Two SaaS experts debate whether to grow through product or sales. One argues for hiring 100 sales reps aggressively; the other points to Zenefits, which went viral by giving away a strong product for free instead.
100 sales reps by the end of the year.
Sold for free.
In West Philadelphia. Born and raised on a playground is where I spent most of my days. You spoke with 400 institutional investors? 40. Whatever it is, they understand SaaS, right? They're working on it.
A lot of founders come from a product background, engineering background. Sales is still this, like, sort of icky. Like, what is this thing? I don't really want to have to sell?
This isn't Yig Yak or Snapchat. It's not going to explode on you in 30 days.
Okay.
Why are you guys so bush league? Like, what's. Like, why 20 reps? You guys should be at 100 sales reps, like, by the end of the year. Like, don't you want to be going big, going after something? People talk about fundraising environments and, like, this is a good time to raise or a bad time to raise, but if you have a great company, it's always a good time to raise money. I guess I'd say in the case of Zenefits, it's. It's a product that every small business needs, and we're selling it for free. Yeah. So, like, that combination is just pretty explosive. I'd love to say that it's all about sales and sort of genius sales leadership. It's not. It's about a really great product market fit. No one's on commission today, right? No, I'll say. You have no sales team. I believe we can have no commissions Forever. Forever. I think we can have no outbound sales. So we could have been way more viral, I think, had we, you know, had we done mobile from the beginning. Get the customer to understand why the way that you're building it might actually better solve their problem.
Similar to playing in the NFL. The best talent in sales and the best talent anywhere wants to compete with the best.
I looked at my kingdom. I was finally there to sit on the throne as the Prince of Bel Air. Page.
