A short interview-style discussion about sales leadership for technical products. Speakers debate the importance of technical knowledge (engineering/PhD backgrounds) for salespeople and CROs when selling to technical buyers versus prioritizing domain-specific experience; they emphasize hiring a mix of technical talent and domain experts to teach customers how to get value from the product.
First off, our company was founded by seven PhDs from Berkeley, right. So some of the smartest people I've ever met. And I think in general if you have a really technical product, most of the buyers, if they're technical buyers, they want, they don't really love talking with salespeople. So you have to add a lot of value on the technical front. You need to know your stuff. They don't even necessarily trust all salespeople. I think inherently, I think if you look at Silicon Valley, even lots of founder technical CEOs and I really think like having a technical CRO for a technical company is really important. I could say the same for domain and whatever you're selling. But for sure, in the technical space that I'm in, having an engineering and a technical background and having known very technical sales and technical products is not just a big part of kind of my background, but a big part of our sales team. Right? Like I would say, most of our salespeople are more technical than most. We're still going to focus on business outcomes and how do you sell to the C suite and all those things. But knowing the technology and being able to add value, I think is, is really important for a technical company and technical sales team.
What I'm interpreting as a takeaway is my guidance on this to founders is something like I wouldn't over index on domain experience because oftentimes you're making a trade off for something else. And if you're selling into healthcare as an example and you only look to hire somebody who has sold the healthcare in the past, your candidate population is just extremely limited by that nature. There's only so many tech companies that exist in the world and how many of those are selling into healthcare? I think maybe the one nuance, and I've heard this now both from you, but also somewhat regularly, even from Jason Lemkin, who is the head of Saster. A technical sale to a technical buyer might be its own unique category where domain experience or having an engineering background similar to yours is something you actually want to solve for. Does that sound right and is that the right. Right interpretation based on what you said?
Listen, what does a salesperson do? They teach your customers how to get value out of your product, right? So if you're not technical enough to understand the product and understand how it works, it's hard to teach your customers how to get value from it. So even if your leader. Again, I'm a people leader. I try to hire the best people and motivate them and inspire them. But you're still going to have to hire the right types of domain experts and the mix of those talents to be able to add value to your customer.
