S4E34 - Making Bolder Decisions with Mark Roberge

Hey everybody, this is Richard Harris from the Surf and Sales podcast. One of the best episodes we've ever done from season one, actually a long time ago with Mark Roberge. If you don't know Mark, you'll hear more about him in a minute. But.

He was the first CRO over at HubSpot and now is founder of Stage 2 Capital, a really, really smart sales leader. And I'm very, very excited to have him on the show where he shares some amazing stuff about the one year cliff and the four year vest. If it's a broken model or not, his answer will surprise you and how to survive past the first 18 months as a VP of Sales. Again, his answer will surprise you. In the meantime, a quick shout out to HubSpot. We are excited to share with them, share with you about their integrated AI technology, helping teams automate the more tedious parts of running a business. They have tools built into the CRM, things that can pull reports and do research and summarize information and craft content. And it saves a ton of time. Saves literally 30 to 45 minutes or an hour a day based on what your role is. So imagine what you could do with three to five hours a week. Extrapolate that over a month, over a year, and what you could do for your revenue and growing your business overall. So please check out HubSpot.com and of course please subscribe to our podcast YouTube channel and by all means, the up and coming surf and Sales event in November 2023 at surf and sales.com thank you and let us know what you think of this episode.

Hey everybody, it's Richard Harrison. Scott Leese here with another episode of the Surf and sales podcast. Super, super excited. One of those people, you sort of wonder if they would even say yes when you ask. And he did. Mark Roberge is here, if you don't know. Mark. Obviously very well known from his HubSpot days. Currently though he's also the managing director of Stage 2 Capital. I think that's right. And then a senior lecturer at Harvard. So aside from just going off and building an amazing company, he's also really working hard to give back to the community that supported him through all those years. So we're really excited. So, Mark, thanks so much for joining us.

Yeah, Richard, come on. I always respond to your emails and phone calls.

You do?

You do. Come on.

I know, but you ask. Sometimes you email people who you know and you're like, oh, I wonder if they're going to make me go through a publicist or a.

Talk to my assistant, we had.

We've had two people say they've got to go to legal. You know, like, you got to avoid these topics. So, you know, so I'm. And I also don't want to try and take advantage of people. Right. Like, just because I know you doesn't mean I want to be. Hey, man, come on. So, but. So we really, genuinely, we're really glad you're here. So thank you so much for coming.

Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Yeah.

I think, you know, there are a couple things we're going to hit on today, a little bit about the presence of what's happening. We are. We're recording this during COVID so I think there'll be some interesting dialogue around that. I know you've got a couple of things, too, around your VC fund that I know we're going to talk about, because you're filling a gap there, and I really do want to spend time there. And then also this really. The science of reestablishing growth. Because I think probably even before COVID you were already thinking that way, and then this hit, and now it's like.

Now everybody's thinking about reestablishing growth.

Yeah.

I've been telling people for the last two months that you're almost back to reestablishing product market fit.

That's exactly it.

That's. So how do you guys see. How do you see that in your world and what you're doing?

Yeah, I mean, across the board. I mean, we'll just start with the stage two capital portfolio. You know, we've got 11 companies in that now, and right when it hit, I mean, you know, you know how these, these are mostly originally series A investments, and some have grown for a couple years now, but they're, they're founders who maybe weren't even working during 08. You know what I mean? So they haven't, they don't have experience with these recessions, and we just had to scramble to just help them. They were just calling us, like, when can we talk? We need help. And just ran them through it as a recession, though.

Like, people are saying, what'd you learn in 2008 to now? And it's like, there's a little bit of stuff, but there's nothing in the.

Books for this fair to say. Yeah, I mean, I guess, like, if we say, what do you do when people start laying people off and cut budgets, you know, as a tech startup. Right. It's like, so there's, there are some parallels, I think, to, oh, 1 and 08 from that degree and of course some differences too. But so we just, you know, first off, help them like make the hard decisions around, you know, sourcing up cash, whether it was taking down credit lines, readjusting budgets, some had to go through some layoffs, some, some salary cuts. That's like 101. I think the one where they just don't lean into enough. And you're talking about this, Richard, is like most people that went through 08 as another time down economy, looking back on it, has significant regrets of not making bolder decisions around reinventing themselves. Right. And so as human nature we get, we just get naturally attached to the investments we've made and to the learning we've made over the last two years. How hard did we work to establish product market fit to optimize our messaging? And now our buyer, many buyers. I don't think there's any buyer whose mentality is the same today as it was in January. Okay. And so we are, our messaging, our whole strategy, our ideal customer profile and our customer value proposition is not optimal. And so we have, like you said, Richard, we have to, we have three pivot. So we had to work hard to push our portfolio to just forget about that investment unit. Like we've got to rethink ourselves in the times we're in. So an example we had a company that sold into residential real estate.

