Welcome to the Official Newsletter of Salesman Summer, hitting your inbox every Monday
Last week I sat down for a chat with Sam Marelich - a top sales recruiter who specializes in placing salespeople and Go-To-Market experts into fast scaling roles at venture backed start up firms
If you’re looking to get into sales, or if you’re thinking about your next move, this is a must read article
Understanding Start Up Hiring: The T2D3 Model
Before you can even think about entering this world it’s important to understand exactly what venture backed start ups are trying to do - and Sam broke this down for us in clear English.
Most start ups (and their investors) are looking to follow the T2D3 model; Triple-Triple-Double-Double-Double.
Let’s say that a new business hits $2m ARR (Annual Re-occurring Revenue, the forecast revenue stream from signed up customer contracts). In the next year they would be expected to triple this to $6m, then triple again to $18, then double to $36m, then double again to $72m and then double yet again to $144m - all within five years. This attracts funding for a business to be able to scale through the Seed Phase-A-B-C-D funding rounds and eventually a lucrative IPO on the stock market.
This takes a lot of work - and a lot of salespeople. In fact a business will often need to hire over 120 Account Executives to make this a reality, in addition to SDRs, sales support and leadership roles. We can’t forget attrition either, team turnover can run at 30% a year - which is why companies like this are always hiring.
By the time they hit Series B funding most companies will have internalized recruitment. But until then, this is where recruiters like Sam come in. And those first 5-10 sales/GTM hires are *very* important.
Founders at these early stages are looking for grit. Someone who can operate without a playbook, whilst also laying down foundations for those who follow after them. The people who’ll create the sales deck, figure out how to handle objections in a new market - people who’ll become a reference point for every sales hire who comes after.
For those salespeople willing to take the gamble, joining a start up with T2D3 potential is the high leverage play which can make the risk worth it.
“You’re not building a sales team at this stage - you’re building the people who’ll train the sales team. Different game.”
How Start-Ups *Actually* Hire Salespeople
Sam is able to give us a real behind the scenes look at what actually takes place on a sales hire process, and knowing how all this goes down can give a candidate a serious advantage.
Let’s say you’re a start up founder and you need a deal closer. You post a job opening on LinkedIn and within a few days you’ve got 1,000+ applications. Even if you take under two minutes to review each application you’re still looking at an entire working week to shift through them all; founders simply can’t afford to take that long, yet for a first set of sales hires it’s very important that the founder does review them personally.
This is why early stage start ups often rely on candidate sourcing - that is, employing recruiting specialists using tools such as LinkedIn to source people with specific skills. Because you don’t want randoms you can train, you want proven closers and GTM experts.
This allows recruiters to pre-screen applicants for quota achievement, average deal size, sales cycles, and coachability. Then, a shortlist can be presented to the founder.
This should get you thinking - if you want one of these roles, what are you doing to make your profile attractive enough to enable someone like Sam to show interest in you, and place their trust in you as a potential hire?
For recruiters, trust is currency. One bad person on a shortlist could destroy a relationship with a founder forever.
“A bad AE hire doesn’t just cost quota. It burns leads, damages morale, and makes your board ask hard questions.”
A quick word on SDRs: by the time a business has scaled to needing an SDR team they generally have internal recruiters; so job ads still work on places like LinkedIn and graduate-focused sites like Handshake. Companies aren’t hiring for experience; they’re hiring for interest, intent and hustle.
What Recruiters Actually See on LinkedIn
So - how to use LinkedIn to attract those recruiter reach-outs?
First of all, don’t worry about ‘building a following’. Whilst doing so won’t hurt, recruiters will never actually see anything you post.
Here’s what they do see, and how to optimize it:
- Location
For any company with an in-person office location is a big deal, as they often prefer to hire someone that’s already in the area. Recruiters search by big-city key words so give yourself an advantage by keeping it broad. ‘London’, not ‘Brixton’.
-Job Title
Again, go broad. Silly titles like ‘Cloud Evangelist’ won’t show up in searches, so use common terms like ‘Account Executive’ or ‘Sales/Business Development Manager’.
-Metrics
Put these in your job description and use real numbers; % quota hit, average deal size, pipeline generated. ‘Top performer’ is meaningless without this information.
Another really important thing to get right is consistency across how you present yourself. Let’s say a recruiter sees you claim $1.2m in closed revenue on your LinkedIn and requests your CV… where you claim $800k in closed revenue. Even if it’s just because you forgot to update, it’s an instant red flag.
Get all this right and you should be getting approached by recruiters a couple of times a month (if you’re not, take it as a sign you need to sort your profile out).
