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.
startup salespeople are different, They want to be part of a team that's building. in the process,you want to make them feel as they should. Part of building something right.
Kevin Moore: At a large company, you're just a spoke in the wheel. Whereas every role within the go to market engine at this stage of company matters, everything they do matters. We're learning constantly of what's working and what's not, and there's a certain type of personality that thrives off of that type of environment.
That's what you're looking for. So to attract them, you want to, I think you want to, exponentially compound. You ultimately also of course, [00:39:00] for sales personnel, it's about compensation. You want to reward them for that hard work, and especially in the earlier stages, they're helping build those best practices.
So giving them equity in the company is incredibly important. Giving the ability to overachieve is incredibly important. and then when you get those people and they start seeing, achievement and they're overachieving, it's really important even earlier in the process to ask them for referrals, great people know great people, so getting internal referrals and making that even part of that year as part of your recruitment process,is really important.
I think the last thing I would say to that, sorry, the last thing that I would say that also is, helping them understand as part of this bill process. ultimately what the outcome can be, whether that's, some type of liquidity event,an IPO to some extent, or also understanding what's in it for them, what are their motivations?
It's incredibly important to understand not everybody's the same. You can actually put a, there's a lot of similarities with high-performing sales, account executives. But the reality is [00:40:00] that, some are earlier in their career and they want career development. helping them map out.
Career development is I actually ask every single one of, I'm in every part of the interview process for field account executives at this stage. And every time I'm talking to somebody and I'm usually one of the last interviews, I asked them what their career goals are. And some people say, look, I just want to be, I just want to sell enterprise software and make a lot of money.
And that's okay. There's other people that want to be people managers. the reality is you come to an early stage company because you can build your career a lot faster than say, going to a Cisco or a Palo Alto networks, right? Because your individual contribution,is helping build the company through, through the best practice recording that we're doing.
And then in the enablement is based off of some of those earlier stage folks. it's really important just to identify, what motivates them, and then helping compound that.