Agents. Within a week.

They stood up a virtual home show module and it just changed the game. We're in Sandosa. You may know them in the Valley, Richard. So they, they, they, they kind of use gift sending to, you know, to help with lead flow and customer relationships. Well, everyone wanted to send gifts, but guess what? No one's at the office. So they stood up within a very quick time a module that allowed a recipient to anonymously provide their home address so a gift could be sent. Brilliant.

Right?

And so this doesn't stop at like functional product modules. This is messaging who we call, etc. But that was probably the, the most important work is pushing ourselves to rethink on ourselves. And whether you're a 10 billion dollar company or a couple hundred thousand dollar company, I feel you have to do it.

Well, let me ask you this, Mark. Does that trickle down to the individual level? Do all the individual contributors out there need to be thinking about reinventing them themselves? Yeah.

So Scott. Sure. On the front line, definitely. I mean from SDRs to digital marketers to whatever in terms of what you do in your job. Yes. And then.

You know.

Different flavors personally. Right. So of Course, my students, I had to push them on that, too. I mean, God forbid my students are graduating right now. You know what I mean? It's like. But, yeah, you can. You can think about February when you had that hedge fund job lined up and how great life was, and now that's gone. Or you can think about that. You just went through one of the most, you know, unbelievably experiences of your life with some of the smartest people you ever meet, with a wonderful degree, with a world that has so many societal problems that you are probably more better positioned than.001% of the world to help, and you can embrace that.

Right?

And so, yeah, I mean, different degrees. I mean, if you're. If you're. If you're an account executive at Zoom, I wouldn't necessarily want to reinvent yourself. Right now, you're a pretty good spot, but, you know, there's different flavors of that. What have you been thinking, Scott?

Yeah, I've just been thinking about people who, you know, in our line of work, for example, you know, if you're delivering training, and I know a lot of people who are like, oh, I just got to ride this out, ride this out, ride this out. And I'm. And I've been thinking to myself, no, I got to do something completely different right now.

Right?

And I certainly. I started thinking about virtual happy hours and webinars and all these Zoom. I literally started thinking them as network television. I was like, this is a TV channel now, and people are watching tv. And so what does a talking head need to do? They need to be on tv. So I'm like, I need to do every podcast, I need to be on every virtual happy hour, every show, and I just need visibility, visibility, visibility. And so for me, that was. That was something that I wasn't doing previously that this kind of brought out of me. And, you know, not that it was, like, big, bold action, but in my head, it was like, okay, this is a pretty big different step that I might be willing to take.

Yeah, I totally agree with that. You've got to, you know, whether it's a buyer that you work with, like, just because they can't have meetings or whatever, they still want to do certain things. So we have to reinvent ourselves and, like, the experiences and skills that we have. What do they mean in this current world order that we're in? So. Absolutely, yeah.

Steve Richards has this state, this phrase of go fish where the fish are, right? Don't just throw your line in the water. You got to. Got to know where they are and go fish there. And I think that's what a lot of people are trying to do. And to your point, Mark, that's what folks are looking at just out of curiosity, because you are at that VC level and you do see sort of, you have the ability to be future minded in a lot of ways. What do you see on the. What are some positive things coming out? Like, are you like, oh, I'm really encouraged, you know, this sucks, but I'm really encouraged by the kinds of things I'm seeing.

Well, yeah, I think, I think from a societal level.

You know, there's a lot of speculation that this incident accelerated.

Sort of evolutions that were likely anyway. Okay, telemedicine, right? Like one of our companies is a telemedicine company. I mean, they're hitting 200% of goal right now, you know what I mean? And like, I think like people are gonna like, even when this is over, knock on wood, like, why drag a sick patient into like one spot, you know what I mean? Like, great, now we've embraced it, you know, virtual campuses, you know what I mean? Like.

