How to Build a Successful Sales Team: Key Strategies for Early Stage Startups

Name: How to Build a Successful Sales Team: Key Strategies for Early Stage Startups
Uploaded: 2024-03-11T13:03:42+00:00
Duration: 50 s
Channel: Jason M. Lemkin
Description: Jason M. Lemkin argues that early-stage startups need sales hires who are deep product experts, not generic salespeople. Unlike mature companies that use…

11 Mar 2024 · 1 min

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Jason M. Lemkin argues that early-stage startups need sales hires who are deep product experts, not generic salespeople. Unlike mature companies that use scripts and sales engineers, nascent startups require salespeople who understand the product intimately to educate prospects. Promoting a VP of Sales without this product knowledge creates a major bottleneck.

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If there was one thing that, there's so many things we could talk about, but if there's one thing I could reinforce for this audience, it's that, you know, that early sales team, they've gotta be product gurus for your product audience. They've gotta be product experts. And later as you scale, they can't be, or you can't scale. You know, when I started, when I came outta my own startup and started interviewing other folks, I remember I would interview a lot of folks at places like GitHub back in the day. I'd be like, are you, do you have a technical background? Like, are you an engineer? Have you ever built any software? They're like, no, I don't, I don't know. I don't know. And I, like, I, I was curious how you could do it, but GitHub was so well established that it's 10 questions. It's 10 questions and grab a sales engineer. It's 10 questions and grab. So you gotta be really good at 10, then you grab a sales engineer. That doesn't work in the real estate startups. So you gotta find these sales folks that are a bit of product savants and dropping the VP of sales in that isn't a product savant, which is a big issue.