How to grow your sales team by Intercom

Growing a sales team isn’t as simple as putting a bunch of “A players” in a room and getting them to start selling your product. Sure, you might get a few more deals across the finish line and maybe even score a lighthouse logo. But this approach rarely succeeds in today’s environment.
About Techcelerate Ventures

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sale sale TEAM sale TEAM Part TEAM Part II product grow
About Techcelerate Ventures

Tech Investment and Growth Advisory for Series A in the UK, operating in £150k to £5m investment market, working with #SaaS #FinTech #HealthTech #MarketPlaces and #PropTech companies.
sale sale TEAM sale TEAM Part TEAM Part II product grow
GROWING YOUR
SALES TEAM
Brought to you by Intercom
Growing a sales team isn't as simple as putting a bunch of 
"A players" in a room and getting them to start selling your 
product. Sure, you might get a few more deals across the 
finish line and maybe even score a lighthouse logo. But this 
approach rarely succeeds in today's environment. 
If you want to build a revenue engine that'll fuel long-term 
growth, you need to scale your sales org with intention. 
Only then will you have the foundation to consistently win 
new customers, upsell existing ones and see the kind of 
predictable growth that'll make, or break, your company. 
An efficient and profitable sales org is the product of many 
strategic decisions  who you'll hire, what you'll pay them, 
how you'll onboard and train them and much more. When 
done right, your sales team won't just accelerate your 
company's growth; they'll enrich your company's culture 
and help build a better product too. 
Whether you're scaling an existing team or creating a new 
team inside an existing sales org, here are the crucial things 
you should work through before any sales activity begins. 
Growing Your Sales Team
Part II
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Growing Your Sales Team
Part II
The first goal in  
sales  get on track 
to building a big  
business
Karen Peacock, 
COO, Intercom
   If you run sales at a growth-stage startup, 
you have two jobs. The first is obvious: be the head 
of sales. The second is less obvious and that's to be 
a commercially oriented leader for the company 
overall. In some cases, you may be the only or first 
commercially oriented leader. 
Why do you need to do both jobs? Because your goal, 
if you set your sights on the right thing, isn't to close 
a bunch of one-off deals in the next six months. It's to 
build a big business.
The outcome of having these two jobs is that you are a 
part of creating the go-to-market blueprint for your 
company. This requires you to be deeply invested in 
the product, constantly on the lookout for new ways 
to pitch and position it, and ready to pivot in the market 
4
Growing Your Sales Team
Part II
with different applications of it. You should 
constantly be taking what you and your sales 
team learn on the frontlines and using it to fuel 
ideas for new features or products that you 
think will help the business grow.
My advice for sharing these ideas is simple: 
first, start with a very specific articulation 
of the problem you and your customer want 
to solve; and second, prioritize. What is the 
most important, unmet customer need that 
you think your company should address? 
The biggest traps that sales teams fall into is 
prescribing solutions ("We should build X"), 
talking in generalities and indiscriminately 
passing along customer requests based on 
whomever they talked to last.
Let me share an example  here at Intercom, 
many of our customers use Salesforce. As a 
result, our sales team told our product team, 
"We need a Salesforce integration." The product 
team invested in building a deep integration 
between the two products. Still, the sales team 
came back with, "That was good but we need an 
even better integration," and they were right. 
But "better Salesforce integration" is a solution, 
not a problem and it was far too general to 
know what our sales team or customers actually 
wanted.  
The big "aha" moment for us was when our 
sales team started focusing on problems to be 
solved. Instead of saying "better Salesforce 
integration," they provided details like, "As 
a sales ops manager, I want to assign live chat 
conversations to my team based on ownership 
rules in Salesforce." That gave the product 
teams exactly what they needed and it enabled 
them to get creative about solving real customer 
problems. The product team quickly built this 
functionality and started flying through the 
asks, enabling the sales team to close more and 
more deals.
By being a commercially oriented leader who 
strives to be nimble, learns from the market 
and focuses on the biggest problems customers 
face, you will set yourself and your team up to 
build a big business.
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Growing Your Sales Team
Part II
The top-down  
vs. bottom-up  
approach to sales
Peter Levine, 
General Partner, Andreessen Horowitz
 I'm often asked the question of 
"Why sales?" by entrepreneurs and technical 
founders. The "why sales" question becomes 
even more pressing given the trend toward 
"bottom-up" product adoption  i.e., offering a 
given product for free or without a formal top-
down sales motion, as is common with SaaS. 