Even in our space closing big deals, we're seeing shorter sales cycles on big deals because it's easier to get in front of decision makers and get decision making units together. You know, like universal basic income. Whether you're a believer or not, I mean, who knows? But like, we have to have some solution to the fact that like, you know, technology and robots will likely be able to do 90% of the jobs are out there and people still need to eat and have. So anyway, like, you know, these are, these are some of the things, you know, good or bad. I think there's a lot of silver linings there in terms of our adoption of, you know, what was an evolution for our society.

Richard, you're on mute. What are you thinking now? What are you thinking on that?

So I agree with you. I think it's accelerating a lot of things. I think a lot of things haven't changed and it really is a back to basics, hey you, you now can get in front of your people. So you now need to be better at what you do because you're not going to have time to waste, right? You've got to be better at knowing your buyer, knowing their pains, asking questions, like the same stuff we've always known. So in some ways it hasn't. Nothing has changed other than maybe the timeline, right? Like that's about it. And that timeline is directly affected by people just hoarding their cash. Yeah, which is the smart.

Probably like an extremity. Richard, you're exact. I'm like, I'm trying to find like what is it? What's the new sales model? What is it, what's working? And it's literally all the best practices that we've been preaching, but honestly the minority have adopted, you know what I mean? Like, and, and now it's like you could get by with you know, like a subpar. Now you don't, now you can't, right? So it's, it's kind of forcing the issue.

It's been removing mediocrity or exposing mediocrity. Every.

You know what's different though is I see, you know, in every recession it exposes mediocrity. But what I'm really seeing is that the old school businesses who are already two generations behind, right. The legit fortune folks are forced to adopt, right? Like my, you know, my kids, teachers, like I don't think I've ever seen a peer, a group at that level who are often over 40 aren't coming from the tech mine like the three of us are. And they had to adapt to tech in like weeks, right. And I'm really proud of what they've been able to accomplish. I hope they can leverage that. And all they gotta do is say, great, you don't wanna pay our raise, we'll go on strike. You know what that's like, go for it. Here's the lesson plan.

You go do it.

Right.

So I think that's really interesting.

Let me change the topic on you real quick.

Mark.

I have said that one of my biggest regrets in my career as a sales leader is that I never attached myself to a company that was led by somebody with sales or marketing background. So I've always, I've always had, always had a founder that.

Candidly just like struggled to understand sales and how to put together a scalable kind of sales engine. And the founders were, you know, engineers or finance kind of folks. So in your work now, I mean how are you, how do you educate some of these non sales background founders to better understand, understand the sales people, the sales leader, the sales process, that kind of stuff.

Yeah, I get, I come from a very blessed accidental position there honestly because of my roots as an engineer. Right. So I was a mechanical engineer undergrad. The first two years of my career I wrote code. You know, being at MIT is very quant mindset. And so like my book sells the biggest amongst product and product founders in San Francisco because they're kind of like they've always seen.

Yeah, you're this, like, unique.

Yeah. Like, them.

And kind of. So they really relate to it. You know what I mean? I'm very lucky that my brand relatable from them. And they do listen to me more than a purebred. Like, I've been at work over 20 years type of thing. Right. And also my approach. Right. My approach being very data driven, very process oriented that they can relate to because we have. We've been trained to think of a very similar way.

So.

You know, because they kind of have, like, the Valley's gone through, like, different ways of, like, you had, like, the first wave of software companies in the, like, 90s, potentially, that were very enterprise sales driven. And then, you know, here comes, like, Google and, like, the product movement. Like, all of a sudden, like, product people were in charge. And it was like, why? It was like, if we build it, they will come like, why do I need sales people? And why would I. Why would I pay a salesperson $250,000 a year when I pay my engineers, you know, 150? That doesn't make any sense. And that's correct. I mean, this day and age, I. I do think the top engineers should make more than the top salespeople, to be honest with you. And they did. They do in a lot of cases.

Look at how Zoom just made Google eat their lunch on video platform.

Yeah.

I think there's a question of not valuing one over the other. Recognize everybody's worth, that they work together. Yeah.

Because they've gone through ways.

Right.

I think it was like. I think it was a kind of like 2000. It was like in Vogue in 05, and like, Jay Simon at last. And he's one of our investors and he's a friend, but he's always like, oh, we know sales, you know, and that's like the cool thing to say, especially in the Valley. But then, like, there was this time, I think, in like, 2010 or so, when someone was like, hey, why don't we try, you know, free. You know, they didn't call park leg growth at the time. I think it was like, freemium, whatever. But then all of a sudden, there's this demand, like, oh, we're having a little bit of a slow quarter. What do you think about, like, dropping a salesperson in on these hundreds of thousands of downloads we get every day? And all of a sudden it was like, you know what I mean? So it's sort of like we're constantly trying to figure out how they blend together.

