YouSaid · the spoken record

Eleanor Dorfman

lines on the record: 51
first: 2022-09-14
most recent: 2022-09-14
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“All right, Monty Carlo invested in field and content in a way that I have found very impressive. They've created a category through sheer market education in a way. They somehow seem to be at every conference producing new content every week and have created a new language and a new category. And they had a booth at the Snowflake Summit where if you won the raffle there, you want a ticket to actual Monte Carlo, which I thought was pretty cool.”
2022-09-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: How To Interview Sales People; The Red Flags and What to Look For, How Sales Leaders Should Change Goals and Quotas in Harder Markets and What Reps Can Do To Ensure They Hit Their Numbers in These Markets with Eleanor Dorfman, Sales Leader @ Ret · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Honestly, not investing in those foundational pieces early enough, not investing in revenue operations early enough, not investing in sales enablement early enough.”
2022-09-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: How To Interview Sales People; The Red Flags and What to Look For, How Sales Leaders Should Change Goals and Quotas in Harder Markets and What Reps Can Do To Ensure They Hit Their Numbers in These Markets with Eleanor Dorfman, Sales Leader @ Ret · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They personalized? Are they relevant? And is someone getting value from the interaction? So when you're putting together the content, are you designing it to say who are my listeners? Who is my audience? And will they take away value from this? Ours are customers typically demonstrating what they've built. And then we have someone in the comments or in the chat moderating and answering questions from the audience. So it's not retool pitching retool. It's customers talking to their peers about what they've built to solve business problems.”
2022-09-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: How To Interview Sales People; The Red Flags and What to Look For, How Sales Leaders Should Change Goals and Quotas in Harder Markets and What Reps Can Do To Ensure They Hit Their Numbers in These Markets with Eleanor Dorfman, Sales Leader @ Ret · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lack of personalization, like spray and prey outbound, cold calling without knowing who you're talking to. I think buyers now today expect a level of personalization that they historically have not.”
2022-09-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: How To Interview Sales People; The Red Flags and What to Look For, How Sales Leaders Should Change Goals and Quotas in Harder Markets and What Reps Can Do To Ensure They Hit Their Numbers in These Markets with Eleanor Dorfman, Sales Leader @ Ret · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think relationship building has been fundamental to sales since day one. And even with PLG, even with everything that's come, building relationships with your buyers and understanding their pain has always been and is still incredibly important.”
2022-09-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: How To Interview Sales People; The Red Flags and What to Look For, How Sales Leaders Should Change Goals and Quotas in Harder Markets and What Reps Can Do To Ensure They Hit Their Numbers in These Markets with Eleanor Dorfman, Sales Leader @ Ret · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a thousand things that are immediate, and I think it's that classic, urgent verse important. And how do you prioritize what's important? And how do you make sure you get done what is urgent?”
2022-09-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: How To Interview Sales People; The Red Flags and What to Look For, How Sales Leaders Should Change Goals and Quotas in Harder Markets and What Reps Can Do To Ensure They Hit Their Numbers in These Markets with Eleanor Dorfman, Sales Leader @ Ret · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have a culture of psychological safety, like you need to create environment where people feel empowered to ask for help and people feel empowered to say they're losing and that they don't feel they're going to get punished because it is the single only way you learn and grow as a company. And so I think that's on their leaders to create a culture where they feel safe doing that.”
2022-09-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: How To Interview Sales People; The Red Flags and What to Look For, How Sales Leaders Should Change Goals and Quotas in Harder Markets and What Reps Can Do To Ensure They Hit Their Numbers in These Markets with Eleanor Dorfman, Sales Leader @ Ret · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's in all hands, it'll just be someone presenting a slide that'll sort of talk through the three things like how did we answer the questions, why buy anything, why buy now, why buy retool? How did we recognize that we had these signals? What gave us confidence that we were going to win the deal? Did we run a POC? Who were the stakeholders involved? And then back to those three questions. For loss reviews, I think early on, it depends how close the founders want to be. I think it's important if the lessons you take away, like I do like a blameless post-mortem, it's just five whys, ask the whys as many times as you can. There's a really important lessons that come here and like it also fosters a mindset of you win and lose as a team. And so I do think in the early days there's a lot of value in founders being involved in those and having a really deep understanding of why you're winning or why you're losing.”
2022-09-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: How To Interview Sales People; The Red Flags and What to Look For, How Sales Leaders Should Change Goals and Quotas in Harder Markets and What Reps Can Do To Ensure They Hit Their Numbers in These Markets with Eleanor Dorfman, Sales Leader @ Ret · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think win reviews are extremely valuable for the AEs. We do a ton of those every two weeks in a sales all hands. We'll do win reviews and then we'll do lessons from the field, which is how did we win?”
