Desk managers don't build great sales teams

By First Round Capital

Categories: VC, Startup

Summary

Great sales leaders must have deep product knowledge and selling ability to earn trust and forecast accurately. Desk managers who can't sell the product themselves are a red flag for the health of the sales org and the business.

Key Takeaways

1. Sales managers must be able to sell the product better than anyone else and understand the technology in order to articulate it effectively to leadership.
2. Desk managers who only look at numbers and spreadsheets, without hands-on selling experience, cannot be trusted to hire great salespeople or provide accurate forecasts.
3. If sales leaders lose touch with what's happening in the organization, the entire business can become unstable and flimsy.
4. Founders must ensure their second-line sales leaders have direct selling experience and can demonstrate how to execute a great sales call.
5. Trusting the sales forecast is critical, and depends on having sales leaders who can sell the product themselves, not just manage spreadsheets.
6. Great sales leaders demonstrate their product mastery by being able to articulate it effectively to the CEO and founders.

Topics

• Sales Leadership
• Sales Forecasting
• Hiring Great Salespeople
• Product Knowledge
• Organizational Trust

Transcript Excerpt

If you have second line leaders in your organization who don't know how to sell their product, how can I trust the forecast that they're giving to me? As you look at your leadership team, it's incredibly important that they know how to sell the product. I need to know how to sell the product better than anyone else and understand the technology and then be able to articulate that back to the founders, the CEO, whomever. I've had sales managers in the past that are spreadsheet managers that sit b...