You Know, coming back to Scott's question, how do you coach those technical. I've worked with them and oftentimes, you know, they are the smartest person in the room Sometimes, from my experience, they often want to be the smartest person in the room and they're more interested in figuring out how something is done versus actually understanding it and understanding that you can't do that with a salesperson. You can't. I mean, it's hard to learn sales in a book, right?

Yeah. Yeah. So how do you channel like to a person? Yeah, trying to think because I've worked. You know, Drew Houston was my student, actually. I mean, I was his TA and got to know him and he kind of had that mentality in the beginning, but now he's, he's really mature. Beyond that, I'm trying to think of like some of our product founders right now because they all have maybe a different question, weird issue. Yeah, go ahead, Scott.

Maybe a different question that would make it a little simplification would be like, what was the hardest part for you then? Coming from a engineering background to transitioning into sales and understanding sales. Like, what was the hard part? Because maybe that's the hard part for founders as well.

Yeah, I think for me it was like, you know, I thought it was, I was a, I was terrible. Show up and throw up. You know what I mean? I was, I was a terrible, like, I was just a pitch person. I thought it was like, build an amazing deck and just tell the story as many people as possible. And we have so much evidence from gone and everyone on how broken that is. Now, fortunately, my dad's been a salesperson since he was 18 selling Cutco knives. And he quickly mentored me on the importance of discovery and pain development. And you know, he's kind of Sandler trained. So I quickly learned that sales is a lot more about, you know, building trust quickly with a prospect so that they open up to you and using that trust to open end, sequential open ended questions to understand and develop pain and then tailor your pitch accordingly. So I'm not sure that's where that was my struggle. But I think with the product founders, I think they again, they're just stuck on like, if you build a superior product, people will buy it. And I'm trying to think when I've come across that perhaps with some students, et cetera, and I just like baby step them, I think I'm like, you might be right. But like, wouldn't it be valuable to have someone right now you have your engineers and Your product people and, you know, how many conversations with customers do you think you're having every week? You know, it's like, yeah, you know, maybe every product manager talks to a customer every other day. You know what I mean? So it's like we're having like a handful. What if you could increase that to like 40 a week? How much better would that be for you? You know what I mean? So it's like it's a stepping stone. And that's honestly like the ideal first sales hire anyway. It's just someone who's almost like a mix between the product manager and account executive.

I like the stepping stone analogy. I've sort of told people before. It's, you're sort of like smoothing a stone via water. That's the speed with which, you know, some of these things, like the change comes about or the light bulb goes off for them, so you got to do it little by little. I like that, that analogy.

Yeah. Because then all of a sudden, now they brought this person in. They're like, they're gelling with the team. We brought the right person in who's not like the coin operated salesperson, but they're, they're going to enjoy collaborating with the engineers and all of a sudden, like the sales are going and the learning's happening, you know what I mean? And like now we've established the foundation for, for a codified processing team.

Yeah, I want to flip it because the other side of this coin is, you know, even five years ago, the sales leader had to be mediocre at data and understanding data. Right. All of a sudden, five years ago, you heard sales leaders dropping the word cohort for the first time. And I'm like, really? Come on.

Using the word wrong probably as well.

Yeah, exactly.

So do you see that shift happening now with sales leaders where you. And as you look at sales leaders and help evaluate for your clients that, hey, yeah, you definitely need someone who's a closer, but they also really got to understand this process better now. And I know your process anyway. But have you started to see that evolve on the sales leaders? Definitely.

And honestly, in the entrepreneur community, I think it shifted too far. I think people have put like almost an exceptional sales ops person in as VP of sales. And I think that's a mistake. Right, so. So it's like, I think definitely the purebred VP of sales has to be more analytical than 10 years ago, but they don't need to have like the sales ops ability to like create the report, you know what I mean? Or like really even understand what I'm getting at. They do need to be totally bought in to running a tight process driven, data driven sales org. But it's okay if they're not super analytical as long as they know that they need a right hand person.

Right.

