What is a Renaissance Rep?
The term was coined by Mark Leslie and Charles Holloway in their seminal article on scaling a sales team, available here: http://signallake.com/innovation/SalesLearningCurve.pdf
In a nutshell, during the initial phase of product launch, your sales people need to focus on helping the organization grow, not just on hitting their quotas.
“The types of skills needed during this phase differ from those needed to sell more mature products. They include a facility for communicating with many parts of the organization, a tolerance of ambiguity, a deep interest in the product technology, and …must be resourceful, able to develop their own sales models and collateral materials as needed. We think of this kind of person as the “renaissance rep.” ”
As the first sales hire at analytics company Mixpanel, this summary resonated deeply with me. When I joined the company we were still figuring out how to sell to enterprises; we grew to several hundred people and built a scalable machine.
After 4 years at Mixpanel I joined InVision, a design collaboration platform, to help build their Enterprise sales team. InVision is incredibly unique in that it’s 100% distributed, which has many pros but also presents some challenges in hiring and growing.
These are some of the lessons I’ve learned over the last decade in building sales teams.
