# ElevenLabs Sales Strategy: 20x Quotas and Ruthless Outbound

**Podcast:** The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
**Published:** 2026-02-14

## Transcript

We ask everyone to bring 20 times their base salary.
That's your quota, right?
So if I pay you 100k a year, your quota is two million dollars.
If you don't achieve your quota, then you're gonna be out, right?
And we're rushless on that end.
When I see my sales team in the office like multiple days, I start getting worried.
Because like if you're a salesperson, you need to be on the road.
When you join 11 labs, you need to have signed your first contract within the first two weeks.
Salespeople need to be on their toes all the time and they need to be told.
This is 20 sales with me, Harry Stebbings.
Now stay we have the best 20 sales episode that we have ever done.
Carles Rayner is the VP of sales at 11 Labs, where he has scaled the revenue org to over 330 million dollars in just three years.
He's also a phenomenal investor with investments in the likes of Revolute, Happy Robot, Nothing and more.
This was probably one of the most granular but also insightful sales episodes we've done.
Carlos does not pull any punches.
Get your notebooks out.
This was one of my favorites to record.
But before we dive into the show today, a quick shout out to a company I've been genuinely blown away by and have been tracking closely, ROX.
I've been watching this team closely and the speed they're operating at and the level of applied AI talent they've assembled.
It's honestly remarkable.
Rocks is pioneering revenue agents for the global 2000, plugged into your data warehouse and CRM and delivering board level ROI in just 90 days.
These sales and revenue agents handle the end-to-end sales process for large enterprises, from research prep to deal risk, outreach, and opportunity management.
So sellers spend more time with customers and less time in tools.
This isn't another productivity app.
Christ, we've all had enough of those.
Rocks gives reps a single interface on top of their GTM stack, powered by a knowledge graph across your internal and external data.
So if you want to boost AE productivity, increase revenue per rep and consolidate your stack, try rocks at rocks.com/slash sign up.
And speaking of great companies, we have to talk about Monaco.
For years I've watched some of the best founders and early go-to-market teams struggle with sales.
Too many CRMs, too many point solutions, too much manual work.
Well that changes with Monaco.
Monaco replaces your legacy CRM and fragmented sales stack with a single AI native platform.
Monaco's agents automatically build and score your entire TAM, lay it in real-time signals, create and run outbound sequences, schedule calls and record and transcribe meetings.
Your pipeline practically manages itself.
Monaco creates reminders, draws follow-up emails for you, and keeps deals moving forward.
So that means more meetings, higher conversion rates, and faster revenue growth.
If you're an early stage startup, tired of duct taping sales tools together and looking to grow revenue faster, check out Monaco at Monaco.com.
While Monaco runs your sales pipeline, Framer runs your website.
A website should help your business grow, not slow it down.
If updates to your dot com feel harder than they should, Framer is the shortcut you've been looking for.
Framer is an enterprise grade, no-code website builder that works like your team's favorite design tool, and it's used by companies like Perplexity, Miro, MixPanel, to move faster.
Designers and marketers can fully own the site with real-time collaboration, a robust CMS built for SEO, and advanced analytics that include integrated A-B testing.
So you're not just shipping pages, but you're maximizing what works.
And when you're ready to ship, changes go live in seconds with one click, publish, without relying on engineering.
Plus, Framer is built for scale with premium hosting, enterprise grade security, and 99.99% uptime SLAs.
Whether you want to launch a new site, test a few landing pages, or migrate your full.com.
Framer has programs for startups, scale-ups, and large enterprises to make going from idea to live site fast.
Learn how you can get more out of your dot com from a Framer specialist or get started building for free today at Framer.com slash 20 VC for 30% off.
30% off of Framer Pro annual plan.
That's Framer.com slash 20 VC for 30% off.
Framer.com slash 20 VC.
Rules and restrictions may apply.
You have now arrived at your destination.
Carles, it is fantastic to have you on the show, dude.
I've heard so many good things, mostly from Matty, but thank you so much for joining me today, man.
Thank you so much for having me here.
It's fantastic.
Dude, I want to start with you were VP of product back in the early days.
And now in the sales world, that is a big transition.
How do you think about moving from product to sales?
And what have been your biggest lessons when you reflect on that?
I've actually done everything.
I've done like uh I was BP of operations for another AA company.
And like we believe from zero to like uh unicorn.
Then I moved to product, and then ended up like moving to sales and then sales again.
So it's like I've done the full, like all of the different kinds of roles that you could do, except in Ging.
When did you realize you loved sales?
I think like when I was doing operations, I kind of like was seeing all of the guys like doing sales, and I was like, shit, I can do this much better.
And that's the moment I started thinking, like, I want to do sales, I want to do sales.
So I getting I started getting closer to like customers, and then I realized like that is my area.
But like when you work in a startup in the early days, nothing really matters.
Like the only thing that you care about is like how do you get to the next milestone, right?
So whether you do ops product, like sales, everything is kind of a mesh in in reality.
Was there a moment there where you're like, this is what I'm destined to do?
I'm a sales leader.
Yeah.
So when we like uh there was a company that came out of Yev called Sonantec that was doing AI voices back in the early days.
So I ended up building the entire go-to-market site for them.
And that's when I realized, like, okay, this is what I want to be doing going forward.
But then one of my friends, like Felipe from Job and Talent, called me one day saying, Hey, like I wanna rebuild the entire product stack.
Would you join me?
There's gonna be a very good challenge.
I was like, okay, fine, let's do it.
And then that's when I changed, but I realized like product, I love it.
I did it for a year and a half, it was fantastic.
Like I built the entire product that like now they've pivoted to that product and it's doing super well.
But I realized like I want to be talking to customers all the time.
I want to actually sell them.
Like the rus that you get when you close a deal, it's insane.
It's insane.
And and I absolutely love it.
Tell me, how did you first come to meet Matty?
Because you invested as well.
You're the like first round investor.
Yes, at five million valuation, pre-seeds.
So I met Matty through a common friend, Paolo.
We used to work together at tractable AI back in the day.
He messaged me one day being like, Hey, I have this friend, like uh he we used to work together at BlackRock.
He's thinking about like something about the AI voices and so on.
Have no idea, but you've been in that space.
Do you want to talk to him?
I was like, absolutely.
And then that's when I met Matty, and within 30 minutes of the first conversation, I was like, I'm all in.
How much money do you want?
And I will introduce you to my friends.
And that was pretty much it.
How much did you put in?
I put it 20K.
20K?
Yes.
Have you kept it all?
I sold a tiny, tiny portion through one of the secondaries, but it's that's tiny portion.
What is 20K worth now?
It's probably like it's it's like 800k in return.
So that's probably like what, six uh 16 million, something like that?
Not bad.
But you've done much better.
So no, I haven't had that multiple.
I haven't had that multiple.
That is fucking phenomenal.
It's good.
But like it's it's it's been good.
When was that moment when you're like, holy shit, I've just gotta join this rocket ship?
I've always been willing to actually leave everything and join one of my portfolio companies.
Like one of my key things is like I would not invest in a company if I'm not 100% convinced, like, if there is a time that I need to join, I will join them.
And I think 11 labs was one of those ones where like they were like the first off site that we were doing, it was in Portugal, and then Matty called me one day saying, We're doing this.
Do you want to join us?
It would be great to have you there.
And we're doing it in one of our investors' houses in Portugal.
And then I went there literally like for 24 hours, met the team, and towards the end of the mini offside, Matty was like, Well, maybe we should talk about you joining us.
And then we that's when we started talking.
I was like, I'm all in.
Like you tell me, I've done it before, I know the space because we sold Sonantic to Spotify.
So I knew the type of customers, the pitch, the way of doing it.
Like, I'm 100% in.
And I kind of felt inside of me like there was like something that was not fully closed in the AI voice space.
And it was like, it was absolutely no-brainer for me to join 11.
What revenue were you at when you joined?
Uh zero.
You were zero?
Yeah, like we had like uh the company launched like literally a week before I joined.
So we launched at the end of January 2023, and then within a month or so, we had over a million users.
And so for you, it was like, hey, you need to build out the sales team.
What was Matty's like job description for you that you have to do?
Objective role number one.
So the idea was to actually like build the entire enterprise side, and that's how we timed it.
Like the entire go to market, but the company ended up like growing so quickly that like we ended up switching it.
That was like being let's do it on the enterprise side.
And the way we put it, it was like now you think all right, it makes sense, but the the compensation was was based on milestones.
And essentially, like we we ended up deciding together with Matthew and Piotr, it's like, okay, if we reach a certain level of like revenues within 24 months, then my equity compensation goes up.
