How to Build a Sales Machine | Max Freeman, Ramp

Why Ramp pays bankers 2x and demands four times the output, how to recruit sellers the way Billy Beane drafts players, and the one question that proves a buyer is real. Sales, Max Freeman argues, is an engineering problem before it's a people problem.

With Max Freeman

"There are some sellers at RAMP that are on 15 plus calls in a given day." — Max Freeman

Max Freeman, on the episode

Max Freeman is the SVP of Sales at Ramp, and he built its early go-to-market team almost from scratch. The pop framing of a sales leader is someone who hires hungry closers and motivates them with a leaderboard. The actual operating system Freeman runs is closer to a talent arbitrage and recruiting discipline: find mispriced sellers before the market reprices them, pay for brutal output instead of average effort, and treat the whole go-to-market function as a system you engineer rather than a vibe you manage. He talks about recruiting bankers into sales roles, finding sellers at companies with bad product reviews but huge growth numbers, and building internal software to do the research a seller used to do by hand. This protocol pulls the tactics from that conversation that a founder or sales leader can actually use before their next hire or their next qualifying call.