What I learned building SurveyMonkey's EMEA business from zero to €60M

How I got there

Before Dublin, I spent years at SurveyMonkey in the US. I ran frontline sales teams across SMB, mid-market and enterprise, then took over RevOps, then worked as Chief of Staff to the CRO. A small team of us had built a segmented sales program in the States, and once it was working I was asked to take it international. I moved to Dublin and started EMEA from a clean sheet, and a few years later we added JAPAC.

Start with the users you already have

When I arrived, SurveyMonkey already had a massive base of individual users across Europe. Most of them were on free or self-serve plans, and many worked at the same companies. That was the opportunity. Instead of trying to find new buyers, we looked for companies where lots of employees were already using the product and went to them with a reason to consolidate onto a company plan.

In practice, that meant a few things running together:

• Mine the base. We grouped self-serve users by company domain and prioritised the accounts with the most users, the most paid seats and the most recent activity.
• Enrich with product signals. Usage data told us who the power users were, which teams were active and when an account was growing. Reps went into conversations knowing what the customer was already doing.
• Crawl, walk, run pricing. We made it easy for a company to start small, with one team or one department, and expand later. A small first contract that grows is far better than a big proposal that stalls in procurement.

Build the team around the motion

Because the leads came from product usage, we needed reps who were curious and good at discovery more than reps who were great at cold calling. We also set up the office in Dublin as the EMEA headquarters, which meant hiring locally, working through Irish employment law and GDPR, and building relationships with the local startup and investor community.

What I'd tell a MENA founder today

If you're expanding a product-led SaaS company into the US or Europe, look at your existing users there before you hire anyone. Group them by company, see where usage is concentrated, and start conversations with those accounts first. The key is having the data in your CRM so your team can see it, and pricing that lets a company say yes to something small.