hyrise

hyrise helps tech companies solve two of their biggest challenges: fill open sales positions fast and effectively train existing sales teams. Via our service hyriseRecruiting, we place vetted and untapped talent as motivated salespeople at innovative digital companies. With hyriseTraining, we effectively train sales employees on-the-job via a continuous training program tailored to their specific needs. We work with over 150 leading companies such as SoSafe, Doctolib or HRS and have become known through the VOX start-up show "Die Höhle der Löwen" in the fall of 2022.

Co-founder & Managing Director

Sales Expressed

Podcast produced by hyrise inviting software sales leaders to share ONE specific challenge and how they solved it. Compact. Concrete. Actionable. 

Our promise: 20 minutes of “real talk” with hands-on tips, best practices and impulses for building and leading successful sales teams in the software world.

Podcast Host

ARRtist

The ARRtist SUMMIT invites 400 high-profile B2B SaaS Founders, CxO and VPs and 100 B2B SaaS investors. Network with and learn from the most relevant community in B2B SaaS for DACH.

Co-Host with hyrise since Day 1 in 2022.

Co-Host

POSpulse

POSpulse is the leading agile shopper and consumer response platform, providing brands, retailers and service providers with realtime feedback on their questions along the entire customer decision journey - from the physical POS, home or out of home. With a community of 800.000 consumers globally POSpulse enables customers to better market their products with fast and cost effective insights.

Founder, CEO & CSO

savvo digital sommelier solutions

Advisor

savvo provides a touch screen decision making guide for wine and wine related products positioned at the point of sale - the wine aisles. By offering consumers multi-category search options, savvo will match them with the perfect wine in the store, thereby helping to sell more and higher priced wines; benefiting everyone down the value chain. No longer will the wine aisles remain a point of confusion for the consumer and a missed opportunity for matching them with their soon to be favorite wine.

Cofounder & Chief Sales Officer

ViMedicus

ViMedicus is a healthcare IT startup providing innovative and easy to use collaborative software solutions designed for clinicians.

- Customer development and relationship management
- Identify gaps, deficiencies and areas for improvement within   
  customers' clinical workflows 
- Design customized solutions in partnership with the customer   
  including identification of key features and outlines of solution 
- Build and manage relationships with appropriate sales channel 
  partners 
- Project ownership during pilot implementation phase; ensure 
  proper and timely execution of agreed milestones

Business Development Manager

NovoView Diagnostics LLC

NovoView Diagnostics is an early stage medical device company created to safely and effectively assess the risk for ischemic stroke through conjunctival blood flow analysis.

Co-founder & Chief Commercial Officer

Institute for Entrepreneurial Studies / IL SBDC at UIC

- Consulting pre-venture, start-ups, and established businesses in management, marketing, finance and strategy
- Assistance in business and marketing plan preparation, securing capital, improving business skills and addressing other business management needs

Consultant

Siemens Enterprise Communications

· Managed mid to large-sized private accounts in one of the 
  world's leading companies for telecommunication solutions 
  and services- customer acquisition, consulting and 
  development 
· Conducted market and data based analysis to create 
  potential sales leads, identified accounts with highest 
  potential (ABC analysis), designed acquisition strategy via 
  direct marketing tools and executed that strategy leading to 
  a new customer acquisition quota of 18%- recognized as top 
  of the class acquisition quota
· Provided economic analysis regarding prospective 
  investments using efficiency, return on investment and 
  amortization measures
· Designed and executed mid and long-term migration and 
  growing paths with existing customers

Sales Manager

Siemens

18 months of full-time training in Commercial, Marketing, Reporting and Controlling, Performance, Sales and Strategic Change Management
· Sales Management: Developed and implemented a tailored 
  user friendly Customer Development Plan enabling the 
  consolidation of organization, reporting and selling tools for 
  account managers
· Commercial Management and Efficiency: Extrapolated a 
  Key Performance Indicator set for operational excellence 
  figures in one of Siemens' business fields, thus establishing 
  a tailored reporting and business review structure
· Project Management and Efficiency: Interacted with cross-
  functional project teams to identify deficiencies and evaluate 
  gaps in the project execution process. Defined specific 
  action plans to close these gaps guaranteeing substantial 
  improvements in the entire process and enhancing value 
  chain profitability
· Reporting and Controlling onsite; Generated and 
  consolidated financial reports and key financial measures for 
  all countries of the Andean region, Latin America, four month 
  period

Certified Industrial Management Apprentice

Serial entrepreneur and B2B sales enthusiast with a great passion for people development, sales and tennis. 

