“It’s easy for me to trust my team and give them space to make their own decisions” — The Espresso with Jack Griffiths

Sanaa Siddiqui

15 August 2024•3 min read

What’s it like to work at 9fin? We ran a quick-fire round with some of our employees (9finners) in this interview series. Their answers were punchy, powerful — and just like a shot of espresso in the morning ☕

In this interview you’ll hear from our Head of European Sales, Jack Griffiths, on initiative at a scale-up, sales team culture, and being a huge history nerd.

Hi Jack. Firstly, what does the sales team do?

In short: finding prospective clients, pitching to them, and signing them up. This involves:

Finding people who might want to use the service
Hooking them in, whether that’s tempting them with content from our insights page, or speaking to our network
Getting in front of the right people — we’re selling to a small niche so this is key
Pitching the product. It’s hard to get our potential clients in one place and get them looking at what we want to sell them, we want to make sure our pitch is really impactful
Navigating the client from wanting the product to buying the product

There’s a lot of preconceptions around sales team culture at high-growth scale-ups — what makes our team different?

I’d like to say we’re not as self-interested — there’s a level of respect and autonomy within the team.

The team doesn’t have any activity key performance indicators (KPIs), such as how many calls they should make, or meetings they need to book each day. That’s atypical to what you’d see at other sales teams, and fosters a healthy environment.

This also informs my role as a manager — if people are performing well, then it’s easy for me to trust my team, step back, and give them the space to make their own decisions.

“Having the initiative to say ‘I’m going to take this problem and find a solution’ when senior management have a lot on their plates is really important.”

Describe your team in three words.

Hungry. Driven. Cooperative.

What made you decide to join 9fin?

I first heard of 9fin in 2019. I was working for a big competitor at the time. We lost a head-to-head sales process to 9fin, which was at the time a tiny company no-one had ever heard of before.

To me, as a salesperson, that signalled a huge opportunity — to be at a company that had no clients, with a great product: that’s the perfect storm.

I met with Steven (co-founder and CEO) through a series of startup-y interviews — I remember sitting in my car, in the dark, for my first phone interview, because my flat had no phone signal. My second interview was in a pub.

The rest is history; it seemed like a great match from the off.

What’s the one thing you’d tell people about 9fin that they can’t guess through the website?

We’ve gone from 12 people in 2020 to over 200 people this year, we’ve doubled revenue year-on-year — the rapidity with which we’ve established ourselves might not be obvious through the website.

What makes people successful?

Having the initiative to say ‘I’m going to take this problem and find a solution’ when senior management have a lot on their plates is really important.

No-one will be looking over your shoulders to make sure you’re doing the work — you need to have the drive to do the work yourself in order to succeed.

Can you share your biggest achievement so far?

I’m really pleased with the sales team’s progress — both in terms of the level of competence but also the culture that we’ve built and maintained over the years.

“We want people who are thoughtful, targeted and sophisticated in their outreach … You need to be able to understand who you’re speaking to and what they need.”

What do you geek out over?

I’m a huge nerd. I geek out over quizzes, I love politics and geography. Also history — I listen to a lot of podcasts, like The Rest Is History. I’ve also listened to Mike Duncan’s 180 episodes on the history of Rome two or three times now.

What advice would you give someone who wants to join your team?

We want people who are thoughtful, targeted and sophisticated in their outreach.

Regardless of how you do it, outreach is hard and takes a lot of time, but in this industry you can’t just adopt a single approach and shoot over the same three unique selling points (USPs) to a hundred prospects a day, because you’ll quickly burn through all the strong leads.

You need to be able to curate your outreach, understand who you’re speaking to and what they need. Plus it’s quite niche, so you need to be able to throw yourself into the work and learn as much as possible about our clients.