He was my hands-on mentor for many years. Bolt sales would not exist without him.
Much of this is learned wisdom from him.
Ok, here we go 👇
How to build a sales team:
He was my hands-on mentor for many years. Bolt sales would not exist without him.
Much of this is learned wisdom from him.
Ok, here we go 👇
It’s impossible to now how to construct a sales team without first knowing how to conduct a sale.
Some founders try to hire before this step.
Doing so is skipping a crucial step of getting intimate with your product and customers.
At Bolt we wrote a 50+ page sales playbook which included
- Email scripts
- Cold call scripts
- FAQ and Rebuttals
- Negotiating tactics
- Closing tactics
With this handy, new salespeople ramp 3X-5X faster.
If you hire just one salesperson and they can’t sell your product, you’re in trouble.
Why?
You don’t know if the problem is the person or the product!
Hire two, and you have a point of comparison.
The best salesperson may not fit the mold you have in your head.
In fact, few salespeople are alike.
All our best have had completely unique personalities.
The common thread: deep thinking, authenticity, and ability to close.
Ask about quota performance over recent years.
One or two bad quarters is fine and signals honestly.
The best don’t shy away from this ask.
They’re proud of their numbers.
Some products are naturally harder to sell than others.
High technical and integration complexity means harder.
Simple onboarding and inbound customer demand means easier.
Know what camp you’re in and hire sales reps from that camp.
I believe it’s every CEO’s job to stay involved in sales.
Especially in the early days.
As much as we all want to build “sales machines”, it’s only possible after endless repetition.
Figuring out sales isn’t easy.
Expect it to be really really hard.
Every company dependent on sales goes through a sales journey.
And it’s never smooth sailing.
The best thing I did when building our sales team was reach out to everyone I knew in sales.
From VPs to individuals sales reps in my network.
I asked endless questions and learned a ridiculous amount.
Oftentimes the reps on the ground were the most insightful.
Creative pricing is a sorely under-discussed topic.
There are likely ways to modify your pricing.
Nail this, and pricing turns into a sales accelerant.
Getting sales comp right is also paramount.
Design it to incentivize behaviors that are aligned with core business objectives.
And keep it simple, or design a calculator, so that reps can easily estimate how much they’ll make on a deal.
Changing pricing and comp plans can create chaos and confusion.
Experimenting is important.
But watch out for doing it too much.
Doing so creates perceived instability, which can demoralize a team.
Most companies are afraid to over-pay top performers.
Don’t be.
Accelerators allow your top performers to earn outsized commissions.
That’s a GOOD thing because it only happens when they’re delivering outsized results.
More from Ryan Breslow 🕺
Over the last 7 years I’ve built 2 multi-billion dollar companies.
It’s been grueling. We don’t share these lessons enough.
So I decided to do that over the last month.
The feedback has been awesome - 25k new followers in 1 month.
Here’s a roundup of all of the threads 👇
Why Bolt is the first tech unicorn to shift to a 4 day work
I’ve built both a $4B company and a $1B company over the last 7 years.
Here are the 12 mindset rules that got me
We 10X’d our company in the last 10 months.
Here are the 10 tactics to making every day
We’ve closed more deals in the last 90 days than in all of Bolt history.
Here are 10 tips on how to negotiate your best
It’s been grueling. We don’t share these lessons enough.
So I decided to do that over the last month.
The feedback has been awesome - 25k new followers in 1 month.
Here’s a roundup of all of the threads 👇
Why Bolt is the first tech unicorn to shift to a 4 day work
The biggest lesson I\u2019ve learned in building a $4B company:
— Ryan Breslow \U0001f57a (@ryantakesoff) September 23, 2021
It\u2019s all about the people.
I\u2019m thrilled to announce today that Bolt is the first tech unicorn to officially shift to a 4 day work week.
Here\u2019s why we did it and how we came to the decision \U0001f447\U0001f447\U0001f447
I’ve built both a $4B company and a $1B company over the last 7 years.
Here are the 12 mindset rules that got me
Over the last 5 years, I built a $4B company.
— Ryan Breslow \U0001f57a (@ryantakesoff) September 20, 2021
Sounds awesome right?
Not until recently.
I made every mistake imaginable.
The toughest part was getting my head right.
Here are the 12 mindset rules that I\u2019ve developed.
We 10X’d our company in the last 10 months.
Here are the 10 tactics to making every day
At Bolt we grew from $400M to $4B in the last 10 months.
— Ryan Breslow \U0001f57a (@ryantakesoff) September 28, 2021
That's a 10x in 10 months.
This wasn\u2019t an accident, but it also wasn\u2019t a given.
The shift? We started making EVERY day count.
What exactly does that mean?