So in local additional portion of equity.
And to the point I was like, it seemed like so silly the number that we had put in there.
What number did you put in there?
It was a very silly number, like uh very high.
But it seemed so silly that like Matty even told me, like, okay, so what we'll do is like we will put a check-in at 12 month mark.
So like whatever you've accrued up until that point will just give you the portional, like the proportional basis, right?
Like it was so funny because like we hit that revenue milestone within less than 12 months of actually like starting everything.
So but it actually back in the day when we were thinking about it, like we were negotiating as like it seemed like no one had done that, right?
When you are with the GTM that you have, it's a PLG motion largely.
Yes.
Are you not just an order taker as an enterprise sales team?
Can you help me understand how to think through how PLG converts successfully to enterprise without it being an order taker?
So the the way we did it is like the PLG motion gave us a ton of like volume of leads, which 90 plus percent of those were like extremely bad.
But the interesting portion is like you started seeing like some patterns of like where people were finding interest and where you would essentially have were having meaningful conversation.
So that for me was like instrumental to understand later on and building name account list and going after specific accounts from an album basis because I was seeing some level of traction.
And like investors were telling us, like, God, you have product market fit because you're doing all of these millions.
And I was telling them, like, no, no, no, no, like we don't have it.
Like, I don't believe in product market fit until you in one single ICP you've made more than 10 million dollars, right?
So you keep experimenting and you build like uh like list, and then one week you tackle like a specific persona, and another week you tackle like a completely different vertical to actually understand what moves quicker, what is the pitch that actually resonates better, and so on.
That's how we essentially started doing it.
And I remember the first two deals that we did within 30 days of like launching the first product, it was like a company that was doing a chatbot based in Germany, they paid us $12,000.
And we thought, like, this is super good.
Like we could start doing things.
Second company was like media company that was doing automated radio stations, that we signed a two-year deal, $36,000 per year.
Like those two companies, we still have them as customers.
They've a skyrocketed in value both of them.
But like that was only the beginning.
It's like, okay, we can start doing it.
We know how to actually this generate this motion.
Now we need to go much deeper.
How do you advise founders then in the early days when they're in this kind of again?
We have so many founders that listen kind of pens and paper.
When they're looking at it and going, do I go horizontal and let everyone try it and really kind of let the market decide?
Or do we go very vertically focused and go, okay, chat bots, we've got one customer, let's just put all the sales team on all the chatbot partners.
How do you advise founders on which one's the right on?
Depends on the product that you're building, right?
If you're building something in the healthcare space, it's an absolute no-brainer.
You need to actually go to a healthcare.
But you can still take a very broad approach within the healthcare space, right?
So you can actually target hospitals, you can target like clinics, you can have bigger ones and smaller ones, you can target like practitioners, you can target like across the entire spectrum of your vertical, target as many people as possible.
Because truly, you might have a guess or like you might have an intuition of like what's going to be performing, but the best companies in reality started in one end, ended up like winning really good traction in a completely different end that they were not expecting, right?
So if you can target as many people as possible, you will understand what resonates, what doesn't resonate, how quickly they're moving.
And essentially you can then you can fine-tune your pitch and your name account list in that area.
If we go back to the outbound element on the leads that we have, what did we look for that suggested a great lead that was a qualified lead that we would go after?
Was it the fact that they had an email extension that was ex-sha.com or whatever that was, and it was a company name?
Was it usage patterns?
What was it?
Nothing at all.
It was like so random, like I had absolutely no idea.
Like in the early days, we were signing like enterprise contract with Gmail accounts.
So we remember like this is like early days of Chat GPT.
People were building applications left and right and thinking like I might need to add some voice here or there, even if it's like for like some dubbing or for like voicing some of the narrations and all that stuff.
The reality is like there will be all of these like developers, like single developer shops using a Gmail account saying, Well, I want to act at voice, but your self-service plans are not enough because they have like some limitations, some caps, and essentially I would need all of these additional things.
I was like, okay, fantastic.
Then enterprise is the right path.
We'll customize it for you, blah, blah, blah.
And what I used to do is like it got to a point where like I was doing like 30 minutes calls, and I would do maybe like 50, 60 calls in a single week, back to back.
And I would tell them, like, within 30 minutes, I knew if they were the qualified or not.
I knew they were interested, if they could move quickly.
So what I would do is like I would set up a trial by the end of the day, I would commit on the call on the spot being, by the end of the day, you will have heard from me.
I will set up your trial, you will have access to the contract so that you can start reviewing it.
And if you need anything, just ping me at any time.
And this is my WhatsApp.
What you end up creating is like this dynamic that you would end up building a very close relationship with those companies.
They will message you on WhatsApp.
And even up today, if one of those like very early ones have an issue, they message me on WhatsApp and essentially we try to fix it, right?
But like that is the type of relationship you want to be building with your first customers because essentially they will be there for you forever.
They're not going to switch away because we have such a good personal relation that it's an absolute no-brainer.
Just if we go through that, questions to ask, which really clearly showed that they were a great high quality lead.
In those 30 minutes, if you were to advise me, I'm a technical fan, imagine I'm Matty.
Dude, how do I know if they're a good lead?
What questions do I ask?
For me, it's like slightly different from what the traditional sales methods are, right?
But I want to know like what are you building and what is your vision for your company?
How are you thinking about like the entire market that you operate?
And essentially, who are you?
Are you technical?
Are you not technical?
What are you going to be doing with like the product in general?
Do you need to involve a lot of other people or not?
Right.
For me, those are the core questions in the early days, specifically on developer economy, or like if you're targeting developers, that tell me if like you are ready to actually buy this.
You're only playing a little bit to understand whether it makes sense or not, or how hard things like are going to be playing.
Because like if you think about it, like different markets have different types of profiles, right?
Like in the US, you need to be very direct.
And it's a lot more like aggressive, like sales in nature.
In Europe, we're always in the middle, right?
So like, but if you go to LATAM or if you go to India, people don't have an incentive to actually tell you no.
So you end up getting stuck.
If you don't qualify well, you end up getting stuck in like endless loops of like trials, chaser emails, and so on, of people that for a cultural perspective, they're not gonna tell you no, but they're not gonna buy.
Every single market has a lot of variations, and because I've actually built all of them across the world for 11 labs, I know all of the details for all of those pieces, right?
So if you tell me like, okay, I'm building a company in Mexico City, then I can tell you like these are the core items that I would like to understand from a qualification perspective in the first few minutes.
What ACV does it make sense to have reps on?
And what I mean by that is you said that 50 to 60 tools.
Is it like 10k a year you can start to have a rap-led approach?
Below that it's called a BLG.
How do you advise founders on that?
I think it's like uh it needs to be at least $1,000 a month, right?
The trick is like how much money do you feel that like you can put in your credit card without having to explain anything?
Like if you are comfortable putting like a thousand dollars a month, absolutely fine.
Then your threshold should be two thousand dollars, right?
But if like the majority of people putting a thousand dollars on their credit cards, even if it's like for the business transaction, they still need to explain quite a lot of stuff.
So then that's the moment in which like they need handholding, they need convincing, they need to show ROI.
That's the one that you want to uh tackle them.
Because then you treat it as like a PLG motion with a land and expand.
It's like, don't worry, we'll sort everything, we'll help you like $12,000.
It is a lot of money.
Acknowledge that it's a lot of money for them because it is a lot of money, then work with them on an expansion plan.
But if you do it much higher, then I see a lot of founders telling me, like, no, no, no, it needs to be like investors have been telling me, like, I need to go proper enterprise, proper enterprise, like six-figure deals and so on.
I'm always like, forget about it.
Like, it's gonna take you months to get that contract done.
The beautiful side is like if you sign a $12,000 contract, there is probably one layer of approval.
Maximum two layers of approval for a bigger company.
If you want to sign a six-figure deal, this can be like at least three or four layers of approval.
If you want to sign a million dollar contract out of the gate, it's gonna take you a long time.
But if you actually land in a very like small deal, then you start expanding it, those approvals have disappeared completely.
What are your biggest lessons on how to land and expand successfully?
Because I I'm in a lot of companies, period, but I'm in a lot of companies where they've landed and they've assumed that they've expanded and they have the cost base ready for the expansion in terms of CS and all that comes with the sales machine, but they stay at the land price.
And that's a big problem because then the economics just don't work.
What are your biggest lessons on how to expand successfully and manage that as a sales leader?
So we've had that as well at the uh T-Level Labs like multiple times, right?
There's a portion of the customers that we oversold and then like they kept kind of flat.