Why not simply invest in hiring more engineers 
and let the targeted end-user virally adopt the 
product of their choice?
The answer is that unstructured, bottom-up, 
user-generated sales do not unlock the full 
value of a given product. If you build it, they may 
comebut they probably won't discover  or 
take advantage of  every feature you want them 
to. Most users view a product only through the 
lens of their own use, not through the needs and 
habits of all the users in their enterprise (which 
is a view someone at the top, such as a Chief 
Information Officer, is more likely to have). 
For example, a security or audit feature that is 
crucial to a CIO might be completely irrelevant 
to an individual user.
A formal sales function promotes the value 
of a product to an organization in ways that 
individual adoption and usage can't. Salespeople 
can demonstrate the importance of features 
across the board, including criteria-setting, 
pricing, and packaging that unlocks more of the 
value the product is materially creating for an 
organization. The result is greater penetration 
into the enterprise, higher product appreciation 
and more revenue from a given customer.
This is not to say that bottom-up adoption is bad 
strategy; quite the opposite. Many great products 
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Growing Your Sales Team
Part II
Excerpt from "Hire a Head of Sales."
see exciting initial revenue traction. The number of customers increases, 
and the dollars per customer correspondingly grow. However, as a product 
achieves broader adoption, the dollar per customer tends to flatten. This 
reflects an individual user ascribing a fixed value to a given product:
 
That's why combining a top-down and bottom-up approach by layering a 
formal sales function yields the best results. Although a sales organization 
might seem too expensive, the revenue it will add can far exceed the cost 
(you want your sales organization to generate 3x its loaded cost). Creating 
a formal sales organization will help accelerate revenue and product 
adoption, as well as result in more satisfied customers
$$$$ / customerWith formal sales
"Bottoms-up" no formal sales
# of customers
Sales
Productivity
Gap
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Growing Your Sales Team
Part II
The optimal  
structure for your 
SaaS sales team
Jason Lemkin, 
CEO, SaaStr
 The optimal sales team structure is 
one that is accretive, where, roughly speaking, 
each sales rep brings in at least 5x his or her 
total compensation.
If the average sales rep produces more than 5x 
the comp she takes home, then:
 A SaaS company should be able to be cash-
flow positive, at least by a few million in 
annual recurring revenue (ARR).
 You should be able to hire as many reps as 
you can find.
 Sales will not be a stress center from a cash 
perspective.
 Marketing costs can be managed.
 Sales Development Representatives (SDRs), 
specialization, and account management 
can all be funded.
 
It all "works".
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Growing Your Sales Team
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The sales-driven SaaS companies that are very 
capital-efficient generally end up at 5x or greater 
as a ratio of average quota attainment / average 
on-target earnings.
Where you burn a ton of cash is "buying" sales. 
Shoving sales reps into segments where you 
don't have enough leads or enough demand. 
"Starving" reps with too few opportunities. 
Brutal head-to-head competition in areas you 
might not otherwise compete.
Buying sales isn't bad. It works. If you can raise 
a ton of capital, it's one strategy for winning and 
crushing the competition. But whatever you do, 
make sure you know the game you are playing.
Sales doesn't need to be a cost center. It can be, 
and for at least most of the life of your company 
should be, a profit center.
Sales doesn't need to be a cost center. 
It can be, and for at least most of the 
life of your company should be, a 
profit center.
Excerpt from "What is the optimal structure of a startup SaaS B2B sales team?"
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Growing Your Sales Team
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Using the pod 
to structure your 
sales organization for 
maximum efficiency
Steli Efti,   
CEO, Close.io
A pod model for your sales team creates focused tight-knit groups, 
or "pods" that comprise team members playing different roles. A pod-based 
organization is customer centric.
For example, a six-person sales pod would be composed of three SDRs, 
two AEs and one customer success rep. Rather than having large teams, 
you create little pods of specialized roles, and each pod is responsible for 
the entire journey of specific customers.
Dave Gray, author of The Connected Company, provides this diagram of the 
pod model: 
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Growing Your Sales Team
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Excerpt from "3 models of effective sales team organization."
