BC Startup Sales Podcast - Building Your Post-Seed Sales Machine with Brandon Gracey (GasLight Solutions)

This week we were joined on the podcast by our friend Brandon Gracey, seasoned B2B salesman and Principal at GasLight Solutions, to talk Building Your Early, Post-Seed Sales Machine. For this conversation, we dug into the process of building your sales team after a seed round and what common pitfalls for founders are along the way. Brandon is currently a Principal at GasLight Solutions where he works with early stage companies to accelerate their growth through scalable and economically viable practices. Additionally, he sits on the Advisory board of Alice Financial and is a member of the New York Revenue Collective. Through his career, he has helped build sales teams at Handshake, StreetDelivery, and Alice Financial. Given the topic of our discussion, we could think of nobody more qualified to speak on building your early, post-seed sales machine.

Our first topic was the high level, 30,000-foot consideration points to consider when building your sales machine after the seed money is in the bank. This transitioned into a drill-down, tactical level discussion on what are the immediate actions and hires that a founder should be thinking about. We walk through how to dissect your previous sales to understand where the sales process is failing and diagnose what is happening with your existing customers. We cover the question of how revenue projections may be built on optimistic forecasts, and how sales managers should think about defining the funnel and ICP through a more realistic lens as early on as possible. Finally, we dug into the biggest pain points for founders and where they tend to mess up the most when thinking about early stage sales. Brandon rounded out our conversation by discussing best practices for hiring and how to ensure that your team is growing at an appropriate pace relative to your sales pipeline.

Brandon Gracey is a Principal at GasLight Solution and works with early stage startups to help build their revenue teams. He moved to New York in 2013, after 12 years of building sales teams at StreetDelivery, an earlier iteration of StreetView, to help build the sales team at HandShake from the ground up. Even prior to HandShake’s acquisition by Shopify, Brandon held several board memberships of various sales-focused advisory groups. Brandon graduated from Keene State College with a Bachelor of Arts in Communications. An East Coast native, Brandon was born just outside Atlantic City and spent his childhood in Connecticut and New Hampshire.

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