YouSaid · the spoken record

Kim Graves

lines on the record: 85
first: 2025-06-27
most recent: 2025-06-27
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“That's a good question. And no, I would say this is diversified within your portfolio of the segment that you're selling into. So if you're a commercial seller selling to SMB, your big accounts might actually be like the $50,000 accounts and above while still making sure that you're knocking out the $10,000 to $20,000 deals. If you're an enterprise seller, it's most likely like your big accounts are those million dollar deals and the velocity accounts are like the 50, the 100k deals that you're bringing in.”
2025-06-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: How to Layer Enterprise Sales on PLG | How to Sell AI Tools To Enterprises That Are Scared | Should Reps Own Their Own Pipeline | Mistakes All Founders Make When Moving From Founder-Led to Rep-Led Sales with Kim Graves · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The customers that typically evaluate more quickly, you know you can win them, there are all the right signals here for you, and ensure that you're not minimizing focus on those accounts and so that you build this pipeline that can reliably get you to your number.”
2025-06-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: How to Layer Enterprise Sales on PLG | How to Sell AI Tools To Enterprises That Are Scared | Should Reps Own Their Own Pipeline | Mistakes All Founders Make When Moving From Founder-Led to Rep-Led Sales with Kim Graves · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We say $100,000 plus, and that's actually a really good question because I think it's important to have a dual focus as a seller. So you have your strategic deals that are $100,000 and above, but you also have your velocity deals that are more tried and trud. So those are like your 20, 50K deals that you know you can win and that are less risky. And I've seen that where if you have a diversified portfolio, similar to financial advising, like you don't want to just focus on the highest risk stock. Like you want to make sure you have a diversified portfolio. I bring that mentality into sales to think about, okay, in your week, in your months as you're planning your path to target, what are the accounts that you should be focused on? You should have a few big bet accounts that are going to get you the hundred thousand or million dollar deals. And then you should have the tried and true accounts that you know that these are”
2025-06-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: How to Layer Enterprise Sales on PLG | How to Sell AI Tools To Enterprises That Are Scared | Should Reps Own Their Own Pipeline | Mistakes All Founders Make When Moving From Founder-Led to Rep-Led Sales with Kim Graves · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, my biggest advice is to think about the key outcomes that you're looking for the seller to achieve in the early days. And oftentimes it's not like they make their first huge sale, it's actually looking at the leading indicators before that. And we're actually redesigning our onboarding program at Notion. And what I really like about it is we're thinking about the key outcomes that we expect our sellers to learn in the first few weeks. As an example, one of the first key outcomes is learning how to prioritize their book of business. What are the accounts that they're going to focus on that deserves the time and the attention to ensure that we're focusing on the right accounts?”
2025-06-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: How to Layer Enterprise Sales on PLG | How to Sell AI Tools To Enterprises That Are Scared | Should Reps Own Their Own Pipeline | Mistakes All Founders Make When Moving From Founder-Led to Rep-Led Sales with Kim Graves · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The expectations are set up front, especially in the US. You can see what the comp ranges are for all of our jobs. And so it's important to also see as like a seller, okay, does that range meet what I'm looking for? And then what I would say in a company that's a startup or scale up, if you're just looking to maximize your OTE, that's probably not the best place. Like go to one of the large giants because that's where you're going to maximize your OTE. You also want to think about the equity and the full package. It depends on where you are in your career. Like early days, I actually think it's a big miss to just focus on comp and to not focus on the bigger picture. Because if you're at a fast growing company, that is doing really well. Your equity is going to be way more meaningful than your OTE.”
2025-06-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: How to Layer Enterprise Sales on PLG | How to Sell AI Tools To Enterprises That Are Scared | Should Reps Own Their Own Pipeline | Mistakes All Founders Make When Moving From Founder-Led to Rep-Led Sales with Kim Graves · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We do early stages, it's a lot of cross-functional partners, so it's not just sellers on the team, but also looking at the partners that they would be working with most closely. It's similar, but we have a few people on the panel, and we ensure that we have laid out what are the competencies that we're looking for so that we all know what we're looking for.”
