Jason M. Lemkin breaks down how to build a sales team that scales: specialize roles early (SDRs, closers, upsellers), segment accounts by size and industry, and hire sales ops around $3-4M ARR so your VP can focus on recruiting. Train your first two reps hands-on through shadowing because poor training kills later hires.
Alright, fourth tip.
And people don't do this early enough. This is the simplest hack in growing.
Faster from 1 to 10.
Specialize your sales team. We didn't really, we sort of knew this, I mean a few years ago, but we didn't really get good at.
This until about five years ago.
You want to after just even like two reps, you want to specialize, you want closers closing. Okay, there's a continuum of sales from opening, from, from qualifying, which I think.
We all figured out.
We want SDRs and BDRs where possible, qualifying deals. We want openers, we want middlers, we want closers, we want upsellers, we want retainers. Okay, you're gonna go through this lifecycle of customers. And so you wanna segment the time that folks work with customers.
And it's super important.
I know you know this, but you wanna segment by size as early as you can. Most of you will end up even by 50 customers, 60 customers having small, medium and large. I always do this exercise with founders.
I draw a pie chart and I.
Say, do you have like small, medium, large customers?
I always nod what's small?
What's large? Sometimes large is 100k, sometimes it's 10k. But there's always these natural segments, the little ones, the medium ones and large ones. Sometimes there's two segments, but it's rare, there's only one segment. The sales team. Give folks that are good at the high velocity, the quick close ones give them the quick close leads. Give the folks that are more consultative that just closed your number one, your biggest customer, give them the big ones. Don't spread them out evenly.
Don't do infinite round robin segment, segment.
By size and then as soon as you have verticals, segment by verticals. You want the rep that closed one insurance company talking to the next insurance company that invalids. You want the rep that closed Google talking to Facebook, talking to Twitter talking to Yelp, talking to them. They want to hear the stories, they want to hear how Google deployed you. Facebook wants to hear that it will close faster. So segment by vertical, segment by time.
Frame and segment by small, medium and large.
And if you think about this, this.
Is like three types of segmentation. Okay, so you're going to need at least nine reps to make a three.
By three probably work. But probably even by rep number three.
Or four, you can do some of this.
At least you can do size or something. Don't have four reps all doing the same thing.
It's a waste.
You're not making people good at what they're good at. You're not getting the most revenue per.
Lead that you can out of it.
So people wait a little bit too.
Long here and so don't do that. And then.
So we wait a little bit too long here and then two last things that we also all wait too long.
Look, when you have no money and there's nine of you, everyone has to do everything. The CEO has to take out the garbage. Your head of engineering has to cook.
The hamburgers at the barbecue. But as soon as possible, your VP of sales especially make sure that she is selling and managing her team. So what does this mean?
Bring in sales ops early if you.
Can afford it, Bringing sales ops even at 3 to 4 million.
If your sales head of sales is.
Making marketing collateral, if she's spending hours.
Figuring out sales comp, if she's trying to get chorus or gong deployed into salesforce, she's trying to figure out how the heck do I make a dashboard? Is that the right use of her time?
No.
You want her recruiting, you want her backfilling the team and you want her working big deals. You don't want her do sales ops.
Okay, so we all these days force.
Our head of sales to be a sales ops person. That shouldn't be what they're good at or they would be doing sales ops, right? So get them leverage. And then the very last thing, we all screw up. I just screwed this up again myself.
Even with my latest team.
But we all don't train our reps enough from 1 to 10. If you train them, I guarantee you you will get more revenue and you will close faster.
Almost all of you in this room.
Train your first two sales reps yourself. Okay? You learn them, they. They become part of you.
You grab them from the call, you.
Sit in the same room, and the truth is they learn by osmosis. Your first reps learn by osmosis. And if you're able to find these really quirky diamonds in the rough in the early days that can close your product that no one's ever heard of on planet earth and they get good at it, then you're going to need a village. And you're going to need all different types of people and a much more diverse team on many levels. Not just backgrounds, but skill sets and things. I have seen eight times out of 10 the startups that I work with, reps three through six flame out. Like, not always, but almost always because the CEO doesn't have time to train them by osmosis. They put them in another room, the CO's out on the road, you're too busy. You can't do what you did with Linda and Bob in the early days with Brittany, Brendan, Colin and the rest.
And they don't get trained.
So I don't know the magic solution in the early days until you have sales enablement, which you probably won't have until after 10 million, but. But find a way to train them those first couple weeks, get them a buddy, go through it, force someone to do the first calls with them, make sure that they can sell your product as well as the first two. However you do it, bear in mind you're not doing it good enough and you will see this thing and you'll be so frustrated when your sales productivity plummets after these first two. And it's because you didn't train them. You didn't train them.
So you've got. Even if you don't do any of.
This else, even if you have no money, it does not cost that much money to train them. It just costs time and work and do it.
It always, always works and always people.
Come to me and we look at the number and they're at 10 reps and it's still only two performing. I just worked with a company that hired 20 reps in a remote office and reps three through 20 all had to go. Do you really think they were so bad? It was a remote office and the co, he did not train them, so none of them performed. It's tragedy. They're going to have to rehire all these people and now they're going to have to train them.
Don't let it be you.
It happens again and again.
