Scaling a B2B SaaS sales team from $100K to $7M ARR

The starting point

The company sells fleet management software to Indian logistics companies. When I joined, annual recurring revenue was roughly $100K. There was demand, but the way the company sold did not yet scale beyond the people already doing it.

Logistics buyers in India are practical. They want to see the product working on their own trucks, they care about the local support team, and the decision often sits with an owner rather than a procurement function. A playbook copied from a Bangalore SaaS company would not have worked in Ludhiana or Nagpur.

What got built

1. A team that could grow without breaking

When I joined there was one salesperson apart from the founders, and the founders closed every deal. When I left, the team had 135 salespeople reporting to me directly and indirectly, and the founders closed under 1% of deals. Six of the people I hired went on to become team leads. Every stage of growth needed a slightly different structure, so the hiring profile, the ramp plan and the targets were rewritten more than once. More than 150 people went through sales training, in classrooms and through an LMS, so a new hire in a new city learned the same motion as the first ten.

2. City by city go to market

Instead of one national playbook, we wrote go to market playbooks for more than 30 Indian cities. Each one covered the local segments worth chasing, the objections that came up there, and how the sales and support teams would work together on the ground.

3. A RevOps centre of excellence

The CRM and reporting layer was rebuilt as a centre of excellence on Leadsquared, HubSpot and Tableau. Stages, fields and dashboards were defined once and used by everyone. One practical result: the time taken to resolve issues dropped by around 35 percent, because problems showed up in the data before they showed up in a customer complaint.

4. The Southeast Asia launch

For five months I was posted to Jakarta as AVP to lead the Southeast Asia launch and write the expansion playbook. I led the launch and the go to market there, and in that time the team built more than $1M of pipeline to proof-of-concept stage. Indonesia needed its own ICP, its own messaging and its own view of who decides. Very little transferred directly from India, which is the main lesson in the market entry checklist.

What changed

Over four years ARR went from roughly $100K to $7M. The number mattered less than the fact that the machine behind it was documented, trained and measured, so it kept working as people joined and left.

What you can take from it

• Write the playbook per market, not per company. Cities in one country can behave like different markets.
• Train before you scale. A new hire should learn the motion, not reinvent it.
• Treat RevOps as a product. If the CRM does not tell you the truth, every other fix is a guess.