Jason M. Lemkin explains why promoting your top-performing sales rep to VP of Sales almost always fails. Top individual contributors lack hiring and training experience. Lemkin estimates a 0-1% success rate for these promotions.
A team lead, especially for engineers. There's a lot of team leads that kind of become skip, skip a step and become leaders. And what I found is the biggest mistake a lot of founders make is, oh, my God, I gotta hire a VP of sales. I'm so stressed out. They will hire the number one AE at a company, the number one sales rep. They'll go find a Brex or a Talkdesk or Algolia, and they'll hunt around and they'll find out that Lauren was the number one AE or the number one AE in the west, okay? And they will wine and dine her and take her out to the fanciest restaurants and meet the team. And they'll say, wow, you did 2 million last year. And the next rep did 700,000. I want you to be my VP of Sales. And they're ambitious. And if they want the next step, they'll take that job. How many reps do you think the number one AE ever hired? Zero. Zero. Do you think the number one rep even knows how to train anybody? Do you think she knows where to find anybody? Good. I find that number one rep 0.00% of the time is successful. Actually, 1%.
