Bonafidesalesguy

BDR

How important is it to have sales leadership in place?

I'm a tenured Sdr and I am interviewing for entry level AE position at a startup and they only have 1 AE on the sales team. He is taking on a leadership role and hopes to be promoted soon. The company just got a series B and will be exploding their headcount over the next year.

I fee like the company will bring on sales leadership in the near future.

How much of a concern should this be for me?

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CuriousFox

WR Officer

🦊

It could be great if you're a full cycle rep with no problem working 24/7.

poweredbycaffeine

WR Lieutenant

☕️

Is the AE moving into the VP role...and if they are...do they have any pedigree to back up their success?

Series A rounds don't often come without an established VP in place. Which exec is responsible for sales today?

braintank

Politicker

Enterprise Account Executive

So you got 1 AE who is going to run sales and build the team? Are they reporting directly to CEO?

This could be concerning. Scaling up a startup is tough and it's really helpful to have people at the helm who have done it before.

SaaSguy

Tycoon

Account Executive

Could be good or bad. If you are the sole SDR or a really small team you likely will have a huge patch to set meetings in. A sole AE could have bandwidth issues, just means you gotta really qualify whats hitting his pipeline and maybe even do some discos to pre qualify before sending his way.

Bonafidesalesguy

Valued Contributor

BDR

Just wanted to clarify I would be joining as an AE

GingerBarbarian

Opinionated

Lead Sales

There is a wide array of tasks that get pushed onto sales managers. Since sales is the lifeblood of any and every organization, Sales managers tend to have a crazy level of responsibility and it can differ from business to business. What kind of sales do the AEs do? What is the sales cycle? What kind of support would the AEs need? Do they need to promote for themselves or do they have a marketing team? Where do leads come from?

Simply put, most business do not die of starvation, they die from trying to do too much. A good manager should be able to narrow a sales team's focus to income producing activities and stop them from being distracted from strategies that are not productive. It is the difference from BUSINESS to BUSY-NESS.

The lack of a manager may not be concerning, but you need to make sure that higher management is not throwing everything in your lap and forcing you to complete low-margin activities.

CRAG112

Valued Contributor

Account Executive

I would caution against.

Small companies like that, it's sell or die, and they are even worse at putting the onus for every single thing on the sales person. Are you sure you want your first experience selling fully to be a potentially major shit show?

How confident are you in the ability to sell? What's common for setting meetings as an SDR? How many calls to meetings booked ratio, and how many connects out of all calls?

A random AE that becomes the VP. That dude is likely dead already and doesn't know it.

Just going off data. I would like to be wrong.

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Bonafidesalesguy

How important is it to have sales leadership in place?

7 comments

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