Jason M. Lemkin explains a hiring lesson for sales leaders: prefer candidates who have sold in industries that are equal or more complex than your product’s sales complexity. He warns that hiring a VP of Sales from an easier-to-sell industry often leads to failure, and illustrates this with an anecdote about a VP who closed nothing in the first six months after moving to a more complicated product.
But the mistake. I see. And I'm going to rewrite this to be clear, I see this again. I was just talking with the CEO out here at 15 million in error that I know who made this mistake. He hired a VP of sales that I know. That's pretty good. Okay. And it's a complicated product. It's not technical, but it's very complicated workflow. So he hired a VP of sales that actually was good, but came from a slightly less complicated industry. So that's hard. You want to hire someone always from something that was a little harder or more complicated. That's the other cheat code in sales. It doesn't have to be 10 times. Hire someone from a little harder or more complicated and it'll be like gravity is lower at your startup. It will be easier for them. I'll tell you a story in a minute. If you hire someone from something that is great but easier to sell and yours is harder, they will fail almost always. Okay. So this VP of sales came in to a product. He sold a product that was medium hard to sell to one that was more complicated. And he never sold himself. He hired five A's. Okay. And I like this VP of sales. He closed nothing the first six months. He never learned it himself. And he.
