Larry Shurtz on Hiring Sales Teams, Vertical Playbooks and Forecasting

Harry Stebbings welcomes Genesys chief sales officer Larry Shurtz. Shurtz originally wanted to build robots, but found electrical engineering was not the right fit and realized he was more interested in selling what robots could do. After studying marketing and finance, he joined Eli Lilly, where two years of foundational sales training helped establish his interest in the profession.

Asked about his decade at Salesforce, where Stebbings says he led a 1,300-person team to $2.1 billion in revenue, Shurtz identifies prioritization as a major lesson. Leaders often attempt too much, spreading themselves thin and adding work to teams without removing anything. Eventually, he says, the accumulated load breaks execution.

His priorities are people, delivering the number and customer success. There is no substitute team waiting to deliver the sales commitment if his organization fails, but he says the third priority could arguably come first. He presents this as a leadership framework rather than a mechanical solution to every prioritization decision.

Shurtz once thought sales was roughly 70% art and 30% science; pressed today, he suggests 60/40. He associates the art with interpersonal judgment, emotional intelligence and empathy, and the science with skills and repeatable methods. His belief that high-end empathy is difficult to train is a personal view, not a settled finding.

For a sales playbook, Shurtz starts with the desired outcome and works backward: by when must it happen, what critical steps are necessary, and who will do them? He prefers a simple document with clear measurement and a regular cadence, including an understanding of what the team will change if it falls behind.

Hiring starts with a precise definition of the role and its most important requirements. A talented candidate can still be a poor match if the company has not defined what it needs. Recruiters also need an authentic, transparent account of the company’s value proposition so they can explain why the candidate should join.

Shurtz prefers one-on-one interviews over panels, usually with no more than five interviewers, and wants a defined process that moves quickly. But he resists a candidate’s pressure to rush diligence simply because other offers are pending. Hiring errors can take substantial time and money to correct, particularly in some international markets.

His questions cover a candidate’s track record, the cultures they preferred and why, and what motivates them. The culture question helps reveal values, whether the answer emphasizes amenities or difficult work and growth. When a candidate says money matters, he asks why: the underlying goal may be a better life for their family.

Shurtz does not personally rely on case studies, believing a 45-minute conversation can reveal a candidate’s thinking, but some colleagues use them successfully. Presentations can show how people perform before an audience. Stebbings also asks leaders which colleagues they would bring; Shurtz agrees that the quality of that network matters more as responsibility grows, and says the names still need scrutiny.

Compensation should be discussed before the end of the process, though not necessarily in the first conversation. Shurtz wants to understand whether a structure is affordable and what the candidate values: on-target earnings, commission accelerators or equity. In his experience, equity tends to matter more to senior leaders and on-target earnings to individual contributors.

Stebbings describes a highly paid salesperson who left because of a manager. Shurtz believes empathetic, service-oriented leadership can be more important to loyalty than a small compensation gap, while acknowledging that a very large pay gap can still cause departures. He contrasts this with the more purely commission-driven cultures he encountered earlier in his career.

Onboarding has become harder since the shift toward remote work, Shurtz says. He favors an initial in-person immersion to communicate culture, introduce executives and clarify priorities, followed by manageable pieces of role-specific learning. He describes enablement as a journey lasting a year rather than a single orientation event.

Stebbings recommends listening to support calls to understand customer pain; Shurtz welcomes the idea. His own approach includes buddies and mentors, and he wants new hires to meet major customers early alongside a manager or colleague. The newcomer must prepare, represent the company accurately and contribute something, even while using the meeting to learn.

A combination of red flags and a failure to improve with coaching can reveal a poor fit early, Shurtz says. He has found that his own hiring mistakes sometimes involved concerns he noticed in interviews but did not investigate. He advises leaders to examine those concerns rather than treating gut instinct as a substitute for evidence.

Whether to act quickly depends on the nature of the issue. After a poor sales call, Shurtz asks the employee how they think it went and discusses the gap. Employers have a responsibility to communicate and coach as people learn a new culture, tools, customers and industry; if a coachable skill still does not improve, he favors acting rather than indefinitely delaying a decision.

Shurtz distinguishes skill-related mistakes from issues such as lack of preparation or interpersonal problems, which he regards as serious for a sales role. Asked about an abrasive high performer, he says he would not hire someone whose behavior he finds offensive, because customer relationships and the team’s culture matter as well as individual results.

