What do you look for in a world-class account executive or sales engineer?

Kevin is the Chief Revenue Officer of Abnormal Security, where he leads worldwide revenue generating activities. In this class, Kevin lays out the steps required for building a best-in-class sales organization, starting from early sales hires all the way to expanding to a larger team. He brings strategic and operational experience with over 20 years of success leading global, high-performance sales teams at companies including Vectra AI and Proofpoint.

Kevin Moore: there's a couple of things. It really depends on also again, the state, the stage of the company, the type of persona that you're looking for an earlier stage company is someone that has a hunter mentality, That, that is going to do whatever it takes to break [00:37:00] down doors, to get you the at-bats that you need early, to then, to give you the ability and the company, the ability to sell the product and deliver the value proposition and get feedback from the market. because the reality is, you have enough support when you get that first meeting, you have the enough support that to help you get the right value proposition across the line. That can be even from the founders and CEO.

Heck I think you're an abnormal security, Sanjay Kumar. Who's the,the, the CTO and co-founder was our first se and only yet. Who did all the demos and the installations for six months of my existence here, now we have a big team and we've enabled a very effective se organization, but the reality is, he wouldn't be effective.

And once we got that meeting, so it's really about hiring hunters, right? That are hungry, and have a very strong work ethic. I look for people that are intellectually curious and, who were builders they want to build as opposed to maintain. And then also it's really important for them to have the right growth mindset.

And also it's important to have some level of experience, [00:38:00] but I will always substitute grit and hard work and hunger in the, in a growth mindset and wanting to learn with, I would always substitute that for years of experience because people are going to have to be dynamic.

The one thing that will be constant in earlier stage company has changed. So giving them, having a growth mindset and understanding that you can change, but also being hungry about wanting to be number one, is also equally as.

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What advice would you give to founders without a sales background that have to do a lot of selling early on?

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