Part of the big effort always is like how do you find new use cases for them and how do you show them like additional value?
So there is like you need to knock on people's doors.
Like even if you sign an inbound deal, that is one deal that is inbound.
But you should not be thinking that like that is done.
It's like then you need to transform it into like an outbound opportunity as well.
And then to do it outbound opportunities like okay now I have an MSA signed with an order form let's actually go and outbound every single other team that might be relevant across the entire organization to show them what the capabilities are.
That is the only way you actually expand a deal but not only that like the most important question is how do you retain them forever?
Because if there is only one team that uses you, that team at some point might get pissed, someone might pitch them, you lose the deal.
Who's responsible for this internally?
Is it CS, is it product, is it sales?
Uh depends how you want to organize it.
Some companies call it like account management, right?
So what do you do?
We do like uh account execs and customer success.
So for us like once a deal is signed, we transfer it to like customer success.
Customer success is responsible for like the upselling, negotiations, all of that stuff.
Now, the difference is in the enterprise segment.
So very large customers, right?
So name account lists, companies that have like over 2,000 employees and things like that.
Then for those ones, my request to the account execs is like your job is not finished.
Even if you transfer it to an uh customer success manager, I still want you to go and upsell and find new opportunities in the account because your incentivize, and if I'm an account exec, like let's be very honest, like everyone loves money and making money as an account exec.
So your incentive is saying like you went through hell for the past 60 days to close an enterprise contract, fantastic.
Then that contract is signed.
Getting the next team on board is relatively simple because you've actually gone through the actual like signing of the contract.
So just outbound, open new doors, and we'll pay you even more commissions because like you're you keep accruing more, right?
Help me understand as a founder.
How do I create a comp plan for sales reps first?
And then how second, how do I create a comp plan for sales reps to sell upsell efficiently?
I think like in reality is like pretty much exactly the same in the sense that what we do at 11 labs is like I set up like this this threshold, which is like we ask everyone to bring 20 times their base salary.
That's your quota, right?
So if I pay you 100k a year, your quota is $2 million.
That's it.
If you don't achieve your quota, then you're gonna be out, right?
And we're very ruthless on that end.
So everyone actually smashes their quota at 11 labs.
I would rather have a smaller teams that like smash their quotas and I pay the maximum.
Do you hit their quota?
Today is more than 80% hit their quota.
Right.
And they unlock accelerators and all of that stuff.
But the interesting piece, like on the upsell side, is we compensate both the account exec and the CSM.
If the contract is absorbed, if we upsell a company within the first 12 months, the accounting exec continues to accrue like quota retirement and also like commissions, and the CSM is compensated on NRR, right?
So I'm paying double, but I don't care.
It makes perfect sense because then I have these two people busting their ass to make sure that they actually can make more money, which is fantastic for me as a company.
Totally get that.
Again, I just want to pick on some things you said that you said that 80% is phenomenal given the ambitiousness of 20x.
If you're advising me as a founder, is that 20x a good rule of thumb, or do you think that's specific to the margin profile of 11 labs?
I think like the reality is like every business will be slightly different depending on the industry you're selling, right?
So what I always tell everyone is like, let's start with 20x.
Uh and then you can adjust.
What I told everyone in the company, like the first account X that I hired was like, guys, I have absolutely no clue if 20x is going to be the right number or not.
The standard in SAS is that like you have like somewhere on like six to seven, maybe eight, maybe ten, right?
That is the standard.
I know this is what you are expecting.
This is not how we're gonna be building a company at a level apps.
If you're thinking about like doing the same that you'd be doing at Notion or like all of these places like sales and so on, then you're in the wrong place.
So we'll experiment.
If we get it wrong, absolutely fine.
We'll compensate you correctly, and then essentially we will change the whole the entire compensation structure.
But if we get it right, which I think it is the right number, this is what we're gonna keep.
And we've kept this in Z1.
We've been running with this for the past two and a half years.
Of the 20% that don't, what did they get wrong?
When you look at that cohort, what do you learn when you're looking at the next hires?
So there is two buckets within this 20%, right?
One is like people that truly don't fit in the company, right?
And what they get wrong is fundamentally like they're not product experts.
Like they haven't actually dived deeper enough in the product that actually can understand it.
They have the aggressivity to actually go into the market, outbound and so on, right?
Those guys, unfortunately, we terminate the contracts.
We give them a compensation, so we usually pay anywhere between like two to three months of base salary.
So that like we tell them, like, hey guys, it didn't work out.
We do believe that like you are very strong.
It didn't work out 11 labs because the way we do things, but you're gonna go somewhere else, and we're gonna help you get someone else.
That's why we're giving you this two or three months compensation severance package, and you can do super well.
So it's us, it is not you, it is us fundamentally, right?
The other percentage of people that don't get into that 80% is people that like are building long-term pipelines.
So I have a guy, for instance, like, and there's been plenty of them like over the past like two years, but this is like this guy that we hired from AWS, mega smart guy.
Like super good.
And you look at the core numbers and you're like thinking, shit, I should be fighting this guy.
He's not hitting the quota.
He's like, like less than 50% quota, right?
And then, like any other person will have like look at the numbers and be like, this is not a fit.
Like, I cannot keep this person.
Talk to an investor, and we'll tell you, like, fire this person.
Like, it's just not a fit.
You dive into the numbers and you realize, like, oh, it's because he went to the proper enterprise cycle, and then he's building the most amazing companies you can have in the entire UK UK region, right?
Wait a second, why would I fire this person when he actually needs a lot more ramp?
Fundamentally, because he's tackling the difficult, challenging industries.
We kept that person, and this person like absolutely smashed it this year.
200 plus percent quota.
So like you need to actually differentiate like what is it actually someone that doesn't fit in the company for a variety of reasons, and who is actually building a proper pipeline over the long term, and then you they need a little bit more help.
Well, this is I I completely disagree with the notion that because someone's selling to large enterprise, you can't tell whether they're good or not for a much longer period of time.
I think like he did that.
You look under the hood, you look at the relationships, you look at the conversations, you look at the interactions, you look where they're at, you get a good enough feel of how close it is.
Yeah.
And what what I do is like with the team, and we do it, like we we have quite a lot of people in the go-to-market side, like globally, we have about like 90 people or something like that.
But what I do is like I have sessions every single month with my account execs and my CSMs where we go deep into the pipeline.
It's like it's pipeline review sessions, and I drill them on absolutely every single detail.
And we do it in front of everyone, right?
So if someone hasn't been building the proper pipeline and I do see it in numbers and I do say it, I will tell it in front of them like you have not done a good job.
Like you're actually slacking, you're doing this, this, this, or I will tell them, like, you're actually lucky.
Like in the past, like month, you hit your numbers because of pure lack.
Next month you're not gonna hit them, so you're not in the good spot right now.
And if they improve, which the majority of them do, the following month, I'm like, I know I gave you a lot of crap last month, you've done fantastically well now.
But you need to have that honesty with your team because otherwise, like, what are we doing here?
We're trying to build a generational company, you cannot like do things like the traditional way.
You need to do it in a completely different way.
You said there about those meetings with execs and CSMs.
Can you actually just take me to them?
You do them monthly, correct?
With the monthly?
Do the monthly.
Do you do them separately with CSMs and execs all together?
CSMs have their own meeting and then uh account execs have a different one.
And then in account execs, I split it by region.
And they're in person or remote?
All remote.
There is an interesting thing.
I know like how some people are about like being in an office and all of that stuff.
And uh when I see my sales team in the office like multiple days, I start getting worried.
Because like if you're a salesperson, you need to be on the road.
I travel like 75% of my time.
Like in the past three weeks, I was in San Francisco, I was in Mexico City, in Tokyo, in Seoul, in Singapore, in London, and I'm heading to Dubai, right?
It's like that is like the standard thing.
Like salespeople need to be on the road talking to their customers, whether that is in the UK, that is across Europe, or that is like in Cancun.
I do not care.
If you're constantly in the office doing virtual meetings only with your customers, you're doing it wrong.
How do you build a sales culture remotely?
By being ruthless.
You need to be on top of it.
It's like it requires extra time and it requires people to be forced to actually like be on the road.
It's like we will have multiple touch points, but I don't hire people that are junior.
I hire people that are actually like autonomous, very energetic, very passionate, will accept like a million no's fundamentally because like building sales is tough.
Building sales remotely is even tougher, and you just need to be on top of it.
We're gonna get to actually the people, but I do just want to stay on these meetings case.
We have them separate, we have them remote, we have them monthly.
Let's start on the like sales team side before we move to the CSMs.
