AMA: Notion Mid-Market Sales Leader, Alicia Lewis on Establishing the Sales Function

Retaining top sales talent is my highest priority. One of the highlights of my career was going three years without any regrettable attrition, which I attribute to the culture we built. It starts with knowing people as individuals. Every team member completes a “user manual” and a strengths assessment so we understand how they operate and how to best work together. We make these visible not just within the team but to partners across the company who collaborate with us. Once you have that founda ...Read More

I like to think of small company leaders building the motion and large company leaders scaling the motion. In a small company, sales leadership is a lot more hands-on and fluid. You’re testing for product market fit, selling alongside reps, building the first repeatable motions, hiring the early team, and iterating quickly based on metrics and direct customer feedback. In a large company, it’s about designing and scaling the machine. You’re focused on territory planning, org design, forecasting ...Read More

This is the approach that we take when structuring, hiring and training our sales group. Hire for talent density and values fit. At Notion, we set a high bar for judgment, ownership, and customer centricity, and we optimize for quality over speed in every hiring decision. Before opening a role, we co‑define core competencies with the team, translate them into structured interviews and work samples, and use consistent rubrics to avoid “gut feel.” Structure the team for clarity and leverage. We de ...Read More

Each week we keep pipeline generation expectations simple and visible. Managers set weekly targets and inspect them consistently. AEs are expected to keep roughly 4x coverage in new pipeline each week. This is accomplished through calendar‑blocked prospecting, event‑driven motions, and dashboard visibility into concrete activity metrics to ensure they're on track. When someone falls short, we expect them to make up the gap for the next week and managers often help them re‑prioritize where time i ...Read More

My advice would be to stand up the lightest workable process you can actually run, then iterate weekly. I've found great value in building the process with one or two respected reps to ensure adoption and to surface edge cases. Make sure everything is documented and visible in the CRM so coaching and decisions are made based on data. Keep things simple by using clear exit stage criteria and standardize only the fields that drive action (e.g. next steps date). Leverage a shared framework like MED ...Read More