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# Customer Interview: Angela White, CRO at Staffing/Recruiting Tech Company **Date:** January 2, 2026 **Duration:** 30 minutes **Interviewer:** Marcus Chen, Enterprise Sales Director (Salesloft + Clari) **Interviewee:** Angela White, Chief Revenue Officer **Company:** TalentFlow Solutions (Staffing/Recruiting Tech, ~$95M ARR) **Company Size:** 450 employees across 12 US locations --- ## Background Context TalentFlow Solutions is a mid-market staffing and recruiting technology platform that serves both direct-hire placements and temporary staffing across healthcare, IT, and administrative verticals. Angela oversees all revenue operations, including sales strategy, customer success, product-market fit decisions, and go-to-market positioning. --- ## Interview Transcript **Marcus:** Angela, thanks so much for taking the time today. I know Q1 is typically your busiest season, and you guys are ramping hard. **Angela:** Of course. Happy to be here. It's a crazy time for us—always is in January. We're running full throttle, closing out holiday hiring surges and gearing up for spring placements. Our reps are juggling everything. **Marcus:** That's what I want to dig into. Let's start with the macro picture. The staffing industry feels like it's in this perpetual boom-bust cycle. I'm curious how you think about that at TalentFlow. How does that cyclicality impact your business model and your strategy? **Angela:** Yeah, it's the eternal staffing problem, right? We're tethered to broader economic cycles in a way that, say, a pure SaaS company isn't. When the economy softens, hiring slows down, temp work dries up, companies freeze positions. We saw it in 2020, we saw it in 2022-23. It's brutal. **Marcus:** So how do you insulate yourselves? **Angela:** We've had to be really intentional about portfolio diversification. That's actually been our biggest strategic shift over the last three years. We're not just a healthcare temp shop anymore. We've invested heavily in IT staffing, administrative services, even some niche verticals like financial services recruiting. Each vertical has different demand curves, different seasonal patterns. **Marcus:** Walk me through that. Healthcare staffing has its own seasonality, right? **Angela:** Exactly. Healthcare peaks in Q4 and Q1 when flu hits, holiday coverage ramps up. But IT is different—we see consistent demand year-round, with some surge in spring when companies get fresh budgets. Admin is more correlated to white-collar employment generally. By having all three, we're not betting the farm on a single industry cycle. **Marcus:** That's smart portfolio risk management. But does that also mean you're spreading your sales organization thin? I imagine selling temp staffing requires very different sales tactics than selling direct-hire placements. **Angela:** That's actually our biggest operational challenge right now, and honestly, why I'm interested in solutions like Clari. We have separate sales teams for temp and direct-hire because they're fundamentally different products. A direct-hire placement—that's a $40,000 to $200,000 deal depending on the role. It's high-touch, long sales cycle, requires relationship building with hiring managers and recruiters. Temp staffing is volume-driven, lower margin, more transactional. The sales motion is completely different. **Marcus:** How do you structure that? Do you have physically separate reps? **Angela:** We do. About 65% of our salespeople focus on direct-hire, maybe 35% on temp staffing. But here's the issue—we're losing a ton of efficiency. A direct-hire rep is spending weeks building a relationship to close one deal. A temp rep is working on velocity, pushing through dozens of placements. The tools, the reporting, the compensation structures... they should be totally different, but we're running them on the same infrastructure. **Marcus:** So visibility into those two different pipelines is probably messy? **Angela:** Messy is generous. My VP of Sales and I are constantly in different data worlds. She's looking at temp staffing volume and velocity, I'm looking at direct-hire pipeline and deal value. We don't have a unified view of what's actually in the funnel, which sales activities are driving revenue, or where we're losing deals. That's become a real problem as we've scaled. **Marcus:** That makes sense. Let's zoom out again to that portfolio diversification strategy. You mentioned verticals. But you've also got a geographic expansion story, right? I know you operate across 12 locations. **Angela:** Yeah, that's part of the diversification play too. We started regionally—basically the Northeast—and we've been systematically expanding. Each market has its own economic cycle. The Sunbelt markets are experiencing different growth rates than the Midwest. By having distributed locations, we're not betting everything on one regional economy. **Marcus:** How does that affect your sales organization structure? **Angela:** It complicates things. We have regional sales directors who own local revenue, but they're also accountable to vertical leaders who own account strategy. So