The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Sales: Biggest Lessons Scaling Slack from $6M to $1BN in ARR | How to Build a Customer Success Machine and Where Most Go Wrong | The Framework to Hire All Sales Reps: Take-Home Assignments, Hiring Panels and more with AJ Tennant @ Glean
23 Oct 2024
Full Episode
This is 20 Sales with me, Harry Stebbings. Now, 20 Sales is the monthly show where we sit down with the best sales leaders to discuss their tips, tactics, and strategies when it comes to scaling both sales and customer success teams. Today, we have one of the best in the hot seat. AJ Tennant.
AJ Tennant is the Vice President of Sales and Success at Glean, where he's had more than a 20x increase in revenue and a 100x increase in user base in the two and a half years he's been at Glean. Before Glean, he had incredible runs at both Slack and Facebook. At Slack, most notably, AJ helped grow revenue from 6 million to more than a billion in ARR.
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This is so, because we were planning on doing it remote. And then when you said you were in London, I was like, yes, this is it. Thank you so much for doing this. Thank you. I'm stoked to be here. Now, I want to start with sales leadership skills and sales skills. A lot of people suggest that they are born. You're a natural sales person.
Do you believe that sales skills are born or they can be learned?
I fundamentally believe they can be learned. I think a lot of people would say it's innate. You're born with it. It's at your personality, someone that's outgoing. But my philosophy is that humans can learn anything if they're taught and they have the motivation to do it. I've seen in my career someone that's joined both Facebook and Slack that many people were like, oh, they're not outgoing.
They don't have that. gregarious nature, but they were able to navigate just like figuring out how to do sales because they had the work ethic, they had the desire to learn. And ultimately it's about inputs and it's not just about being a personable, like gregarious person.
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