Whalen: Big-tech hires at startups struggle with resource constraints, not work ethic
Mark Whalen · How Revenue Leaders at Box, Calendly, and Lattice Scaled From $0 to $100M+ and Beyond · Jan 24, 2024 · at 25:54
Mark Whalen, CRO at Box and former Salesforce executive, discusses why enterprise tech sales leaders often struggle when transitioning to startups.
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“The thing that actually is that people struggle with when they lose, when they leave a place like that is when you work for a company that's really well run and you have first party experience of things being done right. And then you go to a startup where things are resource constrained. Then what ends up happening is that some executives struggle with the resource constraint. So if you've seen a marketing event, maybe a customer event like this done the right way, or you've done a CIO dinner the right way, or you know how to do territory carving the right way, then when you go to an environment where it's not that things aren't being done right, but they're just not resourced. And if there's 10 things that you're used to doing the right way, and you can only afford because of bandwidth to do three of them the right way, I think the thing that with some people when they leave a big company, Is that they have a fit when they can't have everything done the right way. It's not that they can't keep up and that they're not working hard and they're not willing to roll up their sleeves and get down and dirty. It's that they have sometimes not the right level of sort of patience and accepting that we're just not going to be able to do everything the way that I'm used to.”
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