SaaStr 877 CRO Confidential: 0 to $600M in Under 4 Years. The ElevenLabs GTM Playbook with Carles Reina

Carles Reina (0:00)

The number one thing was like, am I gonna get replaced? Are we gonna get to a position where Leechron, an AI agent, would be able to do sales, and I would essentially be replaced by the company? And of course, we never got into that space, but we were able to prove to the members that actually by having an AISDR that answers emails from customers and calls them straight away, or the customer can actually interact with them directly, then you end up having better conversion rates. You don't have to be that worried about replying an email, like an inbound that comes in within the first 30 minutes because an agent can take it from you, right?

Or we started to prove that by having an AI customer success manager to focus on the app sales for the long-tail account, like the SMBs and the mid-markets, we could automatically unlock revenues and we will pay commissions to the account owner of those companies, right? And I think that helps us navigate a lot of the initial concerns of the team and then start pushing.

Sam Blond (0:55)

SaaStr fans, welcome back. We are kicking off another series of CRO confidential episodes and we are coming out with a bang. We have Carles Reina, formerly of ElevenLabs, now of Baobab Ventures. Carles led GTM at ElevenLabs for over four years. He was the fourth employee, first go-to-market hire, scaled the business to several hundred million of annualized revenue and an $11 billion valuation. Carles is making the natural transition almost as we speak to helping start up scale with Baobab Ventures. There's so much to unpack here. Can't thank you enough for being here, Carles. Welcome to the show.

Carles Reina (1:38)

Thank you so much for having me, Tom.

Sam Blond (1:40)

So the ElevenLabs run is pretty close to end of one. Let's jump right in and let's start there. When I say end of one, there's a couple of dynamics here. Joining as employee for GoToMarketHire1, the company is almost definitionally relatively unknown. You step in the seat, you build GoToMarket from scratch, you scaled hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue.

I can't think of many or any that have done that in the past. I think like, let's maybe start, what are the things that you and you all at ElevenLabs, just absolutely nailed in GoToMarket, that you attribute much of the overall success of that organization and that company too.

Carles Reina (2:23)

Yeah. So for us, a lot of it was building distribution from day one. In the early days, it was all about, let's nail one channel and we do really well on direct sales, and then you start going after resellers, and then you start doing the Cloud ecosystem and all of that stuff. For us, how do we actually get our technology as quickly as possible in the market, even in those markets where we don't even have people?

When you look at it, it's all about distribution, fundamentally. In some core markets, you need to actually sell directly and you want to do mostly that way. In some other markets, you might do essentially resellers because you don't have team on the ground, and because when you look at the tax and withholding taxes and the billing issues and all of the stuff, actually it's much better to actually go resellers versus get direct sales. There was a lot of combinations of those things that we started looking at, and we defined what was the actual mix for each one of the markets that we wanted alongside the thesis. Each one of the markets that I started to build and launch had a specific thesis. Why were we launching that market? How will we expect to start doing go to market? Essentially, what were the results that we were expecting in the first three to six months? I think that was the number one thing that we did that worked really well because it was all about experimentation. We didn't really know what actually would work in one market versus a different market. When you combine distribution together with experimentation, that was the winning side. When you look at the stats, for instance, we went from to 100 million dollars in AR in 20 months. Then we went from 100 to 200 million dollars in another 10 months.

Then we went from 200 to 330 million in another five months.

Then we went from 330 to over 600 million in another six months. So it just gives you an idea, when you actually do it at scale, and you start repeating and testing a lot of ideas and experiment with it, it has a massive impact on this rocket increase in revenue. And I think that was the number one thing that we did really well.