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This bonus episode dives into how Rick Kelley helped scale Meta’s global sales organization (from 900 employees to 90,000) and the playbook behind building high-performing international teams.
Rick Kelley is the former SVP of Gaming and App Monetization Solutions at Meta and Managing Director of Meta Ireland, where he led a $1B+ revenue organization and played a pivotal role in building out Meta’s go-to-market teams across North America and EMEA. Over his 15-year career at Meta, Rick was instrumental in driving international expansion, especially across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa—helping to localize strategy, scale high-performing sales teams, and bring new ad products to market. Today, he advises founders on global GTM execution, sales hiring, and how AI is reshaping the future of commercial organizations.
This is a clip from the full episode with Rick, an inside look at how Meta built its $1B EMEA business and the lessons every GTM leader can apply to scale globally.
Discussed in This Clip:
- The exact framework Rick used to decide which EMEA markets to enter first
- How Meta built a $1B+ regional business from just three salespeople
- The power of centralization in early-stage go-to-market
- Why you should plan every headcount allocation before hiring
- Creating “optionality” in your sales org to weather change
- How gaming became Meta’s fifth global region
- When to localize sales teams versus staying centralized
- Why AI can make sales more efficient—but can’t replace relationships
Highlights
00:12 — Scaling Meta: from 900 to 90,000 employees
Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7Gj0rDpG60&t=12
01:22 — How Rick Kelley built Meta’s mid-market sales org from scratch
Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7Gj0rDpG60&t=82
02:15 — The data-driven framework Meta used to prioritize global markets
Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7Gj0rDpG60&t=135
04:50 — Why startups should build expansion plans before executing
Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7Gj0rDpG60&t=290
07:52 — Centralized vs. in-country hiring: Rick’s take for startups
Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7Gj0rDpG60&t=472
09:49 — The importance of sales ops and forecasting discipline
Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7Gj0rDpG60&t=589
13:32 — Hiring leaders who scale with you, not limit you
Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7Gj0rDpG60&t=812
14:59 — How AI will reshape (but not replace) sales relationships
Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7Gj0rDpG60&t=899
16:09 — From zero to $1B: lessons in efficiency, cost, and culture
Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7Gj0rDpG60&t=969
Key Takeaways
Build before you hire.
Rick’s success at Meta came from meticulous planning, ranking markets by opportunity and headcount impact before a single hire was made. A three-month analysis beat instinct every time.
Centralize early, localize later.
Early-stage GTM teams gain efficiency and optionality when they centralize sales operations before going country-specific.
Hire for tomorrow’s org.
Don’t hire managers who fit today’s team, hire those capable of leading the team 18 months from now.
Prove ROI before scaling.
Rick’s mantra: demonstrate the return on every investment before asking for more resources.
Comp design can make or break your team.
Early-stage comp plans need guardrails, too generous or too strict can both derail momentum.
Sales ops is your secret weapon.
Your most important hire after AEs? A strong sales planning and operations partner to forecast, measure, and justify growth.
Create optionality in org design.
Hiring multiple reps in a central hub lets you pivot by language, market, or segment as business needs shift.
AI augments, not replaces.
AI can help with prospecting and research, but real relationships still close the deal.
Measure both top and bottom lines.
Rick’s teams stood out for being both high-revenue and cost-efficient, a discipline rare in scaling orgs.
Treat new regions like startups.
Building Meta EMEA was like incubating a startup within a giant. Ownership, vision, and efficiency were non-negotiable.
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Referenced
- ZoomInfo Copilot Workspace: https://zoominfo.com/copilot
- Meta: https://about.meta.com/
- Yahoo: https://www.yahoo.com/
- Activision Blizzard: https://www.activisionblizzard.com/
Guest Links
Host Links
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sophiebuonassisi/
- X (Twitter): https://x.com/sophiebuona
- Newsletter: https://thegtmnewsletter.substack.com/
- Website: https://gtmnow.com/
Where to Find GTMnow
- Website: https://gtmnow.com/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/gtmnow/
- X (Twitter): https://x.com/GTMnow_
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@GTM_now
- Podcast Directory: https://gtmnow.com/tag/podcast/
Bonus Episode Transcript
Rick Kelley: 0:00
I joined the company when there were 900 people. I left the company when there were 90,000 people. The first thing you got to do is figure out what markets you’re going to go after first. The most effective resource that any sales leader could have is a sales planning and operation person. Early days it was no revenue. And then what makes me a little bit different than other sales leaders is I do have a focus on cost, the bottom line, not just top line. And that’s always been my story to go to T. Culture’s everything. If you have the right people there and they’re there for the right reason, then we can make pivots when it comes to new products, something not working. When I left, it was close to a billion per year.