you've got this matrix where a healthcare temp rep in Nashville is reporting to both a regional director and a vertical VP. Decision-making gets murky fast. **Marcus:** That's a pretty classic scaling problem. When downturns hit—and they will—how do you think about preserving cash while maintaining market position? **Angela:** That's keeping me up at night, honestly. Last recession, we did the typical thing: we cut marketing, we froze hiring, we culled our lower-performing reps. But that meant we lost institutional knowledge and we were slow to ramp back up. This time, I want to be smarter. We're building more predictable business around partnerships and enterprise agreements. If we can lock in volume commitments from large MSPs or VMS platforms, we're less exposed to individual hiring cycles. That's worth a lower margin to us. **Marcus:** That's a great segue, because I want to dig into that partnership strategy. You mentioned MSPs and VMS platforms. That's a different motion entirely, isn't it? **Angela:** Completely different. And here's the tension: the fragmented market of small staffing agencies is probably 70% of our opportunity by sheer number. There are thousands of small shops—10 to 50 people—doing local staffing. But they don't have technology, they don't have scale, and they're consolidating. **Marcus:** Right. So the fragmentation you see today might not exist in five years. **Angela:** Exactly. And that's why we're obsessed with the VMS and MSP gatekeepers. These platforms—companies like Apex, Workforce Logic, Bridger, SAP SuccessFactors for the enterprise—they're essentially controlling who gets to access client hiring demands. If you're not integrated with the dominant VMS in your client's environment, you can't participate. **Marcus:** How does that change your sales strategy? **Angela:** It means we're not just selling to the staffing agency anymore. We're selling to the VMS platforms themselves, or we're selling through them. The economic model is totally different. You've got revenue-sharing arrangements, integration roadmaps, technical partnerships. It's enterprise software dynamics, not staffing dynamics. We have a dedicated partnership team now—three people whose job is to maintain those relationships, negotiate integrations, and push product requirements into their backlogs. It's slow, but it's also sticky. Once you're embedded in a VMS, clients have to use you. **Marcus:** But you still have to win the client at the end of the day, right? The VMS partner gets you in the door, but they still have to select you over other staffing firms? **Angela:** Exactly. So it's layered. First, you have to be in the VMS system. Then, you have to be competitive on rate and service. Then, you have to have account management that actually drives utilization and retention. We lost a major client last year even though we were integrated with their VMS—because their internal hiring manager was frustrated with our turnaround times on admin roles. We fixed the problem eventually, but we lost six months of revenue. **Marcus:** That's a critical insight. So even in a partnership-mediated model, the underlying service quality matters enormously. **Angela:** Absolutely. The VMS relationship gets you to the dance, but you still have to dance well. And because these are usually enterprise clients with hundreds of hiring managers across multiple locations, you need sophisticated account management and visibility into utilization patterns. That's where your Clari solution becomes interesting to me—we need to see how engaged a major client really is, whether utilization is declining before they tell us, where the friction points are. **Marcus:** Let's dig into that. How do you currently monitor client health at that scale? **Angela:** We don't, honestly. We have account managers who manage maybe 15-20 accounts each, but they're manually checking in, asking about headcount, getting spreadsheets. If a hiring manager isn't actively using us in the VMS system, nobody knows until they miss a review and we realize we've lost them. We're trying to build some dashboards now, but it's basically homegrown Excel and Looker at this point. We should have predictive signals for churn, but we don't. We should know which hiring managers within a client aren't engaging, but we don't. **Marcus:** Okay, so let's move back to your product portfolio. You mentioned direct-hire versus temp as fundamentally different products. How do you think about that portfolio strategically? Are they meant to be sold together, or are they separate lines of business? **Angela:** That's actually a board-level question we're wrestling with. Directionally, I think they need to be separate P&Ls, separate sales organizations, possibly even separate brands eventually. The margin profiles are different, the sales motion is different, the customer needs are different. A client might use us for direct-hire once a year to fill a key role, but they use us for temp staffing continuously. If we bundle them together, we're underselling both. The temp client resents paying for direct-hire service, and the direct-hire relationship gets neglected. **Marcus:** But