Insight certainty 3/5 debate potential 2/5

Egan: Early Enterprise Sales Teams Must Prioritize Product Feedback Over Revenue

Kevin Egan · Kevin Egan: Biggest Lesson on Managing Sales Teams at Slack and Atlassian | E1034 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings · Jul 12, 2023 · at 10:33

Kevin Egan, Global Head of Enterprise Sales at Atlassian, discusses how high-growth startups should structure their sales teams when transitioning from product-led growth to enterprise sales.

0:00 / 0:45exact quote · 45.6s
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“Well, I think at first the sales team is, is obviously there for revenue growth, but almost even more importantly, providing customer feedback into the product group, giving the product team that they're working with a sense for why do these people gravitate to the service? What business problem is it solving? How would you down the line translate this into ROI for the end user? And once they start doing that, so it's kind of at the early days, It's creating a major feedback loop, which you can build that repeatability on. Once you have that repeatability, then you can start to build sales teams that are more traditional with the EDR. Core sellers focus on just revenue numbers supported by sales engineers and so forth.”

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