BC Startup Sales Podcast – The Importance of Creating an Internal Growth Ladder for Your Sales Team with Meghan LaTorre (Zendesk)

This week, the Bowery Capital team hosted Meghan LaTorre, Manager of Velocity Sales at Zendesk to discuss “The Importance of Creating an Internal Growth Ladder for Your Sales Team.” Zendesk is a global customer service software company headquartered in San Francisco, CA. Zendesk builds software to help companies improve customer relationships through higher customer engagement and better customer insights. Founded in 2007, the company now has over 1,700 employees and serves 100,000 paid customers in 150 countries and territories. Some of their most notable customers include Uber, Slack, Box, and Groupon.

Meghan LaTorre is passionate about building teams, mentoring future sales stars, and streamlining processes. She is currently the Manager of Velocity Sales (North America) at Zendesk, a company that builds software for better customer relationships and empowers organizations to improve customer engagement. Prior to that, she has over 10 years experience in SaaS revenue generation at some of the most notable companies in the industry, holding various sales roles at companies such as Salesforce, Facebook, and Betts Recruiting.

In today’s episode, Meghan begins by defining an internal growth ladder and emphasizes the importance of being able to promote from within as your company scales. She explains that as a manager, it’s your responsibility to develop your team to make them successful in their next role. She notes that checking in with your reps about their career goals in 1-1s creates consistency and that it is never too early to start thinking about building a ladder. She mentions the concept of building in mini-promotions or tiers for your team by adding title bumps such as “senior” to roles to show growth. She also explains that growth doesn’t always have to be vertical and that reps should be able to grow laterally into different parts of the organization such as Customer Success or Marketing if that’s what they become passionate about.

She then dives into how she determines when a rep is ready for a promotion and explains how Zendesk has created a methodical approach to career pathing, by outlining a concrete “Career Template” and SWOT analysis that reps fill out and go over with their manager. We end the podcast by talking about pitfalls or red flags that early founders or managers should be cautious of as they hire and begin to build internal growth ladders for their teams.

If you liked “The Importance of Creating an Internal Growth Ladder for Your Sales Team” and want to read more content from the Bowery Capital Team, check out other relevant posts from the Bowery Capital Blog. If you haven’t already, subscribe to the podcast to get all our new content each week!

Zendesk will be hosting a great event in NYC on October 23-25 all about creating trust with your customers. If you’re interested in attending, you can use the discount code, “Podcast” when you register here.