Case Study: Hiring Your First VP of Revenue
CLIENT: LANE
The Result
How Lane partnered with Sales Talent Agency to hire a vice president of revenue to scale its business from $1M to $100M+ in ARR.
The Challenge
Lane is a high-growth, startup technology company in the rapidly growing space of property technology and tenant engagement. Its goal is to use technology to make workplaces as intuitive as everything else in our lives – and that means turning the workplace into a tool that helps you do more, easily. This was a hot space when it launched and, because of COVID-19, it’s growing even more quickly as landlords of commercial properties need to adjust to new challenges like health & safety and the growing work from home trend.
With its continued success and high-growth, Lane needed to hire a vice president of revenue to develop, lead, and execute on their go-to-market strategy. That said, the window of opportunity to dominate a market is very short for a startup, and hiring the wrong revenue leader can put a massive dent on growth prospects.
Lane knew that it was in a position to attract the best leaders in Toronto and its challenge was to find and attract the right revenue leader who could build a repeatable, scalable, profitable revenue model and scale Lane to $100M+ in annual recurring revenue.
The Solution
Lane wanted to hire the best for this position, and with that goal in mind, it partnered with Sales Talent Agency (STA) to help make this critical hire.
When hiring for a critical position it’s important to have the right process to find, attract, choose, and equip the right revenue leader. STA’s experience with high growth start-ups in the SaaS industry allowed it to work efficiently and effectively to do the following:
- Map out the mandate for the role and the 3 ideal customer profiles (ICPs) to target
- Create an interview process that would be compelling to the candidates, while giving key insights needed to assess alignment with the role
- Share insights on the landscape of the talent pool available for this role, which included every leader that matched the ICPs
- Connect with and excite these highly-qualified leaders about the opportunity
- And, provide strategic support throughout the process to both Lane and the candidates in play
The Result
Lane’s goal through this engagement was exciting and challenging: to find the right vice president of revenue who could lead them to $100M+ in annual recurring revenue. But, this search wasn’t an easy one as executive searches of this nature require time and due diligence, and, in this case, there were added complexities from COVID-19.
Throughout the search key stakeholders at Lane met with a number of Canada’s top revenue leaders, which resulted in them hiring their newest Vice President of Revenue: Josh Guttman.
When Josh joined Lane on July 6th, 2020, it was a strong product-led organization, but it was missing an equally strong sales and marketing engine. In his first few months, he has laid a solid foundation and has made tremendous strides in mapping out the sales organization from “soup to nuts”. This has included:
- Building out the whole revenue generation process for Marketing, Sales and Customer Success
- Establishing a single source of truth for the organization by implementing a comprehensive CRM tool
- Developing the sales team structure, including hiring 4 new team members that consisted of business development reps, account executives and solutions engineers, and forecasting for continued scaling over the coming months
- Creating playbooks for each step of the customer journey from prospect to renewal
- Standardizing the organization’s process for pricing
- And, providing coaching across the organization, and playing an effective role in meetings with the Board
“Hiring revenue-focused leadership was an absolutely crucial step towards ensuring Lane’s continued success. As a team which had solely relied on inbound interest, we had significant foundational practices we needed to build out and then build upon. We deemed it critical we find the right person to help us implement our own revenue practice with equal amounts of quality and speed. We turned to STA for their expertise and their deep connection to the local talent pool. The process was professional, efficient, helpful, and concluded with great results. I would highly recommend Netty, Asad, and the STA team.”
Rob Price, Chief Operating Officer at Lane
“The entire Sales Talent Agency Team and the Executive Search Consultant working with Lane (Netty) were incredible from day-one. From the initial outreach and throughout the entire process (and even after), STA was professional and transparent, and added a lot of value by effectively managing and triangulating the entire recruitment and interview process. My expectations were very well managed, my questions were answered promptly, and valuable coaching was given. I couldn’t be more excited about the outcome and opportunity ahead, and I highly recommend working with STA and Netty!”