Introduction

In the latest episode of The Science of Scaling, host Mark Roberge sits down with Carina Brockl, former Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) of Aurora Solar, to unpack her experiences guiding a rocket-ship company through both meteoric growth and sudden macroeconomic adversity. For sales leaders, founders, and ambitious operators, this episode brims with actionable wisdom about evaluating opportunities, scaling quickly, handling chaos, and leading through difficult pivots.

Apple | Spotify

Diligence and Choosing the Right Sales Leadership Job

Carina begins by offering a strategic framework for evaluating your next sales leadership opportunity—a vital process for anyone eyeing scale-up roles:

• Quantitative Health: Always start with the numbers. Ask about ARR (annual recurring revenue), growth rates, and net dollar retention. But, as Carina points out, be wary of impressive growth percentages, especially when the base is low. These can be deceiving and become exponentially harder to sustain.
• Valuation Matters: Mark highlights the peril of sky-high valuations, especially in hot sectors like AI or SaaS. A massive multiple might seem exciting on paper—but it amps up pressure and can quickly put your equity “underwater” if the market corrects. Instead, aim for a healthy, grounded valuation to set you up for realistic success.

When and How to Move Upstream

Aurora Solar’s journey from selling to smaller customers to courting larger “enterprise” accounts is a classic SaaS evolution. Carina and Mark emphasize:

• Product Readiness: True enterprise sales require not just more features—think security, scalability, workflow integration—but an organizational commitment to integrating customer feedback and iterating quickly.
• Realistic Mindset: Even if you have a couple of big logos, don’t assume you can simply tweak your SMB playbook and expect enterprise success. Instead, re-validate your product-market and go-to-market fit. Don’t rush into high revenue targets until you truly understand the new segment and have repeatable wins.

Professionalizing Chaos: Building Structure at Scale

As Aurora scaled from $20M to over $100M in ARR, Carina’s early focus was on the fundamentals:

• Territory & Comp Structure: Creating a fair, transparent, and simple system for dividing accounts and territories—then communicating it obsessively—eliminated most gripes and gave the sales team clarity and motivation.
• Org Structure & Talent Alignment: Ensuring that roles matched workloads and job descriptions, and that every employee was motivated and “in the right seat,” was key for building a cohesive, driven team.

Surviving Macroeconomic Whiplash

What happens when a sector-wide storm hits? Auroral Solar faced a brutal combination of rising interest rates (which crippled solar financing) and unfavorable policy changes (like California’s NEM 3.0).

• Reacting to Change: The team saw the signs (slowed demand, tougher financing) and took initial steps like a hiring freeze. But Carina admits that the company could have acted more decisively, “always a quarter behind”—a familiar theme for many leaders.
• Managing by Leading Indicators: Mark underscores the importance of managing from leading, not lagging, indicators—watching pipeline, sales activities, and early pipeline health to spot trouble before the topline numbers crater.

Leading Through Layoffs—With Humanity

When layoffs became unavoidable, Carina’s approach was to:

1. Start with Strategy: Don’t build your org chart around individuals; start with the strategy, then determine the roles and the people needed.
2. Transparent Communication: Leadership was open about the situation, owning up to mistakes and being clear with the team about who was impacted and what came next.
3. Caring for the Team: Recognize that both those departing and those staying behind need empathy, attention, and a renewed sense of purpose.

Reflections and Looking Forward

After years of sprinting in the high-growth, high-stress world of solar SaaS, Carina is currently on a well-earned family break. However, she expresses palpable excitement about the AI wave, likening today’s shift to the transition she witnessed from client-server to SaaS early in her career.

Key Takeaways for Scale Leaders

• Due diligence before joining or investing is non-negotiable; understand the numbers and the story behind the numbers.
• Scaling is never tidy—chaos is part of the process, even for the winners. Structure and transparency are your best tools.
• Don’t underestimate macro risk. React faster; err on the side of decisiveness.
• Lead with empathy when hard times come, but always tie decisions to strategy first.
• Remember to recharge—breaks foster clarity for your next big leap.

Whether you’re a founder, a revenue leader, or an operator hungry to learn from others’ battle scars, this episode is a masterclass in how to navigate the highest highs and the lowest lows of scale-up life.

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Note: The insights shared in this podcast were initially distilled through advanced AI summarization technologies, with subsequent refinements made by the writer and our editorial team to ensure clarity and engagement.

About "The Science of Scaling" Podcast

Every week during a season, host Mark Roberge—co-founder and Managing Director at Stage 2 Capital and a senior lecturer at the Harvard Business School—interviews some of the tech industry's most successful and renowned leaders and managers in the areas of sales growth and Go-to-Market strategy. This is a HubSpot for Startups original podcast, and part of HubSpot's Podcast network. It's available on Apple, Spotify, and anywhere you get podcasts.