there is some natural bundling, right? You could be filling direct-hire from within your temp candidate pool. **Angela:** Sure, absolutely. We do that. A temp-to-perm conversion is one of the highest-margin deals we do—we've already built the relationship, the candidate is proven, the switching costs are minimal. But that happens more or less organically. We don't need the sales team coordinating it. **Marcus:** How are your conversion rates from temp to perm? **Angela:** About 8-12% depending on the vertical. Healthcare is lower because temp roles are often short-term seasonal work. IT is higher because companies love to temp-to-hire IT talent before committing. Administrative is in the middle. **Marcus:** Is that a metric you're trying to improve? **Angela:** Constantly. It's a high-margin motion, so we're incentivizing it. But we've learned you can't force it. Push too hard and your temp staffing reps resent you because they lose the revenue, and you piss off the client who feels like they're being upsold. It has to feel natural. **Marcus:** That's a sophisticated understanding of the dynamics. Let's shift to competitive positioning. You've got Indeed and LinkedIn—which are absolutely dominant platforms—expanding aggressively into your territory. How do you think about that threat? **Angela:** It's existential, honestly. LinkedIn for direct-hire is already a monster. They've got the largest professional network in the world, billions of profiles, recruiting tools that are getting smarter every year. Indeed is doing the same for job-seekers. And now they're both trying to own the staffing supply chain. **Marcus:** What's their play specifically? **Angela:** They're building their own marketplace features. LinkedIn's trying to enable companies to post jobs and hire directly without agencies. Indeed's doing something similar. The threat is that they disintermediate us. Why would a hiring manager use a staffing agency if they can go directly to Indeed or LinkedIn and source talent in 48 hours? **Marcus:** But isn't there still a need for staffing agencies? Like, the sourcing quality, the vetting, the service? **Angela:** There is, but it's shrinking. The agencies that will survive are either specialists in niche verticals where quality matters enormously—like specialized IT or healthcare—or they're going to be low-cost volume players who operate at scale. The middle is getting crushed. We're positioning ourselves as the specialist play. We have domain expertise in healthcare, IT, and finance staffing. We have relationships with clients that go back years. We know the nuances of hiring in these verticals in ways a generic platform doesn't. **Marcus:** How do you communicate that differentiation? **Angela:** We emphasize service, speed, and quality. "We get you the right person faster" is our core message for direct-hire. For temp, it's "we handle the complexity so you don't have to." We're selling time and certainty, not just access to a candidate pool. But I'll be honest—that messaging is getting harder to defend. LinkedIn can say "we get you candidates in 48 hours too." The competitive advantages are becoming more subtle. **Marcus:** What if the differentiation isn't in sourcing, but in the entire hiring process management? Like, you're not just finding candidates, you're actually managing the workflow, ensuring quality, handling compliance and paperwork, improving time-to-productivity? **Angela:** That's actually closer to where we want to land. The problem is we need to bundle those services with visibility and data. A client needs to see: "Here's how many placements we've made this quarter, here's the quality, here's the cost per hire, here's the time-to-productivity compared to our direct sourcing." We're not there yet. **Marcus:** That's where Clari comes in—you can show the entire hiring journey, the outcomes, not just the placements. **Angela:** Exactly. Right now, I can tell you how many bodies we've placed, but I can't tell you if those placements stuck, if they're productive, if the client is satisfied. We're missing the outcome layer. **Marcus:** Let's talk about sales efficiency more broadly. With your portfolio spread across verticals, geographies, and product types, how do you think about channel strategy? Are you direct, are you building partnerships, are you leaning into affiliates? **Angela:** We're primarily direct, which is actually a constraint. Our sales team is about 80 people, and they can only reach so many companies. We're not doing much affiliate or partner channel yet. **Marcus:** Why not? **Angela:** Margin economics and control. When you partner with another staffing firm or an affiliate, you're giving up 20-30% of your revenue. On temp staffing, that kills the margin entirely. On direct-hire, it's manageable but still painful. That said, we're starting to explore it because direct sales has limitations. We can't penetrate the smaller end of the market efficiently. It costs us $50,000 to $100,000 in sales and marketing to acquire a small staffing firm that's generating $500K of annual business. The payback period is too long. **Marcus:** So you're underserving the long tail