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HR and payroll platform Deel has come a long way since entering Y Combinator in 2019. The 6-year-old business has evolved from a global contractor platform with an employer of record service to an all-in-one global workforce platform, surpassing a $1 billion run rate in Q1 2025. In many ways, it has achieved this by going against the grain: launching globally and creating an aggressive sales lead motion from day one.
At the center of it all is co-founder and CRO Shuo Wang. An engineer turned sales savant, Wang was first introduced to sales at 16 when, while speaking very little English, she and her mother ran a wholesale scooter and motorcycle business.
In a conversation with Revenue Brew, Wang discussed why the sales world intrigued her, Deel’s early success, and how the company builds culture from the top down.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
I read that when you came to the US you sold scooters wholesale with your mother. How did that experience shape your journey into sales and how does it still translate into your work today?
I think that taught me about some basics about running a business. You always need to have your pipeline. You always need to have a brand. You always need to have a channel to tell the story of the brand, and then let people know what you’re selling.
I remember my mom was very focused on profit margin as well. Sometimes I’d listen to her calls to negotiate with manufacturers in China. Each motorcycle, the difference is probably $10 or $20, but she would try so hard to gather the best pricing possible.
It seems a lot of professionals are founders and CEOs, or founders and CFOs. What’s really interesting is that you’re a founder and CRO, which I don’t see a lot. Why did you want to fill that CRO position?
For me, because of [my CRO role], that made us focus on sales, focus on business, focus on growth. I’m very involved in how we build the sales process, what are the key markets that we should focus on, how we expanded those key markets, and then what is even the sales commission model, and how we design the sales commission model.
How do you think your CRO expertise influences the identity of Deel as a company?
I think the number one is clients: How do we provide really good care to our clients? Whenever they have a problem, we really think of multiple solutions to help them because their problems could be very complicated, because we run a global payroll business.
Number two is our managers are not only managing people, they are ICs. They need to be able to do work. For example, a sales manager needs to be able to sell to a client by themselves.
Deel is growing very quickly. How have you built a modern sales organization that can facilitate that growth?
We are very efficient about our head count. Our expectations on how much revenue each of our sales talent will be able to close, we have a very high standard there. The way that we build the sales team is we’re very global, so we started to focus on global markets since day one.
In what ways has Deel done things differently than other companies to scale at the rate that it has up to this point?
Number one is we don’t have one sales leader to oversee all the markets. We have distributed sales leaders. Each of the sales leaders has their own segment focus and has their own regional focus.
Number two, we don’t have a president club…We don’t have that because I believe everyone has this opportunity to close $1 million per year. I’m here to help them to make that happen.
Number three is we started a sales operations function early on that helped us to build sales processes and data analytics around the revenue, or different metrics to help regional sales leaders to understand their efficiencies, where they gain efficiencies, and where they can improve.
How is your sales team implementing AI agents or AI-oriented technology?
We actually started early on. We started back in 2023 when AI was not as popular yet. When ChatGPT first rolled out, we started to implement ChatGPT to help our sales team to write copy and then to write the cadence.
Within the internal workflows, we implemented AI to help our team to understand what are the best products to pitch to what type of clients. That is the dream for any sellers out there.
It’s interesting that Deel is building a remote culture at a time when many tech and finance companies are calling for employees to come back into the office. Why is it important to you to keep that remote culture?
Culture is culture. Culture doesn’t need to happen in person or online. Culture is from the managers, from the founders. If you follow the culture, people will see, people will learn, and then people will follow.