Blog
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Jan 14, 2025
Future Salesforce Teams Should Look Like Brex
There are 3 reasons Brex is taking the right approach when it comes to investing in Salesforce and it all starts with their ability to invest in the strategy layer of the team before the build layer.
Founded in 2017, Brex is a FinTech & SaaS startup with ~1,100 employees and combined Sales / Support org of 300+ Reps.
Today, the Go-to-Market Systems team consists of 10 FTEs, which is roughly on par with companies at their scale and potentially even slightly undersized in comparison. But it's the composition of this team that is particularly unique - one that has been built to function more like a traditional Product org than an Internal Tools team.
At FoundHQ, we firmly believe that as AI capabilities continue to evolve, the vast majority of companies will need to restructure their entire GTM Systems team as a result of project delivery costs sharply decreasing. It will fundamentally tip the scale from delivery being the bottleneck to strategy being the bottleneck.
Brex's team building approach can serve as a good model to where things are headed.
Biggest Takeaways:
50% of Brex's Salesforce team is Product Managers - 5 / 10 people.
A good Salesforce Product Manager is objectively the most valuable function on any team.
They proactively advise stakeholders; design solutions like an Architect; and help craft an overall product roadmap.
Brex invested in the strategy layer of the Salesforce team before the build layer.
They didn't hire internal Admins / Engineers until Q4'24 (the 8th, 9th, and 10th hires on the team)
At this point, they had a structured roadmap in place to build against vs. tackling ad hoc requests
Brex understands cost-efficient hiring strategies.
Onshore Team = All 5 Product Managers; CRM Systems Manager; Head of Business Systems
Nearshore Team (Brazil) = 2 Salesforce Admins; Salesforce Developer
GTM Systems Team Breakdown
A quick snapshot of the current team at Brex - for more comprehensive insights, check out the Brex Profile within our Salesforce Org Library.
Head of Business Systems (Joined April 2024)
GTM Systems Engineering Manager (Joined November 2019, Hire #1)
(5) GTM Systems Product Managers
(2) Salesforce Administrators (Joined November 2024, Based in Brazil)
Salesforce Engineer (Joined November 2024, Based in Brazil)
The Product Manager Layer
Product Managers are one of the more versatile roles on a GTM Systems team with their importance likely to grow exponentially with AI.
As AI increases Admin & Developer productivity, strategy becomes the bottleneck. It’s about figuring out what to build and designing best-in-class solutions instead of spending the majority of time and resources on the actual build process.
For any Salesforce team to effectively establish a long-term product roadmap and proactively serve the business, they need a strong PM layer embedded within each critical business unit. Ideally, each Product Manager on the team brings a distinct competency and is aligned to the team they are uniquely qualified to advise.
This is the exact approach at Brex:
PM focused on GTM Systems Architecture, including the surrounding ecosystem of tools: CPQ, Chili Piper, Ironclad, ZoomInfo, Monday etc.
PM coming from 4 years as a Salesforce Admin at Amazon, more tactical in nature within the team while still flexing into BA and PM duties.
PM who is Former Head of a Salesforce CoE and Business Systems Architect at Shopify, bringing strengths around architecture, integrations, and governance.
PM from a Support Ops and Zendesk Admin background to lead CX Tooling.
PM from Sales & Marketing Tech Manager role, bridging the design gap across all GTM teams.
How AI Is Changing GTM Systems Teams
It's becoming increasingly clear that AI will fundamentally shift how companies approach building GTM Systems & Internal Tools infrastructure.
The future of AI + SaaS isn’t going to be teams of Admins & Developers configuring an out-of-the-box Salesforce CRM instance.
Ultimately, it's going to be companies layering lightweight, team specific, custom applications directly on their dataset - eventually adding AI Agents that sit on top of your data warehouse.
And this approach will require significantly more product strategy to get right. It won't be a world where Admins & Developers deploy a feature at a time. It will be Product Managers embedded within specific business units looking at the big picture and driving real innovation around internal product development.
This will be a result of both the capabilities AI can deliver and the cost of project delivery decreasing substantially thanks to productivity gains from AI. Teams will be able to ship more, faster.
In general, this type of proactive, advisory approach from the Salesforce team is how teams should already be working today. But the reality today is that the build process requires a lot of resources and often takes a long time on bigger initiatives - so, this is where resources are allocated and even if there were enough Product Managers in place, delivery capacity becomes a bottleneck unless you have unlimited budget.
In short, you can get away with a lighter Product Management layer when build takes so long.
But when the time between deployments is cut in half, this doesn’t work. The lack of PMs to drive continuous innovation will lead to strategy becoming the blocker and companies without this critical layer in place will inevitably (and quickly) fall behind.
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