Started my career in the IT/Telco business at Siemens AG, where I fell in love with and started working in tech sales. Following my entrepreneurial urge, pursued an MBA in the US specializing in entrepreneurship. Having started 4 tech companies in the US and Germany since then, I have always been in the role of chief salesperson and managing director building heavily customer focused and sales driven organizations. 

In those roles I have learned that there is a severe lack of sales talent in the market - making both sales hiring and effectively scaling sales teams extremely challenging. This experience has culminated in the start of hyrise in 2021 allowing me to combine my passion for sales, entrepreneurship and people development. 

hyrise is now building the next generation of sales talent for tech companies via two pillars. 

Pillar 1: We grow the pool of qualified salespeople by placing talent from all walks of life based on their soft skills and effectively training them on-the-job afterwards. 
Pillar 2: We upskill existing sales teams by continuously training them in their day-to-day using an innovative pedagogy based on individual 1-on-1 training.

Feel free to reach out anytime.

💰 Current AE salary benchmarks for Germany

125.000€

That's the average OTE salary for Senior AEs (2–5 years experience) in Germany for 2025.

Here’s how the numbers break down:

Junior AE (1–2 years):
86.000€ OTE (58.000€ base)

Senior AE (2–5 years):
125.000€ OTE (75.000€ base)

Senior+ AE (5+ years):
200.000€ OTE (100.000€ base)

 → Top earners make up to 300k OTE (mostly in Enterprise)

To attract top talent, a 75k+ base with a strong commission upside is no longer a nice-to-have – it’s a requirement.

Disclaimer to the source: This is based on a meta-analysis and real data from our work with >200 SaaS companies in Germany (from early stage to public).

Want the full salary report for AE and SDR roles?

🙋‍♂️ Comment below
and connect with me – I’ll send it over via DM.
___

p.s. You are hiring AEs, SDRs or Leadership?

Send me a quick message.

Dominic Blank

🏗 Helping companies hire and train great sales talent I 🔥 Passionate sales entrepreneur I 🎙️Podcast host Sales Expressed

🤔 “Balance” sounds nice. But often it's a myth.

What works for me: extreme clarity.

6 weeks ago, my second daughter was born.

Since then, my calendar has felt like a battlefield.

Founder. Co-CEO. Partner. Friend. Dad of two.
Oh – and someone who needs sports and tennis to stay sane.

If I want to keep showing up in all those roles - there’s only one way:

⚡ Discipline and focus.

Discipline means:
6am deep work blocks
9pm gym sessions
Even when my body battery tells me no.

Focus means:
Saying no to anything that’s not essential.
Even if it looks great on paper.
Something I still have to improve on tbh. 

There’s this quote I once read.

Randi Zuckerberg called it the “Entrepreneur’s Dilemma”:
"Work, Sleep, Family, Fitness or Friends. Pick three."

For me?
Core friends are family.

So I go with:
Work. Family. Fitness.

And I remind myself:
Clarity beats balance.

What’s your version of “three”?

🤯 "No mothers", "only German names", "nobody over ..."

These are real hiring criteria we've heard.

Not from a decade ago.
From this year.

Shared with us by hiring partners who wanted help finding “top sales talent”

Some worried about productivity.
Some about “culture fit”.
Others about how a name might “look” to customers.

Let me be clear:
❌ That’s not a world I want to build at hyrise.

I’ve hired mothers who outperformed everyone on the team.
Because they plan ahead.
Because they know what it means to show up, even on tough days.

I’ve hired talent with diverse names.
Has Ali Shokravy experienced lower open rates because of his name?
Yes.
But he’s adapted, iterated, and double-downed on his strength.

