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Jake Levant

Go Forth and Sell Unto The Nations

Israel has established itself as a start-up, technological hub. As we mature, it’s time to take a realistic view as to whether we are making the right moves to become a scale-up nation. 

Technological innovation continues at a torrid pace but is our industry growing at the same rate? While we have a developer culture, we have yet to create a sales culture to maximize our innovative edge. And, even a superficial understanding points to the fact that Israel’s maturing tech ecosystem needs a sales boost. 

Check the jobs showcased by high-tech recruiters: Sales Development Reps, Business Development Reps, Sales Executives. 

Take a look at the hundreds of opportunities on these boards 1, 2, 3 or these recruitment sites like this.

But today, Israel does not have the sales talent to help start-up nation grow into scale-up nation. We simply do not produce enough sales talent to meet our tech-ecosystem’s current and growing demand. 

And the lack of sales infrastructure is hurting our ability to Scale-Up. 

  1.  Sales provides much needed market validation for innovation.

Israeli tech companies needlessly flounder without market feedback and sales. Much has been written about the commercial gap that is impacting the # of companies that move from seed funding to A round investments and beyond. This wastes technologically innovation and development resources in directions that are not proving themselves commercially. 

2.  Israeli tech companies currently offshore high-paying sales jobs.

Israeli companies offshore sales jobs to America or elsewhere rather than growing our local ecosystem.  Israeli companies pay an international premium for recruiting and managing sales talent in their core markets. They essentially offshore sales jobs that should and could be done from Israel through remote, inside sales – a universally accepted sales approach.

3. Our high-tech nation fails to integrate high-potential local talent

We are not leveraging a fast-growing under/unemployed group of business talent that can spur further economic growth: Olim and minorities. Many of these groups have business track records, language skills, are internet savvy and have a network and maturity to help local tech companies speed their commercialization.

We have no system in place to retrain Israeli non-tech talents to join scale-up nation. Our growth can be accelerated by creating a sales infrastructure in collaboration with government, industry and education. 

V – There are coding colleges and development internships. 

V – There are R&D hubs and innovation centers.

V – There are grants for technological innovation and R&D centers.

X – There are NO internships for sales.

X – There are NO sales schools for sales training. 

X – There are NO grants available and earmarked for sales retraining for Olim. 

Anecdotally, a group of sales leaders from leading tech companies volunteered to test this.  Even before a formal ad campaign, Salesclass.co received hundreds of applicants for its high tech sales boot camp. Clearly there is much more to be done.

Thank you to the leaders from AngloRecruits, Sales Talent Agency, Viking Consulting, AWS, Lightico, Similarweb, Sapiens, Webeyez and more for volunteering their expertise to start addressing this problem.

=> We as an industry need to pick up the opportunity. 

=> We need to build the infrastructure to sell unto nations. 

Venture capitalists, employers, industrialists, ministers…It is starting, come join us, come build with us. Get involved – message us via LinkedIn here

Go Forth and Sell Unto the Nations!

P.S. A note about sales – inspired by my late grandfather Jack Meloff. 

  • Sales can be learned and improved with grit
  • Sales is a merit-based, high-paying career
  • Sales is onramp towards entrepreneurship

    Jack Meloff Z’l
About the Author
Canadian who moved to Israel 20 years ago, working in technology sales and marketing and loving life in the holy land. Building high tech companies, co-founder of bootcamp www.Salesclass.co
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