2025-06-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: How to Layer Enterprise Sales on PLG | How to Sell AI Tools To Enterprises That Are Scared | Should Reps Own Their Own Pipeline | Mistakes All Founders Make When Moving From Founder-Led to Rep-Led Sales with Kim Graves · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If we, as an example, give an objection and we say, hey, do you offer discounts? And they just make something up and they're like, yes, we offer a 40% discount. And they cave under pressure. Then we're like, or if we ask them a technical question and they just make up an answer versus saying like, hey, let me get back to you. Those are some areas where we're like, okay, there's an integrity piece here. And can they really think on their feet and adapt?”
2025-06-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: How to Layer Enterprise Sales on PLG | How to Sell AI Tools To Enterprises That Are Scared | Should Reps Own Their Own Pipeline | Mistakes All Founders Make When Moving From Founder-Led to Rep-Led Sales with Kim Graves · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Say there are two ways. The first is a lack of preparation, a lack of preparation, research, and actually doing their homework to come up with a polished first meeting. And so I'm looking for did they look at our customer stories and read through all of our customer stories? Did they watch all of the videos that we've published about what we're trying to solve? Did they actually sign up for the product and start using it themselves to see what it feels like? And so you can see where someone put a lot of time, put a lot of effort in actually learning, or they sort of just winged it or relied on a playbook that they've used before. And then I would say the second place that people mess up is thinking on their feet. That's very important in sales. We say a seller needs to be audible ready. So if we throw them off, what do they do?”
2025-06-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: How to Layer Enterprise Sales on PLG | How to Sell AI Tools To Enterprises That Are Scared | Should Reps Own Their Own Pipeline | Mistakes All Founders Make When Moving From Founder-Led to Rep-Led Sales with Kim Graves · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Few days. Because the other thing is we need to move fast. We need to get hires. And so we can draw out our hiring process. We want to get hires and fast. We give them a few days because we also want to see how can they be a pace setter, how can they deliver with short time deliverables? Because that's going to be the reality of the environment that they're operating when they're getting here.”
2025-06-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: How to Layer Enterprise Sales on PLG | How to Sell AI Tools To Enterprises That Are Scared | Should Reps Own Their Own Pipeline | Mistakes All Founders Make When Moving From Founder-Led to Rep-Led Sales with Kim Graves · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We do, especially for our sellers in commercial and mid market. We expect them to be very well versed in the product. And so we'll ask them to research our product. And let's do a case scenario where we're going to be a customer. You're going to pretend to be the account executive selling or product. And let's go through a first call to see what that sounds like. What we're looking for is what are the questions that they're asking? Can they adapt and learn about what we're selling and the actual problems that we're solving? And then without any training, how far can they get with our product? And that's another example of assessing problem solving. Like can they be resourceful and do this without a lot of guidance?”
2025-06-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: How to Layer Enterprise Sales on PLG | How to Sell AI Tools To Enterprises That Are Scared | Should Reps Own Their Own Pipeline | Mistakes All Founders Make When Moving From Founder-Led to Rep-Led Sales with Kim Graves · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly, because it will be everything from like I, we didn't have enough inbound or my manager left and I didn't know what to do. And so those are the places where you're like, okay. So what did you do?”
2025-06-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: How to Layer Enterprise Sales on PLG | How to Sell AI Tools To Enterprises That Are Scared | Should Reps Own Their Own Pipeline | Mistakes All Founders Make When Moving From Founder-Led to Rep-Led Sales with Kim Graves · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is where past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior. So asking for stories and examples of how they've solved problems in the past. Questions that I really like are tell me about a time you weren't set up for success. Because then you can also start to hear, not only did they solve that problem, but did they take accountability or were they a victim in that scenario? Another line of question that I really like is tell me about a really big challenge that you had to overcome. Great. Tell me another challenge that was really hard that you had to figure out the right path forward. And you'll start to see like, is there a pattern of them taking an ambiguous problem and just finding a way to persevere and get to a great outcome?”