So let me ask this:

What kind of teams do we want to build?
And what kind of society do we ACCEPT living in?

Non-parenting, young Germans is just NOT the answer I want to accept.

Hiring isn’t just about who closes best.
It’s about who we become as a company.

Curious to hear your take.

Where do you draw the line?

🚫 Good reps don't do follow ups 


You are in a disco or demo with a prospect. 

With a couple of minutes left, they thank your for the great meeting and tell you that they will now discuss internally and get back to you asap. 

Next week passes.
Nothing.
Silence. 

😞 


You have left the drivers seat,
relinquished control and probably find yourself sending value-free follow-up mails to get back on track. 

Awful. 
For you, your prospect, everyone. 

There is a simple yet extremely effective method to stay in control and not having to follow-up.

✅ Always set the next meeting. 

As the last agenda item of every disco or demo, make it a routine to ask your prospect to open up their calendar to schedule the next meeting slot.

You can say something like: 
"Knowing how fast our calendars fill up, let's find a date / time for our next meeting to discuss next steps after your internal discussion. This will also save us time in coordinating a meeting later on."

✅ If your prospect is seriously interested and perceive the value, they will always commit.
❌ If they don't, disqualify and don't invest any more time. 

For some, directly asking for the next meeting may feel like imposing when your prospect is about to hang up. 
Really no reason to feel this way. 
They will appreciate your professionalism. 

"I wish our reps secured commitment this way" is what a CRO responded to me asking him to open up his cal just this last week. 

Up your sales game and don't send unnecessary follow-ups.
Always close the next meeting. 

Especially relevant if your Q4 is the most critical quarter of all. 

Are you setting meetings or still doing follow ups? 😉

🪴 Building a great place to work

As entrepreneur I have found "building a great culture" to be the hardest thing to do - and the easiest one to loose.

When my cofounders Alvaro Rojas, Michael Land and I started hyrise, we didn't just want to launch any company.

We wanted to build a company we ourselves would love to work in. 

A culture of trust, empowerment, alignment and mission identification. 
A great culture with great people.

Every few months, we run an anonymous pulse survey.
 
This time, we got our highest score ever.

Two results I’m especially proud of:
⭐ 9.3/10 – “I’d recommend hyrise as a great place to work”
 📈 4.9/5 – “I understand how my work contributes to the company’s goals”

The feedback shows:
Our key initiatives are paying off

–> Each person has a clearly defined job mission
–> We plan in 6-week NCT cycles (Narrative, Commitments, Tasks)
–> We are radically transparent about goals, strategy, and performance

That doesn’t mean we’re perfect.
It means that we’re getting something right.
It just means we’re getting better.

Happy about the direction we’re heading.
Even happier about the team we’re building along the way.

What are parts of your company culture you don't want to miss?

😮‍💨  I experienced it again:
The phone is just unbeatable.

Even or especially for me as MD. 

Context:

Had a first meeting with a senior revenue leader months ago.
Good conversation.
But timing wasn’t right.

So we agreed to reconnect 3 months later.
When the time came, I reached out.

Emails.
LinkedIn.
Silence.

In the day-to-day hustle of being an entrepreneur and MD, my calling blockers have admittedly become rarer.

This time I did what we should all do more of:
I picked up the phone.

He didn’t just answer.
He told me he had left the company.
And joined a new one.

A high-growth scaleup.
With even more need for what we do.
 
We booked a meeting for this Thursday.
Turns out they have a need in recruiting new and training existing reps.

One call → One meeting → Right buyer → Better fit.

2 minutes and one initiative to call made all the difference. 

💡 (Cold) calling is far from dead.

It works - especially when you're not expecting it.

When was the last time you picked up the phone?

❌  Nobody ever learned sales.

There’s no degree. 
No vocational track. 
No standardized curriculum.

That’s exactly why skill (and quota) gaps in teams are massive.
And why so many companies scale inefficiently. 

Some reps got great managers.
Some had luck with mentors.
❌  Most had neither.

So why do we still argue training?

