Nothing matters but recruiting and using your personal network. Sam Blond, CSO at Brex explains why recruiting, networking and employee happiness is the key to this playbook on recruiting your sales team.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/MK_qmw3869E?version=3&rel=1&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&fs=1&hl=en-US&autohide=2&wmode=transparent
Sam Blond | Chief Sales Officer @ Brex
FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW
My name’s Sam Blond. I’m doing The Playbook To Recruiting Your Sales Team.
Before I start, what an awesome event. I attend these types of events periodically and these SaaStr events are just always a cut above. Once again, amazing job to the SaaStr team. I’m really honored to share this stage with some really bad ass speakers. Several of my former bosses, Kathy Lord that was just up here actually started at Intacct right out of college. She was my first VP of Sales. Hi there. Brendan Cassidy, second VP of Sales at EchoSign. Jason was the CEO at EchoSign, so pretty cool. I’m doing The Playbook To Recruiting Your Sales Team. Jason had emailed me a few months ago asking if I wanted to participate and unlike other events where sometimes I have to really think about what I want to present on, this came really quickly to me and it’s because he prefaced it with, “We’re doing The Playbook too and then you got to figure out what you want to talk about.”
And for me, I’ve learned throughout my career that I can and probably do suck at just about everything else, but if I’m okay at recruiting the sales team, everything’s going to be okay. Recruiting is the only thing that matters. We’ll start off … This is a picture of our sales organization or some of our sales organization. This is why we are successful as a sales org. It’s all about the people. I wish that I could say I had some silver bullet with regard to strategy or something like that that has really taken the company out from a growth perspective. It’s the people, that’s it. And so when I started putting this deck together, I wanted to see if my experience around people in recruiting being the most important thing was something that resonated with others, so I was just Googling recruiting quotes and just about every major leader of a large business had something.
And so I found a couple that I took out. The first one is, “Acquiring the right talent is the most important key to growth. Hiring was and still is the most important thing we do.” That was Marc Benioff. The second one is, “The secret to my success is that we’ve gone to exceptional lengths tohire the best people in the world,” and that was Steve Jobs. And I just picked these two but I could’ve done 10 or 12 and just done a slide deck on quotes, but that would’ve been a little boring. And then I was putting this deck together, it was actually last week. I think it was three weeks after the due date for the final draft, so sorry, team SaaStr. And then Jason posted this on Twitter and it says, “NMBR, after $2 million in ARR, so nothing matters about recruiting.” So lots of social proof people that I really look up to that have had this experience around recruiting being by far the most important thing that you an do to build a successful business.
For today, I’m going to start pretty high level just with a few recruiting principles and then get really tactical around the evolution, who to hire, when to hire, introduce strategy and some things that you can do to make recruiting easier. But starting with the recruiting principles, the first one is hiring the right people is the most important thing you can do to build a successful business. This really hits home for me personally. When I look at joining a company, the primary reason that I join is the people and really the leadership team. I remember when I joined Zenefits a number of years ago, I met with Parker who’s the CEO and I left that meeting just thinking he’s going to build a really massive business and that’s why I joined. The same was true when I was meeting with Pedro and Enrique and our CFO, Michael at Brex.
It didn’t really matter what the company did. It was just like these people are going to build a massive business and that’s why I want to join. I think that transcends throughout the entire organization where even individual contributor sales reps and SDRs, they’re joining the business in large part because of who that leader is. Hiring the right people is the most important thing you can do to build a successful business and you’ve sort of seen that is a recurring theme through the Steve Jobs and Mark Benioff quote.
The next one is make recruiting part of everyone’s job. We don’t pay referral bonuses when somebody at the company refers somebody that we ended up hiring. Oftentimes we’ll get asked the question, do you pay for referrals on hires? And the answer is actually yes, it’s your salary because it’s part of everyone’s job at the company to refer candidates and to recruit and so that’s the second principle. Recruiting is part of everybody’s job. It’s one of two things that we hammer home on a consistent basis around making recruiting part of everyone’s job. The other one is customer focus. That’s a different presentation for another day.
And then the last one is hiring is all about mitigating risk. And so what I mean by this is what you’re really trying to solve for is this risk reward ratio where it’s really a low risk and high upside in the types of hires that you’re making. There’s a lot of things that you can do to find these types of people, so we’ll talk about some of those.
Again, now we’re moving to the tactical stuff. What I’m going to talk about is when you want to hire people on the sales team and then who you want to hire, so the profiles of those different people. In the early days, what you really want as a CEO is to actually be the first sales rep, so you want to find some sort of product market fit. You really want to bring on several non friends and family customers. And part of why you want to do this is you want to learn the type of profile that you will be looking for in your future sales rep. How long does it take to close these deals? How much can we sell the product for? And then you can use the information that you have learned by educating yourself on selling the product and you can design a profile of who you then want to hire. Once you’ve done that, you are ready to hire your first salespeople.
