“One of the places where I see these companies stall out is they had founder selling to be able to get to the first 10, 15, 20 customers. And then we start to add salespeople that go to market model. They find, oh, wait a minute. A regular sales or marketing person can't actually do what the founder was doing.”
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 Bob Tinker
Opinion
Tinker: Early startups should hire versatile "Davy Crockett" reps, not sales VPs
“My personal opinion on that is that's not the right thing to do. You need to find, like, go hire more of like a Davy Crockett type sales rep that can sell, but also has a little bit of product and product marketing in them.”
Bob TinkerFeb 26, 2019▶ 13:02a16z Podcast | Finding Go-to-Market Fit in the Enterprise
Insight
Tinker: Product-led growth fails when enterprise sales require committee approval
“If it's a committee decision where you'd have the CIO, the chief security officer, the VP of infrastructure involved, It's really hard to do marketing-led or product-led when you have a committee decision.”
Bob TinkerFeb 26, 2019▶ 27:20a16z Podcast | Finding Go-to-Market Fit in the Enterprise
Opinion
Tinker: Silicon Valley excels at product creation but struggles with go-to-market
“I think there's a bug in Silicon Valley, which is that at our core, I think we're fundamentally a product shop and we are really, really, really good at helping entrepreneurs build products. But we are not that good at helping entrepreneurs build go to markets…”
Bob TinkerFeb 26, 2019▶ 0:50a16z Podcast | Finding Go-to-Market Fit in the Enterprise
Insight
Tinker: A GTM playbook is a buying journey, not sales slides
“This is something that I got horrendously wrong as a first time CEO is that I thought like having a go to market playbook essentially meant you have a really good PowerPoint pitch. And some good sales tactics. And that was horrendously wrong because your go-to…”
Bob TinkerFeb 26, 2019▶ 15:08a16z Podcast | Finding Go-to-Market Fit in the Enterprise
Insight
Tinker: Scaling post-GTM fit requires shifting from frugality to calculated recklessness
“So you have to go from being sort of ruthlessly frugal, pinching every penny and counting every nickel to almost like calculated recklessness. We're going to try some things and spend some money on things and hire some people, even though you're not sure it's …”
Bob TinkerFeb 26, 2019▶ 31:26a16z Podcast | Finding Go-to-Market Fit in the Enterprise
Insight
Tinker: Hiring a great VP of sales should feel uncomfortable for founders
“If you hire a grade A VP of sales, they're going to absolutely push you and the rest of the organization as they try and drive to scale. And it's going to be uncomfortable. And if it's not, you may have not hired the right person.”
Bob TinkerFeb 26, 2019▶ 34:33a16z Podcast | Finding Go-to-Market Fit in the Enterprise
Made with StarZero
Turn any episode into a week of clips.
This entire site, over 1,000 episodes transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable,
runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the
moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.
We use essential cookies to make the site work. With your permission we
also use analytics cookies (Google Analytics and Mixpanel) to understand
usage and improve StarZero. See our Cookie Policy.