Hi all, I'm looking for some advice on thinking longer term about my career.
TLDR; my sales experience is in Series A SaaS companies. I wonder if making the move to a larger org is worth it or even possible given my experience so far.
Some background
Got into sales about 5 years ago after being a data analyst for a a couple years. I had joined a startup (10th hire) as an analyst and started randomly going on sales calls as a technical resource. I really enjoyed it, so I made the change and became the first sales hire. As you can imagine it was a s**t show for a while until I figured out how ppl bought things. Was at that company for about 4 years - we did a series A, 6/7x the company to about $3m ARR - before some poor (imo) strategic decisions meant the company went into a nose dive. I tried to get growth going again but was unsuccessful.
Joined another Series A company as an early sales hire back in June. Another sales rep and a head of sales also joined at a similar time. Sold a few deals early on but there's been loads of messaging changes, product changes, new verticals etc. Things have been pretty slow the last few months - for me and the whole team.
In neither case I've had no sales training, other awesome sellers to learn from or loads of repeatable at bats. Everything I've learned about sales so far has been trial and error/reading/webinars etc.
I guess I've got two questions:
- Is this normal for a sales hire at a series A company? Real patchy deal flow, total hustle for every scrap?
- If I did want to go into a larger org, would I be taken seriously given I don't have like "5+ years of demostrable quota outperformance and presidents club"? Like at my first company there were no formal quotas - it was just that we needed to grow by $X each year and that was it.
I'm confident I can succeed at a larger org, just want to get a perspective of what my experience looks like from folks already in those orgs if possible.
Thanks for reading what seems like my life story. Appreciate any thoughts.
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