The Exchanges

Q Well, I mean, listen, we will save the 40th birthday party for later. I want to start. I think there's often a moment where someone like falls in love with sales. When did you first fall in love with sales, Steve?

A I didn't even know I fell in love with it. It just kind of naturally happened. I was a psychology major in college, and I was a sports psychology major, and I played baseball through college, and I was a catcher, and as a catcher, your job is to kind of manage the field, manage the team, manage everybody's momentum and motivation, and, and I have to go into the pitcher's mound a lot when the pitcher was down and kind of bring him back up, and I was just so fascinated by, by psychology, and I didn't realize how important psychology was in the business world until I actually got into sales. And I always thought sales had a negative connotation when I was growing up. And, and when I first got into sales, I was afraid to say I wasn't sales because of that negative connotation. And then at one point I realized that, you know what, I'm going to embrace this because salespeople are problem solvers and they help your customers solve their problems, which makes your customers at the end of the day look really good and hopefully get promoted and move through their career. And there was this one gotcha moment where I was, uh, I was actually working with K-Way computers, and I was up there, and I walked in there saying, you know what, I am, I, I'm in sales, and I'm here to sell you something, but I'm here to help you solve your problem, and it just, I embraced it, and I realized that at th…

AI assessment note: “there was this one gotcha moment where I was, uh, I was actually working with K-Way computers”

Q it a good excuse if I'm one of your reps and I say, Steve, it was, we nearly had it. Okay. We nearly had it, but then our champion left. I'm really sorry. It wasn't my fault. Our champion left. Is that not our fault and it's next denality? Or is that you should have known? Is it a good excuse to have a champion leave to lose a deal?

A No, it's not a good excuse because there's never just like one champion. There's multiple people as part of the process. You know, part of it's, it's always never the seller's fault. We talk about why we do deal reviews, why we have first line managers to really coach and manage their people. You do that so you minimize the surprises that happened at the end. And you've got to naturally always be looking and always have these conversations with people. Going back to what is their personal win? If you go back and understand what this person's personal win is, you'll start to get a sense of how long they're going to be at that company or not. If they trust you as, remember, salespeople, the negative connotation versus I'm a problem solver, I'm here to help you get to your next role. And if they trust you, they may open up to you and say, hey, look, I'm not going to be here that long. I'm thinking about moving on. Like, you've got to build that trust in these relationships. If not, you will get surprised. You will get surprised. And in that case, I never say it's your fault, but, you know, bad news never travels better with age, like wine, and you've got to really, you know, assess that out early and go with your gut.

AI assessment note: “No, it's not a good excuse because there's never just like one champion.”

Q I love this detail. So we have this, uh, you know, Hunter, they sell three months. Great. How do you do the handoff of, Hey, meet enablement CS manager who you've never met before. They're going to own this relationship now. Good luck. How do you do that?

A That's the second thing we changed. You have to bring the CS team into the selling process. Remember I talked to you about the what and the how? The CS team is the how. So you bring them into the pre-sales process so the customer can feel comfortable with the customer journey and how you're going to make them successful. And they've got the confidence in that. So they know what they're buying into early on. And then we build these production environments because we're in a very competitive market. Our market is everybody says they kind of do the same thing with similar value props. So we have to go in there and say, all right, we're going to build this production environment and we're going to lie to a use case. We're going to build out the business case, and then we're going to put it in production and show you exactly how we're going to do this. So you're going to understand what it's like to work with us even before you're a customer and our, our win rate and attach rate to that. Is, is pretty, pretty incredible, actually, as we go into this year. So we made all these changes this year, and I've heard some of, you know, other CROs talk about, you know, the handoff, and they do it after the implementation. You've got to do it, you've got to do it as part of the early selling process. What makes us unique is our ability to make our customers successful, meaning the get to the …

AI assessment note: “You have to bring the CS team into the selling process.”

Q Do you still need CEOs to close big deals? You said about coming in up here. Do CEOs need to come in to close large six figure deals or seven figure deals?