2022-09-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: How To Interview Sales People; The Red Flags and What to Look For, How Sales Leaders Should Change Goals and Quotas in Harder Markets and What Reps Can Do To Ensure They Hit Their Numbers in These Markets with Eleanor Dorfman, Sales Leader @ Ret · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not as much as we should, but for really big ones where, especially if it's something we've committed or we've called in and it doesn't close, we'll definitely do a post-mortem.”
2022-09-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: How To Interview Sales People; The Red Flags and What to Look For, How Sales Leaders Should Change Goals and Quotas in Harder Markets and What Reps Can Do To Ensure They Hit Their Numbers in These Markets with Eleanor Dorfman, Sales Leader @ Ret · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think if you have a founder with a sales background versus a founder with not a sales background, that's going to look very, very different. And so I think it starts there and what the founder wants. And I think it comes down to what are the expectations for the role, what does success look like? And then I think you just say, what do I need to do that? And I think you shouldn't be afraid to say, hey, here's what I need. Here's what I need to be successful. And here's what I'm going to get from you. And here's what I might need to get from someone else, but weekly sounds pretty standard to me.”
2022-09-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: How To Interview Sales People; The Red Flags and What to Look For, How Sales Leaders Should Change Goals and Quotas in Harder Markets and What Reps Can Do To Ensure They Hit Their Numbers in These Markets with Eleanor Dorfman, Sales Leader @ Ret · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say an empty calendar is a red flag to your point. They're not outbounding. They're not putting any meetings. They're not meeting with their SDR. They're not meeting with their sales engineer. They're not meeting with their CSMs. So I think an empty calendar would be a huge one. And two, I think if someone's really ramping and going all in, they are asking me so many questions. Like if they're not peppering you with questions, if they're not peppering, they're onboarding buddy with questions. If they're not posting in channels, being like, hey, I was reading this. I was listening to this call. Could someone walk me through this? And I know they're not actually trying to deeply engage with the material and internalize it. And that to me is a huge red flag. So yeah, an empty calendar and no questions.”
2022-09-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: How To Interview Sales People; The Red Flags and What to Look For, How Sales Leaders Should Change Goals and Quotas in Harder Markets and What Reps Can Do To Ensure They Hit Their Numbers in These Markets with Eleanor Dorfman, Sales Leader @ Ret · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A huge fan of Gond. We've got a series of onboarding playlists that are tied to different stages in the cycle onboarding, we've got a discovery playlist, a POC stoping playlist, negotiation playlist, and then we sort of stagger onboarding in the first two weeks to focus on learning.”
2022-09-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: How To Interview Sales People; The Red Flags and What to Look For, How Sales Leaders Should Change Goals and Quotas in Harder Markets and What Reps Can Do To Ensure They Hit Their Numbers in These Markets with Eleanor Dorfman, Sales Leader @ Ret · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I always think people hire rev ops too late and sales enablement too late because you can't hire it once you need it. You got to hire it before you need it. So maybe hire it when you've onboarded your first few reps and you're starting to figure out what works, but you as the sales leader are wearing too many hats and you want to go focus on something else, then bring in sales enablement then. I think it's a tough role to hire for too. But I think you hire before you need it. When you're feeling like onboarding is going really well and you're patting yourself on the back, it's probably time to hire sales enablement. Okay.”
2022-09-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: How To Interview Sales People; The Red Flags and What to Look For, How Sales Leaders Should Change Goals and Quotas in Harder Markets and What Reps Can Do To Ensure They Hit Their Numbers in These Markets with Eleanor Dorfman, Sales Leader @ Ret · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How does sales enablement started a few months ago? I think that one of my biggest lessons was you hire for sales enablement too late. And I think we hired too late. I think we have a lot of process debt as a result.”
2022-09-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: How To Interview Sales People; The Red Flags and What to Look For, How Sales Leaders Should Change Goals and Quotas in Harder Markets and What Reps Can Do To Ensure They Hit Their Numbers in These Markets with Eleanor Dorfman, Sales Leader @ Ret · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People are still running their businesses. They're still operating. It's an opportunity to get creative to pivot your messaging to efficiency, to cost savings, to operational efficiencies, all of these things. And I think I've watched the team get really creative. We've got two folks down at a customer on site right now running a hackathon with a team. They're retool sponsoring a hackathon, and they're building applications together. And so they're meeting all these new teams. They're embedding themselves in the business. They're building great relationships. And I think hopefully they'll find some cool opportunities. We've got folks running webinars themselves with customers they work with and targeting very specific verticals, which I think has been really cool to watch. We've got folks creating their own customer dinners and traveling to create new interests. Like the team is getting really creative. That's what this type of economy will drive is really honestly inspiring creativity from the team.”
