Why the Salesforce Team Foundation Matters: Lessons from Canva

You simply can’t overstate the importance of laying the right foundation for your GTM Systems team.

Too many companies today are building these teams without adequate planning. Bogged down and laser focused on the immediate needs, they hire for roles that fill near-term gaps with zero view into the future.

During the early stages of team growth, companies have a lot of initial build and third party integrations to setup. So the hiring focus is inevitably on Admins & Developers to execute that work

But there are a range of issues caused by this “build first, plan later” approach.

Some are easy to spot and quantity as they arise.

For example, introducing a lot of new features with imperfect solutions design and little-to-no documentation will result in bugs, deployment bottlenecks, usability challenges, and increased support requests.

The biggest challenges are more difficult to quantify and result more from how the Salesforce team is perceived and the value they are equipped to deliver.

GTM Systems Hiring Timeline at Canva

In 2024, Canva surpassed $2B ARR with a Sales org nearing 300 Rep — the fastest growing team in the business.

This is a company that didn’t even focus on Enterprise Sales until early 2020, sitting at ~$125m ARR at the time.

The Salesforce team that has developed over the last couple years reveals the challenges of scaling GTM Systems in high-growth settings.

In the context of Canva, it represents the difficulty of evolving from PLG to Enterprise Sales and the changes needed from GTM Systems.

• PLG requires a more Marketing & Analytics centric approach to GTM Systems

• Enterprise Sales is much more workflow & feature heavy

But the lessons learned from Canva apply more broadly, regardless of whether it’s a move from PLG to Enterprise Sales.

Every company needs their GTM Systems & Internal Tools stack to mature with the business, which requires skilled practitioners that can not only deliver work but also plan, strategize, and advise on the long-term roadmap.

Early 2020 ($500M ARR)

This was the GTM Systems team at Canva all the way through mid-2021:

• Head of B2B Sales Systems

• 2 Salesforce Developers

The next 3 hires were purely tactical, including 2 Salesforce Admins and 1 Developer.

Finally, in December 2021, they hired a GTM Systems Product Manager, adding a critical layer needed to liaise with stakeholders, begin formulating the details of a roadmap, and properly design the features being deployed.

Even with this addition, the number of execution-focused hires far outweighed strategic roles, which leads to a range of problems:

• It inevitably creates a build-first mentality because you have idle team members only capable of building

• Stakeholders dictate requests because there is nobody to advise them and propose solutions more strategically

• The output is one-off features and short-term fixes rather than scalable solutions

Ongoing Hiring Patterns

Over the past 2 years, the Salesforce team has seen substantial growth, expanding from 5 people to 20 people today.

And while some of the gaps have been addressed in that recent hiring spree - adding a few Business Analysts and a Salesforce Architect - the overwhelming majority of hires has continued to skew heavily toward tacticians.

It’s been a conscious decision to double down on the initial hiring strategy, which is a common path taken even when companies know their Salesforce team isn’t optimally designed. We dig into why this occurs in the concluding section below.