E577 | EUVC Summit 2025 | Will Maunder-Taylor, OutboundVC: Sales Talent Over Experience

0:00As Europe's startup landscape intensifies, the search for top sales talent has never been more critical. not just for scaling revenue, but for building culture, resilience, and executional excellence from day one. Will Monder-Taylor stands out as a rare force in this space. A former UK government strategist, Special Forces endurance leader, and CyberSec founder, Will brings an unmatched triangulation of elite interpersonal skills, gritty operational experience, and founder insights to the world of talent building. Across seven different companies, he's repeatedly identified, hired, and coached zero experience talent into top performing salespeople in under 18 months.

0:45Not once, every time. In a world where everyone hires for experience, Will hires for character, leveraging battlefield methods, psychological frameworks, and high-performance coaching to decode what truly makes a driven, coachable, high-output individual. With a lens forged in the worlds of security, sales and startups, Will Maunder-Taylor isn't just finding talent, he's redefining how Europe builds its next generation of commercial leaders. I'm really building off Tom at Seedcamp's talk around talent and using that as a flywheel. And I think against the backdrop of today about how we scale European companies, one of the critical challenges for those selling business to business, business to government, is how they build a reliable sales engine.

1:36And I've enjoyed watching a lot of companies find that a challenge. Because most will try and find expensive salespeople from big names who've been proven before, but they churn really quickly. They have really high commission expectations and they're hard to attract for a smaller name. And so something that really excites me is giving talented people a chance to shine and build companies. So if we take a mind away from munching grass as a herd of sheep and instead look on the horizon, I'd like to talk through a couple of examples and then make this a really tactical session on how we can give our founders the confidence to do that.

2:15So back in 2014, Darktrace, I think will be a name some of you know, and Darktrace is now valued at just over$4 billion. They entered the cyber software market, and they built a whole new area, threat detection. So at the time, you had AI coming through, hackers were innovating, and they had to convince CIOs, heads of IT security, to build a whole new budget for threat detection. So it's not if you're going to get hacked, it's when you're going to get hacked. Darktrace recruited people straight from university. No commercial experience. But in 2015, they were growing at 600 % year-on-year, and they reduced a six-month sales cycle in cyber to 62 days with an inexperienced sales team.

2:57And if you look at the current global head of sales, Katie Newton, she charts a path like many of them. So she joined straight after university. In two years, she was a commercial director. But at 24, she was head of sales for the whole of Europe. And at 29, she took over global head of sales. and she's still there today. Pepper Wise left Bristol University, went into the marketing team within one year, was an account exec, within three years, commercial director, and aged 29, she's VP sales for Multiverse, which, for those who know the numbers, probably top three fastest growing companies in Europe in the last couple of years.

3:32But it's not just in tech we see this, and I think a unicorn of the football world, for those who enjoy football, is the story of Leicester City Football Club. So for those who don't follow football, it's one of the big underdog stories. So in 2008, they were relegated to the third division in the UK, playing on pub football pitches. 2010, they were bought. And then in 2011, the owners made the decision to hire Steve Walsh as head of recruitment. And Steve believed in talent. And over the next few years, they decided to compete with the big players, the big teams, in the areas they're weakest in.

4:12So they focused on talent scouts, and they spent more on talent scouts than any other team in the game. They looked at the lower leagues, the unknown football teams, and they didn't hire for ego or for people who'd been validated at big names. They went for character, and they looked for four things. Hunger, drive, work ethos, and humility. Some of that based on data, like how far they ran on the pitch. and they hired a team for 25 million which was less than a single player on some of their competitors and in 2016 against 5 000 to 1 odds they won the premiership championship and they believed in talent and mindset over character and i'd love to move on to how we can help our founders once they've got the confidence to look for talent find it so i see four key things when we're looking for a salesperson.

5:09The first one is intelligence. So probably seven or eight different types of intelligence. But the one I'm talking about is the ability to speak to a stakeholder at a customer and change your value proposition for your startup based on what they care about. And you can test that simply in the interview process. The second is EQ, the emotional quotient, and that discovery mindset. Do they ask questions? Are they likeable? Can they build rapport? Because customers of our company selling B2B or B2G, they sell to who they like. The third one is drive and motivation, because a good salesperson will work hard.

