your company to the Dutch region or to EMEA and you want to speak with someone who's done that before for others, happy to have a chat. So good. Listen, if you made it this far in the show, I want you to hit like and subscribe for me. I'll see you guys in the next one. Thank you so much, Ben. It was such a pleasure talking to you. Thank you, Chad. Thanks for having me.

You might be focused on the wrong things as a founder.

Chad interviews Benedikt Meuthen about why founders must be salespeople and why strong sales execution can outperform even a great product with weak sales. 

Benedict explains “message-market fit” and warns against relying on early customers from warm connections. 

They discuss scaling lessons from growing a desk-booking SaaS during COVID from near zero systems to a structured revenue engine, including prioritizing conversion when inbound is strong, hiring sales ops early, and using ops for data-driven pushback. 

Benedict outlines stages from $0–$1M ARR (PMF/MMF), $1M–$5M (repeatable sales motion), and $5M–$10M (net retention with customer success and account management), plus hiring and performance challenges in Europe vs the US. 

He covers entering DACH markets, the role of fractional leaders, burnout from fast career climbs, and advice for sellers and founders to find mentors and build balanced founding teams.

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Benedikt Meuthen is the founder of BM Sales Solutions.
Benedikt's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benedikt-meuthen/
 
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Chad's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chadtabary/
Book an appointment with Chad: https://chadtabary.youcanbook.me/

00:00 Founders Must Sell
01:38 Why Finance Led Teams Fail
03:23 Message Market Fit Explained
05:44 Messaging Case Studies
08:56 Desperate Growth Story
11:38 First Key Hires
14:55 What Great Sales Ops Does
18:04 Hiring Ops on a Budget
21:36 Fractional RevOps and LinkedIn
25:50 Honest Marketing vs Hype
27:43 Scaling Lessons to 10M ARR
29:24 Startup to Scaleup Thrill
29:45 Revenue Phases to 10M
30:30 Customer Success and Upsells
31:37 Hiring Mistakes and Burnout
32:43 Selling Across Cultures
34:07 Winning the DACH Market
42:39 Ideal Client and Engagement
44:44 Founder Role in Sales
47:19 Hard Calls on Team Fit
51:07 Fractional CRO Value
53:13 Advice for Sellers and Founders
58:13 Where to Find Ben