“You’d be shocked how many people leave their profile completely blank and wonder why no one reaches out.”
Oh- and skip the green ‘Open To Work’ banner on your profile picture. It just stinks of desperation. Instead use discreet setting instead, viewable only to recruiters. Same result, less cringe.
Understanding Equity: What It Really Is and What It Really Isn’t
Sam knows a LOT about what salespeople should know about equity… and this busts a lot of myths.
Start ups love to dangle equity in front of new sales hires and it sounds like a great deal. Stick around for five years until an easy IPO, then spend 50 years chilling on a yacht. And to be fair - this does actually happen.
But the happy ending is the exception, not the rule. So you need to know exactly how to play the equity game.
“Equity is potential money. Not real money. And it only becomes real if a long list of things go right.”
First off; you need to understand the cliff. That’s how long you need to be employed to be entered in to any sort of share program. Typically that’s one year. Imagine throwing away a high paying corporate job to take a high-equity role at a start up only to be dismissed one year before the cliff… it happens.
Then there’s the vesting schedule. Once you get past the cliff, it’s unlikely you get all your equity in one go, typically it’s spread over four years… so that 1% total could take over five years to claim.
Even once you’ve got your equity it can, depending on what type of share it it, be diluted, be illiquid, or be trapped behind so many restrictions that even after you IPO you’re still not getting that yacht. So whilst you might be offered 10,000x less equity at a corporate role compared to a start up; a publicly traded company generally will allow you to sell your equity as soon as you get it (plus the equity is… you know… actually worth something).
Sam shared a horror story of a brilliant candidate who turned down a well-paying role at a public company for a startup with generous share options, that folded on it’s arse nine months later. That person still hasn’t recovered financially.
What you should take from this is simple: you can’t pay rent with potential. If the cash doesn’t cover your needs today, no amount of lottery tickets make it worth it. Get your base comp right, and treat the shares like lucky money - not guaranteed money.
Not that shares *don’t* matter, of course. I have no idea what % the first sales hire at Nvidia got as part of his comp package… but I bet they’re reading this from their spare private jet.
I encourage you all to seek advice from a financial professional when presented with a share-based early stage start up comp offer. Remember that the founders will be taking advice from seasoned investors who want to maximize IPO value, not give it all away to salespeople. So you should take advice too.
Startups vs Logos: What’s the Trade-Off?
All of this is, of course, assuming that you do actually want to work at a start up instead of an established corporation.
There’s no right or wrong answer. But it’s important to know where you stand.
Big corps with a logo your Granny recognizes offer stability, process, and predictable compensation. You’ll have a sales manager, a proven playbook, and a team offsite in Lisbon to answer emergency Salesforce queries . But you’ll also have limited ownership, rigid comp bands, and political ladders to climb.
Start ups are often pure chaos. The CRM might just be an Excel document, there’s no fancy onboarding/training process, and the ‘sales support’ is just the founder replying to your Slack message at 3am. There’s also no real model to go off for what you’re expected to do and can expect to earn. But you’ll have full control of whatever you’re doing, a chance to carve your own path, and you can make a lot of money very quickly.
“If you’re asking me about quota attainment at a seed-stage company - you’re not ready for it.”
You can have the excitement of a start up or the predictability of a corporate, what you can’t have is both.
Again; there’s no right or wrong answer. Think deeply about what sort of career you want and the kind of person you are.
Personally; I left the ‘logo’ world fairly early in my career to go into start ups, went back to a logo, realized again how much I hate corporate structures, then promptly ran back to start ups.
Sam mentioned that the best startup hires tend to have an almost founder-like mindset. They’re not scared of not having a script. In fact they’re suspicious and feel a bit uneasy when things feel too polished. They want to build. That’s why I like working for start ups; I get the founder-like experience with little of the founder risk levels.
It’s not that startups are better. It’s that they expose you to velocity. You might learn more in 9 months than you’d learn in 3 years at a major org. But it comes with risk, ambiguity, and often poor infrastructure.
There’s no ‘Performance Improvement Plan’ at a start up and things can come to an end almost overnight - even if you did everything perfectly. Yes if a start up goes right you can pay off your house; but if it all goes wrong, can you still pay your mortgage next month?
It all comes down to a piece of career advice I find myself giving again and again:
Before you know what you want, you must know your self.
Make sure you join me and The Lion Glass - and the occasional special guest - every Sunday for the Live Sales Space - set a reminder on your phone - and look forward to a new Sales Letter from me every Monday, right into your inbox.
Thanks for reading.
Love to you all,
The Sales Bull x