Sophie Buonassisi: 1:00
Rick Kelly joined Meta when it had 900 employees and left when it had 90,000. In this clip, he shows the exact framework he used to build and scale Meta’s mid-market international sales organization, including how to prioritize markets, structure headcount, and hire for long-term leadership. This is a good blueprint. All right, let’s get into it.
Rick Kelley: 1:19
Well, I joined the company when there were 900 people.
Sophie Buonassisi: 1:22
Wow.
Rick Kelley: 1:22
I left the company when there were 90,000 people. So there were no playbook to go buy, or, you know, it wasn’t like I was joining something and then having to refine it. It was, hey, Rick, go figure it out. And, you know, I had great people around me to help me do that. I wasn’t here alone and, you know, all by myself by any means. But the first thing you got to do is figure out where are you gonna, what markets are you gonna go after first? You know, should I hire five people for the UK or five people for France? Or, you know, how do I, in a limited resource and limited headcount way, how do I go about, you know, choosing the allocation of different headcounts? And so one of the things we did in the early days was create an economic study utilizing probably a seven to eight different characteristics. What is our user base? What’s the ad global total ad revenue, online ad revenue? How many users do does Facebook have in those countries? And we kind of weighted them all and came up with a score for every country. So that meant that if I was given 150 heads, I would know the order of which I would go and hire them. You know, I’m gonna hire my fifth person in the UK, then my first person for the Nordics, and then my third person for, you know, France, whatever it was, so that if my boss had given me 18 new heads, 28 new heads, 38 new heads, I’m not saying, ah, you know, I don’t quite know how I’m gonna use them. I’d say this is exactly how I’m gonna use them, and here’s how much revenue I can actually forecast as a result of this, you know, study that we did over a three-month period. So I think the lesson in the early days is when you start to build a sales team, is you know, you don’t just do the finger in the air and just start hiring willy-nilly based on where you currently have customers. You got to figure out where your opportunity is and invest for that opportunity. I think the nice part about being in a centralized sales team like in Dublin or or Barcelona or London, wherever, is that you can also move headcount around based on where you see in traction and needs and things like that. And a good example of that is maybe we overinvested in account managers and we needed more salespeople. Well, then you can move some people around based on the skill sets that you needed. Or in 2012, we started seeing gaming become this massive revenue stream for the company. It ended up being 15% of the company revenue back in 2012, 2013 when everybody was getting a smartphone and had an iPhone or an Android and people were playing games and downloading games. It was a boom to the company. And so one of the things that my boss had decided to do was pull gaming out of the regional structure and create a fifth region for the company, which was gaming. So you’ve got North America sales, Latin America, AMIA, APAC, and gaming. So it was treated as the fifth region. And because I had a pretty sizable portfolio of gaming companies in my AMIA mid-market team, she asked me to uh to take that global role on. And the next 10 years meant me growing that business out from Dublin.
Sophie Buonassisi: 4:15
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Rick Kelley: 5:11
So when I came to interview for the Yahoo role, and I’m going to go back now a couple of years. Yeah. I was, I wrote a 39-page PowerPoint presentation on how I would go and build the European mid-market sales team for Yahoo. I had been doing it. I I thought that I had to woo the boss and make sure that I showed up prepared, not realizing that he was kind of trying to get me, you know, to make the move across the pond. But my point is that I had a plan and I created it. And I everything from how we’re going to recruit, the timeline of when we’re going to have people at desk, you know, time to prospect, time to whatever activity we needed to do. And I absolutely think that if you’re a startup or, you know, starting to think about what your go-to-market playbook looks like, you need to figure out who are the constituents that you want to sell to. Is it partners? Is it agencies? Is it third parties? Is it direct customers, big customers, small customers? Lay it all out in a document of some sort. And then you start to put a plan around how do you address them? What’s the timing to address them? What’s the priority of maybe one channel versus another? And then, yeah, for Europe, I think you or any international team, you have to think about what markets you go after. And you need a level of critical mass in those markets. Because if you’re only hiring one person to address Italy, if that person leaves, is ineffective, goes on maternity or a paternity leave, you got to have a little bit of depth there in order to keep the market going. So these are all things to be very, very thoughtful about. And I don’t think you always have to put people in the markets in order to be incubating a market. You might start that in a centralized team, you know, get the activity moving, and after a year or two and the revenue starts to be meaningful, then you can deploy a local office because that creates a whole other set of, you know, dynamics. You’ve got to have a legal entity, you’ve got to understand local HR laws, which are very different from France to Italy to Spain to Germany. And you can’t just say, hey, we’re going to hire in those markets and not have a good understanding of what that might mean if things don’t work out in that market or if that person doesn’t work out. So there’s lots to be thoughtful for. And I think the more that you can get that on paper before you start to execute, you can see around corners better.
