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Early Slack Sales Reps Received Flat Salaries Without Commissions or Quotas

Maggie Hott · Maggie Hott: 3 Questions You Must Ask When Interviewing Sales Reps | 20VC #960 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings · Dec 15, 2022 · at 12:17

Maggie Hott was an early sales leader at Slack and currently serves as Director of Sales at Webflow. She discusses Stewart Butterfield's initial approach to sales strategy at Slack.

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“As I mentioned, when I came into Slack, there had been absolutely no reach outs ever to anything proactive. Everything that we were doing, our single biggest goal, our single biggest charter was talk to the customers, was understand what is it That the customer needs is to be as helpful as humanly possible. We weren't even on commission early days slack. Like we were just straight up salaried. We had no other measurements and no other goals. Stuart's charter for the sales team was to help our customers, which I absolutely loved.”

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