Sales talk with Vincent Coirier

How Partoo built a scalable sales machine - from outbound prospecting to international expansion, deal qualification, and marketing-sales alignment.

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WHAT IT'S ABOUT

Recorded at a SaaStock Paris event, this talk covers the operational reality of building a sales organization from scratch. Vincent Coirier and Thibault Renouf share how Partoo grew from 1M to 30M ARR with 99% outbound - the structures, decisions, failures, and philosophies behind every stage of that growth.

The session goes deep on how to build a scalable sales machine: how to divide the sales cycle into stages, how to structure BDR and AE teams, how to manage upsell and account expansion, how to go upmarket on enterprise deals, and how to make marketing and sales work together effectively.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

01Building a scalable sales machine requires separating the sales cycle into clear stages with distinct owners. BDRs generate M1s, AEs run the cycle, solution consultants handle complex deals above 20K. Each role has a precise KPI and a precise handoff point - without that clarity, the pipe becomes noise.

02Sales velocity depends on keeping salespeople prospecting even when BDRs exist. At Partoo, AEs were always required to generate 50% of their own pipe. The moment you remove that obligation, the culture of hunting disappears and it never comes back.

03Going upmarket is not about changing your product - it is about changing your political strategy. On deals above 50K, you are managing relationships between HQ and local countries, not just selling a solution. Winning from the bottom up - country by country - is often more effective than winning at HQ level.

04Marketing and sales alignment works when marketing stops measuring itself on leads and starts measuring itself on pipeline quality. At Partoo, the shift happened when webinars moved from product-focused to market-focused - covering industry problems, not company features. That multiplied attendance and inbound intent by 2 to 3x.

05Upsell is a hunting job, not a customer success job. Partoo learned this the hard way - CAMs managed by country managers lacked the prospecting mindset to expand accounts. Centralizing the CAM function under a global lead with a hunting culture was the fix.

VINCENT'S PERSPECTIVE

The mistake most teams make is thinking that structure replaces culture. It doesn't. You can have the best BDR-AE-CAM model in the world and still lose if your salespeople have stopped hunting. The culture has to come first - then you build the structure around it.

Vincent Coirier

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