Heresy

This is the final episode of the Heresy podcast. After a failed acquisition (company pulled out in the very last minute), we were left with no choice but to start winding down Heresy. In this episode, Dimitar sits down with his co-founder Svilen and senior frontend engineer and first employee Jack Otis Barker to talk about the journey they'd been on - the ups, the downs, the lessons learned as well as the things they would do differently.

In this episode of the Heresy podcast, Dimitar speaks to Farlan Dowell. Farlan is a sales pro & leader, but in reality what he brings is much more comprehensive approach to repeatable revenue. He has 15 years of startup experience in early stage B2B Saas companies. He currently serves as VP Sales at CleanShelf. Previously he was the VP of Sales at RainforestQA, where he increased ARR from $300k in founder-led sales to $10M ARR, increased ACV from 10k to ~100k, and built a 25-person sales team that continues to grow. In the past he’s held positions as the VP of Sales at Upsight and most recently has consulted for a number of companies including Replicated, Test.ai, and Kloudless. He’s interested in helping early teams find product market fit and scale rapidly while avoiding common mistakes developer companies make.

Andrus Purde is the founder of Outfunnel - a marketing automation tool that's friendly to your CRM. Andrus is a seasoned digital growth marketer, with over 20 years of experience. Before starting Outfunnel, Andrus served as the CMO at Pipedrive, the leading CRM for small businesses. He was one of the very early employees and was responsible for the company's rapid user acquisition. Andrus joined Pipedrive from Skype where he held various digital marketing roles both in Tallinn and London. In this episode of the Heresy podcast, Andrus talks to Dimitar about his increasing discontent for cold email and why he thinks we are all, slowly but surely, killing email as a channel. Andrus also shares his very own framework for determining which marketing channel would be best suited for your business - an absolute MUST-listen to any founder and/or marketer at early stage companies trying to decided what might work best for their business.

On this episode of the Heresy podcast, Dimitar is joined by Josh Allen - Drift's Chief Revenue Officer. Josh talks about his journey in tech, from LogMeIn and CarGurus to his current role at Drift, and shares lots of practical advice on managing hyper-growth. If you want to know what going from $40M to $400M feels like and why it's absolutely normal to wake up in the middle of the night "feeling like your hair is on fire", this is the episode for you! Last but certainly not least, if you are planning on attending Drift's Hypergrowth conference in London, be sure to use promo code HERESY for 50% off tickets for the London event in June! You can buy your ticket here: https://hypergrowth.drift.com/register/london

In this episode of the Heresy podcast Dimitar speaks to Jeremey Donovan, SVP Sales Strategy at SalesLoft - the world's leading sales enablement platform. Jeremey shares lots of tactical advice and best practice around engaging prospects, including: - How long your emails should be; - What are the most engaging subject lines; - How to achieve a 5x increase in your reply rates; - How to use video in your outreach and much more The episode is an absolute must-listen to anyone on Sales Enablement/Development!

In this episode of the Heresy podcast, Dimitar speaks to Jason Lemkin - CEO & Founder at SaaStr, serial entrepreneur and investor. In the first part of the show Jason talks about his early career, how he ended up in SaaS, his first two exits and the lessons he learned from them. In the second part of the show, Jason gives a no-BS, practical advice on building and scaling a high-performing sales machine. Topic covered include: - The importance of founder-led sales - Why in SaaS the founder should close at least 10 deals before hiring any salespeople - What should you look for in your first Account Executives (and what to avoid) - When is the right time to hire a VP Sales - The different "flavours" of VP Sales - which one to hire when - Should you hire a VP Sales or VP Marketing first - When should you start building your Customer Success team - Jason's best sales advice

On this episode, Dimitar is joined by fellow London Revenue Collective teammate, Munyaradiz Hoto (Director of Digital Marketing at Foundry). Tune in to hear Munya's crash course on how to operationalise your message. Topics covered include: - Why the way you've been taught how to qualify prospects is totally wrong - Why you almost never lose deals in a competitive bake-off - How to help your prospects discover their "undiscovered needs" - How to destabilise "preference stability" and displace existing solutions - How to address prospects concerns and handle objections around "anticipated regret" This is an absolute MUST-listen for all individual contributors, managers and execs!

On this episode Dimitar speaks to best-selling author and internationally-recognised sales leader, Aaron Ross . Stay tuned to find out: - What motivated Aaron to write his first book, Predictable Revenue; - How he manages to run two businesses, look after his 9 children and still find time to work on new projects; - Plus lots of tactical advice on how to cut through the noise and ensure your outbound strategy stays highly-effective in a day and age where everyone is singing from the same hymn sheet. For more Outbound Sales advice from Aaron, be sure to check out www.predictablerevenue.com

In this episode of the Heresy podcast Dimitar speaks to Jacqui about how she built the UK sales team at DocuSign. Jacqui shares tones of sales advice and best practice including: - DocuSign’s approach to hiring great salespeople; - Why and how they use aptitude tests in the recruitment process; - How they train and onboard new team members; - What separates the top performers from the rest; - How to approach territory planning so you avoid conflict and increase collaboration between regional offices and much, much more. Check it out & happy scaling!