What are you expecting them to bring?
Should they send pipeline ahead of time with notes?
What's that prep phase pre-meeting?
So they will essentially tell me like how much they've closed, how much it's in the pipeline, how much they're expecting to close in the in the next 30 days, and essentially like we start going into the deals, right?
We talk about like the biggest deals and all of that stuff.
And then I always like look while they're talking, I look at their pipeline and I pull up some random deals so that to understand like whether they have a full grasp of what they're talking about.
Because sometimes you know, like sales teams, like they can end up like cheating and then having a bigger pipeline that is inflated, but it's not moving, right?
And catch them.
But for me, the key item that I always tell them is like at the end when they present, I keep interacting with them and giving them feedback and asking questions.
But at the end of it, I'm like, the question is always the same.
What are the blockers that you have and how can I help you?
And for me, what I do is like I build a list of the blockers for each one of them, like summarize them later on and then post it across the entire organization, being like, hey, if we solve all of these blockers in Europe, we could be making a lot more money.
In India, these are the blockers.
In the Spanish Latam, these are the blockers.
In Middle East, these are the blockers, right?
And then everyone is like understands what are we, whether we in each one of the regions.
Okay, and so we have that.
And when they come to you and they say something, because I'm on a lot of boards, and very often it's like, that one, that slip to next quarter.
What do you say when you get reps who say that?
And what's the right way to deal with that?
I mean, there is always like deals that will end up like uh moving towards the next quarter.
That's inevitable, right?
It was like the question.
And you do this though, by the way, in front of everyone.
Yes.
You don't do it one by one.
No.
No one has enough time to do it one by one.
And I think like everyone can benefit from like like doing it in front of other people.
It's the pressure, it's the fact that you you can give them good feedback, but feedback, people learn from it, right?
So the learning come like components, I think it's important, specifically from a sales perspective.
How do you do that without shaming people?
I don't know.
You need to shame them.
Like if someone hasn't done their job, they haven't done their job.
And you need to actually publicly tell them so that like they understand that they haven't done their job, and everyone else knows that like they're getting shit for it.
Do you don't agree with the praise in public criticized in private?
No, I don't agree.
I think like I need to tell you like what is right and what is wrong.
Of course, I'm not gonna tell you like this is like full shit, like you're gonna get fired.
I'm not gonna say that.
But at the same time, I'm not gonna hold back on saying if you haven't done a good job.
And for instance, there was like a case earlier this year of one of my accounting execs that I told the person, like, you just were lucky, and you you've closed these deals just for pure luck, but you haven't done any good job.
And then like the next one, there was like it was so funny.
Like, there was exactly two people, the same case.
And then the next one that came in presenting was I told him, like, you have done exactly the same thing, but you have not been lucky as the previous person.
And that's why you haven't actually closed anything.
Both of them, the following month absolutely smashed it.
Salespeople need to be on their toes all the time, and they need to be told.
And if they're good at their job, they're gonna accept the criticism, learn from it, and then improve.
How long are those meetings?
We end up putting usually an hour and a half, and then people have like about like seven, eight minutes to present, and then like it's very, very quick in general.
What happens?
And this is a hard one because 11 laps seemingly just such rocket shit revenue growth.
What would you advise if you would put on a hypothetical hat for it not working so well?
What would you advise a sales leader or a CEO who's taking this, who's gonna run with this, but the numbers are not up and to the right.
How do I have a meeting like this without feeling like dejected, demoralized when numbers aren't up and to the right?
I think it just depends on like why the numbers are not on the on the right place, right?
I think like you need to do understand, like do the back work first to understand like what's happening.
Is it because the sales team is not good enough?
Is it because the product is not good enough?
Is it because we're not being aggressive enough?
What is essentially happening here?
Because like if you don't have a full understanding, then like you might be like shaming people for the wrong reasons, right?
And the best way of understanding is like roll up your sleeves and actually pitch customers.
I am the SDR in chief in the company, right?
Like I absolutely love it.
I actually love outbounding people.
I love it.
Like we were like Matty and I were like in Singapore, like uh talking to you, talking like to to Razor, like uh the laptops company.
Absolutely love the brand.
And then that came out because like I outbounded the CEO and I messaged him like Matty and I are gonna be in some in in Singapore in a few days.
Like, we'll love to actually meet and figure out how we can talk, how we can figure out like a partnership.
And he replied saying, like, yes, let's do it.
So we end up spending like a good hour in their offices, which is like fantastic.
I do it all the time, and then I pass it to the team because I do believe like a good leader needs to be a good outbounder.
It's interesting that I have this this narrative also with VCs, right?
It's like for me, a BC is just a glorified SDR or BDR.
100%, and respectfully, why do I bother doing venture when I sorry being blunt when I can make millions from media?
Because of the media, you have the ability to be the best PDR in the world because people will always respond to you when you have a big brand.
Exactly.
That's why this is why people like founders, they're like, Yeah, I love working with her.
I have quite a few who come in and sit in our office and they just go on LinkedIn with me, and we just send cold emails from mine.
And I I'm literally a BDR.
Yeah, yeah.
But that's that's great.
But like to your point, though, I feel this rush when I get a response.
That's like, yeah, we'd love a cool.
That'd be so great.
I'm like, yes, I love it.
Like, but it's it's like it's great.
As a leader, like as a CEO, like a say Lila, if you're not doing it, I think you're doing it wrong.
Of course, as the company keeps getting bigger, like no one expects like Matty or like any CEO, like for a very successful company, to be doing like outbounds, but nevertheless, what you could do is like you can prep.
So I have team members that like will message me saying, like, could you send an outbound message to this person?
I've just drafted it for you, right?
And we do it for with Matty as well.
We do it like with my LinkedIn account and all of that stuff.
And the response rate that you get is like, as you were saying, like through the roof.
Dude, we do what we do on founders or through my LinkedIn, where like Paul or Kieran or Alex will do it.
A hundred percent.
And they join the cool, and that's totally fine.
It's good.
100%.
If you trust in your team to be amazing, it'll be a great experience for everyone.
But you need to help a team, right?
Like what I don't buy is like sales leaders that are essentially the leaders, right?
Like you don't know the pain, you don't know essentially what it is actually your team is suffering.
And it goes back to your questions.
Like, truly, if you go to a meeting and like the numbers are not in the right, maybe the problem is you that like you don't understand how the sales process happens, the product that your team is selling and the pain points that are actually they're going through.
So maybe like you need to fix that first.
Totally get that.
If we just go back to this meeting, because I'm uh I so want to kind of extract everything I can from this.
Is it just retroactive review, or is there any element of forward planning?
Do we at the end spend 15 minutes go, okay, for the next four weeks we're gonna do this?
How do we think about that?
Yeah, so uh usually is like as part of like the presentation for the account execs, every single one, and even in the CSM side, it's like what are they forecasting to actually be closing uh over the next 30 days as well?
And essentially, what are they gonna be doing to actually close them?
Okay, fantastic.
What is your advice to me, a sales leader or CEO who's not as experienced and brilliant as you on the right way to forecast?
Is it like be optimistic, be realistic, be negative?
How do you advise on that?
Be as negative as possible.
So I always like advice team on if uh we are now sitting a deal that is going to be half a million dollars.
Fantastic, just put me that like you're gonna be signing it at $24,000.
I don't want to put like a an unrealistic number because like if you think it's gonna be half a million dollars, the most likelihood is gonna be 100k, right?
So let's just not inflate the pipeline because then essentially account execs are incentivize to inflate as much as possible so that it looks like better.
I don't like that.
So let's put the lowest possible number.
That's fine, we'll fix it later, but at least we under underestimating what it's gonna look like.
But we do it also like for the board.
Like when we put like the vortex and like we told them like we tell them like, hey, this the pipelines, like this is the contracts, all of that stuff, like we put the lowest possible number because otherwise it inflates.
And if it inflates the numbers, also investors will ask more questions, being like, hey, by the way, you put me like this account over here that it was gonna be a two million dollar account, but it seems you sign it at like 100k?
What?
And it just raises such a like a number of like awkward questions that like it doesn't it doesn't it doesn't make sense?
One of the fastest ways I think to create distrust, you know, obviously, when you have investors like your company, obviously you share pipe often of what you expect it to be.
Yes.
When we do reference calls as all investors do with friends who are CEOs of those companies, and like dude, we'd never spend more than 25k on this and they've got it in for 250, fastest way to lose credit.
Correct, correct.
And there is another item in there, is like if you always underestimate or undervalue your pipeline, it means that like to reach the numbers that you had, you need to have a higher pipeline.
