The Exchanges

Q is so good to have you on the show, dude. I said, I'm so lucky in the way that, like, I get to interview the coolest people, and, like, Figma is a product. It's incredible. The machine that you've built is awesome. I'd just love to start on you and, like, the love of sales. When did you know that you loved sales? Was there, uh-huh, this is my career?

A Uh, it happened kind of by accident. Like I think it maybe does for a lot of people. I mean, when I was, um, going to school, graduating high school, thinking about college, it wasn't really like, uh, I mean, there was obviously the sales profession, but it wasn't something you really studied. And so for me, I kind of fell into it. I, um, I ended up going to school at BU. I was studying advertising. We had to get a summer job. And I remembered, um, You know, for me, just like the year before, I got my very first cell phone. So this is back, you know, 2000, cell phones were becoming a thing. You didn't have them when you were much younger than that. And I remember when I got my phone, it was in a mall, it was in one of those kiosks, and I remember asking the woman who worked there, I was like, hey, how did you get this job? She's like, well, I'm a law student, and this is a way to make extra money, and you can do really well. And I was like, I wonder if, like, I could do that. So, uh, you know, I went to the same kiosk in the mall that I bought my own phone with my mom the year before, and I met this guy who was working there, and I said, hey, hi, how does one get a job like this? I have no idea, but I'm, you know, I'm home for the summer. I'm looking for work, and, uh, he said, well, why don't you start by just, like, writing down some information here about yourself? So, gave …

AI assessment note: “it happened kind of by accident. Like I think it maybe does for a lot”

Q You can have someone who's sold that size of contract before, or who's worked in, in or around the industry problem area that you solve, but you can only have one. Which one do you have and why?

A Uh, I, if those are the two options to choose from, I would take the person with the experience doing the deal, because I think the industry experience you can teach, uh, with, to the person who's got, you know, the right willingness to learn and the curiosity, and obviously you need to make sure you have that in a person and you test for it. I'm kind of making a bit of an assumption that with those two choices, the person who's done the really big deal hasn't just got a bluebird, right? That they've managed multi-stakeholder Long sales cycles, have to build a lot of champions, have to get to EBs, um, you know, they're, um, likely leveraging something like Calm, and they're using Medic, and they're familiar with these concepts. There's a lot more confidence that I think that needs to be built over time for people to be really good at that, and I think, generally speaking, smart people can learn industries and landscapes in a shorter period of time. So if those are my two only choices, I would probably take the person who's got the deal experience.

AI assessment note: “I would take the person with the experience doing the deal”

Q You can have someone who's sold that size of contract before, or who's worked in, in or around the industry problem area that you solve, but you can only have one. Which one do you have and why?

A Uh, I, if those are the two options to choose from, I would take the person with the experience doing the deal, because I think the industry experience you can teach, uh, with, to the person who's got, you know, the right willingness to learn and the curiosity, and obviously you need to make sure you have that in a person and you test for it. I'm kind of making a bit of an assumption that with those two choices, the person who's done the really big deal hasn't just got a bluebird, right? That they've managed multi-stakeholder Long sales cycles, have to build a lot of champions, have to get to EBs, um, you know, they're, um, likely leveraging something like Calm, and they're using Medic, and they're familiar with these concepts. There's a lot more confidence that I think that needs to be built over time for people to be really good at that, and I think, generally speaking, smart people can learn industries and landscapes in a shorter period of time. So if those are my two only choices, I would probably take the person who's got the deal experience.

AI assessment note: “I would take the person with the experience doing the deal”

Q Can I ask with you, and jumping, when you look at Figma State, it's a beautiful product, and it's a PLG motion in so many ways. In a world of PLG, is sales less important than ever?