A Well, one, CEOs should never be RVPs. They should never be the ones that are actually closing deals. That, that's, that's my job. What they, CEOs should give the customer the confidence about our vision and what we are doing as a company. I'd never like to put my CEO in a position where he's actually having a, he or she is having a closed business. Their job is to align with others, maybe CEO and other executives to give them comfort that they're making the right bet on the right company. They, they should not be closing business, but I strongly believe when you do big deals, When you do big deals, they buy into your company. They buy into your culture. They buy into your innovation. They buy into what you're doing. And you've got so many tentacles within your organization that they buy into you. And it's kind of called the shiny penny in a way. You become the shiny penny of each other's companies and everybody rallies around them. So it's not just the CEO. It's multiple people in the organization. It's aligning CFOs. It's aligning chief technology officers. It's aligning chief product officers. And it's aligning CEOs and that's the job. It's the connections.

AI assessment note: “CEOs should never be the ones that are actually closing deals.”

Q it a good excuse if I'm one of your reps and I say, Steve, it was, we nearly had it. Okay. We nearly had it, but then our champion left. I'm really sorry. It wasn't my fault. Our champion left. Is that not our fault and it's next denality? Or is that you should have known? Is it a good excuse to have a champion leave to lose a deal?

A No, it's not a good excuse because there's never just like one champion. There's multiple people as part of the process. You know, part of it's, it's always never the seller's fault. We talk about why we do deal reviews, why we have first line managers to really coach and manage their people. You do that so you minimize the surprises that happened at the end. And you've got to naturally always be looking and always have these conversations with people. Going back to what is their personal win? If you go back and understand what this person's personal win is, you'll start to get a sense of how long they're going to be at that company or not. If they trust you as, remember, salespeople, the negative connotation versus I'm a problem solver, I'm here to help you get to your next role. And if they trust you, they may open up to you and say, hey, look, I'm not going to be here that long. I'm thinking about moving on. Like, you've got to build that trust in these relationships. If not, you will get surprised. You will get surprised. And in that case, I never say it's your fault, but, you know, bad news never travels better with age, like wine, and you've got to really, you know, assess that out early and go with your gut.

AI assessment note: “No, it's not a good excuse because there's never just like one champion.”

Q Do you still need CEOs to close big deals? You said about coming in up here. Do CEOs need to come in to close large six figure deals or seven figure deals?

A Well, one, CEOs should never be RVPs. They should never be the ones that are actually closing deals. That, that's, that's my job. What they, CEOs should give the customer the confidence about our vision and what we are doing as a company. I'd never like to put my CEO in a position where he's actually having a, he or she is having a closed business. Their job is to align with others, maybe CEO and other executives to give them comfort that they're making the right bet on the right company. They, they should not be closing business, but I strongly believe when you do big deals, When you do big deals, they buy into your company. They buy into your culture. They buy into your innovation. They buy into what you're doing. And you've got so many tentacles within your organization that they buy into you. And it's kind of called the shiny penny in a way. You become the shiny penny of each other's companies and everybody rallies around them. So it's not just the CEO. It's multiple people in the organization. It's aligning CFOs. It's aligning chief technology officers. It's aligning chief product officers. And it's aligning CEOs and that's the job. It's the connections.

AI assessment note: “CEOs should never be RVPs. They should never be the ones that are actually closing deals.”

Q Dude, you ever chatted to Chris Dagnan about CS? He goes, you know what I did when I came into Snowflake? I got rid of all CS. No more CS. I don't believe in it. What do you think of that?

A I've talked about this actually, um, a while ago. And look, every business is different. Like his business could be different than my business. I mean, they, they're more on the data side. We're on the workflow side. And we, we've got to help our, we have to integrate with our customers business processes. So they can get to specific outcomes. And we've got to integrate with a couple with different systems. We have multiple use cases that we constantly have to work with. We got to leverage AI and insights to show them how they're doing. And in our world, I think that the, the skill set of a CS person is different. The skill set is when I, we were at Salesforce back early on in the day, we created a customer success manager. We were the only, we were the first companies to do it. It hasn't changed since then. It really hasn't. They're really, a lot of customer success organizations are, are really a first line for support because they're hanging out with the people. Remember I told you about, they're hanging out with the people that they sold the first product to, and they're just answering questions. They're not able to be proactive. They're not able to get strategic. They're not able to help them get to these outcomes because they're just solving how to problems with like the admins and the operations people. And so I think what Chris is talking about doing is that He, he prob…

AI assessment note: “every business is different. Like his business could be different than my business.”

