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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