Speaker Jason M. Lemkin advises that in early-stage startups the initial sales hires must be product experts—'product gurus' or 'product savants'—because unlike later-stage companies you can’t rely on simple qualification plus a sales engineer. He warns that hiring a VP of Sales who isn’t deeply product-savvy is a common mistake and will hurt early-stage scaling.
If there was one thing that there's so many things we could talk about, but if there's one thing I could reinforce for this audience, it's that, you know that early sales team, they've gotta be product gurus for your product audience, they've gotta be product experts. And later, as you scale, they can't be or you can't scale. You know, when I started, when I came outta my own startup and started interviewing other folks, I remember I would interview a lot of folks at places like GitHub back in the day. I'd be like, do you have a technical background? Like, are you an engineer? Have you ever built any software? They're like, no, I don't, I don't know, I don't know. And I like, I was curious how you could do it. But GitHub was so well established that it's 10 questions. It's 10 questions and grab a sales engineer. It's 10 questions and grab. So you gotta be really good at 10. Then you grab a sales and you get. That doesn't work in the early safe startups. So you gotta find these sales folks that are a bit of product savants. And dropping the VP of sales in that isn't a product savant, which is a big issue.