2022-09-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: How To Interview Sales People; The Red Flags and What to Look For, How Sales Leaders Should Change Goals and Quotas in Harder Markets and What Reps Can Do To Ensure They Hit Their Numbers in These Markets with Eleanor Dorfman, Sales Leader @ Ret · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A time and a place, but I think discounting is sort of a false hearing. It's just do you understand the value you're providing? Do you understand how important that is to them and what problems you're solving? Do you understand their alternative to using your product and do you have a compelling ROI case? And then if you have all of those things and you have them with the right people and you're negotiating with someone who can say yes, sometimes people have a tendency to negotiate with people who can only say no. If you're negotiating to someone to say yes and you believe it's a fair exchange of value and if it's a discount that dits you there, great.”
2022-09-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: How To Interview Sales People; The Red Flags and What to Look For, How Sales Leaders Should Change Goals and Quotas in Harder Markets and What Reps Can Do To Ensure They Hit Their Numbers in These Markets with Eleanor Dorfman, Sales Leader @ Ret · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So funny because it's such a different market than for COVID, where there were some sort of clear COVID winners, whereas this is like no one's really winning. It's like, it's very different. It went from, oh, during COVID, we're going after these companies. We know we consulted this. We know we're going to let the poor events industry take a breather right now. You know, we're not going to go after them. But here it's across the board. So you have to cling to that delusion, that greatness can come out of these moments. Does it forces you to be really creative?”
2022-09-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: How To Interview Sales People; The Red Flags and What to Look For, How Sales Leaders Should Change Goals and Quotas in Harder Markets and What Reps Can Do To Ensure They Hit Their Numbers in These Markets with Eleanor Dorfman, Sales Leader @ Ret · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Always have to be looking at the inputs, and to get ahead of it as quickly as possible. Right now, coach should be looking at their books of business. Are they talking to all of their customers? What kind of outbound are they doing? What success are they seeing? I still think as a sales rep, you have the opportunity to be control of your own destiny, and so much of it is just recognizing what you can be in control of, but you control what you can control. And that is all the company can ask of you. And so as a leadership team, you have to create an environment where people do feel safe and they know that you'll take care of them, but that they're doing everything they can that's within their control. And I think that's leadership that's cross-functional partnership, it's making sure product and marketing is coming to your team and saying, here's what we're doing to make you successful, here's what we're working on. There's an avenue for sales reps to have asked of the business to say, here's what I need, here's where we're struggling, here's what I need to be successful. I think it's how you create an environment, it's how you create the culture on the team and you do what you say you're going to do as a leadership team and make sure that everything that's in your control you can help with.”
2022-09-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: How To Interview Sales People; The Red Flags and What to Look For, How Sales Leaders Should Change Goals and Quotas in Harder Markets and What Reps Can Do To Ensure They Hit Their Numbers in These Markets with Eleanor Dorfman, Sales Leader @ Ret · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You don't get to decide what the market is, unfortunately. So I think all you can do is always look at the most recent set of data. You have to look at the company goals and where are you trying to go and then you reconcile the two. So what are you seeing? What is top of funnel? What is past performance look like? What is average deal size? What does average sales cycle? What kind of pipeline coverage do you need to hit the target every month, every quarter, every year? And how can you take that and map it into a com plan where I think the logic I've always used is that you should design a comp structure where at least 80% of your reps are hitting and that's sort of where the bell curve is.”
2022-09-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: How To Interview Sales People; The Red Flags and What to Look For, How Sales Leaders Should Change Goals and Quotas in Harder Markets and What Reps Can Do To Ensure They Hit Their Numbers in These Markets with Eleanor Dorfman, Sales Leader @ Ret · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Should always flow back to what's your company philosophy? How do we want to motivate employees? What's our company philosophy on equity? And then for our first hires, how do we motivate them and create incentives to act like owners while still creating a stretcher that will scale beyond the first two or three sales reps?”
2022-09-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: How To Interview Sales People; The Red Flags and What to Look For, How Sales Leaders Should Change Goals and Quotas in Harder Markets and What Reps Can Do To Ensure They Hit Their Numbers in These Markets with Eleanor Dorfman, Sales Leader @ Ret · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Funny, I think, when things were so insane towards the end of 2021, people were looking for the next moonshot. They wanted the bid valuation. They wanted the equity. They would take early bets more. People are trying to de-risk their choices now. Is this company spending responsibly? Have they made smart financial investments? Are reps hitting their numbers? People have been challenging me on that way more than they used to. What does reps obsess with like? Where are the deals coming from? What is leaf flow like? And so I think now folks are optimizing for cash a little bit more than equity. Still both though, but they're more focused on de-risking versus finding the moonshot.”