of the market. **Angela:** Completely. And that's intentional. We're focused on deals we can close efficiently—typically companies doing $10M+ in annual hiring spend. Below that, it's too much friction. **Marcus:** But those companies are also the ones most likely to be captured by Indeed or LinkedIn. **Angela:** True. That's the risk. We might be ceding market share to the platforms at the smaller end. But if we tried to serve everyone, we'd dilute our focus. The bet is that we can build a sustainable business serving mid-market and enterprise clients who have enough complexity and volume that they genuinely need us. **Marcus:** How does that tie back to your downturn resilience strategy? **Angela:** It actually makes us more vulnerable to downturns in one way—we're concentrated in larger clients. If they freeze hiring, we're hit hard. But we're less vulnerable in another way—we have fewer but deeper relationships, so we have more visibility into problems early and more opportunity to defend. In 2023, when the market softened, we lost maybe 15% of pipeline volume, but it wasn't uniform. We lost a lot of smaller temp clients who just cut their staffing budgets. But our enterprise direct-hire clients kept hiring, just more selectively. So we weathered it okay. **Marcus:** Did you make any operational changes during that period? **Angela:** Yeah. We pulled back on hiring for our temp staffing team—we were overstaffed there. We doubled down on direct-hire because it had higher margins and more stable demand. We cut some of the experimental verticals where we didn't have strong market position. And we started this partnership push because we realized we needed more predictable revenue. **Marcus:** Did you adjust your sales comp or territory structures? **Angela:** We did. We simplified incentives—less emphasis on volume, more emphasis on deal size and margin. We adjusted territories to focus reps on high-potential accounts. And we started tracking sales productivity metrics more rigorously. Before, we just tracked revenue per rep. Now we track revenue per activity, deal velocity, win rate by vertical. That's been eye-opening. **Marcus:** What did that reveal? **Angela:** That some of our reps and territories were actually quite inefficient. We had a rep in the Midwest who was closing deals, but it was taking her 120 days on average. We had another rep who was closing in 45 days. Same vertical, similar clients. The difference was in prospecting quality and early-stage qualification. So we brought in the high-performer's methodology, trained the team on it, and suddenly we're seeing 20% faster sales cycles. That's real leverage. **Marcus:** That's a great example of insight driving efficiency. But that requires good data, right? **Angela:** Absolutely. And that's where we're struggling. We're using Salesforce, but it's only as good as our reps' discipline in logging activity. And our reps hate logging activity, especially the temp staffing team who are just trying to move placements. I spend probably 30% of my time just trying to get clean data. My VP of Sales and I are constantly asking reps to update opportunities, add activity notes, update stage. It's exhausting. **Marcus:** That's where Salesloft can help. Automated activity capture, Clari for predictive analytics on pipeline health and outcomes. Together, they give you clean data without the constant nagging. **Angela:** That's the promise, yeah. The implementation would be a project though. We'd have to get buy-in from our sales leaders, and honestly, they're skeptical of new tools. Our VP of Sales is old school—she doesn't trust technology to tell her about deal health that she can't see herself. **Marcus:** That's actually really common. Have you found ways to win over sales leaders when they're skeptical? **Angela:** We usually start with a pilot. Pick one sales team, implement the solution, measure the impact, let the results speak. If we can show that a team improved their close rate by 5 points or cut their sales cycle by 20%, the leader becomes a believer. **Marcus:** What would success look like for you guys with a solution like this? **Angela:** Three things. One, visibility into what's actually in our pipeline—real pipeline health, not wishful thinking. Two, visibility into why we're winning and losing deals, especially in competitive situations. Three, better forecasting. Right now, we're often surprised at the end of the quarter. I'd rather know in October if we're going to hit November targets. **Marcus:** Let me ask about the temp staffing component specifically. How would a predictive pipeline tool work for that more transactional, volume-based business? **Angela:** That's actually a great question. It's different because there isn't really a "deal" in the same way. A temp placement happens in days. But what we could see is placement velocity—are we placing candidates fast enough? Are we losing placements because of pricing or availability? Are certain placements becoming harder to fill? If we could predict churn in temp placements the way you predict deal churn in direct-hire, we could be more proactive. Instead of waiting for a client