2025-06-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: How to Layer Enterprise Sales on PLG | How to Sell AI Tools To Enterprises That Are Scared | Should Reps Own Their Own Pipeline | Mistakes All Founders Make When Moving From Founder-Led to Rep-Led Sales with Kim Graves · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To dig into what are the key competencies that you should be looking for. And when I'm talking to early stage founders, there's three competencies that I think are really important. The first is high motivation. The second is And the third is a continuous learner. If you start to define what those competency look like, then you can start figuring out what is your process, what are the questions that you can ask so that you can figure out whether that's a great hire for your business.”
2025-06-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: How to Layer Enterprise Sales on PLG | How to Sell AI Tools To Enterprises That Are Scared | Should Reps Own Their Own Pipeline | Mistakes All Founders Make When Moving From Founder-Led to Rep-Led Sales with Kim Graves · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So if I'm a founder, I would make sure that I have some great go-to-market advisors on my board or in my arena. And I would talk to them and learn what do they look for in hiring great early sellers? What are the key competencies that are important to look for? And knowing the business and the unique aspects of your business, what's important to that business to double down on. So if it's a certain industry that you're selling into, perhaps it's some industry knowledge. I can't think of another example, but it's like starting to define what that looks like because I think a common mistake is not knowing what you're looking for and then just relying on heuristics that can lead you astray. Heuristics like they come from a big flashy company so they must be a great seller or heuristics like they're a great communicator and presenter. Customers are going to love them. That's surface level. Like you really need”
2025-06-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: How to Layer Enterprise Sales on PLG | How to Sell AI Tools To Enterprises That Are Scared | Should Reps Own Their Own Pipeline | Mistakes All Founders Make When Moving From Founder-Led to Rep-Led Sales with Kim Graves · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Found it's a little bit of both, and it's not as a matter of like where they are in their career because I think you want to build a diverse sales team. And so typically you hire three to four reps. Some could be earlier on their career, but I've shown a high aptitude for learning and then others can be potentially making a career switch or they're really excited about building. And that's the thing. They're not excited about just making a lot of money because that's not the point in the first year of sales. They're actually really excited about learning and building something and bringing the mission forward.”
2025-06-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: How to Layer Enterprise Sales on PLG | How to Sell AI Tools To Enterprises That Are Scared | Should Reps Own Their Own Pipeline | Mistakes All Founders Make When Moving From Founder-Led to Rep-Led Sales with Kim Graves · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A Harvard business review, but I highly recommend founders to read this article because it talks about the stages of building a sales team. And the earliest stage of building a sales team is not looking for traditional coin operated reps that are going to come in and just build the sales playbook for you. The earliest stages are actually about learning, similar to how if you were bringing a manufacturing product to market, like you were selling bathing suits, your first 10 that you make are going to be really expensive. But you're going to learn a lot in making those first 10 bathing suits. That's like when you're hiring sales. Your first few sales reps, say three to four sales reps, it's going to be very costly because you're not going to know what they're exactly doing, but we call them the Renaissance reps, where they're generalists, they're adaptable, they're highly skilled in communicating and collaborating with the internal stakeholders at your company, that being marketing product.”
2025-06-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: How to Layer Enterprise Sales on PLG | How to Sell AI Tools To Enterprises That Are Scared | Should Reps Own Their Own Pipeline | Mistakes All Founders Make When Moving From Founder-Led to Rep-Led Sales with Kim Graves · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My biggest advice for the early stages of building a sales team is thinking through it as if you were thinking through a manufacturing supply chain. And this idea comes from the HBR article of the sales learning curve. Have you read it?”
2025-06-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: How to Layer Enterprise Sales on PLG | How to Sell AI Tools To Enterprises That Are Scared | Should Reps Own Their Own Pipeline | Mistakes All Founders Make When Moving From Founder-Led to Rep-Led Sales with Kim Graves · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, exactly. Having the founder start to build sales initially that helps bring intuition into the product. It also helps to figure out who to hire for. Like if you don't know who your ideal customer profile is or what kind of sales motion is going to work for your company, how do you know who you're going to hire as a sales leader who will actually bring your business to the next level?”
