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04.15.13 // Through the Looking Glass: Hiring Sales People

He’s a big bad wolf in your neighborhood
Not bad meaning bad, but bad meaning good
—Run DMC, Peter Piper

Artist: Run DMC
Track: Peter Piper
Album: Raising Hell
Released: 1986
Label: Profile/Arista Records
Lyrics

Perhaps the most common mistake that I see a technical founder make when building her sales organization is she applies strategies that worked in building the engineering team to the sales hiring process. This may sound shocking, but sales people are different than engineers and treating them like engineers does not work well at all.

It starts with the hiring process. If you attempt to hire sales people using the same assumptions that worked with engineering, then here are some of the things that will go wrong:

The Interview

A good engineering interview will include some set of difficult problems to solve. It might even require that the candidate write a short program. In addition, it will test the candidate’s knowledge of the tools she uses in great depth. A small portion of the interview may address personality traits, but smart managers will tolerate a very wide variety of personalities to find the best engineers.

A good sales interview is the opposite. You can quiz them on hard sales problems all day long, but only a horrible sales rep won’t be able to bluff her way through the most intricate quiz on how to sell a complex account. On the other hand, great sales people tend to have very specific personality traits. Specifically, great sales people must be courageous, competitive and hungry. They also need enough intelligence to get the job done. That’s the magic formula. Hire engineers with that profile and you’ll fail. Hire sales people who are really smart problem solvers, but lack courage, hunger and competitiveness, and your company will go out of business.

Dick Harrison, CEO of Parametric Technologies, home of perhaps the greatest enterprise sales force ever built, interviewed Mark Cranney, the greatest sales manager I have ever met, as follows:

Dick: “I’ll bet you got into a lot of fights when you were a youth didn’t you?”
Mark: “Well yes, Dick, I did get into a few.”
Dick: “Well, how’d you do?”
Mark: “Well, I was about 35-1.”
Dick: “Tell me about the 1.”
Mark tells him the story, which Dick enjoys immensely.
Dick: “Do you think you could kick my ass?”
Mark pauses and asks himself: “Is Dick questioning my courage or my intelligence?” Then replies: “Could or would?”

Dick hires Mark on the spot.

Ask an engineer that same set of questions and at best she’d be confused and at worst she’d be horrified. By asking Mark those questions, Dick quickly found out:

If Mark had the courage to stay in the box and not get flustered
That Mark came from a rough environment and was plenty hungry
That Mark was super competitive, but smart enough to calculate his answer

Hiring sales people is different.

The Background

When screening engineers from other companies, it’s smart to value engineers from great companies more than those from mediocre companies. All things being equal, always interview the Google engineer over the Quest Software engineer. Why? Because, as an engineer, you have to be way better to get a job at Google than at Quest. In addition, Google’s engineering environment and techniques are state-of-the-art, so engineers who come from there will be well trained in an environment with high standards.

In contrast, anybody with a pulse can sell a massively winning product like Google Ads or VMware hypervisors, but people who consistently sold Lanier copiers against Xerox were elite. In fact, it might be a good sign that a sales rep was successful at a bad company. To succeed at selling a losing product, you must develop seriously superior sales techniques. In addition, you have to be massively competitive and incredibly hungry to survive in that environment.

The Cost of Making a Mistake

Great engineering organizations strive never to make hiring mistakes as hiring mistakes can be very costly. Not only do you lose the productivity that you might have gained from the hire, but you might well incur severe technical debt. To make matters worse, even when an engineering manager recognizes she’s made a mistake, she’s often slow to correct it, leading to more debt and delay. In addition, building an engineering organization too quickly will cause all kinds of communication issues, which makes slow hiring in engineering a really smart thing to do.

On the other hand, you often can’t afford to build out your sales force too slowly, especially if you have significant competition. Sales people, when compared to engineers, work in relative isolation, so there’s productivity loss, but relatively little long-term debt or fast growth issues. Sales managers generally don’t have issues with firing poor performers, so sales people go fast. I have a friend who was fond of saying, “We have two kinds of sales people: rich and new.”

