You Want Your Sales Team to Make a Lot of Money

Name: You Want Your Sales Team to Make a Lot of Money
Uploaded: 2024-02-23T16:51:47+00:00
Duration: 49 s
Channel: Jason M. Lemkin
Description: In this monologue, Jason M. Lemkin recounts his first venture investment in Pipedrive, a SMB CRM that later sold for $1.5 billion. He describes hiring…

23 Feb 2024 · 1 min

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In this monologue, Jason M. Lemkin recounts his first venture investment in Pipedrive, a SMB CRM that later sold for $1.5 billion. He describes hiring the company's first sales representative—a former employee of his—despite the founders' cultural resistance because the business was 100% self‑serve. Within three months the rep generated more revenue than any founder, prompting both frustration and admiration. The rep identified existing multi‑seat self‑serve customers, such as AOL, and directly called them to upsell additional seats, dramatically increasing revenue from a $2 million base. Lemkin uses this story to illustrate the power of early sales hires and proactive upselling in self‑serve startups.

Chapters

I remember the first investment I ever made was a company called Pipedrive, which sold for a billion and a half. You know, a SMB CRM. And I put in the first sales rep there. He used to work for me and the founders got mad at him. They got mad at him because in 3 months he was making more than any of the founders. They were pissed. I'm like, guys, I know we're, we're hot, have different backgrounds and cultures, but this is what you want. But it took them a long time culturally as self- 'Cause Pipedrive was 100% self-serve at the time. They'd never had a sales rep. And I put the guy in and what he did was he went and he looked all these self-serve customers. He's like, it was, this was the company was at about $2 million revenue at the time. And he is like, okay, who's bought more than one seat? He just did a reverse sort and he called them. I remember he called AOL back in the day and he is like, you guys have 20 seats of Pipedrive. Would you like to buy more for your sales team? And they're like, thank you very much.