How to Build a Sales Machine | Max Freeman, Ramp
Max Freeman, SVP of Sales at Ramp, joins Harry Stebbings to dissect the operational blueprint behind scaling one of tech's fastest-growing sales machines. Freeman explains why hiring investment bankers and sellers from low-NPS companies creates outsized alpha, why sales is fundamentally an engineering problem, and how Ramp designs compensation, rigorous onboarding certifications, and automated tooling to achieve 7:1 to 12:1 quota productivity ratios.
- Enterprise deals rarely die to rival software. Freeman points out that when Ramp loses, "the majority of the time we're losing to the status quo, which is on us. That's not a product gap. That's a we need to look ourselves in the mirror. We did not create enough urgency." Read →
- Max Freeman looks for sales reps at companies with north of nine figures in revenue that suffer from low Net Promoter Scores. Read →
- Ramp rejects legacy SaaS quota ratios of 4:1 or 5:1 from Snowflake and MongoDB, running reps at productivity ratios between 7:1 and 12:1. Read →
- Ramp embeds at least six dedicated growth engineers directly inside its go-to-market organization to build internal software for sales reps. Read →
- Pay 100% on-target earnings (OTE) without sales quotas for the first two quarters. Max Freeman advises that setting arbitrary revenue numbers early penalizes new hires for what founders have not figured out yet. Read →