An Insider’s Take on Hiring Your First VP of Sales

#AskAVC with Ryan Floyd

Storm Ventures Managing Director Ryan Floyd and Go-to-Market Consultant Mark Stephenson discuss how early-stage companies can hire the right VP of Sales using a few essential strategies. #b2bsaas #venturecapital #hiring #salesexecutive #gotomarket Here's what's covered: 0:00 Intros: Ryan & Mark 1:13 Hiring the Right VP of Sales 2:58 Preparing with a Strategic Plan 4:55 Importance of Defining the Spec (Functional Experience, Domain Experience, and Customer Experience) 6:00 Functional Experience 8:02 Domain Experience 10:39 Customer Experience 11:34 Should Be Stage-Appropriate for the Company 12:34 Hypothetical Situation — Business with $1m ARR 14:25 The Interview Process 21:39 Questions to Ask the Candidate 23:06 Sales is a Systematic Process 25:18 Set Objective Criteria — How to See Green, Yellow, and Red Flags 27:13 How Important is Culture? 33:23 What About Diversity? 37:15 Three Es for Top Sales Hires (Ego, Empathy, Energy) 38:57 Take Your Time to Hire Well 40:08 Importance of References 44:55 Thanks! Make sure to also:

• Follow Ryan on Twitter @RyanFloyd for more content on building SaaS B2B startups, venture capital, and entrepreneurship in general
• Subscribe to Ryan’s blog at https://ryanfloyd.org, where he talks about why he invests in certain companies and broader tech industry issues
• Connect with Ajay on LinkedIn / ajayawatramani
• Check out the #AskAVC​​​ podcast based on this channel - https://anchor.fm/ask-a-vc

About Ryan Floyd: Ryan is a founding Managing Director of Storm Ventures, where he invests in, and works with, early-stage enterprise SaaS startups. His primary focus is applications and cloud infrastructure-related companies. He is always interested in hearing from passionate technology entrepreneurs. Ryan is a skilled writer and commentator on all things SaaS. He's written for TechCrunch, Sifted, Thrive Global and regularly contributes to The UK Newspaper. He's the host of the recently launched #AskAVC​​​ YouTube channel aimed at enterprise entrepreneurs. In each episode, he tackles a different issue relating to building and scaling B2B startups - topics such as pitching to an investor and tackling sales churn. When he's not working with his portfolio founders, Ryan is active with Code2040, a nonprofit organization that creates pathways to educational, professional, and entrepreneurial success in technology for underrepresented minorities. And occasionally, he finds time for surfing! About Mark Stephenson: Mark has over 30 years of solution sales GTM leadership experience with high-growth venture backed Series A through E SaaS modern software disruptors such as Evisort, Avi Networks as well as large matrix sales organizations such as HP and Cisco. Mark started sales at Xerox. Over the years as a strategic go-to-market executive, he has developed a four-pronged growth approach to drive consistent exceptional results delivering above quota performance in 24 of 27 operating years. Mark loves building teams that work well together and has a proven ability to lead direct and indirect sales teams at the 3rd and 4th line level as well as Marketing and Customer Success Orgs. He is a high-energy, cross-functional business partner known as a creative thinker with a method for aligning GTM with the business, who has a passion for finding and developing talent, and building repeatable customer engagement and growth process that leverages the team for impact. Great results come from great teams -- Mark can help you hire great GTM team members, put them to work on the right things to scale results.