Personio

I stopped recommending founders hire a Head of Sales. Not because the function is dead. Because the human-only version of it is. Watch what happens at 2 to 10M ARR. You hire one person on a 200K base. They walk into 5+ reps, an unloved CRM, a forecast nobody trusts, and a founder who needs deal coaching, pre-call prep, debriefs, pipeline reviews, forecast hygiene, and pattern recognition across every rep. 6 jobs. 1 human. 18 months. Then the founder fires them and blames the hire. I spent 13 years in that seat across Teamleader, 24sessions/MessageBird, and Personio. The work that breaks Heads of Sales is operating work. Repeating analysis. Same questions every Monday. Same gaps every Wednesday. Operating work is software work. Coaching work is human work. We stopped separating the two. That is the bug. 3 months ago I rebuilt the function with a sub-5M ARR coaching client. Six agents. SPICED-scored. Running in production today. 1. Daily Deal Execution Brief at 07:00. Stale deals, urgent actions, three-minute scan. 2. Pre-Call Prep 90 minutes before every meeting. Context, SPICED status, key questions, game plan. 3. Post-Call Debrief 30 minutes after. Transcript pulled, SPICED delta captured, CRM updates suggested. 4. Weekly Coaching Summary every Monday 08:00. Talk discipline, objections, next-step quality. AE copy and coach copy. 5. Weekly Deal Review every Wednesday 08:00. Top 5 deals, full SPICED scoring, gaps surfaced before the coaching call. 6. Monthly Pipeline Strategy on the first. Win-loss, velocity, forecast accuracy. The CRO view. Six agents replace the operating work. The founder still owns the people. Net coaching time: 20 minutes per AE per day. Cost: a fraction of one hire. This is one stack inside GTMcraft. If you want the six agents as markdown, reply "agents" and I will send them.

It's Friday evening. 2 years ago on a night exactly like this, I sent a LinkedIn DM that closed a 40K deal seven days later. Zero meetings. The recipient was a consultant. She was also the preferred partner of our biggest competitor in the Benelux. Most reps would have queued up a Calendly link and waited until Monday. I sent her a 90-second personalized video on Friday night. A buyer workspace link on Monday morning. A mutual action plan she could share with her management team by Wednesday. She presented to her board on Thursday. Contract signed Friday. 7 days. No call. No demo. No "let's find a time next week." I have built that motion at Personio Benelux for 3 years. The data we now have is direct: 40% win rate lift. 65% ACV lift. 875 stakeholders uncovered async that would never have made it onto a calendar. This is the system I have been quietly running. Not a hack. Not a Loom trick. An operating system that compounds across every deal your team touches. Next Thursday I open it up for the first time. GTMcraft Cohort 1: Async Selling. 4 weeks. 1x 60-minute live session per week. Week 4 is a live deal review where you bring your stuck deal and the room works it with you. 25 seats, capped. Every ticket includes one full year of GTMcraft membership. Early Bird closes Sunday at 23:59 for 497 EUR. Monday it moves to 997. Wednesday it closes at 1,497. If you own a pipeline and your deals stall between meetings, this is built for you. Claim your seat: https://lnkd.in/e7bisyex

Yesterday I asked three CROs what is actually breaking when they deploy agents in GTM. The answer was not the models. It was what happens when you tell everyone to build. The panel was Ghazi Masood ( Replit ), Jennifer Lawrence ( Red Panda ), and Peter Grant ( Weaver ). A few things that stood out. Every leading GTM org has agents in production and is rolling out more. The question is no longer whether to deploy. It is how fast and how well. At Personio we are in the mix. Our inbound AI SDR is one of several agents in production, and around 90 percent of our GTM team is building on Claude. Hiring profiles are shifting. CROs and CEOs are looking for people who can build and iterate on AI workflows, not just prompt. GTM engineers are appearing on headcount plans that did not have that role two years ago. Agent sprawl is a real and underrated problem. Encouraging everyone to build creates duplication of process and wasted token spend. Governance matters more than most people want to admit. The leaders pulling ahead are not the ones with the most agents. They are the ones who know which agents earn their place. Thanks to Jason M. Lemkin and Amelia Lerutte for another epic event. #SaaStr AI #GTM #AIAgents #CRO

What does AI readiness actually look like for HR teams today? That was the question at the heart of this morning's HR Breakfast in Dublin, and the conversation didn't disappoint. Personio ’s own Rebecca M. led a brilliant panel with Veronica Brady, M.A. HRM , Graham Nolan and Shane O'Brien , who brought sharp, honest perspectives on moving from workforce insight to real action. No fluff — just the kind of grounded, practical dialogue that makes these mornings worth showing up for (croissants help too 🥐). It's genuinely exciting to see our Dublin HR Breakfast series grow. There's something special about getting HR leaders in a room together — the conversations that happen over coffee before the panel even starts are half the value. Community is at the heart of what we're building here, and we're just getting started! If you'd like to be part of what's coming next across Ireland and the UK, join our events list 👇 🔗 https://lnkd.in/dw4sfWVT

Who said competitors can't be good friends? Yesterday, I invited Timi Olotu (CRO at CharlieHR ) to come speak with the Personio marketing team at our office in London. Topics included: AI adoption, effective positioning and sales-marketing alignment. Yes, a direct competitor in our kitchen. Timi and I worked together at Meta years ago. Since then, we've both ended up leading teams in the HR software space - but above all, stayed good mates. Timi is one of the best GTM leaders I've worked with, so I asked if he was willing to join a breakfast talk with my team. No commercials, no secret sauce, just honest conversations about positioning, ICP clarity, human psychology, and shared challenges that he and I are facing in the category. The team left inspired by Timi's perspective and career journey from copywriter to CRO. Thanks again for joining us Timi Olotu . I'm always learning from you.

