Sales Leader
topic on 7 shows · 40 statements across 33 episodes
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40 statements about Sales Leader, every show
Wang: Conventional wisdom adds sales leadership at $25M–$50M ARR as self-serve slows
“Previously it made sense to start layering a sales leader at 25 to fifty million of ARR when self-serve starts to peter out.”
Strange: Scaling past $50M requires recruiting sales leaders from mature markets
“One of the tougher things of getting ecosystems going, is you can have very, very smart people, you can land your customers, but then when you look around for who's my sales leader that's gonna take me from fifty million to five hundred million, You probably h…”
Dorfman: AI forces sales leaders to become systems thinkers over strategists
“Sales leaders are rapidly becoming systems thinkers over deal strategists. And you have to think about the system in its entirety.”
Peet: Universally Liked Sales Leaders Are Wrong For The Job
“If your sales leader is beloved by everybody, you got the wrong guy.”
Mirzadegan: Hiring $50M+ ARR Sales Reps at Seed/Series A Usually Fails
“If you're a seed or series A founder, and you're evaluating sales leaders and AEs that have only been at companies that have done like, fifty million or more of ARR when they joined, it's probably going to be really difficult for them.”
Sales leaders provide poor signal-to-noise ratio for product feedback
“Building for salespeople Or sales leaders in particular. I feel the signal to noise ratio is pretty poor because they're really quite willing to hop on quick calls and are very, very positive and kind of very friendly people.”
Recruiting ability is the primary differentiator of world-class enterprise sales leaders
“I'll tell you that the number one thing that they do extremely well is recruiting.
And it sounds like, you know, you're talking about sales.
Why is recruiting the
Number one thing.
And all I've found is that eventually the sales scaling comes down to ability t…”
Stebbings: Most tech salespeople and sales leaders are not good
“I don't think the majority of salespeople are very good. I don't think the majority of sales leaders are very good.”
Milliano: Founders rarely clarify product-led versus sales-led strategy when hiring
“Almost never have I seen like a founder or an exec hire a sales leader and like actually be able to articulate very clearly, like I'm going to be a sales led company or I'm going to be a product led company.”
Better to Delay Hiring Sales Reps Than Hire Mediocre Talent
“You're going to have pressure to build the team quickly. Better to be late. Than to hire mediocre people.”
Lemkin: Few sales leaders are quant enough to understand demand gen
“I don't know very many sales leaders that intuitively are detail or quant enough to understand demand gen marketing.”
Lemkin: Demand gen reporting to aggressive sales leaders can sometimes work
“I think it's more whether demand gen should report to an aggressive sales leader who says I've had an all of enough and I used to be against it for the reasons, but now I'm seeing it work up to a point because at least they can get more results versus a lackad…”
Lemkin: Hiring a great sales leader gives founders zero time back
“When you hire a great sales leader, assign it, you don't get any time back in sales. It's just used differently. You'll just be more efficient.”
Fougere: Bad sales leaders yell at scoreboards instead of joining calls
“The leader is not in the boat with them. The leader yells at the scoreboard at the end of the quarter or end of the week. How come you didn't get more meetings? How can we didn't do this? Like, well, you should have been in it with them. It shouldn't be a surp…”
Lemkin: Great sales leaders constantly cultivate reps ready to join them
“Any great sales leader always has a couple of folks ready to go with her the next day. They, and I know you got to be careful with this word this day, but it's true. This word, they groom them. They groom them. The best sales leaders are meeting with tons of f…”
Shurtz: Overcommitting as a sales leader causes severe health and mental strain
“If you're personally trying to do too much, you know, this is where you really get into what I would think are, or what I know are mindset challenges. These end up in health challenges. You really get spread way too thin when you're trying to do too much”
Norton: Giving sales leaders ownership of post-sales eliminates finger-pointing
“This also makes the customer problem your sales leader's problem, which means there's no more finger pointing. And I think that's really valuable. So I'm a big believer in single threaded ownership. Make your post sales problems your sales leader's problem som…”
Blond: Startups should not hire SDRs before hiring a sales leader
“I don't like hiring SDRs prior to hiring a sales leader. Because they need a lot of hands-on management.”
Half of Current Sales Leaders Will Fail Within Two Years
“Half the sales leaders probably are not, I'm going to make it in the next year or two.”
