🎙️Transcript: How to Build a Winning Sales Team
Betts Recruiting - Ask the Experts
"How to Build a Winning Sales Team"
Amber Medeiros, David Baga, Trent Truitt, Bridget Gleason, Ralph Barsi
September 2, 2015
Summary
This panel discussion, moderated by Amber Medeiros of Betts Recruiting, brings together four accomplished sales leaders to explore strategies for building and maintaining high-performing sales organizations.
The panelists include David Baga (Chief Sales Officer at Lyft), Trenton Truitt (sales leader with experience at Documentum, EMC, and PagerDuty), Bridget Gleason (VP of Corporate Sales at Sumo Logic), and Ralph Barsi (VP of Field Sales at Achievers).
The conversation covers the complete lifecycle of sales team management, from attracting top talent in a competitive market to retaining and developing that talent over time.
Key themes include the importance of promoting team success publicly to attract candidates, establishing clear career progression paths, implementing repeatable hiring processes, maintaining company culture, and ensuring sales teams influence product direction.
The panelists emphasize that successful sales leadership requires balancing individual development with team execution, creating mission-driven cultures, and never stopping learning.
Throughout the discussion, they stress that sales leaders bear responsibility not just for revenue numbers but for making their team members' professional and personal goals come true, viewing pressure as the obligation to deliver on the trust people place in them when joining their teams.
BIG Takeaways
Publicly Celebrate Success to Attract Top Talent
In competitive markets like the Bay Area, constantly promote your team's achievements through social media, photos at company events, and public recognition on platforms like Twitter and LinkedIn.
When teams consistently hit their numbers and you broadcast those wins, you attract an audience of exceptional candidates who want to join winning teams. People don't want to work for teams or leaders who aren't fun, so make celebration and recognition part of your talent attraction strategy.
Articulate Clear Career Progression Beyond the Current Role
Millennials and ambitious candidates want to understand not just the job at hand but what comes next and what follows after that. Communicate the complete career path from SDR to junior rep to senior rep to manager and beyond.
Show candidates you're invested in them individually and committed to their long-term development. This clarity about progression is a major differentiator when competing for talent against companies where employees become "one of many" without clear advancement opportunities.
The Real Pressure Is Making Team Members' Goals Come True
The best sales leaders don't feel pressure about hitting numbers because that's what they're going to do. Instead, they feel pressure because people gave them their confidence when joining the team, and leaders owe those people success.
When you recruit someone, you take on responsibility for making their professional and personal goals reality. This human connection and sense of obligation to individual team members drives exceptional leadership and creates loyalty that transcends compensation.
Implement Repeatable, Machine-Like Hiring Processes
Treat recruiting like running an SDR team with clear metrics, pipeline tracking, and conversion rates. Work backwards from when you need people productive to determine when to start hiring.
Create detailed hiring specs with HR and recruiting partners, establish consistent interview loops with rapid feedback mechanisms, and have offer packages ready to move at speed. Organizations with 24-page hiring process documents can tell candidates exactly what happens next and move quickly enough to compete in fast markets where top candidates have multiple offers.
Overhire and Overpay Early to Establish Culture and Identity
In early-stage companies or new divisions, resist the temptation to cut corners on initial hires. Bring in people who are creative, thoughtful, experienced, and won't be scared off by ambiguity or lack of playbooks.
These core team members establish the culture and identity that will shape the next 10, 30, or 90 hires. If you don't build a strong foundation with your first five people, your culture flips when you scale to 20 or 30 people, creating an inverse pyramid that destroys what you've built.
Master the Current Role Before Advancing
Sales development reps must spend their first year mastering the SDR role because the skills learned in prospecting, networking, and follow-up will serve them for 20 years of their careers.
Break career paths into clear six-month chunks showing exactly what skills will be developed and why that timeframe matters. Leaders still draw on SDR fundamentals decades later, just as Steph Curry warms up with basic drills before every game. Rushing to account executive roles without mastering fundamentals leads to performance plans and job-hopping cycles.
Sales Teams Are the Tip of the Spear for Product Direction
Salespeople are the only people in organizations pounding pavement and phones, listening directly to customer problems and identifying repeatable themes.
In early-stage companies, sales teams essentially function as the product management team because they understand what resonates in the market. Sales leaders must create systematic ways to funnel product feedback from the field to product teams, quantify revenue commitments tied to feature requests, and ensure product leaders spend as much time with customers as sales leaders do.
Transcript
Amber Medeiros (00:00:15):
Yeah, no peanut gallery up front, but definitely sit there. Great. Well, thank you so much all for coming tonight. Welcome. My name is Amber Medeiros. I am the director of leadership recruitment here at Betts Recruiting. And tonight, for the next half hour or so, we're going to be talking about hiring and retaining winning sales teams. Finding the right team in the very beginning can be challenging for companies, but it also can very much be a make or break. If you don't have the right sales team, you can't succeed. So tonight we'll have the opportunity to pick our panelists' brains on hiring, winning sales teams, retaining that team. And then also for the aspiring sales leaders in the audience tonight, we'll have an opportunity to hear any nugget of advice that they have for you as you grow your career.
(00:01:12):
If you're going to be tweeting about this event tonight, I thought it would be great if we could all use the same hashtag, which is ask the experts. And to kick us off, let's introduce our panelists. Great. So first to my left, we have David Baga, who is the chief sales officer of our favorite ride sharing service, Lyft. David's team is responsible for providing transportation solutions for enterprise clients. And most recently, he was chief revenue officer at Rocket Lawyer, where his team grew revenues from two million to 40 million in four years, which is amazing. And then he earned them position number 72 on 2012 Inc. 500 fastest growing companies list as well. Prior to Rocket Lawyer, he spent seven years at Oracle building enterprise teams and delivered record setting results there as well. David's very active in the startup community and he helps startups with their go-to-market strategy.
Next on our panel, we have Trent Truitt. Welcome. He has built and run sales teams at both large companies like Documentum and EMC, and then also at smaller startups like Accelerate and PagerDuty, which I'm sure you're all familiar with. Trent has a deep understanding of how to build and implement repeatable processes while hiring the right people to execute on those processes. He has found success in promoting from within and ensuring that his team has what they need to execute. He's an excellent communicator, mentor, and leader to his team. We'll find out.
Trent Truitt (00:02:54):
Trenton Truitt himself, folks. I can't wait to hear what she said about me.
