A Timeline of Salesforce Hires 1 thru 9 at Notion 🤓

I genuinely believe the sequence of Salesforce hires at Notion shows the right way to build an internal team. It's a group of 9 people supporting ~300 Sales Reps, a team that's growing 75% YOY.

The Hiring Roadmap 🗺

If you go back just 2 years, Notion was a different business.

They were still heavily Product Led, far less focused on Enterprise Sales, as evidenced by the size of their Sales team and the relatively immature Revenue Operations & GTM Strategy function overall.

By late 2023, everything started shifting.

• A new Chief Revenue Officer was in seat

• Enterprise Sales was became a priority

• The Rev Ops team expanded rapidly (from 4 people to 20+)

• GTM Systems quickly matured

Evolution of GTM Systems

In 2022, the Business Systems / Salesforce team was 2 people:

• Head of Sales Systems

• GTM Systems Lead

Starting in Q3 '23, things started to get interesting.

August 2023 | 2 People

1. GTM Systems Lead remained

2. (New) Head of Business Technology

September 2023 | 4 People

3. (New) Manager, Sales Systems

4. (New) GTM Systems Manager (promoted from Sales Ops Lead)

January 2024 | 7 People

5. (New) Salesforce Developer

6. (New) Salesforce Business Analyst

7. (New) Salesforce Business Analyst

February 2024 | 8 People

8. (New) Head of Finance Systems

Why is this the ideal Salesforce hiring strategy - not just for Notion - but for virtually every SaaS company?

Because 90% of the team is focused on strategy & planning.

Only 1 person is entirely dedicated to hands-on build.

Frankly, the EASY part is the execution.

The hard part is identifying what to build, when to build it, and how.

And the vast majority of startups at this stage have too many Salesforce Administrators. Requests come in, features go out. The result is near-term thinking and low-impact build.

Instead, take a page from Notion's playbook:

• (3) Product Owners embedded in the business to serve as Technical Advisors

• (2) Business Analysts forging deeply collaborative relationships with stakeholders

• (2) Business Systems Leaders thinking about the long-term, big picture

• (1) Admin/Developer building well-defined & planned functionality.

Takeaway

There is a very simple reason companies struggle to get budget for the Salesforce team.

Underinvesting in Business Analysts and Product Owners leads to undefined, poorly prioritized features. The team simply can't drive the kind of impact for the business that justifies additional spend.

Instead, these teams will often over-invest in Salesforce Admins & Developers, mistakenly thinking that the more they build, the more value they can show to the business. In reality, this approach leads to a worse GTM Systems infrastructure and an increase in support load as a result.

This forces you to hire Administrators to serve as a Salesforce Help Desk - and that does turn Salesforce into a cost center.

Think about the big picture.

Spend money on a team like Notion's that will drive tangible ROI for the business, reducing the support load in the process, and making a far easier case for additional investment in the team.