Sales Team

“So yeah, I think, you know, some of these companies today where, you know, 40, 50% of the team's hitting quota, I think they're probably doing themselves a disservice. Either their quotas are too high or, you know, they're hiring profiles off.”

“You want to know when you have the right sales team in your company, when the customers hound them for months and years after, when they added so much value in the sales process that even when they're handed off to someone else in the org, they don't do it. Th…”

“I personally think net net, it means we'll have sales teams about half the size we used to.”

“I think like you have to go in and you have to then sell, like in a consumption model, you have to get usage. So like we talk about forward deployed engineers. Okay. Well, that's an ideal situation to deploy a forward deployed engineer or professional services…”

“There is a strategy that we think is very interesting, which is instead of having a sales team, you buy one.”

“The pro, the net productivity is about the same. It's not better. It's not worse. But it's so much more efficient and it scales because software scales.”

“They don't work out of the box. But when you dial them in, when you take your best person or your best script and you train an agent with your best person and best script, that agent can start to become a version of your best salesperson, your best person.”

“Marilyn is our internal go to market chat bot, and it's a multi-agent system I'built with one engineer. I've never had something I've built that had like a better ratio of impact to effort. So this is like me and one engineer as like a part-time thing for him.…”

“And I think a lot of folks I talked to, too, more common, you probably do too, Jason, just say they're not going to add headcount so that they can empower their teams, either Q four, 25 or Q one, 26 with these tools. Like they're just, again, reallocating budg…”

“If a company just hired its first non-founding sales team, that means they found product market fit, and it's on repeat, and they can get the founder out of their sales job.”

“Our sales folks touch probably less than one percent of our total customers. And it's not meaningfully infringing on their job. It's just helping them like touch more accounts that otherwise we never could have touched.”

“Seems like there's so much demand for AI that people don't need these massive sales teams and they can get things done with much leaner, leaner teams.”

“Even today, our sales team is only Does about five percent of our accounts.”

“Now we probably have 20 guys make a million bucks in in the sales team.”

“At the end of the day, I work for the sales team. That's how I see it in MeToBe, right? I do. I work for the sales team. Either I'm helping them close deals and get customers, or I'm not helping them close deals and get customers.”

“60% of most sales teams are going to miss their number in any given year.”

“The earliest stage of building a sales team is not looking for Traditional coin operated reps that are going to come in and just build the sales playbook for you. The earliest stages are actually about learning.”

“Sales teams, generally speaking, at companies are wildly dysfunctional and waste lots of money and lots of time on stuff that doesn't amount to anything.”

“Because this number has been 25% to 35% for more than a couple of decades. We've not been able to move the time we spend in front of customers because we are trying to do all these administrative tasks.”

“So it is not, we don't have, you know, a huge sales force team. We don't believe you need that. We need, you need a good, great story. You need a tight process, and you need to have the right data partners from a sales perspective to enrich that pipeline that …”

“Something quite controversial, which is to take the thing that our sales team was gated on a self-hosted version of retool and made that available self-serve to anybody who wanted it. They didn't have to talk to a salesperson and that kind of blew up the funne…”

“If you charge more than 1500 dollars, you're gonna need a sales team. So by just charging 1500 bucks, that's, you know, a sweet spot that people will be, like, willing to take a risk and invest into that without you getting bogged down with you know, needing t…”

“Now we do have offices that, or people that work from home that don't live in those major cities, but I bring the sales team together once a month.”

“Half of these sales teams will be gone in two years. Half of these sales and customer success teams will be gone in two years because they're mediocre. They'll be gone. They're all going to be laid off.”

“Dramatically smaller. It could be 10 to 20% of current kind of org sizes.”

“Instead of having large teams, you need fewer teams who hold more book, and management layers kind of compress, and then you need different kinds of leaders. And that completely changes, like, sales and marketing is 40% of your OPEX, right? Like, it could pote…”

“When the complexity of the buying process on behalf of the customer goes from I'm making decisions, I got the budget, to I have a committee of people that now need to make the decisions, that includes IT, that includes procurement, that includes security, that…”

“I always say look for shutdowns, which is like, if you shut down a whole product division and the sales team are gone, that may not have been that they were shit. It may have been that the product didn't have product market fit.”

“Make sure your sales teams are not trading away logo rights. You have to get those logos to be able to have them as referenceable customers, and often it takes one big lighthouse logo in an industry, and then the dominoes start to fall, and you start to be abl…”

“I think the best thing to do is just to stop. Let's all get in a room and let's talk about it. Let's talk about how we're feeling.”

“We built an amazing sales team, you know, going forward to today where we have more than a thousand people in our sales team, but it was not obvious back in the days.”

“So a med spa that could do 10 x the volume as a hair salon, In, in terms of their own processings, a med spa that does three million a year, a hair salon that does 400,000 a year, those can close at the same time if you train your sales team to be specialists …”

“I think a lot of the best zero to one product people Should be forced to get the first million dollars in revenue for the thing, not just build the widget and have the sales team bring it to market.”

