Head of Enterprise

Overview

You're building Vanta's enterprise sales engine—the team, processes, and playbook for selling to the largest global companies. Vanta started as a compliance automation tool and has expanded into a full Trust Management Platform. You'll define how they position and sell this broader platform to enterprise buyers who have more stakeholders, longer cycles, and different requirements than their mid-market base.

Role Snapshot

Company Context

Stage: Late-stage (1,743 employees, multi-product platform)

Size: Substantial - this is not an early-stage startup

Growth: Aggressive expansion from single product to platform; Julie Martin notes they're "firing on all cylinders" and have "repeatable success" in enterprise over past 2.5 years

Market Position: Category leader in compliance automation, now expanding into broader GRC/Trust Management against established players

GTM Reality

Current State:

• Enterprise team has been successful for 2.5+ years but needs to scale 10x
• Product evolution from single compliance tool to multi-product platform changes the selling motion
• Selling to "largest and most complex organizations in the world" per the post
• Dennis Martz and Ben Goldman already in place (your peer leaders)

What You're Building:

• Define the enterprise selling motion for a platform, not a point solution
• Build processes that work across security, privacy, and expanding product lines
• Scale from repeatable to systematic - hiring AEs, SEs, potentially regional leaders
• Figure out how Vanta competes when they're no longer just the "fast compliance" vendor

The Shift:

• Mid-market motion (faster sales, single-product) won't work at enterprise scale
• You're creating the playbook, not executing someone else's

Competitive Landscape

Main Competitors: Likely facing established GRC vendors (OneTrust, ServiceNow IRM), traditional compliance tools, and internal/manual processes

How They Differentiate: Started with automation-first approach to compliance, now expanding breadth. 400+ integrations, AI-powered platform

Common Objections:

• "We already have compliance processes"
• "We need more than just SOC 2 automation" (they're addressing this with platform expansion)
• Enterprise buyers want to see maturity, not just automation

Win Themes: Speed to compliance, continuous monitoring, platform consolidation (if you can prove it)

What You'll Actually Do

Time Breakdown

Hiring & Team Building (30%) | Strategic Planning & Process (25%) | Customer/Deal Involvement (25%) | Cross-functional Alignment (20%)

Key Activities

• Building the Team: Hiring enterprise AEs, SEs, potentially regional VPs. Defining roles, comp plans, territories. You're probably hiring 10-20+ people in year one
• Defining the Motion: What's the enterprise sales process for a platform vs point solution? What's the pitch? What buyer journey? What proof points do you need? You're creating this, not following a playbook
• Deal Involvement: Early on, you're in the biggest deals. Showing the team how it's done, figuring out what works, meeting with CISOs and CTOs to understand their evaluation criteria
• Cross-functional Strategy: Working with product (what do enterprise buyers need?), marketing (how do we generate enterprise pipeline?), customer success (what does implementation look like at scale?)
• Executive Relationships: Building relationships with prospects at the C-level and board level. This is strategic selling, not transactional
• Reporting & Forecasting: Building the reporting infrastructure to show the board this engine is working. Defining metrics that matter for enterprise

The Honest Reality

What's Hard

• You're building while flying - there's traction, but not a fully-baked enterprise playbook. You'll make mistakes and iterate
• Enterprise sales is slow. You won't see results from hires for 6-12 months. Board will want growth faster than enterprise cycles allow
• Product is still evolving. You're selling a "platform" that's newer than their core compliance product. Some capabilities won't exist yet
• Managing up and across. You're not the only leader - Dennis and Ben are peers. Julie is your boss. You need to influence without full control
• Hiring in this market is hard. Top enterprise reps have options. Vanta's brand is strong in compliance, less proven in broader enterprise GRC
• The "10x" goal is real pressure. You need to build for scale but also hit numbers

What Success Looks Like

• Year 1: Hired a team of 10-15+ enterprise sellers, closed 5-10 flagship logos that become reference customers
• Year 2: Repeatable process in place, team hitting 70%+ of quota, defined territories and specialization
• Year 3: Enterprise is a major revenue driver, you've built a leadership team under you, expansion motion is working
• You've defined what "enterprise" means at Vanta and built the machine that can scale it

Who You're Selling To

Primary Buyers:

• CISOs and VP Security at F500/Global 2000 companies
• Compliance/GRC leaders at complex organizations (healthcare, financial services, government contractors)
• CIOs and CTOs involved in platform decisions

What They Care About:

• Risk reduction and audit readiness across multiple frameworks (SOC 2, ISO, HIPAA, etc.)
• Consolidation - they have too many tools already
• Continuous monitoring, not point-in-time compliance
• Integration with their existing security stack (400+ integrations is the pitch)
• Vendor stability - can Vanta support a multi-year enterprise relationship?

Requirements

• 10+ years building and scaling enterprise sales teams, ideally in security, compliance, or GRC software
• Proven track record taking a product or division from <$10M to >$100M in enterprise revenue
• Experience selling platforms (multi-product) to technical and business buyers simultaneously
• Comfort with ambiguity - you're defining the strategy, not executing a known playbook
• Ability to hire, coach, and retain top enterprise sales talent in a competitive market
• Executive presence - you'll be in front of CISOs, on board calls, representing the company at the highest levels
• Understanding of compliance/security buying cycles and the stakeholders involved (legal, IT, security, procurement)