A Um, Uh, I don't think so, but what's really unique about Figma as a company, this was what I, so I joined, I've been here about four and a half years, and I started talking to Dylan five and a half years ago, and at the time, it was really early in the journey, but it was kind of unique in that, you know, Figma was, has been around since 2012, and really spent like six years building the product, studying customers, really trying to perfect it, really not something that I had Heard happen very, very often. And then once you started monetizing, this is like end of 2017, end of 2018 really took off and it took off very much in this, not even PLG, I would say self-service way. Like most of our, our customers, even today, at some point they started by going online with a credit card. Someone bought a couple of licenses, started sharing links internally, and that's how things took off and that. Happened really, really fast. And so when I joined four and a half years ago, we were a hundred, maybe fifty million dollar company, but in terms of our penetration in the market, we had tons of customers, way more. So I joined Datadog, my previous company, similar stage in terms of revenue, nowhere near the number of customers. So in, in many ways, the job at Datadog in the early days was much clearer than it was at Figma. In Figma, We'd acquired all these customers so quickly, and at the ti…

AI assessment note: “I don't think so, but what's really unique about Figma as a company”

Q When we think about that, like platform expansion and product expansion in terms of usage, you know, everyone is saying that seat based pricing is dead. Seat based pricing. Do you agree? And if, if so, what comes next?

A I, I haven't seen anything in our business that like would suggest to me that that's the case. I think it is hard to predict the future on this one, honestly. Um, but if you look at our own business, I mean, we had our earnings call a couple of weeks ago. You may have seen it. Our, we added five points on our net retention, pretty significant when I think went from 131% to 136%. Obviously today, We're in a pretty much exclusively, um, seat-based model now. You might also know that that's changing in just a matter of a few days, um, where we're, we're gonna start monetizing our AI usage through credits as well. Um, but so far we haven't seen that in our business. Um, part of that, I think, may be just the fact that, um, because of all the things happening in the world and in technology, there's just more and more builders, I think, coming, you know, into software as it exists. So, Is that part of the reason? I don't know, but there, there's nothing that we've seen in our business yet that suggests that's dead. I do think it's a tough one to predict longterm.

AI assessment note: “I haven't seen anything in our business that like would suggest to me that that's the case.”

Q and hesitant with giving their time to anything. It's more like, Sean, I know that Figma is this size company with this X and this problem. Do you not need to know the customer today because you don't have time to be curious? But if you're going to, if you're going to do qualification on me, you know, I don't want to be qualified. You should fucking figure it out.

A So I, I do think it's a, it's a skill. I mean, and to be honest with you, I, I believe like right now more than anything else, if you want to be great in, you know, enterprise tech sales, it's not just about being curious, it's about being prescriptive. And that's an interesting balance, right? Because you're right, people are busy and what they really want is insights. They want to know what, what can you teach me? What, what are you, what are your other customers, your best customers doing that we haven't figured out yet? And that's very much What we are preaching to, um, you know, our sales team every single day, but you have to mix curiosity in along the way, and I think that's the art of it, is you have to be able to do both at the same time, or else you're not going to be successful.

AI assessment note: “it's not just about being curious, it's about being prescriptive.”

Q What is, what is the challenge or exercise? Is this a take home assignment?

A It's a take home assignment. It's a take home assignment. We've evolved it over time, but it's kind of a combination of, Uh, disco demo. You know, it's basically like we want to give people, um, a use case, you know, a case study. You're gonna go pitch to this customer. Here is some information about them. Learn about them, and come in prepared to lead a conversation, you know, do some discovery, and then sh, you know, turn around and, and get in the product a little bit, and, and show us a quick workflow that you think would be interesting. Um, and personally, I'm much more interested in how they do, frankly, on the discovery side of that, because I think, you know, it's probably a little bit unfair to expect someone to be doing this amazing demo of your product with just a few days, um, of playing around with it. But I do think, actually, the product piece we've kept in there, because it does show an element of perseverance. If someone is actually willing to spend the time to, to learn a little bit of it, I think it's telling. Um, and then the way they approach the discovery part, I think, tells a lot around You know, their ability to actually be curious and do all of those things.

AI assessment note: “It's a take home assignment. It's a take home assignment.”

Q Is that job not quite easy? You're essentially an order taker when people are pulling the product out of your hands and desperate to use it. Kind of easy, no?

