How To Hire The Right Sellers In An Early Stage Company

Ariel came from engineering, he had been a product leader for quite a few years and then made the transition into sales. 

Initially when he moved into sales, he was running product marketing. And he thought sales was so easy, you just get all of the factsheets and  battle cards and the information on the features and capabilities and share that with the prospects that they will buy it. Of course, he learned quickly he was wrong. Running a sales team taught him that sales was so much more and luckily he learned before he started his company. 

That mindset shift is what prepared him to at first do the sales himself and then build a sales organization at Second Nature AI. 

He learned two very important things as he moved from founder led sales to hiring a team. First, in an early stage company you have to hire a different type of seller. They have to have passion for the product and they have to know how to do full cycle selling without all the resources of a big company.  

He told me, you have to hire full cycle sellers - salespeople who don’t need the support of a large marketing and sales team.  They need to be able to adapt on the fly. 

So that is what he did and then he learned the second thing, you have to have inbound leads. Even with the right salespeople, if there are no leads sales don’t happen. 

Listen to hear the lessons that helped him grow sales. 

Chapters:

00:00 - Artificial Intelligence That Trains Your Salesforce? 
07:48 - The Genesis of Jenny AI 
10:53 - The First Customers Input 
15:19 - Scaling Sales and the Team 
26:32 - Using Second Nature to Train and Assess Sellers 
28:15 - Marketing Ahead of Sales Hires to Increase Inbound 
32:55 - The Sales Feedback Loop 
36:15 - The Next Chapter

About Our Guest:

Ariel Hitron is the CEO and co-founder of Second Nature. He has held various executive positions including VP of New Markets and VP of Sales and Customer Success at Kaltura. He ran global sales teams with dozens of reps, built playbooks and training sessions, and earlier in his career, developed and brought to market multiple software products, generating tens of millions of recurring revenue and used by millions of consumers.

As the CEO of Second Nature, Ariel is able to merge his passion for sales, tech, and product development, by applying AI to enable large B2B sales organizations to scale up and get systematic about their sales coaching.

About Second Nature:

Second Nature helps salespeople have better conversations.

Using AI-driven role play, sales professionals can practice in a safe space, and improve their performance and confidence by gaining real-time, personalized feedback.

Social links:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/arielhitron/

https://www.linkedin.com/company/second-nature-ai/

​​You can learn more about and connect with Alice Heiman in the links below.

Website: https://AliceHeiman.com