Salesforce

Industry

SaaS

Location

United States

Roles placed

Account Executives, Sales Representatives

Placements made

— leave blank

The challenge

In the early 2000s Salesforce was selling something the market did not yet have a category for. Software delivered as a subscription, over the internet, with no licence and no installation, was a genuinely unfamiliar proposition to enterprise buyers.

That made hiring unusually difficult. The experienced enterprise software sellers of the day had spent their careers selling perpetual licences, and many of them did not believe in the model. The candidates who could sell it needed conviction as much as capability.

What we did

We screened for the willingness to sell an unproven model, not just for a sales record. That meant candidates who could explain a new category to a sceptical buyer, work without the comfort of an established brand, and accept a compensation structure built on recurring revenue rather than large one-time deals.

It also meant being honest with candidates about the risk, so the people who joined did so with their eyes open.

The result

We helped Salesforce hire a number of their initial sales staff as the company established its SaaS model — the group that had to prove the category could be sold before anyone else would follow.

Every SaaS sales search we have run since has been informed by that one.