Amber Medeiros (00:03:04):
All right. Next on our panel, we have the VP of corporate sales for Sumo Logic, Bridget Gleason. Welcome. Bridget has 20 years of sales and sales management experience in the technology sector. She recently joined Sumo Logic as one of their executive members to help lead and grow the inside sales team. Her most recent experience was VP of sales for Yesware in Boston and the SVP of worldwide sales for Engine Yard. Prior to Engine Yard, Bridget was the founder and principal for BLG Consulting Group, a strategic sales and consulting organization. And she's also an advisor for several early stage startups.
And then finally on our panel, we have Ralph Barsi. Ralph is currently the VP of Field Sales for Achievers, and he currently oversees the company's sales development and sales operations teams, both of which were instrumental in the recent acquisition from Blackhawk Networks. That's great. Prior to Achievers, Ralph built and led the sales development organization at InsideView. He is an active member of the American Association of Inside Sales Professionals, an organization that recognized Ralph as one of the most influential sales professionals for both 2014 and 2015. He also has a wife of 19 years and three boys, and he's been a drummer in a Segway band for 20 years. Wow. Which is amazing.
Ralph Barsi (00:05:08):
Let me talk about music tonight. Yes.
Amber Medeiros (00:05:13):
Great. So please join me in thanking our panelists for being here tonight. Great. So on the topic of hiring to kick things off, I'm going to direct this question to the entire group, so I definitely want you guys to weigh in on this one. In a competitive market, how do you ensure that the best salespeople not only want to come work for your company, but want to work for you?
Ralph Barsi (00:05:46):
It is a very competitive market, especially where we are and where we live. So it's really important that, at least in my experience, that you are always touting the success of your company and your company's brand, the success of your team and your team's brand. If your team does really well and hits their number for a quarter, for example, don't just take them out to the Giants game to celebrate, which you should do, but take pictures at the event, tout it on Twitter, LinkedIn, tell the world how well your team is doing. And when they're consistently successful and you're consistently promoting their success and recognizing them in front of all of you, it starts to attract an audience of fabulous candidates because they want to work for a winning team. So it's really important to leverage social media to attract the audience that you want to work for you, and have fun doing it, because nobody wants to go work for somebody who's not fun.
Bridget Gleason (00:06:58):
So I totally plus one that. I think the other thing, particularly with millennials, we hire a lot of millennials on our team, is they want to know their career progression, and not just what the job is at hand that you're talking about, but what's the next job? And what does it look like after that? And that there are people who are going to be invested in them individually. So I think there's not a lot of that out there. You go to a company and you can be one of many, and so we like to tell people that we... Like you said, it's very competitive. By the way, we do have 30 openings for salespeople. Contact anyone at Betts. I said it first, I said it first. But I think it is... We talk a lot about what the progression is and what your career might look like at Sumo Logic and then beyond. So we spend a lot of time thinking about the individual and sort of the progress that they can make in their professional careers.
Trenton Truitt (00:08:04):
I guess it'd be plus two. Again, my name is Trenton. Thanks for coming tonight. One of the things that I think about when I'm meeting with people is I find that individuals want to be coached, they want to be mentored, at least the people I'm looking for. The people that I want to bring in are willing to be pushed and challenged in a safe environment where they can excel. And I find that when you do that with people, you give them the opportunity to excel and you give them coaching and mentoring, not just to tell them what they're doing right, but also coaching what they're doing wrong or what they can improve upon. That goes a long way because people are building their careers.
When I think about the pressure I feel every day, it's not about making the number because that's what we're going to go do. The pressure I feel is I recruit people to my team and my pressure is making their professional goals and personal goals come true. And I'm sure some of the sales leaders, the best ones I know feel that way. That's the real pressure, that you've given me your confidence, and so now I owe you, and I have to make you successful. So that's the pressure I feel. And so I like to make that human connection, and when I do, I find that we get very, very good candidates.
David Baga (00:09:23):
Not much left to be said here. I think that I like to position really around kind of three Rs of managing my career: relationships, reputation, results. Deliver the results, you build the relationships, you build a reputation, and that kind of carries you forward. And so recruiting hopefully is something that you develop momentum with over time and momentum, inertia is the enemy. And once you get that momentum going, I think that game recognizes game and they want to join a winning team.
The other piece is really about, it's something that's kind of changed in my career the last two companies that I've been at, and it's really about trying to find mission-driven companies. And so for me, I'm looking for this intersection that I think is really interesting, which is how do you find companies that are going to contribute to a better society, have tons of social impact, and at the same time, the financial opportunity is extraordinary. And then I sell that vision. That's what got me excited and when I'm out competing in the market, I'm going to tell you about an opportunity where you can change the world and you can make a lot of money at the same time. And I think that's a pretty unique position against a lot of the competitors that are out there.
Amber Medeiros (00:10:49):
Great. Perfect. So on that, from a recruiting standpoint, it's an extremely fast paced market right now. So Trent, I'd love to hear from you, how do you find the right balance between doing your due diligence with candidates, but also staying competitive and moving quickly?
Trent Truitt (00:11:08):
There's a great article I read on LinkedIn about this very subject. I forgot the author's name. So recruiting, that's your real question, right?
Amber Medeiros (00:11:24):
Sure. And also finding the right balance between vetting out a candidate and making sure that you have all of the necessary information, but then being able to move quickly when say they have five offers in their hand from multiple clients.
Trent Truitt (00:11:38):
A couple things. And it was very well summarized today, but I will tell you what my process is. The first part is you have to be very clear with your HR partners and with your partners in the recruiting field, like Betts, exactly what you want and what the quote unquote spec is for that role. This is my third startup. This is the third team I've built with Betts. And what I like about that is they know, the people that work with me know the intangibles of what I'm looking for. So now I have to just clearly define the metrics of what I'm looking for and the spec, if you will. So it kind of starts there. And I do that not alone. I do it with the people on my team. I do that with my HR team. I do that with the marketing brethren who are going to be working with day in and day out.
SEs, product management, I kind of give them all a chance to look at it because the best people are going to be roaming the hallways and asking questions about the product or customers, et cetera. So that's an important thing to do. The next thing you have to do is you have to have a repeatable recruiting process. So what does that look like? And I run this essentially, Ralph, you'll appreciate this. I run it like an SDR team, if you will. How many phone calls, what's the pipeline, the conversion rate? When do I want someone to be productive? So I back that into, okay, it's three months to get productive from December. We have to hire November, October, September. They have to give two weeks notice. So call that August one, it takes this much time to interview. Okay, now I'm in July. I work it all backwards so the whole team knows what our goals are when we have to go.