Sophie Buonassisi: 7:26
That’s great advice. And like you said, there’s a lot of different nuances to every single different country in AMIA. How would you recommend startups think about that distribution of sales reps, whether it’s centralized or deployed in countries themselves across AMIA? Should it be a singular country focus? So one country at a time should be distributed across a few different countries when you’re looking to first come into EMIA?
Rick Kelley: 7:52
It depends on the size of the startup. And a lot of what I do now post my my meta world is work with startups on their go-to-market. So this is a conversation that I feel like I have once a week, if not more. You know, there’s not a one size fits all, but I have a bias. And that bias is to be how do you have add optionality to your sales organization? Meaning if you if you only have four people to hire and you think that it’s one in the UK, one in France, one in Germany, I don’t know, and another country there, I would rather see you be a little bit more thoughtful and say, let’s put those first four people in a singular location where A, they can learn from each other. B, English is widely spoken across the business world, you know, in EMIA, you know, less so in certain countries. But, you know, if you’re having, you know, if things are not as busy in France as you might have expected, a big competitor or whatever reason, you know, you could always have that French person calling into Belgium, where they speak French, or Switzerland, where they speak French. You know, Spain, for example, when we hired our first Spanish um employees, they were also calling into Latin America because we didn’t have a Latin American team at the time. So if you have them in the country and it’s only one or two people, it’s harder to gain that optionality and be able to move people’s focus around. You know, another example in in Southern Europe is everybody goes on holidays for all of August. But if your team isn’t going on holidays, you know, what more could you have them do so that they’re not ineffective for three weeks and sitting on their hands? And so anytime I talk to a startup, I try and say, look, you don’t have the resources to go put in, you know, 35 people across the region. Let’s be a little bit more thoughtful about how we can get more, you know, from a limited resource there.
Sophie Buonassisi: 9:31
That’s excellent advice. Yeah, I really look for those overlap areas. So you took us through your market segmentation of IMIA and where to focus first. Take us through what happened after that. So you’ve got your plan, you’ve got your plan approved. What do the early execution days look like?
Rick Kelley: 9:49
You’ve got to get the piping right. So, how are we reporting on sales? How are we forecasting, you know, goal setting? And in a world where you’re going zero to whatever, you know, these things are a little bit more challenging to get right. Um so you got to set up a comp plan. You probably don’t want to have an uncapped comp plan, or because, you know, in the early days when your goal is a million bucks in the first quarter, you know, it’s easy to come in at a million and a half, and now you’ve come in at 150% a goal and you’re paying out ridiculous amounts of money to your sales team. Similarly, you might have over forecasted and you only come in at 75% to goal, and you don’t want your whole team to be hurt. So let’s look at a comp plan that works for the company and a comp plan that works for the the sales or the team itself. Then you’ve got to figure out like operationally, sales ops, you know, how do we distribute the goal? How do we forecast? How are we looking at the pipeline? So I think the most effective cross-functional resource that any sales leader can have is a sales planning and operation person that is focused on that segment of the business. So, you know, as my career developed and, you know, became more influential with different cross-functional partners from marketing to sales engineering, you know, so on and so forth, my number one partner has always been that sales planning and operations, the CFO of my organization, if you would. Because they’re going to help you create investment cases, figure out if your investments are working, how are they paying off? Because there’s nothing easier to go and ask for, you know, more money to go and grow the team when you can say, this is what you gave me six months ago, here’s what I’ve done with that. Give me this, and then I can do this as well. Right. Like that’s that’s the playbook where, you know, while the team was probably 150 people large, give or take, you know, when I moved on to gaming in 2013 after four years, it didn’t get there on day one or day, you know, first, second year, or third year. You know, that was an incremental growth along the way. And we needed to prove the value of every resource that we were given in order to get more. So that’s always the to me, it’s about don’t just think about the salespeople or account managers that need to be at desk. What other key roles or leaders do you need to help you tell the story and write the right story? The other thing I would say, as the guy coming in to start the team, doesn’t mean that that was the manager of every person within it. So you’ve got to hire good leaders and you’ve got to invest in people that A are going to be able to do the job in 18 months’ time when maybe the team goes from 10 to 30 people. Are they still capable of leading the 30 people that, you know, so so higher ahead of maybe where you think the team is gonna go? Because the last thing you want to do is layer somebody after, you know, a year or two because the the job has just got too big for them. So, how can you sell the vision to people that are like, yes, the team is maybe only 10 people now, but here’s what I need you to do over the next 18 months, and that team’s gonna look like this. And if they can come on that journey, then that’s great.
