#34 Dominic Blank / Tackling the shortage of B2B tech sales talent with Headstart Academy

Finding, attracting and ramping sales talent as an entrepreneur is really hard. Turns out the root cause for this is not the above task, but the shortage of overall available trained sales talent in relation to demand. Dominic co-founded https://www.headstartacademy.co/ to tackle exactly this problem and these are 3 things that we learnt from him: 1️⃣ Great sales talent shares 5 traits: coachability, curiosity, drive, resilience and prior success. These do NOT need to be sales-related, but e.g. top 1% of class, in sports, in vocational training or similar (Source: Dominic & Team interviewed 50+ VP Sales) 2️⃣ Both self-care in terms of discipline, self-organisation and hunger COMBINED with a strong team spirit is crucial for success 3️⃣ Entrepreneurs need to validate their sales approach themselves by winning the first 10, in some fields even 100 customers, and that cannot be outsourced. Only once product-market-fit is there, it makes sense to get senior, but hungry sales talent - if you can afford it and de-risk it. Otherwise invest into junior, but trained sales talent.