Hey friends,
I want to say something early-stage founders don’t like to hear: most sales teams I see look the same:
Ultimately - same way of selling.
Ten, fifteen people, and it feels like one person copied many times.
And almost nobody sees it as a problem. It feels normal.
I think it is a mistake.
One of the biggest ones you can make early.
When you start a company, it is easy to hire people like you.
But a team of copies is a weak sales team in the long term.
There is difference in many aspects of "selling":
If your whole team is the same kind of person, you win one kind of buyer and lose the rest.
And you never understand why.
Different people see different things.
A woman on a team of men reads a room in a way the others cannot.
Someone from another industry brings a network nobody else has.
Someone aggressive on outbound moves a team that is more inclined on inbound or scared of picking up the phone.
Someone deals with objections differently than others thanks to their life prior.
I am not talking only about gender. I mean background. Culture. Religion. Sexuality. Age.
Every different person adds an angle you did not have before.
And this is the part I feel most.
This is the part I see the most impact when I work with a new sales team.
How diverse are they? How unique is *this* team?
Most of the time, the more diverse they are, the better the results they get.
But still, most founders don’t care (?) and focus on copying the same person over and over until it becomes the standard.
But diversity is not something you add later.
You build it from the first three hires. It is a foundation.
Otherwise, one day, you try to add a very different person, and it does not work because the team has one culture that pushes the new person out.
Start different from the beginning, and different becomes normal.
That is the team you want.
Yes, it is less comfortable. Different people push back. They argue. They look at the plan and say they don’t agree.
Good.
That is where better ideas come from.
A team that always agrees is a team that is not thinking. It's levelling (down). It's settling for average.
I don’t have a method for this.
I just know what I see.
The strongest early sales teams I work with look nothing like each other.
The weakest ones are the ones where everybody nods in the same way.
Build your sales team the way you build your product.
From many angles, for many people.
And you will see that in the long run, diversity may be the biggest asset you have.
Thanks for reading this far - If this hits home, send it to a fellow founder or a friend who needs to hear this.
See you all next week!