So like there is a lot of consequences of all of this.
So it's like you'll end up working twice as hard because your pipeline is not big enough for the year end number or the quota and number that you needed.
So you just kind of it's a forcing mechanism to have the right culture in place.
We went through this like a cultural change earlier this year because I actually got obsessed.
We were doing the majority of deals, like 90% of the deals were mostly inbounds, right?
And as the team keeps growing, I was like very getting extremely worried that like we were not building the right mentality in the team.
It's like if at some point the pipeline dries up, then you essentially end up dying, right?
So I put a goal saying like we need to migrate to 50% outbound, 50% inbound by the end of the year.
So it kept hammering absolutely everyone.
I still put together a report every single week with every single account exec and SDR in the and in the team, telling them like you've achieved your target on a weekly basis, you haven't achieved it.
And if people don't achieve it, then I I call them out.
I did it so often that I ended up like getting uh like uh people make jokes about outbound, outbound, outbound.
Like, I'm the outbound king, yes, I love it.
Like people and people like know that like if you are on that list of people that are not doing their outbound, uh I'm gonna call you out.
And if at some point I call you out too many times, then we're gonna have a problem, right?
It's a cultural thing, and we end up like migrating from like this 10% outbound sales that we're doing to 40% that we do today.
You're 40% outbound.
Wow.
And when you say outbound, just to clarify specifically, this is not picking names from a PLG list.
This is direct outbound.
Direct outbound, yes.
Wow.
What's the primary channel for that direct outbound?
Um, most of it we use a company called Lemlist, which is fantastic for sequencing.
Yeah, it's fantastic.
You're doing super well.
We use uh LinkedIn and there's a lot of call calling.
The traditional method works.
And it depends on the market because literally called cool.
100%, yes.
I was in the office yesterday and early today, and I had like some of my team members actually call calling.
I was like so happy.
I wasn't smiling.
Like I was actually like listening to the conversation because like I was so happy.
I kind of felt like these guys are hustling, they are building the right pipeline with the right mentality.
But in Latam or in India, cold calling works, but the best method is WhatsApp.
It's a different culture.
Like in India and Latam, it like they use WhatsApp all the time for absolutely everything.
So you just need to be in WhatsApp.
See, this is why I disagree with you on the remote preference.
I get you in terms of needing to be with customers and I understand that, but I think you learn so much from hearing your friend who's also in sales, have that message work really well, and you're like, God, I could use that, and he his mastery is much better than mine.
And then you see support over in the other corner, and everyone is talking about the same challenges that they're having, and you're like, God, okay, I could actually talk about that as one of the core problems that we solve.
And actually, you get so many of the multi-functional benefits from being in the office.
But I agree with you, you need to be with customers.
It's it's a nuanced thing to be fair.
But also the fact that like you could be sharing those like best practices and uh with the rest of the team, and over the of the bands, like as we keep expanding the team, specifically in Europe, for instance, the team has become extremely good at sharing their best practices.
You will have like one of the account execs saying, I've done this like 50 times, this is working super well, and we'll share it in the Slack message, being like, guys, you should try it.
Is that how you do it?
How do you create a structure to share best practices?
I incentivize everyone, or like my incentive to everyone is like in my message is we need to experiment, even at this size, like we don't know what's gonna happen tomorrow.
We need to be ahead of the trends, we need to constantly experiment.
So if you experiment with like messaging, like ways of like talking to customers and so on, just put it with the what with a wider team, and then everyone can copy you.
When does the sales team become too large for this forum and communication?
Never.
But like, dude, if you have a hundred sales reps.
Doesn't matter.
What you're gonna have 700-minute meeting.
Fine.
You can't no at some point at some point, like you end up like doing like uh you end up making multiple exactly, right.
And you end up like today, we we actually have like subdivided in Europe where like we have like UKI, the Nordics like meeting, we have Southern Europe, Western Europe, and all of that stuff, right?
But still, you need to keep actually doing it.
Okay.
When we move to the CSM side, is there anything different about these meetings?
Like, what are they expected to bring?
And what how did these meetings go?
It's exactly the same thing.
So we will go through the pipeline and understanding like how many calls they've done, what are the problems with like some of their call customers, what is the NRR they are expecting to close, and how much like upselling and cross-selling they're gonna be doing.
What NRR do you chase?
115.
115.
Yes.
Um, but which is like we absolutely smash the number every single quarter.
Yeah.
It's absolutely crazy.
Because we have this land and expand.
Line expand works really well if you work closely with your customers, and then you end up having like a very solid like GRR and NRR.
What ACV justifies having a CSM and how many accounts are they responsible for?
Any value actually works.
Because like literally, uh, you need to actually separate it, right?
Like I want my account execs to actually go hunting, be hungry all the time, right?
So I want them to bring logos quickly because the market, like anyone can be building a competitor at any point in time extremely quickly.
So I have to have like those people that are incentivized to move extremely quickly.
And then as soon as they've done it, they need to be able to transfer it to someone else.
So like CS is like something that you need from the early days as well.
We made a mistake at 11 labs of bringing CS way too late.
Way too late.
It took us like 15 months from the first contract that we signed to bring customer SS.
You know, it's massive chaos.
Because the account execs, and I was like selling a lot back then, and I was like running these deals, and at the same time, like people would complain like, hey, like I have these problems, and then like I also need to do this, and then I would look at the list of usage every single week and then outbound, and I would put like a list saying, okay, all of these accounts are ready for like upselling because of usage.
We need to get in touch with them, all of these other accounts, like we should touch base with them.
So I was sharing it with the team, and it's like at some point it starts breaking, right?
And that's when I realized like shit, we've done it wrong.
I should have brought like customer success much sooner.
Let's bring them.
And there was like a day and night initially, like account X wanted to transfer the accounts, but they just didn't really give any level of information.
So they were like, it's sign, you deal with it.
Then we're like, they get they get on the c the customer success guys will be like, what?
Like I don't even know any background of this account.
Like it's a Gmail account, right?
Like, how the hell am I gonna know who is behind it?
John Doe.
Oh boy, it could be a few people.
I've learned on LinkedIn.
It leaves me with 784 profiles in London.
I I love that.
Okay, and so we have that.
How do we financially incentivize customer success?
Just so I understand that.
NRR.
Like net revenue retention.
That's essentially how we do it, right?
Uh of course you could have like once it's over 115.
Exactly.
You get compensated how.
So we have like bonuses or commission structure that like depending how big it gets, then essentially you get 2x, 3x, 4x, whatever that is, right?
So just so I understand, just because there's gonna be so many founders who are like, I love this, but what do I actually do?
It's like two, three X.
What salary?
Like what the upsell, what are they getting?
Yeah, so like when you increase the NRR, then fundamentally it's like based on the NRR, like we calculate it's like the baseline is 115, right?
So if you went to like I don't know, like 130, then essentially you calculate how much it takes you, and then like it would be like fundamentally more.
And that's like it's a direct like math that you do on top of it.
We don't have accelerators for like NRI or like CS.
In the account exec team, we have accelerators for next year.
We might change some of that.
How do you use accelerators to get the most out of sales teams?
And any advice there?
For account execs, for instance, what we do is like up to 100% of your quota, we pay you five percent commission, right?
So fairly simple.
From 100 to 150% quota, we pay you 7.5% commission, and then anything above 150%, we pay you 10% commission.
Like fairly simple, straightforward.
So everyone is incentivized to actually going above 150%.
To the point that like a lot of my account execs, now we're finalizing the performance reviews for 2025 because we always like want to start January with everything fully sorted.
To the point that like some of my account execs will tell me or have been telling me like I don't want an increase in salary.
If you're gonna increase my salary, then calculate that and put it in equity.
Because if you increase my salary, my quota goes up, and then it takes me longer to hit accelerators, so I can make a lot more money with like a smaller quota hitting the accelerators much out.
Which is it's smart.
Really smart.
It is totally smart.
Also tells me that no one's buying fucking houses and getting mortgages, uh, which isn't fuck you, Rachel Roof.
Uh is what I say there.
Um interesting, it's not very much.
I didn't mean that rudely, but by over 150, I get 10%.
Shit, mate.
So what?
It's a lot.
Dude, it's not much.
It's a lot of people.
Com compared.
If we think about it, you set me, okay, I'm on 100k and I get 20, 20x, I'm on two million.
So if I get three million, then I get 10%.
Yeah.
And I get 300K.
Yeah.
As a bonus.
It's fantastic.
Is that good for industry?
That's fantastic.
Like, think about it like salespeople used to be the highest paid in any organization.
Now it's changed with the researchers and NAI, which 100% they deserve it.
But up until like the AF revolution that happened three years ago, like salespeople were like the highest paid.
Always.
No, I'm aware of that.
But I'm just like, God, I thought if you hit like a hundred percent of your quota, getting 15 to 20% would be good.
No, like it that's too much.
Otherwise your numbers would never add up, right?
When do you advise founders on when to have a customer success team?
You said that you waited way too long, way too long.
Yeah.
When's our time?
I think like once you hit like uh a good like three, four million dollars, then I think it's time to actually bring your fair customer success.
Three four an hour.
Yeah.
Okay, got you.
So like it makes sense like to have like an upper like uh CSM function, like an average of like four million dollars in book value.
I think that makes sense.
We're super bad on that, so I think like our average book value per CSM is about like eight point something million, right?
So it means that we're massively under staff, so we're trying to fix it for next year, but ideally, like four is a good number.
On the flip side for sales teams, do you think that you need to wait until you have a sales play but before you hire a fantastic sales leader like you?
Or do you do what Matty did and bring you in with zero revenue?
Bring with zero revenue.
Bring someone that is like a scrappy, that like wants to iterate, will tell you like if things work where things don't work.
Like I think you need that as soon as possible.
Because I think like there would there was this like moment in which like Matty like called me one day and like, you know what, going forward, I report to you for sales, you report to me for everything.
You know, like and that was his way of saying like you are supposed to be doing sales, founder-led sales are good, but like you hit a rock, right?
Like you hit like a ceiling, and just like at some point you need to the transition.
So better do the transition now than actually wait another six months because we know what we're selling, we know how we're selling it, you've been doing it all of these months, and you get a lot more deals than me.
How common is that though, that you know what messaging works, you know what channel works, you have a playbook.
I think it just depends on like the sales that you bring into the organization and how quickly and how willing to experiment they are, right?
And I think like that has a ton of value if you bring someone sooner that has the right mentality.
Of course, if you bring like someone that has like very like, I have my playbook and this is how we're gonna be doing it, I always hate it because that playbooks don't work, unfortunately, right?
And I think like that that is the key, is like if you have someone very early that you can iterate and build trust extremely quickly, then essentially like founder led sales stop making any sense fundamentally because you could be spending a lot more time doing other things.
Unless you're a founder that is like really on the sales side.
Fantastic.
Then just keep going, right?
Otherwise, you could be spending your time like building the product or doing other things that are much more important.
So you come in, and then what's the biggest advice post that in terms of do we just hire like five reps at once and just go hell for lever?
How do we think about the right way to sequence hiring in the really early sales days?
In the early days, like hire one or two.
Like don't like don't don't overhire because then if you overhire fundamentally you're gonna be building their own culture.
People are gonna be asking you a lot of questions.
You will have like five different people like iterating their own playbooks and thinking about their own stuff.
What you wanna do is like you wanna give them some guidelines like this is what works, this is what is not working.
You can still iterate a lot of what works and what doesn't work, and you can make a ton of mistakes, but I don't want like five different people like going wild and trying to figure out because then essentially no one is gonna be closing anything, right?
So better to have like you bring the state leader, someone that is like is able to actually get the hands dirty and understand what's happening in the business and pitch and and go deep, and then you bring two more people.
Then wait until they're on boarded.
Like, wait a couple of months.
You don't have to wait too long, two, three months.
Let's make sure they're fully on boarded, let's make sure that they're starting to sell contracts.
And internally at the company at 11 labs, we used to have like this this target that's like when you join 11 apps, you need to have signed your first contract within the first two weeks.
Whoa.
It's like and that was a target.
That was a target.
We got people that are even like signed like within like uh what is like 72 hours, they signed the first enterprise contract, right?
Tiny contract, but I don't care.
It doesn't really matter.
Do you put them on calls straight away?
Like you don't want to burn leads.
In the early days, we used to do it, and then they would join my my meetings, and essentially I would tell them, like, okay, this is like how we do it on the product side, is like the overview.
My expectation is like you're gonna be spending the next like 24 hours like drilling the entire product and understanding it, and I will ask you to pitch me tomorrow, right?
And then I would bring into my calls, and then they would see me pitch, they will see me talk to customers.
The following day, they would essentially just give me the pitch.
If I liked it, then essentially we would just join calls the same day or the following day together, and then they would pitch.
I will be taking a back seat.
Like, I'm there to support you if they have any questions, and then within like a week, they were already fully up and running.
And then, of course, it was a lot more risky, but hey, we had nothing to lose back then, right?
We had to move quickly because the market was like crowded.
Advise me, how can I train my reps most effectively?
If this listen to all my gong calls, go spend time with product, go spend time with customer support.
What should I do to train reps most effectively?
In the early days, the best thing is like they should join calls, like immediately.
Like they're not gonna be talking in those calls, but like they should just join absolutely immediately so that like they see how all the people are doing it.
They need to be answering tickets, like of support questions, they need to essentially be talking to the engineers and then going deep into the product side.
Once all of that has passed and you're already making a good amount of money and you claim that you have product market fit, claim because you never know.
Then essentially it's a completely different game, right?
Because you want to make sure that like your reputation is like on the line, you want to have them like selling to the proper people.
So essentially you end up like having join me, then also watch some customer calls through gong, and at the same time, you need to pitch me, you need to have like the certifications and all of that stuff, right?
Then you end up migrating toward like much more of a corporation style, where like then people take a lot longer for two weeks, they have like this run period, but like they understand everything, they meet multiple people and so on.
That's like a lot more boring.
When was your hiring process broken?
And what did you learn from that time?
So I we made a lot of mistakes.
I made a lot of mistakes because like the first person that I hired on the go-to-market side, I thought, okay, let's bring someone that like understands a lot more on the product side.
I can train them how to excel, and then it will be fine.
And then it turned out like it just was not working.
And like the person was really good on the product side, but like on the sales side, there is something that like was missing in there.
And then that's when you're flipping.
This is a hunter mentality.
There's like like being hungry, like being like super driven, passionate, and and so on that you get like straight away, or you don't get it.
And I think that that was a mistake.
Like the person is still with us, like doing super well, right?
And we always joke with him saying, like, hey, like you joined the wrong in the wrong role.
But that was the type of profile because like we were selling, like we we had a lot of like self-service companies, we had a lot of inbounds.
Like you were thinking much more like needs to be product-led sales, it needs to be like fundamentally like thinking about like the product and trying to like help them navigate and so on.
And you're like, like, shit, no, no, no, no, no.
These people already know what 11 labs is, right?
Specifically the inbounds.
So like it's less about the product, it's more about like we need to convince them to sign this fucking contract, right so like that's a completely different profile of people and that's that's when I brought my first two proper account execs that started on the same day and I trained them in parallel and they did super well.
What did you do well that you would recommend to everyone else having seen it literally like getting them in in calls with me.
Theme pitch right like I had done it already like hundreds and hundreds of times see me pitch see me how how I was answering calls seeing me that like I would tell them customers like by the end of the day you have all of these things.
And then by the end of the day I would send those things because the best thing that you have is trust with your customers.
It set up the right culture and the right way of operating in the team that was for me the most important thing.
And then on top of that then I then I was keeping like in the loop and it's like joining their calls randomly so I would open their calendar and be like okay I had they have a call in 10 minutes.
Fine I will join that call it so I would just pop up in that call and essentially make them nervous because then like the worst thing that you have is like your boss joining a call like unexpected so what's gonna happen there and I would just stay quiet and be like no, no, I'm just here to support, don't worry.
But of course, you could see that they were very nervous, right?
And they make a ton of more mistakes.
So, like, you end up building that massive memory by forcing people to make mistakes as well.
Do you worry about having a culture of fear?
You said the word ruthless.
You you are very direct.
I love it, I thrive off it.
I'm a narcissist and need therapy.
Do you worry about having a culture of fear?
I don't think the team is as scared of me because I think when I hire people, I always tell them this line, which is like 11 labs is not the easiest company to work for.
And like that's always what I tell them is like you're gonna be working a lot.
I'm gonna have very high expectations, we can have a lot of fun.
If you're not ready, absolutely fine, don't join us.
But I want you to know before you accept the role.
And then it sets the right tone.
Like some people have told me, like, this is not for me.
And I hundred percent respect it.
The majority of people end up saying, like, I value that.
Of the successful sales reps that you have, what is the most common background and what backgrounds tend to not work?
We've tried all of different backgrounds, and it doesn't really matter whether you come from a very pure massive sales organization like Salesforce, or you come from like A B C background, like it doesn't really matter.