So repeatable recruiting process. And then the interview process is something else that's repeatable as well. So what happens there? Who's going to interview this person? What's the interview loop? What's the feedback? What's your fast response time? Some organizations want to have a decision by the end of the day, which we've done. We're happy to walk out the door with an offer at the end of the day, right? Thank you for coming. Here's your offer. But you have to be unified in everything, it has to be on rails, the package, the options, it has to be just a machine and everyone has to be on board, especially the finance team because we're going to move fast and you got to be ready to get off your wallet and I'm going to start writing some checks and hiring some people to hit the plan that we put together. And then it kind of goes to the onboarding process. But for me, it really comes down to repeatability in recruiting, repeatability in hiring and then repeatability in onboarding and having really good partners internally and externally that can help you identify the candidates.
Amber Medeiros (00:14:26):
Thanks, Trent. Does anyone else have anything to add on that topic? Great.
Ralph Barsi (00:14:32):
This is a great question. It's a very real issue that we have here in the Bay Area, as we talked about earlier. It's so competitive. I have candidates come talk to me. We're on Third and Market Street. They can literally walk out the door of my interview and go talk to Zenefits, Zendesk, LinkedIn. They're all within a stone's throw of my office. I do everything I can to get myself into the stream of inside sales and sales development, and I try to meet and get to know all the sales development leaders in the Bay Area. And I love them all too. I actually really get to know them. So if there's a sense of urgency in hiring a candidate and I know they have three offers on the table, I'm going to make sure I know who those offers are with because it's likely I know the managers that are going to lead them.
And it's a very short amount of time to get to know someone, but I will actually, in the interview process, try to tap into the candidate's purpose, why they even want to get into sales development, why they want to get into sales, why they're into technology, what their background is, where they grew up, et cetera, et cetera. And by the time we get to the offer stage, I will know and reconcile all the different offers and potential sales leaders that they might go work for and I will have a very candid talk with them. "Oh, you want to go work for Brian Remington over at New Relic? I love Brian. Yeah, he's a great guy and you're going to learn a lot there. So now you really need to ask yourself, do you want to sell that or do you want to sell this and let's talk about where you're going to be."
With all due respect, because it might resonate very well with the candidate and if they would much rather go sell New Relic, I will absolutely encourage them to do it because at the end of the day, as Trent said, we are here developing people, whether we do it on our team while they're on our team or not, does not matter. There's a much greater purpose that we leaders have in our industry and that is to develop people. I want people 10 years from now going, "I declined an offer from Ralph Barsi but that son of a gun, he inspired me and I went and had a great career as a result" and I'm fine with that.
Amber Medeiros (00:16:41):
Thanks, Ralph. Wonderful. Bridget, I'd actually love to hear from you on what type of individuals you look for when you are hiring an early sales team.
Bridget Gleason (00:16:51):
So there are some things that are pretty generalized across sales that I look for regardless of the company that I'm employed at or where I'm employed. And there are other things that are very specific to the job and the job itself. I'd say generally the things that I look for, and part of it has to do with just my management style also. I need people, and the fact that I've been at startups for a lot of my career, more than 20 years. I look for individuals who are self-directed. I am a sucker for smart. I like smart. If somebody's smart and curious, they can learn just about anything. In sales, I also look for ambition and drive, and I want to hire with a lot of headroom. When I look at somebody, I don't look at them for this particular job, I look at them for two jobs out, and thinking about where in the organization they need to go, because I'd rather tap someone internal than I would have to go find someone external.
So smart, ambitious, drive, integrity, and then specific to the role, like at Sumo Logic, it's a technical product, and so we need people that have technical aptitude and curiosity. So there's certain things that are skill or industry or domain related, but generally smart, ambitious, curious, drive, self-starters, they're going to do really well in sales.
Amber Medeiros (00:18:25):
Great. Bridget, you mentioned domain experience. So that brings me to my next question, and I'd love to hear from the group on this. How important is it that early sales hires come from a similar space to what they've been selling? So for example, if a rep has been killing it at Marketo, does it make sense for them to go to Couchbase and sell something very technical?
David Baga (00:18:55):
I think if you hit all of the criteria that Bridget laid out, then I don't think that matters at all, at all. And I didn't know the difference between a row and a column when I went to Oracle and started selling databases to Fortune 500 companies, but I did at the end of it. If you have the onboarding program, you have the training program, you're going to be surrounded by other people that really, really know their stuff, and you learn how to team sell, so you try not to do everything yourself. Well, then I think that you can absolutely be proficient in a category that you don't know a heck of a lot about in the beginning.
And in my career, going from, I went from databases, I went into business intelligence software at Information Builders, and then I went completely into a brand new category, legal, which I'm the least equipped person to ever do legal at Rocket Lawyer, and you learn it. And I think that if you have the right mentality, if you have that innate curiosity, then everything's going to work itself out, provided you have the systems and the process and the people around you that are willing to recognize that it's going to take time.
And for me, I think we should be encouraging a lot more of that. I think it's a mistake for someone to go from selling Informatica to selling BI at IBM and then turn around and sell Oracle Enterprise Edition. What a waste of your time when we're sitting in the most abundant part of the world with more opportunity than any place that you could possibly land yourself in with more interesting things to do than sell databases three times in a row. I just think that's a huge mistake for your career.
Trent Truitt (00:20:38):
My only comment on that is I do think that it depends a little bit on the stage and your sales model. So if it's more of a high velocity, you get a lot more at bats, you can take someone a little bit younger in their career. If you're selling something that is a little more strategic, you may need someone that is a little bit later in their career. And then you have to put everything in place. My job, our job, is to make sure that we get those people that are earlier in their career to go do the big stuff. That's our job, right? But it comes down to passion. The people I recruit, if they got passion, they'll be very successful.
Amber Medeiros (00:21:22):
Great. Anything else to add on that? Great. Thank you. So we've talked a lot about sales DNA tonight throughout this conversation. I feel like the intangibles continue to come up. So Ralph, do you believe that a candidate can have a true sales DNA? And if so, what does that look like?
Ralph Barsi (00:21:44):
Absolutely. A candidate can have true sales DNA. And if you're a hiring manager, you likely have very good spidey sense, so you can sense when they don't have true sales DNA. They may look great on paper, but if they don't have conversation flow when they walk in the room, that's trouble, right? So I look for three areas in particular, and they all start with the letter A. First is attitude. I think attitude is everything. I'm a big fan of the people who walk into a room and light that place up. They don't suck the life out of it.
