Case Study: Building an Elite Go-To-Market Division
CLIENT: PAVILION
The Result
Pavilion recently partnered with Sales Talent Agency to recruit elite talent that was perfectly suited for its company culture and platform. Here’s how.
The Challenge
Pavilion is an international membership community of sales, marketing, revenue operations and customer success leaders – the largest community of its kind in the world – that’s reimagining professional development for teams. Its platform allows members to develop skills to further their careers by giving them access to collaborative learning and by offering 75+ unique programs through the Pavilion University. There are currently 10,000+ registered members from many of the world’s most successful companies, located across 100 different cities.
Pavilion experienced major growth post pandemic, as people turned to communities like this for support and up-skilling in the face of uncertainty. Because of its sustained growth, Pavilion looked to hire top talent and expand its go-to-market team, starting with account executives, business development representatives and enrollment managers. These candidates were difficult to find and attract, and on top of that, they needed to be hired in one of the most competitive talent markets to date.
Without the internal bandwidth to handle this task efficiently, Pavilion recognized its need for an outsourced partner who strongly understood its purpose, journey and impact, and who could source candidates with the specific profiles required for success while providing intelligent hiring advice when needed.
The Solution
In December 2021, Pavilion engaged Sales Talent Agency (STA) to support them in building out a new go-to-market division. Given the complex nature of the project, STA connected with key stakeholders over a series of discovery calls to gain a comprehensive understanding of Pavilion’s go-to-market strategy, workplace culture and future growth plans. Throughout the calls, the teams aligned on: the overall recruitment project and process, messaging and how to best portray Pavilion’s narrative to candidates, the ideal candidate profile and what success looks like in the role. The objective was to ensure that when STA went to market, it could function as a true extension of Pavilion’s team.
This recruitment project presented a new set of challenges because Pavilion is a unique organization; it is a technology enabled community of sales, marketing, RevOps, and customer success leaders, that delivers value to not only individual consumers, but also to corporate teams as a B2B professional development service. The hires would need a high degree of familiarity with hyper-growth tech companies (Pavilion’s main client) and the business acumen to sell a platform not centred around a product, its features or an immediate ROI. The cherry on top: candidates would need a strong executive presence and a knack for LinkedIn networking in order to be successful, as they would be selling to all business units within an organization – including to c-suite executives.
Due to the complexity of the roles and the volume of candidates needed, STA took an executive search-style approach with two senior recruiters leading the project. With this framework in mind, the team:
- Took the information gained from the initial discovery calls and conducted a candidate sourcing exercise to drive alignment. This was a presentation of a sample candidate pool for each role, so that Pavilion knew exactly the caliber of candidates STA would source.
- Developed a scorecard of core competencies to evaluate candidates during the interview process alongside STA’s DNA/PRO™ methodology.
- Assessed candidates based on their LinkedIn presence and how they portrayed themselves online, to get a feel for how they would handle the networking side of the role.
- Focused on candidates with a breadth of extracurriculars, like ongoing clubs, certifications and leadership programs, as a way to identify candidates who value professional growth and development, since this is a key focus of Pavilion’s platform.
- Conducted weekly 20-30 minute sync calls with hiring managers and stakeholders to collect feedback, optimize the process and strategize.
The Result
Through this partnership, Pavilion hired an elite team of go-to-market professionals, including a director of sales, growth manager, enrolment manager, two account executives, and two sales development representatives (SDRs). In short, 100 candidates were screened and contacted by STA, of which 80 were then interviewed. From there, 45 shortlisted candidates (across all roles) were presented to and then interviewed by Pavilion. The hires took between 30-90 days to fill depending on the role, and there were eight offers made in total to make seven hires (an acceptance rate of 87%!).
“I’ve spent years hiring and onboarding salespeople and STA has been the best recruiting firm I’ve ever worked with. They are experts in what’s happening in the market and provide those insights to my team, as well as potential candidates. They placed some of my best hires, and equally as important, their team is a joy to work with.“