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Recently I was talking with a friend about sales-oriented startup cultures. He recalled how at his first startup, of which he was an early employee and investor, everyone in the company was extremely focused on sales. It was such a sales-oriented culture that the entire company participated in the weekly sales meetings where they discussed the pipeline, opportunities, wins, and losses.

Naturally, you’re probably thinking that that’s not a big deal when you have five or 10 employees. Everyone can jump into a conference room and hash things out for an hour. Well, they kept doing the all hands weekly sales meeting by conference call up to the time they had 100 employees. Imagine taking an hour a week out of the busy schedules of 100 people, most of which weren’t in sales, to be on the sales meetings.

The all hands sales meetings were important so that everyone in the company was thinking about ways to improve the product, close deals, and outsmart the competition. There was no telephone game from the front line sales reps back to the engineers by way of the product managers. Everyone was able to hear everything good, and bad, that was going on each and every week.

What else? What are your thoughts on an all hands weekly sales meetings?