Segment founder Peter Reinhardt on what makes a salesperson great #vc #tech #sales #saas

I think it's easy to have this sort of TV vision of sales, which is like the SCSI salesperson in the used car lot. That's not effective sales. Our second sales rep in the hiring process, I was like, we can't hire this guy. It's like slick back hair. I was like, this guy's going to sell to developers. You gotta be fucking kidding me. The guy crushed his number every year. I spent time with him traveling around, meeting with customers. When I noticed the customer would be like, Oh, can you tell me a bit more about segments before we get into that? Can you tell me why we're here today? We're interested in how to solve our data problems. He's like, why? Almost accusatory. They would basically outline the entire ROI case before we even got started as to what their actual problem was and how much it was worth to them. And then the sales process was like a slam dunk after that. And they felt like he actually understood them because everything that he was talking about after that was directly targeting their actual pain points as opposed to our imagination of their pain points.