20 Sales: The Biggest Challenges Building Outbound Sales Teams and How To Overcome Them | How The Best Sales Reps Do Customer Discovery | 2 Elements Sales Teams Are Always Responsible For | Sam Taylor, VP Sales and Customer Success @ Loom

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4.4 • 637 Ratings

🗓️ 20 July 2022

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Sam Taylor is the VP of Sales and Customer Success @ Loom, an essential tool for hybrid and remote teams allowing you to record quick videos of your screen and cam. At Loom Sam leads Revenue Org including: Direct Sales, Customer Success, Self-Serve Revenue Growth/Assist, Sales Development, Global Customer Support, Revenue Ops + Strategy and Sales Enablement. Prior to Loom, Sam spent over 4 years at Salesforce, following their acquisition of Quip, where he was the first sales leader. Before Salesforce and Quip, Sam spent over 3 years at Dropbox as a mid-market sales leader.

In Today's Episode We Discuss:

1.) Entry into the World of Sales:

How did Sam land his first big role in sales at Salesforce?
How did the sales orgs differ when comparing Salesforce to Dropbox?
What are 1-2 of Sam's biggest lessons from his time at Salesforce and Dropbox that shapes how he thinks today?

2.) Sales People Should Be Customer Therapists:

What is the right way to approach customer discovery?
How can sales reps get potential customers on a call in the first place?
What are the right questions to ask? What engenders the most honesty?
What are the wrong questions to ask? What are common mistakes?
How do the best sales reps then feed that back to customer success and product?

3.) The When and The Who:

When should founders consider hiring their first sales hire?
Should this hire be a sales leader or a sales rep? What are the nuances?
What are the characteristics of the best first sales hires?
What are the first sales hires really on the hook for?
Why does Sam disagree with the word "playbook" and instead suggest "frameworks"?

4.) How To Hire The Best: The Process

What are Sam's lessons on what it takes to hire the very best sales reps?
What are the right questions to ask in the interview process?
What tangible case studies or tests are done to measure quality?
Who is brought into the hiring process and at what stage?

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is 20 Sales, the monthly sales show where we interview the best sales leaders to reveal their tips, tactics and strategies.
0:06.8	When it comes to starting and scaling sales teams today, I'm so thrilled to be joined today by a friend and incredible sales leader, Sam Taylor,
0:14.2	VP of sales and customer success at Lume, an essential tool for hybrid and remote teams, allowing you to record quick videos of your screen
0:21.9	and camera.
0:22.7	At Loom, Sam leads all things Revenue Org, including direct sales, customer success, self-serve,
0:28.3	sales development and more.
0:30.0	And prior to Loom, Sam spent over four years at Salesforce, following that acquisition of
0:33.9	Quip, where he was the first sales leader.
0:36.0	And before Salesforce and Quip, Sam spent over three years at Dropbox as a mid-market sales leader, I'd love your
0:41.9	thoughts on these sales shows. You can find me on Twitter at Harry Stebbings. But before we
0:46.2	dive into the show stay, Harmony.a.i can be a total game changer for your company and your
0:51.3	sales team specifically for two core reasons. First, lead gen, Brex,
0:56.1	Ramp, Vouch, Carter, and many others are using harmonics filters to define their ICP and build
1:02.1	feeds of companies that are matching their criteria, whether it be newly formed, recently funded,
1:06.9	key hires made, etc. And then second qualification, companies with a PLG motion like Notion,
1:13.0	Superhuman, are using Harmonics integrations to enrich new leads as they come in. This allows them to
1:18.4	shorten their forms and quickly dedicate sales resources to qualified leads. As I said, this gives
1:23.6	your sales team superpowers they've never had before. You must check them out at harmonic.AI.
1:29.1	And now you've heard me talk a lot about product-led sales on my podcast and on LinkedIn,
1:33.3	and that's because it's the future of how modern software companies go to market.
1:36.8	I first heard about it from a company called Endgame,
1:39.3	and they're creating the product-led sales category with a new product you should know about. I was too late to get in
	...

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