Carles Reina

Outbound is dead unless it’s human. Carles has tried a large number of AI go-to-market tools and none work — “they see everything as a transaction,” and buyers can smell mass AI outreach, with outbound email response rates now “less than 0.01%.” ElevenLabs instead spent engineering headcount building in-house revenue agents — an AI SDR for inbound, an AI proposals manager scanning the web for RFPs, an AI customer-success manager drafting personalized emails — and “that has closed deals for us already.” The rule: “it’s human if it’s perceived as human.”

The AI-native sales org is smaller, not bigger. Carles targets a 50% productivity improvement explicitly so he can hire fewer, better-paid people, pays full commission on deals AI agents close “as if a human actually closed it,” and would rather sign a million-dollar commission check than cap earnings — because “every single million has $33 million in extra valuation” for the company.

Comp mechanics behind the 20x quota: two employees hit their entire full-year quota in February (“the Mount Olympus of sales”), commissions run 5% on everything sold with accelerators at 1.1x–1.5x above quota, and pilots pay nothing — “it’s not adding to our valuation as a company… then why should we pay it?” Quotas must be challenging but fair because good salespeople “are moved by the coin” and without the challenge “they’re just going to be slacking.”

Customer success is a revenue function now, not “complete BS.” The Snowflake-era view (charge professional services, CS is a cost center) made sense then; today “anyone can spin up a competitor of your product in the next two days,” so CS must drive expansion, cross-sell, and retention — a pure services model “becomes a transaction.”

Go-to-market is portfolio construction: open markets in parallel, not sequentially, because 100 competitors arrive within a month; “test 100 things to find the three, four, five, six that actually perform.” India verticalized too early and “depressed our revenues for a single quarter — an absolute disaster.” Carles scaled the revenue org from zero to over $350M in ARR; ElevenLabs could hit $1B revenue by year-end “if we were creative”; the sales team doubles from 130 toward ~250 this year.

The customer-support paradox: Harry calls the category uninvestable (Sierra, Dacorn (likely Decagon), 16 providers raising $75M+ in 18 months); Carles wouldn’t personally invest either — yet it’s ElevenLabs’ “fastest product in terms of revenues that we’ve ever had,” and “we power all of them,” competitors included — the Nvidia position. The CIOs-and-CSOs must-buy-AI window is only 18–24 months, and he agrees “100%.”

Substitution risk is overrated; brand is the moat. He half-believed open-source commoditization last year and changed his mind — enterprises try open models, “lose three months and then they come back.” Brand cuts enterprise sales cycles “1 million percent,” and today’s procurement blue chips are OpenAI, Anthropic, and Cursor.

The macro call: a next wave of foundational-model companies is coming, and OpenAI, Anthropic, Google — and ElevenLabs — “will end up buying all of them… a few billion here, a few billion there.” Asked to pick: buy Anthropic at 500 over OpenAI at 8:30 — Anthropic is “spread too thin… they need to start from scratch.” “Claude is my best friend.”

🔗 Original source & video: ElevenLabs: Building an AI Sales Machine & Why We Set a 20x Sales Quota

ElevenLabs anchors rep quota at 20x base salary—$2 million on $100,000—and says more than 80% hit it. Carles contrasts standard SaaS at roughly 6x–10x and admits he initially had “absolutely no clue” whether 20x would work; after 2.5 years, the formula remains.

Upsell economics deliberately reward both the AE and CSM rather than forcing one owner. The AE keeps earning quota retirement and commissions, while the CSM is compensated on NRR; Carles accepts paying twice to get two people “busting their ass” to expand the account.

Missing quota demands diagnosis: reps lacking product expertise or outbound aggressiveness exit, but a credible enterprise pipeline earns more ramp. An AWS hire below 50% looked fireable until pipeline inspection revealed hard UK enterprise cycles; retained, he subsequently delivered “200-plus%” of quota.

Carles runs public, remote monthly reviews across a roughly 90-person go-to-market team—and expects sellers to be on the road. He rejects praise-public/criticize-private, arguing “you need to shame them,” but warns leaders to diagnose product, team, or execution problems before assigning blame.

Forecasts are intentionally marked down to the floor: a possible $500,000 deal enters the pipeline at $24,000. Conservative values curb rep inflation, avoid awkward investor questions, and force the organization to build more coverage and “work twice as hard.”

Outbound is survival infrastructure, not incremental lead generation. With roughly 90% of deals mostly inbound, Carles feared the company would die if that flow dried up; weekly scorecards and public accountability moved outbound from 10% to 40%, toward a year-end 50/50 target.

🔗 Original source & video: The Ruthless Sales Culture Behind ElevenLabs Growth | Carles Reina