Mike Nesser Head of Sales, Tillable

Company

Tillable was founded by Corbett Kull, an engineering and Agtech veteran whose previous startup, 640 Labs, successfully sold to The Climate Corporation in 2014. Today, the breakthrough technology the 640 Labs team created is known as the FieldView Drive, and it has become one of the most rapidly adopted technological innovations in agriculture.
The idea for Tillable began to take shape as Corbett became more entrenched in the agriculture space and recognized both the potential and the extreme lack of technology and services in the farmland rental market. In the U.S., 40% of farmland is rented, creating a $32 billion industry that has, for decades, lacked any basic technology or tools that could help landowners better manage their farmland—which, in addition to often being a cherished family heirloom, is almost always one of the landowner’s most important and valuable financial assets.
Tillable was created to address the problems, inefficiencies and lack of transparency in the farmland rental market.

Search Background

Having closed their Series A, built a 6-person sales team that established product/market fit, and having begun the Series B fundraising efforts, the time was right to add a Revenue Executive to the fold. This person would develop and execute a multi-faceted sales strategy to gain market share and build the highest levels of customer satisfaction and loyalty. Our thesis was that Inside Sales would likely dominate Field Sales and we needed the person based in Chicago alongside Corbett Kull, CEO, so our search was principally focused on the local success stories over the last decade such as Grubhub, Groupon, Braintree and LinkedIn.

Requirements

We sought an outstanding and experienced Inside Sales leader who could develop and execute a multi-faceted sales strategy to gain market share and build the highest levels of customer satisfaction and loyalty. We indexed towards experience building high performance sales teams and instituting “best of breed” sales processes. They had to prove they could deliver leverage between inside sales, online sales, field sales and marketing (including marketing campaign strategies).

Result

Mike Nesser was placed from of LinkedIn. He joined LinkedIn in 2009 and scaled up to the Director of Mid-Market Sales running a team consisting of 12 managers, roughly 100 sellers and over $150M in ARR. His responsibilities included talent management/development, go-to-market strategy and delivering meaningful value/growth across thousands of customers.