Q Steve, I get, I get you. I love the how, I love the how, but you know, ex-competitor, they're gonna give me a 20% discount matters nowadays. My budgets are tight. How do you feel about discounting? Is there a right time or should it be a flat no always?

A So no, this should never be a flat no, but I care more about what's in the, in the contract than how much they're paying us. Meaning like in our business, being a workflow platform, there's consulting capabilities that we need to bring into the process. There's, there's, uh, support and services pieces in there that I want to make sure that the relationship is set up so they can be self-sustaining. And that we can integrate truly into their workflow. So I care more about that. And procurement cares a lot about, I want to see what my per unit price is. They want to understand like what their per unit price is. So we can work with them on making sure we fit within their budgeting cycle. But I care a lot about making sure the customer is set up for success, because I will come to work negotiating many, many deals right now or all the time. And my point to them would be, yeah, you may look good. Because you got this per unit price down. But in six months from now, when your business unit comes to you and says, well, I'm not getting any value out of the product. Then how are you going to feel then? And so we've got to figure out and meet somewhere in the middle because yeah, we'll make sure we give you the right structure that's in place. I always try to get, and I coach my team on, you, you always want to like, you don't want any winners or losers in these negotiations. You really …

AI assessment note: “So no, this should never be a flat no”

Q Can I just pause on that? Just, I want to make sure that I don't miss stuff, which is great. When you say at the beginning of the quarter, it's different. We want to understand what's happening. What are we trying to understand? And why are we trying to understand it for forecasting, for projections, Help me understand our objectives on what we're understanding and why.

A Well, we're, we're trying to understand power. We're trying to understand one. Do we truly understand the problem we're trying to solve? Do we truly understand what our unique value proposition is in that process? And has the buyer bought off on that? Or has, and then, then you go through the MedPIC process and understand like, what do we know? What don't we know? And MedPIC is really just a qualification process. And the goal at the beginning of the quarter is to understand what you don't know. You look at order charts, but by the middle of the quarter, at some point, what I usually lock in on by the middle of the quarter, we have to have agreed upon mutual plans in place and alignment on how we actually get to the end of the quarter. And then we have to measure that nonstop to continue to track all the activities that needs to happen, but obviously you're gonna close business early in the quarter as well, but if you've got that process, In place every quarter, then you're going to have more consistency and actually closing business and not just waiting until the end of the quarter.

AI assessment note: “the goal at the beginning of the quarter is to understand what you don't know.”

Q I love this detail. So we have this, uh, you know, Hunter, they sell three months. Great. How do you do the handoff of, Hey, meet enablement CS manager who you've never met before. They're going to own this relationship now. Good luck. How do you do that?

A That's the second thing we changed. You have to bring the CS team into the selling process. Remember I talked to you about the what and the how? The CS team is the how. So you bring them into the pre-sales process so the customer can feel comfortable with the customer journey and how you're going to make them successful. And they've got the confidence in that. So they know what they're buying into early on. And then we build these production environments because we're in a very competitive market. Our market is everybody says they kind of do the same thing with similar value props. So we have to go in there and say, all right, we're going to build this production environment and we're going to lie to a use case. We're going to build out the business case, and then we're going to put it in production and show you exactly how we're going to do this. So you're going to understand what it's like to work with us even before you're a customer and our, our win rate and attach rate to that. Is, is pretty, pretty incredible, actually, as we go into this year. So we made all these changes this year, and I've heard some of, you know, other CROs talk about, you know, the handoff, and they do it after the implementation. You've got to do it, you've got to do it as part of the early selling process. What makes us unique is our ability to make our customers successful, meaning the get to the …

AI assessment note: “You have to bring the CS team into the selling process.”

Q encourage urgency? Like close, close, close. And it kind of just feels like it goes against the solving Steve's problem. How do you balance between that needing to close an urgency of closing in a quarter with, I get it, Steve, it may not be optimal for you to sign right now. You've got this big thing happening. Have another week. How do you balance that urgent with the personal?

