Blond: Early-stage startups should build fully in-person sales organizations
Sam Blond · Sam Blond: Why Startups are Doing Outbound Wrong and How to Fix It | E1139 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings · Apr 12, 2024 · at 1:11:53
Sam Blond, former CRO at Brex and former Partner at Founders Fund, discusses his stance on remote versus in-person sales teams for new startups.
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“I think if you are starting a business today, I am very biased towards building the in-person both the, you know, the entire company, but also the sales organization.”
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“I just wanted to join this guy's company because he was going to build a hundred billion dollar business. You know, we didn't realize that outcome with Zenefits. He's going to with Rippling.”
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Blond: Do Not Hire Initial Sales Reps From Salesforce or Rippling
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Blond: Brex Never Used Recruiters to Source Sales Talent
“At Brex, we did not use recruiters, internal or external, to source candidates for the sales organization Ever.”
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“And I just believe that demand masks a lot of other potential problems and almost all startups. The bottleneck to growing faster is demand. We are constrained by the number of opportunities that we are creating. We are misdiagnosing this as a conversion rate p…”
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“Salespeople should absolutely be responsible for controlling their own destiny in a way, generating their own demand that often manifests through outbound. I think this is true on day one. This should be true on day 1000.”