The Ledger, every show

“Is that the only thing that motivates you? Because if that's the only thing that motivates you, we're done here. I have nothing to discuss with you.”

“That has to take place before you build the product. Otherwise you could build a product that nobody wants to buy.”

“Yeah, usually you're going to need more than a couple million bucks to do this. You don't need 20, but you probably need 10.”

“The person that knows what the customer wants to buy is the person that's talking to the customer. It's the CRO.”

“What I never want to see is, Hey, I just hired 10 reps. I put a rep in New York, rep in Dallas. And a rep in San Francisco and Los Angeles, and I told them they can have all the accounts in those geographies. You're in deep shit.”

“They are, in fact, while not as directly responsible as sales, they're still responsible for revenue.”

“Salespeople are great because they're predictable. I can get you to do whatever I want you to do by setting up the comp plan accordingly.”

“So first of all, it should be the CRO's decision, not the founders.”

“If you're going to be in my interview process, you are either uniquely qualified to qualify or you are uniquely qualified to sell. If you are not one of those two things, you are not getting into the interview process.”

“If I ever hear that a rep says, well, why aren't you hitting your number? Well, I'm not getting any leads. You ain't going to make it. So yes, they are ultimately responsible for their own lead generation, but they should be supplemented.”

“Look at Databricks, right? Like Databricks is hiring lots of people. Some might argue too many people. I, we'll see how that plays out. But A lot of people are just going to Databricks because it's a hot company, or so they think.”

“Like what I'm being told, and again, I don't do it, but the feedback I get is emails, LinkedIn simply doesn't work. It just, it, there's too much of it.”

“Gross retention tells me if people like my product. Like, I understand if my gross retention is 90%, I probably have a pretty good product. Right? If my gross retention slips down to 70%, I have a product problem. Net dollar retention is about expanding. So yo…”

“Early stage company, look, we do, you'll do negative margin deals, right? Like we're going to do this deal, but we're going to lose money on the deal. But we need the referenceable account, and we'll make up for it later.”

“Even if you have the best product in the world, you're still going to leave money on the table if you have shitty salespeople.”

“There's great companies with very shitty sales organizations, and there's shitty companies with world-class sales organizations. So the first thing you look for is what quality of sales organization does the individual come from?”

“You never want a new manager to have less than five productive reps. You can't scale the organization from 100 to 300 and not have that. What I mean is if I have a manager, he's got five reps on his team, he or she, three of those reps should be productive, tw…”

“I think one year we went from 100 to 300.”

“A productive rep, if the productivity per rep is a million dollars per year, the first quarter they're productive is the first quarter you can expect them to do two fifties. So first of all, you have to, people get this definition wrong all the time. Like the …”

“You can do a good job of getting the enablement to happen within 90 days, but if your sales cycle is six months, you're still gonna have ramp time of six months.”

“Somebody that's passionate about their career will know every single one of these details. They're proud of it. They hang their hat on it, right?”

“And so it makes it harder because I, again, I need more senior people, but I can't give up that ability and willingness to do the hard grunt work, the PG pipeline generation. So it makes it harder. The spec has gotten more narrow.”

“And so every scaling company that I've ever been a part of, we will model 25% attrition, and we're typically right there.”

“Ok, so I have to, when I'm building a productivity plan or a hiring plan for a company, I have to bake into the fact that I'm going to have six percent turnover every quarter. I have to hire ahead of that turnover.”

“As you scale, you would expect productivity to come down. The only place I did not see that was Snowflake. We could not hire fast enough to bring the productivity down.”

“So, I take my productivity, expected productivity last year, let's assume it's a reasonable number, and then I tack on 20% to set the quota. I expect my average rep to sell 1.2, I don't want everybody hitting quota, so then I'll take the 1.2, tack on 20%, and …”

“The usual problem is, my new logo ACV is not where I want it to be. All my reps are doing is focusing on expansion. Why? Because expansion's easier than opening a new account.”

“MongoDB at scale. Has the best training and development of any at-scale sales organization I've ever seen. It's a world-class place.”

“Everything we do, we incubate inside the four walls of Sutter Hill.”

“Salespeople are great because they're predictable. I can get you to do whatever I want you to do by setting up the comp plan accordingly.”

“If I'm a 10 K ACV, then I'm exclusively inside sales and I better be able to keep the cost of sale low. Otherwise, to your point, I can't justify it. The unit economics don't work.”

“It's sort of a rule of thumb. My reps should be able to generate three times their OTE. So if your OTE is 300 rough numbers, you should be able to get 900 K in productivity.”

“If you have a field sales organization, and you have 10 reps, and the productivity is 600 grand, you better not be hiring. You need to get that productivity, and until such time as either you get that productivity up, or at least can look at the data and see t…”

“Inside, I'd like to see 90 days. Outside, six months. Reality is, it probably trends more towards nine months in enterprise.”

“So at 10 reps, do you need an enablement person? Probably not. And each circumstance clearly is unique, but at 30 to 40, yeah, you better start to think about it.”

“In the early days, it was crazy. Like people would buy A 15 K land deal, and they'd expand to 150 in six months, right? So when you have product like that, that just expands on its own, you can get away with less customer success. I've not seen that since Snow…”

“Your SEs will start to depart before your reps. And when your SEs start to depart, the reps know that the SEs know more than the reps know about the product. Right. So you'll see SE start to depart and the reps will start to follow.”

“If you're going to scale like that, you can't have 10 interviews per hire, right? It kills the productivity.”

“Most of these guys are now reaching a point where they've made so much money where they may not want to go back and do this again. So you have to look for the next generation.”

“Salespeople, as good as they are, is capturing and understanding the data. That doesn't mean they're necessarily great at creating content. So what you want them to do is capture all of the information, feed it back into product marketing and let product marke…”

“So if you look at a 10 K ACV, well, that's definitely not a field sales rep, right? If I'm a 10 K ACV that I'm exclusively inside sales and I better be able to keep the cost of sale low. Otherwise, to your point, I can't justify it. The unit economics don't wo…”

“My reps should be able to generate three times their OTE. So if your OTE is 300 rough numbers, you should be able to get 900 K in productivity.”

“So if you have a field sales organization and you have 10 reps and the productivity is 600 grand, you better not be hiring. You need to get that productivity, and until such time as either you get that productivity up, or at least can look at the data and see …”

“Inside, I'd like to see 90 days. Outside, six months. Reality is, it probably trends more towards nine months in enterprise.”

“So at 10 reps, do you need an enablement person? Probably not. And each circumstance clearly is unique, but at 30 to 40, yeah, you better start to think about it.”

“They don't have a customer success organization at Snowflake, or at least they didn't. Maybe they've created one out, but they didn't. The feeling was everybody's in customer success.”

“Like, people would buy A 15 K land deal, and they'd expand to 150 in six months, right? So when you have product like that, that just expands on its own, you can get away with less customer success. I've not seen that since Snowflake.”

“Having a rep that loves his day job is, is very difficult in our environment because nobody likes doing pipeline generation. It's not fun. It's a grind.”