A I think there's a respect component of that where you build relationships and you're working towards a moment in time where you've got to have a tough conversation. And you, you don't want to have it to be a surprise. You don't want to ever do anything unnatural. But at the end of the day, you know, we do work in months and quarters, and there's going to be times throughout the relationship that you're going to ask me for something, and I'm going to ask you for something. Right now, what I'm asking you for, not to do anything unnatural, but if you can do it in this timeline, we'd appreciate it. Now, you don't have to, but we would really appreciate it. But that's why the mutual plan is so important. So you're not just having to do something unnatural and throw a Hail Mary at the end of the quarter, end of the month. I mean, that happens. In certain cases, but if you align on the deal reviews and the process and the structure, you're having these conversations and you're aligning towards a plan to be able to do something in, in a timeline that works for both of you. And it, you know, you talk about compelling events and how do you back into compelling events? And, you know, I think that's also really important, but at the end of the day, I do think relationships matter because a procurement person, if they're told what to do by the buyers, That they'll work towards those days. I…

AI assessment note: “aligning towards a plan to be able to do something in, in a timeline that works for both”

Q What do you want to see in asking those questions?

A I want to see how people make decisions. I want to see people's thought process for how they make decisions. I want to see if people could be consistent, and they don't just give up. They don't just give up. They actually have grit, and they are out there to like, you know, they're, they're obsessed with winning, and they're very competitive. And we, you naturally, you look for trends that people make, Throughout their life. And you look for consistencies. And, um, it's been really helpful because you can really start to assess. You're just looking for trends. And then you look at their career for an example. And if they jumped around, like, tell me why you left this role to go to this role. Tell me why. Okay. You start off as an SDR. You were there for nine months and then you went to another company and be an SDR. Well, why didn't you wait? What happened? How'd you make that decision? Then you start to look for trends of, uh, scenarios that you could start to assess. And what, what you see is when you, when you miss, you can look at backwards and people that didn't work out at your company, the same trends that you caught, they maybe admired the problem in the, uh, in the interview process. And, you know, you, you were just trying to fill street quota and you didn't make it deep enough.

AI assessment note: “I want to see how people make decisions. I want to see people's thought process”

Q I love that. That's a, it's quite a development. Now our final one, otherwise I can just keep going all day, but it's what company sales strategy around you that you've seen? Do you go, huh? That's really impressive. I'm impressed by that.

A Back in the day when we were at Salesforce, I think Salesforce did it so good. Like there's just, I spent almost 10 years at Salesforce. I know that you had a, listening to your interview with Mark Benioff and You know, just, he cultivated such a culture of, like, perfection, that people wanted to win for him, and he cultivated so many incredible leaders, And that company just had such an incredible sales process. Cause you think about our market, you can say, well, at that point, Siebel and Oracle were the big, PeopleSoft, SAP, Microsoft, you know, they, they were the, they, no one even knew about Salesforce. He just created so much talent around a process that we built a process around helping companies be more agile, be more flexible, put our data in the, put your data in the cloud. Were you crazy? Put your data in the cloud. Our sales process was around, hey, let's, let's show you, trust us. We'll show us, we'll show you our security. We'll show you our uptime and downtime in the market. And we would be very transparent with our customers. And we just had such an incredible sales process designed and built around what made us great and what made us unique that nobody could compete.

AI assessment note: “Salesforce did it so good... We'd be very transparent with our customers.”

Q What do you want to see in asking those questions?

A I want to see how people make decisions. I want to see people's thought process for how they make decisions. I want to see if people could be consistent, and they don't just give up. They don't just give up. They actually have grit, and they are out there to like, you know, they're, they're obsessed with winning, and they're very competitive. And we, you naturally, you look for trends that people make, Throughout their life. And you look for consistencies. And, um, it's been really helpful because you can really start to assess. You're just looking for trends. And then you look at their career for an example. And if they jumped around, like, tell me why you left this role to go to this role. Tell me why. Okay. You start off as an SDR. You were there for nine months and then you went to another company and be an SDR. Well, why didn't you wait? What happened? How'd you make that decision? Then you start to look for trends of, uh, scenarios that you could start to assess. And what, what you see is when you, when you miss, you can look at backwards and people that didn't work out at your company, the same trends that you caught, they maybe admired the problem in the, uh, in the interview process. And, you know, you, you were just trying to fill street quota and you didn't make it deep enough.