You still utilize the specialist roles of SDRs, AEs and customer success 
reps. But instead of having all of your SDRs or AEs compete against one 
another, pods compete with other pods. Each pod works together to win 
the customer, and keep the customer happy afterward. They're more 
fluid, and come up with ideas independently.
Pods are more modular and flexible than traditional sales teams. 
Because success is measured by pod, each member of the sales force 
has a larger, more holistic view of the entire company. Pods build more 
meaningful connections between people who are working together. It's 
perfect for mature startups trying to optimize existing sales resources 
to tap into new markets and verticals.
If you've established your market and have significant traction, 
organizing your teams into pods creates a highly flexible, agile sales 
force that's ready to meet a variety of challenges and pounce on new 
opportunities.
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Growing Your Sales Team
Part II
Aligning sales 
and product
Des Traynor,   
Co-Founder, Intercom
 A great partnership between product 
and sales needs to be based on shared 
definitions of success and an agreed upon 
process to collaborate. Without these things, 
the relationship retreats to the magnetic 
stereotypes of both 
industries: Product 
teams think sales teams will do, say and sell 
anything to make money, while sales teams 
think product teams will build anything cool 
except things that actually make money. It's 
not a good place to be. 
First, for a product to truly be considered 
successful, among other things it has to be:
 Valuable  solve a real problem people are 
willing to pay for.
 Marketable  be attractive enough to dif-
ferentiate itself from competitors.
 Adoptable  have sufficient table-stakes 
requirements for features such that the 
majority of the market can adopt it.
 
Justifiable  demonstrate its value as being 
greater than its cost (time and money) to 
the customer.
However, a great product is more than some-
thing that "the market accepts." There are 
other hard requirements in building a suc-
cessful product business. The product must 
also be:
 Secure  
features must be 
added 
thoughtfully so as to not create new attack 
vectors. 
 Scalable  every new feature must work for 
your largest customers and future largest 
customers.
 Reliable  business critical software can't 
have features with bugs that go unresolved 
for years. 
 Usable  you can't build features with no 
cohesive vision that need layers of solution 
consultants to walk every new customer 
through them. 
 Sustainable  the footprint of the product 
can't grow exponentially to accommodate 
every new 
feature 
request, which 
jeopardizes all of the above. 
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Growing Your Sales Team
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Product teams that don't understand the first 
list will never connect with sales. Sales teams 
that don't understand the second list will 
never connect with product. 
Second, sales and product need a way to 
collaborate on the product roadmap. Sales 
is usually the only team that has in-depth 
conversations with would-be customers who 
couldn't proceed due to a product problem. 
If your product team isn't taking roadmap 
input from your sales team, you're not 
listening to the potential market. You can go 
deeper in your current niche, but you'll never 
expand out of it, nor will you move upmarket. 
At Intercom we take inputs into the product 
roadmap written in the form of a "problem." 
Each problem is an atomic unit that articulates 
why a deal can't be completed. The problem 
has an abstract statement ("I can't connect 
conversations in Intercom with my user record 
in my CRM"), a reason it's a problem ("Using 
Intercom would make my sales process too 
inefficient for SDRs who would have to copy 
and paste all day") and then instance details 
("I need to see sales conversations in the 
HubSpot CRM"). 
In addition we capture things like:
 Stack rank.
 Order of magnitude  often the gap between 
#1 and #2 in the list is substantial. 
 Status  is it currently being worked on?
 Persona  who in the buying process speaks 
to this need? 
 Segment  what customer group does this 
first occur in?
1
2
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5
6
7
8
9
10
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
Separating feature requests by orders of magnitude
Idea popularized by  Ken Norton
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Growing Your Sales Team
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All of this is refreshed at every roadmap 
session, and detailed discussions are had 
with sales as a new problem is tackled. 
It can be easy to let this list become your 
roadmap, and if you're really lacking the 
table stakes features in the market, that 
might be the right choice. 
But it's important for both sales and 
product leadership to remember you can't 
"table stakes" your way to a dominant 
market position. You need to differentiate. 
Faster horses will get you only so far. Your 
roadmap should have many other inputs, 
such as iterating recent launches, new to 
market innovations, and causes of customer 
churn. What changes and evolves is the 
weight of each input, depending on where 
the shared priorities are. A roadmap, at its 
core, is just a page of trade-offs, arguments 
and priorities.
