The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
00:00:00 · Max Freeman
[00:00:00] S0: There's three categories of performance in sales. One, you are God. Two, I don't know yet. Or three, you're fucking fired. We'll pay two x what a standard SDR is gonna make. But guess what? You get a book 40, 50, 60 meetings, which is four to six times what a standard SDR has to book. There are some sellers at Ramp that are on 15 plus calls in a given day. You have to treat go to market recruiting like Billy Bean. Sales is very much an engineering problem when you break it down. It's a data infrastructure problem. It's a math problem.
00:00:30 · Harry Stebbings
[00:00:30] S1: I have had enough. I've had enough of podcasts being fluffy. I want them to be granular, and I wanna learn very specifically how to excel across different disciplines. TwentySales takes you inside the world of the best sales leaders. Today, we're joined by one of the fastest growing companies in the world's SVP of sales, Max Freeman, to understand how to think about onboarding, how to think about acquiring the best talent. By the way, he thinks bankers make the best sales leaders. How to think about retention, how to think about incentivizing sales reps with new products, all of this and so much more in what is one of the most granular and detailed shows on how to build a sales machine. But before we dive into the show today, today, I wanna tell you about how the first AI law firm, Crosby, helped us close a big sponsor. As you know, some of the biggest companies in the world advertise on 20 VC. My British dulcet tones clearly convert well. I was working to close this big sponsor, and they wanted to get through legal review quite quickly to close the deal. Crosby turned red lines around in three hours and caught major issues that would have caused serious problems in the future. Crosby combines AI, some of the best engineers in the world from companies like Ramp and Stripe, and some of the best attorneys in the world from top 10 law firms. Customers get the best of both worlds. An elite human attorney reviews every contract, but they move incredibly quickly, returning redlines in under four hours. They help the fastest growing companies like Cognition, Ramp, and Clay close deals in hours, not weeks. Learn more at crosby.ai/20vc. If you wanna redline NDAs, MSAs, DPAs, and any other procurement contracts faster, go to crosby.ai/20vc. It's speed that you can really trust. While Crosby keeps your numbers sharp, OneMind keeps your customer conversation sharper. Our friends over at OneMind have a hot take. The b to b GTM model we've been using for, well, the last twenty years, It's collapsing. Predictable revenue isn't so predictable, and buyers are just tired of explaining themselves at every handoff between SDRs, AEs, CSMs, and support. You feel it in your board reporting. Your sellers feel it in their coverage. Your buyers feel it as they wait for answers. Well, enter OneMind and their GTM superhumans.
00:02:58 · Harry Stebbings
HubSpot, Alteryx, and ZoomInfo are just three of the tech companies using OneMind's superhumans to qualify buyers, ride along with sales reps, and coach customers. Whether you're ahead of target or under pressure to increase bookings ahead of hiring or behind on target even and need every rep to hit quota, OneMind is the solution. See for yourself at 1mind.com. That's One Mind, mind,.com. While One Mind helps you sell smarter, Framer helps you build faster. When a new landing page turns into a pile of tickets and handoffs, Framer helps your team move faster. Framer is the AI website builder that helps creators, teams, and businesses ship production ready sites faster than ever while getting every detail right. Prompt, inspect, edit, and publish in one place at a whole new pace. Agents and humans work in tandem. Agents bring speed and scale. You bring taste, judgment, and control. The work lands on the canvas and stays editable. Build custom code components, manage CMS content, optimize SEO, and audit for issues all in one place. Enterprise grade hosting, security, and 99.99% uptime SLAs trusted by leading brands like Perplexity and Miro. Learn how you can get more out of your site from a Framer specialist or get started building for free today at framer.com/20vc for 30% off a Framer Pro annual plan. That's framer.com/20vc. Rules and restrictions may apply. You have now arrived at your destination. Max, I am so excited for this, dude. I think when people think of the fastest growing companies, they do immediately think of Ramp. Eric told me that the entire revenue accumulation was down to you. And so no pressure, but the next hour is gonna be a lot of treasure trove of wisdom. Okay?
00:04:45 · Max Freeman, Harry Stebbings
[00:04:45] S0: I love it. I'm fired up, and I think I'm getting too much credit for that. There's amazing individuals on the go to market team at RAMP, and I feel very lucky. [00:04:54] S1: Well, that's great because I was totally BS ing. He said you're a total douche. But moving swiftly to the show, a a sales team is nothing without the people in it. And when we were chatting before this, I... We don't do prep calls. No. Harry's far too old in arrogant for a prep call. But you you made me do a prep call, and I'm so glad you did because you said that you like hiring bankers and turning them into sellers. Why?
00:05:20 · Max Freeman
[00:05:20] S0: So not only bankers, but I think there's a lot of mispriced assets on the market where their resume will not suggest the true alpha. But let's let's start with bankers. So in building the early go to market team at Ramp, we brought on quite a few investment bankers, and now they're running pretty large pieces of the business. Here's why I have an affinity towards doing this. One, bankers are programmed to work. The concept of a nine to five is completely foreign to these folks. Two, they have intelligence and they have business acumen and a lot of horsepower that is not always found when hiring for sales talent. And I think the third for our business, you know, we're selling into the office of the CFO. And so in the earlier stages when we didn't have brand recognition, no one knew who we were as a company, being able to call a CFO cold, tell them, Hey, I just quit my job at Goldman TMTIP to join this credit card business. That packed a very compelling punch for us. I think those were the tangible benefits. Maybe the last additive component that I think is important is I didn't have time and early sales teams don't have time to teach folks this is how you use lean language in a cold call, this is how you use appropriate grammar in a cold email. We had to be executing and so bringing on folks like that helped de risk a lot of that. So we were just in pure execution mode. And now today, you know, Mike Weber, we pulled him from Citi. He runs a massive piece of the business. Sam Buck runs a massive piece of the business. He came from Goldman.
00:06:51 · Harry Stebbings, Max Freeman
[00:06:51] S1: I spoke to Sam before this show. He was fantastic with suggestions. My question to you is I I can literally feel the pain of founders listening going, really? How on earth do you afford these investment bankers? How do you afford these investment bankers? [00:07:07] S0: Yeah. So the the bet we took early on was to actually pay way above market rate for this talent. But in return, we were gonna expect way above market rate when it comes to output. And so we'll make the unit economics work. We'll pay two x what a standard SDR is gonna make. But guess what? You gotta book 40, 50, 60 meetings, which is four to six times what a standard SDR has to book. [00:07:31] S1: You book 40 to 50 meetings? What is the expectation on meeting bookings, really? [00:07:36] S0: It depends by segment. Obviously, the the further up market you go, the numbers are are lower, and we're looking for quality. But down market, we still have SDRs that are booking well above 50 meetings in a given month. [00:07:48] S1: In a given month? [00:07:49] S0: Yes. [00:07:50] S1: That's not very much, dude. 50 meetings in a given month for an SDR. [00:07:54] S0: You have to book a meeting with intent. There has to be qualification rigor. There's a lot that goes into it that takes precision. I think you're understating this. [00:08:04] S1: No. Because when we were chatting before, I said, like, Deignan... Chris Deignan is like, oh, you can't do more than seven. And you were like, oh, people do way more than that. They do, like, 10 in a day.