If there’s no formal path, the workplace becomes the school.
And without a school, you get randomness.
Randomness kills consistency.
And it's consistency that brings quota.

What “training” is not:
 – Two days of slides
 – Shadow a top rep and hope
 – Product videos

✅ What training is: deliberate practice honed by continuous, expert feedback that transfers to live conversations.

If nobody learns sales in school, arguing training at work makes no sense.
You either build the system or you bet on luck.

That applies to newbie SDRs just as much as to senior Leadership.

How do you go about training your (revenue) talent?

🤯 You just got promoted to VP Sales. 
Now, here's everything about to go wrong.

You’re excited. 
You bring your experience, your GTM playbook, your 100-day plan.

But then it hits.

You realize:
 → You don’t fully understand the product.
 → The ICP isn’t what you thought it was.
 → The founder team has different expectations.
 → You’re hiring too early.
 → You have acted way too fast. 

That’s what happened to Frederik Messmer joining doctorly for his first role as VP.

For this episode of Sales Expressed we talk about his learnings:

1. Don’t rush your 100-day plan.
Take time to absorb. Be a sponge. No quick fixes without the full picture.

2. Don’t back down at the first pushback.
You were hired to challenge. Stand your ground to founders / CXO.

3. Don’t mistake early hires for momentum.
Take time to understand who it really takes.

And most importantly:
You need to shift from “What do I close this quarter?” to 
“What needs to be true in 12 months to hit the next milestone?”

Highly recommended episode not only for all those transitioning from TL to Head of or Head of to VP but anyone in first leadership role. 

Thanks for sharing your experience and unfiltered truth so openly Frederik Messmer. All topics around leadership are extremely close to my heart so I absolutely loved this one!

What were your key learnings when stepping into your first leadership role?

___

🎧 Links to the full episode in the comments (Spotify, Apple, Amazon, Youtube)

You’re promised a top-performing team.
What you get is a mess.

Here’s how great sales leaders handle it.

Rainer Mayer - leading sales teams at Salesforce, Juni and DeepL - shared a situation where he joined as sales leader to take over a “well-functioning” SDR team.
 
What he walked into?

No structure
No clear goals
Empty pipeline
Reps promised AE promotions that would never come

Instead of quitting, he owned the chaos.

Here’s what he did in the first 90 days:

🟢 Step 1: Reset expectations with his own leadership

 “False advertising happened. Now I need your full trust and freedom to rebuild.”

🟢 Step 2: Earn trust from the team, fast

 He sat down with every single rep.
 Asked about their “why”.
 Understood their frustrations.
 And showed he was on their side – but with new rules.

🟢 Step 3: Lay a foundation for real performance

Built an Outbound Playbook from scratch
Defined ICPs & buyer personas
Aligned career paths with real milestones
Created enablement sessions weekly
Made best practices and prospecting wins visible

All while still onboarding himself.

Very fitting quote: “It wasn’t my fault. But it was my responsibility.”

🎧 Tune into the full Sales Expressed episode, links in the comments.

Great lesson on leadership Rainer Mayer so many revenue leader out there can surely identify with. Happy to have you on board as trainer sharing those lessons with our customers. 

Curious to hear what you Kira vom Hagen Christoph Karger Frederik Messmer think about this one 😉 

—

Have you ever taken over a team that was nothing like what you were promised?

Let’s hear your story 👇

🤔 Your new hires failed because they weren’t good enough?
Wrong. You failed them.

Hiring great revenue talent is just 50% of the job.
And it’s the easier half.

The harder part?
Helping them succeed after they join.

Applicable to both junior and senior talent.

Here’s why so many promising reps fail within months:

❌ No ramped targets or week specific expectations
❌ No clarity on their ICP
❌ No working talk tracks or discovery frameworks shared
❌ No feedback on tactics: calls, messages, structure
❌ No best practice sharing internally
❌ Intransparent or frequently changing comp plan
❌ Vague book of business

You can't give them a black box and expect gold in return.

The old "hire great people and results will come" mindset?
Outdated.

Modern GTM motions are too complex.
Product, ICP, tools, buyer landscape – it’s all too specific.

