Fillmann: Industry Expertise Matters More Than Prior Deal Size Experience
Frank Fillmann · Frank Fillmann: How I Boosted Revenue by $500M at Salesforce; Tips for Hiring Salespeople | E992 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings · Mar 22, 2023 · at 58:31
Frank Fillmann is CRO and Country Leader Australia for Salesforce. Host Harry Stebbings asked whether experience with deal size or industry experience matters more when hiring sales leadership.
0:00 / 0:11exact quote · 11.2s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“Industry experience and driving client trust and relevancy, you can reverse engineer everything a lot easier than having big experience on a deal, but not understanding what's going to make your customer successful.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Frank Fillmann
Fillmann: Founders Should Hire Sales Reps Individually, Not in Competing Pairs
“If you want the environment where people perform at their best, you need safety. If you want safety, they have to know that you're trusting them, that you've got their back. And if you have two different people kind of competing in the same environment, I don'…”
Fillmann: Teaming Two Sales Alphas Together Will Crash and Burn
“I think for me I'd say the biggest mistake I've made was trying to team people together that were both alphas. And like, I think being an alpha in sales is really, really good. You want the natural leader, but if they do it at the expense of other people and t…”
Fillmann: Prioritize Potential Over Experience, Except for Mature Enterprise Accounts
“It's always hypo one experience to the, there's always an exception to that though. I think when you have like a big mature customer and a big brand with a lot of visibility, You'll always have to take experience first. You don't want someone learning on the j…”
Fillmann: Retraining Non-Enterprise Reps for Upmarket Selling Fails
“Trying to train folks that don't have the enterprise experience and convert them over, I don't think it's setting them up for success. I think you need to be able to find folks that have done this before that bring in the top end of the game and then having re…”
Fillmann: Competitive Sales Roles Build Bulletproof Skin for Beginners
“And then my first role at IBM was a competitive sales rep. So every account I talked to didn't want to talk to me. So you get to kind of have this like bulletproof skin on you, which is a really, really great way to get into sales.”