Transforming Sales: How to Sell Harder Products and Succeed

Name: Transforming Sales: How to Sell Harder Products and Succeed
Uploaded: 2024-03-05T14:04:42+00:00
Duration: 52 s
Channel: Jason M. Lemkin
Description: In this segment, Jason M. Lemkin argues that hiring salespeople who have experience selling more difficult, complex products yields immediate performance…

5 Mar 2024 · 1 min

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In this segment, Jason M. Lemkin argues that hiring salespeople who have experience selling more difficult, complex products yields immediate performance gains. He likens such hires to “weight being released from their feet,” because they have already mastered the challenges of selling hard-to-sell solutions. Lemkin illustrates the point with a concrete example: his first Sales Development Representative (SDR), Sam Blonde, who previously sold an online financial‑software product at Intact (later acquired for $1 billion). After joining Lemkin’s company, Blonde quickly excelled, later becoming CRO at Brex and now a partner at Founders Fund. The anecdote underscores the broader principle that a modest increase in product difficulty in a candidate’s prior experience translates into outsized sales effectiveness in a new, easier‑to‑sell environment.

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But this is the mat— and I'll give you a story, an example in a second. If you hire someone from something that was just a smidge harder, a smidge harder to sell, and they come into your company, it's like they're on Mars. It's like weight has been released from their feet. Like they learned how to sell a harder product and get it done. And then they come to you. And the first example I had, the first SDR I hired was a guy named Sam Blonde who went on to be, um, CRO at Brex and, um, And then, uh, now is a partner at Founders Fund. And he, we, we worked together from the very beginning, first SDR. And he came before that, he was an SDR at a company called Intact, which was bought for a billion, which was online financials. Okay. And back in the day, no, we know what the one thing people didn't want to put in their cloud was their, their financial statements. Okay. It just wasn't trusted that there's some things you would trust to the cloud, like a CRM, but they'd be like, these are my crown jewels. I can't put these. So he went from.