Entrepreneurial Sales (15.387)

About the Class

Faculty

“40 years ago when I joined IBM one of the parts of the program they put us through in the training program was “sales”. I will never forget it and it was incredibly helpful through my career. It was training us how to sell multi-million dollar mainframe computers.” -Bill Aulet In 1998 Howard Anderson started one of the first Sales courses at a business school at MIT Sloan from the same center of gravity. The course has continued built off this foundation and been one of the most successful courses at MIT. However, as we look at the course and the challenges that business leaders are facing, we’ve seen just how much the revenue landscape has transformed. With that, we’ve taken an opportunity to evolve the class beyond how to be a better sales person or manager to instead focus on how to be a Chief Revenue Officer. The course will still cover integral sales skills, but will revolve around four fundamental Go-To-Market business models and will explore how a CRO can identify, build and execute on the right model for their business. This includes not only building out a sales organization, but also the underlying tech stack and revenue operations required to measure results and sustain competitive advantage. Each class will cover the relevant core first principles per topic and include an industry expert speaker to provide context and share valuable lessons learned throughout their careers. This course is highly relevant to anyone interested in building a business or better understanding how to drive revenue at scale.

Adam Blake

Adam Blake is currently co-founder and co-CEO of Telescoped, a company focused on better connecting companies with remote software developers to enable people to lead fulfilling lives. Prior to Telescoped he co-founded ThriveHive, a SaaS company providing marketing solutions to small businesses that was acquired by Propel Marketing in 2016. Adam served in a variety of roles at ThriveHive both before and after the acquisition, including COO, CMO, and GM. Prior to founding ThriveHive, Adam founded a consumer electronics business, Pear Cable, which he bootstrapped into a profitable company selling products globally. Before Pear Cable, Adam served as the director of Fuel Cell Technology Development at CellTech Power, a developer of novel fuel cells. Adam holds three patents, received a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering from Tufts University and an MBA from MIT Sloan School of Management with a Certificate in Entrepreneurship and Innovation. Adam is also an active startup advisor and investor.

Emmanuelle Skala

Emmanuelle leads all the post-sale customer-facing functions at Toast as the Senior VP of Customer Success. She sits on the advisory board of four startups and is a frequent industry speaker and blogger. Prior to Toast, she lead Sales & Customer Success at DigitalOcean, scaled Influitive 10x in two years leading Sales, and ran the Global Channel Sales at Sophos. She was also the first hired sales person at Endeca and Vertica and was fortunate to see both through rapid growth and successful acquisitions. She holds a B.S. in Industrial Management from Carnegie Mellon University and an M.B.A. in Marketing and Finance from New York University’s School of Business.

Jim Baum

Jim Baum brings over 25 years of experience growing and managing cutting-edge technology businesses. As an operating executive, his career includes building highly successful organizations, bringing businesses to scale, IPOs, and a multi-billion-dollar exit. Jim is passionate about entrepreneurship and helping to build successful enterprises around exciting market opportunities. Jim currently serves on a range corporate boards from innovative startups, to fast growth pre-IPO companies, to publicly traded companies. He is a Trustee at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) and co-chair of WPI’s initiative in innovation and entrepreneurship as well as a lecturer in entrepreneurship at MIT’s Sloan School. Jim previously served as President and CEO of data warehousing and analytics company Netezza. Throughout his tenure at Netezza, Jim brought his passion for building great teams that deliver disruptive technology solutions to market. In 2007, Jim worked to take Netezza public, ultimately driving the nearly $2B acquisition of Netezza by IBM in 2010 — a transaction dubbed “the most disruptive acquisition of 2010” by Information Week. Jim also led Endeca’s early rise from tiny startup to the leading provider of innovative information access and delivery software solutions to the Global 2000. Endeca was acquired by Oracle in late 2011. Prior to Endeca and Netezza, he served at PTC as an Executive Vice President and General Manager. Over the course of his 11-year tenure, he had the opportunity to manage roles across nearly every facet of that organization, helping the company grow from $11M to $1B in revenue.

Max Faingezicht

Max is the Co-Founder of Telescoped, a startup focused on connecting the best remote software engineers in LatAm with first class opportunities in the US. Prior to that he was the Chief Technology Officer of Propel Marketing, the digital marketing division of Gatehouse Media, the largest publisher of local and daily newspapers in the United States. Max joined Propel Marketing in March 2016 via the acquisition of Thrivehive, where he was Co-Founder and CEO. Max is a former small business owner, has worked as a product manager intern for the Kindle team at Amazon and has held engineering roles in industrial automation and artificial intelligence research. Max is passionate about remote work and empowering others through technology. Max holds a BSEE from the University of Costa Rica and an MBA with a certificate for Innovation and Entrepreneurship from MIT Sloan. He teaches Entrepreneurial Sales at MIT Sloan and has taught Entrepreneurship at University of Costa Rica. He also mentors early stage founders through Techstars, Founders Institute, and the MIT Trust Center for Entrepreneurship.