Our December newsletter is packed with advice for sales leaders planning their 2025 strategy! 🎁 Inside this edition: 📈 A comprehensive guide to building your first sales comp plan with insights from Liz Christo and Graham D. Collins (QuotaPath) 💰 Real-world answers to founders' top sales compensation questions 🤓 Exclusive access to our Sales Productivity Calculator from LP Brent Holloway 🎯 Plus, fresh fundraising tips for 2025 featuring wisdom from Foundry, Insight, Redpoint, and Threshold partners. + 80 open roles at Stage 2 Portfolio Companies. Take a peek!
Stage 2 Capital
Venture Capital and Private Equity Principals
The venture capital fund led and backed by elite go-to-market professionals
About us
Stage 2 Capital is a venture capital firm that invests in early stage B2B software companies and sits shoulder to shoulder with leadership teams to operationalize sustainable revenue growth and sales operations. Backed by top go-to-market professionals from leading tech companies, Stage 2 Capital leverages its deep sales expertise to help entrepreneurs scale their businesses in addition to providing capital.
- Website
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http://www.stage2.capital
External link for Stage 2 Capital
- Industry
- Venture Capital and Private Equity Principals
- Company size
- 2-10 employees
- Headquarters
- Virtual
- Type
- Partnership
- Founded
- 2018
- Specialties
- Sales, Marketing, Customer Success, B2B Software, Venture Capital, Go-to-market, Scaling, Growth, Revenue, Acceleration, Strategy, Sales process, Repeatable Sales, Efficiency, Capital, and Investing
Locations
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Primary
Get directions
Virtual, US
Employees at Stage 2 Capital
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Ray Rike
Enabling B2B SaaS companies to make better metrics-informed and benchmark-validated decisions using our industry benchmarks, primary research…
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Paul McGhee
Accelerating Field Productivity | Revenue Enablement
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Andy Jolls
C-Level Marketing Executive & Advisor | B2B SaaS | AI Enthusiast & Practitioner
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Suresh Khanna
Rolling out AI Call Answering Agents for Small Businesses at Smith.ai. Co-founder/board member at Pieces and Kasa Indian. Early-stage advisor and…
Updates
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Founders—how do you design a sales comp plan that motivates your team and drives company goals? This week on Inside Catalyst, Liz (Cain) Christo Partner at Stage 2 Capital and Graham D. Collins of QuotaPath shared how to build sales comp plans that align teams and fuel growth. Key takeaways: 💰 Keep It Simple: If your team can’t explain it, it won’t work. 🎯 Align with Strategy: Design comp plans after setting business goals. 🚀 Reward High Performers: Use accelerators to motivate top reps. This one is full of tactical goodness. Read the full article here: https://lnkd.in/gwie5H_J
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During a recent Stage 2 Capital Catalyst session, we tackled founders’ biggest questions about sales comp plans, from setting quotas to avoiding common pitfalls. This week’s #DearStage2 covers the highlights: 🔑 Keep It Simple: Focus on 1-2 key metrics. If reps can’t understand how they’re paid, the plan won’t work. 📊 Quota Ratios Matter: Use a 3-5x OTE-to-quota ratio to balance risk and reward. ⚖️ Stay Aligned: Try hybrid payouts—half at booking, half at collection—for motivation and cash flow management. Read the full breakdown on Dear Stage 2: https://lnkd.in/gV43tr-h What’s your top tip for sales comp success? Liz (Cain) Christo, Sean Po
Top Founder Questions About Sales Comp Plans—Answered
dearstage2.com
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Stage 2 LP, Toby Carrington shares his thoughts on the impact #AI is having on GTM organizations in his recent #Forbes article. 👇 💡
Chief Business Officer at Seismic | Limited Partner at Stage 2 Capital | Board Advisor
The use cases for #generativeAI continue to multiply. We are quickly moving beyond co-pilots assisting humans to agents performing entire tasks autonomously. A challenge I posed yesterday to our team that you should also be asking: Rather than looking at a process and asking how AI can assist a human at each step, which steps can be replaced with AI entirely? And from there, how does AI help the human at each remaining step? We see industries like customer service, help desks and so forth transformed where AI handles lower level support cases completely autonomously. An example from our own product - we have quickly evolved from generative AI search which saves minutes to creating entire content and training assets which saves hours or even days. A key topic for consideration is making sure that you don't just take your current process and iterate on them with generative AI. Take a look at how the platforms and technology available to you can allow you to do things in a completely different way. If this agentic AI can do most of the steps you used to do but in a different way, you don't need those steps anymore. The ability for GTM teams to think more broadly and stay on top of AI literacy is going to allow you to redefine the way you do operations. I dig into this a bit more in my latest article published on #Forbes.
