Episode description

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. 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.