2022-09-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: How To Interview Sales People; The Red Flags and What to Look For, How Sales Leaders Should Change Goals and Quotas in Harder Markets and What Reps Can Do To Ensure They Hit Their Numbers in These Markets with Eleanor Dorfman, Sales Leader @ Ret · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I think it's looked really different over the last few months. Like, it's definitely shifted, and you can feel it. In terms of the hardest candidates to close, ones who came just from a company that just had a bid Ebsit where the really good early talent is starting to load, those are profiles people really like to go after. So those are really tough to close. They have a lot of options. They've had a lot of success. They know what they're looking for. They know the hallmarks of a company that will be successful. So they push you really hard.”
2022-09-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: How To Interview Sales People; The Red Flags and What to Look For, How Sales Leaders Should Change Goals and Quotas in Harder Markets and What Reps Can Do To Ensure They Hit Their Numbers in These Markets with Eleanor Dorfman, Sales Leader @ Ret · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So to your point, or what Jordan said earlier about how do you sell a product with no buyer or no use case, we test for that in the interview process. How do you sell a product with no buyer or no use case? It's to me the biggest signal I'm dot connecting, can they take an abstract product and tell a compelling story? Can they understand the company and their business model well enough to know what problems exist? Can they connect the dots between Rituals functionality with the problems that company has? And can they turn that into an interesting narrative that would be compelling for a buyer?”
2022-09-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: How To Interview Sales People; The Red Flags and What to Look For, How Sales Leaders Should Change Goals and Quotas in Harder Markets and What Reps Can Do To Ensure They Hit Their Numbers in These Markets with Eleanor Dorfman, Sales Leader @ Ret · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Verses we want is huge. When you're doing performance screens, there are quite a few others. If they take ownership over things, if they're like, hey, well, my SDR was really tough that year or my SE couldn't do this or the product X, Y, and Z. Like I think an ownership mindset can come through really clearly in examples like that. And that's a big red flag.”
2022-09-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: How To Interview Sales People; The Red Flags and What to Look For, How Sales Leaders Should Change Goals and Quotas in Harder Markets and What Reps Can Do To Ensure They Hit Their Numbers in These Markets with Eleanor Dorfman, Sales Leader @ Ret · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, Jordan taught me one of the best things here, which is that salespeople are good at selling, but is their job. And when they're interviewing, they're selling their favorite subject themselves. And the key is to go 19 levels deeper until you reach the real point. So yes, they sold this. Okay, tell us about the deal. Okay, what was your role? Okay, who did you work with? Okay, how did you do that? Okay, what problem did you run into? Okay, like to actually get to the bottom of not just look at the numbers, but the story behind the numbers. How much of it was outbound? How much of it was inbound? Did you have to create your own pipeline? Did you work with sales engineers? Did you work with CSMs? What did that look like? But ask those questions so you understand the inputs that went into the outcomes.”
2022-09-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: How To Interview Sales People; The Red Flags and What to Look For, How Sales Leaders Should Change Goals and Quotas in Harder Markets and What Reps Can Do To Ensure They Hit Their Numbers in These Markets with Eleanor Dorfman, Sales Leader @ Ret · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like really good at deals. But yes, I think a customer first mindset is also something you can't teach. You can't build it. You have to buy it.”
2022-09-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: How To Interview Sales People; The Red Flags and What to Look For, How Sales Leaders Should Change Goals and Quotas in Harder Markets and What Reps Can Do To Ensure They Hit Their Numbers in These Markets with Eleanor Dorfman, Sales Leader @ Ret · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Care a lot about customer centricity. We're a very customer oriented. I have a customer success background. So we asked folks to talk through previous customers they've worked with. What do they remember about them? What stood out? What was the value they were able to add? What problems did their product solve for them? And basically, do they think about it in terms of the customer or do they think about it in terms of the deal?”
2022-09-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: How To Interview Sales People; The Red Flags and What to Look For, How Sales Leaders Should Change Goals and Quotas in Harder Markets and What Reps Can Do To Ensure They Hit Their Numbers in These Markets with Eleanor Dorfman, Sales Leader @ Ret · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I like them to explain. We have one of our sales engineers interview, and they say, it's on walked us through the previous last product you've sold, walked us through the tech. And so then we can test how deep did they get in their previous product and did they understand it? And then we'll ask a few questions about retool. We're not even looking for future candidates out there. We're looking for less can you answer them more? How do you handle yourself when you're asked questions? You don't know the answer to. Do you try to make something up? Or do you just say, great question, I'm not sure I'll have to bring in someone else.”
