BC Startup Sales Podcast – Hiring Sales Generalists Versus Sales Specialists with Eileen Wiens (Intacct)

This week, the Bowery Capital team hosted Eileen Wiens, VP of Emerging & SMB Sales at Intacct, to discuss “Hiring Sales Generalists Versus Sales Specialists.” Intacct is the largest private ERP vendor that provides cloud-based financial management and accounting applications for businesses and CPA firms. The company’s applications are used by more than 8,500 organizations from startups to public companies and are designed to improve business performance and make finance more productive. Eileen Wiens is a technology sales industry veteran with an accomplished track record spanning 20 years in inside sales strategy, quota attainment, team development, lead generation and channel development. Before joining Intaact, Eileen was the VP of Sales at ToutApp and Head of Sales at Hoopla Software. Prior to Hoopla, Eileen led the inside Sales team at Zscaler, a pioneer in cloud-delivered enterprise security, where she established a ten-person sales team that achieved bookings over $1.1 million. Prior to Zscaler, Eileen was Director of Inside Sales at Nimsoft, where she grew the sales team from 12 to 45 account managers in 6 months, and achieved over $17 million in bookings. Eileen’s earlier career includes Sales and Marketing Management positions with a variety of high-growth innovators and industry leaders.

In this podcast episode, Eileen joins us to discuss whether early stage startups should hire sales generalists – individuals with great sales acumen but less experience selling in the specific space – or sales specialists – individuals with very specific knowledge and domain expertise in a particular space – when building out their sales teams. Having led multiple sales teams throughout her career and toying with this question of hiring sales generalists versus sales specialists, Eileen has an in-depth understanding of how a successful sales team operates and shares with us what she looks for in the ideal sales representative. In addition, Eileen shares her insights on the optimal sales interview format, sales team training and motivation, and best practices for new hire on-boarding.

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