Builder.ai India: Scaling a Cloud Sales Operation to $100M ARR
Built the India cloud sales operation from a three-person team into a 40-person organization spanning three cities.
Shivam Singh
Senior Account Executive at DigitalOcean
From their time as
Regional Sales Head - India
Builder.ai • 2020 - 2022
Overview
Shivam joined Builder.ai as an individual contributor managing a handful of large accounts, reporting directly to the CRO in a three-person sales org. After two and a half years in that IC role, he identified that a significant share of the company's business was coming from Bangalore, Mumbai, and Hyderabad, cities where the company had no local presence.
The Story
Shivam joined Builder.ai as an individual contributor managing a handful of large accounts, reporting directly to the CRO in a three-person sales org. After two and a half years in that IC role, he identified that a significant share of the company's business was coming from Bangalore, Mumbai, and Hyderabad, cities where the company had no local presence.
He pitched the CRO on opening a satellite office in one of those cities to serve local customers directly. The CRO took it to the board, and the outcome was a mandate for Shivam to relocate to Bangalore and build the operation himself. He moved cities, hired locally, and stood up the first regional office, assembling a team of BDRs, account managers, a solutions architect, and a customer success manager, with deliberate attention to local language capability for markets across South India.
Within six months, the Bangalore office was generating meaningful revenue and the team had grown to 15 people. He was then asked to extend the model to Mumbai, becoming Regional Sales Head for South and West India with a combined team of 20. When COVID hit, he returned to Gurgaon and was promoted to Regional Sales Head for all of India.
Building the National Team
At the India level, Shivam built a team of 40: BDRs, account managers, customer success representatives, and solution architects, with line managers for the BDR and customer success functions. He carried both a team quota and his own individual quota.
A key inflection in his leadership came when his manager sat him down and told him he needed to learn delegation. He had been running everything himself, which was becoming unmanageable. He restructured how he worked, hired line managers, and built repeatable processes that could scale without him at the center of every decision.
Revenue Outcomes
By the time he left, the India operation was running at $100M ARR. He personally closed two back-to-back enterprise deals totaling over $60M in ARR, achieving 150% of annual revenue target in FY20-21 and 200% in FY21-22.