Sophie Buonassisi: 12:49
Yeah, and you essentially, it’s almost like incubating a startup within a larger organization. You really built it from zero.
Rick Kelley: 12:54
100%. That’s a great way to describe it. It’s like nobody in Memo Park back in the day, you know, or or Sunnyvale, you know, in in the Yahoo days, knew anything about the team that I was, you know, developing. But once you start to, you know, get the team in place at desk and putting numbers on the board, then all of a sudden they’re saying, whoa, let’s uh let’s have another look at this.
Sophie Buonassisi: 13:14
And when building out that leadership team and being really thoughtful about those hires, were you prioritizing certain skill sets around expansion into EMIA? So people who had already run that playbook before, or did you find that wasn’t necessarily a characteristic or trait or experience area that you had to prioritize?
Rick Kelley: 13:32
I think back in the day, I try to prioritize language skills. So I probably over-pivoted to that. Um and then rolled that back. I ended up rolling it back where how can I get good managerial and leadership talent, even if they don’t speak the language to be the directors? And then maybe we could hire the or or develop the individual contributors to the point where they could be team leaders and and you know, more junior managers and they speak the language of the local country, but that there’s still some pretty senior talent above them to be able to, you know, build out a proper go-to-market plan for that particular sub-region, you know, and as you get bigger and as you get to be a certain level of scale, you knew you do need to go from a MIA into Northern Europe, Southern Europe, you know, Eastern Europe, whatever the breakout might be, or vertical. You might say, you know what? Autos and travel and gaming, whatever, you know, there’s benefits to doing that too. So you got to sit down and you got to be able to spar with some other senior leaders to say, well, here’s the pros and cons, and maybe here’s what why that wouldn’t work. And having the right people around you to do that, I think is one of the things that I was out I would always advocate for. Even if they were a little pricey to come in because they were at a more senior level, you know, in in in a year’s time, you’re gonna need that seniority.
Sophie Buonassisi: 14:50
And how do you anticipate AI now impacting the potential global expansion and that emphasis on language abilities?
Rick Kelley:14:59
Yeah, I’m a big believer in AI, making your, you know, the world more efficient, no doubt about it. I think that there are tasks that take place within a sales functionality that AI is great for, like helping prospect, helping surface the right. You know, I just got off a call today where, you know, the tool itself, you know, creates emails for prospects that helps identify prospects. It’s like a Tinder for um companies they can swipe right or swipe left based on how good that prospect looks, you know, to be a fit for the the product that they’re selling. There’s a lot of things that they will do in terms of like business development um efficiency, and I’m a big believer in that. But I also don’t believe that it will replace building relationships, which I think is such a big part of sales. You could probably get a sale over the line just with an AI type bot or um, you know, utilizing some form of uh machine learning. But when things go wrong, people want to talk to people.
Sophie Buonassisi: 15:54
Definitely. And you mentioned the number 150. So 150 people when you left the organization to go build global. So you scaled, it sounds like from zero to 150. What kind of time frame was that? And what kind of revenue was reflective of that too?
Rick Kelley: 16:09
Yeah, so day one, I actually there were two salespeople already at desk before I came. So I was number three coming in as the manager. And then yeah, it was it was close to 150 when I then moved on, uh, and that organization got moved into a different one. Um early days, it was no revenue. And then when I left, it was close to uh a billion for the year. And what was funny is that we were like neck and neck with the North America team that was, you know, similar, similarly built, right? Mid-market. And I can remember my boss saying, that has never happened before. Like, you know, how is a MIA the same revenue as North America? And I was pretty proud of that. And I told that to the team because then the team wore that as a badge of honor as well. Um, but the the truth of it matter is is gaming was a big part of that revenue piece of the pie. And, you know, you could have Candy Crush, which is by King, uh now owned by Activision. They’re sitting in London, but they want to advertise to every person around the globe. So, you know, that might be in your region in a MIA, but that’s a big advertiser. And so that’s one of the ways that we got up to, you know, 900 million pretty quickly after, you know, it was about three and a half years when we got to that point. So yeah. So that’s what, you know, kind of part of the idea was incredibly efficient when it came to cost of sales, when it came to revenue per head. And I I always really tried to, and kind of the, you know, maybe what makes me a little bit different than other sales leaders is I do have a focus on cost, on, you know, uh the bottom line, not just top line. And I like to be a really efficient sales channel and a really cost effective one. And that’s always been my story to kind of