to say "we don't need your temp staffing anymore," we'd see declining placement activity and reach out to fix it. **Marcus:** That's actually a sophisticated use case. Most temp staffing firms don't think in terms of predictive analytics. **Angela:** We're trying to be ahead of the curve there. The problem is most of the tools in our space are built for direct recruiting or temp staffing separately, not both. We need something that spans our entire business model. **Marcus:** That's a real gap in the market, frankly. Most recruiting tech is focused on one or the other. **Angela:** Which is why we're interested in conversations like this. We need partners who understand that staffing is a portfolio business, and who can help us get visibility across the portfolio without forcing us into separate systems. **Marcus:** I hear you. Let's shift gears a bit. I want to understand your expansion strategy. You've moved from Northeast to 12 locations. What's the growth trajectory? Are you planning to be in all 50 states, or are you being selective? **Angela:** We're being selective. We're currently in 12 states, covering maybe 35% of US employment. Our strategic plan is to reach 20 states in the next three years. Each new market is a significant investment—you need local sales hires, you need to build market credibility, you need to understand the local hiring dynamics. **Marcus:** What's your selection criteria for new markets? **Angela:** Three things: one, large employment base in our target verticals—healthcare, IT, finance. Two, less-concentrated competitive landscape—markets where there aren't dominant regional players. Three, geographic spread for economic resilience. We don't want to be too concentrated in any region. **Marcus:** That's smart portfolio thinking again. How do you handle the sales team expansion? Is it a time-to-productivity problem? **Angela:** Huge problem. It takes a new sales rep six to nine months to become fully productive in a new market. They need to build a prospect list, understand local hiring patterns, build credibility. We're typically not seeing profitable unit economics from a new rep for a full year. That's why we're starting to think about inbound and channel strategies. If we could attract incoming deals in a new market before we've built a mature sales presence, we'd accelerate productivity and reduce customer acquisition cost. **Marcus:** Have you considered a hybrid model? Like, inbound in markets where you're not yet established, and transition to direct sales once you've built presence? **Angela:** That's actually interesting. We haven't explicitly modeled it that way, but it makes sense. The problem is our current marketing is not super sophisticated. We're doing LinkedIn ads, some event sponsorship, a bit of content marketing. But we're not really optimized for inbound. It's an opportunity. **Marcus:** Okay, last major topic. Let's talk about downturn prep. You mentioned last recession you cut aggressively. What are you doing differently this cycle? **Angela:** We're building optionality. First, we're fixing our partnership strategy so we have more predictable, less-cyclical revenue. A partnership with a major MSP might be lower margin, but it's more stable. That's worth something in a downturn. Second, we're automating more of our operations to reduce variable costs. We're investing in tech—better candidate screening tools, better matching algorithms—so we're not entirely dependent on having a ton of human recruiters. Third, and this is where your tools come in—we're trying to get better at customer retention and expansion. It's cheaper to keep a client and expand their usage than to replace them. So we need visibility into which clients are at risk and where we have expansion opportunities within existing clients. **Marcus:** How are you thinking about profitability? Are you willing to take lower revenue in a downturn if it means protecting margins? **Angela:** Absolutely. In the last downturn, we were too focused on defending revenue. We took deals that were lower margin or higher friction, just to keep the number. This time, I'm willing to shrink revenue if it means maintaining healthier margin. It's a different mindset. **Marcus:** That's a mature approach. Have you communicated that to your board? **Angela:** We have. Our board is aligned on protecting margin over revenue in a downturn. The startup boards I've seen want you to defend growth at all costs, but our board is PE-owned now, and they care about sustainable profitability. That aligns with my thinking. **Marcus:** That's refreshing. A lot of teams are still in growth-at-all-costs mode even though the landscape has shifted. **Angela:** Yeah, I think that era is ending. The cost of capital is higher, investors are demanding unit economics, and the bar for profitability is higher. Companies like ours that have good margins, predictable revenue, and proven unit economics are in a better position than high-growth, low-margin businesses. **Marcus:** Let me ask one final question. Given everything we've talked about—the portfolio complexity, the competitive pressure from platforms, the need for better