My Guest
One of the most common investment theses among acquisition entrepreneurs revolves around building an internal sales function where no such function has existed in the past. While this makes intuitive sense on the surface, just how easy is it to build a sales team from scratch? Do you hire the leader first, or do you hire an individual contributor first? Does it matter if your sales reps have experience in your particular industry? How do you evaluate the success of new hires if you have a long sales cycle? How do you change an incentive compensation plan in the middle of a fiscal year? Should lead generation be outsourced or brought in-house? How involved should a SMB CEO be in sales?
These are just some of the many questions that we explore with my guest this week, Dave Prusinksi. Dave is the Chief Revenue Officer at SafeAI, a hyper-growth silicon valley company in the autonomous vehicle space.
Prior to his current role, Dave spent 10 years as the Executive Vice President of Sales and Marketing at FleetComplete, a technology provider to fleet-owning businesses around the world. Under Dave’s leadership, FleetComplete grew from $6M ARR to $150M in total revenue, achieving an average 50% revenue CAGR for 9 of his 10 years.
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The Art (and Science) of Building a High-Performance Sales Organization – In The Trenches
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Specific Questions and When They’re Asked
Hiring and Onboarding
- (3:50) What are the most common mistakes that CEOs make when hiring a Head of Sales?
- (5:40) How do you hire a Head of Sales who can scale while also avoiding “over-hiring” risk?
- (7:00) How important is industry experience when hiring individual sales reps?
- (9:30) When should a CEO expect a new sales hire to pay for themselves?
- (12:00) How do you evaluate new sales hires if your company has very long sales cycles?
- (14:25) How do you translate a revenue goal into a quantifiable activity goal for each rep?
- (18:40) If building a sales team from scratch, who should you hire the first? Leader or individual contributors?
- (22:50) How do you most effectively ramp/onboard newly hired sales reps?
- (25:30) Should CEOs utilize their existing reps to help onboard newly hired reps?
Compensation Plans
- (27:30) What are the biggest mistakes CEOs make when crafting incentive comp plans?
- (30:25) How do you know if a comp plan is sufficiently simple & easy to understand?
- (33:40) How do you re-structure a comp plan mid-year if you’re forced to do so?
- (35:20) How do you know if you should change a comp plan mid-year vs. leaving it as is?
- (39:00) How much change do you generally make to your comp plans year-over-year?
- (41:00) When should a new annual comp plan be in the hands of sales reps?
Team Attrition
- (42:30) How do you deal with a high performing rep who is a cultural net-negative?
- (45:20) How do you deal with with a successful VP of Sales who is on a cold streak?
- (48:15) How do you minimize churn of BDRs? Do you have to accept it’s a high churn role?
- (50:05) Does sales have to be a high turnover group? What are best practices re: retention?
- (52:55) How do leaders deal with reps who are frustrated with things beyond their control?
Functions Supporting the Sales Team
- (55:00) How do you make the link between Sales & Marketing as strong as possible?
- (59:20) Does external lead gen work? What should you outsource vs keep in house?
- (1:01:25) Does product complexity impact the effectiveness of outsourced lead generation?
- (1:03:45) What does Sales Ops do, and how do you know if you need Sales Ops or not?
- (1:05:05) How do CEOs know when to add various supporting functions to the sales team?
Scaling a Sales Team
- (1:07:40) How do you know when it’s time to scale and add significant headcount?
General
- (1:11:25) How involved should a CEO be in sales?
- (1:13:35) How do you specialize between hunters (AEs) & farmers (AMs) with a small team?
- (1:15:50) What 5-10 metrics should be on every CEO’s sales-specific dashboard?
- (1:20:15) What resources (books, blogs) that CEOs should familiarize themselves with?
- (1:27:45) If you could shout something from the mountaintops that every CEO should know specific to sales, what would that be?
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Links to All Resources Discussed
- Predictive Index: Benchmarking tool for employees
- Book: Predictable Revenue, by Aaron Ross and Marylou Tyler
- Book: Solution Selling, by Michael Bosworth
- Book: The Challenger Sale, by Matthew Dixon
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