Early startups must hire pioneer AEs before a VP of Sales
Pete Kazanjy · Founder-led sales | Pete Kazanjy (Founding Sales, Atrium) · Dec 15, 2022 · at 40:40
Pete Kazanjy, author of Founding Sales and co-founder of Atrium, discusses early-stage sales recruitment strategy with Lenny Rachitsky.
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“Generally what you want to do is you probably don't want to start with like a VP of sales to start like a sales leader. And there's a couple of reasons why they're like, even if you figured it out yourself, that's required. Right. You gotta, you have to get to that minimum sufficiency of 10, 20, you know, 30 customers yourself first. Right. But then the reason why I advocate for folks that like hire a couple of sellers or a couple of AEs to start is because again, you have that like software in your brain. Like, unfortunately there is no GitHub for sales motions. So it's in your brain, it's in your documents, et cetera. And so now you're going to teach these other These other folks. So what you want to do is you want to hire a couple like early stage kind of pioneer sellers to take that sales version. The downside of hiring, like seeking to hire a VP of sales or like a head of sales or what have you, who actually is a head of sales, like is coming out of an organization where maybe he or she is a manager of managers or like manages like, you know, 10, like eight reps or something like that is that person hasn't been selling for A hot second.”
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