1. How can we onboard our sales teams faster, and get sellers hitting quota faster? 2. When did we last align our sales teams on messaging and products, and how do we know they’re good to go? 3. How are we coaching our first-line managers to increase their team’s distribution of quota attainment? As the former senior vice president of sales productivity at Salesforce from 2005–2013, let me tell you how I made sure those questions were always answered. We invested heavily in training, onboarding, certifications, messaging alignment, ongoing learning, coaching, communications, playbooks, and sharing best practices. We invested, on average, $10,000 per quota-carrying sales executive, per year, to elevate total team results. The International Data Corporation (IDC) claims the industry average is about $2,400 per seller, per year. I’m sharing this to show what’s truly possible for startups. As a startup founder myself, and now working with hundreds of startup companies, we need to be smart about how we invest our time and resources. We don’t all have the deep pockets we had in the early Salesforce days, but that shouldn’t be discouraging. Instead, we can get creative and do our best with what we have. When I started working with many early-stage startups in 2013, I realized we had to create ways for marketing and sales to mesh together, yet remain nimble. The old onboarding methods of death- by-Powerpoint and thick playbook reference manuals weren’t going to work. I was getting reactions along the lines of, “Are you crazy?” or, “Who has time to read all of this?” It got me thinking, we need to break down messaging alignment, playbooks, and onboarding into smaller, bite-size deliverables. Not only is this reflective of the fast-paced, content-focused world we live in today, it’s also the perfect solution for startups who are moving quickly with limited resources. A Better Approach to Sales Learning We’re in the midst of a sales-learning revolution. The investments, shared learning, and outcomes happening at large enterprises like Salesforce are now in demand by small startups, too. Why? Because they work.