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The Twenty Minute VCLarry Shurtz: How to Hire, Train & Retain the Best Vertical Teams | E1151
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At a glance
WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT
Larry Shurtz Reveals How Elite Sales Leaders Build High-Performing Verticals
- Larry Shurtz, CRO at Genesys and former Salesforce leader, breaks down how to hire, train, forecast, and vertically organize sales teams that consistently hit their numbers. He emphasizes ruthless prioritization around people, the number, and customer success, and argues that EQ, empathy, and leadership “art” still separate the great from the merely good despite rising sales science and tooling. Shurtz details his philosophy on hiring rigor, onboarding, compensation, discounting, forecasting, and when to cut bad hires, as well as why verticalization must go far beyond just the AE. He also shares lessons from mistakes earlier in his career, especially around empathy, culture, and how great leaders handle tough customer situations.
IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING
5 ideasRuthless prioritization around people, the number, and customer success is non-negotiable.
Sales leaders often try to do everything, which burns them out and overwhelms teams; Shurtz argues leaders must aggressively prioritize talent, hitting the number, and ensuring customers are successful, removing initiatives instead of endlessly adding more.
Hire slowly, with clarity, and never let ‘hot candidates’ compress your diligence.
He insists you must be crystal clear on the role, values, and comp structure early, avoid hostage-style “I’ve got three offers” pressure, use small interview loops, and favor depth of diligence over speed to prevent costly 12–18 month hiring mistakes.
EQ and empathy remain the ‘art’ that separates great sellers and leaders.
While tools, data, and frameworks have increased the ‘science’ of sales, Shurtz maintains that high-end EQ, genuine listening, and empathy are largely hard-wired and very hard to teach, and they meaningfully affect culture, loyalty, and customer trust.
Onboarding must be immersive, in-person where possible, and tied to real customer pain.
He advocates for early in-person cultural immersion, buddy/mentor systems, long-term enablement, and specifically having new hires listen to support calls to understand customer pain and build practical empathy rather than relying only on classroom training.
Accurate forecasting is a core part of a sales leader’s brand.
Consistent forecast misses usually indicate shallow deal diligence, insufficient pipeline, wrong stakeholder coverage, or poor questioning; Shurtz believes leaders must balance risk and commitment and that the entire investment plan of a company depends on reliable forecasts.
WORDS WORTH SAVING
5 quotesThere’s nothing more important than people. Your human capital is the most important thing.
— Larry Shurtz
If you can’t forecast accurately, either you don’t truly understand your business or you’re not doing enough diligence with customers and opportunities.
— Larry Shurtz
I don’t think you can train really good, high-end EQ. I firmly believe that’s in you.
— Larry Shurtz
Closing the deal is like the easy part. They have to be successful.
— Larry Shurtz
When quality people start leaving, comp is likely always an issue. I don’t think comp is always the issue.
— Larry Shurtz
High quality AI-generated summary created from speaker-labeled transcript.
