Sales Force
topic on 4 shows · 7 statements across 7 episodes
the Official SaaStr Podcast 
Top Founders 
the a16z Podcast 
20VC
7 statements about Sales Force, every show
Verticalizing Horizontal Sales Teams Hurts Meritocracy
“Verticalizing the sales force when you have a horizontal solution, I think cuts it cuts against meritocracy because there's typically going to be some verticals that are better than others.”
Casado: Consumer companies must be marketing-led due to sales force economics
“So consumer companies are typically marketing-led, and that drives everything else about the company. Why is it marketing-led? Because if your customer's a consumer, there's no way you're gonna pay a sales force to go talk to every one of them. There's just no…”
Horowitz: Sales is the most critical department for maintaining company culture
“In fact, in a way, it's the most important part of your company to have great culture in because it's the part that represents you.”
Tradeshift has 600 employees, with one-third in sales
“So we totally, we are out 600 people doubling roughly year over year. And right now around a third of that is our sales force, right?”
Startups Must Retain Early Customers Before Paying Salespeople Commission
“Why on earth would you pay a salesperson commission before you know if you're going to retain your customers? So it's that first hundred customers, maybe first 10, 20 customers, depending on your business model, before you even think about commissioning a sale…”
Lawson: Twilio enterprise sales exist to shepherd developer prototypes past procurement
“Developers are the ones who bring you in first, build that prototype, you know, and then it starts to snowball within the company, right? The momentum, because people see this thing and they say, oh, we want to ship that. Hey, what's preventing us from shippin…”
Ferrara: It's called Salesforce because you must force salespeople to use it
“CRMs today don't stand for customer relationship management. They stand for customer reporting management. You actually have to force your salespeople to use it. That's why they call it sales force. Cause you have to force salespeople to use it.”