Blueprints to Borrow
Build, recruit, and assemble a structure for your sales team's success
Hello friends,
Once again, this week shares a common theme. As sales leaders, we’re tasked with an endless amount of things to accomplish.
But none more essential than building, recruiting, assembling, and setting up a structure for our sales teams success.
But where do we look for blueprints to borrow from?
In this week’s edition of Stretch Weekly -
How CRO Chris Degnan Built Snowlake’s Sales Org From the Ground Up
How To Create A Winning Coaching Culture With a Remote Sales Team by Steli Efti
Ang McManamon and 5 Things to Look for When Hiring Salespeople
And of course, this week’s snippets to help us build and coach our team to success.
THANKS for reading!!
-Grant
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STRETCH SHARES
How CRO Chris Degnan Built Snowlake’s Sales Org From the Ground Up
Stumbled on a new podcast called Go To Market Grit with Joubin Mirzadegan and couldn’t be more excited. Add this one to your playlist!
In this episode, hear the fascinating story of Chris Degnan and how he went from the first sales rep to now CRO and helped build Snowflake to the mega-unicorn it is today - and highest valued software IPO in stock market history!
Other highlights include:
Taking a risk and becoming the first sales hire to his role now as CRO in just 7 years.
Selling just a concept
How Chris built the sales org from the ground up
Hear how fear of failure can be an effective motivator (“I've got 3 months until they fire me")
How To Create A Winning Coaching Culture With a Remote Sales Team
Steli Efti is a good follow on Twitter with loads of great advice - including this article in Forbes about creating a winning COACHING culture as you manage a remote sales team. He says communication is key.
“The golden rule of making remote sales work is to overcommunicate. If you’re ever wondering whether you should say the thing on your mind or not, default to saying it.
Communicate what exactly?
Tell your team WHAT. What’s the goal for the year/quarter/month/week/day etc.
Tell your team HOW. Provide a clear plan of action. Don’t let your team wonder how to do something.
Take the gloves off. Create a culture where everyone feels safe providing candid communication. Giving timely feedback is key.
Create (friendly) competition. Playful competition can help foster peak-performance.
Listen. Practice the art of listening. How can you support them, ask for candid feedback.
5 Things to Look for When Hiring Salespeople
Maybe it’s because I noticed some striking similarities with this article and one of my favorite books on scaling sales (The Sales Acceleration Formula - by Mark Roberge), but I enjoyed this post from Ang McManamon in Sales Hacker on tips when hiring salespeople.
Amongst other ideas - Ang (and Mark would mostly agree) believes we should look for these 5 traits as we hire salespeople:
Performance
Coachability
Grit
Curiosity
Culture
Great read and a good reminder as we build out our sales teams.
*Bonus. Mark’s five traits that correlated most significantly with sales success? Coachability, CuriosityPrior success, Intelligence, Work ethic
STRETCH SNIPPETS
💪 How to succeed as a first-time VP of Sales is one of my favorite posts by Jason Lemkin. If you agree - check out this new post of his on the 12 most common mistakes made building your first sales team.
🥇 Coaching wins championships (you know this - we went over this in the Feb 3rd newsletter). Devin Reed knows this too. His post on how to become a legendary sales coach with data is awesome.
😥 Jake Dunlap puts first-time VPs on the back and tells us that we are good enough. Says "The number one reason you will fail is that you will try to do too much yourself. Or, the odds were stacked against you from the start...”
🤝 Jeremy Donovan quotes from The Success Cadence, a book by David Mattson to remind us that: "As a sales leader, you must understand that your product is actually salespeople who are both willing and able to do their job."
🏆 Watch this video of Thiago Sa Freire presenting a keynote on Rising to the C-Suite Challenge and equipping your team to win high stakes deals.
🤔 Pipedrive pens a pretty thorough post instructing us on how to manage a sales team remotely.
🏡 Talking about blueprints! I love seeing other's work environments. Check out this thread started by Bryan Elsesser (New VP of Sales -SaaStr) with some inspiring and covetous remote work/office setups!!
🧠 Mindset Matters
Thanks for reading!
My hope is if you find this valuable, consider sharing it with friends (or signing up if you haven’t already).
— Grant 👋
About stretch vp: confessions, learnings, and insights from sales leaders in SaaS
Compiled and aggregated from a network of sales leaders in SaaS, Stretch VP showcases learnings, insights, and experiences as well as best practices to overcome common hurdles, obstacles, and setbacks in your quest for excellence as a sales leader in SaaS.
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