If your product 
team isn't taking 
roadmap input 
from your sales 
team, you're not 
listening to the 
potential market.
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Growing Your Sales Team
Part II
The sales acceleration  
formula for building 
a sales team
Tomasz Tunguz,   
Partner, Redpoint Ventures
 If you want to understand how to build a great SaaS 
sales organization, you should read Mark Roberge's The Sales 
Acceleration Formula. It's the single best book on the topic.
Mark was the Chief Revenue Officer at HubSpot, a company 
that has created tremendous success by perfecting the inbound 
marketing plus sales model. The book is invaluable for every 
founder, CEO and member of the management team because it 
not only explains how the HubSpot sales team is structured, but 
why the structure came to be.
The first employee at HubSpot and tasked with building the 
sales team, Mark developed a structured interview to qualify 
candidates and correlated the attributes of the best sales 
candidates. His list surprised me: preparation, adaptability, 
domain experience, intelligence and passion are the five 
characteristics of people most likely to succeed in HubSpot's 
sales teams.
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Growing Your Sales Team
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With this knowledge in hand, Mark created a quantitative candi-
date assessment. Based on the linear regression mentioned above, 
the scorecard established hiring consistency and enabled the team 
to grow predictably.
 
Candidate Name
Date of Interview
Interviewer:
Primary Criteria Score:
Summary of Strengths:
Summary of Weaknesses:
Next Step Recommendation:
John Doe
1/1/2012
Mark Roberge
71%
<Insert Strengths>
<Insert Weaknesses>
<Insert Recommended Next Steps>
Coachability
Curiosity
Work Ethic
Intelligence
Prior Success
Passion
Preparation
Adaptability to Change
Competitiveness
Brevity
Total
8
9
7
6
4
8
8
7
8
6
9
9
8
8
7
5
3
3
3
3
72
81
56
48
28
40
24
21
24
18
412
90
90
80
80
70
50
30
30
30
30
580
71%
Primary Criteria
Candidate Summary
HubSpot Sales Candidate Assesment
Score
Weight
Weighted Score
Max Score
Excerpt from "The Best Book on Building a SaaS Sales Team."
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Growing Your Sales Team
Part II
Why your sales 
team needs to  
care about more 
than quota
LB Harvey,   
VP of Sales, Intercom
 In sports, stacking your team with 
all-star players doesn't always lead to a champi-
onship. Similarly in sales, hiring prima don-
na salespeople rarely leads to a great sales 
quarter. Great salespeople care deeply about 
reaching and exceeding their own personal 
quota, but they care about the company too. 
How can you tell?
 They go out of their way to deliver cus-
tomer feedback to product teams.
 They're dedicated to protecting your 
non-negotiables.
 They're fired up to help the team create 
best practices and scalable processes.
Excerpt from "Hiring for sales in a product-led world."
 They raise up fellow salespeople along the 
way and instinctively understand that the 
whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
While it's hard to directly attribute those 
things to helping hit quota, they'll lead to 
a better customer experience and a better 
product  which, ultimately, are easier to 
sell. It's a win-win.
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Growing Your Sales Team
Part II
 Passion is the one thing you cannot train. 
I worked with Jack Welch of GE for a couple of 
months to get his online MBA program off the 
ground, and when I started my first company way 
back in the day, Jack came to Boston to do one of 
his conferences. At that time, my company had 50 
employees.
I stood up and I said, "Jack, look. You talk a lot 
about passion and all this other stuff. When we 
were five people starting this company, we were 
all super passionate. Everybody was on the same 
page. We got to 20 people and everybody was still 
super passionate. Now at about the 51st person 
we're bringing in, it just doesn't seem that they 
have the same passion that we do for the business. 
How do you instill your passion on somebody 
The one thing 
Jack Welch thinks 
all salespeople need
John Barrows, 
Sales Trainer
else?" In front of 1,000 people, he basically told 
me I was an idiot. He said, "You're looking at it all 
wrong. You can't instill your passion in somebody 
else. You have to hire passion."
That flipped my hiring persona upside down. I 
can teach skill, I can teach technique, I can teach 
product knowledge  I can teach all that stuff to 
somebody who's willing to learn, but I can't teach 
drive. I can't teach passion. I can't teach grit. Sales 
is a brutal profession. You literally get told "no" 
99 times, and you have to keep coming back and 
asking for more so you can get that one "yes" in 
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Growing Your Sales Team
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100. That's why one of my favorite interview 
questions is, "What are you passionate about?" 