A I mean, I think there's things about it that are hard. I don't want to say it's easy, but I think the way I think about it more is like how many people out there could probably do it if we brought them in, right, trained them, and they had the right personality, they had the willingness to learn. I think about it as there's a, there's a big population of people, you don't need to have 20 years of sales experience to figure out how to do that, even if there's things about it that are challenging. I don't want to diminish what the job is. But I think in that type of situation, right, you're probably focused more on Driving efficiency in the business, right? Where we are right now in that SLG motion in particular, which is again, mid-market enterprise strat, what we're asking people to do, the stuff you just heard me get so, you know, warm and fuzzy about when I heard customers talk about in terms of bringing insights and building champions, that is strategic work. You need people who can really understand how businesses operate, who really understand not only the product, but the landscape that we're operating in. Who are able to PG and build these relationships, bring these insights, manage complex multi-stakeholder deals. That is hard work, and it's very, very strategic work. So our philosophy now at Figma is kind of the opposite, which is we want to have really aggressive, as …

AI assessment note: “I don't want to say it's easy, but I think the way I think”

Q This is why consulting businesses will do very well in the next few years, my friend, seriously. Um, Implementation and adoption I think will be one of the biggest things that you can learn and improve on as, as a company. Cass, you mentioned sales performance and hot takes there. What are the hot takes around sales performance? I'd love to hear those.

A Probably my hottest take on sales performance, which is not a new thing. I've said this for a very long time is I kind of don't care if you as a rep hit your quota or not. Um, and what I mean by that is a bunch of things, but first and foremost, Similar to the discussion we're having before, I think I've been in, in situations consistently where we're doing our best to set a quota based on that philosophy, right? I just shared our philosophy right now is to try to do aggressive ones, really reward people, right? I've been in other situations where it's a, we're focused a little bit more on efficiency based on the job to be done. Whatever the philosophy is, I've been in situations multiple times in my career where the year starts going and you realize you didn't actually get it right. You, and that could be in either direction, right? You set them too high. Oftentimes you set them too low, whatever, compared to what you expected, you don't get it right. And so I, I think of quota as both something that's more systemic than something that, uh, is in entirely on the individual. Um, and I also, the other reasons for this is I just think it's too much of a lagging indicator. And I think it, what my fear is, it creates lazy leadership. If we're performance managing based on the idea that someone got to their number or didn't get to their number at the end of a month, quarter, or year…

AI assessment note: “I kind of don't care if you as a rep hit your quota or not.”

Q Will sales teams be larger or smaller in the future? Um, I... Is DLM pushing you to be more efficient?

A No, I think we're kind of going the opposite. Um, I feel like, truly, we, we talked a lot about efficiency in our early days, and I think now, so first of all, like, how much more efficient can you get, right? You've got a half million customers you're trying to support with, I don't know, 300 quarter carrying reps, whatever the number is, like, you're pretty freaking efficient already. So I think this might be like a unique Figma thing that for us, I'm pushing and Dylan is on board with, More headcount in sales to, to do more of the strategic work with customers that, um, we, we really are seeing great results from. Is that the case for every business? I, I don't know, but not for us. I think we're going to continue investing in sales headcount.

AI assessment note: “I think we're going to continue investing in sales headcount.”

Q How do you think about pushing the boundaries of sales technology adoption within the team? Like again, Jason's one of my best buddies. He is so qualified on what he is so versed on qualified momentum, artisan, all the different providers. Do you worry that you're too focused on execution that you don't pull your head up enough to invest in the future of sales tools?

A I, I do worry that, if I'm being honest. Like, that is not something that has been top of mind for me historically. Um, I've been much more focused on, like, the inputs. Um, like, what are we doing every single day? You know, getting better ourselves, the conversations we're having with our customers. But, so, to your point, just in these last few, uh, like, weeks and months, I've been much more, um, passionate about what, where can we Invest more, um, in either agentic solutions or more, um, you know, exciting tech that can make some of this stuff easier. It, it just comes back to, I want to make the job of our reps easier. And it's very clear where they're really happy and where there's frustrations. I think every company you're going to have both. And I think the frustrations on our side right now would be from the fact that, um, there's a lot on their plates and, And I think if we can leverage some of these new technologies to remove some of the friction, um, on the duplication of data entry and those types of things, I think it's not a hard thing to do that will make a meaningful impact.

AI assessment note: “I do worry that, if I'm being honest.”

Q And I, and I close, and I'm not bad for the culture, but I'm not collaborative, and I'm not a team player. You got a problem with me?

