Next Venture

Next Venture is a recruiting agency that focuses on helping VC backed Startups

1) Move beyond Founder Led Sales 
2) Scale their Sales teams 
3) Expand into the US

Founder

The Collective Search

Managing Partner

At The Collective Search I connect top salespeople with VC backed companies that are making it happen.

Talent Partner

Candidate Development Specialist

I help VC backed founders 
1) Move beyond Founder Led Sales 
2) Scale their Sales teams 
3) Expand into the US

Are you 22 years old?  

Want to be making $180-200k by the time you're 25?  

Here's how:  
1) Get an SDR role at a tech co. Expect to be an SDR for 12-18 months
2) Get promoted at said tech company into an Account Executive position
3) Spend 2 years as an AE

The nuance:

1: SDR bootcamps are a joke
If you want a good primer, save your money & read Sales Development by Cory Bray & Hilmon Sorey ($10 on Kindle)

2: The odds are you're going to be an SDR for 12-24 months. 
The #1 thing you can do to extend this is by jumping around too much
If you have a genuine path to promotion, 95% of the time your best bet is staying still

3: Once you're 4-5 months in you should be able to answer: does this company have genuine upward mobility?
If it doesn't, now is the time to start looking for somewhere that does.
Things won't get better.
And you reset the clock when you move to a new company (promotion wise)

4: High base salaries for SDRs often bite your ass further down the line
Eg.
SDR with $65k base → AE with $75k base, $75k variable. $600k quota
SDR with $90k base → AE with $100k base, $100k variable. $800k quota
Who's more likely to miss quota once promoted?

Sam Marelich

Founder | Hiring great salespeople into venture backed SaaS startups

When the engineer you’ve bought into the sales call keeps bringing up the product shortcomings

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A few years ago I got a pair of Beats Headphones for sitting through a demo

Did I care about the solution? ❌
Was I a qualified buyer? ❌
Was I interested in buying the solution at all? ❌
Did the company ask any disqualifying questions before booking the demo? ❌

Did I feel like a $300 pair of headphones was a good trade for 30 mins of my time? ✅

It might have been a win for the sales organization though - they got to report they'd held another demo that week

For me, this was a fantastic cautionary tale

Salespeople work the comp plans they are given

I cannot overstate this enough

If you give them BS metrics, and tie cash to those metrics... that will be what you get

As the saying goes "garbage in... garbage out"

I don't think you can break into an industry remotely

Moving to San Francisco when I was 23 was one of the best decisions I've ever made

You can go remote later

When you're getting started, you need every advantage

You need to be where the action is

Sending my thoughts and prayers to the Oracle sales rep out there who's had to update a $10b deal to closed-lost this week

(story in next comment)

This is not really a work post, but it'll make your life way better - 

If you want to massively improve your social life

Be the friend who organizes stuff 

Most people sit around at home, wishing that someone would ask them to do something

It's not that no-one is thinking about you, or that people don't like you

Rather, everyone is waiting to be asked

Be that one who gets the ball rolling

Today is Tuesday - the perfect day to send a couple texts to people you haven't seen in a little while. What can you organize this weekend?

If you're an SDR interviewing at a company... 

Check the SDR team for tenure 

Is this an org that makes people spend >18 months in the role? 

This is something you want to avoid

The reason America is the best country in the world to work in (it's not close), is because Americans are RISK ON 

Imagine going to the horses and asking people.. what happens if you win big today? 

And they tell you "I'd keep betting.. maybe buying a horse"

Happy Fourth 🗽🇺🇸

July 4th is nearly here

A reminder for everyone booking meetings with Americans around ANY public holiday

Americans will schedule meetings for crazy times. Definitely on holidays.

The will also cancel these meetings 15 mins before they start

If it's booked for Thursday or Friday...

Just push it to next week

The paradox of sales is that the easier your product is to sell, the easier it is to recruit good salespeople

Engineers often enjoy the intellectual challenges that come with solving hard problems

That's not how sales works

Selling something people don't want sucks, and is bad for your bank balance

CISOs getting ready to fend off 15,000 “Crowdstrike alternative” pitches today

If you’re a CEO or founder you have credibility where others do not

It's a massive advantage in any selling or recruiting conversation. 

It is easier for you to win people over vs. the people on your team - regardless of your actual skill level

There is no career upside to working at a dead-end company

Steve Jobs coming back and saving Apple was the very rare exception to the rule

If you sell a product for less than $2k USD annually it’s near impossible (maybe impossible?) to run a Silicon Valley sales approach

Even a deal size of $5-$10k makes it pretty hard to run the numbers

Was curious: how many current Crowdstrike account executives are open to work right now?

589 AEs in the US

105 open to work

Compared this to 1200 AEs in the US at Palo Alto Networks

258 open to work

Interesting to see if this changes in the coming days & weeks

Getting a job isn’t rocket science

MIT has a 4% acceptance rate

Which is about 40x higher than most online jobs these days

The ratio is seriously that bad, 1000:1 in a lot of cases

Part of how we can fix this is by making jobs HARDER to apply to

That way candidates aren’t wasting their lives playing these insane volume games

If you have 1,000 applicants you’re going to look for the fastest way possible to immediately discard at least 95% of them

If you have:
• 50 candidates
• 20 phone screens
• Second interview with 8-10 of them
• Third round with 3-5
• Make an offer
• Still have a backup candidate in case

These are numbers you can truly work with

You cannot look through 1,000 applicants properly. 
Run the numbers:
• 30 seconds to look at each profile: 500 minutes (more than one full day of work)
• Setting 30 minute phone screens with the top 20% of applicants: 100 hours (2.5 full work weeks)
• If you worked on this role exclusively, and put in 40 hours of dedicated work per week, it'd take 3 weeks just to get a shortlist of candidates to a second round

At this point I’m genuinely impressed

If you thought IT was angry before…

for the life of me, i cannot understand, why recruiters avoid talking about comp on the first call

better to find out in 15 mins if we're in the ballpark or not, than waste everyone's time

The idea that simply paying top compensation and calling it a day as a means to find “a players” is a deluded but common one

Yes… top reps cost $$$$

Mid reps also cost $$$$

Example: 

I was talking to a rep recently. He's at a $250k OTE, and has closed ~$1m in the last year. 

Great stuff. 

His counterpart has the same OTE, and has closed $100k in the last year. No-one wants to spend $250k to bring in $100k. 

The difficult reality is that comp went up a lot over the last 5 years.

But across the board, performance has dropped.

And while that's partly due to external factors (there are more competitors than every before, outbound has become harder), the median income in America is $48k.

If you'd like to make 4-8x that, then you need to find a way through the noise. 

Being an A player also means delivering "A" level results

The problem with using the AI auto generated outreach script is that your message looks exactly the same as everyone else who has also sent the AI auto generated outreach script

(especially on LinkedIn)

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