2022-09-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: How To Interview Sales People; The Red Flags and What to Look For, How Sales Leaders Should Change Goals and Quotas in Harder Markets and What Reps Can Do To Ensure They Hit Their Numbers in These Markets with Eleanor Dorfman, Sales Leader @ Ret · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then I think it always comes back to what's important to you at that stage. So many of my sales cycles that I'm in, are you going to build something or are you going to buy something? I think it's the same with hiring. When it comes to your candidates, what do you want to build and what do you want to buy? And so I always think about, here's what I can build. I can teach this sales process. I can teach how to use the product. I can teach how the technical aspects. I can't teach IQ. I can't teach EQ. I can't teach character. I can't teach drive. And I can't teach curiosity. What are the things that I cannot teach that I must buy and are critically important to me? And those five are mine. So design interviews that test for those things. How do you test for those? Where are you getting the signal? I also want to test for technical comfort. So what's an interview to make sure they're just not going to be intimidated by a technical product or selling to engineers? I want to test for past performance. Have they been successful? And then I build the interview process from there, but it starts with, what am I buying?”
2022-09-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: How To Interview Sales People; The Red Flags and What to Look For, How Sales Leaders Should Change Goals and Quotas in Harder Markets and What Reps Can Do To Ensure They Hit Their Numbers in These Markets with Eleanor Dorfman, Sales Leader @ Ret · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Go out there and say, What's my onboarding? Oh, there is none. Cool. All right. I'm going to figure this out. And those are the folks who you're going to learn more from them than from anything else because they're going to bring this fresh perspective. They're going to be hungry. They're going to be curious. They're going to be creative. And they're going to help you figure out what to do next.”
2022-09-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: How To Interview Sales People; The Red Flags and What to Look For, How Sales Leaders Should Change Goals and Quotas in Harder Markets and What Reps Can Do To Ensure They Hit Their Numbers in These Markets with Eleanor Dorfman, Sales Leader @ Ret · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think early on, especially when you're building a sales team from the ground up, it's sort of that V1 of who you hire, that's the DNA of your sales team. So I think in the beginning, you have no idea what you're doing. You have some ideas. You know what hypotheses you're testing, but you don't have sales enablement. You don't really have the playbook for the deals yet. Do you have your ICP? Do you know if your PLG or Enterprise? Do you know what works? Pricing is still probably really new. The product probably has a lot of gaps where you're sort of a human patch against product gaps. sales leaders are running a million miles a minute so you're not going to get a ton of support so you kind of have to be a street fighter you have to be really adaptable you have to be really flexible you have to be able to operate without a safety net and you have to do so with a level of confidence and you have to enjoy that level of ambiguity and flourish in that type of environment and folks who have been in incumbents for a while they're well oiled machines and sometimes you just want a street fighter who's doing”
2022-09-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: How To Interview Sales People; The Red Flags and What to Look For, How Sales Leaders Should Change Goals and Quotas in Harder Markets and What Reps Can Do To Ensure They Hit Their Numbers in These Markets with Eleanor Dorfman, Sales Leader @ Ret · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That comes down to the culture. What's the culture you're building? Do you have a high ownership, high accountability culture where refs feel very accountable to bringing in their deals on time? I think that comes down to people and the people you hire and how you manage them and how you steal the team.”
2022-09-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: How To Interview Sales People; The Red Flags and What to Look For, How Sales Leaders Should Change Goals and Quotas in Harder Markets and What Reps Can Do To Ensure They Hit Their Numbers in These Markets with Eleanor Dorfman, Sales Leader @ Ret · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I think it's pattern recognition is so important, and people are used to buy seats from Salesforce. Consumption pricing with Twiliov, there are known models going out and creating a new Piscing model is why? Do not reinvent the wheel when it comes to pricing. However, I think it is important to know what your value metric is and to always start with how do customers get value out of my product? What does that metric? How can I get as close to that metric as possible? Because you need the price to value to be there. When you buy more stripe and you spend more money, you get more revenue. Like there is extremely tight price to value alignment. What's the way to get that tightest price to value alignment where if they're spending more, you're increasing the value that you're delivering?”