A I think that there's a place for that, honestly. You know, and I know some great reps who you would probably define that way. And actually, When you talk to them about it, they don't even want it. They're not, it's not like they're proud of being a lone wolf. It's just that this is what, this is how they're wired, and you know, like, the job means something different for everyone. So, um, I don't really have a problem with it, and I think I've actually seen people who are categorized that way, where once you talk to them, and you say, hey buddy, like, you're great, but you know that, like, some people are defining you as a lone wolf. Is that how you want to be known? And they go, oh shit, no, I didn't even know. That's what people thought of me. Um, and you know, like, thank you for the coaching. And there's others who they're like, you know what? I'm going to be a lone wolf, but I promise I'm not going to poison any wells. I'm not aspiring to be a leader. I just want to like, do my thing, make money and be successful. And I think that's also perfectly okay. As long as it's not negatively impacting others.

AI assessment note: “I don't really have a problem with it”

Q How do you determine when enough is enough? And when the rap's not performing, like, is it better to like fire fast and make the decision? Or is it actually better to give people more time?

A I think it depends on where their challenges are. Um, and again, I am generally pretty patient. If, if you tell me someone's working really hard and they're, they're improving and they have a growth mindset and they have, the tools are there. Um, it's just not quite, quite coming together yet. I generally tend to be more patient, because again, I'm, I'm always thinking about, at scale, I need hundreds of people, right? Like, what is the alternative to this person who's busting their butt, and getting better every day, and, and, and has the desire to win, and seems to have, you know, the aptitude, and it's just taking time? There's, you know, like you said, if you hire 200 people, maybe 40 of them are good. Like, there is, it's hard to find great people, and I think those Like, characteristics are really fundamental in what great people look like. If the problems are different than that, if they're, like we talked about, they're bad seeds, um, or they're not working hard, um, you know, they're complaining, those types of things, then I think you have to move much faster. I have, I have, like, super high bar in patience for the people that are doing all the right things, but it's not clicking yet, and I have a very low bar for the people who are not exhibiting the will, um, Um, because that, that's just so, I feel like it's so in our individual control. You might not be able to c…

AI assessment note: “I think it depends on where their challenges are.”

Q Can we just dig in on what, what is behaviors and competencies though? Cause like, if you have like curious and ambitious, dude, I can be curious and ambitious and sign no fucking contracts.

A Yeah. Well, I mean, I think, The behaviors one is, is like probably a little bit simpler and straightforward. It's how are you showing up? Are you collaborative? Are you someone who is just, you know, looking out, are you lone wolfing it, just looking out for yourself? Are you collaborating with your teammates? Do you have a growth mindset? Are you someone who's, you know, negative constantly, um, in the office and impacting the people around you? So, I mean, there's like some basic things there. Competencies, which I think are like the most critical. Those are, hey, if these are the things that we've defined as Important for you to be good at your job day to day. What are they? So that's the ability to do PG effectively. That's the ability to do discovery effectively when you're talking to a customer. That's an, uh, the ability to actually manage, um, your pipeline effectively, um, you know, leveraging our, our, um, medic framework. That's, uh, when you're doing discovery, we teach calm. We call it Figma value selling, but are you leveraging Our, our methodology, how you're, when you're doing discovery. So it's all of those details. And then back to just quickly the point around the hot take on quota. My, where I come back to is if someone says, Hey, this person is not doing well. Okay. The first thing I'll ask is why? And if they say, well, there didn't hit their quota. I'll …

AI assessment note: “The behaviors one is... It's how are you showing up? ... Competencies ... Important for you to be good at your job”

Q and hesitant with giving their time to anything. It's more like, Sean, I know that Figma is this size company with this X and this problem. Do you not need to know the customer today because you don't have time to be curious? But if you're going to, if you're going to do qualification on me, you know, I don't want to be qualified. You should fucking figure it out.

A So I, I do think it's a, it's a skill. I mean, and to be honest with you, I, I believe like right now more than anything else, if you want to be great in, you know, enterprise tech sales, it's not just about being curious, it's about being prescriptive. And that's an interesting balance, right? Because you're right, people are busy and what they really want is insights. They want to know what, what can you teach me? What, what are you, what are your other customers, your best customers doing that we haven't figured out yet? And that's very much What we are preaching to, um, you know, our sales team every single day, but you have to mix curiosity in along the way, and I think that's the art of it, is you have to be able to do both at the same time, or else you're not going to be successful.

