AJ Tennant
33 statements across 1 episodes · 6 bullish · 7 bearish · 1 people on the record · first statement Oct 23, 2024 by AJ Tennant · said 2 times in 1 episodes since 2022 · across every show →
On the record as a speaker too: AJ Tennant's record, appearances and statements → this page counts the times other people say the name.
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Everything said about AJ Tennant, oldest first
Oct 23, 2024 positive
Tennant: Chronological interviews reveal a candidate's true underlying motivations
“Understand the deep history of the individual Over a chronological period of time. I didn't realize that that was a hiring methodology until Bob Fratty taught me that at Slack, which is kind of this who hiring, the who hiring method is what we call a chronolog…”
Oct 23, 2024 negative
Oct 23, 2024 negative
Oct 23, 2024
AJ Tennant: Glean's mid-market annual contract values are well over $100,000
“Yeah, a little, little north of that, like you could get you know, in that, that segment right now, we're well north of that, but when we were getting going early, early days, where even before I was there, that's even, that's what it would be.”
Oct 23, 2024
Oct 23, 2024 bearish
Oct 23, 2024
Oct 23, 2024 negative
AJ Tennant: Coin-Operated Sales Reps Are the Ones You Shouldn't Hire
“The sales reps that are coin operated are the ones you don't want to hire. The sales reps that have that insightful IQ that you talked about want career development. They want challenges. They want to figure out how to get, like, coached and mentored. That's w…”
Oct 23, 2024
Tennant: Glean converted a Fortune 100 pilot into a seven-figure contract
“We had one Fortune 100 companies say, we want to test how you're, how we're lowering call resolution time with Glean relative to the other solution we had and the competitors. It was very time bound. It was very specific. And we're able to tie that back exactl…”
Oct 23, 2024
Sales teams should remain generalists until hitting $200M to $250M revenue
“I hear that argument. I still think staying generalist is important until you get to a certain scale. I think you need to be at 200,000,250 million to go that granular because Just the number of AEs that you need to hire to get to vertical, just become, and it…”
Oct 23, 2024
Tennant: Regional Generalist AEs Beat Sector Specialists for Global Accounts
“I think that you can solve that by educating Some of the other generalists AEs because the problem with it is sometimes, you know, those telecoms are all over the world, right? And you're not going to have one AE who's based in the, you know, the Bay Area be a…”
Oct 23, 2024
Tennant: Enterprise land-and-expand deals require upfront executive alignment on expansion metrics
“I think you need to be very willing to do that. Now, the key thing that we've learned, and I, you know, learned this at Slack as well, but at Glean, You've got to have success criteria. You've got to have, okay, we're going to do, let's say for Fortune, 100 co…”
Oct 23, 2024 negative
AJ Tennant: Sales playbooks overcomplicate sales, which is fundamentally simple execution
“My view is that playbooks are really, it's like a fancy word for what is your strategy? What is your outbound messaging? Like, what is your plan? Like a play, so I guess, you know, it can be semantics a little bit, but what I view is sales is very simple. You …”
Oct 23, 2024
Tennant: Sales interviews must test quick strategic thinking over canned answers
“What I'm looking for in that question is actually like higher level thinking of like, how can you think not only quickly, but strategically and then map it to what is actually going to be your job? Like you are going to get a hundred accounts and you are going…”
Oct 23, 2024 neutral
Oct 23, 2024 positive
AJ Tennant: Winning T-Mobile ignited Glean's upmarket growth momentum
“T-Mobile became that account for us at Glean. Not just a sales team, as a company and leadership team, we said, we are going to prove success at a Fortune 100, Like T-Mobile, get it to, get a win, get value, get success, and that's what we did. And then, as so…”
Oct 23, 2024 positive
Tennant: CEOs Should Have Executive Candidates Solve Active Company Problems
“I think that having him ask me, hey, AJ, here are the three problems that we're dealing with as a company right now. Can you produce something and present to me and my leadership team on how you're going to solve it? It has two benefits. Even if I don't turn o…”
Oct 23, 2024
Oct 23, 2024
AJ Tennant: Glean defined enterprise sales as 2,000-plus employee companies
“At Glean, when I joined, we had real great success in that mid-market segment. We had strong sellers, about like eight of them, and we decided very quickly with the team to say, we've got to move up market, let's cut it at 2000 employees and above, and the bel…”
Oct 23, 2024
AJ Tennant: Startups past $10M-$20M ARR need a strict discounting matrix
“I approach it early days, do it, get the deals done, but once you get past, like, 1015, twenty million in revenue, you really need to have a very tight discount matrix, and don't give away just horrible deals, because it's gonna impact the market discount rate…”
Oct 23, 2024
Oct 23, 2024 negative
Oct 23, 2024
Slack segmented sales into SMB and enterprise at $10M ARR
“When I joined Slack, I immediately, after we got to about ten million in revenue, Cut the team into SMB and enterprise, and I basically said enterprise is a thousand employees and above, SMB is below, and that way we just sort of put the resourcing, the more e…”
Oct 23, 2024
AJ Tennant: Customer success drives subsequent sales better than brand logos
“If you get a marquee customer and get them successful, it's more important than the logo, it's actually, they will do reference calls, they will do intros, so I think it's less about the logo, and it's more about that customer becoming successful to then do re…”
Oct 23, 2024 positive
Aggressive accelerators are the single best sales compensation lever
“More aggressive accelerators. You know, accelerators are essentially ways to, if someone goes over a hundred percent of their quota, An accelerator just gives that rep the ability to move faster in terms of accelerated comp. And so what it's doing, and why I s…”
Oct 23, 2024 positive
Tennant: Product and sales drive tech, non-engineers should pick sales
“In technology companies, and this might be controversial because like, you know, this is like putting aside like all the other things that make these companies go. There is product. And then there is sales. Like, what drives technology companies and most busin…”
Oct 23, 2024 negative
Enterprise AI implementation takes 6-12 months or $5M in services
“Everyone is being sold A bag of goods and a dream of this sort of AI enabled workforce or Automation, top line, bottom line, and then when it comes to implementation, it's taking six, nine, 12 months, or it comes attached with a five million dollar services bu…”
Oct 23, 2024
Tennant: R&D teams underestimate enterprise security and legal friction
“I think people underestimate, especially R&D organizations, like, how you're gonna navigate security, deployment, POCs, pilots, like, all of that nuance of getting through that, not to mention legal and contracting, becomes just, it's like molasses.”
Oct 23, 2024
Oct 23, 2024 positive
Bypass polished sales pitches by asking for specific manager references
“One approach to this, which is in the Who hiring method, is you ask people while you're going through that process of, who is your boss? Who is the hardest person you worked for? Who is someone, like, you didn't like working for? And then you, in the moment, s…”
Oct 23, 2024
AJ Tennant met T-Mobile's CEO at a bar to impress the CIO
“I knew the CEO at the time, John Ledger, used to hang out at the W Bar in Seattle, and so, Before an on-site, that night before, I just stayed in that W bar, like, just hanging out, and John Ledger came in, and I went up to him, and we spent time chatting. And…”
Oct 23, 2024