A short YouTube talk (Jason M. Lemkin) recounting hiring experiences at EchoSign about the critical importance of hiring sales reps who deeply know the product. Lemkin contrasts high-performing, product-expert reps (e.g., Joe) who closed early revenue with later hires who checked traditional experience boxes but failed because they couldn’t demonstrate product expertise, costing deals to competitors (DocuSign). He advises hiring the one person you yourself would buy from until the brand and onboarding scale can compensate.
Chapters
I think it might have been a Kel's cousin or something like that. Big guy. He grabs me walking into Dreamforce and everything. Grabs me by my shirt. He's. Because I had a. I had a company sweatshirt. Echo Sign grabs me by. Do you work at Echo Sign? I'm like, yeah, I'm the founder. Do you know Joe Coletti? I'm like, yeah, he's our. He's on our sales team of one. He's on our sales team. I love Joe. I love him. That's who you want, okay? And it's not so much that Joe was lovable, it's that he knew this product cold, right? And so when the. When you finally get a prospect and you don't have enough leads in the early days, you don't have enough pro. You're not overflowing with them, right? You need that sales rep that the customers are going to not just love, but trust. Like, they trusted Joe. They trust to architect a solution to their problem. And you've already closed a million of revenue. So I'll end it saying forget. I don't care where they came from. If they graduated from high school, whether they dress weird, whatever their problems are, if they don't bathe often enough, that one that you would buy from, hire her or him and don't hire anybody else or they'll be gone. They'll close nothing. They'll close nothing. And even worse, what will happen is you will quickly not even give them the leads because you'll see revenue go down. You'll see revenue go down, right? So I hired that one guy, Joe. He and I got to 2 million in revenue. And then I hired my first VP of Sales from Salesforce. He hired 10 people. All of them except Sam Blonde, who have done a lot with them, became Brex. All of them. All the other nine closed nothing. And with 10 people, that VP of sales closed less than me and Joe did. They all came from the right places, and they all checked the boxes. And many of them are reasonably attractive and fun to go out for drinks with, but they never knew the product. And so we lost all of them except Sam. Lost 100% of the deals to DocuSign back then. 100% because they didn't know the product. This was too early in the space. The space was not mature. They're not going to buy from someone that they don't know. We didn't have this great brand, right? But when it was me or Joe, we closed them. And then when Brendan came back in and Sam did it, then we could beat him in most deals, right? But they lost zero. They closed nothing. These nine reps, nothing. And I wouldn't have bought from them. I wouldn't have bought from them. But later when you scale and then we can break. When you scale, you need a divert a more heterogeneous team. You need folks you wouldn't buy from. Go talk to a toaster app. You wouldn't buy from most toaster apps. Okay, but toast, how many reps does toast have? A thousand or something like you. Your sales team will figure out how to train and onboard and then you'll have a brand and the brand will do a lot of the work for you and stuff. But you ain't there. Triple redundant interview 30. There's probably only one you'll buy your own product from. Make him even. Do a demo. Hire her. Him. You will not fail.
