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When Puay Lim Yeo joined Glints’ team at Series B, they were selling to a broad range of customers and doing whatever they could to close them. But he knew that his job of scaling sales at Glints to the next stage of growth would take much, much more than that.
In our third and final edition of the Asia Growth Podcast Startup Special series, we’re sharing how to scale up your company’s sales motion from Series B to Series D and beyond.
Hear unfiltered insights from Puay Lim Yeo, Commercial Director at Glints, who joined Glints in 2021 and scaled their sales motion from Series B to D in just two years.
Before Glints, he was a Senior Business Leader at the insurtech BIMA from 2012 to 2020 where he played a leading role in BIMA’s journey from Series A to Series D. Puay Lim was responsible for its P&L growth in Asia from scratch to tens of millions in annual revenue.
He’s joined by HubSpot’s Senior Director of Partnership Marketing, James Gilbert, who interviewed him live on the Asia Growth Forecast podcast. Before HubSpot, James led commercial and growth teams at startups, midsize, and large companies across Asia Pacific.
You need to switch up strategies at different stages of startup growth, but also when the market shifts.
It’s easy to feel like you’re on top of the world when the markets are good. Clients are game, and your lead generation strategy seems to be working well. Puay Lim Yeo himself focused on top-of-funnel outbound lead generation with Business Development Representatives (BDRs) when markets were good.
This was back in 2020 and 2021. Remember those good ‘ol days?
Why? It didn’t make sense to invest a lot in outbound sales when markets weren’t the best. Keeping their existing clients happy wasn’t just a customer success decision—it was also a strategic sales move to deepen wallet shares.
In the early days of sales, you’re extra focused on new customer acquisition. While this remains important when you’re hitting the growth stage, doubling down on the same strategies won’t get you very far.
Don’t ditch your tried-and-tested customer acquisition strategies, but you’ll need to innovate and expand.
PLY: Because the original playbook still works, right? That's what got you to today. But, what got you to today is not sufficient to get you to tomorrow.
When you’re at the Series C to D stage, sales leaders are expected to play a strategic role in decision-making and execution to drive growth and expansion opportunities. It’s only later on, when an enterprise grows much larger and when growth and expansion opportunities slow down within a defined business model that a sales leader’s responsibilities would equally evolve towards efficiency and optimization.
We all know about geographic expansion. But two other things you can leverage as a sales leader? Channel expansion and segment expansion.
Channel expansion
Don’t be afraid of growing your complexity of channels. You can start developing both your direct and indirect channels.
Both Glints and HubSpot leverage direct and indirect channels. There’s a place for both, and you can double down on either the direct or indirect channels, depending on what’s more important for the business at that point.
JG: So we have a similar thing at HubSpot where we have a direct channel and then we have a partner channel where agencies resell HubSpot to their customers and we have internal sales teams on both. The direct guys are more hunters that find new business and the people that work with the partner channel are more like farmers that are selling into the IB (install base).
PLY: Direct versus indirect is something that we're thinking quite actively about right now…amping up our indirect. So we're quite keen on partnerships not only at the top of the funnel marketing layer for awareness and lead generation, but we're also quite keen on partnerships when it comes to sales partners.
Segment expansion and verticalization
At Series B, Glints was boiling the ocean, trying to get as many clients as they could. But now, they’re at the stage where they’re trying to deepen their relationships with customers.
Are you boiling the ocean too? Spoiler alert: If you’re an early-stage business, you probably are! But most companies do need to be scrappy when you’re just starting with sales.
Eventually, you’ll learn more about your business and your PMF. Through this, you get to sharpen your targeting when it comes to clients.
What’s great about deepening these relationships? Ideas for verticalization come up organically in conversations when customers share their pain points.
Time to double down. The growth stage (yes, scaling!) is where you want to start playing to win in specific verticals that you can serve. For Glints, it was developer talent for companies building specific tech stacks.
PLY: We are not a large enterprise at this moment. So we are not playing to win across all the fields. But where I think we have a possibility is we can play to win in particular verticals. And we are going to double down and chase that.
Understanding your sales funnel is a given. But it’s even more important to deeply understand how a customer uses the product and at what stage they derive value from the product.
At Glints, the sales funnel is long and has multiple steps. More importantly, the first point of value capture (where money is exchanged) at Glints isn’t after signing the contract—it’s after a company achieves a successful hire and pays a placement fee.
