What characteristics make a successful entrepreneur? Jim Baum has over 25 years of tech industry experience as an entrepreneur and board leader. According to Jim, it takes “the smarts, the drive, and just enough of the craziness to make it happen.” As a seasoned president, CEO, and advisor of high-growth, venture-backed B2B software environments, he shares his insights on the limits of technology, the importance of customer-defined value, and how entrepreneurial values are critical to the success of all sales individuals and leaders. Dig in to strategies for personal and organizational growth in this conversation with John McMahon and John Kaplan on Revenue Builders.

Additional Resources:

Support Angel Flight in providing transportation to lifesaving medical care: https://www.angelflightne.org/
Connect with Jim on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jimbaum/
Listen to More Revenue Builders: https://www.forcemanagement.com/revenue-builders-podcast

HIGHLIGHTS

How Jim’s technical background helped him in his career
Advice for technical people looking to become revenue builders
Admitting and owning mistakes
Iteration is key
The dynamic subordination of leadership and decision making
Key traits of successful entrepreneurs
Entrepreneurship as a mindset for all sales leaders
How contagious passion shapes enterprise teams
Differences between being an entrepreneur and being a corporate executive
The importance of having an outside-in vs inside-out mentality

QUOTES

Jim - Get to know the customer: “Not to downplay the importance of technology, and the quality of the technology and the architecture and the systems that are used, and the way they're deployed, and the way they scale and all of those things. But on top of all that, there's an end user, there's a person, there's a human or a system that needs to somehow derive value from what this technology is doing. And so I really think the advice is, get to know the customer get to know the use case, get to know, in deeply understand the value.”

Check out John McMahon’s book here:

https://www.amazon.com/Qualified-Sales-Leader-Proven-Lessons/dp/0578895064

Episode 12: A Happiness Exercise