2022-09-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: How To Interview Sales People; The Red Flags and What to Look For, How Sales Leaders Should Change Goals and Quotas in Harder Markets and What Reps Can Do To Ensure They Hit Their Numbers in These Markets with Eleanor Dorfman, Sales Leader @ Ret · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Always asking yourself what you're learning and what you're trying to learn does know the why behind everything you're doing what can we take away from that what's the hypothesis that we're testing it comes back to what's the problem you're trying to solve what's the hypothesis you're testing don't go out and just hire 10 or 15 reps hire one hire two how are they successful what are they doing are we ready what's the right profile great let's hire two more three more great are they successful what's the profile okay good now we feel we validated this hypothesis let's hire more but to be cyclical and test hypothesis as part of it before you just create a lot of complexity that you have to unwind later”
2022-09-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: How To Interview Sales People; The Red Flags and What to Look For, How Sales Leaders Should Change Goals and Quotas in Harder Markets and What Reps Can Do To Ensure They Hit Their Numbers in These Markets with Eleanor Dorfman, Sales Leader @ Ret · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's all in the use case, and what are the problems we're solving? And I think what's been interesting actually about the market shift over the last few months, it feels like years, is the value prop of Ritual has shifted a little bit. It was acceleration. It was time to value. It was enabling people to grow really quickly and move at work speed. And now it's about efficiency. And it's about doing more with less. And it's about consolidating your tooling online platform. So I think that's been a hugely valuable thing and how product marketing thinks about it is not who's our buyer, what's the product, but what are the problems that we solve. Given your experience, and then we'll move on to actually.”
2022-09-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: How To Interview Sales People; The Red Flags and What to Look For, How Sales Leaders Should Change Goals and Quotas in Harder Markets and What Reps Can Do To Ensure They Hit Their Numbers in These Markets with Eleanor Dorfman, Sales Leader @ Ret · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With a lot of experimentation, we deal with a lot of vertical specific webinars targeting popular use cases that we've seen in fintech or we've seen from marketplaces or we've seen for B2B. It's just highly personalized. We look for folks who are hiring heads of internal tooling. We look for folks that we know are right at this stage where you go from having ad hoc internal tools to more robust approach to internal tools. And then we experiment some more. Have such a horizontal About effective product marketing when it could be so”
2022-09-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: How To Interview Sales People; The Red Flags and What to Look For, How Sales Leaders Should Change Goals and Quotas in Harder Markets and What Reps Can Do To Ensure They Hit Their Numbers in These Markets with Eleanor Dorfman, Sales Leader @ Ret · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To rectify how to run it. You mentioned your experience that way. Have to ask how did you figure out with retool how to sell a product with no buyer and no use? Well, every deal is a little bit different, but I think it isn't that there isn't a buyer, there just isn't a defined owner out of the date. Like you can't just answer the question, who owns Retwell at your company? And it depends on what stage you're at as a company, your level of maturity, how you're getting started with Retool. Are you getting started with a single use case? Are you getting started with Retool as a platform? So it's really dependent on that. How do you do Outbound if there's not a head of compliance?”
2022-09-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: How To Interview Sales People; The Red Flags and What to Look For, How Sales Leaders Should Change Goals and Quotas in Harder Markets and What Reps Can Do To Ensure They Hit Their Numbers in These Markets with Eleanor Dorfman, Sales Leader @ Ret · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Say, yeah, we have these self service options on our website there for folks at smaller companies, they're for startups, they're for you to get started, they're for you to trial, they're for you to have an easy way to get started with the product. But when you're buying and investing in a product like retool or X or Y or Z platform, it's a behavior change and it requires multiple stakeholders. It requires a full-blown evaluation. It requires having multiple use cases in order to get it started and it requires creating space in your budget and your team and your process to bring a new platform in. And that requires a more thorough evaluation. And that's why we're done with customers like X, Y, and Z. So to me, that's the fun part is the deal situational awareness it requires. Like our reps have to always think what type of deal am I in? Am I in an enterprise deal? Am I in a PLG deal? Do I need to just get out of the way? Do I need to zoom out and run a nine month sales cycle? It's part of the fun to watch them really learn their approach to that exact problem and how and when they find the signals early on in a deal.”
2022-09-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: How To Interview Sales People; The Red Flags and What to Look For, How Sales Leaders Should Change Goals and Quotas in Harder Markets and What Reps Can Do To Ensure They Hit Their Numbers in These Markets with Eleanor Dorfman, Sales Leader @ Ret · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Your market's maturity has likely changed. Your product has likely changed. And at that point, it sort of becomes more evident that one or the other is going to be your primary sales motion. So I think in the beginning, it can be a healthy tension and you can learn. Your only job is to learn as much as possible with every single deal and every single cycle. And then at around 100, I think you can really start to narrow in on one. How do you think about the problem, which is in product-led growth, often you sell to more savvy startups onboard easily? And then I see a lot of founders layer on sales teams wanting enterprises, the additional layer. And the poor sales reps go, the customers are telling me about the product matching on our website and they're concerned about it being for startups. And I'm having to sell this kind of different product. How do you think about the challenge of serving two masters too soon? And when the right time is to kind of layer on that new customer persona? So I always want to make sure we have enterprise loados on our website so that we can point to, yes, it's all of the above. And I'll frequently say the way that pricing impacted you is structured is it lends itself to that.”
