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Published · transcript-backed

Jen Abel: belief

9 Nov 2025 Lenny's Podcast "Sell the alpha, not the feature": The enterprise sales playbook for $1M to $10M ARR | Jen Abel

“I think that that's the best type of salesperson because it doesn't feel like sales.”

— Jen Abel

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Everything needed to verify it.

Speaker
Jen Abel
Attribution
Verified speaker
Claim type
belief
Recorded
9 Nov 2025
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

Transcript context

…Is there anything else that I missed that you think is really important for this stage? So one to 10 is no longer the founder. Maybe the founder comes in very strategic points, but you need a really good enterprise salespeople. Taking someone from small business and expecting them to do enterprise sales, big no-no, it's a different game, right? Vibe like a different game. You need to understand how corporations buy. You need to understand how executives think. You need to better understand simply just what the enterprise business model is all about and their ability to take on risk. People will bring in super junior enterprise sales reps and I'm like, "You're looking to sell to an executive and you have this person that's five years out of school with no corporate experience doing it, again, unless they have some extremely deep experience in the industry or are just a unicorn in terms of, wow, this person can sell ice to an Eskimo kind of thing." A junior person converting an executive, again, if the founder is involved, maybe that's doable, but usually the founder can't be involved in every deal and you need people that can, I always say you need people that can cosplay a founder, which is selling the vision, getting them excited, running through a wall to get the deal done and getting creative on ... None of my deals look exactly the same, every deal looks different and that's okay because every organization has slightly different opportunities of where they want to go, and you have to kind of build towards that and the framing may change. So it's this ability to adapt from what you're hearing and let that compound over time, but I always say, can this person cosplay the founder? I think that that's the best type of salesperson because it doesn't feel like sales. It's more of the art. This is amazing advice. What is a common profile that you've seen be successful? What level of seniority? What kind of personality and any traits to look for?…

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