2025-06-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: How to Layer Enterprise Sales on PLG | How to Sell AI Tools To Enterprises That Are Scared | Should Reps Own Their Own Pipeline | Mistakes All Founders Make When Moving From Founder-Led to Rep-Led Sales with Kim Graves · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wouldn't even call it well, I guess it is ICP. It's figuring out who is your ideal customer profile, and I strongly believe it's the founder because that's not only going to guide your go-to-market strategy, it's also going to guide your product roadmap and where do you continue to lean in? So back to my Slack example, like we actually didn't lean into community roadmap features. We leaned into B2B specifically for our distribution as we went up market.”
2025-06-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: How to Layer Enterprise Sales on PLG | How to Sell AI Tools To Enterprises That Are Scared | Should Reps Own Their Own Pipeline | Mistakes All Founders Make When Moving From Founder-Led to Rep-Led Sales with Kim Graves · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's like, what is the industry that they're operating in? How big is their company? Where are they located? Are they located in major cities or are they located in a certain geographical area? Basically everything outside of your product that you could use to describe them. And then going even deeper inside of those companies if you are B2B, who are the personas in those companies that are getting the most value? And I would use that to work backwards to figure out who is getting the most value that unlocks the most budget that we should be focusing on.”
2025-06-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: How to Layer Enterprise Sales on PLG | How to Sell AI Tools To Enterprises That Are Scared | Should Reps Own Their Own Pipeline | Mistakes All Founders Make When Moving From Founder-Led to Rep-Led Sales with Kim Graves · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So if I was a founder and I had a PLG motion, so I saw that customers are already using my product, I would start doing a lot of interviews. And I would interview all of those customers. And I would understand what motivated them to try the product. How are they using it today? How do they see it fitting into their business priorities and what they're ultimately trying to drive as a business or if it's a consumer, as a consumer? I would start to put in the pieces of what do those customers look at and instead of looking at the product-led growth signals, which is the common trap, I would actually look at the firm graphic details.”
2025-06-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: How to Layer Enterprise Sales on PLG | How to Sell AI Tools To Enterprises That Are Scared | Should Reps Own Their Own Pipeline | Mistakes All Founders Make When Moving From Founder-Led to Rep-Led Sales with Kim Graves · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of communities, it's a very different post sales motion. You're seeking or different than if you were selling to a company, it would have led your product roadmap in a very different direction because you would have had to invest in features like inappropriate message flagging within a community. Those groups also don't have a lot of money. And so while they might have had a lot of licenses, there's not a lot of budget to unlock there. And so we made a very deliberate decision to not focus on communities. That was great if they were using Slack from a product-like growth promotion. They were using our freemium product, but from a B2B sales motion, we were very focused on selling to B2B.”
2025-06-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: How to Layer Enterprise Sales on PLG | How to Sell AI Tools To Enterprises That Are Scared | Should Reps Own Their Own Pipeline | Mistakes All Founders Make When Moving From Founder-Led to Rep-Led Sales with Kim Graves · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not quite. And this is the common trap that PLG companies fall into because they'll typically look at their data and look at product usage signals. And they'll use that product signal to figure out where should they focus. And so at Slack, we saw that our biggest workspaces were actually communities. They were professional networks that were using Slack to trade best practices. There were student groups that were using Slack to work on projects. And the sales team was tempted to sell them because our sales team was using product-led growth signals and seeing what are the biggest workspaces because lots of active members translated to lots of licenses. And it was very important that we actually remained focused on the biggest customers that had the most value from the product. And so that wasn't necessarily communities because when you think”
2025-06-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: How to Layer Enterprise Sales on PLG | How to Sell AI Tools To Enterprises That Are Scared | Should Reps Own Their Own Pipeline | Mistakes All Founders Make When Moving From Founder-Led to Rep-Led Sales with Kim Graves · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I've spent my career at PLG Company Slack and Notion, which have great distribution across a whole host of different customers. You have students, you have communities, you have B2B companies across all industries, across all departments. The uniformity tends to start very general. But the key here is ensuring that your sales team is very focused so that you can build or bring in the most successful customers. And those customers tend to have patterns.”
