The Inside Sales Playbook

Very few founders build one exceptional company. Hans Robertson has co-founded two.

Meraki began as an MIT grad student project on cheap Wi-Fi mesh networks. After a couple of tries that did not work, it took on Cisco head-on with easy, cloud-managed wireless for mid-market companies. It worked so well that Cisco bought Meraki for $1.2 billion in 2012.

Then Robertson did it again.

Verkada, co-founded with three others, sells cloud-managed security cameras, a market where venture investors had lost a lot of money. Robertson built its sales team from scratch a second time, and it worked again. In December 2025, Alphabet's growth fund CapitalG led an investment that valued Verkada at $5.8 billion, as it crossed $1 billion in annualized bookings.

This playbook breaks down 12 rules Robertson uses to build an inside sales team.

tldr: start with proven reps on small quotas, hire on numbers instead of gut, pay a commission reps can work out in their heads.

Inside you will find the 12-step playbook that Robertson uses:

1. Price the sales team before you hire it. Find out why the cost of sale comes first, and why it starts at 50%.
2. Stay inside until you know what you're doing. Find out why a field team needs a $2 million quota, and how Verkada closed a $1.2 million deal by phone.
3. Start with 2 known-good reps and a $50,000 quota. See the cohort test Verkada ran before it hired more reps.
4. Hire on three proofs, not gut. Learn why the top 5% copier rep beats the top 30% Salesforce rep.
5. Fish where recruiters aren't looking. Find out why a happy hour beats a LinkedIn search, and the one number to give an in-house recruiter.
6. Filter in 60 days, cut after two misses. Build a short trial like Meraki's Ignite program, and learn what a wrong pick really costs.
7. Pay a commission reps can do in their heads. See why Robertson bans points plans, spiffs and annual comp plans.
8. Make reps find their own deals. Learn the $100 giveaway that lifted webinar attendance 10x.
9. Use the channel to fulfill, not to find. Find out why 100 signed resellers sold nothing, and the handoff that made them sell.
10. Let reps find the price, then close with a DocuSign. See why wide discounts are fine early and how Verkada cut a week off the close.
11. Keep reps local, and hire sales ops at 6. Find out why cheaper cities are a false economy.
12. Give sales its own culture. Learn why a uniform culture isn't the goal, and what founders owe both sides.

Rule 1. Price the sales team before you hire it

Pick the cost of sale first, then build the team to fit it. When you pick a target, you tend to end up hitting it.

The starting point is about 50% of revenue, and that number includes everything: ramp time, turnover, managers and travel. Robertson is wary of ending up like some other public tech companies, where the cost of sales ran north of 100% of revenue. Every dollar of revenue cost more than a dollar to sell.

To set quotas, use three lenses:

• Competitors. Look at what their reps carry, then take a discount off that.
• Your own gut. What could you reasonably sell yourself? Discount that too.
• Finance. What keeps you near the cost target?

The math that makes a business great: if you could hire a rep for $150,000 a year, give them a $1 million quota, and know it will work, that's a great signal. And to be great, you need to repeat this – do it again and again. At scale, Meraki ran at 23% cost of sale for inside reps and 40% for field.

Why it works: a target turns a starving sales team into a question you can debug. Is the product not there, did you hire bad reps, or is the quota wrong?

🧮 Founders: write down your rep's all-in yearly cost today and divide it by the quota you have in mind. If the answer is above 0.5, change the quota or the hire before you post the job.