AI assessment note: “I want to see how people make decisions. I want to see people's thought process”

Q Can I ask you when it comes to those people who have what it takes in that performance driven culture, who thrive on that chase and the unwillingness to accept losing and that bluntly grit. How do you test for that in interviews? How do you see it in someone before you hire them?

A I'm from Massachusetts. I'm a Patriots fan. I'm a Bill Belichick fan. I know it's not probably the most popular thing to say right now, but what, what he does, cause just cause he hasn't really changed with the times recently, but the people that he recruits and that he brings on to the team are typically Um, people will have a lot of grit. They have a lot, like, they were captains of their programs, or they were, you know, really kind of leaders in school, and, um, and they were really competitive, and so, one, you've got to really look for grit, and what we do in our interview process, one of the most valuable things, is we do top grades with everybody, and in a top grade, we'll spend, um, two to three hours with you, and we'll have you walk us through your life, Walk us through the decisions you made in elementary school that you can remember. You, you got to be your freshman year and you, you know, you decided, say you had a coach and you decided you were a quarterback and you decided, Hey, I'm, I'm going to go be a receiver. Well, walk me through, like, how'd you make that decision? And then, okay, so now you're in college and you went to this school. Why did you go? Like you, but you had two, two decisions to make. Why'd you go here versus here?

AI assessment note: “what we do in our interview process, one of the most valuable things, is we do top grades”

Q How many chances do you give people Steve in an ideal world? And I don't mean this, but everyone's like me and you, and what I mean by that is fucking machines, sadly. Not everyone is a machine, or not everyone knows that 10 o'clock Friday, you gotta be on. How many chances do you give people when it's not quite there?

A The market has changed from a nurturing market to a performance-driven market, and that's happened probably over the last six to nine months. And it was really hard to drive that process in place because people would like to be asked questions, for example. But you, uh, we still drove that process. And in my experience, when I grew up, I was at Siebel and I was at Salesforce. If you showed up, Once and didn't have it together, you maybe got invited back twice, but there was no third time if you didn't have it. And, and that's just the environment I grew up in. Now, the market's not like that as it is today, but the expectation, the discipline that is getting back to that model, like the market is getting back to driving that process. And a lot of the people that have grown up in this industry over the past, say five to 10, seven, eight years, they haven't seen this.

AI assessment note: “you maybe got invited back twice, but there was no third time”

Q I know it's different for different segments. I know it's different for different companies, but just baseline bastardize it for me. RevOps enablement. When's the right time to hire your first in each? Ten million in revenue, your first, you know, massive logo. When's that trigger, Harry?

A I think revenue ops is probably the most valuable role in a company. And you're going to start to see the evolution of RevOps be moving into the CRO world. Uh, when you start bringing data and science together. I think you want to hire an analyst, like a really good analyst early on at about, say, five million to really start to analyze your processes, because a great CEO, very passionate, but they got to be able to make decisions based on data, not just based on gut. By five million, you're going to start to use some data and some AI that you can start to incorporate some AI, so you want to hire a really smart analyst, and as you grow to ten million, maybe two analysts, when you get to twenty million, you're going to need someone who's got some management experience, you know, Kind of seeing that ship around, uh, really building a strong kind of RevOps organization. Um, RevOps To me, I couldn't survive without a great, I've got an incredible RevOps leader.

AI assessment note: “hire an analyst, like a really good analyst early on at about, say, five million”

Q What's your biggest advice? As you mentioned with sales loft, it's plenty. It's a noisy landscape. And there's a lot of people who say they do the same thing. The product messaging and marketing is quite similar in a lot of cases. What would be your biggest advice to founders who are in noisier markets where a lot of people say the same things?

A You got to focus on the how. And you got to stay maniacally focused on the how. And you got to talk about what, how you are delivering for your customers. A lot of companies focus on the what. You just talked about, there's a lot of what out there. Here's what we do. Here's our value prop. Here's how we do that. Focus on like what you're delivering for them and how you're going to help them. But you got to prove it. You got to show them every single day. And you've got to be maniacally focused on showing them the how. Because a lot of people just focus on the what. And, uh, and you gotta, it goes back to solving the right business problem, but you gotta constantly be in front of them, showing them how you're helping them, how you're helping them hit these targets, how you're helping them solve the problems. Not only when you get the deal done, when you get the deal done, the relationship just starts.

