What is the right balance between expanding sales team and focusing on the product?

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.

You have to continue to evolve the product to make it more attractive in the market. and that usually starts with your early conversations with those design partners, who, again, ultimately what we'll buy, but the reality is it's one and the same.

Kevin Moore: Cause I feel like 90% of startups actually [00:14:00] fail . Because the founders have product religion, They build a product that they think is cool or solves this niche problem. But the market doesn't adopt in the, in with the velocity that they think they would. but here's the thing is the market will tell you what to do, right?

The market, if you just listen. So it's important to have these conversations, but listen, and then ultimately take their feedback, build it back into the product and do a philosophy. And moral security is a phenomenal job of that. everything that, that this product, everything has been built in this product has been feedback from the market, from prospects, from customers.

And every next new release of course is going to be from the feedback from our customer base and prospect base. but then, you got to do that also with velocity. When you're in a conversation with a prospect, you get them then to acknowledge. That their feedback is helping you build and round out this problem to the point where, or the solution to the point where not that it's bespoke, but the bottom line is they'll help you.

And then as they help you, they will then become reference-able. And then they'll talk to some of [00:15:00] people within their network and they will help you build credibility with this fairly immature product. And so I think that there's no right answer here outside of, you can only build what the market's going to gonna tell you to build, and you should do that with velocity, get it to a foundation, get those, look at those happy early customers to be referenceable and open up and brought into the network.

Then as you start to scale as an organization, start to start, when you're listening to the market and continuing to listen to the market, evolve the product based off of, the, I guess the quantity of demand of different types of solutions.

Thank you. You don't want to be a bad idea. Let's let's skip this next one and go straight to the strategy one,

because cause the channel comes into the pipeline generation thing and I can answer it maybe after or whatever, but I think it goes back to the strategy part.

Up next

What is the role of data in a high performing sales organization?

Series episodes