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One of the most common investment theses among acquisition entrepreneurs revolves around building an internal sales function where no such function has existed in the past. While this makes intuitive sense on the surface, just how easy is it to build a sales team from scratch? Do you hire the leader first, or do you hire an individual contributor first? Does it matter if your sales reps have experience in your particular industry? How do you evaluate the success of new hires if you have a long sales cycle? How do you change an incentive compensation plan in the middle of a fiscal year? Should lead generation be outsourced or brought in-house? How involved should a SMB CEO be in sales?
These are just some of the many questions that we explore with my guest this week, Dave Prusinksi. Dave is the Chief Revenue Officer at SafeAI, a hyper-growth silicon valley company in the autonomous vehicle space.
Prior to his current role, Dave spent 10 years as the Executive Vice President of Sales and Marketing at FleetComplete, a technology provider to fleet-owning businesses around the world. Under Dave's leadership, FleetComplete grew from $6M ARR to $150M in total revenue, achieving an average 50% revenue CAGR for 9 of his 10 years.
Dave played an integral role in the acquisition of 6 companies, leading the sales and marketing due diligence processes, and ultimately integrating the operations of the acquired businesses into that of FleetComplete. Dave was also a central member of the deal team helping to lead FleetComplete through multiple investment and acquisition rounds themselves, managing the sales & marketing due diligence processes in each instance.
Dave has served as a Revenue Coach to several SMBs, working directly with their CEOs and Heads of Sales to optimize their sales and revenue generation processes. All of the companies with whom Dave has worked thus far have now exited with great success.