Ilana Elbaz

The Journey

Ilana joined Deel when the company had five people, no sales org and no playbook. What they did have was a product that solved a genuinely painful problem for companies hiring globally, and a market that nobody had really cracked yet.

She built the entire GTM function from scratch: hiring the team, designing the processes, setting the culture around how Deel sold. Over the next couple of years the company grew from zero to more than a billion in revenue. By most measures it became one of the fastest-scaling SaaS companies on record.

The thing that experience reinforced more than anything else: people are the only variable that really matters once you're moving fast. Systems and tools matter, but they're always downstream of having the right humans in the room making decisions.

The Exact Tools

Nooks powers outbound. The parallel dialer and AI coaching let AEs work at a level of throughput that would have required twice the headcount a few years ago. When building a global sales org, tools that multiply output without multiplying cost are the ones that earn a permanent spot.

Claude Cowork is how Ilana thinks through hard problems. Strategic planning, messaging drafts, analysing deal data. She treats it like a co-working partner that can context-switch instantly and go deep on whatever gets thrown at it. The quality of thinking that comes from working alongside it on a messy GTM problem is genuinely different from anything else.

Clay rounds out the stack on the data side. Targeting quality determines everything in enterprise sales. Clay provides the enrichment to be precise about who to pursue and what angle to take.

What Channels Work For Them

AE-led outbound. The AE owns the relationship from the first conversation through to close. No handoffs, no leads sitting in a queue. When the person starting the conversation is the same one who'll be working with the customer long-term, every interaction carries more weight.

At Deel's scale this was how they opened new markets, new segments, entire geographies. Inbound, partnerships and events all played a role, but AE-led outbound was the engine underneath everything.

The piece most people underestimate is champion alignment. The best AEs don't just engage whoever responds first. They find the person inside the organisation who genuinely cares about the problem, equip them with a clear business case, and support them in building internal consensus. That alignment is where enterprise deals actually get won.

What To Look For in the Age of AI

Builders. That's the word Ilana comes back to. People who make things happen without waiting for instructions or a playbook.

The profile that works in today's market is someone creative, resourceful, and sharp at managing complex workstreams. Modern enterprise sales is cross-functional, and the best people coordinate internal teams, build custom business cases, orchestrate multi-threaded account strategies, and use AI tools to move through all of it faster than seemed possible a couple of years ago.

Creativity separates people now more than ever. Everyone has access to the same AI tooling, so the edge is the person who spots angles others miss and crafts approaches that actually land with a specific buyer.

Project management is the skill nobody talks about. Large deals are multi-stakeholder, multi-month processes. The people who close the biggest ones run them like a PM would: milestones, owners, clear next steps, nothing falling through the cracks.