This is a transcript excerpt from a live panel at SaaStr Europa (Cantina Stage) focused on sales hiring and organizational design for startups. Panelists give pragmatic advice: prefer internal promotion when early employees have organizational clout, test external senior hires to avoid "copy-and-paste" playbooks, include early joiners in hiring decisions to reduce flight risk, and treat early clients as potential evangelists. The excerpt ends with an invitation to continue the conversation and a brief introduction by moderator Eleanor and panelist Christina (Cloudara).
Chapters
Company early. For example, in my case, I joined early, so the person that sat next to me was just an engineer. You Fast forward for four years, now they have 100 engineers rolling up to them. Well, when the external sales leader comes in, they say, hey, we have some customer requests. How do we create a process to flag this with engineering and product and let's have a monthly meeting? Well, because I had the experience of connective tissue and organizational clout, I could navigate horizontally and say, hey, I'll just text the VP of engine, have them join the customer call. So I'm not against process, but your internal candidates will be able to navigate the organization horizontally, be more effective, faster, execute faster. So consider that when you're weighing promote from within or hire externally.
And the eighth tip is to ban the copy and paste. So in the same vein, here comes a day where you need to hire your first sales leader and you feel super lucky to have this amazing intro from one of your investors. Like, sales leader, renowned, renowned company, like a player, whatever you've been dreaming of, you meet them and you literally believe whatever they tell you because they're confident and they're good. The thing is, if you're lucky enough to be able to close this candidate, let me tell you that when they join, there's a high risk that they actually copy and paste their old playbook into your company. And this is not what you're looking for. What you want is an innovative mind, a creative mind who's going to be so obsessed with your customers and with the problem that you're solving, who's going to craft everything based on your company and not their previous companies. So test that in the interview challenge. Even though they're like amazing sales leaders, very well known, and make sure you challenge them.
We're running up on time. So the last two tips are, first, the layering process over early joiners. Include them in if you're going to hire over them. It's a much different experience to say, hey, we're bringing in a senior leader, it's your new boss. Than to say, hey, we're going to bring in a senior leader who we think you can learn from great career progression, and we want to include you to be in on the hiring panel. That's one way to make sure your early top performers don't become flight risks.
And final tip, let's tease you a bit. Your best salespeople are not your salespeople initially. They're your first few clients. And if you want to know how to build a true champions and true championship out of your clients and make sure they're the ones selling the products on your behalf. You can come to us and we can discuss it.
Please reach out to us if you want to talk about anything sales related. As former operators, we feel we miss being in the game. We're, as investors, we're on the sidelines. And so if you'll invite us even into the game for an hour to talk about this stuff, we'd love to hear from you.
Thank you so much.
Okay, here we go.
Okay.
Hello, everyone. I'm Eleanor, deputy editor at Sifted, which is the FT backed publication covering European tech and startups. I hope you all have had a little bit of coffee to wake you up after your lunch slump, because we've got a very awesome conversation coming up right now and hopefully talking about a bunch of questions and, and kind of common anxieties that I hear from founders when I talk to them all today. So I'm here today with Christina, who's co founder and CEO of cloudara, which is a management software to help companies manage their.
