Jennifer Lawrence and Brendon Cassidy argue startups should hire two or three seasoned advisors with equity rather than rely on big-company VPs of Sales. Those executives excel at managing metrics but often can't sell hands-on or adapt to a startup's unique problems. Role-specific coaches for CEOs and VPs offer better leadership development.
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So just one of my learnings, and I think over time, is, is get a coach or three. And essentially what this is, is obviously you have your board and your investors, but this is sort of like your your true board in a way where you're going to get unfiltered feedback that is based off of experience and sort of in the trenches experience, which you're not always going to get from your investors. Not all investors have operational experience. Not all investors have experience running sales organizations or even managing sales or managing VPs that run sales organizations. So it's important to get honest, clear, concise feedback And what I would do is just hire, you know, just bring on 2 or 3 people as advisors or consultants. Give them some sort of stake in the company, which is probably gonna be equity. What most companies do is they hire these huge advisory boards, sometimes 10, 15, 20 people, of which you're not gonna get a lot of distilled feedback. So, you know, and have these people be who you lean on for major decisions in your company, especially for hiring a VP of Sales or a CRO. It's critical. And I would even add that for CEOs to have CEO coaches, VP of Marketing to have VP of Marketing coaches is a tremendous asset to have.
So what this doesn't mean is to hire this guy, right? It's the big company VP of Sales. Can you see? Great. Everyone's like, I'm like, "Is anyone laughing?" It's like that didn't go over well. So big company VP of sales. That's the guy or gal that walks in super polished from Salesforce. Any VPs from Salesforce here? I probably should have asked that first. So it's the guy or gal that walks in that's hitting numbers in the tens of millions on a quarterly basis for Salesforce, super polished, shows up in a suit, even comes to the interview with his sales playbook. And you're reviewing the sales playbook and you're seeing things like how to get high and wide, how to shake the tree, and you're psyched. You're like, "This is gonna work. This is gonna work for my company." But the issue is this: that person didn't build that playbook. They're executing on it. And when you're in startup mode, startup going to growth, and even growth mode going to scale, you wanna find someone who knows how to actually figure things out, not execute on a playbook that's been given to them. So I think that's really, really important. The other thing that I found with big company VPs of sales is they do a great job managing up, right? Like great command and control of the metrics, They know how to have great relationships with their managers. Sometimes I've found it can be hard for them to roll up their sleeves and to get on calls with their reps and to move deals forward and to coach and to manage and to provide an awesome customer experience and figuring out like, what are these customers' pains? How do we do great things with them? How do we map our selling process to their buying process? It's just something that they've never done. So don't hire this guy.
