Intercom's Sanj Bhayro on creating the right foundation to help businesses scale

Growth is arguably the most defining and sought after characteristic of tech companies. These line charts showing rapidly increasing user acquisition or exploding ARR have been synonymous with the industry for the past decade.

However, growth is rarely linear, as the current economic climate shows all too clearly. It fluctuates, plateaus, rises and falls with each new round of funding, new competitor, new technological leap – or even a global pandemic or economic downturn. But the unpredictability of variables doesn't mean you can't plan for growth. And for Intercom Vice President of EMEA Sales, Sanj Bhayro, scaling is exactly what you need to invest in to ensure growth becomes as consistent and linear as possible.

Sanj started working at Salesforce in 2005, when the company had about 1,000 employees and a few hundred million in revenue. He has been part of its growth for 14 years, holding several management positions in several markets in the EMEA region. By the time he left Google Cloud as vice president of operations and customer growth for EMEA, Salesforce had approximately $17 billion in revenue and nearly 50,000 employees.

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Sanj has a lot of experience in scaling sales teams in growing companies, and that is precisely why, since November last year, he has been overseeing EMEA sales at Intercom. With him, he brings the lessons he's learned over the past 20 years in the industry, and as he told us, few things are more important than putting in place a solid foundation for growth and to develop a sales model that can take you where you want to go.

In today's episode, we caught up with Sanj to talk about scaling sales teams, what makes a good salesperson, and strategies for delivering the best results to your customers.

Here are some of our favorite takeaways from the conversation:

A business organization needs a good foundation to grow. Attract and develop talent and invest in support resources such as onboarding, sales enablement and sales engineering. Communicate your vision for growth clearly and often, and make sure you create a culture where people feel like they're set up to succeed. By inviting product teams into sales processes and vice-versa, you enrich them with information that contributes to a better experience and a stronger roadmap. In times of economic uncertainty, you need a flexible sales process that can adapt to customer needs and deliver more tangible results, less friction, and a clear return on investment. Good salespeople aren't just passionate about the solutions they sell - they care deeply about providing a good experience and finding the right outcome for their customers.

If you like our discussion, check out other episodes of our podcast. You can follow on iTunes, Spotify, YouTube or grab the RSS feed in the reader of your choice. The following is a slightly edited transcript of the episode.

A new chapter

Liam Geraghty: Sanj, welcome. It's great to have you on the show.

Sanj Bhayro: It's great to be here. Thank you very much, Liam. I am a long time listener.

Liam: That's great to hear. I mentioned some of your previous roles in the intro, but I'd love to hear from you about your professional journey so far.

Sanj: Well, that's quite long. Ever since I left college, I knew I wanted to work in technology, in a sales or marketing role. I started when the internet was still relatively new. The boom back then was around ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) and client-server applications for large enterprises, and that's where I started my career. In 2005, I was lucky enough to join a company called Salesforce, which had just gone public. They were pushing this new way of using technology - with shopping apps being as easy to use as Amazon. It was the beginning of the wave of the cloud.

"I was looking at different options and more established businesses, thinking of going from one billion to five billion as an interesting area to work in"

I was lucky enough to join quite early and become a sales rep, and grew from there. I spent 14 years at Salesforce in various leadership and management positions and eventually became COO for EMEA before deciding that 14 years was probably too long and that I needed to do something different. , so I joined Goo...