It is like how willing are you to constantly trade, like go deep and and and have this high energy situation with your customers and care about your customers, the only thing that actually drives value.
Think about it like you're not doing sales, you're building a community.
Whether you're doing a level lab or you're doing like company X, it doesn't really matter.
Like, if you think about like your customers are like pure sales, then you're falling into the being a transactional element, right?
No one wants to be sold anything.
But if you're building a community that loves your product, that loves your brand, that loves your like everything that you represent, then sale is much easier.
How do you build a community?
Building a community is like you need to do what is right for them.
You need to actually talk to them constantly.
Give them your like specifically in the early days, give them your WhatsApp, put them in Slack.
It doesn't really matter.
Like those people need to interact with you constantly, and they need to know that like if they need to downscale the commitment, you will accept it.
It's fine.
You're doing what is right for them, even if that costs you money.
And that's a part of the culture, right?
It's like if I'm only thinking about like transactional elements and pure transactions, then no no no, I need to sign the highest amount for this company because whatever it is, of course, they're gonna churn at some point.
But exactly the same, like when you are building a company.
Why would you change that approach?
Like, but you do it with your friends.
The only difference, like, hey, like the customers are not your friends yet.
Some of them would become your friends, and I have like a bunch of customers that ended up becoming my friends, and I absolutely love it.
But you need to build a relationship because no one wants to be sold.
Absolutely no one.
So funny, I just did a show with one of the best sales leaders ever, John McMahon.
He was uh on the boards of Monga DB, Snowflake, real.
It was a CR of five public companies.
Unbelievable.
And he said, no one cares how much you know until they know how much you care.
And I just thought that was beautiful.
Yes.
Why should you fire yourself?
And it's a really weird question, but I would fire myself because definitely we were too slow to video.
No shit.
That would be my number one.
And then I'd say number two, I'm too distracted, not focused enough.
For me, I would fire myself because I I do too many things, and I love doing too many things, but also makes me like unfocused in many in many areas.
The other one is the moment I lose passion, like literally, like I I just don't care anymore.
So that's the moment like I would lose.
I would fire myself.
Like if I start thinking that like I'm starting to lose a little bit of the passion, then it's like shit.
No, like it's you need to look you need to fire yourself, like do something else because you're gonna be like you're gonna be burning out extremely quickly.
Most people say that there are people destined for stages of companies.
Oh, they're zero to one person, oh there are very rare is it I'm thinking of Chris Dagnan actually, it's not like he went from zero to public company and he would say he was zero to four billion an arrow.
Do you think you're full stack?
I love the early stage of companies, but it's still like for me it doesn't really matter if you're still enjoying what you're doing, just keep going, right?
It's like life is too short, like for doing something that like you don't enjoy.
And I think like majority of people are smart enough to actually figure out something else in their life.
That's my main motivation.
And I've always taken like my job at 11 labs on a monthly basis.
Like, if next month I don't enjoy it, I would just like tell Matty Matt Matty I'm not enjoying it, it is time for me to quit and do something else.
Really?
Yes.
How do you advise people?
Because I would say a month isn't long enough.
A month can be a bad part of the market, it can be I don't know, psychology, whatever.
How do you advise people on when the right time is to say, you know what, enough's enough?
Move job.
Of course, one month is like the trigger to for you to start thinking whether it is or not the right thing.
One month is not enough.
So like if it happens with like number of months, like two or three months, consecutive months, then you have a problem in there, right?
Because like everyone will start seeing it.
So I think like if for three months you've been going like through this like very rough patch that you're not finding motivation, you should just triple check whether you're in the right place.
What is the main reason that eleven labs is a efficient machine of a company that no one knows and sees?
I think it's fundamentally the type of people.
Nothing else like it's like very humble people that essentially don't know what they don't know and they would just stand up and accept their mistakes and I think we've encouraged everyone to make a ton of mistakes all the time.
Experiment and no one gets fired for making mistakes.
And that is the superpower that we have as an organization.
But you just need one to actually deliver to actually make another hundred million in revenues.
And I'm happy with that.
I'm happy with those odds.
What makes Matty such an incredible CEO?
I think it's the fact that like he can do both like the product side and the customer side and he's like very extrovert in nature but and very empathetic with the customers and the rest of the organization, right?
It's actually difficult to find leaders and like CEOs that actually can do both things that the product and can do the customer side.
Like sometimes like they like have this vision on the product side but they're just lacking like the drive to do sales and Matty will roll up his leaves and be like fuck I'm gonna be running this let's say right it's one of his superpowers in general.
You've you met him like he comes across like extremely personal like you're immediately like uh like drawn to him.
He's a nice guy in general right and and as such like when you add up all of these factors then it's like it's a fantastic like fantastic leader, fantastic CEO.
But like we have another one which is fundamentally like Piot.
He's the genius of the company right in the sense like he built the entire technology from scratch we have a very small research team that all of them are absolutely like walking brains like literally that it's like super super smart guys but he's headed by Peter like the company would not exist if it wasn't because like we built a fantastic technology.
Is it almost harder when you become a sexy brand because you have so many people want to join it becomes a lot noisier.
Yeah but also like the expectation is higher right we hired about like 0.18% of people that uh apply or 0.018 um we had about 1800 applications in the first six months of the year.
There is a lot of imbalance there is a lot of things that you get but that doesn't mean that like that that is equivalent to like quality that is equivalent to like the type of build that you'll be hiding of course as you become a hot commodity in there people want to actually work for you but they want to work for the wrong reasons most of it people will see that like a step in their career to actually do something else much bigger later on.
We try to filter those ones out that's fucking insane.
180,000, 0.01A.
It's insane, huh?
And like in the second.
It goes through that.
Yeah.
I'm being serious like and like if it's half is AI.
No.
I mean, the first half of the year, we had like what, like five, six recruiters across the entire organization, right?
They've been doing a fantastic job on that end.
And then like they're doing 996, aren't they?
Fucking hell.
Here's a dot room, here's 180,000 applications.
Give go go have fun.
And by the way, like screen them all and talk to them.
And then like it's just it's tough.
It's really tough.
What have you not done when you reflect back on your time in 11 labs that with the benefit of hindsight, you wish you had done?
Hiding faster.
I think I made a mistake of like not hiding fast enough when the company did a lot more people in the organization.
And I think we've suffered over the years of like we I think I strongly believe that we could have grown much quicker if we had hired like a lot more people.
What did you do that you wish you hadn't done?
That's a tough one, huh?
That's a really tough one.
Sometimes some of the iterations that we've done on the ICPs have probably been like wrong in terms of timing or have been like the wrong focus, essentially, right?
Or even I can tell you, like, even on the cross-sell side, that I had not spent enough time in that specific area, and that meant like we end up like leaving money at the table, right?
So sometimes you actually need to rethink a little bit twice.
But I think like also like when you're growing so quickly, it's difficult to actually not miss stuff.
So something that like I take like that is like we've done well sometimes things like we've not done well in general.
Dude, you've just raised a $15 million fund.
Amazing achievement.
I also love the name, Baobab.
And it's because of your like love of like these trees, right?
Yes.
Yeah, I read about this.
Super sweet.
I think Sequoia got that first, did you tell me?
Uh it's a funny like Baobab shoes, like, they they grow up in like a like in in very warm climate, like in Australia, in in Africa and so on.
I actually grow Baba treats in London in my flat in London, but also like in my flat in Barcelona, and I've been doing for many years, right?
And it's like really fragile trees that like when the winter comes or like when the cooler weather comes, they lose all of the all of the leaves, you need to stop watering them.
So it's like really cool plant in general.
So it's my my favorite one.
And I have like what, I don't know, like 10 or 12 at home these days.
I'd actually be an LP if someone wants to start this in a fund called Cactus Capital.
Okay.
It's not a bad idea, is it from a branding version?
I bet I bet we would really prickly founders.
I bet you would like they obnoxiously prickly.
Like they'll thrive on the friction.
Yes.
Yeah.
I love it.
Does being an investor make you a better sales leader?
No.
I think like being a good salesperson makes you a better investor.
How?
Because you're able to qualify better.
And I think like what we do like from an investor perspective, like these days, of course, like we do outbounds to actually get into the deals that we want.
And we also do like inbounds reviewing like all of the leads that we get, right?
Like a good SDR, a good account execs, does exactly the same thing.
The only thing that are missing is like there is a sixth sense that we get specifically on the pre-seed stage.
It's like, is it a good match like with the founders?
Are they really smart?
Can they iterate with the product and the company?
Are they willing to pivot?