You don’t need to lower your hiring bar.
✅  But you do need to raise your enablement standards.

And no – that doesn’t mean product knowledge alone.

It means deep immersion in your ICP.
It means real, tactical feedback – early and often.

If your reps fail, don’t look at their CV first.
Look at your onboarding playbook.

Any best practices you can share from yours?

___

p.s. it's for that exact reason that every talent we place - from SDR to VP - receives role specific enablement ranging from highly structured to peer based coaching

🤔 The fastest way to build trust in a dysfunctional team?

Don’t talk KPIs.
Don’t push for quick wins.

Talk why.

When Rainer Mayer took over a supposedly “well-functioning” SDR team, he found a mess:

No structure.
No direction.
No results.

So he didn’t start with process.
He started with people.

He sat down with every single rep and asked one question:
👉 Why are you here?

Not for the company.
Not for the product.
For themselves.

He wanted to understand what truly drives them.

And then?

He showed that he’s on their side.

Not blindly.
But with clear expectations and action plans.

Here’s what happened:
✅ Not a single rep left the team
✅ Morale improved instantly
✅ Performance followed

💡 The full Sales Expressed episode is a blueprint for sales leaders taking over chaotic teams:
– How to reset expectations with your own leadership
– How to earn trust from reps without being “soft”
– How to lay a clean foundation in the first 90 days
– And how to do it all while still onboarding yourself

🎧 Links to full episode on your favorite streaming platform in the comments 

What’s your go-to move to build trust in a new team?

🤔  “Our reps need to be trained in closing.”

I hear this from sales leaders after every bad quarter.

Low win rate.
Deals slipping.
 “Let’s fix closing.”

Hard truth: in 9/10 cases, closing isn’t the problem.

Discovery is.
Value selling is.

If the pain isn’t understood and quantified, there’s nothing to “close.”
If the value isn’t clear at business and personal level, there’s no urgency.

Closing is a consequence, not a skill block.

✅  What to do instead:

Lead with depth, not "telling" demos.
Uncover the current state in numbers.
Who is hurt. How often. By how much.

Quantify the negative impact.
Revenue at risk. Time wasted. Risk carried.
Anchor it to metrics leadership cares about.

Co-create (!) the desired future state.
Define success in their words.
Tie it to business outcomes and a personal win.

Map decision dynamics early.
Who decides. Who blocks. Who benefits.
What must be true to move.

Then, and only then, ask for commitment.
It won’t feel like “closing.”
It will feel like the next logical step.

A mini-framework for your next disco:
Pain → Proof → Person → Prize → Plan.

Pain: specific problem in numbers.
Proof: evidence it’s real (data, stories).
Person: who owns it and why it matters to them.
Prize: quantified upside and risk removed.
Plan: agreed next step with date and owner.

When discovery is deep and value is felt, closing happens naturally.

Where do your deals actually stall?

👀 Looking for an (Enterprise) Account Executive in Berlin or Barcelona (Hybrid)

Experienced role in a fast-growing SaaS tech scale-up

💰 𝗦𝗮𝗹𝗮𝗿𝘆: DE: 80–140k OTE (Associate–Senior) / ES: 70–120k OTE (Associate–Senior), 50/50 split
🎯 𝗥𝗼𝗹𝗲: Own the full sales cycle in DACH with BDR support. Drive new market expansion. Work with top brands’ marketing & tech teams. Shape the team and sales processes
🌟 𝗣𝗲𝗿𝗸𝘀: Flexible hybrid setup. Workation: 180 days EU, 30 days outside EU. International team (40+ nationalities). Strong onboarding & ongoing training
✅ 𝗥𝗲𝗾𝘂𝗶𝗿𝗲𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁𝘀: C2 German. C1 English. 3–5 years B2B sales experience in SaaS or tech. Proactive mindset. Technical understanding. Ready for intensive onboarding

📥 Interested or know someone? Tag them or DM me!

👊 Skills > Degrees 

In some professions, degrees make sense. 

Sales is NOT one of them.

In Sales it's all about "jobs to be done" and skills. 
Hard (e.g. outbound, discovery) and soft (e.g. growth mindset, motivation) skills.

