Jiménez: Early startups should hire junior sales talent over big tech logos
“So I'm a big believer in you can really do great things with maybe a more junior, perceived junior talent because of the creativity they can bring, and they don't have kind of a bias from a previous experience.”
Lori Jiménez: Founders should hire sales reps only after proving repeatability
“So I think it's that moment where you find a repeatable, you've got enough customers and you find enough of a repeatable process that can take your good work and grow it, you know, and take and get and have feedback.”
Jiménez: Startups should hire sales reps in batches, not individually
“I think you should hire more than one at a time for a few reasons. Less about the competition. I think they're, you know, that's kind of going to happen maybe naturally, but it's more about you can work. It's work for scale. I think if you're onboarding one pe…”
Jiménez: WorkRamp shares exemplar sales calls publicly in Slack
“So for example, with my current team, we do a lot of real listening of calls. Like we just, and we publicly in a Slack channel, mark them when they're perfect. And we say, this is a perfect call. And we want to highlight why this is perfect.”
Jiménez: Incentivize SDRs on sales stage progression to ensure high lead quality
“And I think the way to mitigate that is a few ways is having, you know, a qualification criteria that has to be met. So if it's a band, if it's a, you know, whatever the structure is that identifies kind of the core drivers of that call. But also I think what …”
Jiménez: Bad sales losses stem from poor customer discovery against competitors
“Bad reason loses. You didn't anticipate the competition and how they were engaged or how much the competition was positioning, like what really the customer cared about how the competition could answer that question and how we could answer that question. So it…”
Jiménez: Sales forecast inspections must happen in good quarters, not just bad
“So oftentimes you'll see like the forecast inspection happens when you're having a down quarter forecast inspection needs to happen In the best of quarters, because if you just only pivot to when you're down, then it's in a fear based moment and you're making …”
Adrian Aoun's angel portfolio includes WorkRamp, Atrium, and Convoy
“Adrian's also a prolific angel investor With the likes of WorkRamp, Atrium, Convoy, and many more in his incredible portfolio”
Blosser: Initialized hired Kim-Mai Cutler to coach portfolio enterprise branding
“I know Gary Tan and Alexis Ohanian from our investors at Initialize, they've been very, very good in helping us build our brand. They brought on Kim Mai Cutler onto their team from TechCrunch, and she's been extremely helpful in actually coaching us through ho…”
WorkRamp chose Initialized to apply consumer growth tactics to enterprise software
“We went to them because not because they were hardcore enterprise seed investors, but really because they understood consumer markets extremely well. And we wanted to apply those same growth strategies to the enterprise market”
Blosser: WorkRamp capped seed round at $1.8M to enforce operational discipline
“And so and we actually did cap it. I think we actually, we raised about 1.8 million and we didn't want to raise much more past that. I mean, we had the opportunity to, but we ended up turning down money towards the end, really because we thought that was enoug…”
Ohanian: Initialized invested in WorkRamp for its unsexy, mandatory software
“The most recently publicly announced one would have been WorkRamp. And the reason why is because it's so unsexy and so mandatory. Basically, it's the easiest way to train and develop an employee.”