On this month's episode of the Heresy podcast, Dimitar is joined by Patrick Traynor - VP Sales at The Dots and Former Head of European Enterprise Sales at LinkedIn. Topics discussed include: - How Patrick did pipeline review meeting with his team at LinkedIn using his own framework - How to use BANT [Budget, Authority, Need, Timeline] for qualification and to spot problems early on in the sales process - Why you should always leave your ego out of Sales and should never be the smartest person in the room Check it out!

On this month's episode of the Heresy podcast, Dimitar speaks to Elaine Mao, Global Head of Sales Ops & Strategy @ UBER for Business. Tune in to find out how one of the world's fastest growing tech companies built and scaled its Sales team, why Elaine would hire a sales ops person before bringing salespeople on board and much more.

On this month's episode of the Heresy Podcast, Dimitar is joined by Daniel Farkas, Global Vice President for Renewals and Customer Success at Box. Daniel lays down the blueprint for building a world-class Customer Success team. Tune in to hear why every company should have a CS team, when is the right time to start building one, what you should look for when hiring for CS reps, what are the key metrics you should track and much, much more.

In this episode of the Heresy podcast, Dimitar speaks to Tom Castley, Regional VP Account Management at Apptio. This is a MUST-listen to episode for any startup founder or individual sales contributor. It's full of tactical advice illustrated by some awesome war stories from Tom’s 20+ years SaaS sales career. Tune in to find out why Tom prefers to disqualify instead of qualify opportunities, discover the 7 key questions you should be asking your prospects to ensure you never commit to a futile opportunity, learn about the Sandler methodology and much more!

On this episode of the Heresy podcast Dimitar talks to Pete Crosby, Chief Commercial Officer at Triptease. Triptease, a direct booking platform designed just for hotels, is one of London's fastest growing SaaS companies. Pete joined Triptease less than two years ago and in that time he has scaled the sales team from 15 to about 40 people, building the company's ARR from $2m to $10M. Tune it to hear why Pete built a Sales Academy at Triptease, what training they provide (and why), how it has affected their retention rates and ability to attract talent; why Pete insists on recording everything; why talking about failure is so important to him and much more.

In this episode of the Heresy podcast Dimitar talks to James Parton, the former Director of Europe for Twilio. Dimitar and James compare notes on their experience being the first European employee for a fast-growing, venture backed US business and what "building and scaling Europe meant" for Twilio (and Stack Overflow). James also talks about the importance of training and sales enablement, pre-sales and sales engineering at Twilio and much more. Check it out!

In this month's episode, Dimitar is joined by Terry Russell - a sales coach who's worked with some of Europe's best startups to help them build and scale their sales organisations. Listen to Terry share insights on sales compensation and motivation, growing and development sales talent, as well as lessons learned from working with companies such as JustEat, Funding Circle, GoCardless and Property Partner.

In this month's episode of the Heresy podcast we talk to Alan Kenny, GM Europe at Mimecast. Mimecast is a cyber security company listed on the NASDAQ, that employs over 900 people. Tune in to find out Alan's top tips for sales people and sales managers, the things Alan wishes he'd known and what he'd do differently if he could turn back time. ================================= Special thanks to Red One for intro music!

In this episode of the Heresy podcast we talk to Kristen Habacht, VP Sales at Trello. The conversation was recorded in the last week of December 2016, just days before Atlassian announced they were acquiring Trello for a whooping $425 million. During our conversation Kristen describes what the Sales team at Trello looks like and how that has changed during the two and a half years since she's been there. We also discuss their sales compensation, their recent growth and future plans as well as the challenges and opportunities they have faced selling a freemium product. ======================================================== Content and Timings: - 0:54 - 4:20 - Kristen talks about her sales career, how she met Joel Spolsky & Michael Pryor, the FogCreek days and how she eventually ended up as VP Sales at Trello - 5:00 - 6:50 - Selling Trello in the early days and how the pitch has changed - 7:20 - 12:10 - Kristen talks about Trello’s sales team, their culture, the importance of team cohesion, how they are structured and why - 12:10 - 18: 50 - The evolution of Trello’s sales team - how and why the team transitioned from a “full-stack” sales model to role specialisation, and how that helped with scaling - 18:53 - 21:00 - Kristen talks about “experiments” that did not work and lessons learned - 21:00 - 22:45 - The importance of Sales Ops - 23:00 - 24:15 - Kristen talks about recent growth and projections for the future - 24:25 - 27:35 - Trello’s commission structure - from, simple to simpler - and why Kristen changed their initial commission structure - 27:40 - 34:40 - The challenges of selling freemium products - why traditional qualification models such as BANT don’t work, what can reps do to create urgency and why there’s no sales “playbook” at Trello - 34:50 - 38:45 - SMB vs Enterprise sales at Trello - sales cycle duration and how the process differs - 39:00 - 42:15 - The challenges of managing a remote sales team and tips, and tools to make it work - 42:15 - 45:00 - Lessons learned at Trello & Kristen's best sales advice - the importance of being able to walk away ============================================================== Music credits: - Intro - Qvkata DLG, Duis Taban - Outro - Victor Hugo

In this episode of the Heresy podcast we talk to Jeff Szczepanski, COO Stack Overflow. We discuss Stack Overflow's 3 phase model of building a "full-stack" sales team and how it compares to Aaron Ross's "predictable revenue" sales model. We also look at the key elements of what makes a good sales compensation plan and much more. Music Credits: Qvkata DLG