“You should have a kill sheet for every competitor that basically lists on the left side all the different features, and then how you win or how you lose, and that kill sheet should be in with all your sales reps, so they can talk about positioning, edit the ki…”

“The tactical answer for more kumbaya people is probably cut half your sales team. This always works. Concentrate your leads in tougher times. It may not work at Matt. Maybe it doesn't work at zoom info scale, but even at fifty million, it's going to work.”

“If you have 15 products, where you charge five to 10 dollars PEPM for all of them, and you launch a 16th product, where you also charge 10 dollars PEPM, like you can't build the whole sales team around a single SKU, where like the unit economics, you can't set…”

“The broader theme behind this next category is your sales team is a research team, and if you don't view them that way, you are missing out on half the value”

“Be extremely intelligent and design your sales team based on product market fit.”

“It means marketing has won! That's what it means, right? It means, like, Outbound is now owned by growth and marketing teams, ok? Just embrace it. Like, that war is over, ok?”

“I think so many companies focus on generating new customers by focusing directly on those customers, but you already have an army of potential quote unquote salespeople in your happy customer base. And again, like the status quo here is to Thank you, email, no…”

“And a sales team is going to cost you a couple million dollars to really deploy at scale, so it's incredibly important that you keep those costs small, you build the product so it can sell itself, and then you add the sales team on top.”

“When you're when you're like, it's a very diminishing trait when you try and do too much, my opinion, because you flow it down and you keep adding things on. You never take anything off. Like the list just kind of keeps growing. And when the list grows, your t…”

“It is the most effective thing that I urge all founders with sales teams to hear the pains of customers. You hear, you speak about training empathy. It's probably the closest way to train empathy, just to listen to the customer support.”

“Cause if you have a sales team and let's say the front end of the business, the loss loss leader, the sales team can't see zero dollars. They'll be depressed every day. A salesperson needs to see growth. They need to see sales dollars. You have to engineer it …”

“It is extremely, extremely expensive to verticalize. Your sales team and at least from other founders that are much ahead of us that I've spoken to, like it's when people do it is at a much, much, much different level of scale.”

“दो हजार पंद्रह में हम वास्तव में बहुत तेजी से बढ़ रहे थे और हम sales team को nuket कर रहे थे और sales का पहिया engineering के पहिये से तेज घूम रहा था. हमने जरूरत मताबिक engineers को hire नहीं किया”

“There are fewer engineers, fewer PMs, fewer designers. People are being asked to do more with less. I would guess the average PM probably has less time to get out of the building. And there's more focus on revenue. And if you're a product manager and you're tr…”

“Canva didn't really build a sales team until they were well north of five hundred million in revenue because it's epic self-serve, right?”

“And I'll tell you a company I invested in. 18 months ago when things were easier, right? Maybe 20 months ago, they were doing five million in revenue, growing over a hundred percent with the sales like motion. Things got harder. Things got harder as they did f…”

“I can tell you Lenny, a hundred percent of the time in the sales meeting, when you force, do a whiteboard force rank, you end up walking out with very different outputs than when you start the meeting in sales a hundred percent of the time.”

“Sometimes even in those cases, you don't really need a lot from a CSM, like a success motion, and sometimes that success motion gets, gets shipped over to the sales team. Sometimes I've seen that happen, and sometimes that works, like that's how Snowflake does…”

“If you don't have that conviction and you're just building something really cool and maybe the stickiness of the product or the usage that you're seeing under the hood is not there, it's going to be really hard to bring in a sales team because maybe you'll bri…”

“If we don't have sales involved in building the pitch is never going to stick.”

“If a sales team doesn't want to efficiently make use of the resources that are given to them, you might want to limit or remove any marketing budget or attention that's being given to that particular sales team.”

“What I found is that the most amazing product for enterprise companies is to have a person talking with them. You know, it's like they wanna talk with somebody. They have security issues, they have governance, they need help. And this is just a better product.”

“We actually didn't have a sales team for the first three years. So all of our revenue, we did have it was paid, but it was all self-serve.”

“What you actually want to look for is what people will call positive deviance. So the people who, with the same amount of information and the same training, are actually over-delivering, and that's who you want to study, right?”

“If you decide that something like a product-led motion makes sense and that users should be able to experience your product and learn its value by being inside the product and becoming a user, then developing a sales team later on takes on a very different fla…”

“And customer success, by the way, customer success for me is, ah, they are the guys that upsell. So again, going back to that example, you have a product, you partner with another company to, ah, add their product to your offer, offering. Who does that? In my …”

“If your product needs to be put in context and customized and assisted, you know, sales teams sometimes are expensive services arms to cover over product issues and help customers buy it until it's fixed.”