Why hiring for Skills > Degrees: 

1. Faster Impact: Skills translate directly to performance. Degrees don’t guarantee practical expertise.

2. More Diversity: Skills-based hiring opens the door to a broader talent pool with unique perspectives.

3. Adaptability: It's the right mindset that adapts best to change. And there is a ton of change in startups and scale-ups.

4. Cost-Effective: Focused training is more efficient than assuming a degree equals competence.

At hyrise we see so many companies losing great candidates because of strict degree requirements they have chosen as proxy for competence. 

Often because in reality they are not clear about "jobs to be done". 

Time to challenge the norm! 💫

What's your take?

Yes, you have enablement.
But no – that doesn’t mean your teams are getting better.

Here's what I hear in almost every meeting with revenue leaders:
"We already have enablement."

What that usually means:
👉 A one (wo)man show or small internal team
👉 Mostly content-driven ("internal academy")
👉 Heavily focused on product training and general soft skills
👉 If there’s sales-specific content, it’s usually videos that quota pressured reps don't watch 

And when reps do watch them?

Zero impact.

Because videos don’t build skills.
Doing does.

Especially doing with (corrective) feedback.
In a day-to-day context.
Continuously. 

Exactly what most enablement teams don’t have capacity for.
And what one-off workshops can’t deliver.

No enablement bashing at all - there are lots of enablement leaders and teams I know doing a terrific job given the resources they have.

So yes – you may have enablement.
But you rarely have sales skill (and KPI) improvement.

What's your experience?

🤔 Your sales process = your competitive advantage?

I'm deeply convinced that it's not the best product that wins deals.
It's the best sales that wins.

Explicitely, the best buying experience your prospects have.

Example:

For inbound leads, our rule is simple:
Follow up as fast as possible - ideally within 5 minutes, minimum within 30 minutes.
After that, conversion rates drop drastically.

Last week, one of our SDRs called a new lead within 3 minutes.
He asked about their goal, what they have already tried, offered help sharing a value heavy whitepaper and booked a follow-up meeting.

At 3 p.m. the same day, another inbound lead came in - referred by the first one.

Turns out, the first prospect was so impressed by the interaction that he recommended us to a sales leader friend looking for both training as well as new reps.

It wasn’t just the speed.
It was the tone.
The genuine intent to help.

Same applies to your reps going deeper in discovery uncovering true buying motives, quantifying value and impact.

A great buying experience can be your biggest competitive advantage.

💡 And it’s 100% within your control.

Make sure every prospect walks away thinking:
 “This was different.”

The basics still matter most:
 ✅ Timely follow-ups
 ✅ Professional and friendly tone
 ✅ Curiosity instead of scripts
 ✅ Helpful instead of salesy
 ✅ Consultative instead of informative

It’s shocking how many companies still drop the ball on these fundamentals.

Train your reps well.

What do you do to make your sales experience your USP?

p.s. Stephan Jantz looking forward to our podcast episode on the topic 🤓

🔎 On the hunt for top sales talent?

Meet three standout hyrise heroes below👇
Say hello to Sarim, Gerrit and Lars!

Curious to learn more about them?

Or looking for sales talent with a unique background?

Feel free to DM me.

taplio

Dominic Blank's Linkedin Analytics

Dominic Blank

Performance ScoreDominic Blank's LinkedIn Performance

What is Dominic talking about?

Dominic Blank's Best Posts (last 30 days)

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

taplio

.css-6ytdur{background-image:linear-gradient(284deg, rgba(39, 43, 72, 1) 0%, rgba(33, 47, 183, 1) 100%);color:transparent;-webkit-background-clip:text;background-clip:text;}Dominic Blank's Linkedin Analytics

Dominic Blank

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Dominic Blank's LinkedIn Performance

What is Dominic talking about?

Dominic Blank's Best Posts .css-1emoo84{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:400;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);}(last 30 days)

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

Dominic Blank's Linkedin Analytics

Performance ScoreDominic Blank's LinkedIn Performance

Dominic Blank's Best Posts (last 30 days)