The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 16 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Dan Shapiro: Direct enterprise sales teams capture higher pricing than self-serve
“And my guess is that for most products, you could actually find a price that you could, the product would, you know, in theory actually sell itself at scale. Truth is that we found that price to be materially lower than the value we can communicate to the mark…”
Dan Shapiro: The best way to assess salespeople is having them sell
“I think beyond that, I think probably the biggest lesson I learned about hiring salespeople is the easiest way to assess a salesperson is to get them to sell to you.”
Dan Shapiro: Good salespeople ask great questions; bad ones talk too much
“Good sales person asks good questions, bad sales, people talk a lot.”
Dan Shapiro: Leaders who think firing is easy belong in middle management
“Anyone that acts like, has the bravado to act like, oh, it's easy for them to know when to fire someone, I think that those people, ah, are in middle management. They're sort of relegated to middle management, right?”
Dan Shapiro: Hiring enterprise sales leaders into early-stage startups often fails
“And at least in a startup, most people, like, the thought process that we've seen is, you know, okay, we're at 50 people. We need to be at 500 people. Who has managed a 500, been a manager in a 500 person org? Okay, great. Let's go bring them into our org. Oka…”
Dan Shapiro: Sales compensation plans do not dictate company culture
“And I think what we've learned at LinkedIn is that compensation is not how culture is formed, ok?”
Dan Shapiro: Two days in person beats a year of phone calls
“You can learn more in two days in an office than you can talking to them over the phone for a year.”
Dan Shapiro: Company culture is defined by hiring, promotion, and firing decisions
“Those moments are where the organization learns what the culture really is. Who do you hire? Who do you promote? Who do you let go? Like, that's where culture gets defined, from my perspective.”
Dan Shapiro: Sales leaders fail by focusing on quarters instead of scaling
“I think where a lot of people get struggle is where the top leader is basically thinking about the business three to six months out. And I think a lot of sales leaders do because they grew up in a quarter to quarter individual rep capacity versus thinking abou…”
Dan Shapiro: Slow-ramping sales hires often have the highest long-term potential
“Some of the people that took the longest to mature as salespeople had the highest potential in the long run.”
Dan Shapiro: Default to firing underperformers if still uncertain at the deadline
“I always set a time period for myself, so I say, okay, great. It is July. By October, I'm gonna make a decision, and in October, even if I still feel in the middle ground, it's a no.”
Dan Shapiro: Early startup sales hunting roles have high performance variance
“Some roles, like hunting roles, early in a startup's career, have tremendous variance of success. Some people crush it, a lot of people don't, and you're probably going to have to cycle through people pretty quickly.”
Dan Shapiro: The ultimate purpose of tech sales is funding engineering
“If you want to take a super Silicon Valley view of sales, our goal is to fund engineering, and my ability to do that successfully requires me to be a good forecaster.”
Dan Shapiro: Applying rigid sales forecasting to new products is counterproductive
“I think forecasting goes a little awry, where you essentially apply forecasting rigidity to new businesses, and the conversation is, you're just launching a new product, and it's, you said you were gonna do three million, and you did two and a half, and why we…”
Dan Shapiro: Explicit output compensation hurts creative work like engineering
“Sort of, the other thing that I think if you're a fan of I think is Bob Cialdini, the guy that wrote the Influence book basically says that for creative, expansive type of tasks, giving people explicit compensation is actually really counterproductive. They te…”