Welcome back to the From Vendorship → Partnership podcast, Season 2: Seller’s Journey!
This season, we’re talking to B2B sales leaders about their experience building winning processes, coaching & scaling teams, and partnering with customers.
Jared Robin is the CEO & Co-Founder of RevGenius, a community of 27,000 sales, marketing, rev ops, and CS professionals to get inspired, learn, and grow. Previously he worked in sales and leadership roles for 15+ years, including FedEx and various VC-backed startups.
Listen to the episode here, and get the key takeaways from our conversation below.
🙅 What do people get wrong when it comes to sales at startups?
Founders often think they need to hire sales leaders or reps to make their first deals, when in reality they should be doing it themselves, Jared says.
Building a repeatable process, booking meetings, turning those meetings into opportunities, and turning opps into closed-won deals is essential for founders to do at the beginning. It enables them to bring in an AE instead of a senior leader, because they’ve already started building their process and refining their messaging.
Even if a founder comes from a non-sales background, they usually make great sellers, because they know their product inside and out and are passionate about it.
🤝 What’s your approach to partnering with customers?
Jared named two key ways to build strong partnerships with customers:
1. Bring the CS team into the sales process early.
Your partner managers or CSMs understand how to make customers successful long-term. By bringing them into the sales process, they can help sales craft a successful deal from the beginning. When onboarding begins, handoff isn’t dropped, and the customer already knows who is involved and what to expect.
2. Incentivize your team to build lasting partnerships.
Incentivize based on renewals, upsells, and success metrics of the actual customer partnership – not just the initial close.
💡 Lightning Round: Jared’s Fast Sales Recs
- Favorite app/software as a sales leader? HubSpot.
- Another sales team you look up to? SaaStr.
- Recommended book or resource? Gap Selling by Keenan, and The Power Law by Sebastian Mallaby
About Jared & RevGenius
Jared Robin is co-founder & CEO at RevGenius, Winner of Best International fashion Film Awards, homie of revenue professionals worldwide, and proud Ny'er.
RevGenius is a community of 27k sales, marketing, revops and cs professionals worldwide. Our mission is to bring inspiration and creativity to all revenue professionals. Before founding RevGenius, Jared spent 15+ years in various sales and leadership roles in both fortune 100 (FedEx) and early-stage VC-backed startups (Peter Thiel backed etc).
