Behind RepVue’s New Approach To Hiring, Finding Sales Roles

Chapel Hill resident Ryan Walsh knows the pain points sales professionals and sales organizations face.   

“For modern B2B organizations, especially growth organizations, the quest and the search for sales talent is one of — if not the highest  — priority,” Walsh tells Hypepotamus. 

But for employees, gaining insight into the realities of a new sales role is difficult to find online or during interviews. 

As sales employees and employers alike navigate the post-pandemic hiring rush, Walsh’s startup RepVue is looking to add a new level of transparency to the process.

RepVue’s platform crowdsources ratings for sales organizations and uses a unique algorithm to better understand what a potential role might look like. 

“Ultimately, a sales professional will have extreme transparency into what it’s really like to sell for that sales organization,” Walsh says. “They can have a holistic view and can make the best decision for their career.”

That transparency comes from current sales employees providing information on key categories. Included in the company analysis are sentiment scores, compensation data, quota goals, work culture, product scores, inbound lead flow, and diversity and inclusion. 

Those submitting a review are then asked to stack rank categories, helping RepVue more accurately understand and aggregate what data is most important to employees. 

Walsh said that it can help better understand what finance sales professionals in New York might care about in a role versus what a technology sales professional in Atlanta might be looking for. 

The platform then quantifies the insights and creates profiles for each company. (Take a peek here at how Atlanta sales companies rank).  

Walsh also sees the platform playing a role in fixing the one-sided interview process, where candidates are often left in the dark around what a new sales role will really entail. 

“On the company side of the marketplace,” Walsh adds, “companies can engage with the sales professionals or find compensation benchmarking data.” That could be particularly important in 2021, as top software sales companies compete for talent. 

RepVue currently has around 4,500 sales organizations reviewed on the platform, including insight into careers at Sprout Social, Slack, Twilio, SalesLoft, and Mulesoft.  

The Growth Path

RepVue grew from a side project into a full-time endeavor for Walsh about a year ago when the platform launched out of beta. He previously held the roles of Chief Revenue Officer and Vice President of Sales at ChannelAdvisor, a North Carolina-based eCommerce SaaS platform. 

Now, RepVue completed a $1 million seed round to expedite growth. 

The round was led by Atlanta’s B2B-focused VC Knoll Ventures, with participation from Charleston-based Alerion Ventures.  

Walsh calls the $1 million funding round “opportunistic,” since the North Carolina startup did not need the capital immediately but recognized that it would be important to scale such a marketplace business. 

“People were interested in [RepVue] based on our progress, our growth, and the mission. And found a great partner with Knoll,” adds Walsh. “We’re very mission-driven to deliver transparency for salespeople. And there’s a huge addressable market with regard to not only sales, talent acquisition, but also leveraging our data set for talent benchmarking and sales.”

“We know from our existing portfolio companies that attracting and retaining top sales talent is at the top of the list of challenges and priorities facing modern b2b organizations,” Richard Fraim, partner at Knoll Ventures, added in a statement. “Businesses that leverage RepVue for the recruiting and retention of sales professionals will have a distinct advantage over those not embracing data and transparency to drive success in talent. We’re very excited to support this mission and partner with the team at RepVue.”

 

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Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash