S3E36 - Building a Team of Teams with Richard Sgro of Insight Partners

What's up, everybody? Welcome to another edition of the Surf and Sales podcast. I'm one of your two hosts. I'm Scott Lease, founder of Scott Lease Consulting, co founder of Surf and Sales, along with my good buddy who's joining us here, Richard Harris. How you doing, Richard?

I'm good, my man. How are you?

I'm ready to roll. I'm pretty excited for this conversation and we may pull in some of the backstory that we were just talking about a little bit early earlier today. We're brought to you today and this month by our good friends at Outreach and Scratch Pad, along with Sendoso. Check those companies out. They've got a lot of sales tools that can help you and your team hit your number, and it's getting harder and harder to do, so give them a shout. We appreciate their support. We're here today with my friend Richard Shrew, who's the VP of sales and customer success at Insight Partners. How's it going, Richard?

Awesome. Awesome stuff, Scott. And other. Richard, thanks. Thanks for having me here.

Always a pleasure, man. Always great to see you so. And catch up with you in general. So I'm excited for this one.

Like, the last time I saw Richard was in Florida in. In April.

Oh, for the Thursday night.

Yeah, for the Thursday night. Sales Hard no Tour, right?

Oh, yes, yes.

First time. I think most of us. Oh, sorry, Richard, go ahead.

Let's say we haven't heard about the next evolution of the Hard no Tour.

So I think it's on lockdown right now. Richard. It's in the lab. It's in the lab. This is going to be complicated. I got two Richards that I'm talking to. Every time I say Richard, you're both looking at each other like, which one does he mean?

We both have great hair, too, so. Yeah, exactly.

Unbelievable. Unbelievable. Hey, tell us a little bit about what your role is at Insight Partners, because I think maybe I'm the only one, but I hear VP of sales and customer success at a venture firm, and I'm like, huh? So talk to us a little bit about that.

Absolutely. It's a really interesting role. And if you think of Insight Partners, there's two halves to the whole. On one side, you have folks handling finding great investments and working with great founders to deploy capital and investment into those companies. And then on the other side, you have a team of folks that provide advisory support. And when you think about that, it's folks like myself who've got a background in sales and customer success, working with portfolio companies to help them around Challenges and opportunities they have around in my case, sales, customer success, revenue operations and so on. But I have counterparts in that focus just on product and technology. So think like making sure you're taking advantage of the latest and greatest of AWS and Windows Azure or whatever it might be. And we've got a pretty large team actually across the entirety of the advisory group which we call on site. So it's insight on site, it's a mouthful but as part of that we have folks that kind of help out all different parts of what you would expect a venture backed SaaS company to have. So like I said, sales and customer success, marketing, product and technology talent and so on.

So I mean you have to have a big team I would think because you got a lot of portfolio companies I would imagine. And so that's an unscalable situation for you to try to be the go to market expert and advisor for 100, 200 different companies. Right. All at different stages by the way. Probably, yeah.

Oh yeah. And it's fantastic. And the team's grown quite a bit even just on the sales and customer success side in the past year. We bought on great folks from industry like Jeremy Donovan who I know you both know very well. We just actually recently Hillary Headley. Hillary Headley just joined as an opera, you know, one of the industry leading operation and enablement leaders and kind of we have a deep bench of folks that have different areas of knowledge and expertise. So like my background before I way in the dark ages before I got into sales I was in product management and then that brought me into startups as a solution engineer, pre sales technical resource and then that led me into sales leadership. So the companies that I work with, Scott, to that question, I don't work with all the companies, I work with companies that skew maybe a little bit more technical from a founder standpoint, a little bit more of a complex enterprise, sales. Whereas others in the organization focus on maybe companies that are just getting ready to go public.

So it's interesting. So you have this very different background moving into sales from this, you know, from the product side and, and those pieces. Did you ever have a role of just carrying the bag?

The first bag that I carried was when I was field promoted to VP of sales but never as an individual contributor. So the first time I had anything resembling variable compensation wasn't until I was, until I was leading a solution engineering team.

Extremely rare. Got to be extremely rare.

So I have a couple of questions. One.

Because when it's rare like this, there's Always something that's a different advantage than someone who only comes up from the sales side. And then there are theoretical disadvantages. What were some of those advantages of like wow, oh, this really helped me as I started to understand more formally around sales.

Yeah. I think coming from an engineering and a solution engineering background, you develop an understanding of what it takes to sell. Even though maybe you've never done it before as a sales engineer. Think about you sit on a whole lot of different conversations with a seller. So you start start to develop a perspective and understanding of what could work and what wouldn't. You also have good systems oriented thinking. And now when I was field promoted into leading a sales organization, it was a situation where there was a lot of process stuff that was either way too complicated for what we were trying to accomplish or non existent. So something like looking at where sellers are spending their time and saying my goodness, there's 268 required fields in Salesforce. We got to do something about that. We're spending an inordinate amount of time trying to get data in to run the business. The other part that was beneficial was a deep technical understanding of the product and the problem that we were trying to solve and being able to help others get up to speed on that both in market and on our sales team. So I was super honest about it when I would recruit and with the folks that were on the team at the time, I was like, guys, you're guys and gals, you're all way better at selling than I am, probably better than I'll ever be. But I guarantee you that I'm going to help you understand this product and communicate into the market in a way that's going to help you make a ton of money and make the company very, very successful.

Did they roll their eyes at you in the beginning? Were they like who is this guy?

I love your approach and that's the perfect approach I think even if you come from a sales background to just explain to the team how you're going to help them. But did you get the traditional eye roll?

I didn't get it because I had already built credibility inside of the organization because I had built and led solution engineering for the past year and a half. So I didn't come into it completely cold as an unknown unknown from some guy off the street. I had already helped folks win big deals at the company or win the biggest deal at the company as a solution engineer and a solution engineer. So I guess I had the right to say that in some ways and I Had a little bit of credibility built up.

I got one more question. I know Scott's going to get into this too, which is, do you feel like. And again, it sounds like it was the right fit at the right company and the right play. Do you think there was anybody on the sales team who was like, wait a minute, I wanted that role.

I think it was a welcome change organizationally. That being said, I think there was a number of sellers that I had the opportunity to work with who are now running sales organizations either as directors or VPs or early stage founders. So I think there were probably folks who could do parts of it. But simultaneously, your role as VP of sales is also to protect the integrity of the sales team's time. And so founders sometimes like to dabble in sales strategy. So being able to step in and act as a good buffer between maybe founders who are feeling pressure from the board and day to day, what the sales team were trying to do is an important part that I could bring because again, I had built that credibility both with the team and with the leadership of the organization.

I got to just fire questions at Richard Schrue at 100 miles an hour here because there's too many. And I don't want to get sidetracked on one particular thing. You talked a little bit about being a project manager and I had a conversation yesterday with my friend Jake Dunlap, and he said something to the effect of like, project management is the way sales is going in the future.

What do you think about that?

I think so. It's product management, not project management. So it's one piece there, Scott, for me, at least. I do think if you have on two ends of the spectrum, you have Wolf of Wall street style sales, right? Pace, volume, energy, bang the phones. We're not taking no for an answer. And on the other end of the spectrum, you have Moneyball. We're not selling jeans. We're trying to get on base type thinking. I think sales is skewing in the direction where a revenue organization is a product and your product is the ability to build and scale revenue acquisition. So if you approach it similarly, just like a product, if I was designing an engineering, right, I've got a product, it has to interact with other parts of the system. Sales, well, sales on its own can't really do much, right? You need. It needs to interact tightly with marketing. It needs to have a tight feedback loop with the customer. Success organization needs to have a tight feedback loop potentially with the product organization. So in kind of an abstract way that's Just like you would design any type of product, right? Where there's APIs or interfaces at a technical level between different things. The difference is in sales, you're dealing with people as opposed to technology.

So you have this conversation, let's say with your portfolio company, your founders, and these are like series A type companies. Let's just say, okay, series A, series B. And you explain that to them and their next words with you are like, okay, help me do XYZ 1, 2, 3. Things like where, where are they stuck? Where do you see them stuck and where they need the most help.

It depends a lot. And I know that's a pretty canned answer, but oftentimes they don't totally understand what they're looking for in their first go to market hire or first go to market leader. Oftentimes you'll see these folks come from engineering or product management backgrounds, so they don't have a deep affinity with go to market like we would.

Do you think that they're better. Do you think that they struggle more with finding the sales leader or finding the, you know, first rep or two?

I think it's. I think they struggle with both of those things in part because they've only ever sold as a founder. So they don't understand always how to get the pitch out of their head. And the fact that because they're the founder of company X, Y and Z, that opens certain doors versus hiring your first sdr, your first AE or your first head of sales, they have to get that pitch in store story out of your head, package it up in a way that a mere mortal could do it who didn't found the company. Yeah. And so. So that's one piece of it. And I think the second piece is a misunderstanding of what you're actually asking folks in those roles to do. Scott, I know you've written about this a ton, but it's one of those areas where, well, are you hiring somebody to help with sales execution? Are you hiring to help with somebody to help with sales strategy? Are you hiring somebody to figure out demand gen and sales and customer success and servicing and revenue operation?

Well, you know what the most common answer is?

Yes, all of the above. That's right. That's right.

We're trying to find somebody who can do all of those things and preferably get them at a 25% discount.

Yeah. And so I think part of, part of it when we're.

Baby unicorn. Scott, give me a baby unicorn.

What's it called in recruiting? The Purple Squirrel. Squirrel hires. But part of it is working with founders to help them not think of sales and the discipline of revenue is other. But try to draw parallels between things that they know. Like I was saying with the API example, right. The interconnectedness of it all, but also helping them feel comfortable that startups evolve and grow. What's needed from roles in startups evolve and grow as the startup matures. What you need to do as a sales leader when you're at $1 million in recurring revenue is very different than what you need to do as a sales leader at $100 million or $250 million or pre IPO or publicly traded company. And sometimes when chatting with founders, it's about just disarming them to say, hey, you don't need the right sales leader that's going to take you from zero all the way to publicly traded company. It's about thinking about the problems you have today and in the near future and getting in the right person or people or tools or process or support to solve for that.

Yeah, I got one more question, Richard, and then I'll turn it over to you for a few. So you just hit on something that is huge. And I've had this conversation with lots of people, but it's sort of like stage appropriate hiring and milestones for VPs of sales and stuff like that. I'm wondering if you can elaborate on and help everybody out. You said, you know, what's needed to go from 0 to 1 million as a VP is different than what's needed from 1 to 5 and from 5 to 10 and 10 to 20, et cetera, et cetera. You don't have to do every single thing that would take forever. But like, can you give a couple examples of like what's needed at one stage versus what's needed at a different stage?

Yeah, when I, and when I think about the earliest stage of an organization, your, your sales leader is as much an evangelist and a seller as your individual sellers. Right. They've got to come in and help and they may be working a deal, they may be carrying part of a bag because they're figuring out how to sell your product in conjunction with the team that's in place. As an organization scales into maybe mid stage, it's a lot more about process and kind of getting and putting process in place, getting repeatability in place, but also recognizing that your role isn't to be a super AE or a super sdr. Your role is to build a team and then build a team of teams who can run the revenue process. And as you get to the kind of the latest stage. It's almost like spreadsheets and understanding the math.

And do you have the dreaded VP of spreadsheets?

I had an old COO that would call it spreadsheet heaven. Right. Like there's a certain point in time where it's, it's, it's almost a math equation where you have to make sure you've got the right talent inflow, the right talent outflow, the right activities happening at the right time. You've got the right systems in place and you can consume that data and have trusted lieutenants and captains and all the way down to actually execute on that strategy. And your job is to communicate effectively at that point at an executive and kind of otherwise level.

Yeah, I'm going to jump in. And I love how Scott loves to talk about the VP of spreadsheets. What is your CRM?

A spreadsheet.

Right.

And it's.

And I, you know, I will. I'm pretty sure I could say the number. Are you willing to share what your, what is Your recurring revenue?

2.5 million or so.

There you go. On a spreadsheet. Now, granted, it's different when you're an entrepreneur, but, you know, it's just funny.

But look, it's not like I sit around in Excel all day long. That's the difference.

Yes.

Richard Shrew is talking about people who sit all day long looking at spreadsheets, analyzing data, making formula tweaks, going, if we raised our ASP by a hundred bucks, what would that do to our ARR number? No, I don't want to spend my time doing that. The only reason I know my own numbers and track certain things is because I just obsess over that stuff.

Right. Well, it's also different too. If you had a 10, you know, as you grow your business, if you go get five or seven other people, you may have to change and you, but you'd also, knowing you, Scott, you get a operations person quickly so you don't have to deal with it.

Yeah, I already have one.

Yeah, right. And you still don't have a CRM.

Well, it's not for lack of effort on her part.

There you go.

But I, I think, I think that's an important point, though. Richard Harris. It's, it's something that, like, it's a question that comes up a lot. You see it in communities, you see it in forms. What X should I use? What CRM should I use? What this tool should I use, what that tool I use, and what Scott just illustrated for us is it's the one that will be adopted and utilized. That's going to put the right amount of rigor around the business, but not slow the dang thing down. That's what we just heard. Scott's running a successful business and it's working.

I'll come back to this, Richard, but to us. But Scott, I think it'd be a fun episode for you and I and.

What'S her name to do an episode on, having her convince you to buy a CRM.

Oh, J.M. trying to sell. Scott. Yes.

So because. And it'd be more of an interesting episode of like, how do you sell internally to get some money to do something? You know, I mean, it'd be fun, it'd be funny, but it would be educational. So, Richard, you talked a lot about the founder side of things and you talked about the challenges they have. Just like, if I were going to go in and try and be a founder to build something, I'd be so frustrated with the engineers because I just think it should happen tomorrow. Right. Like, it goes both ways.

Right.

What are some specific pieces of advice that you can. There's two questions. One that you can offer to founders who are listening in the sense of, hey, think about it this way. Aside from this one, 10, you know, like, okay, so you're at 1 million. This is what you need in your sales leader, aside from them being a seller. Right. Like, look for this kind of thing.

That's my first thing. And then the other thing that I want to flip to is if I'm a salesperson and I'm going into a series A and B, how do I know if I've got a founder who gets it? Enough about sales. I've worked for several founders who are so smart, but they fall too much in love with their baby and their product to understand and they've fail. So anyway, I've asked two questions.

Yeah. So pick one First. First question. I think with the what should. What should founders look for in their. In their heads of sales and what should they expect from heads of sales at. At different stages and tips for working with them. I think the most important advice, piece of advice I would give to founders is, you know, really oftentimes your sales leaders, the first person in the executive suite or the first outside leader you're hiring from outside the group of folks that maybe founded the company, really do spend the time to understand how that person works. Back channel references. Because salespeople are fantastic at selling in a lot of instances, and they're fantastic.

That'S how I got my job with Scott. I sold.

And the way that you disarm that is obviously by thorough inspection during the interview process. But it's also understanding what has this person done versus what were they a part of. And I think there's different eras of organizations that you see that have maybe been very successful and sales leaders come out of those organizations and oftentimes they're not successful because those folks were running a playbook versus building a playbook. There's great advice that I heard on. Another was one of the founders of Lattice talking about hiring and hiring your first sales folks and your first heads of sales. And he mentioned look for the top performers at the number two or number three player in a space. Because if they're top performers in that organization, it's not a function of the product being good, it's not a function of the marketing being good. It's a function of their raw ability to do things. So that would be number one. Number two is a founder. As an organization scales and you bring in a revenue leader and that person starts to build their organization. I think founders sometimes forget to give revenue leaders space to build and to be realistic about expectations about what this person can and can't do. And the way that you get there is twofold. First, it's about being very clear about the problems that you're trying to solve and articulating that in a way and looking for that interview process. But then it's also really what I would call sponsoring that person, Having them be the point person for revenue related things. Deflecting questions that used to go to you about revenue related things to that leader in place. So you're putting them in a position to be successful versus kind of looking over their shoulder. And then as soon as something maybe doesn't quite feel right, hopping in and going like a founder because you're smart to fix all of the problems. Like let them take a few lumps and learn as they go.

Yeah, I love that. Getting them to learn how to let go.

It's super hard because then you're smart, you're a founder, you built this business in the face of massive adversity and now you've got to trust somebody else to spread your vision and your gospel. And no, they're probably never going to do it as well as you, but that's okay. That's why you're the founder and they're there to help you scale that vision.

So what do I look for in a founder if I'm in sales And I find this, this happened to me. I started.

Question. Great question. Can't wait to hear that.

I started in a. I started. This company, owns about a year and a half in. And I got seduced by the technology of this other founder. And there are certain highlights in hindsight where.

I learned something from the experience. But what do I look for to make sure that I'm willing to give this person a shot of a founder and a leader? Not that they're not smart, but are they equal a person enough to let me do my job?

And I think it's going to depend a little bit on the seniority that you're coming in. Maybe as an ae, this would be a little bit different than it would be as a leader, but I think.

Early stage, because people are starting to go after series A. You know, as they're getting laid off, they're like, well, I'll go try series A this time.

Right. I think it's, I think it's being, being really honest and understanding how kind of decisions are made. What's working, what's not working. Go to market. What's the vision for Go to market. What's the value system for how the leader thinks about the revenue organization? And then reading that person's body language and the words that they're saying. You want to work at an organization where sales and revenue is, and revenue is always important, but the sales discipline is important to the growth of the business. So you can imagine a founder saying things like, hey, you know, Richard, this is going to be our first account executive hire. This is a great experiment, we think, based on this, that and the other, what we've seen in market. This is the data that we have. This is how we're going to get. Hold on, hold on.

Yeah, that sounds like a great thing from a, a founder. I'll just throw it out there like, you know, a Kyle Porter or a man in Medina where they've learned that I'm talking to series A early stage guy.

Yeah, he just found the like 2.

Of 10 ever, you know, like, they're like, they don't know how to say this stuff yet, which is okay. Like, that's not their fault. That's just who they are. What am I looking for in that person? Because the other thing, you know, who's really good at selling early founder.

The part I would say is I don't even know if I have a good answer to this to be, to be totally honest with you. But what I would come back to is the same advice I would Give around joining any really, really early stage startup. It's value system and appetite for risk right at the end of the day and I hate to say like can you grab a beer with that person? But at the end of the day when you're talking to them about why they've built this company and how they're thinking about things, are they expressing values that align with what you're thinking about?

Yes.

And if you're a series, you know, if you're thinking about and you're an AE and you're like, why is Richard talking about values right now? Because at the end of the day your value system is what gets you up and gets you through the hard times and having a value alignment with a leader that you're working with that startups are hard work.

Richard, you are a fucking LinkedIn machine of posts.

Well, he's more like the muse because he doesn't actually post anything. I know what we just, what we'll do, Richard, true is we'll listen to this episode again and we'll just write stuff like it does.

No worries. That's just, just, just, just take it and Scott, I, I gotta correct you. My last name is Scro. Scro.

I was wondering, I was like, did I be saying it wrong?

I couldn't tell. I couldn't tell if I heard if it was noise canceling, doing something or if you were saying that was the third time. So Scott, I gotta tell you, it's Richard Scro.

Okay, my bad. I'm impressed that you let me fail so many times publicly before correcting it.

Yes. Scott, I wanna, I wanna flip it to you as you think about same topic, going to early stage founders, series A's and B's, the people who are listening, you know, is there anything you'd add? And I love what Richard said about the values and talking about those kinds of things that you would give someone in the interview process of like you might want to look for this in this early stage founder.

I'm, I'm big on understanding their communication style and preferences.

Meaning like email versus text versus well.

Yeah, a little bit of that. But just like how fast they replied to certain things or not. This is a big deal when you're an early stage VP and you're trying to get, especially now that everybody's remote or most people are remote, it's like you're trying to get an answer to something and like there's on silent for five, six hours, right? That's really hard.

So in the spreadsheet, Scott, they're hanging out.

It's just really important to me, to me, at least that somebody is kind of accessible and communicative and responsive and that type of thing. So I try to try to dig into that a little bit. I also really want to understand.

Like, what they would consider a win. Like, what would be a single? What's a double? What's like a home run? What does that look like? Not just like the ultimate outcome, but like in the next six months, what would be like a home run? Okay. What would be like a single? That you'd be like, okay, we're doing good, but it's not like spectacular. I try to understand those kind of short and long term goals a little bit. In my experience, people don't want to talk about that, by the way. They shy away from that quite a bit, like, oh, we don't focus on any kind of outcomes or whatever. So you have to, I have to push them a little bit. Those are two things that I just thought of.

Those are great. I like the single. What's a single? Because that, that then turns around back to that earlier part of the conversation around, you know, milestones and a whole other topic of, you know, stage appropriate compensation and what if you hit certain milestones kind of stuff. So I think that's great. All right, I'm going to shut up now. Scott, jump in.

I want to know, I want to know from, from Richard Scro.

Thank you, Scott.

Implementation of feedback right there.

Richard. I love it.

Of any good sales rep. Okay, I want to know from you, like, you've never, you've never really carried a bag before.

What are you struggling with in your role as VP of sales and success and where do you turn to get help?

Scott, and you had mentioned this at the outset, there's a large and ever growing number of insight portfolio companies that are all.

Approaching growth and scale slightly differently.

Every day that I'm here and I've been here for a little bit more than a year, there's just more stuff I learned that I know nothing about or things that I thought I understood at depth that I really can only scratch the surface of.

Can you give an example of one?

So one conversation we were talking about very recently was the idea of pods. So bringing together sales, customer success, sales development, account management, solution engineering, whatever it might be in a pod, focused on a particular vertical geography, region, segment of the market, and thinking about compensation in that world. How do you. And I think that's, that's different than what maybe most traditionally think of a salesperson's compensation that's 100% different.

We've had a couple conversations with people recently who've been thinking about different revolutionary ways about incentives and stuff like that.

It's. It's super. It's super interesting. And it's not like there's 50 years of history that we can pull on. So we, we first, we lean on, you know, what we see and what we believe as an organization. So chatting folks like Jeremy and Hillary and others on the team, that's the first place. And then the second place, I actually, I consume a lot from the different sales communities. Right. I was involved with modern sales pros for a while. Thursday night sales places like that are also great resources for me to kind of get and see both the state of what the conversation is and like the zeitgeist of the sales world, but also pick up little nuggets. And then finally it's a lot of thinking through kind of fundamentals and blocking and tackling. So back to this compensation question. Well, what's the role fundamentally? What's the role of variable compensation fundamentally? Why would an organization want to deploy a pod structure? And as you start to start to make assumptions and challenge those assumptions, you come to a place where you go, this is a model that could conceivably work.

What are the pros and cons of it?

Anybody seen it work?

I can't speak on specifics, but there are a few organizations that I've worked with who've done a reasonably successful job of it.

That'd be. Even if you anonymized it, it'd be an interesting read because I think nobody's talked. We talk about it, but nobody talks about it. I talk about it conceptually and I wonder, and I'm curious, but Scott, anybody implemented.

Well, say that one more time, Richard.

Have you ever seen anybody or of any of your clients that you can share implemented the pod structure?

Well, no.

Yeah, See, I'm old school that way. I'm like, fuck that.

But I also know, I mean, most people that I've talked to have been more of the old school mindset. But there are people now who are asking these types of questions and playing around with different structures and all that kind of thing. So it's coming and Richard Scro is already seeing it happen.

Yeah, well, and I think the thing with that too, Richard and Scott.

You have to know what problems you have before you jump to a solution. Right. What's that old adage? Treatment without diagnosis is malpractice. Moving to a pod structure is maybe the right thing for some organizations and for other organizations it could just be kicking a problem down the road and for other organizations it could be disastrous. So it's as much about understanding kind of the context around why somebody would or would not as it is then figuring out what the incentive structure or should they or should they not?

Yeah, we got one more question from me and then I'm going to turn it over to you and see if you have any questions for us. But want to once again thank our sponsors, Scratchpad Outreach and Sandoza for helping put on Surf and Sales podcast as well as the Surf and Sales summit in Costa Rica this November. There's two different sessions and we've also got a founders only session.

I think Richard should come. Richard, you need to come.

We'll get him out. We'll get him out. The details. But check out the founders only session. Surfingsales.com Texas and my question is on my mind because yesterday I think it was announced, if not yesterday, earlier this week, Adam Newman, the former CEO and founder of WeWork, raised the largest round ever from a 16 Andreessen Horowitz, $350 million. All this kind of stuff. So my question is how do people like this.

Raise sums of money like that while so many other.

People are founding companies that are successful, even profitable, from different backgrounds and experiences, why do they have so much trouble but big old VC funds, folks like this, again, tough question to end it.

Yeah, that's probably a podcast in and.

Of, in and of itself. Yeah.

And I think we've all seen We Crashed and I think everybody, and including my mom, who's not a technologist, has an opinion on WeWork and Adam Newman.

Scott hasn't seen it, by the way.

Oh, not seeing the movie.

You've got a handwritten note from Adam Neumann. I think that's better than most of us got. I think it's important and it speaks to a broader challenge that I think we as technologists, we as folks that are in sales and go to market, have to solve for. And it speaks to one of understanding that the world and selling effectively and building companies successfully isn't always going to look exactly how we did it. And being cognizant of the fact, I think TechCrunch actually phrased it very well. It's a concrete ceiling. That's not a glass ceiling. It's a concrete ceiling. And I think organizations have a huge part to play in that, both in who and how we hire and who and what we choose to invest in. At Insight Partners. We have A number of different partnerships that we have in place to facilitate both investment in folks that would otherwise not be invested in because maybe they don't fit the. I'm using air quotes for folks on the podcast like the traditional mold of maybe what VC investment looked like 15, 20 years ago and partnerships with great organizations like SV Academy to help bring in an influx of talent into the realm of technology that may not have otherwise gotten exposure to it because it doesn't fit that. And again, I'm using kind of air quotes, the traditional what salespeople used to look like or what folks in, you know, getting into technology roles used to look like 15 or 20 years ago. So I think it starts there to the question specifically about like Adam Newman. Maybe he's just a great sales guy. Just fantastic, fantastic sales guy, I think. And I think.

It'S an opportunity for us, you know, that are in roles like what we have to continue to create environments where folks that otherwise wouldn't have the opportunity can get involved and get exposure to it.

Yeah, it's cool. It's interesting. If you haven't Scott, go watch that, Richard. It feels very similar if you haven't watched the. I don't know how old you are, Richard. Scott was probably four. But the Netflix documentary on Woodstock 99 and what a shit show that was.

And the founders of it just complete lack of accountability, which is.

I think Netflix is making all their money off of stories of things crashing and burning lately. That seems to be the. But Scott, we all like to watch a car crash from afar.

But Scott, that's why we always post on LinkedIn. Crazy negative shit.

Yeah, yeah.

What can we, what can we do for you, Richard? Do you have any questions for us?

I, I am. And it kind of goes back to Scott. The, the last question that you'd asked me, like, how are you seeing what it takes to be successful as a seller? How have you seen that evolve in the past? Let's call it five to 10 years, first part and then second part. What's it going to look like in, in 25 years when we're doing this from a retirement.

The 25 year part is, is tricky. I need a couple cocktails for that part. I mean the, the evolution last few years. I mean utilization of all the tools that are out there. Number one. You know, you even go back. I'll go back to 2016 was when I first started at Qualia. Some of the tools that are more commonplace right now, including Sandoso scratch pad. Right. They weren't even in place and we were using outreach sales loft kind of tools in 2016 and we were still a little bit ahead of the curve. So as a seller and if you're selling B2B and you're like a modern seller, if you don't know how to use these tools and maximize your productivity, you're in big trouble, number one. Number two, you cannot just win the way that we used to way back in the late 90s or early 2000s, when I would just hammer the phones and basically send 7,000 emails if I had to in order to get responses. So I could just win from volume and through the volume, I could get better at conversion percentages and skill sets and whatnot. That doesn't work anymore. You can't just hammer volume like that. It is so freaking noisy. It's very hard to get a hold of anybody. Which leads to my third and final point, which is just creativity. And, you know, getting somebody, meeting somebody where they're at in their journey towards purchase, from their pain to where they are.

When they're willing to purchase, is super, super important to understand and kind of map out, you know, so whatever channel you're using, that's why you're seeing these crazy creative openings from people on the phones or these emails that have GIFs and things like that, and people using LinkedIn and Twitter and other channels or people co selling their way in. Right. It's you giving me an intro to Richard Harris saying, hey, Scott and I are buddies. He does this thing, I know you, we were talking about this problem. Check it out. This kind of thing, anything creative is like.

Way more important now than it was, I'd say, five or 10 years ago.

I think it was Harris.

You have to answer the 25 years from now part because we're going to run out of time. So you have to answer that part. I answer the easy one, you answer the hard one.

Well, I'm gonna, I'm gonna say that all those things Scott said existed five or six years ago, they've just gone more mainstream.

That's fair enough.

You know.

The 25 year part.

Scott, I'm going to be 78 years old and 25 years, so. Right. So if I'm working at 78, I.

Really hope you're not.

I really hope so.

I, I hope by then I'm, I'm supportive to others. You know, you and I, and I think even you as well, Richard, we, we've built these networks of people that we've helped and continue to help. And I, that's where I see myself Being of. Of still being a facilitator and paying things forward and maybe teaching other people who I've already helped how to get them to pay things forward. But hopefully that's already ingrained in them. So I think that's.

Well, that's right.

Myself. You made it all about you.

He's not talking about you. He's talking about sales in general.

But, you know, but how am I going to know? I'm going to be 78 years old. I'll probably barely be able to remember what I had for breakfast.

So. Okay, I'll make a futuristic.

I think here's. Here's my futuristic thing. I think salespeople will. There'll be fewer of us. There you go by about 75%.

There's the answer.

It will become a, you know, and we've been able for a while and still can that, oh, you're never going to need, you know, get rid of salespeople, you know. Well, yeah, you will. The process will shift.

And so it's going to be a different game and a different type of. I mean, even five years, it's gonna be a different type of salesperson.

Right. Interesting.

Yeah. Can I throw one more question? Because that's actually got me thinking. So then how does that change the. Oh, sorry, do I have time for one more or. No, you do.

I just have one more answer.

Oh, yeah, sorry, sorry. Go ahead, Richard.

The sales leadership's going to change, and so the millennials will be in charge and retiring and the Gen Zs will really be in charge. And so it's going to be a whole new ball game based on how they see the world, how they view the world. World just like it's already happening now. So I think that's.

You actually answered the question I was going to ask. I was going to say with that, with this, with this evolution of sales, how does the, how does the manager skill set like, what is the role of the manager in that world?

Well, I think the managers are going and they're already starting to happen is there's a ridiculous level of empathy. There will continue to be a greater sense of power in terms of what the employee can demand and expect from their employer. I think there will be, you know, at some point they'll, you know, it's like everything is. It's. First it was all about the employer having the leverage. Now the employees have the leverage. Even as we go into a recession, there's still not enough people to fill the jobs that are out there. So the employee still is going to have the power. And as the boomers retire, like it's to your point, it's going to be a spreadsheet numbers game. You're going to have to have some actuary figure out what the new compensation model is. So that's going to be the difference.

There you go. Good job. Richard Harris painting the question. Well done.

That's good stuff, I guess. Yeah, I guess the only other one I can think of, which is always a fun, fun, fun question. Where should SDRs live? Sales or marketing? What do you guys think?

Oh, goodness gracious.

Whoever's good at teaching them how to do the job.

Yeah, that's a good answer. The challenge would be if you move the STRs under the marketing organization and it's led by a marketer who doesn't know the first thing about sales. That would, that would be pretty tough. But there's a few marketers out there that I would trust.

Yeah.

Kyle Lacy, Darrell Prail, people like this that I'm thinking of.

Holly is another one. Yeah, there's a couple there.

Yeah.

I mean, as a, as a. Here's a different question. If you are a VP of sales, if you're a VP of sales at a software company, do you want the SDRs living under you or do you want the SDRS living under marketing?

Interesting question. I loved Richard's answer to that. I think all things being equal, what I've observed is it's about 70, 30. Right. This is both from my time at Modern Sales Pros and my time here. You see, it's about 70% of the time they roll into sales. And it speaks actually to some of the changes that we're seeing in the discipline of sales. Right.

Sometimes though, I think we're still in the stage where they roll them into a bandwidth thing. Like, you know, Scott, you're right. But I know a lot of VPs of sales whose natural inclinations like, oh, I just don't want to manage one more team, so let market.

Exactly. That's one of the reasons why somebody might say, I would love for marketing, manage the STRs. Yeah, man.

This is blown by Mr. Scro.

So it was, that was the fastest. I think it's the fastest hour long meeting I've had on my calendar in a long time. Gentlemen.

Love that, love that. We had a lot of fun. You dropped a lot of gold on us. Appreciate you and, you know, let us know if we can ever be helpful to you and, and the team. And thanks for spending some time with us, man.

Yeah, happy to, happy to. Thank you. Thank you both for having me. This was a blast.

Awesome, man. Good to see you. And let's catch up again soon.

Yeah. Take care, guys.