20VC – Host Harry Stebbings (podcast summary)

20Sales: How Snowflake Built a Sales Machine | Why You Have to Hire a CRO Pre-Product | Why Most Sales Reps Do Not Perform | Why Hiring Panels are BS in Interviews (Chad Peets)

• In interviews, ask reps why they made career moves then listen for all of the following motivators:
  • To go to a place where I can be the best sales person I can be; to work for people who will teach (develop) me and help me grow my career
  • To sell a product I believe in
  • To make more money
• Hire a CRO pre-product because you need a sales person, not a technical person, to create the sales playbook. Moreover, sales people are better qualified to have 1000s of conversations with prospects and feed back the learnings to the product & engineering team.
• Who has designed your product roadmap? More often than not, early sales leaders say, “Well, I talk to the product (marketing) people. The product organization is going to build what they think the customer wants to buy. The person who knows what the customer want to buy is the person talking to the customer – it’s the CRO.
• Startups should only hire more salespeople if the product has evolved to offer more use cases in existing accounts or to unlock additional ICP accounts.
• Managers need to execute on the enablement plan created by the enablement function; they should not create their own enablement
• The land is the beginning of the journey; the big payoff is in expansion.
• If you went from a startup company to a big company, I’m not recruiting you. My that move, I know you don’t want to do the heavy lifting anymore.
• Everyone in the rep interviewing process has to have the right/same messaging down.
• Culture to me is, I want to go to a place where
  • we are going to win
  • I’m going to develop and become better
  • there is a meritocracy
• I only want to hire inside salespeople who want to work in the office. This shows that want to invest in developing themselves.
• Start with mid-market, then enterprise, and then go into PLG.
• Gross retention tells me if people like my product.
• If sales engineers start to depart, it is an early sign you have a product problem.
• Early stage companies especially need referenceable customers.