I don't care what you're passionate about; I care 
how you describe what you're passionate about.
For instance, if I asked you that question, you 
could say, "I really like customers and I really want 
to do right by them and make sure our product's 
a good fit." Or you could say, "Holy crap. Did 
you see what happened on Thursday night with 
the Patriots? They got absolutely smoked. I'm rip 
roaring pissed-off, but I think it's a good thing, 
because you know what? They needed to get 
knocked down a notch. I still think they're going 
171 this year!" I don't care if football has nothing 
to do with what you and I were talking about; if 
you describe it in a passionate way, that means you 
have some sort of fire in you. My job as a leader is 
to take that passion and connect it to my business 
so that you can bring a fraction of that to the table 
when you come work for me.
My job as a 
leader is to take 
that passion and 
connect it to my 
business so that 
you can bring a 
fraction of that 
to the table when 
you come work 
for me.
John Barrows, as heard on the Inside Intercom podcast.
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Growing Your Sales Team
Part II
Hire salespeople  
who can blend  
art and science
Stan Massueras,   
Director of EMEA Sales, Intercom
 What it means to be a good salesperson is changing all the 
time. 10 years ago, being a good salesperson was treated as an art. 
You had to influence and persuade and be extremely well-spoken. 
Over the past five years, sales has become more and more about 
science. It's all about looking at data and predicting buyer behaviors 
and patterns.
I think right now a successful salesperson is someone who can do 
both. Someone who is very articulate, who can create content, can 
command an audience but who also has a fundamental understanding 
of modern communication tools like SalesLoft and Intercom. Even 
though more and more the sales process happens online, and more of 
the buying process happens before a salesperson is engaged, complex 
deals still don't happen without people getting involved  managing 
the relationships, navigating the buyer's ecosystem and successfully 
merging decision makers' objectives with desired outcomes (not 
to mention individual career aspirations, personalities, personal 
ambitions and so forth).
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Growing Your Sales Team
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Salary or 
bonus-heavy 
compensation: 
which model is 
best?
Devon McDonald,   
Partner, OpenView Venture Partners
 The short answer to that question is 
that at the expansion stage, the more you can 
leverage compensation for results, the better 
off you (and your sales team) will be in the 
long term.
Commission or bonus-focused compensa-
tion plans provide tremendous upside for 
growth and allow CEOs to truly leverage 
their people  all while those people are given 
ample opportunity to make significantly 
more money than if their income was largely 
dictated by a fixed salary figure.
Simply put, if your compensation plan is 
largely tied to your sales organization's 
ability to achieve specific objectives and 
targets, then everyone will be incentivized 
Excerpt from "A Guide to Creating a Scalable Sales Compensation Plan."
to perform the kinds of revenue-driving 
activities that yield those results. The value 
that you place on certain performance 
measures will vary, but the idea is to create 
an environment that rewards urgency and 
provides upside for over-performers.
Ultimately, that model won't just help you 
appeal to (and retain) A-level sales talent, 
it will also make it easier to scale because 
your upfront investment in additional sales 
headcount will be less expensive.
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Growing Your Sales Team
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Align compensation 
to how your buyer buys
Elizabeth Cain,
Partner, OpenView Partners
 This is my #1 rule in sales compensation. If you don't take 
anything else away from this, take the time to inspect your data 
and understand the natural buying process of your customer. 
Do your most successful customers start with a point of contact, 
land and expand, and add modules/users/etc. over time, or do 
you have one shot to maximize your sale? If you do have a land 
and expand model, what drives that expansion  buyer, user or 
product? Between your data and your team you should be able 
to come up with a few hypotheses. From there, we recommend 
talking to your customers and lost prospects to validate.
If the most natural path to a successful customer is to land 
with one area of your product and grow the account over time, 
you need to ensure your sales team is incentivized to do that 
 do not pay them less for an upsell than you would for a new 
sale, or tell them they can only upsell for the first 3 months 
after purchase if you know that will put undue pressure on the 
buyer. You have to consider the customer experience when 
writing your sales incentive plan.
