Apr 27, 2022 · 37m · 20sales
20 Sales: Zoom's Head of North America Sales on When To Hire a Head of Sales, Why You Should Hire a Head of Sales Before Sales Reps, The 3 Traits to Look for When Hiring Sales Reps & What Sales Leaders Can Do To Make Their Sales Team Feel Like They Are Wi
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gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
In this episode of 20 Sales, host Harry Stebbings interviews Mitch Tarica, Head of North America Sales at Zoom, about scaling high-performing sales organizations. Tarica shares actionable insights on executive hiring timing, identifying top sales talent, structuring onboarding, and driving cross-functional deal execution.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Harry holds 34% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Harry as informed peer 2.7 Guest teaching 3.9 Guest disagreement 1.0 Harry pushing back 1.7
speaking balance: gold is Harry, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 10:38 Mitch rejects the convention that founder sales reliance is unscalable
Mitch directly pushes back against Harry's premise that founder involvement creates an unscalable dependency, arguing instead that keeping founders involved drives faster deal execution.
Hardest push from Harry ▶ 12:58 Harry challenges scaling speed-of-trust to young sales repsHarry refuses to accept Mitch's broad speed-of-trust framework without challenging how founders can realistically extend deep trust to junior 25-year-old reps without existing long-term relationships.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 28:59 Mitch reframes the necessity of lost deal post-mortemsWhen asked how to conduct lost deal post-mortems, Mitch educates Harry on why proactive weekly Key Deal Reviews prevent surprises and render post-mortems largely redundant.
Harry holds his own ▶ 17:41 Harry demonstrates expertise on validating seller performance metricsHarry asserts his own operational insight by emphasizing that interview candidates must tie achievements back to concrete funnel metrics, prompting Mitch to validate and build upon his point.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Harry as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Harry pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mitch Tarica's Career Journey and Path to Zoom | 1 | 3 | 0 | 0 | Harry introduces Mitch and invites him to outline his sales journey. Mitch shares his background from selling shoes at Nordstrom to executive roles at ADP, WebEx, Cisco, RingCentral, and Zoom. | |
| The Founder's Role in Sales Culture and Playbooks | 2 | 3 | 0 | 1 | Harry asks whether founders or early sales hires should build the first sales playbook. Mitch explains that founders set the culture and lead by example in early customer meetings rather than writing formal playbooks. | |
| Hiring a Head of Sales Versus Early Sales Reps | 3 | 4 | 1 | 2 | Harry asks whether to hire a head of sales or sales reps first. Mitch argues strongly for hiring a head of sales first, outlining four key functions they fulfill, while Harry notes the friction of introducing a sales leader to an existing team. | |
| Founder Involvement and Empowering Teams with Speed of Trust | 4 | 5 | 2 | 4 | Harry questions whether founder involvement in sales creates unscalable dependencies. Mitch disagrees, introducing Stephen Covey's Speed of Trust framework, prompting Harry to press on how trust can be scaled to younger, less experienced sellers. | |
| Three Core Characteristics of 10x Sales Reps | 4 | 4 | 1 | 3 | Harry asks about 10x sales rep traits and how to uncover them during interviews. Harry offers his own insight on testing candidates against performance data, which Mitch validates while emphasizing second-level follow-up questions. | |
| Structuring an Effective Sales Hiring Process | 2 | 4 | 0 | 0 | Harry asks for the optimal hiring process structure. Mitch details his interview stages, including a stand-and-deliver presentation panel and the importance of candidate thank-you notes. | |
| Designing Sales Onboarding and 30-60-90 Day Milestones | 3 | 4 | 2 | 2 | Harry asks if early-stage onboarding should be structured or hands-off. Mitch corrects Harry's suggestion of letting reps just figure it out, emphasizing structured product and process training. | |
| Driving Cross-Functional Alignment Across Sales Teams | 3 | 4 | 1 | 2 | Harry explores cross-functional alignment and setting ambitious yet achievable quotas. Mitch explains how comp plan accelerators and multipliers prevent reps from slowing down after hitting target. | |
| Conducting Key Deal Reviews and Analyzing Lost Deals | 3 | 5 | 2 | 2 | Harry asks how teams should conduct post-mortems on lost deals. Mitch reframes the question, asserting that rigorous weekly Key Deal Reviews eliminate the need for extensive post-mortems. | |
| Quick Fire Round: Sales Tactics, Mistakes, and Leadership | 2 | 3 | 1 | 1 | In the quick fire round, Mitch shares insights on dead tactics like mass mail merges, common founder mistakes like homogeneous hiring, and dispels the misconception that sales is an easy job. |
Statements from this episode (24)
Tarica: ADP was one of the first SaaS companies
“ADP is one of the world's largest HRIS and payroll companies in the world, and I think ADP really was one of the first SaaS companies.”
Tarica: Founders fundamentally set sales culture and go-to-market tone
“The founder sets the bar on the type of sales culture you Caring, competitive, cutthroat, combative, whatever culture they want to infuse and instill, they're the ones that set that culture, that set their sales go to market.”
