Jason M. Lemkin explains how to build a sales team that actually works: use simple funnels, let top reps earn big commissions early, and hire people who sold harder products before. A Pipedrive rep expanded self-serve accounts at AOL by doing the basics right.
They got mad at him because in three months he was making more than any of the founders. They're, they were pissed. I'm like, guys, I know we're, we're have different backgrounds and cultures, but this is what you want. But it took him a long time culturally as self serve because pipe drive was 100% self serve at the time. They'd never had a sales rep. And I put the guy in and what he did was he, when he looked all these self serve customers, he's like, it was, this was. The company was at about 2 million revenue at the time. And he's like, okay, who's bought more than one seat? He just did a reverse sort. And he called them. I remember he called AOL back in the day and he's like, you guys have 20 seats of pipedrive. Would you like to buy more for your sales team? They're like, thank you very much, we'll take a hundred seats. And he just went down the list from the top to the bottom and he took home like 20% of those deals. Now that difference, that extra 80 seats at AOL, he brought it in. So Kim, keeping 20% of that is a great deal for the company. Right? But he was pretty good at it and he was the only person for a while. So he made hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars when the poor company, the founders were paying themselves like tiff.
So your advice there is don't be sad if your salesperson is making tons of money.
A good if you architect the simple sales fun we talked about. And they're making a lot of money. You're making a lot of money and your equity is worth a lot of money. Your equity is worth a lot of money, right?
When do you make that switch from they're taking home 100% of what they're selling to sell smaller percentage.
Look, some people are going to think it's goofy. What I said about a hundred. I just view it as a simple ramp you could do. I think you do it for one quarter max. One quarter. The, the problem is if you let this go for too long, more than a quarter. Like if you make it too easy for longer than a quarter. The problem is the mediocre lean into it too much and that doesn't help. Not only does it not help you, it doesn't help them. You don't want, you don't want to make mis hires. They're so damn. I mean you could have a whole podcast on just on mishires. Like it's probably the single most Important thing in scaling startups is not hires, it's mis hires. But if, if it. It's a tragedy if you mis hire a rep but you don't want them there six months. It's not good for them either. You want to, you want to support them, you want to help them find a place where they're successful. And here's the quirky thing on the mish and this is why that first guy I hired was mid pack at that. Like he was less than mid pack. Here's the thing about sales is, you know, someone can be very good in certain sales environments and completely, completely fail in other ones. Completely fail complete. It's probably more binary than any other function. And so you gotta find it before you hire them and. But you also gotta root it out fast. Cause those leads are too precious and it doesn't mean they won't go on to another company and be wildly successful. But you, you could utterly fail. And the one related point I'll give. If I had to be, if I had to throw one hint on this first, any of these reps, first 10 or V&VP of sales, one hint more. More than anything else, trust me. You gotta hire someone whose last product was harder to sell. This is so important. This is a recipe for utter disaster. If you take someone in sales and their last product was easier to sell, they will have none of the skills to sell your product. But this is the mat and I'll give you a store an example in a second. If you hire someone from something that was just a smidge harder, a smidge harder to sell and they come into your company, it's like they're on Mars. It's like weight has been released from their feet. Like they learned how to sell a harder product and get it done and then they come to you. And the first example I had, the first SDR I hired was a guy named Sam Blonde who went on to be CRO at Brex and and then now is a partner at Founders Fund. And we worked together from the very beginning. First sdr and he came before that he was an SDR at a company called Intact, which was bought for a billion, which was online.