The Conclusion

Applying engineering hiring techniques to a sales organization is like eating poison ivy to get more green vegetables. You will get the opposite of what you want.

04.11.13 // Ken Coleman

I done kept it real from the jump
Living at my mama’s house we’d argue every month
N@#$a, I was trying to get it on my own
Working all night, traffic on the way home
And my uncle calling me like “Where ya at?
I gave you the keys told ya bring it right back”
N@#$a, I just think its funny how it goes
Now I’m on the road, half a million for a show
And we started from the bottom now we here
—Drake, Started From the Bottom

Artist: Drake
Track: Started From the Bottom
Album: Nothing was the Same
Released: 2002
Label: Young Money, Cash Money, Republic
Lyrics

When I was 20 years old, I was a computer science major at Columbia University and I needed a summer job. It was 1986 and I was barely aware of a place called Silicon Valley. In those days there was no “startup culture or entrepreneurship movement”. Most people were only recently becoming aware that computers existed and almost nobody knew where they came from. The startups themselves were quite different than today’s breed. Most of the important startups were computer companies like Sun Microsystems, Apollo Computer, Cydrome, Compaq and Silicon Graphics. In 1986, there was no outsourced manufacturing and China was largely irrelevant to the technology industry. All the companies in those days had their own manufacturing—often in Silicon Valley—and were very large in terms of employees compared to today. Having more than 100 employees prior to shipping a product was not unusual.

Although there were important exceptions, very few 20-year-olds started companies in those days. I was not the exception—I just wanted a job. I wanted a job, but I knew absolutely nobody in technology or in Silicon Valley and there were no technology startups in New York. I had no idea how to get a job and then I got a break.

My father’s friend had just married Ed McCracken, the CEO of Silicon Graphics. I had my father ask her if she would talk to Ed, which she did. Ed then passed me to his head of Administration, Ken Coleman. Eureka! I had made the proverbial “friend of a friend of a friend” connection.

Ken agreed to meet with the son-of-a-friend-of-the-CEO’s-wife. After we met, he also agreed to take a chance on me as a summer intern.

Silicon Graphics was the Google of its day—the place where all the best engineers wanted to work. The company invented modern computer graphics and was building the coolest machines in the world. Prior to arriving, the only jobs that I’d held were paperboy, busboy, waiter, bellhop and valet attendant. Coming from those environments, I thought that I had died and gone to heaven. One day I’m washing dishes and the next day I’m helping debug the operating system that would run the graphics for Jurassic Park. In one connection, I’d gone from the outhouse to the penthouse. Everybody at Silicon Graphics seemed to be a genius, the products were incredible and I never wanted to leave work. I knew that I had to do whatever it took to get myself to Silicon Valley permanently.

Unfortunately, I had not been properly socialized for life inside a big corporation. As the son of a new left radical (who later completely switched sides), I was combat trained. If somebody said something that I didn’t agree with, I wouldn’t hesitate to attack them ruthlessly, call their ideas stupid or personally insult them. I couldn’t help it. It was how I was raised. It was like I was Huey P. Newton and everybody else was The Man. I am quite sure that I would have and should have been fired several times, but for some reason Ken Coleman took an interest in me and smoothed things over whenever I got myself into trouble. He was my personal guardian angel. He helped me to build my life and career doing what I loved.

Over the years, despite being about 100 times more important than me, Ken always found time to meet with me and give me pointers about how to be effective. Much of what you read on this blog originally came from Ken.

After we met, Ken’s career continued to accelerate. He eventually became the chief operating officer of Silicon Graphics. He is now chairman of Saama Technologies and on the board of City National Bank, United Online and Accelrys. And Ken continues to help people like me. He helps people figure out how to fit into the amazing, innovative, magical world known as Silicon Valley.

This fits in very well with how we think about Andreessen Horowitz. We help technical founders learn how to be CEOs, we help engineers find the right company and we help executives find the right match. So, it’s natural, obvious and awesome that today we announce that Ken Coleman is joining Andreessen Horowitz as a Special Advisor.