Patrick Dillon (CRO, Nudge Security): You're hiring the wrong sales leader | S6 E4

🚨 Most sales leaders forecast their quota. Patrick Dillon calls that a recipe for disaster. He has scaled cyber go-to-market teams from under $50M to $150M, and he's blunt about what breaks along the way: hero CROs, copy and paste playbooks, bloated sales teams, and founders who can't let go. What to expect in this episode: • Why a CRO who has to personally rescue deals is running a hero strategy, and why it fails • 8 reps doing the work of 20: AI deal scoring out of 100 at every stage, and zero early-stage deals in the forecast • Founders: if you're chasing your first 10 to 20 customers, you don't need a CRO. Hire a VP of Sales • Series A money is go-to-market money, and what investors expect to see as a company moves from seed to Series C • Shadow AI is infinitely scarier than shadow IT: your existing tools are switching on AI overnight and nobody approved it • If blocking and alerting worked, cybersecurity would have been solved years ago • What he hires for: grit, humility, three to seven year tenures, and candidates who ask five good questions About Patrick: • Chief Revenue Officer at Nudge Security, brought in to scale go-to-market after its Series A • Previously CRO at Airlock Digital, plus senior go-to-market roles at Saviynt, BeyondTrust and Hewlett Packard Enterprise • SVP for the Americas at Saviynt through COVID, building the team over Zoom while the company went from under $50M to $150M in revenue in three years • Started in recruitment at Robert Half in 1998 and interviewed thousands of people before he ever sold cyber 🔗 Patrick Dillon:   / patrickdillon2   🏢 Nudge Security: https://www.linkedin.com/company/nudg... 👤 Jack Brandwood: https://lnkd.in/dFMyDUEN 🎧 Spotify: https://lnkd.in/eij7j2m 📲 On Security LinkedIn:   / onsecuritypodcast