Lessons - How to Build a Global Company | Alfie Isa Marsh, Head of Sales at Spendesk

Hi, it's Scott here. On these lessons, episodes of my podcast, I'll be selecting my favorite lessons from various guests and episodes of success story. Today my guest is Alfie Isomar, she's ahead of US sales for Spend Desk. Alfie is one of the first employees at Spend Desk, growing the company through several growth initiatives and capital raises. He has grown the outbound strategy from the ground up and has been wildly successful with the company's sales, growing exponentially under his leadership. He's recently transitioned from his role focus on the UK markets to overseas as Spend Desk hopes to capture market share in the US with the same success that they've seen under Alfie in Europe. So today Alfie is going to teach about take to market strategy, how to take a product and to sell it to a demographic and then once you scaled in the demographic and found product market fit, how do you duplicate that success in another region or in another country? So let's start first, like how you built out a commercial organization and it could be you, it could be you and a team of senior leadership, it doesn't matter, I'm still curious within the UK. And then how do you take that process and then transpose it into a new market? Is it identical or is there small nuances now that you do have a developed sales team? Yeah, sure. So maybe linking back to one of your other questions about the change from Bloomberg and going into assassin climate and kind of a rude awakening. So it's ties in nicely when I first started, it was very clear that I needed to come in and create opportunities so that we could then go and close them. I kind of, from working in such a structured environment, I kind of expected, wrongly, to come in, to come in place, send my emails, do my activity and out would pop a few opposite. Yeah. I hear you, man, I'm just laughing because sorry, I just took a context. I used to work for, for Bell Canada, which was an enormous organization, a kin to, it's not, it's not international, but it's publicly traded like a kin to the size of Bloomberg. And now I'm, I'm working in startup environments. So like everything you're saying is I'm living it, I'm living it. I know, I know, but I'm sorry, didn't interrupt apologies. No, no, it's, it's, it's good. So yeah, so, so we just basically started doing that and, you know, kind of, you know, getting some results, but, you know, definitely not what, what we're hoping for at the beginning. And I just remember, you know, sitting down with, with my boss, his, Nicholas Marce, I was, I was revving that director, and he kind of just took me to one side and was like, you know, we're not getting results by doing what you're doing. So you need to effectively figure it out and change what you're doing. It's like, ah, okay, so that's what I think. Yeah, useful advice, eh? Well, this isn't working. So what, what about something else? And what is that? I don't know, but something else. And so I kind of, you know, just jumped into that, you know, head first and started, you know, working hard to figure that out. And there was two, two, two kind of key dynamics there. So you asked about opening up in different markets. If it's a copy pace and these sorts of things. So when we opened up in France, you know, we were in the French ecosystem communities. So if you think of it like your first circle, and then what's your second circle and third circle, the, the, the, the first circle with those friends and family, people you know, and other founders and startups and Rod Rcio was out on his moped around Paris, going to people they know, and that was kind of the first 50 customers effectively. But you have, you know, your first 50 is going to get you through your first beta, and it's going to get you first paying customers and so on. And then you can kind of expand out from there. Now, when I came into the UK, we didn't have that at all. We weren't in the front, so in the UK ecosystem, we didn't have any brand. We didn't really have any customers either. And I think for the first kind of three to six months, it was much more of a spray and prey type of, not necessarily intentionally. But we kind of just realized that actually we need to replicate what we've done in the French ecosystem, more naturally there, but kind of artificially create that in other markets. So that first started with getting hyper focused on what our ideal customer profile was. So we knew exactly the size of the company that we were working well with, the types of brands, the pain points, we were pretty quick in understanding that side. So we just made sure that quality in, quality out, if you're contacting a wide range of segments, then you're not necessarily going to get lots of traction. So we kind of got laser focus, and I think that with regard to it, that's different for other markets. I wouldn't necessarily recommend that as an approach, if you didn't know that you had product market fit. I think we were pretty confident that we had product market fit right from the get-go in the UK market. In other markets, if we didn't have that product market fit, you do want to test lots of segments out to see which one stick, and then figure out, okay, this is then where we need to get laser focus. But I think that is, I was going to say that is like when you do, when you are required to have a little bit more of a wide approach to identifying your product market fit in that environment, you have to be aware that that's going to take a little bit more time to commercialize. So then map that into your projections, and map that into your business strategy because if you're trying to take on a market and you can't even afford to pay and keep a light sign at home, it's going to be detrimental. So I think that being aware that it's going to take a little bit longer to commercialize in a certain market is important to your overall strategy. If you don't have that target customer profile, ideal customer profile, so defined. Exactly. And to that point, I think this is some of the issues that sales leaders have, not even necessarily the sales leaders, but working maybe with other CEOs or senior management that aren't in the direct customer facing roles, is when you do go to the market, if you don't have a product market fit, your objective is not to create a scalable sales process. Your objective is to get product market fit. And effectively, that sales leader is a medium for communicating with the market and saying, okay, you want to make sure you have a sales leader that can if a deal is going to be one, they will win it. And if the deal cannot be one, obviously they're going to lose it. But you need to know that if you're not winning or you're not getting traction, it's because of a product market fit issue, rather than an execution issue. But at the same time, you need to have that relationship with the senior management to know that this is not a case of how do we build a scalable process? How do we make sure we've got those foundations to then build a scalable process on? And then that's when different kind of objectives. But I think that's where you have to have a very clear from top down to the rest of the teams. What are the objectives in this certain period and taking it from there? I like the way you phrase that because I do believe that a CEO that hires a sales leader too early on is looking for that scalable, repeatable, predictable revenue. And they don't understand that that perhaps they've hired the sales leader too early if they haven't figured out that product market fit yet. I always say that you should probably hire a marketing leader before a sales leader to generate demand and that demand should flow over to the CEO who should then identify the proper sales opportunity, identify the buyer persona. And then once you have too much demand for the CEO and the close rate is exponentially high, then you can hire a sales leader to build a scalable sales process. But I think that a lot of, you know, I listen to a lot of sales podcasts myself and like the lifespan of a SaaS sales leader is something like max at 18 months. But I don't think it's always, you know, sometimes it is the sales leader's fault. But I don't think it always is. I think a lot of it has to do with I'm hiring a VP sales. It's just going to drive my business to the next level. And they don't, the CEO doesn't, isn't aware that a lot of what should be done that he's asking the sales leader to do probably should be done by the CEO first. Yeah. So, yeah. Absolutely. And, you know, second to that point of the, of the tenure of a sales leader, this is something I speak about fairly often in my posting on LinkedIn. It's the kind of difference between growth and the fixed mindset, not just of an individual, but also of a company. And I think that there are a lot of founders that will hire a sales leader with the, okay, you've done X to X and another company. It's a copy paste because we hire you and you're going to do the same thing there. It doesn't really just doesn't really work. And it's the case, I think a lot of companies don't create an environment where they hire someone with the capability to learn how to do that in the future and give them the tools to then succeed. And it tends to be the other way around where it's okay. I expect that you can do this. And the moment I'm seeing signs that you're not getting traction, then we're going to fire you. And that's, I think that is more the fixed mindset rather than a growth mindset at a company level.