Jason Lemkin: evaluation

Transcript context

…When do you make that switch from they're taking home 100% of what they're selling to smaller percentage? Look, some people are going to think it's goofy what I said about 100. I just view it as a simple ramp. I think you do it for one quarter max. One quarter. The problem is if you let this go for too long, more than a quarter, if you make it too easy for long a quarter, the problem is the mediocre lean into it too much, and that doesn't help. And not only does it not help you, it doesn't help them. You don't want to make mishires. They're so damn... I mean, you could have a whole podcast only just on mishires. It's probably the single most important thing in scaling startups. It's not hires, it's mishires. It's a tragedy if you mis-hire a rep, but you don't want them there six months. It's not good for them either. You want to support them, you want to help them find a place where they're successful. And here's the quirky thing on the mishires, and this is why that first guy I hired was mid-pack. He was less than mid-pack. Here's the thing about sales is, someone can be very good in certain sales environments and completely fail in other ones, completely fail. It's probably more binary than any other function. And so you got to find it before you hire them, but you also got to root it out fast, because those leads are too precious. And it doesn't mean they won't go on to another company and be wildly successful, but you could utterly fail. And the one related point I'll give, if I had to throw one hint on this first, any of these reps, first 10 and VP of sales, one hint more than anything else, trust... got to hire someone whose last product was harder to sell. This is so important. This is a recipe for utter disaster. If you've, take someone in sales and their last product was easier to sell, they will have none of the skills to sell your product. But, this is the... and I'll give you an example in a second. If you hire someone from something that was just a smidge harder, a smidge harder to sell, and they come into your company, it's like they're on Mars. It's like weight has been released from their feet. They learned how to sell a harder product and get it done, and then they come to you. And the first example I had, the first SDR I hired was a guy named Sam Blond, who went on to be CRO at Brex, and then now is a partner at Founders Fund. We worked together from the very beginning, first SDR. And he came, before that, he was an SDR at a company called Intacct, which was bought for a billion, which was online financials. Okay? And back in the day, we know what the one thing people didn't want to put in their cloud was? Their financial statements, okay? It just wasn't trusted that. There are some things you would trust to the cloud, like A CRM, but they'd be like, "These are my crown jewels. I can't put these..." So he went from desperately trying to convince folks to move a business process to the cloud. They had no interest. And he came to us, and it was hard, but it wasn't that hard. And he instantly was number one. t from desperately trying to convince folks to move a business process to the cloud. They had no interest. And he came to us, and it was hard, but it wasn't that hard. And he instantly was number one. He went from SDR to SMB-AE to mid-market AE to director of sales, to head of this whole sale... Because, I mean, there are many reasons he was great, but he came to me and I said, "Sam, why are you crushing it when everyone else here is struggling?" He's like, "This is much easier than Intacct." So hire someone like that and don't make... No matter how much you like them, the sell me this pen thing will control for it a bit, okay? But, when we give, we give, we give in the hiring process. We never give what we want. Be very, very careful if the last product was easier to sell.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.