AI assessment note: “You got to focus on the how. And you got to stay maniacally focused”

Q How do you find out what their personal and professional is? Do you, Do you ask them?

A You ask them. You just, you have questions, you have conversations, you naturally just have conversations. Really quickly, I think one of the things that I've been able to do is I could pretty quickly tell, like, people's body language, people's kind of where their head's at, like, you do the research, you follow them, you research them, you understand, like, what they talk about, maybe a little bit of their background, where they went, if they went to college, where they went to college, did they play sports, what sports team did they like, you know, where, where they're from. And where people are from, where people grew up, you just kind of figure out how to correlate with them, and, you know, it's just one of those things where I've just naturally always been able to kind of dig into it and get to the personal side of the relationship.

AI assessment note: “You ask them. You just, you have questions, you have conversations”

Q So you'll understand after this question why I'm asking it, what's a sales playbook to you, Steve?

A I think it's different in each segment. It's different in terms of if you're selling into a commercial business or you're selling into an enterprise business, it's got to be designed and architected into those businesses. It is the kind of gravitational pull that you want to drive within your process to make sure that the sales process is set up so everybody, so it's on your wheelhouse. So everybody's competing with you and it's gotta be consistent in how you do it. Um, and it's gotta be very tactical and very strategic. And so my job is to architect those across an enterprise business and across a commercial business and make sure that you want to give people some of the flexibility, like their managers, some flexibility, but they've got to work in your framework.

AI assessment note: “It is the kind of gravitational pull that you want to drive within your process”

Q I totally agree in terms of catching them at the right time. You also need to make sure that you're speaking to a buyer, How do you know if you're speaking to a buyer, Steve? And I did have a schedule, but like, this is far too enjoyable, so fuck it. How do you know if they're a buyer and how do you get there?

A So one, one thing I always look at, especially when we're building our internal sales process and our structure around our process is when you're selling to somebody within a large organization. Now, if you sell to an enterprise company, like a large enterprise company, they're politicians. You sell to a smaller SMB commercial company, they're operators. And two very different ways to sell to them. I try to put myself in not only their shoes, but the people's shoes that they're actually selling to within their organization to get something done. And if they're respectable enough that the people like a CFO would listen to them and how they would be perceived within their company. And one of the questions I always ask my sales team is the person you're selling to that you think is a buyer, typically, especially in this day and age, they're not a single sole buyer that they make all the decisions. They have to go to many different people. Okay. And when the CFO is putting pressure on them or their CEO is putting pressure on them, how are they going to take to that? Are they going to commit to it? Are they going to say, I'm willing to commit to more because, um, cause I'm going to consume this technology or this service. And you can very quickly realize in that process, if they're truly a buyer or not, or what part of the buying process they go to, or how they need to get to other …

AI assessment note: “You can very quickly realize in that process, if they're truly a buyer”

Q What are signs that someone's not a buyer? Where would you be like, oh, oh, oh, Harry, we've got a sign that, that we may need to go through someone else there.

A Well, one, if they tell you they're the buyer, people will usually tell you they're the buyer. They typically aren't. And, and if they tell you don't talk to anyone else, just talk to me. I can, I can navigate through this myself because you've got to be able to work together in, so no, let's, let's talk about an enterprise company right now. A lot of enterprise companies at the beginning of every year, people switch roles. So if you're selling to a very large enterprise company, you could be the CIO one day, and then next year you could be the CRO. They move roles quite a bit. Or if you're the CMO, and you've been there for, say, four months, and, you know, you're, you're actually on your way, you want to, you want to break some things, you want to try some things, you're kind of in the honeymoon, so you can actually take that chance. You got to look at a company, and how often they switch people's roles in the organization, and what the tenure of that role typically is, and if they're, they're two years into a role as a CMO, They might not have as much power as they did when they were like a year into that role.

