7 GTM Lessons from Building ChargeLab to $20M ARR Without a Sales Team

7 GTM Lessons from Building ChargeLab to $20M ARR Without a Sales Team

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Zak Lefevre, CEO of ChargeLab, revealed how he scaled a sales engagement platform to $20 million in ARR by breaking nearly every rule in the B2B SaaS playbook. His approach challenges fundamental assumptions about when to hire, how to grow, and what metrics actually matter.

Lesson 1: Delay Hiring Sales Until You’ve Mastered the Motion Yourself

The pressure to hire salespeople early is intense. Investors want to see a “scalable” go-to-market motion. Advisors push founders to bring on experienced reps. Zak ignored all of it.

“We didn’t have any sales team for a while. It was really just me,” Zak explains. “I was doing all the sales and closing deals myself, and we had some customer success people that were helping out.” This wasn’t a stopgap measure—it was a multi-year strategy that lasted until the company achieved significant scale.

The logic was counterintuitive but sound. Early salespeople become a filter between founders and customers, slowing down learning exactly when speed matters most. “If we bring on salespeople, they’re just going to be another layer between us and the customer, and we’re going to learn slower,” Zak recalls. “So let’s just keep doing it ourselves until we really feel like we have it nailed.”

By the time ChargeLab finally built a sales team, they had something invaluable: a completely proven playbook. They knew which messaging worked, which objections appeared, and exactly how to overcome them. New reps could execute immediately instead of spending months figuring out what worked through expensive experimentation.

Lesson 2: Prioritize Talent Density Over Headcount

Most scaling playbooks emphasize hiring fast. Hit your revenue target, then hire more people to hit the next one. Zak took the opposite approach, obsessing over quality rather than quantity.

“I’m a big believer in talent density,” he states. “I’d rather have one person who’s really excellent than three people who are mediocre.” This philosophy extended across the entire organization, not just sales and engineering.

The benefits went beyond just doing more with less. Smaller teams of exceptional people make decisions faster, communicate more effectively, and adapt more quickly to market feedback. They don’t get bogged down in the coordination overhead that plagues larger organizations. For a company trying to learn and iterate quickly, this velocity advantage compounds over time.

Lesson 3: Build Distribution Infrastructure Before Building Sales Infrastructure

While competitors invested in account executives and sales development reps, ChargeLab invested in something different: systematic distribution channels that would drive inbound demand at scale.

“We spent a lot of time and energy building really good integrations with Salesforce, with HubSpot, with all these different systems,” Zak says. These weren’t basic integrations—they were deep, native-feeling experiences that made ChargeLab appear as a natural extension of tools customers already used.

The integration strategy created a powerful flywheel. When prospects searched for solutions within these ecosystems, ChargeLab appeared as a recommended option. This positioning dramatically reduced customer acquisition costs while improving conversion rates, since buyers were discovering the product in contexts where they already had high intent.

Lesson 4: Let Customer Success Drive Growth Before Sales Does

Most B2B companies treat customer success as a retention function. Zak treated it as a growth engine.

“We had some customer success people that were helping out, and they were really good at upselling and cross-selling,” he explains. The team wasn’t just preventing churn—they were actively expanding revenue within existing accounts, often more efficiently than traditional sales could acquire new logos.

This approach created unusual but powerful unit economics. Instead of the typical pattern where CAC spikes during growth phases, ChargeLab maintained relatively low acquisition costs while building an increasingly valuable customer base through expansion. The customers they did acquire became more valuable over time, creating a compounding effect that pure new logo acquisition can’t match.

Lesson 5: Build for Technical Buyers, Not Just Economic Buyers

A critical insight shaped ChargeLab’s entire product and GTM strategy: sales engagement software had evolved from a simple tool into a platform purchase evaluated by technical stakeholders.

“The people buying our product are often quite technical,” Zak notes. “They want to see APIs, they want to understand integrations, they want to build custom workflows.” This realization fundamentally changed how ChargeLab approached product development and marketing.

Instead of focusing exclusively on ROI calculators and executive-level case studies, ChargeLab invested heavily in technical documentation, robust APIs, and developer resources. “We have a pretty good API, so people can build their own stuff on top of it,” Zak explains. This openness attracted technical buyers and created additional distribution through partner-built solutions.

Lesson 6: Question Whether Conventional Wisdom Applies to Your Specific Situation

Every successful company gets advice on what they should do next. Hire faster. Expand the team. Build out sales. Zak’s key insight was recognizing when conventional wisdom didn’t apply to ChargeLab’s specific context.

The decision to delay building a sales team only made sense because of ChargeLab’s specific circumstances: strong inbound demand from integrations, effective customer success-driven expansion, and a founder who was willing and able to handle sales himself. For a different company with different dynamics, hiring sales early might be exactly right.

The lesson isn’t to copy ChargeLab’s specific tactics—it’s to carefully evaluate whether the standard playbook makes sense for your unique situation. Sometimes the fastest path to scale looks nothing like what worked for other companies.

Lesson 7: Optimize for Learning Speed, Not Just Revenue Growth

Perhaps the most important lesson from ChargeLab’s journey is the focus on learning velocity over pure revenue velocity in the early stages. “If we bring on salespeople, they’re just going to be another layer between us and the customer, and we’re going to learn slower,” Zak emphasizes.

This learning-first approach meant ChargeLab moved slower initially but avoided expensive mistakes that would have cost far more time and money to unwind later. By the time they did scale, every dollar invested went toward proven tactics and channels, creating much more efficient growth than trial-and-error scaling.

The companies that win don’t just grow fast—they learn fast. Sometimes those two goals align, but when they conflict, optimizing for learning creates a stronger foundation for eventual scale.