Principles for the B2B Sales Engine

Overall B2B Sales Structure

We believe that the success of the B2B organization has been driven by both building the best sales team and the best sales operations. You need both of these working together to truly scale effectively and efficiently.

As a starting point, you need the best people. You need self-driven problem solvers and you need to properly incentivize them, particularly the top 10% that you need to keep at all costs. This gets much harder as you scale. Revolut cracked this by crafting a systematic hiring and performance management process.

As the team grows to 2000+ people across 40+ countries and selling 20+ products, maintaining consistency with strict centrally enforced processes and KPI tracking is critical. This means that an AE reporting to their manager in Spain is following the same processes and KPIs as an AE reporting to their manager in Australia. This needs to be enforced centrally.

It also means that successful B2B sales needs engineers and data scientists. We use AI automation tools centrally that drive decisions and ultimately growth with data rather than human judgment. The tools are a core competency critical to the success of the organization.

In this playbook we cover how to build the best team and run the best operations.

Principles for B2B Sales That Scale

Revolut’s B2B sales engine was built on four principles we obsessed over more than anyone else. All four come from the same place: be scientific, systematic and data driven.

1. A talent bar that never drops as you scale: Keeping the talent bar high as we scaled was always a top priority, and it took real focus to get right. We pioneered our own interview process to make sure every hire met the same standard, and set unique and aggressive incentives to retain top talent.
2. Engineered sales incentives: At Revolut we approached sales incentives as a science and innovated very objective, transparent and formulaic incentives. This both motivated top-performing sales reps and made it clear which sales reps were underperforming.
3. Central systematic revenue operations: Letting your best AEs run solo feels fast, but it doesn’t scale. We made revenue operations a priority from day one and centralized data, processes, enablement and KPIs. That meant every new product and market could plug straight into the same machine, then build its own tailored tooling and processes on top.
4. AI-driven lead generation: We built ML models trained on real customer interactions to generate better leads than people do, eliminating SDRs. We then used the same engine for cross-sell and upsell, and other segment-specific automation.

Operation Model Evolution

As our market presence and product maturity grew, the operational mechanics evolved significantly across a few vectors. We recommend thinking through these vectors for your product(s) and market.

• Manual Outbound → Autonomous Sourcing:
  • We don’t believe you need SDRs for a great B2B sales organization
  • You can start eliminating traditional SDRs by training full-cycle AEs to prospect using machine-learning lead lists
  • Over time, shift prospecting tasks from AEs to autonomous data agents to deliver ready-to-engage accounts directly to sales reps. You could even go straight to this step.
• Monolithic Sales Motion → Bimodal Architecture:
  • Your sales motion evolution will depend on your product and target segment. If you are multi-segment, then begin with a single, high-velocity outbound model focused on acquiring SMBs at scale
  • Over time you can split GTM into two engines: a zero-touch/low-touch velocity motion for SMBs, and a Mid-Market/Enterprise motion for multi-stakeholder organizations
• Generalist Selling → Technical Co-Selling:
  • Early on, your AEs will be able to manage the commercial and technical sales cycles end-to-end
  • As your deals grow more complex (requiring custom API integrations, webhooks, and ERP connectivity), you can introduce dedicated Solutions Engineers and Product Sales Experts who co-own technical deal design
• Short-Term Acquisition → Net Revenue Retention (NRR):
  • Initially, you can reward reps for short-term account acquisition to drive fast growth
  • Over time, as contract values grow, you should shift to multi-year lifetime value and add dedicated expansion motions that drive product attach after onboarding. You need this to build a big enterprise customer base
• Single Product → Multi-Product:
  • At the start you will be focused on proving product-market fit and scaling your initial core product
  • As you scale your product suite you will want to separately incentivize AEs and product teams on the success of the product. Focus on product GP and sales ROI over arbitrary cross-sell benchmarks.
• Single Geo → Multi-Geo:
  • At the start you may not need deep local teams as you start winning the “low-hanging fruit”
  • As you look to significantly scale local penetration you will need local AE teams that understand the regional cultural and regulatory nuances that affect your sales motion. In our case at Revolut, regulation was a significant driver of how sales motions ran in each geo.