AI assessment note: “if they tell you they're the buyer. They typically aren't.”

Q I know it's different for different segments. I know it's different for different companies, but just baseline bastardize it for me. RevOps enablement. When's the right time to hire your first in each? Ten million in revenue, your first, you know, massive logo. When's that trigger, Harry?

A I think revenue ops is probably the most valuable role in a company. And you're going to start to see the evolution of RevOps be moving into the CRO world. Uh, when you start bringing data and science together. I think you want to hire an analyst, like a really good analyst early on at about, say, five million to really start to analyze your processes, because a great CEO, very passionate, but they got to be able to make decisions based on data, not just based on gut. By five million, you're going to start to use some data and some AI that you can start to incorporate some AI, so you want to hire a really smart analyst, and as you grow to ten million, maybe two analysts, when you get to twenty million, you're going to need someone who's got some management experience, you know, Kind of seeing that ship around, uh, really building a strong kind of RevOps organization. Um, RevOps To me, I couldn't survive without a great, I've got an incredible RevOps leader.

AI assessment note: “hire an analyst, like a really good analyst early on at about, say, five million”

Q Have you always been that way or did you learn it over time?

A You know, what I've learned was that you, you can't be afraid to have the tough conversation. You just, you can never be afraid because if you don't have it, then, then some, somebody else will. And, or, or you just want, you won't get to the objectives. You gotta, you gotta leave it on the field. And this is where you gotta balance things out. Like I've had some of the best sellers in the world when I was a first line manager, they were the best relationship people, the best, but they couldn't close because they couldn't have the tough conversation. So my job as the RVP in that case was to have those tough conversations and to leverage their strength and leverage my strength. And so you, you need that balancing act. You need, you need this team.

AI assessment note: “what I've learned was that you, you can't be afraid”

Q Do you not think they're slightly conflicting when you think about that? Say better this year, building a more efficient, more, uh, kind of a high velocity machine, better, and then bigger, more people, more revenue, more this, more this, more. They're kind of conflicting, aren't they? To assume you can maintain better while bigger is, I think, realistically impossible.

A Well, let me, let me give you a couple examples of that. So, you know, like, you ever been on a beach and it looks beautiful, the sun's setting, tides in, looking outside, it's like, it looks beautiful, right? Looks incredible. Then all of a sudden the tide goes out, and now you're looking at the, you know, if the sun's down, wow, there's a huge reef over there. My God, there's a shipwreck over there. Like, look at all those rocks. I had no idea those were there. Well, that's what's happened this year. You have to change your process. And so what we found for an example, two things that we did this year. So we have a commercial business, which is about one employee to 700 to 50 employees. And we had a hunter farmer model in that commercial business where we had sellers would sell a deal and they would own it for a year. Then they'd pass it off to an AM who would just farm. And in the past, they were, people were just adding on a hundred licenses every year because they were growing at huge rates. But what happened in the past year was that these account managers were just hanging out with the same people that they sold the original deal to, and instead of buying a hundred licenses, they're like, I only have 50 people at the company now. So we saw a lot of downgrades. So we shifted to a hunter-hunter model. And we shifted our process, and we basically told our account managers, …

AI assessment note: “You have to change your process. And so what we found for an example”

Q How do you find out what their personal and professional is? Do you, Do you ask them?

A You ask them. You just, you have questions, you have conversations, you naturally just have conversations. Really quickly, I think one of the things that I've been able to do is I could pretty quickly tell, like, people's body language, people's kind of where their head's at, like, you do the research, you follow them, you research them, you understand, like, what they talk about, maybe a little bit of their background, where they went, if they went to college, where they went to college, did they play sports, what sports team did they like, you know, where, where they're from. And where people are from, where people grew up, you just kind of figure out how to correlate with them, and, you know, it's just one of those things where I've just naturally always been able to kind of dig into it and get to the personal side of the relationship.

AI assessment note: “You ask them. You just, you have questions, you have conversations”

Q Do you do that continuously throughout the year?

