What is Revenue Squared?
Revenue Squared was born from a simple but pointed mission: to remove the stigma attached to the sales profession in Spain. The country has long treated salespeople as a punchline, the annoying caller interrupting your lunch, the pushy rep who does not care whether the product actually helps you. Luis Enrique and his co-founders Iván Landa Baso and Jorge Bestart saw things differently.
In B2B tech, and especially in SaaS, salespeople are the strikers. They score the goals. They earn the Ballon d'Or. In Silicon Valley over the past two to three decades, the highest salaries at tech companies have not gone to engineers. They have gone to the best B2B salespeople. Revenue Squared exists to make that reality visible in Spain and to connect the people who live it.
The sales profession was almost demonized in Spain. That person who calls you on a Saturday afternoon during siesta, always a nuisance. We wanted to put it on the pedestal it deserves.
Luis Enrique Blast Barba, Co-founder, Revenue Squared
The community started as a WhatsApp group, moved quickly to Slack, and grew through a combination of curated content, live events, peer-to-peer learning channels and a rigorous entry process: every member goes through an individual interview. No exceptions. Nearly 500 people have made it through. Hundreds more have been turned away.
~500 Members, all individually interviewed
300 Person waitlist built in weeks with zero paid marketing
100% Organic growth across all three years
Why Nova acquired it, and why Revenue Squared said yes
Nova has always been horizontal by design, connecting exceptional people across functions and geographies. But as the network crossed 25,000 members, a gap became increasingly clear: for the network to deliver real value, it needs to also work vertically. A sales professional does not just want to meet interesting people in general. They want to meet other strong salespeople who understand their problems and can actually help.
Revenue Squared had built exactly that, in one of the most underserved professional communities in Spain. The fit was obvious to both sides.
From Revenue Squared's perspective, the timing was also right. Jorge had moved to a director of sales role at Harvee. Iván was deep in his VC work at JME. Luis Enrique was finishing his MBA. The community they had built with genuine love was at risk of not getting the attention it deserved if left running as a part-time project between three people with other priorities.
Revenue Squared is our baby. We have seen companies founded through it, deals closed that seemed impossible, people promoted because of a course they took. We did not want to hand it to just anyone. We wanted someone who would really care for it.
Luis Enrique Blast Barba
The synergies Luis Enrique kept coming back to: Nova's Gravity matching engine mirrors Revenue Squared's coffee roulette feature. Nova runs events in multiple cities that Revenue Squared members could access. Nova has the international reach that Revenue Squared members have been asking about for years. An Italian member once asked Luis Enrique why there was no Revenue Squared in Italy. Now there might be.
What changes, and what stays the same
The integration will be gradual and deliberate. Revenue Squared will not be dissolved into Nova. The brand, the culture and the community identity stay. The Slack channels, the events format (Revenue Talks and Drinks regularly draws over 150 people), the workshops, the academy content, all of it continues as before.
What changes over time: Revenue Squared members gain access to Nova's broader network, events and features. Gravity matchmaking replaces the coffee roulette. And the longer-term ambition is to take the Revenue Squared model to more geographies where Nova already has presence, building vertical go-to-market communities in new markets.
The framing Luis Enrique uses is a bubble inside a larger network. You are Revenue Squared. You are also Nova. And being both opens up a world that neither offered alone.
The biggest myths about sales careers
With the acquisition context set, Luis Enrique and Ramón spend the rest of the conversation going deep on B2B sales. It starts with the myth that does the most damage.
You do not have to be extroverted
The idea that salespeople are born, not made, that some people just have the gift, is wrong and actively harmful. Luis Enrique has seen physicists, engineers, biologists and an archaeologist become outstanding salespeople. Personality type is almost irrelevant. What actually determines success in sales:
What actually matters in sales (not personality)
- Persistence: the willingness to keep going through the no's
- Intrinsic motivation: caring about the outcome, not just the commission
- Coachability: the ability to recognize and correct your own mistakes
- Active listening: letting the client talk, understanding their real problem before pitching
- Honesty: telling a client when your product is not the right fit, so they trust you when it is
The best salespeople I know are not the loudest people in the room. They are the ones who listen the most. When a salesperson tells you honestly that their product is not right for you, in that moment they stop being a salesperson and become a trusted advisor.