2022-09-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: How To Interview Sales People; The Red Flags and What to Look For, How Sales Leaders Should Change Goals and Quotas in Harder Markets and What Reps Can Do To Ensure They Hit Their Numbers in These Markets with Eleanor Dorfman, Sales Leader @ Ret · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do think it's a little bit of a false dichotomy, especially in the early stages. Again, I think this is also what founders should realize. It's all about how your customer wants to buy and what does that look like at that stage? Do they want to read docs and sign up with a credit card? Do they need to bring in other people? Can they buy it themselves? What's their level of seniority? What is the sales process look like? How long did it take? Were they immediately able to go to budget? Did they have to go above? Did you have to go above? Did you have to run a full-blown trial or did they just want to try it out for a little bit? These are the types of thing that I think are what's so important why founder led sales in the beginning is so important because it's going to teach you what type of model you're in. I also do think you can have both a segment was both retool is both right now. We have a PLG motion and we also have an enterprise motion. I think that works from zero to 100 million. And I think once you hit around 100 million, you need to start to pick a lane a little bit more because by that stage, your buyer has likely changed, your sales process has likely changed. If you're a category creator,”
2022-09-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: How To Interview Sales People; The Red Flags and What to Look For, How Sales Leaders Should Change Goals and Quotas in Harder Markets and What Reps Can Do To Ensure They Hit Their Numbers in These Markets with Eleanor Dorfman, Sales Leader @ Ret · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In near Dallas, who are now a music or whatever that kind of strange and unexpected customer is. Yeah, like a regional credit union, a company that doesn't really have a huge engineering team, but still has business problems. When you can sell a technical product that solves business problems, you're in a really special spot. He spoke about the profiles there. You know, senior versus junior. A lot of people say it depends on actually your emotion, whether you're PLG or whether you're enterprise. And they always are quite binary when I speak so much like you have to be one or the other. Do you agree that you have to be product led or enterprise top-down traditional sales?”
2022-09-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: How To Interview Sales People; The Red Flags and What to Look For, How Sales Leaders Should Change Goals and Quotas in Harder Markets and What Reps Can Do To Ensure They Hit Their Numbers in These Markets with Eleanor Dorfman, Sales Leader @ Ret · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, outbounded, pulled outbounded some of their customers who I'd worked with previously. So before I actually moved forward in the process, I went and talked to their customers. I wanted to understand without having them handed to me what was the problem Ritual was solving for them? Why was it so important? What was their willingness to pay? Would they renew and why? I talked to probably five customers. That was what gave me a ton of confidence. The other thing that gave me a lot of confidence is you see a lot of early stage startups that are good at selling to other startups and to tech companies. And they already had a handful of customers that were outside of tech. They were more traditional companies. They didn't have huge engineering teams. Like it was beyond those sort of savvy tech customers. They had actually found product market fit beyond just tech companies. I've always picked the product over anything else. Like it just has to be a product I'm really excited about. And the way customers talked about it and the way the market was reacting to the product a lot of conviction. I always get very excited when you see Ford gown.”
2022-09-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: How To Interview Sales People; The Red Flags and What to Look For, How Sales Leaders Should Change Goals and Quotas in Harder Markets and What Reps Can Do To Ensure They Hit Their Numbers in These Markets with Eleanor Dorfman, Sales Leader @ Ret · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it is a little more arts than science. And I think a lot of it depends on what you expect out of that person. If someone hires someone junior, don't expect them to build the end-to-end thing of the entire hiring profile, this tech stack, get the leaders in place, be one of sales enablement, all of that. A lot of it comes down to what are the founders expectations of what that role will do. So you can hire someone at any point. It just matters on what to expect from them. But I think you don't hire someone until you have found some form of product market fit. You can retain the customers you close. You have some notion of how your customers want to buy your product. You've generated some form of reliable inbound. Back to the expectations piece. Sometimes there's an expectation that you hire a salesperson and then boom, there's revenue, but really sales is there to accelerate a healthy machine, but it can't fix a broken one.”
