How Emerging Tech Companies Attract ‘A’ Player Talent

Joining us for today’s show is Eric Janssen, a Chief Revenue Officer who knows how to build a team to make the number. Eric is a success story having served as the sales leader for several successful emerging growth companies. I can't think of a better guest to demonstrate how to build and develop the right team to make your number. Eric has been a long-time consumer of SBI's content and he reached out to me with a quick note thanking me for the show. I was looking for a sales leader guest from an emerging market space to come on the show, so Eric was the perfect guy.

Today’s topic is focused on talent and we are going to demonstrate how to attract and retain ‘A’ player talent. This is not a trivial matter since ‘A’ players typically generate five times more revenue than ‘B’ players and 10 times more revenue than ‘C’ players. During our discussion, Eric and I leveraged the annual workbook for our conversation. Flip to the People Plan phase starting on page 285.

Helping me with our demonstration is Eric Janseen, a partner and the Chief Revenue Officer for Intellitix. If you have attended a large music festival or sporting event, you have likely experienced Intellitix technology. Events as such as Tomorrowland, Coachella, and the Ryder Cup are powered by Eric’s company. Intellitix makes the guest experience more seamless for over 20 million fans a year by layering ticket-less technology into the event. They are best known for putting your ticket and wallet onto a single wearable, typically a wristband. Eric is uniquely qualified to speak on this topic with experience building teams and crushing his number year after year in emerging technology companies.

Why this topic? Relying on the heroic efforts of a few eventually catches up with you. When 20% of your sales team produces 80% of the revenue, something has gone wrong. The labor expense associated with the sales team incurred by the company has to be justified or headcount reduction is warranted. Tolerating under-performers and hiring mistakes and very long new hire productivity cycles all lead to missed revenue targets and typically also lead to job loss for the head of sales.

Having a great product is table stakes and is not going to sell itself. For an emerging technology company the dependence on talent is high. In the first segment, we discuss Eric's business and particularly the reason why we have Eric on the show today is because he's an owner and leading the sales team of an emerging growth company. The challenges you have in an emerging growth company are very different than the challenges that you may have in a Global 2000.

The second segment an overview of how Eric makes a new hire productive. Eric throws them in the field to get them out actually doing the work of helping to put one of these events together. This gives the new seller the context and expertise to speak about what it takes to the target audience.

Eric and I discuss how to address poor performance in the final segment of the show. Eric outlines a development plan and how he builds ‘A’ player talent for his company.