2025-06-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: How to Layer Enterprise Sales on PLG | How to Sell AI Tools To Enterprises That Are Scared | Should Reps Own Their Own Pipeline | Mistakes All Founders Make When Moving From Founder-Led to Rep-Led Sales with Kim Graves · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Stage three is solution design. This is when you start to talk about your solution and start to think through where can your solution help them based on the problems that you've heard. The key here is not taking all of that research and discovery that you've just done and then completely neglecting it and just talking about all of the wonderful problems that your solution solves for, it's actually starting to connect the pieces. Or if you're hearing pieces that they're actually not within your wheelhouse or like that's not what you do best at it's also being honest and being the challenging skeptic to say like is this deal really going to go anywhere or should we per ways?”
2025-06-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: How to Layer Enterprise Sales on PLG | How to Sell AI Tools To Enterprises That Are Scared | Should Reps Own Their Own Pipeline | Mistakes All Founders Make When Moving From Founder-Led to Rep-Led Sales with Kim Graves · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, we record all of these calls. We have both gone. Which records the calls and the video, but we also use Notion AI internally to transcribe those calls”
2025-06-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: How to Layer Enterprise Sales on PLG | How to Sell AI Tools To Enterprises That Are Scared | Should Reps Own Their Own Pipeline | Mistakes All Founders Make When Moving From Founder-Led to Rep-Led Sales with Kim Graves · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is what I found when you really loved the product that you're selling. This was the same at Slack and at Notion, where we love selling the product and our customers who are using the product love hearing about the product and the features. What mistake sellers make early on is they'll talk about the product. They'll have premature pitching syndrome. And so it's hard to stay in this zone of let's just ask questions and let's actually not even talk about the product. We're just going to talk about the observations we've seen of what makes the company great, what makes that person great, what are their new challenges that they're coming up against, what are the biggest risks that might prevent them from getting there, and just like really leaning into that conversation without talking about your product at all.”
2025-06-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: How to Layer Enterprise Sales on PLG | How to Sell AI Tools To Enterprises That Are Scared | Should Reps Own Their Own Pipeline | Mistakes All Founders Make When Moving From Founder-Led to Rep-Led Sales with Kim Graves · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Agree. You need to create that psychological safety if you're creating a fear based environment or you don't have that safety, people are not going to tell you the real answer. They're going to hold back.”
2025-06-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: How to Layer Enterprise Sales on PLG | How to Sell AI Tools To Enterprises That Are Scared | Should Reps Own Their Own Pipeline | Mistakes All Founders Make When Moving From Founder-Led to Rep-Led Sales with Kim Graves · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About stage five negotiation, instead of calling it negotiation, we expect our sellers to embody the mindset of a value articulator. So how are you truly articulating the value of your product? It's a nuance, but I don't know if you think about this even in podcast hosting, where instead of thinking about the content that you're going to ask, it's actually thinking about what's the tone, the body language, the feeling that I want to give off in this conversation because people often say they'll remember how you made them feel versus what you actually said.”
2025-06-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: How to Layer Enterprise Sales on PLG | How to Sell AI Tools To Enterprises That Are Scared | Should Reps Own Their Own Pipeline | Mistakes All Founders Make When Moving From Founder-Led to Rep-Led Sales with Kim Graves · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was going to add, and that's actually something that we've brought into our sales process here at Notion. So when you're building a sales process, it's very typical to think about the stages of the deal. Stage one, qualify the deal. Stage two, do discovery. Stage five is negotiation. Stage seven is closed one. Instead of calling it those stages, we actually think about the mindset in each of those stages because that's what we want our sellers to embody. It makes for a much more adaptable mindset than just having the exit criteria or the checkboxes that a seller needs to do at each stage of the deal. So as an example at stage two, we call that the curious investigator. So we expect our sellers to embody being a curious investigator that researches the heck out of their customers, understands how they make money, ask questions from a place of genuine curiosity. And then just what we were saying.”
