Pete Kazanjy: recommendation

Transcript context

…Love it. So, hiring salespeople, we've talked a bit about a lot of these things, like maybe when it's time to hire a salesperson when you're closing a fourth or fifth of your opportunities when this while loop is kicking in. So, in terms of the who to find for this first sales role, and you mentioned that VP of sales are often let go, it's a very high rate of not working out, is that true? Yeah. Again, this is mapped out in the Founder-led Selling presentation and then also in Founding Sales, the book. Generally, what you want to do is you probably don't want to start with a VP of sales to start, a sales leader, and there's a couple of reasons why there. Even if you figured it out yourself, that's required, you have to get to that minimum sufficiency of 10, 20, 30 customers yourself first. But then the reason why I advocate for folks to hire a couple of sellers or a couple of AEs to start is because, again, you have that software in your brain. Unfortunately, there is no GitHub for sales motions, and so it's in your brain, it's in your documents, et cetera, and so now, you're going to teach these other folks. So, what you want to do is you want to hire a couple early-stage pioneer sellers to take that sales motion. The downside of seeking to hire a VP of sales or a head of sales, or what have you, who actually is a head of sales is coming out of an organization where maybe he or she is a manager of managers or manages eight reps or something like that, is that person hasn't been selling for a hot second. I think actually Jason Lemkin had a pretty funny tweet about this the other day where he was like, "Hiring the VP of sales who's been there and done that before, why exactly does she want to do it again?" Like, "Oh, you scaled up a Datadog or Figma or whatever, you should come to my crappy little startup," it's like, "I'm professionally rich." So, instead, the great folks to look at are the deputies or those early-stage sellers. So, the example I always use here, my last software company was in recruiting, so if you have a new recruiting technology, my buddy, Troy, runs this recruiting software company called Guide. They make this really cool, guided, hey, hiring process for candidates, whatever, but they sell to recruiting organizations. So the early-stage sellers that he would be interested in would probably be early people at Lever or Greenhouse who sell to the same persona, probably around the same average selling price, but ideally, not an AE who joined Greenhouse last year or two years ago. Greenhouse just has a phenomenal sales organization, their sales leadership is absolutely fantastic, the gentleman who's the CRO over there is a good friend of mine, Sean Murray. But early-stage selling takes early-stage sellers or people who have been there, because you're not going to have all the collateral, slides and scripts and whatever aren't going to be all buttoned up and with a bow around them, and so looking for those early-stage, grimier, grittier sellers is a more effective way of going about that. Those are the folks that you want to look for once you've gotten to that statistical significance of your own selling capacity. To make that just even clearer, the suggestion is if you're, say, a Series A founder, what's a profile of a person you look for? You said it's a deputy at a successful sales org?…

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