A Path to Different: How B2B SaaS Startups Can Change the Way They Recruit for Sales
30-second read
I've sold SaaS.
I've sold highly consultative, enterprise-level services.
I've sold smoothies to customers and retailers. (Yep. I ran a smoothie delivery business out of my kitchen and designed a retail line for Whole Foods.)
I've sold flowers. (My dad is a florist.)
I've sold wine.
I've sold insurance.
I've sold recruiting services.
I've even sold retail skincare products at the mall.
I've sold a lot of things.
The fact that someone needs specific selling experience in order to learn a product, run a demo, and speak to decision-makers feels ridiculous.
It’s not hard to learn the product or learn the demo or learn a new industry or to even pivot your career.
What's hard is accumulating the experiences––personal and professional––that unlock the confidence, intuition, and self-awareness that enable others to like and trust you.
Those are the unteachable qualities.
And those people exist. But they are being filtered out by a system that requires 5 years of SaaS sales experience in order to be deemed “qualified”.
The result: homogenous bro cultures with high turnover.
I want B2B tech companies to rethink how they’re recruiting salespeople.
And see this as one path to different in a field that suffers from a lot of sameness.
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