Founders Fund

Partner

Brex

Blond Consulting Inc

I work with growth stage technology companies on building, scaling, and optimizing their sales organizations to achieve revenue targets. Areas of focus include: 

Defining the appropriate growth strategy
Recruiting the team at all levels (from SDR to VP of Sales)
Increasing win rates
Decreasing cycle times
Optimizing operational processes
Implementing sales productivity systems
And ultimately dramatically increasing revenue

Please message me if you would like to discuss my services in greater detail.

Founder and CEO

Zenefits

Zenefits manages your benefits, payroll, and HR – so you don’t have to. No more paperwork. No more headaches. It's all done online and completely paperless.

I joined Zenefits as the VP of Sales when there were 18 employees, 2 sales reps, and <1M in ARR. Over the 2.5 years I was there the company grew to 1800 employees, 600 employees in the sales org, and 70M in ARR. Zenefits is considered the fastest growing SaaS business ever from a revenue perspective.

VP Sales

EchoSign

EchoSign is now the biggest e-signature provider in the world and the fastest growing business unit within Adobe. As the Director of Sales I manage Sales Managers, Field/Territory Account Executives, and Inside Account Executives.

Director of Sales

After the Adobe acquisition of Echosign I became the first Echosign Sales Manager overseeing the San Francisco Adobe Echosign office. The San Francisco team (made up of 10 Account Executives and Strategic Account Reps) is the highest producing sales team at Echosign consistently exceeding expectations and quota.

Sales Manager

Continued to be the highest producing sales rep closing deals with many F500 organizations including: Oracle, Nike, Standard & Poor's, Aetna, Cigna, Procter and Gamble, Nationwide Insurance, United HealthGroup, Bristol-Myers, First Data, and many more. In July 2011 Echosign was acquired by Adobe. Shortly after I earned a promotion to become the first sales manager at Adobe Echosign.

Strategic Accounts Sales

Consistently the #1 producer out of all other AE's in the organization. At the end of 2009 I earned a promotion to be in charge of strategic (F500) accounts at Echosign.

Account Executive

Partner at Founders Fund

Startups shouldn’t use recruiting agencies to hire sales reps. Here’s why:

Founders and sales leaders regularly ask me “which recruiting firm(s) do you recommend to find our early AE’s?”

When I ask why they want to use an agency over doing the recruiting themselves, 2 themes emerge: 1) founders generally don’t have sales backgrounds or sales networks. Leveraging an “expert” in recruiting salespeople will produce better candidates and hires. 2) using an agency will save time. 

My experience is the opposite with both.

Candidate quality: When I joined Brex there were 2 sales reps. Both had been in-network hires from our CFO who had brought 2 of the best sales reps from SoFi with him. I hired the next several reps from my personal network - all top performers at their respective companies. And those hires brought the other top reps from their previous companies with them. While there are exceptions to the rule, the best salespeople do not use recruiting agencies to join a new company. They want to go somewhere their reputation precedes them and they trust the people and company they’re joining. Accordingly - the population of candidates joining companies through in-network referrals are better candidates/performers than the population of candidates joining companies through recruiting agencies.

Time savings: Onboarding to a recruiting agency takes time. You have to define the profile, create a job description, and sell the recruiters on your business so they’re able to sell candidates. You then receive a batch of resumes. Every resume says something like: top 10% on the team, 160% to quota, presidents club every year, closed the most revenue in company history, etc. So you start taking interviews. All the candidates seem pretty good. Some better than others. You progress some candidates to spend more time with them and meet the rest of the team. You start doing some references on a few of them. Ultimately make and negotiate a few offers. Finally someone(s) accept an offer to join the company as a complete unknown who was placed by a recruiter who was paid to place them. This process takes weeks to months from start to finish and countless hours of onboarding, interviews, reference calls, etc.

You ultimately produce lower quality hires and spend more time in the recruiting process when working with an agency than doing the recruiting yourself.

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Sam Blond's Best Posts .css-qqfgvy{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);}(last 30 days)

Want to drive more opportunities from LinkedIn?

Sam Blond's Linkedin Analytics

Sam Blond's Best Posts (last 30 days)