This case is built on our conversation with Brain Station Founder Raisul Kabir and is part of our case library. This particular case is part of the organization design sequence.
From 2006 to 2012, Brain Station 23 had zero dedicated sales staff. Raisul Kabir, Founder and CEO of Brain Station, ran the entire sales operation personally. Around 2012-2013, the company decided it needed to build a sales operation and made its first sales hires.
However, the hires didn't work. Deals weren't closing at the rate the company needed. Raisul and Mizanur Rahman, now CTO of Brain Station, kept ending up back in the room themselves, doing the selling that the new hires were supposed to be doing.
His (Raisul Kabir) diagnosis, in hindsight, wasn't about hiring the wrong people. It was that nobody at the company understood what sales actually required as a discipline.
Raisul tells Future Startup: “From 2006 to 2012, we didn’t have any dedicated sales or marketing staff. I handled all sales and marketing myself. Around 2012/2013, we began onboarding our first sales personnel.
As we started building out sales operations, I observed a basic difference between sales and marketing. In short, sales involves generating an opportunity and then closing that opportunity. But in reality, sales is a science that doesn't work the way most of us intuitively think. For instance, you must gain the customer's respect to close meaningful sales. We didn’t know much about this science of sales. (We neither had the necessary processes and systems in place to help new sales hires perform better)
Consequently, even after hiring sales staff around 2012 or 2013, we found out it wasn’t working out. Rather, Mizan or I still had to do the sales ourselves.”
The company didn't have this knowledge internally. There was no playbook to hand to a new hire. So a new hire, however capable, was starting from the same blind spot Raisul himself had.
The actual fix was a different kind of hire entirely. Raisul says: “Then we brought Ferdous Bhai as a partner. Ferdous bhai had good relations and a reputation in the industry. He knew people in places. As I mentioned, sales has a science, which can feel like an art, almost like magic, until you break it down and see the details. When you break it down, you understand the science behind it. But we didn't know any better.
So, Ferdous Bhai joined as a partner, which contributed to a new phase of growth. I, Mizan, and Ferdous Bhai started handling sales and account management.”
MJ Ferdous joined, not as a sales rep, but as a partner. He brought existing relationships and a reputation in the industry, people he already knew in places that mattered, something that a junior or mid-level sales hire structurally couldn't:
After he joined, sales and account management were split three ways between Raisul, Mizan, and Ferdous.
The company tried to address a capability gap by hiring junior headcount for a role that nobody senior fully understood. It didn't work twice. First, with the unspecified earlier sales hires, and second, implicitly with how long it took before anyone identified the actual mechanism.
Finally, bringing someone who already possessed the relational capital the company lacked, at a seniority level matched to the size of the gap, solved the bottleneck for the company.
It also helped solve the company’s structural challenge in building a sales operation. On the one hand, it brought in someone who fills an important gap in terms of expertise. At the same time, that same hire helps the company eventually build out the processes and structures for an eventual sales operation so that when someone new comes in, they know what their job is.
Primary source for this case: The Quiet Transformation of Brain Station 23, Part One
This case is part of our organization design sequence.
