Prioritize deal-closing experience over industry domain knowledge when hiring sales reps
Sean Boscanian · This is why I don't believe in sales quotas | Figma CRO · 20VC with Harry Stebbings · Mar 21, 2026 · at 27:07
Shaunt Voskanian, CRO at Figma, discusses sales hiring strategies with Harry Stebbings, evaluating whether complex deal-closing experience or sector domain expertise is more important for candidate success.
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“I, if those are the two options to choose from, I would take the person with the experience doing the deal, because I think the industry experience you can teach with, to the person who's got, you know, the right willingness to learn and the curiosity, and obviously you need to make sure you have that in a person and you test for it. I'm kind of making a bit of an assumption that with those two choices, the person who's done the really big deal hasn't just got a bluebird, right? That they've managed multi-stakeholder Long sales cycles, have to build a lot of champions, have to get to EBs you know, they're likely leveraging something like Calm, and they're using Medic, and they're familiar with these concepts. There's a lot more confidence that I think that needs to be built over time for people to be really good at that, and I think, generally speaking, smart people can learn industries and landscapes in a shorter period of time. So if those are my two only choices, I would probably take the person who's got the deal experience.”
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