Jason M. Lemkin says founders often overpay salespeople in cash while giving them too little equity, which backfires when you need to scale. He learned this at Flexport after building a support infrastructure that masked whether sellers could actually sell without heavy lead generation and account manager help.
And at some point, I realized hiring great sellers is the hardest part of this job. Hiring and ramping great sellers, really incredible how far you can get. And what we found is the same thing that had been our biggest asset, which was this incredible support infrastructure that overproduced leads that allowed us to have multiple account managers paired with one account executive. You know, all these things we did to give our best sellers leverage, they were ultimately a huge liability because we did not know how to grow a sales team. In fact, I think one of the mistakes founders make overall is they overly focus on paying sellers in cash and they don't give enough equity.
