{"id":487,"date":"2025-03-07T13:04:15","date_gmt":"2025-03-07T14:04:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.hudsonpcrepair.com\/?p=487"},"modified":"2025-03-15T18:15:58","modified_gmt":"2025-03-15T18:15:58","slug":"how-levelset-scaled-to-25m-arr-then-sold-for-500m","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.hudsonpcrepair.com\/index.php\/2025\/03\/07\/how-levelset-scaled-to-25m-arr-then-sold-for-500m\/","title":{"rendered":"How Levelset scaled to $25M ARR, then sold for $500M"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hello and welcome to The GTM Newsletter by GTMnow <\/strong>\u2013 read by 50,000+ to scale their companies and careers. GTMnow shares insight around the go-to-market strategies responsible for explosive company growth. GTMnow highlights the strategies, along with the stories from the top 1% of GTM executives, VCs, and founders behind these strategies and companies.<\/em><\/p>\n

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Former Levelset CRO Martin Roth\u00a0takes us behind the scenes of scaling a company from $0 to over $25 million ARR and a successful exit to Procore. One shift unlocked $500k per month in expansion revenue. They also had no sales playbook for 5 years, then had a $500M exit.<\/p>\n

The early days<\/h2>\n

When Martin joined Levelset (formerly ZLien) in 2012, the company was a far cry from the high-growth SaaS business it would eventually become. At the time, it was a side business for its founder\u2014a bootstrapped, transactional platform helping contractors file construction liens online.<\/p>\n

Martin himself wasn\u2019t the obvious choice for a sales leadership role. At just 23 years old, he had already experienced the highs and lows of entrepreneurship. His first startup\u2014a consumer product company focused on group gifting\u2014never gained enough traction, leaving him scrambling for work. In the months before joining Levelset, he was pedicabbing in New Orleans\u2019 French Quarter and selling insurance, trying to find his next step.<\/p>\n

His introduction to Levelset was pure chance. While selling health insurance, he mistakenly assumed that the company was much larger than it was and attempted to pitch the founder. Instead of a policy, the founder offered him something unexpected: a job building out Levelset\u2019s sales motion from scratch.<\/p>\n

Building a sales organization from the ground up<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Like many early-stage startups, Levelset didn\u2019t start with a well-oiled sales machine. There was no structured playbook, no hiring blueprint, and certainly no quota capacity planning. In those early years, Martin was carrying a bag himself, closing deals while figuring out enterprise sales on the fly.<\/p>\n

For the first five years, the company lacked a formal sales playbook.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf I could do it again, knowing what I know now, I know we could go faster.\u201d<\/em><\/div>\n

In 2018, everything changed. Martin led the charge in implementing a structured sales process, shifting from an instinct-driven approach to a disciplined, repeatable system. He embraced what he now calls \u201cmicro-coaching\u201d\u2014getting deep into the details of each deal, guiding reps through every stage, and ensuring full compliance with their new playbook.<\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t about controlling reps. It was about eliminating inefficiencies and ensuring consistency in execution.<\/p>\n

\u201cI used to think you just hire good people and let them do their thing. That\u2019s a mistake. Great leaders get in the weeds\u2014they listen to calls, they review pipeline deal by deal, and they coach relentlessly.\u201d<\/em><\/div>\n

This shift set the stage for Levelset\u2019s next phase of growth.<\/p>\n

Related resource: <\/em>How Outreach Scaled from $0 to $230M ARR<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

$1M to $10M ARR: The grind <\/strong><\/h3>\n

Scaling from $1M to $10M ARR was one of the hardest phases of Levelset\u2019s journey and a process that took nearly six years.<\/p>\n

\u201cZero to one is really hard. One to ten is really hard. Ten to twenty\u2014they\u2019re all different versions of hard.\u201d<\/em><\/div>\n

One of the biggest unlocks came when Martin and Levelset\u2019s VP of Customer Success (CS) recognized a massive gap in their revenue strategy: they weren\u2019t monetizing their existing customers effectively.<\/p>\n

At the time, expansion and upsell were handled by the CS team, whose primary focus was retention and customer success, not sales. The result? Expansion revenue was trickling in at just $30,000 per month, a fraction of what it should have been.<\/p>\n

The fix: moving upsell and expansion to a dedicated sales team.<\/p>\n

Within six months, Levelset\u2019s monthly upsell revenue exploded from $30,000 to $500,000.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe took a traditional account management role, turned it into a true sales function, gave them quotas, comped them like salespeople, and built a structured playbook. That single change drove a half-million in new revenue every month.\u201d<\/em><\/div>\n

Beyond upsell, hiring decisions during this period were driven by top-down demand modeling and bottom-up capacity planning.<\/p>\n

Related resource<\/em>: <\/em><\/strong>How Asana & Calendly Scaled Their PLG to SLG Motion<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

$10 to $20M ARR: Navigating it and a $500M exit<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Just as Levelset was hitting its stride in early 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic threw everything into uncertainty.<\/p>\n

The company had just raised a $30M Series C at the end of 2019 and was aggressively hiring. On March 16, 2020, two days after lockdowns began, a class of 14 new reps was supposed to start onboarding in person. Instead, the company slammed the brakes.<\/p>\n

But as the construction industry proved resilient, Levelset was able to re-accelerate hiring in 2021, refining its sales processes and scaling its upsell motion even further.<\/p>\n

The result? By the time Levelset was acquired by Procore for $500M, they had:<\/p>\n