Selling is hard! Especially in B2B. And it has not always been sexy. But next to product, it is maybe the most crucial ingredient to make a SaaS company fly and make or break its success. Having worked with more than 50 SaaS founders, we have learned how hard it is to build a successful go-to-market team – from Growth and Marketing to Sales and Customer Success.

Why? Because most advice founders receive on sales comes from people (..VCs) who haven’t actually done it themselves. How often did we hear “just hire a VP Sales”, “get a good recruiter” or “you should get the sales playbook of company xyz and apply it”. This is usually the starting point of rather high-level advice: While there are certainly a few great playbooks and best practices to learn from, each SaaS company needs to find its own DNA on how to scale. It is often exactly that secret sauce of finding the right ICP and the GTM strategy to match it that makes outlier SaaS companies unique.

Building Sales and Go-to-Market successfully is not just one-hour advice – it is a craft that takes operational time and deep involvement. But first and foremost, Deep commitment, passion, and attention to detail. Getting it right from the beginning makes all the difference.

Johann has exactly the background to help make that difference. He brings more than two decades of experience driving sales and growth within some of the most category-defining SaaS businesses globally. As Slack’s SVP of Sales, Johann led its go-to-market team in EMEA and has been in charge of Slack’s commercial success in the region while the company’s revenue scaled from the early beginnings to well over USD 1bn. Before that, Johann was Head of EMEA at Dropbox. He grew the team from 5 to 250 people, taking full responsibility for the EMEA go-to-market strategy, driving the local business to several hundred million USD. Before that, Johann was at Google, where his responsibilities included running Google’s AdSense division in EMEA, a business with more than USD 1bn revenue in EMEA alone. Johann spent the early parts of his career in the US, where he founded and sold two SaaS companies.

 “Johann’s go to market experience is unique and unparalleled in SaaS. We already had the pleasure to work with Johann over the past few years on several boards: His hands on attitude to serve as a ‘co-entrepreneur’ for founders helping them build and navigate their marketing and sales strategies has deeply impressed us and been a game changer to many of our portfolio companies. We thus couldn’t be more excited to have Johann on board at Visionaries” says Robert Lacher, Founding Partner of Visionaries Club.

“Johann is a crucial support not just in building our sales strategy but as the best sparring partner and devil’s advocate and thinker you can wish for. As one of the members of our Board he is always there for me to call and he provides quick and very direct feedback” says Benedikt Sauter, Co-Founder and CEO of Xentral .

“Visionaries has built a very new, unique entrepreneurial approach to venture capital. I got to know Robert and the Visionaries team through the Boards of several companies. The help that they provide to their portfolio companies really sets them apart. To have a local fund able to provide that level of support to early stage companies is a critical contribution to the maturation of Europe’s SaaS ecosystem. I am excited to be part of it” says Johann.

Johann Butting will join Visionaries as a Partner giving our portfolio companies a unique advantage in building their sales and go-to-market strategies.

Welcome to the Visionaries Family, Johann!