Jason M. Lemkin discusses promoting talent within fast-growing sales organizations. Key points: rapid growth makes internal promotions harder because many hires compress org-chart space, but leaders should still create opportunities for SDRs→AE→manager progression in a sheltered, learn-by-doing environment. He emphasizes teaching hires to recruit and hire (a common failure mode), giving reps runway to manage and hire small teams, and using real examples (e.g., Riley Devine) to illustrate success.
Chapters
There's actually some irony. Sometimes it's easier in a slow moving organization because you don't hire as much and it's so you can actually almost promote anyone. Good. The irony is the faster you're growing, you're bringing in so much human capital you can't promote every SDR to AE and every AE to director, but you got try. And I think that's what Brendan and Sam, the rest of the team did over the years even when I wasn't there, is give everyone a chance to get promoted for real and then build a team and hire a team so everyone got their shot in a comfortable environment where they knew the boss and they could get promoted as an IC and then they could manage a few folks and then they could hire, learn how to hire two to three folks with some help and not screw it up. Right. Because that's where you, that's where almost everyone fails on the way to a true VP of sales is they never learn to hire. They never learn to hire and they're a great ic. And then maybe if they're in a bigger company, maybe it's zooming for, I don't know, maybe if you go to director, you mostly inherit a team, right. A lot of times, right. You don't actually show up and they're like, you gotta go hire 10 AES, you actually hire eight and then the team brings in one or two. So you actually don't bigger company, you don't always learn recruiting tools. But if you don't figure that out, you'll stumble as soon as you get a leadership role. But I think they had the Runway to do all this over four years and it gave everyone a chance to do it in a sheltered way and learn. And I think they flew. And I remember one of these guys on our team that was one of our top five guys and then for four years was the number one AE at outreach. Number one from the day he started. Right. What's his name? What's that? Riley Devine. Yep. And I was like, I met him. I'm like Brendan Sky. I don't know, I don't get it. Like he worked from home in shorts. Like now that's normal. I didn't get it, but just gave the folks room to run and be the diverse and that's the key. Right. And so but you gotta. But I think giving folks a chance to run and just promoting everyone you can. As hard as it is, there's not enough room on the org chart. But the ambitious want to be promoted in sales right.