AI assessment note: “it's not just about being curious, it's about being prescriptive.”

Q Will sales teams be larger or smaller in the future? Um, I... Is DLM pushing you to be more efficient?

A No, I think we're kind of going the opposite. Um, I feel like, truly, we, we talked a lot about efficiency in our early days, and I think now, so first of all, like, how much more efficient can you get, right? You've got a half million customers you're trying to support with, I don't know, 300 quarter carrying reps, whatever the number is, like, you're pretty freaking efficient already. So I think this might be like a unique Figma thing that for us, I'm pushing and Dylan is on board with, More headcount in sales to, to do more of the strategic work with customers that, um, we, we really are seeing great results from. Is that the case for every business? I, I don't know, but not for us. I think we're going to continue investing in sales headcount.

AI assessment note: “I'm pushing and Dylan is on board with, More headcount in sales”

Q This is why consulting businesses will do very well in the next few years, my friend, seriously. Um, Implementation and adoption I think will be one of the biggest things that you can learn and improve on as, as a company. Cass, you mentioned sales performance and hot takes there. What are the hot takes around sales performance? I'd love to hear those.

A Probably my hottest take on sales performance, which is not a new thing. I've said this for a very long time is I kind of don't care if you as a rep hit your quota or not. Um, and what I mean by that is a bunch of things, but first and foremost, Similar to the discussion we're having before, I think I've been in, in situations consistently where we're doing our best to set a quota based on that philosophy, right? I just shared our philosophy right now is to try to do aggressive ones, really reward people, right? I've been in other situations where it's a, we're focused a little bit more on efficiency based on the job to be done. Whatever the philosophy is, I've been in situations multiple times in my career where the year starts going and you realize you didn't actually get it right. You, and that could be in either direction, right? You set them too high. Oftentimes you set them too low, whatever, compared to what you expected, you don't get it right. And so I, I think of quota as both something that's more systemic than something that, uh, is in entirely on the individual. Um, and I also, the other reasons for this is I just think it's too much of a lagging indicator. And I think it, what my fear is, it creates lazy leadership. If we're performance managing based on the idea that someone got to their number or didn't get to their number at the end of a month, quarter, or year…

AI assessment note: “I kind of don't care if you as a rep hit your quota or not.”

Q Final one for you, dude, before we do a quick fire. I believe in verticalize sales teams a lot. I think specialization and focus drives efficiency and outcomes. What would be your biggest advice to founders or sales leaders on when and how to verticalize sales teams effectively?

A Yeah, I think, um, focus and specialization, no question, as early as possible, in my opinion. Now, if we're talking about verticalization, that, like, by definition, peeling off specific industries and focusing people in a subset of types of customers, I think that is Again, highly dependent on the product, the platform that you're selling. So I can tell you at Figma, um, we to this day have not actually done any type of like industry based teams, but what we have done is we thought about sales motions, personas that we're selling to and creating, you know, in some cases it's been trial and error, but some overlay teams, we, you may know, we acquired a company called Weavey, um, not that long ago. And the way we're going to market Um, with, with that product right now is, is in a little bit more of like an overlay motion, and what we're coming back to is like, what are you asking one person to do, and is it too much? And at the point where you have to just make the call, at the point where it's too much for one person, um, you have to think about how do you create more specialization, and that might be segmentation, it might be verticalization, it might be overlay, you name it. Um, but That's what I always come back to, is like, are we asking reps to do too much, and too much means understand the product, the vision, the landscape, PG, manage deals, etc. Um, if we're then, you…

AI assessment note: “at the point where it's too much for one person, you have to think about how do you create more specialization”

Q When your business is basically expansions and upgrades, do you have pipeline reviews in the same way that are more? Yeah.

