How to Build a Sales Team With No Sales Engineers w/ Steven Boone, VP of Enterprise GTM @ Perplexity

Steven Boone is VP of Enterprise at Perplexity, where he joined about five months ago and now runs sales, customer success, consumer and enterprise support, forward deployed engineering, and rev ops. He got there without ever carrying a bag. After starting out in law school, he moved through product marketing and rev ops, served as chief of staff to the CRO at Twilio, and ran go-to-market at a seed-stage legal tech startup before leading enterprise sales at Zuora, a deliberate jump from Twilio's product-led motion into top-down deals. Since he arrived at Perplexity, every rep he has hired has closed a deal in their first 30 days.
Timestamps:
• (00:00) Clarity of thought over everything
• (01:38) Welcome to the Crew podcast
• (03:12) A nontraditional path to the revenue seat
• (06:10) Turning support tickets into sales opportunities
• (09:51) What Perplexity sells, from search API to Computer
• (17:58) Leaving product-led Twilio for top-down Zuora
• (20:08) Leading enterprise reps without carrying a bag
• (22:25) Productize it or white glove it
• (26:09) Complexity versus margin-adjusted ACV
• (28:13) Kill the first discovery call
• (31:44) Torn apart by AI
• (36:12) Why Perplexity has no sales engineers
• (42:36) How he interviews for clarity of thought
• (46:54) Green, yellow, red capacity planning
• (52:03) Why he said yes to sales
About The Crew Podcast
The Crew podcast interviews GTM leaders and investors at top AI startups and early-stage companies.
Every week, host Chris Balestras, partner @ Crew, talks to the people actually building go-to-market motions in real time, not in retrospect.
About Crew
Crew is a recruiting, investing, & media firm for seed through series D AI-natives & fast-growing SaaS startups.
This Episode Is Brought To You By
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