visibility, the downturn concerns—what's your number one priority for the next six months? **Angela:** Honestly? Fixing our sales operations. We're leaving money on the table because we don't have visibility into our pipeline, we're losing deals we should win because we're not being proactive, and we're not managing our customer base efficiently. That touches everything. It makes us more resilient in a downturn. It makes us more competitive against platforms. It helps us manage our portfolio more strategically. It unlocks partnerships because we can point to better outcomes. So if we could clean up our data, get better insight into deal health and customer health, improve our forecast accuracy, that would unlock everything else. **Marcus:** That's a perfect place to land. Angela, I really appreciate the time and the candor. This is incredibly helpful context for how we can actually add value for a company like TalentFlow. **Angela:** Thanks for asking good questions. A lot of vendors just pitch at me. You actually tried to understand our business. That's rare and appreciated. **Marcus:** I'll send over some initial thoughts on how Salesloft and Clari could work for you, and we can set up a deeper technical conversation with your VP of Sales. **Angela:** Sounds good. Looking forward to it. --- ## Key Takeaways ### Business Model Insights - **Portfolio Diversification is Critical**: Angela is deliberately building across verticals (healthcare, IT, finance) and geographies to reduce cyclical exposure. This is the most important strategic lever for downturn resilience. - **Product Segmentation is Real**: Direct-hire and temp staffing are fundamentally different businesses with different sales motions, margins, and management needs. They require separate P&Ls and potentially separate brands long-term. - **Expansion is Operationally Heavy**: New market entry requires 6-9 months of sales ramp-up. This drives interest in lower-friction channels and inbound strategies. ### Competitive Dynamics - **Platform Threat is Existential but Nuanced**: Indeed and LinkedIn are powerful but disintermediating. Staffing agencies survive by being specialized and outcome-focused, not by competing on access to candidate pools. - **MSP/VMS Gatekeeping is Real**: Partnership integration with platforms like Apex or SuccessFactors is essential for enterprise access but creates new dependencies. Integration is competitive moat. - **Service Quality Matters Enormously**: Even when you're integrated, you still have to deliver. Faster turnaround, better matching, higher placement quality all matter. ### Sales Operations Pain - **Data Quality is a Major Constraint**: Angela spends 30% of her time fighting for clean sales data. Activity logging is poor, pipeline visibility is limited, and forecasting is reactive rather than predictive. - **Sales Productivity Variance is Hidden**: Without good metrics, they missed that some reps were 2.7x faster than others. Once they understood why, they trained the methodology across the team and saw 20% cycle time improvement. - **Compensation Needs to Align with Portfolio**: Moving from volume-based to margin and deal-size-based compensation was necessary to force the right behaviors. ### Downturn Strategy - **Margin Over Revenue**: Angela would rather shrink revenue in a downturn while protecting margin than defend top-line by taking low-margin deals. - **Predictable Revenue is Valuable**: Partnerships and enterprise agreements are worth lower margin because they're more predictable and less cyclical. - **Customer Retention is the Lever**: In a downturn, retention and expansion in existing accounts is more efficient than new customer acquisition. ### Success Metrics for Platform/Tool Adoption 1. **Visibility into Pipeline Health**: Real pipeline, not wishful thinking. Especially for both direct-hire deals and temp placement volume. 2. **Win/Loss Insight**: Why are we winning and losing? Where are competitive vulnerabilities? 3. **Forecast Accuracy**: They're regularly surprised at quarter-end. Better predictability would improve planning. 4. **Churn Prediction for Both Segments**: Direct-hire opportunity churn and temp placement velocity decline should be predictable signals. ### Untapped Opportunities - **Inbound Channel Strategy**: Marketing is unsophisticated. Investing in content and organic visibility in new markets could accelerate local sales ramp. - **Outcome-Based Positioning**: Moving from "we fill positions" to "we improve your hiring outcomes" requires tracking placement quality, retention, time-to-productivity. - **Temp-to-Perm Conversion**: Currently 8-12%, could likely improve with better proactive outreach and incentive alignment, but requires not pushing too hard. ### Vendor Relationship Dynamics - **Skepticism is Common**: Sales leaders, especially experienced ones, are skeptical of new tools. Pilot programs with measurement are the path to adoption. - **Bundled Solutions Appeal**: Angela likes the idea of Salesloft + Clari together addressing both activity capture and outcome visibility. - **Integration with Existing Stack**: Tools need to work with Salesforce and Looker, not replace them.