5:50And this is easily tested in interview processes. Has that candidate done something outside of work to a high level they haven't been paid to do? Sports, academia, charity, hobbies, music. What have they done outside of work? And when you start looking at these lead indicators, as a senior leader in a startup, you can really start to attract good talent and not pay big money for it. And the fourth one is coachability. And this is something I just don't see in interview processes, especially in the UK, where we're not straight talking. I think in Israel and Holland, they'll probably give quite direct feedback, but not in the UK.

6:29Can we coach these people? Have they got humility? Are they low ego? And I think in any interview process, if we're not sharing our true concerns about the individual, we're not giving them direct feedback, and then expecting them to take it on board and show it at the next phase, how can you test them? And I think if our founders and our leaders, when they're building these sales teams, look at those four things, you can really start to get some impressive talent in. I was working with an IOT and SAS name. They sold into the healthcare industry and they were looking to scale. And we tested this and we got a young lady called Meg.

7:08And Meg came in having got a first-in-law from Trinity in Dublin. She competed for Ireland with national sports and she'd worked in media, booking up hotels for celebrities. That was the only experience she had. Within 18 months, she was selling three times as much as the head of healthcare sales, who'd been in the game for 30 years. Because she hit the lead indicators and hit the behaviours. She was hitting four new business meetings every week. She was doing about 80 outbound calls a week. And often with sales, B2B, B2G, it starts with these simple things. And I think the blocker to founders not doing it is they don't have the confidence.

7:47And hey, we all know you don't get fired for hiring McKinsey. I think the same applies in the sales world. And the last thing I'd say is, how do you get the most out of a sales team in our startups and scale-ups? Quite a few people think if you pay someone well, give them a good commission plan, it's their job to sell. But it's not true. And I love the story by Charles Duhigg in Change or Die. There was a research piece done into dieting. Admittedly, I can probably shave a few pounds off. I'm sure Andreas would tell me that most days. And they ran an exercise with people who needed to rapidly change their lifestyle, otherwise they would have severe health complications.

8:31And they had two groups. One group, they gave them a diet plan and a lifestyle plan, and they expected them to enact it. 80 % of people didn't change their life habits and suffered health complications. They ran a control group. and in the control group the outcomes were the reverse 80 percent changed their livelihoods and their diets and their day-to-day habits and had positive outcomes and the only difference was that weekly accountability sessions with the other people that was the only change thing and the same comes to sales teams and the biggest tip i can give to any founder or leadership team or any vc sitting above it is that weekly healthy accountability and drive.

9:17Thank you very much for your time. Enjoy the rest of the day. Before you go, I just want to give a massive shout out to the partners who made the EUVC Summit and awards possible. So please do not tune out. We're partnering with these firms because they're great people with offerings that we know from our friends in the ecosystem are truly world class. First up, I want to give a big thanks to HSBC Innovation Banking. They helped us incept the awards in the very beginning. And truly, they are the leading bank for anyone in European venture. There's a reason why everyone knows them. Google Cloud, they were our venue hosted the summit.

9:51What a team, what a big effort they put on to help us. We're hugely grateful. Make sure to reach out to Arabella or Oksana at the Google Cloud team to hear how they can help you as well as your portfolio. Massive credits goes to them. Ace Alternatives. we have so many friends in the Berlin ecosystem partnered with these guys. Just the best fund ops team around. And as with any good restaurant, where the locals are is also where you get the best service. And now they're expanding across Europe, so they're definitely someone to talk to. Hainspoon, they're longtime partners of ours in both our own legal work.

10:27They're great supporters of us here at EUEC, and I definitely think that they are one of the go-to legal teams to have in your partner. CW Communications, our dear friends who helped us secure CNBC, Bloomberg, Financial Times, and many more for this summer. It's a joy working with Dan and Kathy and the team, Fundcraft, Digiton Native, Full Suite, Lux Headquarter, and a great partner as you grow your firm out of Luxembourg. Definitely a fund admin to consider in your stack. I can only say that the team are incredible to work with. I'm very thankful that I've gotten to know them. I I think they're one of the up and coming fund admins that you want to be thinking about.

11:05Portfolio IQ by Synaptic. You may know them for the Discover tool, which is branded on a Synaptic, but Portfolio IQ is absolutely a product you should know because there's no one that understands intelligence better than this team. And finally, Goodwin. They are a truly world-class legal partner. You can trust. They're hands-on, business-oriented, and expert in everything and anything transatlantic. So those were our partners for the summit and awards. I know this might've been a bit long and boring, but really, if you have these guys on your side, I don't think your firm could be in any better hands.

11:39And also they're helping us do what we're doing every day for you.