Insight
Gabrisko: Technical software companies need technical CROs to close technical buyers
“I think in general, if you have a really technical product, most of the buyers, if they're technical buyers, they want, they don't really love talking with salespeople. So you have to add a lot of value on the technical front. You need to know your stuff. They…”
Insight
Gabrisko: Inside Sales Teams Must Work Together in a Bullpen
“I do think your inside sales team should be together. I like the bullpen concept. I think they need to learn from each other. They need to feel the energy from each other”
Insight
Gabrisko: Consumption pricing beats seat-based licensing because data volume continuously scales
“And also our baseline continues to grow. So as people get more and more data and more and more queries, our revenue grows as well. Right. Which I think is a way superior model than a licensing or Seat based. Cause eventually you might run out of users. For us …”
Disclosure
Gabrisko: Databricks solution architects write code and run pilots, not just demos
“I would say our SAs tend to be very technical. A lot of them can code, they can do POCs, they can do pilots. They're not just doing demos. And we expect our salespeople to understand the technology, not just be able to bring in the right resources.”
Insight
Gabrisko: Silicon Valley startups are difficult early customers due to build-vs-buy
“We were trying to sell to all the smartest Silicon Valley tech companies, which is actually pretty hard. A lot of those folks like to build their own stuff, right? They're early adopters of tech, but they're also like harder to get big dollars out of early in …”
Insight
Gabrisko: Startups should innovate on SKU packaging, not novel pricing metrics
“Yeah, I would innovate on the packaging, right? Like how do you package things? Again, our base parameter consumption made sense for our market, but how you package those SKUs to make them easy to buy, like this type of buyer likes to buy this, make it easy fo…”
Insight
Gabrisko: Never build one-offs, but add features requested by 20 customers
“You never want to do, do like a one-off, but if you hear something from 20 different customers, put it in the product, right?”
What-if
Gabrisko: Databricks could have grown even faster with heavier early investment
“And if I had to give myself advice would have been invest even more early when you, I think we could have grew even faster.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Gabrisko: Databricks won early enterprise clients via a16z CIO briefing forums
“And A-sixteen Z, they have a lot of those kind of go to market motions where they'll set up basically a forum for you to present to large enterprises. I know not everybody has maybe a VC backer, but those programs are incredibly valuable. Sometimes people like…”
Disclosure
Gabrisko: Databricks hired 40 sales reps during his first quarter as CRO
“I think probably in the first quarter, I probably hired 40 sales folks because I saw the kind of demand that I thought, and we had some big revenue aspirations, but we built both.”