A Oh yeah. So by the way, just to finish, what we did is we said SMB, that's the PLG motion, everything else is sales led. Everything else we do, mid-market, enterprise strat, which is the majority of our team and the reps that we have, it's running like a very traditional Um, SaaS sales business. Uh, again, what's unique is they're PG'ing primarily into what you would consider to be a customer. We almost don't think of it that way, right? We, we are the, the job of a sales rep, they get their, their book of accounts, right? And every year we've, we've created more focus around them and we've done, we've had to do ruthless prioritization on like which accounts are we going to really go deep on. But once they get their accounts, the job is you map it out. You map out that org, and you basically have a vision of what is the best-in-class deployment of Figma look like, based on your understanding of this type of business, and where are they today? And that gap between those things is your job, and you need to go figure out how to do discovery, how to do new business meetings, how to actually go build champions to get them to go from where they are to that Future state that you want to bring them to through insights and, and a point of view. And that is a hundred percent. We do like we, they do PG, uh, they create opportunities. We do pipeline reviews constantly. Um, we do forecast c…

AI assessment note: “We do pipeline reviews constantly. Um, we do forecast calls every week”

Q Is that job not quite easy? You're essentially an order taker when people are pulling the product out of your hands and desperate to use it. Kind of easy, no?

A I mean, I think there's things about it that are hard. I don't want to say it's easy, but I think the way I think about it more is like how many people out there could probably do it if we brought them in, right, trained them, and they had the right personality, they had the willingness to learn. I think about it as there's a, there's a big population of people, you don't need to have 20 years of sales experience to figure out how to do that, even if there's things about it that are challenging. I don't want to diminish what the job is. But I think in that type of situation, right, you're probably focused more on Driving efficiency in the business, right? Where we are right now in that SLG motion in particular, which is again, mid-market enterprise strat, what we're asking people to do, the stuff you just heard me get so, you know, warm and fuzzy about when I heard customers talk about in terms of bringing insights and building champions, that is strategic work. You need people who can really understand how businesses operate, who really understand not only the product, but the landscape that we're operating in. Who are able to PG and build these relationships, bring these insights, manage complex multi-stakeholder deals. That is hard work, and it's very, very strategic work. So our philosophy now at Figma is kind of the opposite, which is we want to have really aggressive, as …

AI assessment note: “you don't need to have 20 years of sales experience to figure out how to do that”

Q What is, what is the challenge or exercise? Is this a take home assignment?

A It's a take home assignment. It's a take home assignment. We've evolved it over time, but it's kind of a combination of, Uh, disco demo. You know, it's basically like we want to give people, um, a use case, you know, a case study. You're gonna go pitch to this customer. Here is some information about them. Learn about them, and come in prepared to lead a conversation, you know, do some discovery, and then sh, you know, turn around and, and get in the product a little bit, and, and show us a quick workflow that you think would be interesting. Um, and personally, I'm much more interested in how they do, frankly, on the discovery side of that, because I think, you know, it's probably a little bit unfair to expect someone to be doing this amazing demo of your product with just a few days, um, of playing around with it. But I do think, actually, the product piece we've kept in there, because it does show an element of perseverance. If someone is actually willing to spend the time to, to learn a little bit of it, I think it's telling. Um, and then the way they approach the discovery part, I think, tells a lot around You know, their ability to actually be curious and do all of those things.

AI assessment note: “It's a take home assignment. We've evolved it over time, but it's kind of”

Q And I always push it to the back. I'm like, ah, they're brilliant, so of course they want to be an ex. No, no, it's always the problem, and it always ends badly. What would you, what's yours?

A I think it's anything like that that suggests, you know, mercenary versus missionary, and look, we're all in sales, like there's little mercenary in all of us, and I get it, that in some ways we're in sales, this is kind of what the profession calls for, but I know lots of people Who, some of my best people over the years, where money wasn't the first thing that they were thinking about. Now, career growth, um, learning and development, different. That's very, very different to me. But I think the best people actually kind of know that if you're prioritizing those things, the money comes. Um, and I think, in fact, some of the people who've been the best earners that I've been around in, in, you know, past 10 years, they haven't been the ones that were Focused on, I got to maximize, you know, my w two, or I have to maximize, you know, and I, in fact, I, I've seen people who, when they're chasing that, it goes the other direction. So I, I think that, that probably is my answer. I think there needs to be a passion for growth, for career acceleration, for learning development, for collaboration, from firm, you know, people who want to just get better. The growth mindset, I think is the biggest thing. And so if people are Too focused on things that don't, that aren't suggestive of growth, and is more focused on the individual and this, like, very, like, point in time thing, that's a…

AI assessment note: “I think it's anything like that that suggests, you know, mercenary versus missionary”

Q What sales communications platform are you on when, when you think about like you as a team and there's an update in the market is, is it Slack? Is it email? How do you ensure synchronicity of knowledge across teams?

