This year at Early Stage, TechCrunch spoke with Zoom Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) Ryan Azus about building an early-stage sales team. Azus is perhaps best known for leading the video-calling giant’s income arm during COVID-19, but his experience building RingCentral’s North American sales organization from the ground up made him the perfect guest to chat with about building an early-stage sales team.
We asked him about when founders should step aside from leading their startup’s sales org, how to build a working sales culture, hiring diversely, how to pick customer segments and how to build a playbook.
Below, TechCrunch has compiled a number of key comments from Azus, and afterward we’ve included the full video from the interview as well as a transcript. Let’s go!
When should founders let others run sales?
Nearly every startup leans on its CEO as its first salesperson. After all, who else knows the product and can talk it up like the startup’s leader? But having the CEO as point-person for sales scales poorly. So, when is the right time to have someone else step in?
Fairly early on. First off, CEOs need to solve customer needs. And so it’s important to be very hands-on for a while to really understand while you’re trying to figure out product-market fit. And then bringing in some of those sales people as you start seeing something [good].
Part of it is also knowing what type of salesperson you need. [ … ] Who is your core audience? What persona are you going after? And trying to find people that know and understand selling something that’s primarily very transactional to small businesses, [or] e-commerce lead, or selling something that’s more enterprise — those are different animals, different segments that you’re going after. One mistake [startups make] is hiring the wrong type of salesperson. (Time stamp: 5:29)
How much product-market fit is enough?
Building off that part of the discussion, when is some product-market fit enough? You can’t wait for perfect product-market fit, but is 50% or less too little? Azus says:
It depends. Scaling a sales team and hiring a few salespeople are very different pieces. To your point, scaling is probably like “there is something there, we know it, [and have] at least enough of a hypothesis and evidence behind that hypothesis and feedback to support it.”
But I would say even a few sales folks could be earlier than that. But [be] realistic about what you’re looking for. Meaning at that point you might just need a few reps to kind of get out there and make it happen. Or maybe what I call a director-level person. You don’t need a VP of sales. And that’s where you want to be careful. Because honestly, things aren’t figured out. You need someone to get in there and get dirty [and] grind it out. And there’s certain leaders [for whom] that’s [just not] who they are. They might be amazing at what they do. But I also see that mismatch of where are you in your scale? What type of skill sets are needed? And how do you find someone with the right entrepreneurial spirit? Because things aren’t figured out.
It’s almost like you’re in a jungle. And it’s very thick in the jungle, and you have a machete. And the good news is you get to cut your path, it’s not blazed [for you]. The flip-side is, guess what? You have to make the path. So it takes the right personality and mindset to find someone that looks at that jungle of thickness with a machete in their hand, and they’re like, “You know what? I get to carve it, where this goes, I’m going to help drive that,” versus “Oh my gosh, I have to cut through all this. How am I going to get over there?” (Time stamp: 7:00)
How does a founder find those early salespeople who want to carve the path?
So you get to product-market fit, and then what? How does a founder go out and find the right early salespeople? Azus has a few ideas. They have to find someone who wants to cut their own path forward and who is curious. An experienced salesperson with both of those traits should be just what a startup needs.
[Ask for] examples about systems they drove, processes they’ve changed, improvements they’ve made at their last company. Because there [are] companies with scale where you can come in, do your job, be great, work with customers and be very successful. [Where] the cake’s baked a little bit more. And so you maybe you take pieces of it out of the oven, put all the ingredients [in] and mix it. So understanding who not just did their job, but also influenced things around it.
Those are the leaders I look for even in my [organization]. We all have our control field. The people that become the leaders are not just hitting [their] quota. But were you helping your team? How are you scaling? How are you helping your floor, your segment, whatever that might be that you’re part of? And what did you do outside of your job? Not where you did so much outside of your job where you got distracted and didn’t hit your core goals, but the people that can hit their core goals and also add value to others [are what you are looking for].
So kind of peeling back in those situations, to understand not only did they drive their primary tasks, [but] how they think about that. One thing I would look for, you know, a good word is curiosity. Natural curiosity. People who are curious, people who like business, they want to figure that out. They tend to be really good sellers. But especially for what we’re talking about, there’s a lot that has to be figured out! Are they naturally curious to understand your business, the model? [To understand] what’s happening with the customer and find ways to add value to that? (Time stamp: 17:13)
Full interview:
You can read the Otter transcript here.
You can also check out other sessions from Early Stage here.
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