How The Best CROs Actually Hire Salespeople w/ Kyle Norton, CRO @ Owner.com

About this episode

Kyle Norton discusses his experience in scaling sales teams and the nuances of hiring effective salespeople.

Kyle Norton is the CRO of Owner.com , the all-in-one online presence platform for independent restaurants: think Shopify Plus meets HubSpot, but built specifically for your neighborhood restaurant that’s your go-to for ordering in on a Thursday night. He's taken Owner from $2.5M ARR to $100M in just under four years, with 2025 growth outpacing 2024. Before Owner, Kyle spent three years at Shopify where he built out the Point of Sale go-to-market organization and then ran the Canadian market, which is a quarter-billion-dollar business. Prior to Shopify, he was the first-time VP of Sales at League, taking them from 0 to $25M ARR. Kyle started his career in sales in 2008 during the financial crisis (tough timing that forged a great seller) and has been building and rebuilding revenue teams ever since. He was only an individual contributor for 14 months total before moving into leadership, which speaks volumes. Kyle recently relocated from Toronto to San Francisco, and he'll be the first to tell you the dinner conversations there are on another level. He works basically nonstop, thinks deeply about first principles, and has a well-known polarizing style: intense, hyper-transparent…

People in this episode

Host: Chris Balestras

Guest: Kyle Norton

Topics covered

• CRO
• sales hiring
• revenue growth
• leadership

Keywords

• Owner.com
• Shopify
• sales strategy
• Point of Sale
• restaurant industry

Mentioned in this episode

Products: Shopify Plus, HubSpot, Avira, Triggers, OneMind, Owner.com, Shopify

Places: Toronto, San Francisco, SF

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