They're sales ops person and they need to trust them. They need to be like, okay, let's optimize the comp plan. Help me. What's wrong with it? How should we think about it? What should we measure? Give me your advice. Let's optimize territories. What are they doing? Like what's the data telling us? Why is the forecast lower? You know, I mean they need to be bought into that and but at the same time because the problem with the ops person coming in is like well you know, we have to hire salespeople, we have to build a sales playbook, we have to level up on enterprise deals. We have to manage them and coach them and lead them to and that's where like the real, you know, data, data centric ops person struggles. Right now we're seeing our first generation real quick. Ricard is Yamini who is at Dropbox now. She's the chief customer officer at HubSpot. Ironically because I started following her career when she was at Dropbox. She got promoted up to I believe CRO or cco. But she came up through Ops because I'm always telling my students if you really want to be in sales and get into leadership, don't go into sales ops. You can add a ton of value there in year one but, but there's no career path to leadership. But that's starting to change with these like you know, of course it's going to happen for the first time in a place like Dropbox where like process and data in the sale is probably more important than the people leadership.

Hey, if you are digging this episode, a quick break. Did you know Mark Roberge actually has his own podcast on the HubSpot podcast network? It's called the Science of Scaling. And each week Mark will bring in different people to discuss, you know, maybe the mistakes they've made so you don't have to sharing everything from go to market strategies to PLG to building sales teams and running revenue ops. If you didn't know he was the first CRO over at HubSpot. He was the founding CRO. He's also a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School and co founder of Stage 2 Capital Capital. So he really sits down with some amazing sales leaders and just gives you so much brilliance and insight. Again, it's called the Science of Scaling by Mark Roberge. Now back to the rest of this episode.

So do you feel like that's because I think you're headed right where I was going to ask, which is that revenue ops. Right. You know, we just talked to the, to the head of revenue ops over at Clary last week and he was explaining how they sort of sit in between, you know, they really are the hub and the spoke. Right. Is that what you're seeing too, in terms of the growth, revenue? There's revenue, definitely.

I'm seeing ops being invested in early on. Like some people even say, like.

When the first salesperson hired. You know what I mean? Really early. If you're going to be like product led growth or whatever like that.

I've been on the record as saying, my very first hire, when I go in to become a VP of sales, whatever, is somebody to run sales ops for me?

Super.

Like my first hire, like, boom, right hand man or right hand woman right by my side.

We got that man there. Because the data focus and to your point, Richard, is not sales ops or marketing ops, it's revenue ops because it used to be marketing, sales, customer success, but now they're all coming together and that's such an important role.

How do you define, and this is really for the listeners, how do you define revenue ops, sales ops and sales? Like, where do you, how do you see them based on your view into the world?

Yeah, I mean, I think their terms revenue growth and go to market are all kind of saying the same thing. Which means like sales is just take a lead and turn it into a customer. But that's not revenue growth and go to market. Revenue growth and go to market is marketing sales and customer success. It's getting the demand, it's converting the demand in the customers and it's converting the customers and successful customers and expanded customers. And that's how I look at the difference between marketing sales, customer success versus whatever you call it, growth, go to market, revenue.

Got it. I want to come back to a hiring thing. I watched your or I read your Saster interview the other day, by the way. I think you're the first person I've researched before we do our podcast.

Thank you. Thank you.

I was like, I got to make sure I don't ask him these. Hey, like at HubSpot in the early days, like if you want. Sure. That's been written about enough. You said that you're not good at hiring.

Right?

I don't know if you remember this quote, but you Basically said, look, I'm not great at hiring or interviewing or something like that. How do you recognize that in yourself?

And so how did you sort of solve that problem for yourself, right? Like, rather than just saying, hey, you go interview them or, hey, let's create a team, like, which is kind of the standard. I'm just curious how you, how you measure.

I don't know if, like, I was not good at. I was. What I was really bad was. Was negative feedback. That's what I was bad at.

Delivering negative feedback.

