4 Important Reasons To Just Do It We realize some of you still need help convincing your team to go all­in with specialization. It can be daunting to take a sales team that has been closing and managing their own accounts, and then ask them to change......everything. Here are the four essential reasons for doing it: 1. Effectiveness: When people are focused on one area, they become experts. For example, in 10 years, we’ve never met a team of generalized salespeople that didn’t struggle with generating or responding to leads. 2. Farm team/talent:Having multiple roles in sales gives you a simple career path to hire, train, grow and promote people internally. This creates a much cheaper, less risky, and more effective way to recruit, rather than relying too heavily on outside hires. (A rule of thumb: Over the long term, grow 2/3 of your people internally and hire 1/3 externally for new ideas and blood.) 3. Insights: By breaking your roles into separate functions, you can easily identify and fix your bottlenecks. When everyone is doing everything, it’’ s like having a tangled ball of yarn you can’t tease apart. 4. Scalability: Specialization makes it easier to hire, train, measure, grow and promote people across the board CASE STUDY: ACQUIA ON THE $100M REVENUE TRAJECTORY THE #1 MIS­HIRE IS THE VP/HEAD OF SALES Early stage companies are painfully “misfiring by mis­hiring” the most important role on the sales team. In fact, there’s a venture capitalist saying I hate that goes something like “You’ve Got to Get Past Your First VP of Sales’ Carcass” or “The Second VP of Sales Is When You Really Start Selling” or variants thereof. In start­ups – especially Software­As­A­Service (SaaS)/ tech, the majority of first VP Sales fail. They don’t even make it 12 months (we’ve heard that the average tenure for VP Sales of early companies in the valley averages 18 months – and that includes the winners – ouch!). Let’s look at what those Sales VPs should do since most founder/ CEOs are looking for the wrong things – especially first time founders, or founders who haven’t spent much time in or with sales.