1. Hiring a Versatile Sales Team with a Shared Vision
- Abishek Murthy CGO at Locus, Ex-COS at Freshworks
- Krish Subramanian Co-Founder & CEO, Chargebee
In this snippet, Abishek emphasizes the importance of hiring a horizontal and versatile early-stage sales team to maintain momentum and foster iteration.
One explicit lesson I’ve had about hiring an early-stage sales team is to have your team horizontally focused.
When hiring a bunch of reps, it’s critical to understand if they will work better as an SDR. Will they work better as a partnership manager? Or will they work better as a PMM? Their roles may change in six months or one year, depending on their skill level.
I'm a huge believer in working with horizontal sales teams. All the Sales teams I've run have been horizontal. I could ask the Sales team to build a demo video to put on the website. I could have them write support articles because they are more in touch with the customer. It is very good for you to think about horizontal Sales teams at the start.
You can keep their title whatever they want. But it’s easy to think a bit more horizontally so that you can realign their skill set based on what they can do as the team matures.
This works especially in teams that focusses on small deals. Enterprise selling is an entirely different beast.
When hiring early leadership, founders often assume that once the hiring is done, the leader will take care of the rest and solve their problems. More often than not, that is not the case. What founders really need to do is showcase how it is done so that the leaders they’ve hired can improve upon it.
When you hire a leader in the GTM team, an SDR, or a Sales Rep, you have to show them how to talk to a customer, tell them what to talk about in the first 60 minutes, and show how many times you need to follow up. People learn by seeing.
For example, Girish, the founder of FreshWorks, even until 2021 – 22, used to stumble upon the Support team and jump on support tickets to respond to them because he really wanted to know what people were asking for. How were the Support Reps responding? Could they respond better and so on?
The main takeaway here is to show leadership by demonstration and not by assuming that when you hire a rep, they will know how to do what you want them to do. Of course, they will know how to do their jobs, but more often than not, whether you hire a rep or a VP, the arbitrage of skills will not be so wide.
As a founder, there has to be a certain way you have envisioned working with your customers. You need to show them how that's done, and then they will make it better.
Founders hiring their first sales rep need to build a shared vision. It’s tough to hire for startups. Incumbent companies will pay twice as much for good talent. This is why talent has to buy into the story to work in a startup.
This is why founders need to focus on the shared vision. Unless you have a shared vision with your new hires, they’re not going to stick around too long. They need to believe that yours is a great product, that the problem is worthwhile to lose sleep on, and so on.
With early Sales hiring, Revenue is a lagging indicator of success, while shared vision and engagement are the leading indicators.
The most important thing, whether pre-PMF or post-PMF, is a critical mindset of being super focused on customer centricity. You want to give the customer a superlative experience, a fantastic solution, and deep engagement because the customer is the one who will come back and give you intel on what to build next, how to build better, etc.
Remember that it is not the founder who delivers this experience. Founders hire a team, and they give the customer this experience. Whether a Sales Rep or a VP of Sales can provide the same experience or a better experience than the founder is a north-star metric that I think all early-stage startups should look at.
The way I think about it is that a superlative employee experience is a great customer experience. If you know how to keep your employees happy and your sales team engaged, motivated, and believing in your vision, you will have greater customer engagement.
One of the things that I’ve learned is that when we think about sales, we think about metrics, logic, how many leads come through the funnel, the percentage of conversion, first-touch response time, engagement quotas, and all that.
What we miss is the human part in it all, and humans are not driven by logic; they are driven by emotion. Sales are driven by the emotions of your customers and the emotions of your employees. You have to manage your team's emotions just as much as you expect them to manage your customers'.
Employees have a very different mindset from founders. A founder’s emotions are driven by product market fit, growth, success, the next funding round, etc. But that emotion does not translate to the team. When you hire a VP of Sales or a Sales Rep, they think more about their own career goals, so their emotions are no longer the same as yours.
In this snippet, Krish emphasizes that a company-wide growth mindset, supported by a seamless user experience, is key to scaling efficiently and achieving product-market fit.
What we could have done differently in the early days of Chargebee was to get everybody on board with obsessing over growth as a primary objective.
Paul Graham articulated this a long time ago: Startup = Growth.
But I think most people don’t internalize that truth enough. We hadn’t.
Growth isn’t a one-person/function problem. Everybody on the founding team has to work towards hitting product-market fit and that million-dollar ARR mark with great urgency.
Everybody needs to have access to the spreadsheet that models your growth. Everybody should be able to talk about what it says. Everybody should know the pieces that make that model real. This is how you prioritize. How you choose between one feature/campaign over another.
This impacts the smallest things that can all prove to be substantial drivers in the early days. I remember that we used to require three form fields for signing up back in 2012 and we debated why we didn’t need two of them.
Getting rid of those as a way of removing friction doubled our sign-ups. While we got that decision right, there were many others that we could have solved for faster if we had product and engineering fully aligned on our shared vision for growth.