Making B2B Sales Compensation and Culture Transparent - with Ryan Walsh, Founder and CEO RepVue

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Reich, Founder and CEO of RevOp Squared, and your host of the Metrics that Measure Up podcast. We talked to a wide variety of B2B SaaS and Cloud thought leaders, executives, investors, and people just like you to discuss the metrics and benchmarks they use to make metrics-informed decisions. Now on to today's show.
Welcome to today's episode of the Metrics That Measure Up podcast. Today, we are joined by Ryan Walsh, founder and CEO of RepVue. Today, we'll be covering four main topics with Ryan. first, the secret to a 16 year sales career at one company. Second, the catalyst and the vision behind RepVue. third, a little more into the making B2B sales culture and compensation a transparent reality. And fourth, our current sales compensation programs really reflective of today's modern B2B sales profession, professional in their responsibilities. Ryan, please take a moment to give a brief background overview of your journey to becoming a guest on the Metrics That Measure Up podcast.

**Ryan Walsh** (1:20)
Great. Oh, thanks Ray. I appreciate you having me on and yep, founded RepVue here in the last couple of years. I'll start at the beginning of my journey. I was a startup person very early in my career in the late 90s.com bubble and was fortunate to not be crushed or exploded by that bubble. I was with a startup that got acquired just before it burst and then essentially that wound itself into what became Channel Advisor and I was there for 16 years. We'll talk about that journey a little bit here in a couple of minutes. But my entire career there was really spent in sales roles from individual contributor to CRO and we were eventually a public SaaS company as well. I did some consulting after that in the last five or so years and have since founded RepVue, which is the world's largest ratings platform where sales professionals can rate their sales organization with the goal and the idea to deliver extreme transparency into what it's like to work and sell for any of the world's most well-known sales organizations.
We're a very mission-driven company to really empower sales professionals with data to help them make the best decisions for their careers. I know we'll dive into a few of those points, but that's just a little bit of background on me and I'm looking forward to chatting about it.

**Ray Rike** (2:28)
Ryan, thank you for the background. Thank you for what you're doing with RepVue. But before we dig in to RepVue even more, when I first was introduced to you and I saw your profile, I'm like, whoa, 16 years at a single company in an industry, in a role where we talk about 16-20 month life cycles as being the norm. Can you give us a little bit of the background on what's your secret to that level of success and tenure at a single company?

**Ryan Walsh** (2:57)
Well, I don't know if there's a secret to it. I mean, first of all, anytime you're talking about a tenure like 16 years, by default, that means it started a long time ago, and it ended in 2017 It started back in 2001
first of all, it's a different time back then. There was no such thing as LinkedIn and many of these other networks. There was not as much of an online forum for sales professionals and really any professional to change jobs as easy as they can today, and access to data, for better or for worse, back then, access to people. I had a job. I was a couple of years out of school. I ended up taking an enterprise sales role, really, and I stayed in that job for five years. When I look back at that time, I think about a couple of different things. Number one, I think about how much I learned about sales and selling over that time period and over that tenure. In those five years, in that one role, literally, I had the same business card. I didn't even need to get a new business card. Today, that would be madness. You got to get a promotion, you got to go run a team. At the very least, just switch companies to mix it up. Whether that's right or wrong, it just wasn't as prevalent back then. So I was really happy and then I just was working really hard. I learned the product in the industry so inside and out that I was able to take the next steps in my career with that organization. But I think it really comes down to another factor of being loyalty. And those founders gave me a chance time and time again to step up. And I was really excited to do that. I had to learn a lot of it on my own. It was early SaaS days. There wasn't a million resources on how to run a SaaS sales team as there are today. You can just open your browser and you stumble off across 20 or 30 resources that have best practices for leading a SaaS sales organization from lead flow to closing to renewals and everything like that. But that career for me was defining. I took over the sales organization at 35 million in revenue in end of 2010, grew it to 115 million. We had an IPO in there halfway through that tenure. I'm very fond of the time that I had a channel advisor. A lot of it though, I will look at those five years as an individual contributor, carrying a bag, learning the craft, and being appreciative of what sales is and what it takes to be successful. I know it's different than it is today. I did a poll on LinkedIn recently.