Articles by Dharmesh Shah
Aligning Vectors: What Elon Musk Taught Me About Growing A BusinessDharmesh covers: • What’s A Vector? • Applying “Aligning Vectors” to Your Organization • How To Increase Progress Without Better People Or More Funding
- Building Startup Sales Teams: Tips For Founders
Dharmesh provides tips for founders setting up a sales team: • The founders should be selling in the early days, not hiring salespeople too early. • Focus on revenue, not fancy titles. Hire for "sales", not "VP of Sales". • Hire salespeople gradually to learn what works best for your product and customers. • Be prepared for a culture shock if you're not used to working with salespeople. They can be different from engineers and founders. • Keep compensation plans simple at first, then refine later. • Apply agile methodologies to sales processes - iterate and improve. • Salespeople will act rationally based on incentives, so set incentives properly. • Track customer happiness and success, not just deals closed. • Understand your business economics like cost of customer acquisition and lifetime customer value. • Use a CRM system to track sales data for insights and improvement.