Let's break it down \U0001f447\U0001f447\U0001f447
We’ve closed more deals in the last 90 days than in all of Bolt history.
Here are 10 tips on how to negotiate your best
In the last 90 days, we\u2019ve closed more deals than ever before in Bolt\u2019s history.
— Ryan Breslow \U0001f57a (@ryantakesoff) September 25, 2021
These deals alone have added billions to our valuation
This wasn't an accident.
We completely changed how we negotiate deals.
Here are 10 tactics we use today to negotiate Bolt\u2019s best deals:
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Great article from @AsheSchow. I lived thru the 'Satanic Panic' of the 1980's/early 1990's asking myself "Has eveyrbody lost their GODDAMN MINDS?!"
The 3 big things that made the 1980's/early 1990's surreal for me.
1) Satanic Panic - satanism in the day cares ahhhh!
2) "Repressed memory" syndrome
3) Facilitated Communication [FC]
All 3 led to massive abuse.
"Therapists" -and I use the term to describe these quacks loosely - would hypnotize people & convince they they were 'reliving' past memories of Mom & Dad killing babies in Satanic rituals in the basement while they were growing up.
Other 'therapists' would badger kids until they invented stories about watching alligators eat babies dropped into a lake from a hot air balloon. Kids would deny anything happened for hours until the therapist 'broke through' and 'found' the 'truth'.
FC was a movement that started with the claim severely handicapped individuals were able to 'type' legible sentences & communicate if a 'helper' guided their hands over a keyboard.
For three years I have wanted to write an article on moral panics. I have collected anecdotes and similarities between today\u2019s moral panic and those of the past - particularly the Satanic Panic of the 80s.
— Ashe Schow (@AsheSchow) September 29, 2018
This is my finished product: https://t.co/otcM1uuUDk
The 3 big things that made the 1980's/early 1990's surreal for me.
1) Satanic Panic - satanism in the day cares ahhhh!
2) "Repressed memory" syndrome
3) Facilitated Communication [FC]
All 3 led to massive abuse.
"Therapists" -and I use the term to describe these quacks loosely - would hypnotize people & convince they they were 'reliving' past memories of Mom & Dad killing babies in Satanic rituals in the basement while they were growing up.
Other 'therapists' would badger kids until they invented stories about watching alligators eat babies dropped into a lake from a hot air balloon. Kids would deny anything happened for hours until the therapist 'broke through' and 'found' the 'truth'.
FC was a movement that started with the claim severely handicapped individuals were able to 'type' legible sentences & communicate if a 'helper' guided their hands over a keyboard.
I'm going to do two history threads on Ethiopia, one on its ancient history, one on its modern story (1800 to today). 🇪🇹
I'll begin with the ancient history ... and it goes way back. Because modern humans - and before that, the ancestors of humans - almost certainly originated in Ethiopia. 🇪🇹 (sub-thread):
The first likely historical reference to Ethiopia is ancient Egyptian records of trade expeditions to the "Land of Punt" in search of gold, ebony, ivory, incense, and wild animals, starting in c 2500 BC 🇪🇹
Ethiopians themselves believe that the Queen of Sheba, who visited Israel's King Solomon in the Bible (c 950 BC), came from Ethiopia (not Yemen, as others believe). Here she is meeting Solomon in a stain-glassed window in Addis Ababa's Holy Trinity Church. 🇪🇹
References to the Queen of Sheba are everywhere in Ethiopia. The national airline's frequent flier miles are even called "ShebaMiles". 🇪🇹
I'll begin with the ancient history ... and it goes way back. Because modern humans - and before that, the ancestors of humans - almost certainly originated in Ethiopia. 🇪🇹 (sub-thread):
The famous \u201cLucy\u201d, an early ancestor of modern humans (Australopithecus) that lived 3.2 million years ago, and was discovered in 1974 in Ethiopia, displayed in the national museum in Addis Ababa \U0001f1ea\U0001f1f9 pic.twitter.com/N3oWqk1SW2
— Patrick Chovanec (@prchovanec) November 9, 2018
The first likely historical reference to Ethiopia is ancient Egyptian records of trade expeditions to the "Land of Punt" in search of gold, ebony, ivory, incense, and wild animals, starting in c 2500 BC 🇪🇹
Ethiopians themselves believe that the Queen of Sheba, who visited Israel's King Solomon in the Bible (c 950 BC), came from Ethiopia (not Yemen, as others believe). Here she is meeting Solomon in a stain-glassed window in Addis Ababa's Holy Trinity Church. 🇪🇹
References to the Queen of Sheba are everywhere in Ethiopia. The national airline's frequent flier miles are even called "ShebaMiles". 🇪🇹