How Can AI Redefine Operations For GTM Organizations?
social-www.forbes.com
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📣 NEW RESOURCE ALERT: Sales Productivity Calculator 🤓 📈 Struggling to scale your sales team efficiently? We're sharing a new calculator to help founders optimize their sales strategy - developed by Stage 2 LP Brent Holloway of SaaS Sales Advisors. In our latest article, Brent breaks down: * Why unit economics are the bridge between Product-Market Fit and Go-to-Market Fit * Key metrics every founder needs to master * Real-world examples of how small improvements compound into major productivity gains Plus, get access to the Sales Productivity Calculator - a practical tool to help you: ✓ Model deals needed per rep to hit quota ✓ Optimize win rates and deal sizes ✓ Understand sales cycle impact on attainment Read the full article and access the calculator here: https://lnkd.in/gCAGx2aM
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🎓 Congratulations to the 2024 Catalyst Graduates! This year’s founders took on big challenges and refined their go-to-market strategies, all while driving real time results and making meaningful connections across the Stage 2 Capital community. A huge thank you also to our incredible Catalyst LPs who made this journey possible. Through expert-led sessions, candid fireside chats, and hands-on mentoring, they helped founders navigate the toughest parts of scaling. Special thanks to those who shared their time and expertise during the Catalyst Curriculum Firesides, including: 💡 Gregg Scoresby, Jessica Gilmartin, Kirsten Newbold-Knipp, Nate Skinner, Rachael Nemeth, Skylar Talley and Steve Cornwell The partnership between founders, LPs, and portfolio companies is what makes Stage 2 Capital Catalyst truly one of a kind. Want to learn how these founders leveled up? Follow along with our #InsideCatalyst series, where we share key lessons and frameworks from the program—including defining Product-Market Fit, building go-to-market playbooks + more. Read more: https://lnkd.in/gzVAdXCG #venturecapital #vc #funding #gtm Aldoa, American AI Logistics, Champion, Curated For You, DayZero, Haize Labs, Korl, Nickel, Restoke.ai, TrackFly, Upwell, Wizerr AI, WingWork
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ICYM!
Last week, we discussed the complexities of equity, stock, and options with experts Liz (Cain) Christo from Stage 2 Capital and Peter Walker from Carta over a webinar by Women in Sales and QuotaPath. I pulled two of my favorite quotes but you can watch the full recording below. 1. This v. important reminder from Liz to treat equity different from cash: "Equity is not the same as cash. It's a bet on the future value of the company, and it comes with risks and potential rewards." We covered essential topics like: • Negotiating equity during job interviews • Making informed decisions when leaving a company • Navigating equity during an IPO 2. Peter also shared this 💎 about questions to ask while interviewing: "When evaluating an equity offer, you're trying to figure out what the company is worth. You can ask questions about the valuation and the last round of capital raised. You can ask about the cap table and shares outstanding, and what percent of the company you own. You can ask about the cash position, the growth rate, and the churn. But, it's still hard to know whether you're making a good bet. I would ask questions about the people that you trust in the company that you're going to work for and how they think about their own equity." #EquityEducation #StartupCompensation #FinancialLiteracy
Equity 101: Understand What Equity, Stock, and Options Really Are
airmeet.com
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🔎 What does it really take to raise a Series B in today’s tough market? We asked top investors Jaclyn Freeman Hester (Foundry), Rachel Geller (Insight Partners), Sai Senthilkumar (Redpoint), and Lisa Xu (Threshold Ventures) what they’re looking for when evaluating Series B companies. Their answers were both candid and tactical. It’s not just about hitting growth numbers anymore. Investors are doubling down on: ✅ Founder strength: Can you scale a team and adapt through challenges? ✅ Strategic storytelling: Are you showing more than just metrics—like customer proof and operational efficiency? ✅ Consistency in metrics: Is your growth backed by solid retention and scalable sales? If Series B is on your radar, read this week’s Dear Stage 2 to see how you can position yourself to succeed. Check it out here: https://lnkd.in/gQyAviKN What other trends are you seeing in the current Series B landscape? Drop your thoughts in the comments! #venture #seriesb #VC #dearstage2, Liz (Cain) Christo
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"Embrace the uncertainty. Don't let it cripple you. Let it fuel you." Encouraging advice from one of our Stage 2 Capital #Catalyst founders on the startup journey. Check out Adam Loewentheil's full founder story and how Aldoa is transforming environmental consulting with software that modernizes and simplifies legacy systems. https://lnkd.in/g8ws-qBC #entrepreneurship #startups #founderjourney #productmarketfit
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Stage 2 Capital reposted this
Co-Founder @ Stage 2 Capital, Prof @HarvardHBS; Founding CRO @HubSpot; Author of Best Seller "The Sales Acceleration Formula"
How should you structure your Customer Success team? Should you specialize roles or keep them generalized? This decision has profound implications for your startup’s go-to-market strategy—and there’s no one-size-fits-all answer. In my latest blog post, I unpack a framework to guide this decision based on the unique context of your business. A few key takeaways: 1️⃣ Avoid the “inappropriate cut and paste.” Just because specialization worked at another company doesn’t mean it’s right for you. Start by analyzing your startup’s specific needs, like the complexity of expansions and the percentage of lifetime value captured in the initial sale. 2️⃣ Understand the hidden risks of specialization. While dividing roles may optimize individual tasks (like setting appointments or managing renewals), it often leads to "local maximums"—where each role operates in silos rather than maximizing overall revenue production. 3️⃣ Compensation drives behavior. If you specialize, minimize potential negative implications by designing comp plans to align team incentives with customer lifetime value, not just individual metrics. For example, split AE commissions: part at signing, part when customers achieve leading indicators of retention (LIR). This compensates sales on short term behavior with an alignment on customer lifetime value. 👉 Read the full blog post: https://lnkd.in/e2bnPh6D
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