SaaStr 168: Why 70% of Startup's VPs of Sales Fail, How and When To Hire Your First VP of Sales & The One Question That You Must Always Ask VP of Sales Candidates with Ryan Williams, Founder @ SalesCollider

Ryan Williams is the Founder @ SalesCollider, the organisation that helps technical founders jumpstart sales. Ryan got his start as the first sales manager at Adroll where he grew the team from 3 to 32 reps in just 8 months, a team that was responsible for ARR growing from $4m to $58m in under 2 years. Ryan then became an advisor to the early team at InVision where he coached both CEO and sales reps to close the first dozen enterprise deals. Then his last stop before founding SalesCollider was as VP of Sales at LeadGenius where he grew enterprise sales by over 400% and added clients such as Ebay, IBM and Google, just to name a few. Ryan is also an Entrepreneur in Residence @ 500 Startups and a Mentor with First Round Capital.

In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:

• How Ryan made his way into the world of sales as first sales manager at Adroll and how that led to advising the CEO of InVision on gaining their first enterprise clients?
• 70% of VPs of Sales fail when they join early stage startups, why is this? How can founders know when is the right time to bring in their first VP of Sales? What can they do to maximise the chances of success when bringing them into the organisation?
• What is the right profile type for the first VP of Sales? What are the core foundations to assessing the strength of the VP in the interview, especially for engineering minded founders? What is the one question that Ryan loves to ask potential sales candidates? What answer does he look for?
• Does Ryan agree with a recent guest, “discounting is now table stakes”? Where do most early stage startups go wrong when thinking about discounts? What framework must startups utilise to analyse the right discount to offer? Why must they know the internal value they are providing to their customer in such a detailed way when discounting?

60 Second SaaStr

1. What does Ryan know now that he wishes he had known at the beginning?
2. SDR’s are the most important function in sales, agree or disagree?
3. Sales rep productivity, what is good and what is bad?

If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here:

Jason Lemkin

Harry Stebbings

SaaStr

Ryan Williams