It's not inconsistent where one week they're just so incredible and the next week they're just really bummed about a lot of different stuff. It's going to bring the entire team down. It's going to bring me down. So I'm always looking for attitude. Second is the conversation flow I mentioned is all about approach. If we are at a cocktail party and our CEO or one of our board members walks up to say hello, that person better be on point and better know how to have a good conversation even in that 30 seconds that they speak. So approach is critical.
And then I always look for some proven track record of their behavior or their activity level. They could be slinging newspapers on a paper route, but I want to know, did they take that paper route customer base from X to Y in two summers? What did they do? It doesn't even matter. I'm just constantly looking for those metrics. And then the fourth A is the one that I try to avoid and that is average. I do not want anybody who is average on my team and I avoid them at all costs. There's a fifth A: avoid average.
Amber Medeiros (00:23:20):
Does anyone have anything to add on that sales DNA?
David Baga (00:23:28):
My answer has no alliterations, so I'm not... Very eloquent.
Amber Medeiros (00:23:37):
Great. So David, you talk a lot about this in your blog post, the article that did come out today. You haven't read it yet. So I would love to know your tips on building the right team early on.
David Baga (00:23:45):
Okay. So early on... Define it: earlier.
Amber Medeiros (00:23:50):
It might be building out a new division. So for example, what you're doing at Lyft or maybe you're starting from scratch in an early stage startup.
David Baga (00:23:54):
Yeah. So I think that the thing I start with is really this concept of an ideal profile. So I'm trying to figure out really what are the characteristics that I need to succeed. And early on, I think that it's a mistake to underestimate what is required. So I actually overhire, I overpay, and I set the expectations with my management team that I'm going to do this, because I need people that are going to be creative, they're going to be thoughtful, they've seen this, they've done this before, and they're not going to be scared off by the situation and not having a playbook at all. And so that is kind of like the beginning stages of it.
The second thing is, I love Betts and I truly do. I think Carolyn is tremendous and proud of what she's built here, but I think that you need to start with people that you have in your own network. So I dig deep into my own network. I'll go all the way back to my Oracle days and find the rising stars and use that reputation and those relationships to try and find the core people. And what I'm looking for is, I know I have an identity that I'm trying to establish for my team and it's going to create the culture of the next 10, the next 30, the next 90 reps that are coming. And so I create that core first.
So they better be on point with mission. They better care like deeply about the mission that I create. They better care about the values that we have as a team. And so like my teams, I care deeply about curiosity. You better be a lifelong learner or you will not keep up. You better be courageous and bring grit to the table every day. If you don't work hard, you're going to get found out and then I'm going to ask you to leave. And you have to have intellectual horsepower because I'm going to ask you to be creative and give you enough rope where you're going to have to figure things out.
And so early on, you're looking for this like killer combination of people you can trust that are going to establish the right culture, the right identity for your sales team, because when the next 20 come in, so let's say you've got five, this happens. You've got five and you've got this tight little team and you've built it, it's working well, it's executing, everybody is playing hard and kicking ass. And then you take the results to the board and you say, "Hey, we're going to quadruple the size of this team over the course of the next 60 days." And they go, "Yep, let's do that." All of a sudden you have an inverse pyramid because you're going to bring in 20 people, 30 people that don't hold those same characteristics. And so if you don't have a really strong foundation, your culture flips, you lose it completely and then God knows what happens.
Amber Medeiros (00:26:49):
Thank you. Does anyone have anything to add on that? We talked a little bit about hiring process that has come up through this panel. I'd love to hear a little bit more about the importance of having a defined hiring process, and then what does that look like within your organization, to the group?
Bridget Gleason (00:27:15):
Our hiring group at Sumo Logic has a 24 page document about the hiring process. It is so prescribed from the emails they send, the order, who's on the hiring panel, how quickly you respond, 24 pages. And actually when I first saw it, I thought it seems like overkill. But as we were talking about how competitive the market is, and we get people in that have offers and they need to know today, I know exactly what's going to happen next. I can tell them exactly what's going to happen next, how long it's going to take. We know what the parameters are in terms of what we can offer. We have it all prescribed. It allows us to move quickly.
And I think particularly in a competitive market, it's important to have a process because you can move quickly. It's also important because to that hiring profile, when you're hiring a lot of people, consistency is really important. We kind of know what to look for and what works. It's expensive when someone doesn't work out. And it's expensive for the company and for the individual. It's really painful. We want to avoid that whenever we can. So we want to make sure it's a really good fit. So the better that we can prescribe the process that we have around that, the better for us organizationally and better also for the individuals on the other end, and then it allows us to move quickly. In this market, oftentimes you do have to be ready to be able to say, "I'll have an offer for you this afternoon." And if you don't have the process, you don't know what the next step is, you're going to miss out on a lot of the candidates. So I think it's imperative.
Amber Medeiros (00:28:52):
Thank you. Would anyone like to add?
David Baga (00:28:57):
I have one more. I think that different stages of companies have different requirements. So at Oracle, you basically get your budget and your budget is entirely based on the headcount that you're going to get. And it comes out way too late right after Q4 ends. Deep into Q1 you get, "Hey, you need to grow this 50% year over year, and every rep is going to carry $1.2 million in quota, and you need to add 20 reps." It's the end of Q1 and you're already in the hole. And so there is a trade off, and I think that sales leadership, I'm just going to assume that everybody here is sales leadership, you have to make trade offs on, am I okay that there is going to be churn? I'm going to move fast, I'm going to fill these seats, I'm going to make sure that these territories are covered, and I know that some of these folks aren't going to make it. Because if you don't have that mentality at scale, then you have no chance of making your number at all. And that's just the reality of scaling a large organization.
Trent Truitt (00:30:08):
I just want to add one more thing. I think we all have a really tight hiring process. I can say that. But maybe a message to the candidates as they go through this. Sometimes we're going to move fast, but sometimes we need to take that extra moment, take the 24 hours to marinate on something with the candidate. And some of these candidates don't have the patience for that. And that's a huge turnoff for me. If someone comes to my office, they're like, "Well, I've got two offers." And I'm like, "Okay, which one are you going to take?" Because we're going to work through our process and I'm going to give you a phenomenal opportunity and you need to be... I don't know what the right word I'm looking for here, but either humble that you have your two offers or you need to be open, you need to be grateful, right?
But I'm looking for people that are not going to play something against me. If that's the game, I'm out. I'll move on. I don't want you on my team. Because I want people on my team that put PagerDuty first, or put Lyft first, Sumo Logic first. It's the company and the mission first and yourself second. When you do that, the company will be successful and you will be successful beyond your imagination.
