How We Grew from 10 to 60 Reps Without Destroying Our Culture

When we started Apex CRM in our tiny Denver office four years ago, our sales strategy document fit on a single napkin. We had ten hungry account executives closing deals across the Midwest, and life felt simple.
Our go-to-market strategy was straightforward: land and expand within mid-market retail brands. But as venture capital started rolling in, our board demanded aggressive growth.
We decided to build a massive headcount model that would take us from ten reps to sixty reps in less than eighteen months. We thought hiring velocity was the only metric that mattered.
To achieve this, we needed a robust hiring plan that could bring in four new enterprise sellers every single week. We opened our talent bench to anyone with a pulse.
Unfortunately, we completely overlooked our ramp curve. New reps were drowning in product details, and our time to productivity stretched from sixty days to nearly six months.
Assuming that throwing more leads at the problem would fix things, we kept hiring frantically. But our sales capacity didn't grow at all because reps kept quitting out of frustration.
The attrition rate climbed past forty percent, and our backfill queue was longer than our active pipeline. We were bleeding money on every single acquisition cost.
Then our Chief Revenue Officer raised a sensitive issue during our weekly recurring one-to-one meeting. She looked at our numbers and said we were about to go bankrupt.
She pointed out that we didn't have a single enablement programme or an onboarding bootcamp. New reps were left entirely on their own.
That was when we made the single most important decision in company history. We froze all sales hiring immediately.
Instead of hiring another fifty salespeople, we used that budget to hire a world-class sales trainer and build a proper training curriculum.
Supposing we had kept hiring reps without that trainer, our business would've collapsed within three months. Otherwise, we would've burned through our entire Series B funding.
Today, we have sixty productive reps, but our span of control is properly managed through team leads who actually coach their people. Our most crucial hire wasn't a top-performing closer—it was someone who knew how to teach others how to sell.

Read again and choose the right answer

What was the main problem with Apex CRM's initial rapid hiring phase?

• They ran out of office space in Denver
• They ignored the ramp curve and lacked proper onboarding
• They focused only on enterprise clients in Europe

What happened to their attrition rate during the uncontrolled hiring spree?

• It dropped below five percent
• It climbed past forty percent
• It stayed exactly the same

What was the turning point for the company?

• They raised a massive Series C round
• They froze sales hiring and hired a professional sales trainer
• They fired their entire executive team

According to the article, who was their most important hire in the end?

• A top-performing closer from Silicon Valley
• A world-class sales trainer who built a training curriculum
• A new Chief Executive Officer from New York

Sources: photo by World Sikh Organization of Canada on Pexels