Sam Taylor is the VP of Sales and Customer Success @ Loom, an essential tool for hybrid and remote teams allowing you to record quick videos of your screen and cam. At Loom Sam leads Revenue Org including: Direct Sales, Customer Success, Self-Serve Revenue Growth/Assist, Sales Development, Global Customer Support, Revenue Ops + Strategy and Sales Enablement. Prior to Loom, Sam spent over 4 years at Salesforce, following their acquisition of Quip, where he was the first sales leader. Before Salesforce and Quip, Sam spent over 3 years at Dropbox as a mid-market sales leader.

In Today's Episode We Discuss:

1.) Entry into the World of Sales:

• How did Sam land his first big role in sales at Salesforce?
• How did the sales orgs differ when comparing Salesforce to Dropbox?
• What are 1-2 of Sam's biggest lessons from his time at Salesforce and Dropbox that shapes how he thinks today?

2.) Sales People Should Be Customer Therapists:

• What is the right way to approach customer discovery?
• How can sales reps get potential customers on a call in the first place?
• What are the right questions to ask? What engenders the most honesty?
• What are the wrong questions to ask? What are common mistakes?
• How do the best sales reps then feed that back to customer success and product?

3.) The When and The Who:

• When should founders consider hiring their first sales hire?
• Should this hire be a sales leader or a sales rep? What are the nuances?
• What are the characteristics of the best first sales hires?
• What are the first sales hires really on the hook for?
• Why does Sam disagree with the word "playbook" and instead suggest "frameworks"?

4.) How To Hire The Best: The Process

• What are Sam's lessons on what it takes to hire the very best sales reps?
• What are the right questions to ask in the interview process?
• What tangible case studies or tests are done to measure quality?
• Who is brought into the hiring process and at what stage?