Lars Nilsson
Chief Executive Officer
Lars Nilsson founded SalesSource over 12 years ago with the same vision that resonates with his clients today: to help enable C-Level executives and GTM leaders to scale pipeline creation and GTM success.
Lars accomplishes these goals through comprehensive assessments and diagnostics, advisory/consulting and technical services engagements that help teams reach “world class” in their pipeline creation initiatives.
Lars first started his career during the new age sales revolution as a top sales rep at Xerox in the late 80s. His time as a rep led him to realizations that would help him create his niche in leading and managing strategic teams at large scale. Building off these early successes, he advanced new strategies of inside sales into the industry through his leadership roles across many of the world’s top companies.
Lars spent his first 10 years of leadership helping fine tune tactical field operations for revenue growth and creating first of their kind inside sales initiatives. Notably, Lars led ArcSight in its transition through a historic acquisition by HP, becoming the VP of Inside Sales at Hewlett Packard Enterprise after the acquisition.
Next, Lars became VP of Global Inside Sales at Cloudera ($CLDR), the role in which he coined the term “account-based sales development” and where he helped the company go from $100M to $4.1B ARR (and one of the most watched tech IPOs in history). Across his career of successes, he has taken companies from seed-stage to IPO 5 times, leading to the birth of SalesSource 12 years ago.
Most recently, Lars reignited the SalesSource flame again in 2024 after his 4 year run as VP of Sales Development at Snowflake. During his time there, he led the initiatives to scale the company from a 65 person to a 300 person global SDR organization and created lasting results that surpassed expectations during Snowflake’s transition to a post-pandemic GTM future. A hallmark achievement of his time at Snowflake was the development of the Sales Development Academy, the culmination of a career’s worth of knowledge around enablement, career development, and organizational leadership to help young SDRs mature into powerful leaders within Snowflake across many departments.
Over the years, Lars has also acted, and continues to act, as the in-house special revenue advisor for seed-stage venture firm True Ventures ($3.8B AUM). In this role he guides, mentors and coaches early stage founders and their teams to today’s modern demand generation strategies helping them grow, scale and reach subsequent financing goals. His singular mission is helping portfolio companies across every stage of startup growth tackle GTM problems properly.
As Lars now leads SalesSource full-time, he brings his experiences filling in-house roles and his many client engagements across the years with top companies including Zoom, Uber, Procore, Intapp, Asana, and more, to make an impact for SalesSource customers.
Lars and the SalesSource team have helped create scalability for early stage companies just starting their sales and revenue journeys as well as some of the largest B2B SaaS teams, and will continue to do so going into the AI revolution that has captivated the world of sales development.
Lars is well known for being a “fire in the belly” evangelist — the concept of being focused and accountable to critical GTM goals, and having the perseverance to achieve them through daily actions. As he navigates conversations across the C-Level, with investors, with GTM leaders and even SDRs directly, fostering this energy is a priority. His infectious passion for winning and the seasoned tenure of his experience help him to give companies the tools they need to avoid critical mistakes that GTM teams often make as they grow.
Together, with his history of scaling companies internally as an operator, advising companies externally as the founder of SalesSource, and working with portfolio companies across venture backed global organizations, Lars has created many proprietary templates, methodologies and strategies, and assembled delivery teams ready to meet your unique GTM needs.
Lars resides in Sausalito and regularly enjoys taking clients, friends and family out on his boat to explore the bay, share stories, and plan the future of the industry he has helped build.