When Wiz brought in new go-to-market leadership and decided to go big, Lauren Lynch's commercial org went from about 40 people to more than 80 in a couple of months. She explains why hiring at that speed made her process tighter, not looser, and walks through the steps she used at Wiz and took with her to Drata to keep the bar where it was. If you are about to scale a cyber sales team, this is the episode to hear first.
In this episode
- The numbers behind the Wiz commercial build: 35 to 65 AEs, 4 to 12 RDs, and three new RVPs
- Why a hot brand and a flood of inbound applicants made defining "good" more important, not less
- Her process stage by stage: a casual 30 minutes, a deeper hour, 3 or 4 cross-functional interviewers with assigned roles, and a final presentation panel
- The "my why" slide, and why she wants the panel to meet the person, not just the resume
- How the panel catches candidates who interview well, including AI-written prospecting samples
- The one question she uses to test coachability
- What changes when the hire is a leader: more time, sometimes a flight, and backchannel references before the first call
- Keeping a team focused on the number while new leadership rewrites the playbook
About the guest
Lauren Lynch has spent more than a decade scaling sales teams in cybersecurity: nearly ten years at Rapid7, then commercial sales leadership at Snyk and Wiz, where she was AVP of Commercial Sales for the Americas. Most recently she was VP of Sales, North America at Drata.
Notable quotes
- "It was really important that we defined what good looked like and what the right profiles were that we wanted to go after because there was no shortage of talent."
- "A leadership hire is a way more expensive mistake to make if you do it the wrong way."
- "If they fall apart in that, no matter how likable they were or how good the answers were, I just can't move forward."
Chapters
00:00 Intro and the spin of the wheel
03:48 Rapid7 and the in-office sales floor
09:20 Joining Wiz to build mid-enterprise
10:50 Hypergrowth: about 40 people to 80+ in a couple of months
14:29 The hiring process, stage by stage
19:30 How she tests for curiosity
23:42 The panel that exposes weak candidates
25:24 Hiring first-line leaders
29:25 Testing for coachability
33:19 Twenty-one days later: the Wiz leadership change
36:29 Leading a team through new GTM leadership
46:30 What she took to Drata
50:24 Enablement and AI call analysis
53:17 It's personal: the wheel questions
The Cyber Go-To-Market Talk is the show for cybersecurity sales leaders, founders, CROs, and go-to-market operators looking to improve cyber sales performance and build more predictable revenue growth. Hosted by Andrew Monaghan, founder of Unstoppable.do, covering cyber sales leadership, revenue leadership, sales onboarding, forecasting, pipeline generation, and cybersecurity go-to-market execution.
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