Chad Peets is one of the greatest sales leaders and recruiters of the last 25 years. From 2018 to 2023, Chad was a Managing Director at Sutter Hill Ventures. Chad has worked with the world's best CEOs and CROs to build world-class go-to-market organizations. Chad is currently a member of the Board of Directors for Lacework and Luminary Cloud and on the boards of Clumio and Sigma Computing. He previously served as a board member for Astronomer, Transposit, and others. He was an early-stage investor at Snowflake, Sigma, Observe, Lacework, and Clumio.
In Today's Discussion with Chad Peet's We Discuss:
1. You Need a CRO Pre-Product:
- Why does Chad believe that SaaS companies need a CRO pre-product?
- Should the founder not be the right person to create the sales playbook?
- What should the founder look for in their first CRO hire?
- Does any great CRO really want to go back to an early startup and do it again?
2. What Everyone Gets Wrong in Building Sales Teams:
- Why are most sales reps not performing?
- How long does it take for sales teams to ramp? How does this change with PLG and enterprise?
- What are the benchmarks of good vs great for average sales reps?
- How do founders and VCs most often hurt their sales teams and performance?
3. How to Build a Hiring Machine:
- What are the single biggest mistakes people make when hiring sales reps and teams?
- Are sales people money motivated? How to create comp plans that incentivise and align?
- Why does Chad believe that any sales rep that does not want to be in the office, is not putting their career and development first?
- Why is it harder than ever to recruit great sales leaders today?
4. Lessons from Scaling Sales at Snowflake:
- What are the single biggest lessons of what worked from scaling Snowflake's sales team?
- What did not work? What would he do differently with the team again?
- What did Snowflake teach Chad about success and culture and how they interplay together?
