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SaaStr 257: How To Scale Sales Culture Successfully and Sustainably, The Leading Indicators of Burnout and What To Do & The 2 Inflection Points In SaaS Growth Where Things Start To Break with Justin Welsh, Former SVP Sales @ PatientPop

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Aug 12, 2019

Former SVP Sales @ PatientPop, Justin Welsh, discusses scaling sales culture sustainably, signs of burnout, communicating with superiors about burnout, and the importance of culture over performance in a team setting.

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ANECDOTE

From Zocdoc To Scaling PatientPop

Justin joined Zocdoc as employee number ten and later joined PatientPop as VP of Sales when it had one person.
Over five years at PatientPop he scaled sales from $0 to nearly $60M and grew the team to ~140 people.

ANECDOTE

How Burnout Creeped In

Justin describes burnout creeping up slowly as responsibilities multiplied and meetings squeezed out deep work.
He compensated with early mornings and late nights, which worsened his personal life and exhaustion.

ADVICE

Tell Your Boss Early And Delegate

Be candid with your CEO or manager early when you sense burnout and ask for help.
Delegate more and move to a higher-level role instead of holding every detail yourself.

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Justin Welsh is the former SVP Sales @ PatientPop, the startup that offers the first all-in-one practice growth platform that's HIPAA-compliant and is proven to grow your practice. During his 5 years at PatientPop, Justin grew sales from $0 to $56m alongside the full build-out of the sales team. Before PatientPop, Justin was one of the first 10 employees at ZocDoc, where he spent 4 years in different roles including Director of Strategic Sales.

In Today's Episode We Discuss:

How Justin made his way into the world of Sales and came to be one of the industry's leading scale up Sales leaders with PatientPop and ZocDoc?
How did Justin experience burnout? What were the first indications and signals for him that he was suffering from it? How did it manifest itself in how he carried himself and his behaviour? How did Justin communicate the situation to his bosses? What does Justin advise others in communicating burnout to their superiors?
As a manager observing their team, what are signs that an individual is burning out? What is the right way to approach them to discuss the situation? What options do managers have available to them when faced with a burned out employee? How does micro-management fit into the signals that suggest clear burnout of the individual?
Justin has said before that "culture must precede performance", what did he mean by this? What actions and communications must they adopt to ensure that this feeling of culture over performance is accepted by the team? With that in mind, how does Justin think about KPI and goal-setting? What can leaders do to create an environment of safety for their team? Where do many leaders go wrong here?
Having seen multiple scaling culture, where do SaaS organisations tend to break down both in terms of culture and process? What are those inflection points? What can be done to actively mitigate these 2 significant points of failure?

Justin's 60 Second SaaStr:

What does Justin know now that he wishes he had known when he started at PatientPop?
Sales leader Justin most respects and why?
If Justin could change one thing about the world of SaaS today, what would it be?

Read the full transcript on our blog.

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