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Mark Schwartz, SVP of Sales and Marketing at the concierge commerce company Humankind, shares his insights.

Mark explains how companies can evolve from founder-led sales to repeatable processes that allow them to grow from startup to scaleup. In short:

1. You evolve from founder-led sales to scaleup by adding rigor and discipline to the sales process, not just scaling outreach.

2. To transcend founder-led sales, identify key verticals, figure out which companies are a fit in those verticals, and tailor content to them. Then do the same for adjacent verticals.

3. There’s still a place for cold outreach, but sales, even at the SDR level, is increasingly about building genuine connections and taking part in the industry conversation.

Here’s a condensed version of our conversation:

JZ: Let’s say you come into a company that has grown to about a dozen customers via founder-led sales. What do you do to get the company its next 10, 20, 30 customers?

MS: A lot of founders undervalue highly professionalized sales and marketing teams. The first 12 months of a startup is just mining your network as best as possible, which generates the initial clients. But that isn’t representative of the discipline and rigor that's associated with putting together a sales organization. That sort of work can be effective for the first 12 to 18 months, but it doesn’t scale.

The difference a professionalized GTM team brings is the level of discipline and rigor that comes with identifying market fit. That's not just a question of whether my solutions solve a problem, but more importantly, it’s about whether I can enunciate that value proposition in a way that makes people pay attention. It's the meaningfulness and repetitiveness of the message.

It’s common knowledge that it takes a half dozen to a dozen touchpoints before a prospect pays attention. A good marketer will determine how to reach prospects across channels — because just sending 12 emails is just as likely to hurt your chances as help. You have to mix channels and match the message to the channel. It’s not buying a set of matching luggage — just scaling the same message to different mediums — you have to customize the messaging, the audience, and the call to action to align with the strengths of the channel.

Then there’s the brand marketing component. How can you build upon the passion of your CEO or founder in a way that speaks to your target audience to address exactly the problem they're trying to solve?

JZ: As someone who comes in as the CRO or head of sales, what is your next move when founder-led sales has run its course?

MS: History is littered with tons of tech startups that were the best in breed of what they did. But sometimes the highest quality isn't what people are necessarily looking to buy. The product has to be accessible and have a certain romance as well.

The first thing I do when I come into a sales organization is identify the verticals that are going to be the most impacted by what we're working on. I'm trying to get to a traditional ICP conversation. Everybody wants ABM and personalizing their messaging down to the client level. But at this stage, you can't do that yet. You still have too wide open a market. And if I just chose 20 prospects to go and tried to customize against them, I'd fail miserably. A step towards that is to focus on verticalized information.

If I’m coming in after 12 months, I usually have a base of 8-10 clients already going. Within those existing clients, there are some vertical commonalities, especially if they're from one person’s network. So, let's mine that and let's figure out who are the top 100 participants in that vertical. You have a starting point of credibility, a good brand story in that vertical, and hopefully solid performance data to draw upon.

Once you’ve executed against that, you can start to look at the adjacent verticals. So, if we're doing really well in beauty, something that's quite associated with beauty is supplements. That's exactly what's worked for Humankind. Our founder came from the beauty business, did exceedingly well in it, and landed a number of clients in that space. Our next growth came from adjacent verticals. A lot of the learnings we gained from the beauty industry were relevant; even the content that we created about beauty was applicable.

JZ: Let's say you have several clients in the beauty industry, and you realize the supplements sector is fertile territory. How do you as the sales leader think about going after them? What are some of the tactics you're going to deploy?

MS: The first thing I do is a top-down TAM evaluation. I want to look at the top 150 players in that space by both revenue and traffic. Are they going to be an ideal customer at 150? If they are, then I dig deeper to as many as 300 prospects. But if you're getting to the point where they aren’t matching all of your ICP criteria, 150 prospects is often a good stopping point.

The next thing I'm going to do is look at those organizations' titles and identify prospect cohorts. Then we match content to the cohorts we're going after. VPs are much more interested in strategic content that addresses industry topics, while managers might be looking for ways to make their lives easier and faster. And then C-level is looking for broader, macro-level, even philosophical conversations.

JZ: Are there tactics or marketing channels that you regard as inappropriate for an early-stage business? For example, is there a certain time when you tend to test paid ads?

MS: If you're in a vertical that's fairly well established, then paid search makes a lot of sense because there is already implicit traffic for your category. But if you're in a nascent space like ours (concierge commerce), you’re not going to get a lot of value from paid media, especially on the generic side. There's some opportunity there, and we can lay the foundation, but we’re not expecting huge movement.

That means we move towards top-of-funnel activities instead: white papers, position papers, research alliances, and PR. Those things don't necessarily generate hand raisers but do generate awareness.

JZ: Do you have SDRs working under you?

MS: We have two SDRs because we've gotten to the point where we can see what the flywheel looks like, even if it's not quite spinning yet. So we want to have the capacity to handle that. And we've also verticalized a little bit. Each of my SDRs has some expertise in their vertical, so they can speak intelligently to and about the people they're going after. We don't want them to be automatons. We want them to understand the beauty space and be able to have an intelligent conversation about it. Then we layer on top of that a marketing leader who is responsible for paid, earned, and owned activities.

JZ: What is a really good SDR doing nowadays? The idea of spamming 500 people on LinkedIn has fallen out of favor. Are they interacting with people on social and trying to forge genuine relationships? Is it a little bit of both?

MS: It is a blend. We still like to send out emails, but the most important thing to us is making meaningful, targeted connections with people. Perhaps, as an SDR, you participated in three conversations on a social media post that was really relevant to us and added value in doing so, so you're building a network of people that you can continue to mine.

Your day is trying to make connections with people who matter in our industry. And yes, an element of that is email and LinkedIn messages, but also a lot of that is just participating in the conversation and being seen.