A I think, honestly, we have work to do there. I think if you talk to our reps, it's one of the things that complain about. Um, if I'm being completely honest, I think we have improvement to do there because we kind of use it all. You know, we have our sales enablement platform. Then, of course, we have Slack and, and our Slack is as noisy as, as you know, a lot of the other companies that get to our scale. Um, you know, we are doing things in person. We are doing things, um, you know, on Zoom. Um, we have We have content everywhere, and again, we have so many customer stories that they end up in multiple systems, um, and of course we have our, I didn't even mention our CRM, that I think we have more work to do to make searchability better across all of these different places, or to just say, look, we're gonna take a different approach, and we're gonna have everything go to one place and have a singular approach, so we don't, we don't, I'm being honest, we don't have that solved yet.

AI assessment note: “we kind of use it all. You know, we have our sales enablement platform.”

Q And I, and I close, and I'm not bad for the culture, but I'm not collaborative, and I'm not a team player. You got a problem with me?

A I think that there's a place for that, honestly. You know, and I know some great reps who you would probably define that way. And actually, When you talk to them about it, they don't even want it. They're not, it's not like they're proud of being a lone wolf. It's just that this is what, this is how they're wired, and you know, like, the job means something different for everyone. So, um, I don't really have a problem with it, and I think I've actually seen people who are categorized that way, where once you talk to them, and you say, hey buddy, like, you're great, but you know that, like, some people are defining you as a lone wolf. Is that how you want to be known? And they go, oh shit, no, I didn't even know. That's what people thought of me. Um, and you know, like, thank you for the coaching. And there's others who they're like, you know what? I'm going to be a lone wolf, but I promise I'm not going to poison any wells. I'm not aspiring to be a leader. I just want to like, do my thing, make money and be successful. And I think that's also perfectly okay. As long as it's not negatively impacting others.

AI assessment note: “I don't really have a problem with it, and I think I've actually seen”

Q Do you, do you create a playbook for them on that? Is it like, here's a file of facts, go learn it. This is.

A To be honest with you, we're rebuilding this right now. Um, the, the, what we're talking about right now, we're in, we're like rolling out. We actually did this week. We're doing our like soft launch of the new version of it, but that is what we are striving toward. It's very much like a, we're also moving to classroom style. In person. And, and, you know, in the COVID days, we kind of got away from that, but we're going back to classroom style. We're going back to in person. We're bringing in, um, the thought leaders across the organization, across these different pillars. And absolutely, we're going to educate them on this is what's happening in the tech ecosystem. These are the different players that your customers are going to be thinking about potentially using, leveraging. Here's our positioning in that Uh, conversation. Here is what our best customers are doing. Here are the things you need to understand about the product. And then of course, here's our sales process. They need to understand our sales process beginning to end all of the resources that are available to them along the way, all of the things that we're going to do to help them, uh, pipeline reviews, forecast calls, the operating rhythm that we built here. So it's taking them through all of those things. Again, once they've got a little bit of footing underneath them, and then it's ongoing enablement, it's S…

AI assessment note: “that is what we are striving toward. It's very much like a, we're also moving to classroom style”

Q Do you, do you create a playbook for them on that? Is it like, here's a file of facts, go learn it. This is.

