Today I’m excited to announce that Armen Zildjian has joined Drift as our VP of Sales.
Armen comes to us from Dyn where he was VP of US Commercial Sales, and over the course of his 20+ year career in SaaS, he has also served as VP of Sales at GrabCad, and VP of Sales and Marketing for EMEA at LogMeIn.
There are many reason why I’m excited about having Armen on board as our sales leader, but there are three things that stood out and ultimately led to our decision to join forces at Drift:
His background. Armen has 20+ years of international software sales and sales leadership experience, and he’s helped take multiple businesses from zero to scale: LogMeIn (IPO), GrabCad (acquired by Stratasys), Dyn (acquired by Oracle).
He knows what it takes in the beginning, managing early stage sales teams with little structure and process, all way through international expansion, millions in revenue, and a global sales team.
He’s our buyer. As VP of Sales, Armen is exactly who we are serving at Drift when it comes to generating more leads, helping sales teams book more meetings, close deals faster, and ultimately be more efficient.
Here’s something Armen said to us last week to give you a better idea:
“In 2006 at LogMeIn we (sales and marketing) would sit around and argue about funnel optimization and the quality of our leads. And 10 years later at Dyn we were talking about the exact same things. The current infrastructure for supporting and managing the sales and marketing funnel doesn’t work, and that’s exactly why I’m so excited about Drift.”
Armen and the sales team at Drift are an amazing internal customer for us and give us the opportunity to have a firsthand look at the challenges that our customers face every single day.
He’s one of us. Armen is hungry, scrappy, customer-driven, and stands for everything that we believe in at Drift.
This is something that Elias and I said to each other multiple times while meeting with Armen, and I was reminded of it last week at our company kickoff up in Vermont when Armen cooked dinner for the entire team on our last night — a full week before his official start date.
In 2016 we doubled our team and grew our customer base by 50x, and I can’t wait to see what we can do with Armen with us in 2017.
Please join us in welcoming Armen to the team at Drift.