Scaling Sales Leadership to IPO and Beyond - with Ryan Meadows, SVP Sales Klaviyo

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Wright, Founder and CEO of Benchmarkit and your host of the Metrics That Measure Up podcast. We talked to a wide variety of the top B2B SaaS and cloud thought leaders, CEOs, executives, investors and people just like you to discuss the metrics and benchmarks they use to make metrics informed and benchmark validated 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 Meadows, the Senior Vice President of Sales at Klaviyo. Today we'll be covering four topics with Ryan. First, the evolution of sales leadership from early stage company to IPO and beyond. Second, selling measurable value to customers.
Third, the metrics that matter to an executive sales leader. And fourth, the keys to effective sales leadership in 2024 and beyond. Ryan, let me first say congratulations on an incredible 2023 Not only did you have the IPO, but 48% year-over-year growth rate, a net revenue retention rate of 117%, and of course, which I was really amazed at, 80% increase in enterprise customers. Customers are billing more than $50,000. So can you take a moment to give a brief overview of your background, to being our guest here on the Metrics that Measure Up podcast?

**Ryan Meadows** (1:35)
Thanks, Ray. Yeah, great to be with you, and thanks for the invitation to join and for the nice words.
So I've spent about the last 14 years, specifically in MarTech, and the last five here at Klaviyo, which has been such an incredible journey and some of that you just mentioned, going from an unknown company here in Boston, Massachusetts, to hitting the grand stage of our initial public offering and now seeing growth continue well beyond IPO. And so as you and I got to know each other, we spoke a lot about, well, gosh, it must take a lot of different ways that you look at the business to move through that kind of scale. And so I'm excited to pull that apart a little bit with you here today.

**Ray Rike** (2:23)
Well, you had a, I'll say a simultaneous growth journey. You started as the Director of Sales in June of 2019 Now you're the Senior Vice President of Sales.
And of course, the company scaled from less than 50 million to an IPO. So tell me this, Ryan, how has your role as a sales leader changed over the last five years? And I know that's a open ended question, but just what are the top things that have changed for you?

**Ryan Meadows** (2:53)
Yeah, it's been a great journey here. And so I think, first of all, titles don't really matter too much to me. I think when I came into Klaviyo, it was really about the impact that the business was going to have, the market opportunity in front of us, and the impact I could have on that business. So I felt awfully prepared having seen quite a bit of growth recently before that at Hubspot, where I spent eight years. And so I felt awfully prepared to help Klaviyo through that stage of growth. And so as things have evolved, I think early days, you look at Klaviyo when I was really focused on the America's business and you're really, we were really just focused on taking this nascent market where we knew we had amazing product market fit. And how do we scale the hell out of that and as fast as possible?
And so a lot of where I was focused was really about how do you build in the rigor of hiring great salespeople, creating great plans for them that are repeatable and scalable, great enablement and teaching them to do that thing. And so we arguably did that thing better than anyone else in the world, which was sell email marketing platform to SMBs.
And naturally, as you find some success there, you want to build a long-term, durable business, really generational business, and a pillar business here in Boston.
It's about doing many things well. And so I think what's changed the most, Ray, has been, well, you can't just build an amazing business selling one product in one market. How do you scale that internationally? How do you scale that to new markets, in our case, as we put some efforts towards moving up market? And then how do you actually build a platform? And so we're on that journey from a single application to a portfolio of application to actually a platform. And so under that direction, it's changed, you know, how we think about sales and how we think about sales leadership quite a bit.

**Ray Rike** (4:49)
Well, you know, I did highlight the 80% growth in enterprise customers, right, from a thousand almost almost 2000 Did you have to fundamentally change kind of your go to market strategy and sales process and even sales measurements for that enterprise class customers versus your traditional SMB?