BC Startup Sales Podcast – Transitioning To A Repeatable Sales Machine with Jordan Wan (CloserIQ)

This week, the Bowery Capital team hosted Jordan Wan, CEO and Founder at CloserIQ, to discuss “Transitioning To A Repeatable Sales Machine.” CloserIQ is a modern recruitment firm that connects top sales talent to the world’s fastest growing companies. Combining industry expertise and innovative technology, they help clients align their sales strategy with talent that produce extraordinary results. CloserIQ is a rare boot strapped business located in NYC and founded by Jordan in 2014.

Jordan is the founder and CEO of CloserIQ, which he founded in 2014. Coming out of MIT with a Bachelors Degree in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, Jordan began his career at Bridgewater Associates where he was a Trading Strategist. After over 4 years with Bridegwater, he transitioned away from finance and took a role at ZocDoc running sales strategy and operations. He then spent some time running analytics at PayPerks, and ultimately ended up starting CloserIQ.

In today’s podcast, we begin by hearing a bit more about CloserIQ, and the current sales stage they are in. Jordan further describes where CloserIQ is at in terms of transitioning from founder led sales to a repeatable sales machine. We also dig in on a popular sales term, The Sales Learning Curve, coined by Mark Leslie and Charles Holloway. The Sales Learning Curve defines 3 distinct phases for sales, initiation, transition and execution, and we go through each of them in detail on the podcast. As a startup, it can be hard to know which stage you are in, so Jordan walks us through the distinct characteristics that describe each stage and exactly what that means for your organization.

We also spend some time discussing how to prepare for a proper pass off of the sales team, and what should be in place in terms of processes, software, and where you should be at from a product market fit perspective. As Jordan explains, timing is everything when it comes to transitioning from founder led sales to a repeatable sales machine. Jordan shares key insights into where CloserIQ was when he felt comfortable transitioning and even why he retrospectively thinks he could have passed off responsibilities sooner.

As part of building up a sales organization, Jordan is passionate about the types of goals you set for your team during the initiation stage. He does not believe that setting OKRs or MBOs right out of the gate is a winning strategy and he goes into exactly why this can be challenging. Jordan believes that a combination of a traditional revenue quota as well as more unique activity-based metrics makes for a more meaningful way to gauge progressions of the sales team. Towards the end of the podcast, Jordan shares his own learnings from scaling CloserIQ and how he ultimately was able to get comfortable transitioning from founder led sales to a repeatable sales machine.

If you liked “Transitioning To A Repeatable Sales Machine” 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!