Jason M. Lemkin says startups hire a VP of Sales too early. You need two product-savvy reps first. A VP hired before that has to find product-market fit, be your first two reps, and scale at once. Early VPs must spend 20 to 30 hours a week in deals, not just managing.
The folks off the street, the new VP sales often doesn't even understand the 10x feature. It's too subtle. It's too subtle. Why? The fact that your product is localized in Portuguese magically means you can win these deals. Or I'm making up something that doesn't quite make sense, but. So you need two reps that are hidden quota and then you hire VP sales. If you hire it before then, you're, you're, you're doing a Hail Mary. It ain't going to work. It never ever, never ever, ever, never ever works. You're asking them to find product market fit, to be the first rep, to be the second rep and scale it all at the same time. It's mission impossible to do all four at the same time. Right? So that's the biggest mistake is I, Lenny, I can't get sales going at my company. I can't do it. But I raised $4 million in my seed plus round. I'm gonna go out and hire the VP of Sales. That VP of Sales will not be there in eight months. And you know what else? Two million of the four will be gone. Because they'll never understand the product. They will never understand. And 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 got to be product gurus for your product audience, they've got to 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 out of 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 and you grab a sales and you grab. That doesn't work in the early stage startups. So you gotta find these sales folks that are a bit of product savants. And dropping a VP of sales in that isn't a product savant, which is a big issue. That's all Mr. Or Ms. Process. This is the issue. They're all Mr. Or Ms. Process. Okay, so the second point I wanted to make, and I was on the fence for years of when you hire a VP of sales, do they need to carry a bag? Do they need to sell themselves or not? Does it matter? Does it? And I wasn't sure for a long time. And the reason I wasn't sure for a long time, it's not that you don't want a VP of sales carrying a bag. And I do think a VP of engineering also should commit code and carrying a bag, meaning close sales themselves. Yeah. Not just be a boss. Not just be a boss. And the reason I was on the fence was because I was like, well, listen, in theory it's great, but let's say you're a hot startup and you want to go from 2 to 6 this year. Okay, so I want to add 4 million in new bookings. And let's say I can do 400k in quota per rep. That means I got to have 10 reps. She walks in with two. I got. I'm at a race, aren't I? I got to hire eight in the next six months to hit my plan. And I got to put numbers on the board. If I'm going to out there as an individual contributor sales rep, I'm never going to hire eight people, am I? It's never going to happen. So I used to say, I don't know if it matters, but what I've Learned the last 18 to 20 months when everyone has gotten lazy, Lenny, everyone in tech has gotten lazy is I see way too many VPs to sales that come in and never have any idea how to sell the product. Never, never. They only want to be managers now, whether they carry a bag or whether what they do is they join calls with the reps, right. They back there whether they backfill the reps. You want your VP of sales in deals 20, 30 hours a week when they start. And I see VPs, the sales today start, there are no deals. I'll go to a board meeting and BP sales will be there two, three months and they'll have a logo on the word. I'm like, how's it, how's it going with Airbnb? And they'll be like, I don't know, I gotta ask. John doesn't know because isn't even in the deal. Isn't even in the deal. So I see this too often.
