Youβre reading an excerpt of Founding Sales: The Early-Stage Go-To-Market Handbook, a book by Pete Kazanjy. The most in-depth, tactical handbook ever written for early-stage B2B sales, it distills early sales first principles and teaches the skills required, from being a founder selling to being an early salesperson and a sales leader. Purchase the book to support the author and the ad-free Holloway reading experience. You get instant digital access, commentary and future updates, and a high-quality PDF download.
Just like you had a structured calendar for onboarding reps, whether SDRs, AEs, or AMs, youβll want to do the same for ongoing learning and development. At TalentBin, we had an hour blocked at the end of the day on Friday that was specifically for this. SDRs took the time to do drilling with their management and each other to work on objection handling, messaging review, or demo practice (which wasnβt something that was important for their day-to-day, but was part of professional development, and had the added benefit of making them more confident and competent in their prospect-facing interactions, regardless). AEs would use this time to work with their managers and teammates on different parts of their sales motions, whether it was discovery, presentation, objection handling, negotiation, and so on. But the important part was that the time was on the calendar, and as such, would be prioritized.