Brendan Cassidy discusses the risks and high failure rates associated with hiring early sales leadership at startups.
Opinion
Cassidy: EchoSign's early team was much better than LinkedIn's
“The team we had at EchoSign was so much better, by the way, there are some great people on our team at LinkedIn, by the way, phenomenal people that have had great success, but overall the team we had at EchoSign was way better. It was a way better team general…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Cassidy: 80% of startups lose their first sales VP in year one
“I would guess probably eight in 10 startups probably fire or lose their first VP of sales inside of a year.”
Insight
Cassidy: VPs of Sales must know their initial hires before accepting jobs
“If you're a VP of sales and a, you know, you go to a startup or a growth company, you should have a good idea about who the people that you want to hire before you actually take the job. And if you don't, then you probably did something wrong.”
Insight
Cassidy: Startups should hire a demand-gen leader before a sales leader
“I would say most companies are probably higher, like a marketing leader, right? Like, you know, before sales leader, I mean, obviously in a startup, being able to hire a marketing leader, that's, that is an expert in driving sort of like top of the funnel, rig…”
Insight
Cassidy: Mass quasi-personalized cold outbound email is waning in effectiveness
“The sort of cold sort of outreach playbook, right, of like, let's just sort of spam the market with sort of quasi personalized communication is waning in effectiveness, right? You should do it, by the way. It's sort of table stakes. You have to do it. On some …”
Insight
Cassidy: Relying on cold outreach early is a mistake for B2B startups
“I don't want to, if we're making cold calls, we're doing something wrong, right? If we're blasting cold emails, we're doing something wrong.”