David Baga (00:31:21):
I never give paper unless they give me that verbal. And then it's really up to them to basically back off of their own word to say, "I'm going to come and join your team, David." And then they don't? Okay, fine. Drop the mic and walk away.
Amber Medeiros (00:31:41):
Okay. So now we've built our successful sales team. They're hitting quota. We have rock stars in place. Bridget, what measures does your company take to retain the talent that is in place? And then I'd love to hear from Ralph after that as well.
Bridget Gleason (00:32:04):
That's awesome. So in terms of retaining them, we talk about that a lot also at Sumo Logic. As I said, in prior companies as well, is looking at what's the job they're going to have, the next job and then the job after. So what I encourage managers to do, and I do also with my direct reports, and a lot of people down the line as well, is one-on-ones are not just about performance and what you're doing today. One-on-ones are also about where that individual wants to go, and what they want to do in their career. And in every one-on-one I have, there's an element of that in it, so that I am always mindful of what this individual is trying to achieve. And then I map opportunities in the organization for them to get more involved.
So with some of the really top performers that we have now, they're ambitious. I mean, we hired them, they're ambitious. They want to do other things. They have aspirations outside of Sumo Logic. And so I do things like we've got a core team working on demand gen marketing, and I invited one of them to be on that core team so that they can experience what that's like. We have another, we're outsourcing a team in the Philippines to do some lead augmentation and lead qualification. I need someone to run the metrics and the process. I have another one that I've tapped to get involved in that. So I try based on what I know that they want to do in their careers, I try to get them tapped in. I arrange for them to go to lunch with the CEO, or whatever it is. Just things beyond the job that are going to let them know that I continue to be invested in them as individuals, and that that's really important. And I've seen that goes a really long way, that there's a lot of loyalty when you're invested in the individual.
Trent Truitt (00:34:06):
Maybe I'll steal from Ralph three letters, but I think Ralph can appreciate this, but I look at my job as kind of the three Rs. It's recruit, retain, and revenue, because if I recruit the right people, I've got to keep them. And if I do that, the model holds up the revenue, right? And as a mentor, the job is actually harder for the mentee because they have to do all the work, right? And so I like putting together career plans for people. Brent's around here somewhere, career plan for him, AJ we have one for you.
But the other thing I remind people of is you have to execute in the chair you're in. Yes, we're going to give you a career plan. Yes, we're going to help mentor you. Yes, we're going to do what you need to make you a better player, but if you don't execute in the chair you're in, then that's not going to be an option. And that's just the reality of it. It sounds cold at times, but sometimes I see people, they get too focused on that north star and you have to put your head down and execute. And when your leadership knows where you want to go and you execute, everything is laid out for you. But don't forget to do what you're in that chair to do.
Amber Medeiros (00:35:23):
Thank you. Ralph, did you want to add on that?
Ralph Barsi (00:35:26):
Do you guys want to hear more about this stuff? Absolutely. Yeah.
Bridget Gleason (00:35:32):
No more letters. Call out a letter. What do we want? Give us a T.
Ralph Barsi (00:35:41):
I already said X to Y, I've been saying that this whole time. So what's been critical to me over and over and over again in terms of retention is this career path. And as important as a sales playbook is in an organization, it's as important to have a career path. For sales development leaders, your primary objective is actually twofold. You are there to drive revenue pipeline and you are there to drive a people pipeline. I tell my sales development reps when they join our team that it's a two year gig. They can't believe I say two years because it's an eternity to a lot of people, but then I break down why it's two years and I actually break up the two years into four, six month chunks and I spell out for them precisely what they're going to be learning month one to six, month seven to 12, so on and so forth.
And in that first year, their job is to master the role that they are in. As Trent was saying, you need to master sales development because the skills that you are going to hone in that first year as a sales development rep, you will draw from those skills 20 years later. I still draw on networking, I draw on prospecting, I did it today. I'm always in the stream taking a look at what's going on in the industry, so I've got my finger on the pulse of it. I saw David's article this morning on LinkedIn because I'm paying attention. In fact, I even commented on it. I thought it was a great article, but all that is important for sales development reps and sales reps too. You've got to be game tight. If you want to move upward and onward in your career and you want to be a kick ass sales rep, or you want to run your own team, or you want to start your own company, you got to get your shit together and you have to get all the basics down pat.
It's the bounce pass in basketball. It's putting a golf ball. It's over and over and over again, that repetition, that leads to mastery. And if you don't have a career plan in your company to show them this is what you're going to be working on and what we're going to invest in you during this timeframe, then you're going to have a hard time. So retention, it totally works.
Amber Medeiros (00:37:51):
Thanks, Ralph. We talked a lot about career pathing for retention. David, I'd love to hear from you on, in the mix of that, how important is culture from a company standpoint?
David Baga (00:38:09):
I've been in good cultures and I've been in bad cultures. Actually, we don't know each other that well. And so one thing on the last topic, just some of us are going to face situations where there is no career path that's obvious for the reps that you've onboarded, and that becomes a much more challenging situation where the gap between your SDR and your AE is just too large for them to take on. It's too much of a risk for any of us that are responsible for revenue. And so one of the things that I really work hard on is connecting those reps with other organizations. And so, you know, Brett Sawers is over at LogMeIn with Preston Hart, the CRO of LogMeIn over there. And Charles Frank is over at a company called WeddingSpot and Ryan Gray and Dan Manning connected with Oracle.
And so I think that we've got these tremendous networks that we built over years and years and years, and we can do a lot to help them get into the next best spot for them. And when you do that, I believe in paying it forward and I think that stuff comes back to you.
In terms of culture, Oracle has a terrible reputation for culture. Flat out terrible. When I joined there, I'd never worked at a company that was more than 40 people. I went there, it was 44,000. I remember my number, 55773, that's my employee number, and that's all you are at Oracle is an employee number. And what happened was, it really surprised me is that I actually enjoyed the culture. There's a subculture inside Oracle's culture. They have a thing called Oracle Direct. There's 4,000 inside sales reps led by Hilarie Koplow-McAdams at the time, and Hilarie is a tremendous sales leader. She's now the CRO of a little company called New Relic, doing okay. Prior to that, president of Salesforce, prior to that Intuit. So she kind of knows what's up when it comes to building sales cultures.