2022-09-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: How To Interview Sales People; The Red Flags and What to Look For, How Sales Leaders Should Change Goals and Quotas in Harder Markets and What Reps Can Do To Ensure They Hit Their Numbers in These Markets with Eleanor Dorfman, Sales Leader @ Ret · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Role of the founder at the beginning in terms of the sales perspective that's not their job, I believe, to create the sales playbook, but it is their job to generate the inputs that go into that playbook. And I think the playbook could be sort of two different things. It could be how you do deals, like your deal playbook. What does that look like? What's your sales process? But then in a much more macro level, I think it very much is also what's your hiring profile, what's your org design, what's your customer lifecycle, what's your tech stack, all of these things. But I think when you go back to the beginning and what do founders need to focus on, the founder's job is to talk to as many prospects and customers as possible. They need to be focused on finding product market fit. They need to get incredibly close to the problem that you're solving.”
2022-09-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: How To Interview Sales People; The Red Flags and What to Look For, How Sales Leaders Should Change Goals and Quotas in Harder Markets and What Reps Can Do To Ensure They Hit Their Numbers in These Markets with Eleanor Dorfman, Sales Leader @ Ret · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So right now I lead our AE organization. I've been at Retool for almost two years and was really focused on deals, on hiring, on recruiting, on building a team, on getting the sales leaders in place, sales enablement, all of that. So I run the AE organization and then it's take on whatever other problems. Need to take on as a company that somehow have an impact on sales as part of that.”
2022-09-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: How To Interview Sales People; The Red Flags and What to Look For, How Sales Leaders Should Change Goals and Quotas in Harder Markets and What Reps Can Do To Ensure They Hit Their Numbers in These Markets with Eleanor Dorfman, Sales Leader @ Ret · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Taught me the importance of educating people on what a car is before you try to solve a Ferrari. So those would be the biggest ones.”
2022-09-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: How To Interview Sales People; The Red Flags and What to Look For, How Sales Leaders Should Change Goals and Quotas in Harder Markets and What Reps Can Do To Ensure They Hit Their Numbers in These Markets with Eleanor Dorfman, Sales Leader @ Ret · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Three that I would say, but I think the biggest would be keep the talent bar as high as possible for as long as possible. Do not ever build a process or a structure or a team or anything until you know what problem you're trying to solve. That's become a very core thing that we have a lot of Eleanorisms. And one is whenever someone comes to me with something, I'll say, what's the problem we're trying to solve? I think it's so easy and hyper growth to just build, build, build, build, build, copy and paste your old playbook, build, build, build, build, build. And you have to, there's such pressure to move quickly. You can't go around and you can at least always stand behind that decision later. And I think the third is that selling into a new category is really challenging. It's a different type of challenge retools, a new category. Segment was a new category. You're not just selling a point solution. You're not just selling a product. You have to create budgets. It's like you're not selling a technology. You're selling a behavior change. And you have to create both. And my friend's dad said to me once it's a lot easier to sell a Ferrari when someone knows what a car is.”
2022-09-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: How To Interview Sales People; The Red Flags and What to Look For, How Sales Leaders Should Change Goals and Quotas in Harder Markets and What Reps Can Do To Ensure They Hit Their Numbers in These Markets with Eleanor Dorfman, Sales Leader @ Ret · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that's a massive advantage. I don't see myself now as a sales team builder, even though I've moved into specializing in sales. I see myself as a company builder. It's why I like early stage startups. It's why I like to always see the complete picture and always ground every decision I make in what is the complete customer lifecycle, what's do I need to happen three months, six months from now? What are we going to run into? What are the challenges we're going to face? I think it's helped me see around corners in a way that you can't if you haven't been exposed to as many different types of conversations. I mean, I've been in hundreds of QBRs of renewals calls, of turn save calls, of discovery calls, of VOC stoping calls, like the pattern recognition you can build by just having been present in so many conversations in so much of the customer lifecycle. I think is a huge advantage.”
2022-09-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: How To Interview Sales People; The Red Flags and What to Look For, How Sales Leaders Should Change Goals and Quotas in Harder Markets and What Reps Can Do To Ensure They Hit Their Numbers in These Markets with Eleanor Dorfman, Sales Leader @ Ret · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hindsight makes me feel incredibly uncomfortable, but I was looking one day for a solution to that, and I found a tech startup that was solving that exact infrastructure problem called Clever. And I thought it might be a little more fun at this stage in my career to do work at a startup and to solve a problem I'm really passionate about. They didn't feel the same way. They rejected me three times. Ultimately, agreed to give me a shot and take me on as an unpaid intern for three months. And I moved across the country, moved in with my mom's college roommate until I had a full-time job and worked there at clever for three months and then ultimately joined full-time and left as the head of customer success and solutions engineering and partner engineering.”
2022-09-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: How To Interview Sales People; The Red Flags and What to Look For, How Sales Leaders Should Change Goals and Quotas in Harder Markets and What Reps Can Do To Ensure They Hit Their Numbers in These Markets with Eleanor Dorfman, Sales Leader @ Ret · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source