Likes Lenny.

Transcript context

…Two directors. Whether they're just split up normally, whether they're east, west is a classic way. Another way, you might have smaller and larger customers. That's pretty standard, right? Commercial and enterprise. But a good VP of sales, once you have, she or he has eight reports, will be bringing in two directors, or maybe two VPs if they're an SVP. There's a lot of title- ... directors or maybe two VPs if they're an SVP. There's a lot of title inflation today, which doesn't bother me nearly as much as a lot of other things we've chatted about. I don't care what your title is if you'll actually do sales or do work, but yeah, we need to bring in managers at 8:00. And folks that can, also, a related point is, a lot of founders were, "When will my ... " I really love my head of sales, but she's a stretch. Most of them should be stretches. If you hire the seasoned one, they're not going to work, so for 95 out of 100 of us, our first head of sales should be a stretch VP of Sales. And what that means is, usually, they were a director before that or a senior director or sort of a VP, okay? But you should be cautious about hiring your first VP of Sales for their first third VP of Sales gig. They're not willing to do the job anymore. You need a stretch and it's worth it for their career growth. It's worth it for their personal growth. It's worth it for the equity, right? So you're going to hire a stretch. That's an important tip right there. But then, you're going to be a little worried, how far can Lenny go? How far can ... I love Lenny, but he was a director for two years before this, and this is his first rule, and he did so good last year, but I'm worried Lenny's going to break. I'm worried Lenny's going to break. And related to this quote, the simple answer is, Lenny will break if he can't source those directors under him. You can scale forever as a sales leader if you can hire better managers under you. And it's true of any functional area, but what you'll see in sales is, you'll see your stretch VP of Sales drown when they never can hire better managers under them, They'll end up doing some weird internal promotions, which you want, you want to do internal promotions. My rule is you want to promote 50% from within and hire 50% without for your managers, but if, really, the only people you can promote are just junior people on your team, you can't find leaders, you can't scale. I do see this happen too frequently is, a first time out of sales, does it, and then, they're like, "Here are my managers, Lorraine and Jason, but they really were just reps for two years and they don't know how to do it." So you have a whole bunch of people who don't know how to do it. That's when the organization cracks. Imagine a place where you can find all your potential customers and get your message in front of them in a cost efficient way. If you're a B2B business, that place exists, and it's called LinkedIn. LinkedIn ads allows you to build the right relationships, drive results and reach your customers in a respectful environment. Two of my portfolio companies, Webflow and Census, are LinkedIn success stories. Census had a 10x increase in pipeline with a LinkedIn startup team. For Webflow, after ramping up on LinkedIn in Q4, they had the highest marketing source revenue quarter to date. With LinkedIn ads, you'll have direct access to and can build relationships with decision makers, including 950 million members, 180 million senior execs, and over 10 million C-level executives. You'll be able to drive results with targeting and measurement tools built specifically for B2B. In tech, LinkedIn generated 2x to 5x higher return on ad spend than any other social media platforms. Audiences on LinkedIn have two times the buying power of the average web audience, and you'll work with a partner who respects the B2B world you operate in. Make B2B marketing everything it can be and get $100 credit on your next campaign. Just go to linkedin.com/podlenny to claim your credit. That's linkedin.com/podlenny. Terms and conditions apply. There's these terms that we throw, around account executive reps. It might be helpful just to give people a sense of what does this actually mean when someone's an account executive. Is it that they're just sitting there calling and doing sales directly? Whatever the key terms are for the roles or the title might be helpful to quickly summarize.…

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