Salesperson

“You know, I'm thinking about, like, all these questions around, you know, people are saying the sales person will be dead, or SDRs will be dead. I just, I don't buy it”

“If you are selling a product that is worth anything, there's some competition that's trying to eat your lunch. You have to be hyper paranoid about that competitor. Like the worst thing is like, if you do a forecast review with a sales team and like, who's the …”

“A really good salesperson, your commission on a 10 K deal. You're not going to get a great salesperson. They're going to want to do, they're going to want to be anchored to like, how can I sell a 250,000 dollar deal? How can I sell a half a million dollar deal…”

“The idea of being the salesman or not is rubbish. Like it's actually even better if it's a product person or an engineering person that learns that talent, because that's where you get everything early on”

“If they make, let's say a salesperson makes a million dollars in, in, it's obviously salary plus commission, they should be generating, I think that it's a loose tenant, 10 to one, I think, they should be generating ten million in ARR for you.”

“Because someone is going to pay you a million dollars, and at least for next 10 years, that trust can only be built by humans, because you can't jail an AI, but you definitely can jail a person. So a lot of these things which require this human trust, for lack…”

“The founder also has one thing going for them that nobody else does. Authority. Sean, if I break this, I'll fix it. And the seller can't.”

“And then if you can't write down a process so that somebody else can follow it, that's client centric. Then you're not ready to hire a salesperson and you're not ready to scale.”

“If you look at the modern like salesperson today, they use 20, 30 different tools as part of like their sales stack.”

“That's why when you are a challenger, you need a higher caliber of salesperson because you don't have the brand. As your brand gets bigger and bigger, either great salespeople become more productive or you know, you're able to get more junior or less talented …”

“As a rule of thumb, I would wait to get to about one million AR before hiring your first salesperson.”

“There isn't the product and the salesperson. This is all the product. And so how you talk about it, how much you know about the industry, how much you know about the other customers is part of being a great sales rep.”

“But like, yeah, I'd say a quarter, you know, a quarter plus some change, you should start to see things going, you know, and like, we would always say by the second quarter, you wanna, by the end of the second quarter, you wanna fully ramp salesperson.”

“I think notion, I think at ten million ARRs when they hired their first salesperson.”

“When you're hiring your first sales person or your first SDR, you should always hire two.”

“Now, I think the difference between a salesperson and a marketing person is I tended to be more theoretical. What is correct? What is right? Whereas a seller is reading the room very closely. Who cares about what? Who has what interests?”

“So in essence, you're splitting the handling of objections between me and my business and the service. And I, and I'm curious to see how that works because I've never tried it before. I'm curious to know if you have any experience or any thoughts on that, but …”

“A salesperson on and to themselves aren't going to sell well on average. They need to be supported by a team of people that tools them correctly, and then that works much better.”

“One of the most important characteristics, in my opinion, with a great salesperson is being curious. It's someone who can ask a question, who can ask the next question that's connected to that first question. Really listen to the first answer, not just for the…”

“We realized that the right type of salesperson can carry like a three times bigger quota.”

“And then for various reasons based on how commissions work, typically the salesperson on most dealerships, not all, would then get paid less.”

“You hire a salesperson when your sales call and demo calls become extremely boring and repetitive because that's when you've figured out what your go to market motion is.”

“In the cybersecurity industry, you often just need to spend a year just understanding the industry, and once you've learned all of that, even if you don't want to be a salesperson, you usually don't want to leave the industry.”

“The people that know the how best on your product are the customers. Get them involved way earlier, because they can speak to the how better than any salesperson will ever be able to, right?”

“Because you need to have that sales Some type of sales process dialed to be able to hand it off to an outsider. You forget all the institutional knowledge that you have, you know, and all the love for your product and all the knowledge of the space and how har…”

“Oftentimes you don't just start a company with a salesperson because you don't just then, you don't know what, how to utilize them unless that salesperson is open to doing other things initially, right?”

“We were, I think, a bit less than 30 when we hired the first salesperson.”

“And then all of a sudden you have a salesperson who's closing a hundred percent of their sales. And by the way, if you can't change that, you should fire them.”

“If a salesperson or the team in the example I gave you before, start slipping behind goal, and they start losing their track a little bit, it's very often the case that they don't really appreciate the gravity of their situation up until it's too late. So in m…”

“We do reach out to even as just someone who looks like a single seat deal will at least reach out to them and ask them if they have questions about how to use the product. You know, we'll set it up for them, get them successful. That call usually takes 20 minu…”

“You have to pay 50% more for a salesperson in this market.”

“When the technology doesn't map onto how a salesperson would optimally want to run that conversation, it actually becomes a hindrance. The rep has to contort themselves and their sales process to the inadequate tool that they have at their disposal.”