Excerpt from "Designing Effective Sales Comp Plans: The Dos and Don'ts for Every Sales Leader."
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Growing Your Sales Team
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How to determine 
the base salary / 
variable split
Michael Hanna,
Revenue Operations Lead, Shopify Plus
 I recommend that you begin laying 
out your compensation plans by ironing out 
the base salary and variable compensation for 
each role.
First, determine the role's base salary by 
assessing the following:
 Level of difficulty. 
 Level of autonomy (how much  
are they out on their own?).
 Experience required.
The higher for each, the greater the base salary 
will typically be.
Next, determine the variable comp based on 
your answers to the following questions:
 How complex is your sales cycle?
 How much influence do reps have  
on the buying decision?
 
Is your model primarily inbound  
or outbound?
 
Is the focus of the role primarily hunting 
(outbound), farming (growing existing 
business) or catching (inbound)?
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Growing Your Sales Team
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Here's an example of where certain sales roles may fit on the 
base salary / variable comp spectrum in the graph below:
Once you have an idea of the total target compensation for 
the role, you can start determining the base elements that 
will drive your comp model.
Excerpt from "Choosing the Best Sales Compensation Plan for Your Business."
Level of Diculty
Level of Autonomy
Experience Required
Complexity of Sales Cycle
Inuence on Buying Decision
Inbound vs. Outbound
"Hunting" vs. "Farming" vs. "Catching"
What Determines Variable Comp:
What Determines Base Salary:
Base Salary / Variable Split
50%
10%
$25k
$100k+
Annual Base
Salary (USD)
Variable
(% of total target compensation)
ENTERPRISE SALES
High volume, hunting,
high inuence, proactive
Large deals, complex
multi-year sales cycles
STRAT ACCT MGR
Complex, large customer
hunt/farm/catch
INSIDE SALES
O/B LEAD GEN
High volume,             
simple, proactive       
ACCOUNT MGR
Hunt/farm/catch, pro/
reactive
I/B LEAD GEN
High volume, short,
simple, reactive
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Growing Your Sales Team
Part II
An onboarding  
process that  
will make sales  
reps stay
Tonni Bennett,   
 VP of Sales, Terminus
 When I was new to sales leadership 
and onboarding reps, I did a lot of classroom 
style training and thought that once I shared a 
concept, my team would be able to absorb it and 
put it into practice immediately. I mistakenly 
trained people the way that met my learning 
style and capability, and expected them to 
know the material intimately right away. But 
I learned that taking into account different 
learning styles and preferences is incredibly 
important in helping sales professionals to 
retain the information long term, and that 
repetition of key concepts is vital for long term 
retention.
I now try to incorporate auditory, visual and 
tactile elements into my team's onboarding 
to meet all three learning styles, and ask new 
reps how they prefer to process information. 
Does role-play help them absorb a concept, or is 
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Growing Your Sales Team
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sitting in a room alone reading over notes or 
talking out loud to the wall more effective? 
Every time we onboard, we adjust parts 
of the onboarding based on feedback from 
our new hires about how they best retain 
information, giving them space to absorb 
the material and to practice in their own 
way. On top of that, we slowed down our 
onboarding program, stretching it across a 
longer period of time to make sure that at 
least the biggest topics and talk tracks are not 
taught once, but repeated or recapped several 
Taking into account different 
learning styles and preferences 
is incredibly important in helping 
sales professionals to retain the 
information long term.
times. Hearing, seeing and taking action on 
a concept over several days improves new 
hires' retention and long term understanding 
of the material, instead of simply facilitating 
regurgitation of the concept. 
To further reinforce the training, our follow-
up materials include a written version of a 
concept, a video or audio recording of a talk 
track by a leader, a couple of live examples 
from the field and then a requirement to 
execute a role-play or presentation of what 
the new hire has learned.
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Growing Your Sales Team
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Train for 
effectiveness, 
not just efficiency
Richard Harris,   
Founder, The Harris Consulting Group
 Efficiency has been the "sales du 
jour" topic of the month for the past 18 
months. While efficiency matters and the 
sales stack is becoming more robust, what 
was thought of as nice-to-have has become 
a must-have (data, dialers, email, etc.) Now 
that we have made ourselves more efficient, 
people are finally realizing that efficiency is 
only 30% of the battle. The other 70% of the 
battle happens in the conversations.
