The First 5 Things You Need to do as the New VP of Sales (in a startup)
1) Listen and Learn – You don’t know shit. Congrats on whatever prior success got you the new gig…but don’t assume it means anything. It may mean everything or nothing. It may actually impede you from making the right decisions. My advice: sit the sales team down, tell them to invite you to their calls and meetings. (Or just get Gong, which automatically records all their calls and demos and analyzes them for you). And set expectations that you will add value. Something like this “I just want to learn the messaging, pitch, and demo, and what prospects are saying. And I’m not doing this to hang over your shoulder. This is a team effort. At some point very soon, if I’m not contributing something to these, I won’t ask to sit in.” Look: a leadership change is traumatic in a sales organization, even if the outgoing VP wasn’t any good. My advice: Don’t go scare the shit out of everyone unless you have a very specific and deliberate reason why. Listen, learn, be open minded.
2) Find the People You Can Build Around – You are inheriting a team. Killing the cubs because you’re the new Pride Leader is incompetent VP’ing. And you will fail with that approach. Find out who is good and who isn’t. More importantly, find out who is good who has an approach/style/ethic that aligns with where you’re going. I don’t believe in one size fits all. You will have some reps that just do it their own way, but they win. And that’s fine. But you can’t scale those people. And those who just consistently don’t perform? Manage up or out. Quickly. Because they are draining your demand resources.
3) What’s The Story? – Wait, isn’t that marketings job? That’s the big company in ya boyo…no it’s really your job. You should be able to pitch and communicate what you do at a 50,000 foot level, 500 foot level, and a 5 foot level. You wouldn’t believe the number of startups out there who simply cannot clearly explain what they do at ANY level. That’s a problem. You are telling a story. That story needs to be clear, unique, and compelling for you to have ANY chance. Not telling it at all…not gonna work out for you.
4) DemandGen: Optimize Inbound and Activate Outbound – A lot of people would put this first. Because as we know…demand is so critical. Years of experience has taught me this: Figure out where you’re going, why you’re going there, and with whom. If you’ve got the wrong pitch with the wrong sales person who is selling the wrong way…maybe demand should be 4th. I mean…you need to be ON this issue from the getgo. Splitting hairs here.
5) Bringing in Your Own Folks – Recruiting is critical. And if you have nothing to work with, then this moves up in the order. You need to have a list at all times. This applies to first time VPs and to industry vets: Who would you hire (and who is available) right now if the perfect job presented itself? This should be a list of 10. Who would be your dream team? This list is dynamic and always changing. The longer you are around, the more folks get promoted, or simply become too expensive for you to hire anymore. Hey: That’s a good thing. Because you probably played a central part in their career development. You want your people to get promoted, move up, and make more money. But that means you have to constantly be curating this list.
The order of priority for these will probably never be the same twice. Every company is completely unique from another and priorities and pain are different. But if you follow these rules you are going to be better than about 90% of your peers. Which is important because about 90% of them fail.
Area Account Manager, Brainlab, Inc.
6yAnnette Plishka
VP, Products & Growth @ Decision Point
7yJohn Hardie
Business Leader |Thought Leadership | Accelerating Growth Revenue & Profit
7yInteresting article.
CEO & Entrepreneur 🔹 Business Advisor 🔹 Best-Selling Author 🔹 Multi-certified Business Growth coach 🔹 25+ Years as a Startup COO/Sales, VP & CMO 🔹 Endorsed by Alan Mulally, Marshall Goldsmith, Amy Edmondson 🔹
7yI was a salesperson and manager at 2 startups and VP of Sales 9 times after that. I also ran marketing at 2 of them as well. I continued to improve as I failed, learned and tried something new. After about 20 years, I got pretty good at this phase of the process. Having said that re: 1) above - While I think listening to your sales team has some merit, I recommend that you do not ask them anything until you talk first to customers (won and lost) and/or prospects. You need to keep your mind free of any biases you can't help but have as you get deeper into the process. (As an aside, I recommend that you read papers and books by Kahneman and Tversky as well as Robert Cialdini about how our brain tricks us on a regular basis. They prove that it is impossible not to be persuaded by what you hear or see.) I NEVER talk to my sales team first. I always create an interview script of 12-15 questions for consistency that I build with the help of other senior folks in marketing, operations, and the CEO. I keep interviewing customers until I hear the same things over and over again. I want to learn first hand from them where they learned about the product (a referral sale is completely different than a cold sale), why they bought the product, what their expectations were, were expectations met, what they thought was most valuable in the solution, etc.. What I learned was ALWAYS different from what I learned from my sales team and usually different as well from others in the organization including the Founder/CEO. Remember that your sales team is coin-operated and are trying to find ways to get someone to buy. The sales process itself is inherently flawed if you are doing discovery to find a market which a startup is doing for the first months to years. Moreover, the reasons they buy are not always in alignment with the reasons your salespeople think they buy. Sales people are also myopic and short-sighted. They do not look for the larger patterns nor much past the last sale or two that help you tap into a market versus close an individual deal. That is your job along with head of markteing and/or product. I think that Brendon's first point of listening and learning from your sales team is completely wrong as one of the first things that you should do. I would modify it to listen and learn from the targer market first. BTW, you might have completely or partially missed your target market and you want to know that quickly. When I did this, I was very clear about "The Story" in 3) and it was easier to create programs for Demand Gen in 4). Also, I could spot when a salesperson did not know what he was talking about or what the training and messaging needed to be for reps among other things One word of caution, depending on where you are in the lifecycle, you may have to do this over and over again as you transition from early adopters to mainstream buyers as they have different motivators for buying the product in most cases. One thing Brendon does not say is to ivolve the Founder or whoever has the influence and power to build a product/solution that people want earley and often. Unless they hear it firsthand and more than once, they will not be as willing to make changes that inevitably need to be made in order to reach product/market fit and then to scale. I think that should be on his list as well. I don't have all the answers but I am happy to share what I learned so you can make new mistakes and avoid the ones that I made. I write a lot about this type of stuff on my blog - https://catalystgrowthadvisors.com/2017/02/ Bill
Business Advisor, focused on Longevity, Growth & Go To Market.
7yGreat article, interesting info. Step 1 is truly the most important, not just in sales but every VP job