And inside there, all the things I heard about Oracle were actually totally wrong. And I learned an important lesson is that you can have a subculture within a larger culture, and even if the larger culture is totally fucked up, yours doesn't have to be. That's not like an excuse to just throw in the towel. So from there, I went to a culture that I thought was fucked up. I went from there to, I took a role. I was traveling like crazy. I had teams all over North America, 150,000 miles domestically a year, managing 125 reps, 350 million in business. I had our first kid. My wife and I, we're both from Canada. My wife's like, "I'm not raising the kid by myself. You need to slow down." So I find a field sales role in the region. It was for a company called Information Builders. Hopefully nobody works there. I'm about to trash it.
It was just, it couldn't be worse for culture for me. I entered it and the first day I got there, I flew to Jacksonville, Florida for their sales kickoff. And I'm used to getting quotas that are like, "Hey, you need to grow this 25% year over year, 50% year over year, 100% year over year." And all of a sudden everybody gives a standing ovation because we went flat year over year. Flat growth, year over year, everybody stands up and claps. I was like, "Where's the exit? Which way do I go?" And then from there it just kind of got worse. They've got the difference between your Enron values, the stuff that's posted out on the rock up front versus your actual values, which are the ones that are the behavioral norms that everybody operates with.
And so they can say, "We have a sense of urgency." Which at Oracle, we have internal service level agreements where when I need a contract, I get it in 24 hours. If I don't, I'm shipping the contract without legal approval. At Information Builders, it's like, "Well, we've got a big stack of contracts. We're going to get to that as soon as we're done with these ones that we've got on the table." Or they say, "We believe in creativity and innovation." And then you bring a new idea to the table and they say, "Wow, that's not the Information Builder's way." And so I just found that that was the first time that I ever ran into culture being an issue. And it's here, it's palpable, like you can feel it.
I think it's really hard to pick culture though. I think that it's very challenging to determine whether or not you're going to fit into that culture, you're going to contribute to that culture, you're going to add value to it until you're actually living it because everybody's got those values on their rock and then there's the real deal of how you operate every day. We can control, as sales leaders, a subculture within the overall culture to an extent, but that's it. But it is crucial. I mean, if you are going home and counting the days, if you have bad days, too many bad days in a row, indicates you're in the wrong place for your career. And I think that you have to make a change. We're in this fun universe, tons of great sales leadership with great companies changing the world, life's just way too short to be in a bad culture. So take action on it.
Bridget Gleason (00:43:43):
Thank you. I have one comment. So when I... I agree that culture is super important and culture and values, those are largely driven and dictated from the top down. And I had just started at Yesware as the VP of sales and I think it was my first, we had an offsite and we were going to talk about our values and the culture. And I thought, oh, this is perfect. It was just the executive team. And we had two executive coaches come and facilitate. And I guess sort of prior to that meeting, there had been a lot of tension. Product didn't get out on time and there was animosity between sales and product and engineering. There was a lot going on. I wasn't privy really to all of it. I was sensing some of it. So we get to this offsite to talk about, we're in a beautiful place to talk about values and culture.
And one of the facilitators said, "You know what? There's a lot of stuff going on here and it's complete BS to sit in this room and whiteboard what our values are. Values are what we live every day and how we treat each other. So you have an opportunity right here, the executive team, are you going to talk honestly to each other about what's going on between you? Are you going to sweep it under the rug because these are your values?" And I'm sitting there thinking, this doesn't sound fun and the VP of product says to the CEO, "Yeah, I'll start." At the all hands meeting, when you said XYZ really threw me under the bus and then he responds and we have the facilitators there, and after two hours, I said, "Can we pause just for a second? We need to take a deep breath and breathe here." And I said, "Why can't we be like a normal startup where we're like building trust, we do trust falls."
We're doing like all this truth telling here. We spent eight hours doing it and it was the most, it was intense, but it bonded us and it really solidified our values around transparency and honesty and saying hard things and being truthful and our values came out of that and then they all took it down, but it was not just stuff we put on the walls, but it had a huge effect on how the company operated and what the values look like going forward. Although I have to say, I think in that moment, I would love to be out in the forest doing trust falls and not telling the truth. So it's hard.
Amber Medeiros (00:46:46):
Thank you for sharing that, Bridget. I want to switch gears a little bit and I want to talk about the fact that customer success and sales really is the eyes and ears of what's happening out in the competitive landscape that the company is playing in. So Trent, what role do you feel that sales should play in the development and the direction of the product?
Trent Truitt (00:47:12):
So where do we start? Exactly. I learned a few things when I was at Documentum and EMC, big companies. We'd go out and see customers and the customers would say, "I want X, Y, Z in the product." Okay. I was a resource hog. I'd always bring our CEO or the VP of product or the VP of engineering. I wanted the founder, I wanted to get high and wide in the organization. I'd love the executive team to go see, bring our talent to the table and meet with their executives, but there was no real repeatable way to get that product information back to the product management team, number one.
Number two, now I'm at the seat at the table as part of eStaff and we're trying to figure out what do we do with the product? What are we going to go do? What features and functions are important? And the CFO would look at me and I'd say, "Look, I have to have this feature to close this deal." And the CFO would say, "Okay, how much revenue are you going to sign up for that?" And I'd have to give them a number. And then you'd look at the product guy and say, "Can you do it with that number? If I write a check to execute on that." Well, I don't know. I'm going to talk to the engineering team. Now the engineering team's got to be involved, how many hours and then HR is involved, right? How many people do we have to hire to go do this? And when you get in this decision loop and you're trying to figure out what do we go do and if I say yes, I want that, what do I not get?
Right? Because what people need to understand is with individuals with a big SDR team or a big sales team, or even if it's just you and the CEO hitting the road, you are the tip of the spear. You are talking to people about their problems and you're trying to build that bridge between their challenges and where they want to go and the value there and just so happens your technology's in the middle to get them there better, faster, cheaper, least amount of risk. And so I believe that especially in an early company, your salespeople are essentially your product management team because they're out understanding what is resonating in the market and they're also going to hear repeatability. "Oh, in the SDR team. We heard this five times. We ran this play, we heard it five times. If we can go have single sign on or two factor auth or whatever it is, we can go sell X, Y, and Z."
You're listening for repeatability, you're listening for themes and the sales team are the only people in the company that are pounding the pavement, pounding the phone, listening to those conversations. So in my opinion, really in the early companies, you are the tip of the spear for the VP of product. As the company starts to mature and you have that VP of product, the VP of product, I've always had as many frequent flyer miles as I had. You're coming with me but we're going and you're going to sit with me, we're going to listen to this meeting, we're going to walk out and we're going to understand how we need to architect our solution to help that client. Does that help?
