BC Startup Sales Podcast – Sales Recruiting 101 For Founders with Jason Dorfman (Rubrik)

This week, the Bowery Capital team hosted Jason Dorfman, Inside Sales Manager at Rubrik, to discuss “Sales Recruiting 101 for Founders.” Founded in 2014, Rubrik offers live data access for recovery and application development by fusing enterprise data management with web-scale IT, and eliminating backup software. This marks the end of a decade-long innovation drought in backup and recovery, the backbone of IT. Within minutes, businesses can manage the explosion of data across private and public clouds. Rubrik is trusted by some of the world’s leading companies, including Driscoll’s, JLL, the Tampa Bay Rays and Berkeley College.

Jason Dorfman is an Inside Sales Manager at Rubrik. He joined the team as the first business hire responsible for sales, business development, and customer/product discovery. Prior to Rubrik, Jason founded Cycle Applications and served as the CEO. He began his career in sales at RightScale, first as a Sales Development Representative and then as an Account Executive. He graduated from the University of California, Santa Barbara with a focus on Technology Management.

In today’s episode, Jason joins us to discuss sales recruiting 101 for founders. He starts by touching on the importance of building your product and getting market validation before hiring your sales team. He discusses how to think about hiring your first salesperson and whether it should be a lead generating SDR or an inside sales rep with closing experience. He talks about how what he pitches candidates on has shifted as the company has grown from startup to 400+ employees and how his interview style has changed with that growth. Jason tells us his favorite question to ask during the interview process and recommends using recruiters as a resource to fill pipeline. He says he allocates about 30% of his time to recruiting and finds it to be seasonal – spending a lot of his time in interviews and on phone screens. For Jason, when it comes to hiring, the most important thing is finding the right people. He even urges managers to be willing to fall short of hiring goals if you haven’t found the right people during an interview process. He says every time you hire a salesperson, you should believe there is a chance they can be the number 1 salesperson at your company. Finally, Jason advises anyone who is hiring to be patient, keep a cool head and think long term – even if you are under intense pressure to fill roles – and he leaves us with a great quote: “good people fix bad process, good process and bad people is not a good situation.”

If you liked “Sales Recruiting 101 For Founders” 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!