20Sales: Slack, Atlassian, Dropbox: Five of the Biggest Lessons on Starting, Scaling and Managing Sales Teams from 25 Years Leading the Best with Kevin Egan, Global Head of Enterprise Sales at Atlassian

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4.4 • 637 Ratings

🗓️ 12 July 2023

⏱️ 37 minutes

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Summary

Kevin Egan is the Global Head of Enterprise Sales at Atlassian and brings more than 25 years of enterprise sales experience and leadership to the company. Prior to his current role, Kevin served as the Vice President of North America Sales at both Slack and Dropbox and has held various senior sales leadership positions at Salesforce.

In Todays Episode With Kevin Egan We Discuss:

1. The Makings of a Truly Great Enterprise Sales Leader:

How did Kevin first make his way into the world of enterprise sales?
What does Kevin know now that he wishes he had known when he entered sales?
What advice would Kevin give to a new sales leader today starting a new role?

2. The Sales Playbook:

How does Kevin define "the sales playbook"? Does the founder have to be the one to create the sales playbook
When is the right time to hire your first salespeople? Should they be senior or junior first?
What are the different types of reps to hire in the early days? Should you hire two at a time?

3. PLG vs Enterprise:

Does Kevin believe it is possible to run both PLG and enterprise playbook at the same time?
How does one know when they are ready to scale from PLG into enterprise? What are the signs?
What do companies need to change in the way their sales team, is structured to make the transition from PMG to enterprise sales?
What are the single biggest mistakes Kevin sees founders make in the scaling from PLG to enterprise?

4. Hiring the Sales Team:

What non-obvious characteristics and attitudes should we look for in sales reps?
How does Kevin structure the hiring process for all new additions to sales and revenue teams?
What makes good PLG sales leaders? How are they different from enterprise sales leaders?
What questions and case studies are most revealing for you in identifying them?
What have been some of Kevin's biggest lessons on comp structure for these early rep hires?

5. Making the Machine Work:

How does Kevin build trust with his early sales rep hires? What works? What does not?
How does Kevin balance hitting the quarterly revenue target with longer-term pipeline strategy?
How does Kevin manage when a quarter is missed? What is the right approach?
How does Kevin approach post-mortems and deal reviews? How often? What do the best entail?

Transcript

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0:00.0	I do favor hiring two to three at a time if you can afford it.
0:03.7	In a PLG world, rep effectiveness, the best companies out there are doing a lot of AB testing.
0:09.0	Early days of hiring reps, you're going to need Renaissance reps that have a very wide rep of skill sets.
0:15.0	You are listening to 20 sales with me, Harry Stebbings.
0:17.5	Now this is the monthly show where we sit down with the best sales leaders in the world to reveal their tips, tactics and strategies when it comes to scaling
0:24.9	sales teams. Today, I'm so thrilled to be joined by Kevin Egan, Global Head of Enterprise
0:29.6	Sales at Atlassian, and brings more than 25 years of Enterprise Sales experience and leadership
0:34.6	to the company. And prior to his current role, Kevin served as the
0:37.6	vice president of North America sales at both Slack and Dropbox and has held various senior
0:42.5	sales leadership positions at Salesforce. I'd also want to a huge thank you to Maggie Hot,
0:47.1	Kim Graves and Rayneu Gupta for some fantastic question suggestions today. I so appreciated that.
0:52.6	But before we move into the show stay, you might remember
0:54.9	in our amazing episode with Maggie Hot, she mentioned a tool she could not live without called
0:59.3	Pocus. What is Pocus? Well, Pocus is a revenue data platform that makes it easy for go-to-market
1:05.0	teams to analyze, visualize and action data about their prospects and customers without needing engineers.
1:11.6	Pocus helps companies like Mero, Wadflow, Lume and Superhuman, focus their sales and success teams on the highest priority opportunities
1:19.6	by surfacing insights at the right moment so reps can take action quickly.
1:23.6	Pocus gives you a 360 degree view into product usage, empowering you to act on insights
1:29.8	and fill your funnel efficiently. Sales teams save 10 plus hours per week, digging through data
1:35.3	to surface millions of new revenue opportunities, learn more about why top PLG businesses
1:40.4	trust Pocus as their revenue data platform by visiting Pocas.com forward slash demo.
1:46.4	And SalesLoft is the leading sales engagement platform, helping sales teams drive more
	...

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