Amber Medeiros (00:50:36):
Very helpful. Thank you so much. So generally speaking, we've seen a huge shift in the market recently. Every other day it seems like a client is coming through our door and saying, "We want a sales development leader. We need a VP of sales development. We need an SDR manager." And it seems that there's been a huge shift in the market when it comes to sales development. So Ralph, how is top of the funnel viewed within your organization and can you speak to this shift?
Ralph Barsi (00:51:05):
I can. Wow. So over the last probably three to four years now, inside sales and sales development has evolved exponentially. There's a ton of research and data out there to prove this point. Ken Krogue and his team at insidesales.com, for example, they talk about this yearly with a brand new research report. Trish Bertuzzi at the Bridge Group, Craig Rosenberg and Scott Albro at TOPO. They back it up that there is absolutely a movement going on. It's because of the evolution of technology as well. We can get a lot done inside without flying all over the country and seeing people. Also, to really answer your question, I derailed a little bit there.
The sales development function and the top of the funnel function in our organization, in fact, the last three organizations I've been at, it is an imperative, critical function. This is the gas that you pour in the engine. And we've talked about recruiting in a competitive market. We've talked about career paths and we talked about that for a lot of reasons. One main reason is you need someone who has the acumen to qualify in or out whether or not you've got a viable opportunity for your company's pipeline. Also, you're hiring and recruiting your future account executives who are going to be the tip of the spear that Trent is talking about and they're going to want to know what open ended thought provoking questions need to be asked of a prospective customer base so that we can win deals, build relationships and everybody can win. So it depends on what type of gas you want to put in the tank.
You could put Octane 87 or you can put high octane into the tank. And so it's a critical function. Companies like SalesLoft, for example, they report directly to the CEO, the sales development team. So it's no joke. It's blowing up and it's been blowing up for the last several years and I think the industry is really starting to see that, they're starting to get it and it's kind of fun. It's fun to be part of it.
Amber Medeiros (00:53:21):
Yeah, I can imagine. Thank you. David, I would like to just quickly wrap up. We're going to talk a little bit about any advice that you have for sales leaders or aspiring sales leaders, but really quickly, I want to talk about at a certain point reps begin to get burnt out and they might start to underperform or maybe you come into an underperforming sales team. So what are your recommendations for turning around an underperforming team or maybe an underperforming rep?
David Baga (00:53:56):
She wants to finish on a high note, positive. Okay. So how many of you guys manage managers? So I think there's a lot written on how to manage underperforming reps. So I'm actually going to talk about what happens when the team is underperforming, because I think that's a much more difficult challenge. I think that the first thing to really do is kind of just try and assess the situation. I've taken over teams. So usually you get promoted, how many times has this happened? Congratulations. We have this great new role for you. And then you take over like the worst performing team in the organization, right? Like that's a promotion and that's what happens. So you take over this team and now you're not sure what to do with it. So you quickly have to assess it. And so you're assessing it for, do I have the right people?
Do I have the right process or is there some sort of product issue that's at play? So I look at those three Ps and I kind of work through those. And depending on the scale of it or where it's at. Let's pretend that you have multiple teams. And so this is a laggard team that you're dealing with. Well, if all things being equal, the territories are roughly the same, it's not a product issue. So it's either a process issue or it's a people issue. And so then I start digging in. And so I try to really understand through a process of one-on-ones and quarterly business reviews and stack ranking and deal reviews and forecasts, and it gets pretty tactical. You start peeling the onion back and you start figuring out... And usually if you have a poor performing team, you have a poor performing leader.
That's just the way it happens. And so, you know, I have this philosophy that As hire As, Bs hire Cs. And so when you're an A, you get the fucking best people you can possibly get from anywhere on the planet, whether it's stealing from your competition, stealing inside your organization, you're going to assemble the best team, they're going to be smarter than you, they're going to work harder than you, they're more creative than you are, and then you're going to be like, "Wow, management genius." You kicked ass. No wonder you have a killer team. When you don't and you default, and this happens early because if SDRs are your pipeline, those SDRs become your AEs, they become your RMs, they become your directors, and it's a death spiral, just a total death spiral. So I usually think, my experience is that underperforming teams are really management led.
And so I start digging in there and I try and find out first, does this person have a process problem? Do they have a burnout problem? Are there things that are happening in their life outside of work? As I've gotten older, I've respected those things more. Are you having a kid? Are you getting married? Are you having a divorce? Is someone sick at home? Those things matter and they can be carried into your workplace. And I want to understand that. It doesn't mean it's an excuse, but I at least want to understand it. And then I really put the onus back on them. So let's say, Amber, you're a laggard, you're not doing well. You are fifth in a team of five and I'm not sure that you are really engaged and you're really working as hard as you need to be on turning this team around.
I need to know your plan. Give me your 30 day plan, your 60 day plan, your 90 day plan. What are the best practices you're installing? What changes are you making? What are the milestones we're going to measure this turnaround with? And I'm going to work with you. I'm going to try and help you and support you, but I can tell you, if after 30 days I don't see you hitting the milestones, Amber, you're fired. Like you're going to get let go. It's just gone.
Amber Medeiros (00:58:24):
Okay. So we ended it on... I actually do want to end on a high note. I want to end on the highest note for the aspiring leaders in the audience tonight. I want to hear from all the panelists on this one. What is the one nugget of advice that you have for someone who wants to be the next David Baga, Trent Truitt, Bridget Gleason, or Ralph Barsi?
Ralph Barsi (00:58:55):
Never stop learning. Continue to improve on an hourly basis. Always be learning. Don't go home and watch ESPN and watch television and play games on your iPad. Be studying sales, be studying sales leaders, be studying life, be studying people who are out there, because success leaves clues and you need to model the successful people that you are aspiring to emulate and you will become an A player in the process. Don't stop learning.
Bridget Gleason (00:59:31):
I have one that's really timely and I feel so strongly about this piece of advice. I feel super, super strongly about it. Okay? Everybody ready? Take note. Does anybody in the room, except Michelle, you can't answer, has anybody heard of Bill McDermott? Bill McDermott is the CEO of SAP and he wrote this book called Winners Dream. I got to tell you something. It's an amazing book. Super inspirational. His story, I mean sort of to your point of never stop learning. Just his story is so inspiring and I think it embodies a lot of things that I think about around success, around his integrity, his ambition, his drive, his humor, his passion. It's a really, really, really, really great read. I'm reading it now, that's why you guys...
Trent Truitt (01:00:33):
I would say... Did you read the book?
Bridget Gleason (01:00:34):
No. It's awesome. She's my publicist. I love that.
