We're currently living in "the information age"
This is one of maybe 5-15 posts/ emails you'll consume today with an opinion on how you should do something
Content marketing feeds this beast like nothing else
It feels embarrassing to admit that I've only really started to ask myself the question "is this right for me and my business - and why?" over the last few months
Am I thinking?
Or am I blindly following?
I've spent way too much time following "best practices"
And listening to people because they had the right credentials
But I think it's a lot more common amongst founders than we want to admit
After all, ~90% of business is about execution
The other 10% is where creativity starts to come in to play
If a company is doing everything differently, they're probably going nowhere
Rules of thumb are useful, but they need to exist within a context
Two examples of searches I've done in the last year or so, both with a seed stage company that went against my "standard" advice
1: Standard advice: Don't hire SDRs early
Normally an SDR is the wrong hire early
- They're 60-70% of the price of an Account Executive
- They only set meetings - they don't close deals
- They need a lot more day-to-day management
But what if you have an Account Executive who's busy closing deals, a founder who's also doing a lot of sales, and are seeing a strong level of inbound?
Maybe it does make sense to bring on two SDRs to focus on the larger accounts that you want to dedicate time prospecting into
We made the hires
And five quarters later, both of those reps are still at the company
One is now an SDR lead, the other is an Account Executive
A pretty good outcome
2: Your first (few) Account Executives should be mid-market focused
Most of the time a mid-market Account Executive is the right first hire for your sales team
- They've got 2-4 years of sales experience
- They have an OTE of $180-220k
- They're comfortable closing deals of $30-50k
- They're comfortable doing their own outbound and have a track record of hitting quota
In this case we hired a mid-market AE.
A few months later, I was doing one of the (few) replacement searches I've ever run in my life
It turns out the right hire for this role was a Strategic Account Executive.
Why?
- Every time I speak with the founder (weekly), they're talking with another Fortune 500 company
- The rep I placed was good... at the mid market level. They were not enterprise ready.
- They have a product their users LOVE, but the users themselves aren't particularly familiar with navigating procurement at their own companies
That second point is an interesting one
If you sell into Marketing, IT, Cybersecurity or Sales, you're dealing with professional buyers
But if you sell into say Design... you're dealing with a persona that doesn't buy a lot
Sure, they've got an Adobe subscription - but that's been the case for 20+ years
So they're not as familiar with an enterprise procurement process
I recently created this document on how to hire your first salesperson
You can watch it in video form here
I've got a lot of rules of thumb in there
They're there for a good reason
But don't forget to think for yourself as well
After all, I didn't create it with the context that you have about your own business
Sam Marelich
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