For an early-stage business, Shurtz favors winning strong category-leading customer brands, provided the company can make them successful. Closing the contract is not enough: a customer becomes a useful reference only after achieving results. He argues that early teams must discover the industries where they can deliver and invest heavily in customer success.

The customer-success function matters even if a company uses a different title, Shurtz argues. In a consumption business such as Snowflake, growth requires customers to use the product successfully. Someone must support the technical architecture and use case, while someone also identifies new applications and expands the account.

Shurtz treats the division between hunters and farmers as a segmentation question. In cloud software, he argues that existing accounts still require active hunting for new use cases, so sales and customer success must coordinate closely. Stebbings agrees that a clean handoff can feel transactional to customers.

Vertical sales at Salesforce grew from customer feedback that teams did not understand the industry well enough. One starting point is industry-specific content or specialists while an account executive serves several sectors. Greater depth means the whole customer-facing organization must develop relevant knowledge, not just the salesperson.

A salesperson who understands aviation may still bring a generic demo from a solutions engineer or a services person without aviation experience. Shurtz says those gaps make true verticalization expensive: technical, support and professional-services teams also need training. A company can stage the investment and test quickly rather than absorb every cost at once.

Salesforce began with financial services and later developed an industry-specific product, Shurtz says. His advice is to choose the vertical with the strongest expected return and try one rather than launch three at once. Landing one famous customer alone is not proof the rest of an industry will follow: assess the use case, value proposition and how widely the problem occurs.

A dedicated account executive, solutions engineer and customer-success manager for a single account requires substantial economics. Ratios depend on the company and the number of accounts each person supports. At Genesys, Shurtz says, an account might need to be close to nine figures to justify that fully dedicated arrangement; that is a company-specific illustration, not a universal threshold.

Shurtz dislikes using discounts as a substitute for a clear business case, although he accepts that appropriate discounts vary with deal size and customer context. An unproven startup selling to a major bank may need to recognize the risk the customer is taking. He wants the team to articulate expected value, outcomes and payback before requesting a discount.

In a role-play about a committed deal slipping, Shurtz asks when the customer changed priorities and who the representative was speaking with. He places a high premium on doing what one says one will do. The questions are meant to expose whether the team understood the customer’s decision and had access to the right people.

Forecasting requires balancing risk and commitment, with enough pipeline to absorb uncertainty. Inaccurate forecasts can signal insufficient customer diligence, weak opportunity coverage or questions asked of the wrong people, Shurtz says. He also acknowledges that forecasting is difficult and that he has missed individual months and consecutive quarters.

A sales leader’s forecast aggregates commitments through multiple layers of managers and account executives, and company investment decisions can depend on that number. Shurtz compares the structure to a Jenga tower: managing the roll-up accurately and adapting as conditions change is difficult, but important.

Shurtz pushes back on a blanket claim that nobody is spending, pointing to the account and market information available to sales teams. At the same time, he says leaders must recognize genuine external shocks and difficult territories, such as travel customers during the pandemic, and respond with humility and empathy.

He acknowledges that earlier in his career he lacked that empathy. When a representative faced a difficult market, he sometimes responded with “go figure it out,” blamed others and took too little personal responsibility. He learned that such behavior makes loyalty difficult and can lead good employees to leave.

Shurtz learned from leaders who listened carefully to customers, understood the details and arrived prepared with a plan. He recalls Hyperion CEO Godfrey Sullivan handling a difficult senior customer meeting with empathy and attention, and another manager whose response to setbacks left teams confident they could solve the problem.

In the quick-fire round, Shurtz wants sales teams to communicate customer value more clearly. He does not believe outbound sales is dead in 2024. He predicts AI will both automate disliked tasks and augment people, estimating that more of its benefit will come from helping people do their jobs better; that 70/30 split is his expectation, not a measurement.

He regards feature-advantage-benefit selling, which he learned at Eli Lilly, as largely superseded by value-selling frameworks. Asked how fast-growing sales teams break, he returns to poor prioritization and waiting too long to try something different. His advice for a vertical playbook is to focus on one area and work backward from the outcome.

For cloud companies, Shurtz favors a land, expand and retain strategy across the full customer lifecycle, not a sales-only motion. In his view, winning the first deal is only the beginning of the work required to keep and grow a customer.