A To be honest with you, we're rebuilding this right now. Um, the, the, what we're talking about right now, we're in, we're like rolling out. We actually did this week. We're doing our like soft launch of the new version of it, but that is what we are striving toward. It's very much like a, we're also moving to classroom style. In person. And, and, you know, in the COVID days, we kind of got away from that, but we're going back to classroom style. We're going back to in person. We're bringing in, um, the thought leaders across the organization, across these different pillars. And absolutely, we're going to educate them on this is what's happening in the tech ecosystem. These are the different players that your customers are going to be thinking about potentially using, leveraging. Here's our positioning in that Uh, conversation. Here is what our best customers are doing. Here are the things you need to understand about the product. And then of course, here's our sales process. They need to understand our sales process beginning to end all of the resources that are available to them along the way, all of the things that we're going to do to help them, uh, pipeline reviews, forecast calls, the operating rhythm that we built here. So it's taking them through all of those things. Again, once they've got a little bit of footing underneath them, and then it's ongoing enablement, it's S…

AI assessment note: “we're rebuilding this right now... that is what we are striving toward.”

Q Then how do we make that specific behaviors and competencies?

A You write it out. So we, we have written out, and by the way, it's probably, if I'm being honest, maybe too detailed, but one of the first things that we did is we wrote out a performance framework and we said, by the way, quote is part of it, right? There's a results category and I'm not dismissing quote entirely. Um, but There's a results bucket and that's just one bucket. And that is not just results from a quota perspective. It's PG. Um, it's, you know, all the, the, uh, success metrics that we are tracking and then behaviors. And we documented, what does that mean? And then competencies. We documented all of the competencies that we actually care about.

AI assessment note: “You write it out. So we, we have written out... a performance framework”

Q kind of aligned actually in what we were saying around quota. And you said, well, like sometimes you've just set the wrong quota. If you're advising another sales leader or me, a founder of an early stage company around how to set quotas effectively. It's pretty hard to do. Thumb in the air. I think it could be this. What would your advice or lessons be around effective quota setting?

A I think it's start with what are you trying to accomplish in the, what you're trying to do with your sales team and, and, and be really honest about where your business is right now. Um, and are you, are you pulling, is the market pulling you? Are you pulling the market? Um, You know, I, I think it starts with those things, and if where you're ending up is, hey, we have an opportunity, we, we love what we're doing, but we have to push it to the market, and we have to do that in a very proactive, strategic, outbound way, um, and we need x type of people to do that, then index towards giving people more favorable quotas to entice great people to come in and do that kind of hard work, And you're going to reap the benefits of it. If you are in a position where, again, you don't know, like the market's moving so fast, and there's so much market pull, and you're just trying to figure out how to keep up with it, and its job is more transactional at the time, then you probably want to build in some safety nets and, and focus more on the efficiency pendulum. But I think it starts with what are you trying to solve for?

AI assessment note: “index towards giving people more favorable quotas to entice great people”

Q Final one. I like optimism. I'm a positive dude. What are you most excited for in the next 10 years? It can be anything. So like for me, mom's got MS. I'm very excited about drug discovery for kind of rare diseases or kind of maybe chronic illnesses. I think that's super exciting.

A Well, we could take this offline, but I've had health things surrounding me, and I feel very similarly. I'm always, um, you know, I don't know if it's real or fake, but I'm always reading stuff about the advances that are happening with AI medicine. I'm very optimistic that, um, that's one of the good, really good things that's gonna come out of, of this new wave of technology. Um, I'm looking forward to, I, so I've got kids, they're nine and seven. I feel like I've got maybe five years where I'm still, and, and their mom are still like the most important, you know, uh, people in their lives. I really, really wanna do my best to enjoy that, um, and, and just be in it with them. Um, so that I'm, I'm, I'm interested in obviously like continuing to grow this team and I'm really excited about the future, um, and just how the landscape is evolving and, and where we're positioned in it. So there's a lot of things I'm really excited about.

AI assessment note: “I'm always reading stuff about the advances that are happening with AI medicine.”

Q Then how do we make that specific behaviors and competencies?

A You write it out. So we, we have written out, and by the way, it's probably, if I'm being honest, maybe too detailed, but one of the first things that we did is we wrote out a performance framework and we said, by the way, quote is part of it, right? There's a results category and I'm not dismissing quote entirely. Um, but There's a results bucket and that's just one bucket. And that is not just results from a quota perspective. It's PG. Um, it's, you know, all the, the, uh, success metrics that we are tracking and then behaviors. And we documented, what does that mean? And then competencies. We documented all of the competencies that we actually care about.

AI assessment note: “You write it out. So we, we have written out... a performance framework”