Blue Carpet SVA & Personio 2026 I'm truly delighted about the great partnership we have with SVA and last week, together with my colleague Minh Tran , I had the privilege of attending my first Blue Carpet event. Once again, it became clear: there is nothing more valuable than personal contact with our partners and customers. Real conversations build real trust. A big thank you to Meike Schönberger , Daniel Delling , Christoph Zurek for everything the excellent hosting, the insightful talks and great conversations. It was an inspiring day full of meaningful exchange. The Blue Carpet event is all about bringing people together who want to make a difference. It stands for connecting partners and customers, exchanging ideas at eye level, sharing fresh perspectives and shaping the future of IT&HR together. #BlueCarpet2026 #SVA #Partnership Personio

"We have a digital sales room. How do we actually make it drive impact?" I have heard this question in 14 DMs and conversations in the past 6 weeks. Founders. GTM operators. Sales leaders. All saying the same thing. We bought the tool. We watched the demos. We even sent a few personalized videos. But the deals still stall between meetings. Here is what most teams miss. Async selling is an operating system. Most teams treat it as a tactic. The digital sales room is one layer. Video is another. The mutual action plan is a third. Champion enablement is a fourth. Run one without the others and you get small wins. Run them as a system and you get a 40% win rate lift, 65% higher ACV, and 875 stakeholders you would have never reached through linear selling. That is not theory. That is 3 years of operating at Personio Benelux. All of it inside trumpet 🎺 . Most teams have the tools. Few have cracked the code. So next week we open the doors to the Async Selling Craft cohort inside GTMcraft. 4 weeks. One 60 minute live session per week. Week 1: build the async rhythm, workspace, video, and mutual action plan. Week 2: connect engagement data, automate follow-ups, multi-thread the deal. Week 3: enable champions, embed async in hiring and coaching. Week 4: bring your stuck deal. The room works it with you. 25 seats. Capped. Starts week of May 18. For founders and GTM operators who want to stop chasing meetings and start running a system. Comment "Async" or DM me to join.

I used to think €90K was fair for a RevOps hire. Growth Institute just published a VP of Growth JD at $550K OTE. I was wrong. And I suspect most founders and GTM operators still are. I have been in this conversation with Malik and Shantanu for months now. How is the future of GTM and RevOps going to look? How do we act on it in the next 3, 6, 12 months? We land in the same place every time: RevOps is the future sales leader. Not because the title changes. Because the function does. For years, RevOps was treated as a back-office role. Join the call for 10 minutes. Build the dashboard on request. Connect the toolstack when asked. I made that bet too. It was the wrong one. The sales leaders who compound over the next 5 years will not be known for the size of their team. They will be known for the system they built, the constraint they diagnosed, and the AI layer they put on top of it. This week I started rewriting what I need from RevOps at Personio International. Not a support function. A strategic equal. Same seat at the management table as me. Jacco and the Winning by Design Growth Institute published a mock VP of Growth JD this week that describes the same shift at the executive level. $550K OTE. 3 years ago the ceiling for this role was $180K. That gap is not a comp correction. It is a role transformation. I am not there yet. But I am building toward it. If you are a founder or GTM operator today, read that JD carefully. Then ask yourself honestly: is that how you think about the operator sitting next to you? Or are you that operator tomorrow? —— The system is the strategy now. Build toward it or wait for it to pass you by. —— PS. GTMcraft opens its founding member doors for the last time today. Everything closes at midnight CET. gtmcraft.substack.com

The end of an era 💔 Words can barely describe how the past 4+ years have been at Personio . My heart is full of gratitude, with all the people I've met, my personal and professional growth, the learnings, the wins, all the ups and downs and the memories I have created the past years. When I joined and moved back to Amsterdam, I had no idea how much this place would shape me. From IC to leading my own team, which was the most terrifying, exciting and humbling experience at the same time. Being part of Personio's hypergrowth and learning how to scale but at the same time not being able to control the external market and economic climate, makes you resilient, creative and solution oriented. I wouldn't trade it for anything! The list is long, but these people in particular played a big part in my journey: My dear Benelux AM/CSM team, Jamie-Lee Claeys Claire Hoedemakers Boudewijn Felser Daisy De Groot Joost Oteman Nikki Wester , each one of you are incredibly talented, always think about your customers and have a big teamspirit. Alba Vargas Jiménez for guiding me through my first-time leadership experience. For challenging me, for listening to me, for going through fire for me and the team. Your passion and dedication are priceless - thank you for everything! Koen Stam for your entrepreneurial mindset within our International Business, for everything you have done for the entire Benelux market, for always thinking positive and having energy that reflects an entire team. Alvaro Matilla Felipe Villegas my two heroes and dream team. I learned so much from you; staying calm under pressure, your hands-on attitude, and always being there when needed. I will miss working with you! Seán Reid for hiring me back in December 2021 & for giving me the opportunity to go from IC into leadership. What's next? 👀 Something that involves AI and 🇨🇭 - very ready for this new adventure! Stay tuned 🥁