Sales at Glints don't stop after the first hire. It’s also about the follow-through and making sure that customers are happy with their hires.
Why? Because the customers can also end up hiring more people or purchasing one of Glints’ other services later on, so there are many upsell and cross-sell opportunities.
PLY: Post placement, after the client makes a successful hire, if this is the cross-border solution, we then have a follow-through service where we're essentially acting as your outsourced HR.
Over here, we're helping you onboard your hire, and we're helping you to take care of all the statutory and regulatory requirements behind that. And that carries a recurring fee. We are then actually measuring the success of the account on the basis of net revenue retention.
Glints’ land and expand strategy is seeded in the long consultative relationship they’ve built with clients, which directly drives further business growth.
In the first two articles of this series, we talked about hiring independent workers who have a strong sense of responsibility and growth drive. But the right hires in the early days aren’t all the same hires you’ll need when you’re a growth-stage startup. You’ll need a mix.
Culture-fit is still the most important factor, regardless of stage. They should fit the “who” before “what” and share the same core values that the founders and their DNA embody.
After culture-fit?
The next thing they look for is the “what”— whether they have the right skill and experience for the stage of the startup and the specific part of the business you will be assigned to.
At Series B or Series C stage, not all parts of your business are scaling equally.
PLY: We're not homogenous, we're expanding and we're also crossing the chasm in some parts of our business. So there are parts of our business where we are actually looking more like an A- stage or B-stage business.
Ready to scale 10x. For the areas of your business with deep PMF, you are looking to scale 10x. For this, you are looking to hire those who have the skill and experience to build systems and processes to scale the existing go-to-market (GTM) playbook by 10x, as well as the ability to continuously learn along the way.
PLY: In our core markets we pretty much have a product market fit that we're fairly confident of. We got a GTM, a go-to-market playbook that's fairly stable. So it's more about being able to build systems and processes to repeat it and to do it at 10 times the scale that you were doing it before.
You want to emphasize in the AEs, the sales reps, people who play well in a structured environment to that effect.
Ready for 1 to 10. In some areas of the business, you may not yet have PMF or you may need market adaptation. As you’re growing and entering new markets, your new hires need to go beyond your standard playbook and make a few tweaks to suit market needs. Expanding in a new market isn’t just a copy-paste of what works in other markets.
Here, you can also let the old guys do new things! It’s smart to move some of the team members who joined you in the early days into roles where they can work on new products, special projects, and new business lines, which require skills similar to working at an early-stage startup.
Understand what works best for your business model and metrics, and know what you can afford.
Milestone check. Compensating someone on an On-Target Earnings (OTE) basis is fine, but if you’re not entirely certain of what specific targets your salespeople should be making, then you can set milestones instead.
Why set milestones instead of targets?
PLY: You’re probably really bad at target setting. If you set that on an OTE basis, what's going to happen is either you grossly underpay someone. Or if you were really bad at target setting, the other way, you would grossly overpay someone. So it doesn't work either way.
Early-stage businesses tend to have a more challenging time setting OTE because they need to still fully establish PMF and know how to scale their sales engine.
But compensation will also look different for different types of business.
PLY: You actually have the ability to then afford a compensation structure where your fixed versus variable can be probably in a 50:50 ratio. OTE basically doubles up your fix. That's possible for most SaaS businesses. You also expect SaaS businesses to carry a quota that’s between maybe 5-10x of your fix.
Glints is a bit of a hybrid, right? We've got one side that looks much more like a product, one side that looks much more like a service.
So for us at Glints, I would say the ratio tends to be more around maybe 30 or 40 percent on top of the fix. And that's the business model. you need to understand that because it structurally sets the boundaries of what you can afford to pay.
But our variable at Glints is uncapped. So what we do is we actually have accelerators. We make it attractive to overhit targets. So for example, if you hit 100% of your target, you will be awarded 100% of your commissions. If you hit 120% of your target, we will award 150% of your commissions.
And this all matters for hiring too. If you’re a service business, you shouldn’t hire the best person who worked in sales for a SaaS company without being upfront about what you can afford.
Successfully scaling up your sales motion at growth stage is one of the most critical tasks for founders and sales leaders, especially in fragmented markets like Southeast Asia.
Each startup will have its own unique challenges and opportunities, but we hope this article delved into some lessons that growth-stage founders and sales leaders can learn from.
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