Tarica: Zoom CEO Eric Yuan joins quarter-close customer sales meetings
“Eric has led by example from the minute he started at Zoom up until I was on customer meetings with Eric as we closed the quarter.”
Tarica: Startups should hire a Head of Sales before sales reps
“My lean, Harry, head of sales first, because I think a strong head of sales can do four things really, really well. First, they create that sales playbook that you asked about earlier, where the CEO is leading by example, but that head of sales goes Creates th…”
Stebbings: Sales leaders perform better bringing their own team
“No, listen, I'm actually with you, and I also think it's much easier when they bring their team than when you kind of throw a head of sales with an existing team that they maybe didn't craft and create, and there's that friction.”
Tarica: Startups must hire a Head of Sales after $1M ARR
“I think you can make it past a million ARR, but then once you get past that, at least from what I see, it's time. I think you have to bring that head of sales.”
Stebbings: Executive sales leader searches take three to six months
“Well, it takes six months to hire a head of sales sometimes. It takes three months, but it's not tomorrow”
Tarica: Keeping founders involved in sales is better than excluding them
“Giving away the Zoom secret sauce here a bit, I think as long as the founder knows how to properly Delegate and the founder can truly trust their team. I think keeping the founder in more than keeping them out is more beneficial.”
Tarica: Zoom CEO gave 'Speed of Trust' book to all employees
“Eric has given out that book to every employee in the company. We were all asked to read it. We've been asked to share things about it.”
Tarica: Personal ownership in sales is an innate, unteachable trait
“Personal ownership means a real understanding. I'm part of a bigger picture. My number is my manager's number is my segment leaders. Number is my head of North America's number is part of the company number. And that's a very big thing. And that's hard to teac…”
Tarica: 88% of poker hands are won by the best player
“There's a survey of a 100,000 poker hands played. 88% of the time, it's not the best hand that wins. It's the best player that wins.”
Tarica: How sales candidates answer matters more than the specific questions
“Yeah, I don't believe there are specific questions. I think it's not what people say when you ask questions, Harry, and when you ask for examples, it's how they answer the questions and the examples. Do they have authentic conviction? Can they speak openly and…”
Tarica: Probe multi-level deep into candidate metrics during sales interviews
“Like I told you I'm a data junkie, but then I would go underneath that question and ask about what's the average deal size? What's the length of deal process? You know, and I really then go second level, third level, and unpack the data even further, because i…”
Tarica: Post-interview thank-you notes reveal how candidates will treat customers
“Then finally, and this is a controversial one out there on LinkedIn right now, but the thank you know, earlier I talked about out professionalizing The competition. This is another piece of professionalism from my seat. I think it's a solid way to stand out af…”
Tarica: Zoom runs a month-long onboarding process for new sales reps
“At Zoom, we have a month long onboarding process for all of our newest sales hire. Each week we focus on a topic. It's either product, it's either sales process, role-specific knowledge.”
Tarica: Zoom doubled overall headcount and sales team size during pandemic
“Our company has doubled in size, and you know, our sales team has doubled in size.”
Tarica: Zoom holds quarterly feedback sessions across seven business segments
“I actually just did a session, what I call voice of the rep. I do it every quarter. I pull two different people from every segment in the business. I have seven segments, and we pull new hires and veterans together.”
Tarica: Tiered compensation multipliers drive sales reps to push past quotas
“Sales reps are going to feel like if I'm just doing everything I can, I'm coming to the end of a closing period And I just don't see the finish line. There is an innate feeling emotion that will say, you know what, I'm going to give up and I'm going to go atta…”
Tarica: Setting sales quotas too high causes reps to delay deals
“You're going to make a bet that people are going to go overachieve against that, but if you set it too high, people will give up and wait till the next period close.”
Tarica: Zoom conducts weekly 90-minute cross-functional deal reviews
“We also conduct large deal reviews at the manager level every single week. We draw an MRR threshold. And we bring the management team in every week, and we hold our managers accountable and expect our managers to review these top deals every week in these sess…”
Tarica: Proactive deal reviews eliminate the need for lost-deal post-mortems
“If both of these motions are done well, deal reviews and these large deal review meetings at the management level, and they're done well, and they're done consistently. There's almost not a need for a larger postmortem on the deal as when you lose a deal, beca…”
Tarica: Larger enterprise sales wins take six to nine months
“So I think that is also another factor in this and small wins along the way, but larger wins are going to take six to nine months.”
Tarica: Generic automated mail merges are dead in sales prospecting
“The old way of doing mail merges from a prospecting perspective, that's died of death. To quote my good friend John Barros, it's all about context in your prospecting versus content. When prospecting. And I think the old way was more very content driven. And I…”
Tarica: Homogeneous hiring is founders' biggest mistake in sales teams
“Homogeneous hiring, you know, lack of diversity across skills, lack of diversity across backgrounds, putting it all into one form factor can be a very, very big mistake. You need So many different parts of the organization, and I think that's my answer there.”