Luis Enrique Blast Barba
The follow-up failure
The single most costly mistake in B2B sales is also the most avoidable. Over 75% of salespeople stop after two or three touches. The vast majority of deals close between the fifth and eighth touch. The math is brutal: most salespeople are voluntarily cutting themselves off from most of their potential pipeline simply because they do not want to seem annoying.
The word annoying is the problem. Persistence is not the same as pestering. Sending a thoughtful follow-up on day seven is not pestering. Giving up after two emails because you assumed silence meant no is just lost revenue.
The standard structure at a SaaS company is 50% base, 50% variable if you hit 100% of quota. That variable is called the OTE (on-target earnings). At startups, typical quotas run at 8 to 10 times the base salary. At large corporates, it can reach 20 times. The outlier Luis Enrique mentions: Eleven Labs, reportedly running 20x quota, but with a product distinctive enough that the math makes sense.
The SDR role is the hardest in the entire career ladder, not the easiest. You are cold calling every day, getting rejected constantly, and doing it again tomorrow. It tests whether you are actually willing to pay the price that a career in sales requires. Most people who cannot make it through SDR learn that early. Most people who can, go on to do very well.
How to cold call effectively
The effectiveness of cold calling depends on two variables. Only one of them is in your control.
Not in your control
- What percentage of people pick up
- Whether today is a good day for them
- Whether they are already working with a competitor
- Internal politics you cannot see (e.g. founders invested in rival products)
In your control
- How many calls you make (volume)
- How well you open and listen (quality)
- Whether you call back after no answer (persistence)
- How honestly you qualify and disqualify opportunities
On the opening: there is no single best opener. Some people use a permission-based approach ("I have 15 seconds, want to hear why I'm calling?"). Luis Enrique's personal preference was no opener at all, just a natural conversation. The point is not to follow a script. It is to sound like a human. And if you miss your own introduction, just improvise. Naturalness is sometimes rewarded more than polish.
The deeper lesson Luis Enrique draws from his time as an SDR: qualifying out is as important as qualifying in. Chasing a deal that will never close (he spent months on Factorial before learning their founders were invested in a competitor) is time you cannot spend on deals that will. The no that stings the most is often the one that teaches you the most about where to focus next.
When to hire your first salesperson as a founder
Ramón, who leads much of Nova's B2B sales himself, puts the question directly: when does a founder stop being the main salesperson?
Luis Enrique's answer is specific. Two conditions have to be true before you hire:
- Clear product-market fit with paying customers who stay. Not meetings for the sake of meetings. Actual closed deals, low churn, customers who are glad they bought. If those things are not true yet, adding a salesperson burns money and demoralizes the hire.
- The founder has no spare hours left for sales. If the bottleneck is time, not product, it is time to hire. If it is product, fix the product first.
The recommended first hire is an Account Executive, not an SDR. An AE can take over closing conversations while the founder stays involved in pipeline. Once the AE is running, adding an SDR to generate more pipeline makes sense. Going SDR first leaves a pipeline problem: plenty of meetings, no one to close them.
A founder never fully stops selling. Mark Benioff still sits down with the biggest accounts. What changes is the proportion of time. You sell less often, but on bigger and more important deals. The rest of the time you are helping the team sell.
Ramón Rodrigáñez
Takeaways from this episode
- Nova has acquired Revenue Squared, Spain's leading go-to-market community, in its first ever inorganic growth move
- Revenue Squared will stay Revenue Squared. The integration is gradual, brand and culture intact, with Nova features added over time
- You do not have to be extroverted to excel in sales. Persistence, coachability, listening and honesty matter far more than personality type
- Over 75% of salespeople stop after two or three touches. Most deals close between the fifth and eighth. Following up is the single highest-leverage habit in sales
- The SDR role is the hardest in the sales career ladder, not the easiest. It tests whether you are willing to do the work
- Six-figure earnings for strong Account Executives at large tech companies typically arrive within two to three years, and senior salespeople at SaaS companies can earn more than their CEOs
- Hire your first salesperson when you have product-market fit, low churn, and no free hours left for sales. Start with an AE, not an SDR
- Qualifying out is as important as qualifying in. The no that hurts most is often the one that realigns your entire approach to time and pipeline
Revenue Squared · Now part of Nova
The go-to-market community for the best sales professionals in Europe.
Revenue Squared is Spain's most rigorous B2B sales community, now growing internationally as part of the Nova network. If you work in go-to-market and want to be around people who will genuinely help you close more, learn faster and go further, this is where to start.
