Jason Lemkin: prediction

Transcript context

…Have a quota. Yeah, have a quote. The reason I was on the fence was because I was like, "Well, listen, in theory it's great, but let's say you're a hot startup and you want to go from two to six this year." So I want to add 4 million in new bookings, and let's say I can do 400K in quota per rep. That means I got to have 10 reps. She walks in with two. I'm at a race, aren't I? I got to hire eight in the next six months to hit my plan, and I got to put numbers on the board. If I'm going to out there as an individual contributor sales rep, I'm never going to hire eight people, am I? It's never going to happen. So I used to say I don't know if it matters, but what I've learned the last 18 to 20 months when everyone has gotten lazy, Lenny, everyone in tech has gotten lazy, is I see way too many VPs of sales that come in and never have any idea how to sell the product, never, never. They only want to be managers. Now, whether they carry a bag or whether what they do is they join calls with the reps, whether they backfill the reps, you want your VP of sales in deals 20, 30 hours a week when they start. I see VPs of sales today start, they're in no deals. I'll go to a board meeting and a VP of sales will be there two, three months, and they'll have a look on the board. I'm like, "How's it going with Airbnb?" and they'll be like, "I don't know. I got to ask John." Doesn't know because it isn't in the deal, isn't even in the deal. So I see this too often. Another company I'm on the board on, I really like this VP of sales a lot. He joined and six months in, sales were down from where, the new bookings were down from where they were six months before. He was honest. He's like, "The biggest problem is I feel like I didn't have time to learn this product. It's a complicated product. It's more complicated than the product I last sold, and I just didn't have time." Jason, this conversation is going exactly how I'd hoped. There's so much actionable advice here. Let me try to summarize a little bit of the things you've said and then keep going. So let me know what I'm missing here. I'm going to try to just highlight some of the important things you mentioned. So in terms of when it makes sense to start hiring your first salesperson, a couple of things you shared is you've closed the first 10 customers on your own as founders. If you're spending more than 20% of your time on sales and you need to start creating more leverage. I'll throw in one other thing I've heard and just to tell me if this is also true, that there's a repeatable process you've created. You can sell consistently enough or you can tell someone, "Here's how I've been selling." Is that right?…

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