Lars Dahlgaard

“I think it's like 90% more important, that first interview, because you create an emotional contract with that person forever.”

“And it's like we've trained ourselves to stay the fuck away from that place, but I go straight where it hurts the most, and I talk about that. And it never fails. All these CEOs, they're very, very successful, they're running public companies, they look in the…”

“I would never be apologetic in an interview around, you know, like, I'm not a tech person, I'm not, like, I can just see it, because I've interviewed a bunch of people that had your background, and I saw some, you know, apologies, and then also this sort of li…”

“It was the third largest company in the world. They had 320,000 employees, and I was the youngest CEO at 26 there by 13 years.”

“I don't ask it in the first minute, because then it's useless. I ask it like, 20 minutes in. Because you've built some rapport and they know who you are and how real you are.”

“73.”

“My first one was Respect for the individual. It starts, and it said, no assholes.”

“Data doesn't lie as much as your own brain does. And you can come up with all sorts of interpretations around why what you're thinking is actually right, but there is nothing to prove it.”

“Don't try and catch a wave. Don't try and do something you've read in a magazine that might be hot, and you can just get in on it, because there is no such thing. Once you try to catch that wave is gone, and it's got a bunch of people on it that came up with i…”

“We had the opportunity, or I personally did, to pitch to a 73 venture capitalists who all said no.”

“You can't find any of my friends working for my company for the first decade, and you can't find any of our customers being any of my friends.”

“What we did in that case is, we gave them a vote. Who helped you the most this year? And they got to go.”

“What I can tell you is the worst thing you can do in the world is make Selling so damn complicated with so many different variables that a rep can try and optimize that they don't have the ability to actually figure out what you want them to do.”

“And frankly, all of companies in Silicon Valley that we didn't have Salesforce up front and thought they could rethink it, have all come home to roost. And they now have great sales forces that sell with commission for a living.”

“Some reps that are successful in one organization, like super successful, might not have any success in a different company. It's a very different thing depending on what you're selling”

“This is maybe one of the biggest breakthroughs in SuccessFactors history was that we made reps feel like they were as important as engineers.”

“One rep does one big deal. That doesn't really mean anything. You, I mean, sales is a hard job. It's very easy to think that because a couple of reps do some big deals, now you've figured it all out and let's move on to the next thing.”