Perret: Plaid avoided using 'sales' job titles for six years
“We didn't hire a sales leader until we were probably. You know, four years into the company, nobody had a title of sales until we probably were even like six or seven years into the company.”
SaaS Companies Average Two to Three Sales Leaders Before Going Public
“In general, we find that most companies have somewhere between two and three sales leaders between founding and actually going public”
Sales Leaders Present at IPO Average Three Years of Prior Tenure
“On average, we find the sales leader that is there at time of IPO has been there for more or less three years prior to that, just to have the time to build out the maturity and sophistication in that revenue repeatability.”
Scale-Up Sales Leaders Need Quota Experience 14x Your Current ARR
“You're looking for a sales leader that has at least 14 times of your ARR in quota-carrying background.”
Rosenberg: Early Startups Should Hire Sales Leaders Before Junior Reps
“I think you should be a sales leader. I really do. I mean, I think that the junior rep has a lot of success because they're figuring it out. They're the first one on the ground. And so you want to invest behind that person. The reality is you're trying to buil…”
Lemkin: Many leading sales SaaS companies are experiencing zero percent growth
“A lot of the sales leaders are growing zero percent.”
Egan: Founders set sales vision; sales VPs codify repeatability
“It's the job of the sales leader to pull from that and codify it and put it into writing and explain that these are our sales motions. So I think it's the CEO and the founder's job to provide the inspiration and the high level talking points and the kind of th…”
Lemkin: Inbound-Only Sales Leaders Should Never Manage SDR Teams
“There are a lot of sales leaders who have only done inbound, ok? They have only responded to leads. They should not manage SDRs if humanly possible. They almost all fail.”
Software sales leaders recruit within too narrow a candidate profile
“I think there's a challenge from software companies and sales leaders thinking too small inside of a box in terms of the profile of who they're looking for.”
Sales leaders must allow reps to fail in low-stakes deals
“So you need to create space for them to fail when the stakes are low so they can succeed when the stakes are high.”
Blond: Startups are seeking sales leaders despite early 2023 macro layoffs
“And one thing that is counterintuitive in this environment of layoffs and slow to hiring is that I'm actually seeing more companies looking for a sales leader.”
Blond: Startups should not prioritize domain experience when hiring sales leaders
“There are only so many really amazing sales leaders that exist to begin with. And if you limit your candidate population to a very small domain, like let's just say property tech or something like that, how many unbelievable property tech sales leaders are the…”
Blond: Founders must prove success with individual contributors before hiring VPs
“The more, Common path here is hire a couple individual contributors, make them successful, then hire a sales leader to scale the team.”
Taking Over Reps' Deals Is the Biggest Mistake New Sales Leaders Make
“The single biggest mistake I see new sales leaders making Is they go super rep their team's deals, and they run their deals for them, and they just burn themselves out.”
Wesley Chan: Sales Leaders and CMOs Often Make the Best Product Managers
“Some of the salespeople, some sales, you know, leaders and CMOs have lots of product expertise. You have to remember, they're close to the customer. They've explained to the customer what the product does. They, you know, in their previous jobs have learned wh…”
Herzberg: Sales leaders must speak with new customers weekly
“If a leader had not gotten in front of a customer, if he or she was sitting in virtual or physical conference rooms for their first two months and wasn't talking to one new customer at minimum every single week, that is a major flag for me about customer orien…”
Bailey: 60% of Sales Leaders Anticipate Teams Will Miss Quota
“This is leading to 60% of sales leaders anticipating that their teams won't be able to hit quota.”
Box CRO: Sales leaders need deal, people, and strategy skills
“I'm a big believer that sales leaders have skills that you could put in three buckets. You know, they have deal skills. You generally don't get promoted unless you can close deals and make it rain. They have people skills. They're often kind of people, you kno…”
Lemkin: Sales Leaders Cannot Build Unfamiliar Functions at Early-Stage Startups
“You can check that you can say these things, but if you haven't done it, you can't do it for the first time at your startup. It's asking too much.”
Dan Shapiro: Audience empathy is the shared key to sales and product
“What makes a great salesperson and a sales leader, I think, is being able to empathize with an audience, and that's also what makes a great product manager.”