Blond: Run late-night, small whiteboard sessions for contrarian sales ideas
Sam Blond · Sam Blond: Why Startups are Doing Outbound Wrong and How to Fix It | E1139 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings · Apr 12, 2024 · at 56:53
Sam Blond, former CRO at Brex and Zenefits and former Partner at Founders Fund, explains his methodology for generating creative demand-generation ideas at early-stage startups.
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“At a ten-person startup, Harry, you're the founder, you're gonna be in this meeting, the two sales reps are gonna be in this meeting, and then maybe we have, like, somebody in growth, that person's gonna be in this meeting. So we've got four people in this meeting. We are going to do, it's up at eight o'clock on Monday evening meeting. It's the end of the day. We're going to do a whiteboard session. This meeting can go until midnight. There's no end in sight because it's the last meeting of the day. Okay. Everybody come in with your top three ideas on what you suggest we do that is different from what everybody else is doing in outbound. Okay. We go around the room, Sam, Who are, what are your top three ideas? Okay. Harry, what are your top three ideas? We go to each person. Everybody comes with three, like a trarion or different ideas on how to do outbound. We discuss them all. We select the ones that we think are the best, and we go out and we try them.”
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More from Sam Blond
Blond: Parker Conrad Will Build a $100 Billion Business With Rippling
“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.”
Blond: Sales Reps Will Fail If Founders Cannot Close Deals First
“If you as the founder cannot close customers and generate revenue people that sort of specialize in sales will definitely not be able to. There is no one better qualified to acquire your first set of customers than you as the founder.”
Blond: Do Not Hire Initial Sales Reps From Salesforce or Rippling
“If you are hiring your first AE, first AEs number one and two, They need to have seen an early stage startup environment. Do not hire from an extreme example, be Salesforce, but gosh, even today, you know, don't hire from a rep who came from rippling. And join…”
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.”
Sam Blond: Generating demand, not conversion rate, is almost always the startup bottleneck
“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…”
Sam Blond: Account executives must generate their own demand from day 1 to 1000
“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.”