Kevin is the Chief Revenue Officer of Abnormal Security, where he leads worldwide revenue generating activities. In this class, Kevin lays out the steps required for building a best-in-class sales organization, starting from early sales hires all the way to expanding to a larger team. He brings strategic and operational experience with over 20 years of success leading global, high-performance sales teams at companies including Vectra AI and Proofpoint.
The truth is that most founders are incredibly good sellers, but they don't know it because it's their vision.
Kevin Moore: It's their product. They know what they know the most about it. They're the most passionate about. I would also say to founders is get used to it because you'll always be selling, right? Even when you're a billion dollar company, strategic accounts,large enterprises want to talk to the CEO, want to talk to co-founders about,their vision, ultimately to either be help you be part of that vision or ultimately make sure that you're going to be a sustainable company.
And so I can talk to you until I'm blue in the face as the head of sales. And, you can have the head of product marketing or the head of product in general. But the reality is they're going to want to talk to the co-founders and CEO at some point to ensure that they're, if they're going to make an investment, it's going to be for the long-term.
But all that being said, I would say the main piece of advice I would give is before you even hire know one salesperson, again, talk to as many [00:08:00] people as you can,then also. When you're talking to people, start with sales leaders have experience building high-performing sales organizations, preferably in the space that you're going to be selling.
And then I would also read some books on enterprise selling, understand the craft, understand that you can build a high-performing machine, but there is a lot of gray in enterprise selling. So understanding what that gray can be, and build scenarios based off of that.
And again, I go back to building a list of people that, you'd like to talk to and leverage every resource you can to talk to those people. I would say then when you have the conversation, take scrupulous notes, like even hire somebody that will take notes for you. So you can start building out patterns of what's working and what's resonating, what's not. And then again, refine that message to a point where your win rate or at least positive reinforcement in those conversations, gets better and better and higher and higher as you go. And then you'll have the framework of what the right kind of pitch is.
