Dan Fougere
Venture Partner, Index Ventures. On 1 show, 1 appearance. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
operatorexecutiveinvestorLinkedIn ↗indexventures.com ↗
Dan Fougere is best known as the former Chief Revenue Officer of Datadog, where he scaled ARR from $60 million to $1 billion. Over his software career, he led sales teams at four companies completing billion-dollar IPOs before moving into venture investing.
1shows
1appearances
35statements
4resolved
3supported
1contradicted
75%fully supported
1said about them ↓ Everything Dan Fougere said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Fougere: Pipeline generation cannot be outsourced to SDRs
“Asking somebody else to do PG for you is like asking them to go to the gym for you. I think it creates, I don't think it creates the right culture to think that this is something that can be outsourced. And so the way I look at it is PG is everybody's job.”
Fougere: One weekly pipeline opportunity and meeting guarantees reps hit quota
“Like at Datadog, when I left, it was one of each of those, a pipeline, a new pipeline opportunity that's got a specific definition and a new business meeting for enterprise and two for SMB. And if I had those, I could, I guarantee you, you're going to make you…”
Fougere: Datadog gave reps four months post-landing before CS account handoff
“Gave them when they broke into a new account, whether it was inbound or outbound, doesn't matter. They had four months to sell more products, to take advantage of some of the growth that they might have because of a consumption model. And then after that point…”
Fougere: Datadog reduced CAC via non-commissioned Customer Success growth
“And so the CAC was incredible because the growth was non-commissioned because CS did not have commission, right?”
Fougere: Founders cannot scale sales playbooks to billions in revenue
“And that's a great way to get started, but you're not going to scale to billions of dollars of revenue, at least in my experience with that. Like you're going to need more of what I just described and every place I've ever been, that's been the sales leader do…”
Fougere: Datadog struggled to recruit sales talent due to engineering bias
“When I went to Datadog, people didn't want to go there. Like recruiting was so hard. And part of it was a reputation that it was a, it was an engineering company. They didn't respect salespeople.”
Fougere: Sales reps with discounting authority always offer the maximum discount
“Without the right leadership, and even sometimes with the right leadership, salespeople left to the left to their own devices will peg at maximum discount, 100% of the time.”
Fougere: Top enterprise CIOs rejected Datadog's cloud monitoring pitch in 2017
“Amit and I went on a series of dinners with Shardul Shah in early 2017, and we were, and it was all CIOs. And CTOs. And we were so excited and we went to fancy restaurants and nobody cared about cloud monitoring.”
Fougere: In early 2017, enterprises had almost no cloud production applications
“And so the enterprise, there were really, in early 2017, this might be surprising to some people, is there really weren't any production applications in the cloud for the enterprise.”
Fougere: Sales reps should excite prospects before attempting early qualification
“They're trying to qualify in the beginning and you need to light them up with like excitement. You need to get them on the hook by getting them as excited about what you have as you are.”
Fougere: High pipeline volume matters more than high close rate
“And if you don't have enough pipeline and you have a really high close rate, you're not going to hit your number. But if you have a ton of pipeline, and even if you have a lower close rate, you're going to hit your number.”
Fougere: Sales leaders should join strong product cultures over sales-first companies
“I can make a great sales culture, but I can't make a great product in engineering culture. And so I'm going to go to a product in engineering culture and I will build a great sales culture because those two things together will be more powerful than, you know,…”
Fougere: Discounting small consumption accounts destroys future pricing leverage
“If you're in a consumption business, if you are going to the lowest discount already, when they have the smallest amount of spend, when they have quadrupled, 10 X to their spend, they're going to expect bigger discounts.”
Fougere: Companies should not discount prices in exchange for testimonials
“I don't think so. I think people, people do it because you're delivering value for them, and because you build relationships with them, and I wouldn't want to trade economics for really like non-economic support.”
Fougere: Qualtrics caught Medallia because its product innovated faster
“Qualtrics caught up to us because they were out developing us. They're out, their product was innovating much faster than ours.”
Fougere: Junior sales reps can close major deals with proper training
“Over my experience over the past few years that very junior people can do very big deals with the right training and the right leadership. And that is very different than what most salespeople are taught is that only the most senior salespeople can do the big …”
Fougere names Sean Walters as the single best CRO to hire
“Sean Walters. He has been able to take over Datadog. I've, I hired him as a rep at BMC right after we were acquired at Blade Logic by BMC. And he went through some super hard times and came out as the top rep. And got promoted. He was a leader at BMC and came …”
Fougere promises sales team life-changing wealth and career success
“We will have a legendary sales team making life-changing money, being best in class, and having fun. You will learn more and become better at your job working on my team than you would have at any other team during that same amount of time. And you will never …”
Fougere: Deal qualification requires actively searching for flaws to overcome optimism
“You have to realize that human nature is such that you want to have the rose-colored glasses on, you want to believe the deal is good, and you need to know that the opposite is probably true. And you've got to look for the dirt and you've got to build that int…”
Fougere: True economic buyers are one or two levels higher than expected
“What I know from experience is it's probably one or two levels above whatever you think it is, whoever you think it is.”
Fougere: Datadog's first enterprise deal was $1.4M with Capital One
“And all of a sudden that was our first enterprise deal, and it was for 1.4 million dollars, and we had never had a deal like that before, and that was about six months in.”
Fougere: Personal buyer motivations drive enterprise sales, not corporate metrics
“Dave is talking there truthfully about like more probably corporate motivations. And so, and those are important, but they're also abstracted away from the motivations of the people you're actually selling to. And so Both of those are important. The ones that …”
Fougere: Datadog differentiated enterprise CS support from commercial sales CS
“So for enterprise CS, it was more about kind of like Implementation and support for commercial CS. It was kind of like a sales kind of cap capacity.”
The other half of the tape: Dan Fougere's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 1 time in 1 episode across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
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One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Dan's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 20VCLEDGER | Venture Partner, Index Ventures | 1 | 35 | 75% 3/4 | full record on 20VC → |