Are they willing to actually listen to other people?
All of those items.
But there is a gut feeling attached to all of this that an S an SDR, a good SDR also has and knows if whether running with that opportunity is gonna transform into something or an account executive is gonna transform into something, or they get the gut feeling is like this is gonna be like it's not the right person, just gonna stop at some point.
I just don't want to run it.
From a VC, we do exactly the same thing.
Dude, if being an investor doesn't make you a better sales leader, why does Matthew let you do it?
What the fuck?
I would be I was expecting you to be like, yes, I teed that one up for you to like slam dunk.
And you're like, nah.
I'm like, okay, well, what the f why would you why would he let you do it?
I don't know.
I kept asking multiple times.
And I think like he knows like I I have a passion for it.
I've I have done like as an angel 74 tickets.
So I think like at some point, like uh when I was like annoying enough that he ended up saying yes, do it.
Top three tickets without like looking into the order, but Revolute 11 Labs and I don't know, like a company called VSIM, they're doing super well, they're doing like training for robots physics.
When you look back at that 74 that you've done, Angel, what's your biggest lesson?
So I I do founders that are like very technical.
And what I realize like is many of the technical founders over the years, like they just realized that like they don't care about sales.
So like what I've ended up like screening over the past over the past years a lot more is like, are they really good technical founders?
And do they also care about sales?
Because otherwise you end up like stomping into a wall where you tell them like you like the product is fantastic, don't get me wrong, but we need to start making some money, right?
And sometimes like, no, no, no, we don't want to make money.
We only want to do research, we only want to build like the best product and so on.
And you're like, you're gonna die as a company, right?
And it's like it's so much more difficult to convince them that like they also need to start thinking about like commercialization of the product.
That like at some point you end up filtering them out.
And I think like one of the key areas, like you need to actually test for appetite for sales at some point early on, because there might not be a fit.
But there's the flip side of all of this, where it's just like if you look at like OpenAI or Anthropic or Sakana AI, like they raise money saying, like, we're gonna be doing pure research, right?
Or like nonprofit.
No exactly, exactly, right?
So like there is a like a flip side of it, but of course, like when you look at like venture, which is like power law, but at the same time, it's like you need to be like looking at a lot of different companies, then maybe research have are like outliers in many ways, right?
Final one and then a quick thought.
What do you want to do with Baal Bap?
Do you want this to be a venture fund that's like a $500 million fund in its own, right?
So far, like what I want to do is like it's I want to build a generational fund, something that like actually will uh like outlive us all ideally.
Like smaller funds, like keep raising relatively often, but being there for founders, like I I want to be there for founders.
I it it has to be the operator led fund that actually is there for them.
It's like doing the right thing and you be there for founders, dude.
If you've got 40 and you're sales leader, uh honestly, and then you do another fund.
I think it is possible.
I think it's like a ruthless prioritization of your time and where you put the you you put the effort.
I talk constantly to my founders like on WhatsApp all the time.
I will dedicate like weekends, late nights, early mornings.
No.
That helps for sure, right?
Helps a lot.
It helps a lot.
Uh but like I go into it.
Do you want kids?
I 100% want.
And but and maybe at some point like you end up like having to decide on which one you go further, right?
Do you take one, do you take the other one, and so on?
I want to do a quick fire run.
I've loved this.
So what have you changed your mind on in the last 12 months?
Like that like specifically on investing, is like you need to also be investing in like in founders that actually care about like sales.
Um not only like uh like the technical aspect of it.
What's the single biggest mistake you see sales leaders make today?
That they don't spend enough time talking to customers directly and signing contracts themselves.
What's the biggest mistake CEOs make in how their relationship is with their sales leaders?
That they would just force a number to their sales leaders and expect that they deliver without understanding what are the implications of what channel or method is like super outdated in sales?
Often people say they're like cold cooling.
What what is outdated?
Outdated, I think is like emails.
Like sending an email, no one replies.
There is so much like outbounds that are like fundamentally AI generated.
Like no one replies.
Like the the conversion rate on emails these days has dropped to like like zero point zero zero something, whatever.
What's your biggest insecurity?
What's my biggest insecurity that like I might not be able to get to the end of the quarter for the number that I wanted?
Has that ever happened?
Yeah, a hundred percent.
But like you live with it, right?
Like we all make mistakes all the time and you live with it.
But I think it's important because like as a sales leader, you always need to be worrying, like, am I gonna get to the end of the quarter?
Because it means that like you are pushing really fucking hard.
If you know that like you're gonna be get there, you're gonna get there, you're gonna relax.
I don't want that.
Let's be honest.
You don't need the money anymore.
Like eleven labs revolute as angels.
It's not about the money.
Are you a better sales leader because you're richer?
Yes.
I don't get compensated on how much sales we make.
So it means that I'm fully independent.
Because that is not like I don't believe in that.
I don't believe like if the company makes X amount of money, then um it's fantastic.
If they make Z, fantastic.
My goal is to make sure we make as much money as possible based on the plan that we've committed.
And the plans are absolutely bananas, right?
Like we always like shoot for the stars.
But my role is to make sure that I get compensated on equity side, not on how much money we make.
I think it's wrong.
If I were to say the person is listening to the next sixty seconds, and this is all that they're gonna take from our conversation and from all of your writing, from everything they've seen and the news about you.
What would you most want that person to take from this and from everything in the next sixty seconds?
Constantly up on people.
I think it's important.
Uh well, man.
Uh, but like do like essentially spend time with the team, spend time with your customers, treat them as a community, not as a proper transactional sale.
Be with them, be on the road all the time, because if you're not, you're missing the reality of what your team, what your company is going through.
And the only way to actually like be a better safe leader, and the only way to actually get to your sales target is fundamentally like going through the pain yourself every single day.
Dude, this has been such a joy.
I've loved this.
It also feels like I've known you for a long time.
But um, thank you for being so brilliant.
Thank you so much for inviting me.
This was this was really, really good.
But before we leave you today, a quick shout-out to a company I've been genuinely blown away by and have been tracking closely, ROX.
I've been watching this team closely and the speed they're operating at and the level of applied AI talent they've assembled.
It's honestly remarkable.
Rocks is pioneering revenue agents for the global 2000, plugged into your data warehouse and CRM and delivering board-level ROI in just 90 days.
These sales and revenue agents handle the end-to-end sales process for large enterprises, from research prep to deal risk, outreach, and opportunity management.
So sellers spend more time with customers and less time in tools.
This isn't another productivity app.
Christ, we've all had enough of those.
Rocks gives reps a single interface on top of their GTM stack, powered by a knowledge graph across your internal and external data.
So if you want to boost AE productivity, increase revenue per rep and consolidate your stack, try rocks at rocks.com/slash sign up.
And speaking of great companies, we have to talk about Monaco.
For years I've watched some of the best founders and early go to market teams struggle with sales.
Too many CRMs, too many point solutions, too much manual work.
Well that changes with Monaco.
Monaco replaces your legacy CRM and fragmented sales stack with a single AI native platform.
Monaco's agents automatically build and score your entire TAM, lay it in real-time signals, create and run outbound sequences, schedule calls, and record and transcribe meetings.
Your pipeline practically manages itself.
Monaco creates reminders, draws follow-up emails for you, and keeps deals moving forward.
So that means more meetings, higher conversion rates, and faster revenue growth.
If you're an early stage startup, tired of duct taping sales tools together and looking to grow revenue faster, check out Monaco at Monaco.com.
While Monaco runs your sales pipeline, Framer runs your website.
A website should help your business grow, not slow it down.
If updates to your dot com feel harder than they should, Framer is the shortcut you've been looking for.
Framer is an enterprise grade, no-code website builder that works like your team's favorite design tool, and it's used by companies like Perplexity, Miro, MixPanel to move faster.
Designers and marketers can fully own the site with real-time collaboration, a robust CMS built for SEO, and advanced analytics that include integrated A B testing.
So you're not just shipping pages, but you're maximizing what works.
And when you're ready to ship, changes go live in seconds with one click, publish.
Without relying on engineering.
Plus, Framer is built for scale with premium hosting, enterprise grade security, and 99.99% uptime SLAs.
Whether you want to launch a new site, test a few landing pages, or migrate your full.com.
Framer has programs for startups, scale-ups, and large enterprises to make going from idea to live site fast.
Learn how you can get more out of your dot com from a Framer specialist or get started building for free today at Framer.com slash 20vC for 30% off.
30% off of Framer Pro Annual Plan.
That's Framer.com slash 20VC for 30% off.
Framer.com slash 20vc rules and restrictions may apply.