We’re excited to introduce you to BurnRate’s Executive Vice President of Revenue, Miles Prowse!
As EVP of Revenue, Miles has the responsibility of building our sales systems to help companies understand what it takes to hit their revenue targets and survive the scaling process. 👊
Title: EVP of Revenue
Location: San Francisco Bay Area and Central CA
Rapid Five Favorites!
I actually purchased BurnRate and was blown away. I had always hated capacity planning because it was never right.
When you’re actually selling and know the capabilities of the sales reps around you, you know whether or not you’re going to hit the number, regardless if your math is right or wrong in a spreadsheet.
BurnRate is the first capacity planning tool that models human capacity, instead of the numbers, and that was a huge selling point for me - that it starts with the people, not the revenue goal.
The culture. It was easy to see in all my conversations with the BurnRate team that everyone takes care of each other and is looking out for one another.
My main focus is learning how to build systems to make our sales people’s lives easier. I’m figuring out how to automate 80% of the team’s job. Of course, I’m focused on who we’re hiring next, but I’m mostly focused on who I’m working with now. I’m excited about working with one of our recent hires, Jonathan, and getting him ramped up, crushing his goals, and doing things he didn’t know he could.
One goal is for Robert to not have to code on the weekends AND to be able to bring his family to Disneyland more often… I’m also working towards getting other companies to see there is something systematically wrong with the way startups capacity plan.
As I do that, I want us to move fast and break things along the way, but not without logic or intention. In many ways, our team is a product too and I want our team product to be successful.
Scaling. This is our game to win to lose. We’re facing the very same challenges as other companies and the companies we’re working with.
I’ve worked for companies where you don’t know what happens in the board room, and there are certain meetings only certain people go to. At this stage, we’re all powering and steering the ship together. My burning desire is for everyone to feel comfortable voicing their opinions and never feel like they are doing the wrong thing for the wrong reason. There is no right way to do the wrong thing.
I studied psychology in college because I thought I wanted to be a therapist. When I decided to go into sales, I realized wow, there’s a lot of psychology in sales.
Miles' career started in sales channel operations before his first inside sales rep job where he found himself crushing his quota by 124% within only a few months. This gave him the opportunity to operate as the team’s sales manager and account executive, providing him with valuable coaching and team development skills. When Miles started working with startups, he realized that many companies and people did not know how to sell, leading him to start his own company, which offered sales teams and operations in a box.
Miles loves data and leveraging data to direct teams. In SaaS sales, he leads with a strategic and customer centric perspective to help turn sales reps into empathetic problem solvers. He stands by the principle that while sales is about knowing and understanding people, the first person you need to know is yourself.
“Because the maximum amount that you can truly understand another human is to the exact minimum degree in which you truly understand yourself. So start by working on understanding who you are and why you are the way you are.”
Miles is known for the many “miles-isms” he shares with his team, another one of them being, “Be careful what you know about people. You’re probably wrong.”
Miles is a graduate of Pepperdine University.
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