A We've changed our whole adoption strategy to outcomes versus adoption, because nobody cares if I come to you and say, here's how many logins you have, here's how many activities you had. What you want to know is, what is my pipeline metrics been, and how am I coming in every quarter to my pipeline targets, and what are my outcomes around revenue that I'm driving with your platform. And so we've changed our whole adoption metrics to outcome metrics, and we know all the leading indicators that get the outcomes. And we designed health scores around every single one of our customers. And we could see, be proactive when it triggers from a green to a yellow and what created that, that we'll all of a sudden start to drive leveraging our platform workflow and, and, and activity and thought leadership and content out to them. And a CSM will follow right up once we see something change.

AI assessment note: “be proactive when it triggers from a green to a yellow”

Q travels fast. Bad news is very slow. I thought that was a really good piece of advice that I, that I always remember. You mentioned deal reviews there, Steve. I'm a total novice here. I'm a first time founder. How should I do deal reviews? How often should I do them? What makes a good versus a bad one? Can you help me understand how to do deal reviews well?

A Yeah. So, so one, it's, it's really that the first line manager needs to own the deal reviews. They need to own the process. My job is to design and architect the whole raw system that people work within. So if I'm asking my second line and third line managers five questions, they need to be asking their teams the same five questions or the same 10 questions. Their deal reviews are different at different stages of a quarter, for an example, or different stages of a year. At the beginning of the quarter, you're going to be asking a different set of questions because you're really going to just try to get an understanding of what's happening. But the whole goal of deal reviews are to understand, like, why not something is going to happen, but also understand how do we actually untie knots? Because manager's job and my job, my job is to help untie knots.

AI assessment note: “the first line manager needs to own the deal reviews. They need to own the process.”

Q encourage urgency? Like close, close, close. And it kind of just feels like it goes against the solving Steve's problem. How do you balance between that needing to close an urgency of closing in a quarter with, I get it, Steve, it may not be optimal for you to sign right now. You've got this big thing happening. Have another week. How do you balance that urgent with the personal?

A I think there's a respect component of that where you build relationships and you're working towards a moment in time where you've got to have a tough conversation. And you, you don't want to have it to be a surprise. You don't want to ever do anything unnatural. But at the end of the day, you know, we do work in months and quarters, and there's going to be times throughout the relationship that you're going to ask me for something, and I'm going to ask you for something. Right now, what I'm asking you for, not to do anything unnatural, but if you can do it in this timeline, we'd appreciate it. Now, you don't have to, but we would really appreciate it. But that's why the mutual plan is so important. So you're not just having to do something unnatural and throw a Hail Mary at the end of the quarter, end of the month. I mean, that happens. In certain cases, but if you align on the deal reviews and the process and the structure, you're having these conversations and you're aligning towards a plan to be able to do something in, in a timeline that works for both of you. And it, you know, you talk about compelling events and how do you back into compelling events? And, you know, I think that's also really important, but at the end of the day, I do think relationships matter because a procurement person, if they're told what to do by the buyers, That they'll work towards those days. I…

AI assessment note: “if you can do it in this timeline, we'd appreciate it.”

Q I totally agree in terms of catching them at the right time. You also need to make sure that you're speaking to a buyer, How do you know if you're speaking to a buyer, Steve? And I did have a schedule, but like, this is far too enjoyable, so fuck it. How do you know if they're a buyer and how do you get there?

A So one, one thing I always look at, especially when we're building our internal sales process and our structure around our process is when you're selling to somebody within a large organization. Now, if you sell to an enterprise company, like a large enterprise company, they're politicians. You sell to a smaller SMB commercial company, they're operators. And two very different ways to sell to them. I try to put myself in not only their shoes, but the people's shoes that they're actually selling to within their organization to get something done. And if they're respectable enough that the people like a CFO would listen to them and how they would be perceived within their company. And one of the questions I always ask my sales team is the person you're selling to that you think is a buyer, typically, especially in this day and age, they're not a single sole buyer that they make all the decisions. They have to go to many different people. Okay. And when the CFO is putting pressure on them or their CEO is putting pressure on them, how are they going to take to that? Are they going to commit to it? Are they going to say, I'm willing to commit to more because, um, cause I'm going to consume this technology or this service. And you can very quickly realize in that process, if they're truly a buyer or not, or what part of the buying process they go to, or how they need to get to other …

AI assessment note: “you can very quickly realize in that process, if they're truly a buyer”