2min snip

Building a world-class sales org | Jason Lemkin (SaaStr)

Lenny's Podcast: Product | Growth | Career

notes

NOTE

Specialization and Division of Labor in Sales Teams

Account executives are seasoned individuals responsible for closing deals, with compensation ranging from 90K to 200K based on deal size. Expecting account executives to be full-stack and manage outbound tasks as well is unrealistic in most cases. Most sales reps prefer specialization, where account executives focus on closing leads handed to them while SDRs generate demand. Managing a team of account executives requires stamina, but handling a team of SDRs can be a challenge that few founders are equipped to manage effectively.

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Transcript

Episode notes

Jason Lemkin created and runs SaaStr, the world’s largest community for B2B/SaaS founders, and is the managing director of SaaStr Fund, a $90 million venture capital firm specializing in early-stage enterprise investments. He is also the mastermind behind two major tech conferences each year—one in the Bay Area, drawing in over 15,000 people, and another in Europe, with a crowd of more than 3,000 SaaS executives, founders, and entrepreneurs. Before SaaStr, Jason wore many hats: CEO and co-founder of EchoSign (later bought by Adobe), vice president at Adobe Systems, co-founder and president of NanoGram Devices Corp., vice president of NeoPhotonics, and a senior director at BabyCenter. In our conversation, we discuss:

• How far you should go without a salesperson

• Signs it’s time to hire salespeople

• Why you need to hire two salespeople

• How to compensate your salespeople

• How to interview salespeople

• When to hire a VP of Sales

• How to prevent their flaming out

• How to scale your sales org

• How to improve the relationship between your sales and product teams

• Much more

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