Owner.com’s hiring and coaching strategies for driving sales growth

Where other companies zig, restaurant marketing company Owner.com zags.

At a time when entry-level sales and revenue roles are being eliminated, CRO Kyle Norton told Morning Brew that the company is investing more in training new hires—most of whom are recent college graduates—while still automating some of the work that might have traditionally fallen to low-level sales development and business development representatives.

Norton explained why Owner always tries to do the hard work up front—and why that leads to a larger payoff later.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

First, tell me a little bit about Owner.

Owner is a vertical AI company that supports independent restaurants. You can think of us as HubSpot plus Shopify for the little pizza or Thai or Japanese place that you order from on a Friday, Saturday. We give them everything they need to compete and win online—website, online ordering, email/text message marketing, custom branded app, review management, business listening management, AI phone ordering, point of sale—all in this one solution. The big difference between us and most of our competitors is our product is a lot more opinionated; there’s less choice and flexibility with Owner, which means that we can run these experiments and tests across like 10,000 websites and figure out how to hyper-optimize every little piece of this digital experience. And whatever experiments we find work, we roll out across all of our customers, without even necessarily asking their permission.

Most of our competitors give the restaurant owner a bunch of tools, and you can build a website, you can send emails, and then [they] leave it to the restaurant owner to figure out. Because we have this army of experts doing it on behalf of the restaurant owner, they make way more money, they end up growing faster, it’s a very profitable channel for them.

What are some of the specific revenue and sales strategies that you’ve used to get Owner from five employees to over 250?

We’re most famous for our application of AI in go-to-market. We were extremely early: We were building machine learning models for lead scoring and predicting customer success in mid-2022. When the ChatGPT moment happened that year, we just went all-in really fast. There’s a biz ops and data leader, my rev ops leader, myself all being really aggressive in adopting these tools. We’ve got a whole applied AI team building internal infrastructure and optimizing customer and sales rep journeys. The numbers that catch most people’s attention? Our comp-to-close ratio is 20x—a sales rep getting paid $150,000 is bringing $3 million ARR per year.

We’re just hyper, hyper efficient. We’ve stripped out as many non-revenue-generating activities as possible from the team. They don’t do their own list research and list building; we’ve automated CRM enrichment and writing their notes for them and passing deals off to the onboarding team. We’ve automated a lot of this stuff so that the sales reps can be doing a small number of things, like making tiles and building pipelines on the XDR [extended detection and response] side, and running demos and closing deals on the AE [account executive] side. Those have really been the keys.

Some of the other keys to our success: We moved back to an in-person model at the beginning of last year. We were a fully remote company when I started in 2022; midway through 2024, I decided that I wanted to get back to building in-person teams. Starting at the beginning of 2025, we didn’t do a “return to office,” we didn’t force people to come back in, but all of our net new hires moving forward were five days a week in person. Basically every single metric got better from there. Time to ramp, productivity, effort metrics, output metrics, the culture and engagement and retention have all gotten a ton better. So that was an important change, even though it meant it actually got much more difficult to hire experienced account executives. If you’ve got three or four or five years’ experience, and you’ve worked remote, or two days in office, people didn’t really want to come back multiple days. But I believed in it, so we’ve primarily promoted from within, as opposed to hiring from the outside. Since the beginning of 2025, I would say 70% of our new hires have been brand new grads from university.

Given that you seem to be automating some of the work that low-level sales employees might be doing, it’s interesting that you’re still able to employ new graduates.

It required a massive investment in enablement and training. Our onboarding program—I’ve benchmarked it with people from the best, most well-known companies out there—is one of the best in the world. It is very much built off of modern neuroscience and elite performance principles in adult learning psychology…We don’t just sit them in front of a classroom and say, “We’re going to talk at you for an hour, and now you know how to do discovery.”

It’s very hands-on and application-based, and we’ve got a PhD in the enablement team that does nothing but learning experience design, so taking the principles that we want to teach and making sure that they are done in the way that we know is scientifically proven to maximize retention, recall, and successful application.

You also streamlined the sales team by cutting underperformers. Can you tell me a little bit about that?

When I joined the team, there were four reps. I parted ways with half of them, because they just weren’t really up to standard. We started promoting from within, started hiring again, and a lot of those first 20 to 50 hires were from my network. There were people one or two degrees of separation away, so I had a lot of confidence in their abilities. We’ve had a balanced approach to performance management, where the reps aren’t constantly worried about their job—that’s not really the culture that you want to build, [nor is it] productive. People start to operate from a scarcity mindset, and that’s not really what you want. You want people coming from a place of abundance.

We have our coaching program, and if there’s people that are off track, they go on what’s called a “get on track” plan, and there’s actually multiple top 10% performers that have at some point gone through a GOT plan. The GOT plan is there to get really specific on the things they need to improve upon and give them an opportunity to take action on it. There’s actually just as much in terms of manager commitments as there is in terms of the rep commitments. The framing should be that the manager is just as responsible for that rep turning it around and giving them the coaching that they need as the rep doing it themselves.

In terms of strategies, how you streamline things, and investments in training, is there anything else that I haven’t asked about that’s pivotal to Owner’s success?

The world is a marshmallow test…There’s this really famous study where they take these groups of kids and go into this room and give them one marshmallow and they say, “If you can wait five minutes, don’t eat this marshmallow for five minutes, you can have a second marshmallow,” and the kids that perform well and can do the hard thing up front are infinitely more successful in life.

I think it’s a good mental model, because so much of what we’ve done, like investing early and aggressively in enablement, being painstaking about how we’ve built our sales methodology, and putting the emphasis on systems design—everybody knows those things in practice; they’re just really hard to do when you’ve got 100 other things that are competing priorities. Pretty consistently we’ve chosen the difficult short-term path: Hiring 50 kids out of school is very difficult from an onboarding, enablement, training, and coaching perspective, and most sales managers don’t want to coach. Coaching is hard. It’s tiring.

We’ve basically chosen in all of these different scenarios to do the thing that is more challenging up front that has long-term compounding payoffs, like building our own sales methodology. You could easily go and buy a methodology…pay the consultant a bunch of money, they come in, they help you with script writing, they teach all your teams, and that’s fine. But there’s not really a perfect methodology for what we do.

It took us months and months, and there were hours of my time and hours of my sales leadership’s time, and countless hours of the enablement team’s time to build the methodology, go through all these calls from the sales rep and spot the best things that the reps were using, and bring it into this methodology. And then we had to bring people in multiple times in person to implement and train things on it. Most leadership groups don’t really have the wherewithal to do something like that, but we implemented it in March, and we saw conversion rates climb by over 10 percentage points within the first 45 days. If you go from a 55% close rate to a 66% close rate in a 45-day period, that is like a monster revenue driver. So that’s a good example of where we have done the hard thing up front.

We had some of our best days ever on the sales team the month that we rolled this thing out, because people were excited to come in…and learn and feel energized by it…The world is a marshmallow test, and doing the difficult thing that has medium- and long-term payoffs has been the secret.