Sheila built a go-to-market team by hiring a sales leader with a ready network of 4-6 reps. Over 90% of her 73 hires came from internal recruiting and past colleagues at Grafana, Mongo, and Snowflake. She uses transparent compensation plans to attract candidates, though only ten sellers have lasted beyond six months.
Chapters
Yeah. And I mean, like, for any, I'd say for any founder listening to this, like, you hire a sales leader that doesn't have 4 to 6 people they can basically text and get into the seat in like 4 to 6 weeks, probably even sooner, let's say 4 weeks, then like maybe not ready to be a sales leader. And if you want to be a sales leader and you don't know who those 4 people are, I'd say think about it. So, I mean, a lot, a heck, a huge amount. I mean, so much, so much respect and admiration for my leadership team because we're like, they are doing a lot of their direct recruiting, like me, them. We have contracts with a bunch of outside recruiters. Recruiters, and like, this has been the case at everywhere I've ever been. I think no one can sell the opportunity as well as you can if you're living it. And so like, we have gotten a handful of folks from outside recruiters, like Hunters and Unicorns in particular is one who we've worked with who I think are like really high quality when they send candidates along. But 90% plus of that 73 people that we've brought in since I got here have been sourced by, recruited by us. Where are those folks coming from? A lot of folks that we've worked with before. So like the initial cohort of people that joined had really heavy Grafana and Mongo DNA. And like, but one of the things that I just say as a heuristic is like sellers and go-to-market people in general want to go work at places and for people who they trust, who they believe care about them, who are going to make them better and who are going to make them money.
Like Sheila was crushing it here. If she went somewhere, it must be like somewhat interesting. And then you said something, you know, you get to, you hire 72 people. They weren't all people that you personally knew that you texted because, you know, you come with 4 to 6, you don't come with 72 people that like, you know, immediately follow you. So there are certain things that you have to do for not immediate network, but sort of like, you know, second network type candidates that make Codium the most attractive place that they can possibly join, something worth leaving Snowflake or somewhere else for? You mentioned one, you want to pay people well. Any sort of like stories about things that you really emphasize to potential candidates that make joining Codium the most attractive option for them?
Yeah, I mean, I think like that, you know, the, I think the PG version of it is like, who cares about your OTE? Show me your comp plan. And so like, we have a very good comp plan that I'm like very happy to pull up and talk people through in an interview. And then the other thing, like this takes time, right? Early stage, it's hard. Like you really, really have to make sure that your early people are successful because we only have 10 sellers who've been here for more than 6 months.
