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.
It's really, [00:09:00] after the founders have locked down at least a few design partners, and have a few companies that are actually using the solution in a production environment.
Kevin Moore: You've had to, kind of learned some lessons prior to really getting your first account executive, because there's going to be a lot of other unknowns, but by this time also you've had enough conversations. Let's just say you've had at least a hundred coversations to know what's resonating to know what's not resonating.
And to understand some of the best practices,you have to have a starting point for enablement for any reps. You have to start somewhere. You can't just say here's a new white Knight. That's going to come in and magic pixie dust starts selling your product. You have to give them a foundation to enable them for success.
And you may not want to start with one person, right? If the idea is to get feedback from the market, maybe you start with a sales development rep. Where the founders still act as the kind of account executives in the very early days and that sales development rep is someone who's going to help get those meetings, get those conversations for you.
You can do that until you have a couple of wins. And then ultimately once you've refined that message and have that framework for enablement, that's [00:10:00] the time to hire the first salesperson. Cause the reality is that doesn't work.
Kevin Moore: Usually the first couple of salespeople, I hate to say it sometimes they're sacrificial lambs, right? you haven't ironed out a lot of the wrinkles that you need for full blown go to market motion. You guess what you think their target's going to be and they don't hit it.
They're not happy. They're not making a good living. They came from a place that was making a good living, et cetera. So if you can iron out some of those potential objections and have some level of framework that can help get them to a point where, they're gonna have decent success.
I'm not saying, groundbreaking success in the beginning, cause you're still ironing out best practices. You're much better off than just hiring someone right out the gate.