2025-06-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: How to Layer Enterprise Sales on PLG | How to Sell AI Tools To Enterprises That Are Scared | Should Reps Own Their Own Pipeline | Mistakes All Founders Make When Moving From Founder-Led to Rep-Led Sales with Kim Graves · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Things typically seem very friendly. As soon as you get to the negotiation stage, instead of thinking about it as a tense conversation, think about it as another conversation because your customer is going to feel your energy. So if your energy is, oof, I don't know if they're going to like this price or this is expensive. I'm scared what they're going to say. They're going to feel that energy. Whereas if you just go in and you say, hey, so we've been talking for a while. Here's the value that I'm hearing that we can bring to you. And here are the problems that we're solving. This is what it's going to cost and pause and just see what they say. Because they're probably going to say something like, whoa, this is expensive. And instead of going into defending your product and why the price is the price, go back into question asking. Go into like, okay, tell me more. Why do you think it's expensive? What do you think is the right price to pay?”
2025-06-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: How to Layer Enterprise Sales on PLG | How to Sell AI Tools To Enterprises That Are Scared | Should Reps Own Their Own Pipeline | Mistakes All Founders Make When Moving From Founder-Led to Rep-Led Sales with Kim Graves · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My advice is don't treat it as awkward. Treat it as any other conversation that you're having with the customer. Early stages of a deal, you lean into discovery, and that's where you're learning about them, asking questions.”
2025-06-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: How to Layer Enterprise Sales on PLG | How to Sell AI Tools To Enterprises That Are Scared | Should Reps Own Their Own Pipeline | Mistakes All Founders Make When Moving From Founder-Led to Rep-Led Sales with Kim Graves · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would tell myself, be confident. I would say that especially in getting into the customer calls and when the customer calls got hard because it was easy enough to talk to someone who loved using Slack, loved the product, but then as soon as they asked for a discount or they had an objection, like they were evaluating Slack with a competitor, I started to feel a little bit more insecure. I would say to myself, you've got this. Like it's all in confidence in like in how you present yourself and just be confident. You got this role for a reason and like learn as much as you can.”
2025-06-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: How to Layer Enterprise Sales on PLG | How to Sell AI Tools To Enterprises That Are Scared | Should Reps Own Their Own Pipeline | Mistakes All Founders Make When Moving From Founder-Led to Rep-Led Sales with Kim Graves · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Skills, and I figured I've got that, so I threw my application in cold on their careers page. I went through a few interviews and I got the job. And it was in the job that I realized that the account manager role was an account executive, a solutions engineer, and a customer success manager all in one helping our customers. From that point forward, I've been in sales ever since. Now I lead our go-to-market team across the Americas at Notion.”
2025-06-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: How to Layer Enterprise Sales on PLG | How to Sell AI Tools To Enterprises That Are Scared | Should Reps Own Their Own Pipeline | Mistakes All Founders Make When Moving From Founder-Led to Rep-Led Sales with Kim Graves · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The interesting thing about my first sales role is I didn't realize it was a sales role until I accepted the job and was in the role. I would say my first customer facing role was at my mom's beauty salon where I was picking up the phone, talking to customers, answering their questions, and booking appointments. And I went to university for marketing. I landed my first job outside of school at a tech startup in a marketing role. And it was there that I started hearing whispers about a local founder in Vancouver who was starting his next gig. And that was Stuart Butterfield, and he was starting Slack. And I became obsessed. I read everything about Slack. I read all of their customer tweets. I read all of their blog posts. I saw on their website that they were hiring their first account manager. Now, I didn't know what an account manager was, but I saw they were looking for someone with great communication.”
2025-06-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: How to Layer Enterprise Sales on PLG | How to Sell AI Tools To Enterprises That Are Scared | Should Reps Own Their Own Pipeline | Mistakes All Founders Make When Moving From Founder-Led to Rep-Led Sales with Kim Graves · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source