Glean

“We'll be back to Arvind Glean. We did it as a co-led it with Lightspeed at 35 post. And Arvind is a G. You know, he started Rubrik. He's like one of the, you know, Google fellow type of person. He raised a lot. He's like fifteen million at 35 post, so gave up …”

“We had this healthcare company do a 60,000 dollar land deal with us, and over the course of nine months, the AE, the SE, and the CSM turned that account into a 500,000 dollar plus contract because they focused on deployment, they focused on success, they tied …”

“I took a page out of Dave Schneider's book from ServiceNow and We're implementing a system where we're not paying AEs on their deals unless they have an approved deployment success plan filled out.”

“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.”

“I remember having conversations with Vish, one of the co-founders of Clean, he's like, AJ, I've been on 20 hours of calls with, you know, with this account for the same conversation about security issues.”

“One of the strategies we have in our panel interview is, I always ask my managers, it's a double, like, choose the account that this person is prepping for their sell to, On a new prospect that we are trying to get into.”

“Our strategy is to capture that AI demand, but then turn it back into clear business value that has success criteria.”

“And so, you know, luckily at Glean, we have like a 97, 98% GRR. The only accounts we're churning are SMBs,”

“Actually, we did that at Glean, but we haven't systematically done it. So, for example, you know, the companies that did these multi-million dollar expansions, we actually strategically gave a large spot bonus to the CSM that was on that because we wanted to r…”

“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…”

“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…”

“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…”

“Our strategy is that in the enterprise, you as an AE are involved in the deployment. The reason you're involved is because you have an incentive to make them successful because your, the future upsell is dependent on your ability to drive deployment.”

“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…”

“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 …”

“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…”

“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…”

“What we did was we said, okay, this team that's going after the, 2003 1004 1005 thousand, maybe even we started selling to like 10,015 thousand person accounts. We said, we're going to give you one or two of these key accounts that we're going to try to get in…”

“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…”

“You know, well, well north of five million.”

“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…”

“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…”

“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…”

“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…”

“AI budgets that are based on just, hey, we need to quickly enable our employees to be AI-centric that aren't tying it back to business outcomes, impact, Top line, bottom line. A year from now, two years from now, we're going to churn.”

“Absolutely. We at Glean, you know, we have a, you know, and every company I've been a part of, like, I want AEs to be joining, expecting that they have to do outbound, and they're not going to have a BDR. Now, the reality is, is you're going to have a lot of h…”

“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…”

“We're actually tying the compensation of our CSMs not to an upsell. I guess it's sort of embedded into the NDR piece, but it's frankly more about, are you getting users active?”

“We have about, ah, all time, like a 20% turnover rate.”

“At Slack, Stuart was very involved on figuring out how to get those first customers and making them successful. Arvin, the same thing at Glean”

“Founders and sales leaders that have the mentality that I have like had back then who are just like, let's hire the best reps. They can figure it out. It, it's gonna hurt you in the long run”

“It is, but I, on the sub-one thousand, we're getting it down to, you know, 90, 90 days. So it's closer to the four if you blend in that, like that below a thousand.”

“OpenAI famously saying, hey, if you're an investor in Glean, you don't get to be an investor in OpenAI, which would foreshadow they plan to play in that space.”

“Even if Dropbox had shipped a perfect, hear me out, even if Dropbox had pitched a perfect functionally equivalent product to Glean, it would mean that for their existing business customers, which is a smallish percentage of their total business, they would win…”

“Yeah, we use Perplexity. We use Glean. We actually built some of our own AI, like a sales AI assistant.”

“In the age of AI, you can't buy glean's unsellable, unacquirable, right? Lovable's unacquirable. Replets unacquirable.”

“If you think about his huge, huge winners, whether it's Figma, Glean, Rippling, they all have like a common through line of the, you know, it's B to B software, but it's almost like consumer like software that, that demands really high user love and engagement…”

“I think the analytic world is getting reshaped already where you can see people like Snowflake or Glean or Databricks. All these people boast enterprise data lakes where you can bring the data and run LLMs against it and get you much more synthesized analytics…”

“We actually get a lot of credit for being the first enterprise AI company in the world. The first ones to actually bring RAG into the enterprise. The first ones to build conceptual semantic search.”

“Well, hopefully, you know, 5000. We're gonna grow.”

“Now it's probably about almost a hundred percent. Like, nobody's actually, like, writing the initial code, you know, by hand anymore.”

“I've always personally, like my style has been a little bit too disciplined to be the right strategy anymore. I get that feedback from my team that, you know, we are trying to be conservative. We're trying to make sure that our capital goes a long way. And in …”

“There's a power law, like, you know, in our company, and also at all of our customers, you will see some people who spend 10,000 dollars or 15,000 dollars in tokens every month, and then you have others who are spending 20 dollars.”

“I would say, like, our series C probably felt the most I guess you could say the most expensive, because we barely had any business, like, definitely, like, you know, sub two or three million dollars, maybe five million dollars, I don't remember exactly, but t…”

“Today the way to think about Glean is that first, it's a super set of JetGPD, Cloud, Gemini, All of those combined into one product experience.”

“We are absolutely in a land grab, like, you know, no question. Like every single company in the world wants a product like ours today. And either we get in today or it's going to be like 10 times harder to actually get in the future.”

“So first, actually, we never actually went out to race you know, except for our first round of the company, you know, we always had somebody come in, and it was a relationship that got built over some time, and kind of became the de facto, like, you know, that…”

“If we look at our experience with as we go and prospect the, I think we would hear this answer more often that, well, like, you know, we are a Microsoft customer and we already have, you know, we're getting co-pilot. And so, therefore, like, it doesn't make se…”