This means both training and coaching are 
no longer merely something to consider, but 
something required.
Excerpt from "The Ultimate Guide to Winning Sales Conversations."
Gone is the time when two days of features 
and benefits, a half day of CRM training and 
then a few hours of "ghosting the top rep," 
(which turned into bullshit because they 
rarely ever got on live calls) are acceptable. 
In fact, if this is your sales training, just 
quit now. Go find a company who respects 
the role enough to give you guidance and 
support and help shorten your ramp time, 
and sees you as a benefit to the company, 
not a cost to control or manage.
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Growing Your Sales Team
Part II
Would your  
team go into  
battle for you?
Alyssa Merwin,   
VP Sales of Solutions Americas, 
LinkedIn
    At some point in our careers, all leaders 
invariably switch roles, inherit new teams or 
change companies. These moves represent 
huge opportunities, but they're also fraught 
with potential land mines. I learned the hard 
way that what made me successful in my last 
company would not necessarily guarantee 
my success in my new organization. I know 
this because my entry into LinkedIn was a 
rocky one.
For some background, I left a company where 
I'd established a strong track record over 
nine years to take a bet on building part of 
LinkedIn's sales team in New York. I stepped 
into my new role wanting to make an immediate 
impact and saw a ton of opportunity for 
improvement. Based on my prior experience, 
I knew I could build a highly efficient team, 
instituting sales process and rigor, which the 
team sorely needed. But there was a problem 
brewing and I had no idea.
After being in the role for six months, I 
received my first 360-degree survey feedback. 
I was devastated to learn that I was rated near 
the bottom among my peers.  
On top of that, Peter Kim, my manager at the 
time, shared feedback he had collected from 
other leaders, leaders whom I thought I was 
working well with and who respected my 
experience and input. The feedback revealed 
that while I had focused in my first six months 
on having a huge and immediate operational 
impact, I had underinvested in building 
relationships and aligning with the company 
culture. My survey results illustrated that I 
had not yet connected with my team.  
Peter said, "Alyssa, people are describing 
you as robotic, abrasive and difficult to work 
with." But what stung the worst was when he 
said, "There are leaders whose teams would 
28
Growing Your Sales Team
Part II
go into battle for them. Alyssa, your team 
would not go into battle for you."   
That was the darkest day in my leadership 
career. I questioned whether I'd made the 
right decision to come to LinkedIn. More than 
that, I questioned whether I was fit to be a sales 
leader. I stewed over the feedback for days. It 
hit me hard.  
After spending more time than I care to admit 
in my crisis of confidence, I realized I had 
two choices  I could continue to sulk, or I 
could make a change. I decided on the latter. 
But first, I had to look at myself in the mirror 
to figure out what was making people feel 
that way about me. 
After deep introspection and discussions 
with Peter, I decided there were four things 
I needed to do differently, and immediately. 
The change happened for me in these ways:
1. I changed my space. I moved out of an office 
and onto the floor, sitting with and among 
my team. I gave up a permanent desk and floated 
around to open seats, always sitting next to my 
reps  I still do that today.
2. I started to walk the walk, literally. 
Rather than charging down the hall in my 
high heels, I slowed down my pace, I paid 
attention to how I entered a room or showed 
up to a meeting; my entire tone had to shift.
3. I focused on my emotional resonance 
with the team. Rather than leading in a 
directive way, I started to shift to a more 
supportive tone. Based on a suggestion from 
Dan Shapero, I also became more attuned to 
helping each member of my team to build on 
their strengths rather than focus on things I 
thought should be fixed.
29
Growing Your Sales Team
Part II
4. I started bringing my whole self to work, 
allowing people to see all sides of me, to 
open up and let people get to know me, 
professionally and personally.
It took time, but eventually I was able to 
mend and build meaningful relationships. 
I evolved from a manager whose team 
would not go into battle for me to a leader 
whose team who was so cohesive and high-
performing that I was able to fulfill a lifelong 
dream of taking a three month sabbatical to 
travel around the world. The team didn't 
miss a beat while I was gone. That sabbatical 
would not have been possible if I hadn't had 
that career defining moment a year prior.
I became more attuned  
to helping each member  
of my team to build on 
their strengths rather  
than focus on things  
I thought should be fixed.
Excerpt from "Would Your Team Go Into Battle For You?"
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