Trent Truitt (01:00:47):
She's my first fan and probably my only fan. All right. Two things. I would say passion and ownership. You got to have passion about what you do and that includes the SDRs. I have so much respect for the SDRs in organizations. They probably have the toughest job in sales because they pound the phone and then they're asked to make more phone calls and they got a lot of pressure on them. And it is, but you know, you don't realize the life lessons and the sales lessons you're learning. You don't realize how good you're becoming in those two years in a great organization to execute. So you better have passion for what you're doing.
And the second thing is ownership. You own it. You own your career, you own your deals, you own your process, you own it. And so you need to remember that, that the mentors can help you all you want, but it's up to the mentees. You've got to do the work and you got to own where you want to go.
David Baga (01:01:44):
Okay. So when I moved down here from Canada, it was 2000, not responsible for the downturn in the economy, but timing was perfect. I started a company called Trapeze and I was in business development and alliances there and reporting to... It actually doesn't matter. But we were trying to hire a VP of sales. And this is like pre-LinkedIn. And I grew up in a really blue collar neighborhood. My dad was blue collar. I was a truck driver. I had a small construction company. So I'd never really seen like what a career like Trent's might look like. I got to be part of the hiring process. And so all of a sudden I get these resumes given to me and I'm going to interview my future boss. And I just see them over and over, see 10 of them. And you start to see a blueprint emerge.
It was really, really simple. It's like, okay, you need to go to a company with a defined sales process that's respected for having a strong sales methodology and you have to kick ass as being a sales rep. And then when you do that, if you want to, you can go into sales management. And then you manage as a frontline manager and manage six, eight, 10 reps. And when you do that and kick ass, then you can go become a director. And when you do that at that big company, you should leave. And then you should become a VP of sales at a startup company. And that might take you one, two, three tries to hit one that is really going to be the next big company, unicorns, decacorns, if you will. And so I set up, I was at Trapeze, which was like the worst startup and literally worst startup.
And I went from there to... I started as an SDR. We called them BDCs at Oracle, business development consultants. I was like, "I did BD. I used to be a consultant. That sounds really great. You're going to make a hundred phone calls a day to CFOs and tell them why Oracle ERP is better than PeopleSoft." It was awesome. So I executed that playbook. So I think that having a vision in your mind's eye around the career that you're trying to build, and now they're all public. They're all on LinkedIn. You can go and see, "Okay, I want the CRO job of XYZ company." And you can look at the track that they've built and then you can execute those steps systematically. And I just think it's all drawn out for us. You just have to put it in your mind's eye and visualize what that's going to look like. And that takes a lot of work and a lot of determination and a lot of learning to do.
Amber Medeiros (01:04:36):
Thank you so much. I think we have time for one to two questions. How are you guys feeling? Cool. Great. Let's do it.
Trent Truitt (01:04:52):
So I'll add a little more to this because I already think I know the answer to this, the first part. So let's say your sales team is exploding their goals, blowing their commission out of the water and your CFO comes to you telling you they're making too much. What do you do?
David Baga (01:05:07):
Cut their territories in half and double my quota. Can I answer that?
Trent Truitt (01:05:21):
My first question to the CFO is why do you think they're making too much money? That's my first question. In relation to what? Right? And if you look at the valuation of these things, I want to cut million dollar commission checks. Why? Because that means we're doing something right. Right? So that's my first question back to the CFO. Why do you think they're making too much money? Then... I'll split their territory.
David Baga (01:05:43):
You got to wait to split the territory for next year, but when you first... No, you celebrate. You tell the CFO congratulations. This is the best thing that's happening. It's all good. When sales reps make money, it's all good.
Bridget Gleason (01:06:04):
I am in full support of Winners Dream. Everybody should go out and get it now. It's also available in audio.
Audience Member (01:06:17):
So it's a short question. Given that so many of your team members are going to be early in their careers, one, how are you prioritizing your training and ongoing professional development? And two, can you actually give us an example of what it looks like currently?
David Baga (01:06:45):
Somebody should go build a hundred million dollar business in training in the Bay Area. Start today. You could start doing it because it is just absolutely a gigantic blind spot for all of us. And we try our best, but when your resources are really slim, you're giving night projects to the ambitious reps that want to take the next steps in their career. And so you're telling them to build a playbook and build onboarding materials and you're going to run the first 30 day onboarding experience. And that's okay. That's all right. But if you've been in a larger company, you're going to see them give you a lot of training. You're going to get your training on Monday. That's going to be all about the product updates. And then you're going to get your training once a month that is going to be about career development, like financial acumen and presentation skills and how to delegate authority.
And then you're going to get once a quarter, depending on which new sales leader came in, a new sales methodology to learn. And so you're going to get ample training there. But when you go into the startup world, nothing exists. You have to start it all from scratch. And I think that, man, I would buy it in a heartbeat if somebody could help me build my sales methodology. I'm four weeks in at Lyft and I am rapidly hiring and I have no answer for that question yet. And it's shame on me. Shame on me. I don't, but I will and we're going to do it as we go. But at scale, you're hiring cohorts, that makes it easier. You bring in the rest of the team cross-functionally to support you, and then you do use third parties for different parts of your sales cycles that you're trying to develop. And if you're really good, you operationalize it and videotape it and put it up in a great sales portal.
Audience Member (01:09:01):
How about integrated with Salesforce?
David Baga (01:09:05):
In salesforce.com? You're way above me. Yeah, way beyond me. I haven't even considered that.
Trent Truitt (01:09:11):
One thing that leaders talk a lot about, especially on eStaff, is their people. I mean, people want to know what you talk about at eStaff. A lot of the time you talk about the people on your team, the culture, et cetera. You know, like at PagerDuty, we put together a very detailed plan for SDR and then an SDR to junior manager and then a manager or an SDR wants to go SDR to maybe a junior rep. It gets very intricate and it's very difficult to do. And I think what happens at times, especially in a smaller organization, at Salesforce, they have the machine.
I tell someone, "You need to go to Salesforce because you need to get on the railroad tracks and you need to go." And I mean that with the absolute respect of what Salesforce has done, absolute respect. They built the machine and they're worth $35 billion. Like that's for Marc Benioff. At the small companies, you got to be creative, right? And the plans need to be detailed, but they take some time and you need to have people on your teams that are patient to put that together, but you're unified in the mission. So it's important, but it's not... I don't know about y'all, I'm just not perfect at it today, but it's very, very important to do.
David Baga (01:10:36):
Progress, not perfection on sales training in early stage startups. It'll be perfect later, for sure.
Amber Medeiros (01:10:46):
Well, if everyone can please join me in thanking our panelists.