Yeah, delivering negative feedback. And I had to go through, like, therapy. We've talked about that, Richard. You know, like, you know, because this all roots into, like, childhood stuff, right? So you can't. You can't be a good leader and not give negative feedback. So I actually had a quota to give at least one piece of negative feedback a day to my team. And so. But that was my big weakness on hiring. Like, I certainly, in the beginning, you know, had no idea what I was doing, but grew over time. And like, the big thing there that, you know, even I was on a webinar this morning. It's like most hiring managers, the way they approach the hire is like, read the resume five minutes before and then go into the interview and have them run through the resume. And I mean, gosh, with so much on the line for a good hire versus a bad hire, we have so much to grow in management. I think, you know, my work, Richard, that, you know, very much like the who, that book. The who, which I think I found it after I used this process. Otherwise I would have coded it more, but just very like, take a step back. What is this role? Let's attach this role to skills, knowledge, experience. Let's really define what those are into a scorecard. Let's use that scorecard to build a hiring process. Who says what, when, how many steps. And then let's force everyone to use the scorecard and especially for something like sales, that if we're successful, hopefully we're going to hire like 50 of these a year. Like, to have that much predictability and to be able to literally get to the point, which we did a HubSpot to run regression analyses of our scorecards. Predictability of success. When you're hiring 50 people, 100 sales people a year, you better have that science. You know what I mean? So it's really, It's a process, and it's also an awareness that there is no universal good sales hire for every company. It's only an optimal sales hire for your company. And your context, which is what you're selling to who is and the stage that you're at. And so it's very dangerous to walk into a conference and be like, hey, what are you looking for in your salespeople? And copy that, because what are they selling?

You know.

What kind of things did you measure in that? Just, again, I'm trying to give people some tactical stuff, like, as you that iteration and after you did some regression analysis, what did you really start to focus in on?

Top five, coachability, curiosity, work ethic, prior success, and intelligence. And it was funny that coachability was not even in my first pass, my first theory of the scorecard. It took me about a year of, like, every time, every six months, I would, like, take some time to think about the people I hired six months ago and reflect on how they were doing. You know, why is Betty doing really well? And am I looking for that in the pro in the process? Why did. Why did we have to fire, you know, Bob and am I looking for that? And I kept seeing coachability, like, the rep that was like, hey, I've been selling for 5 years, 10 years. Thanks for the training, but no thanks. I'll be at my cubicle cranking calls the way I know how to do it.

How do you solve for coachability when you're just going through the interview process?

I have them role play, and then I test a bunch of things on the role play, like consultative selling, the curiosity, their intelligence of how much they picked up the technical elements of our product. Then we stop. Scott, how do you think you did if you're like, awesome? I don't know. If you're like, oh, you know, I did okay. I liked how I handled this objection.

I wish I had this moment back, because, like, in every interview, Scott, I give one piece of positive feedback and one piece of needs for improvement. I thought you handled that objection really well on the SEO thing. That's a very sophisticated answer. You clearly down your homework. The area that I'd improve on your part is diving a little bit deeper into the need, trying to quantify and implicate it. And any ideas how you might do that? Scott, we're having a conversation. I'm coaching you five minutes later. Great. Why don't you redo the roleplay, Scott? Right.

That's. That's what I was getting at, because I've done that before, and I was curious if that was a similar strategy.

That's become like, I have no idea. You never know what you write. That's gonna just go Viral. That has just gone viral. And like these days, you ask everyone what they look for, and they all ask for coachability. And I'm kind of glad because I see. I see it correlate in a lot of environments.

Does I mean, give them an immediate chance to implement the feedback? That's the only. Only way to test it in like, real time.

Yeah. And you could do it sequential, right. You do your phone screen. You, like the person do a role play. Listen, I really want you to work on this thing. In fact, I'm going to send you our training documents. Why don't you read those and when you come in in three days, we'll do another role play. It's great.

Yeah. Let me switch the topic on you a little bit to sales leadership. The average sales leader is in their role. Average VP of sales in their role, like 15 to 18 months right now, depending on who you talk to.

My last three VP of sales or SVP of sales gigs, I think my average tenure is like 33 months. So I arguably doubled the average. But what is the key in your estimation to surviving if you're a VP of sales right now? Like, how the fuck do you get out of the first 18 months? Right. And make sure that you don't become on the chopping block or walk away?

That's a really good question. I've actually never answered that question before. Scott is a very good question. First off, I think you got to play venture capitalist because as good of a sales and sales leader as you, you can't control product and market. And you know what I mean? So you got to pick them good, pick them well. And I have helped some peers with that. I have a. Like, I love. I love freemium businesses that are having trouble monetizing as a sales leader, you know what I mean? Because it's like I've had some peers ask me, like, yeah, you know, like, they're getting like a hundred thousand downloads a month, and They've got a 2 million people that use this product every day, but they can't figure out how to monetize. I'm like, go, go take that job. Go take that job. Because, like, I mean, that's product market fit. I mean, you got 2 million people that choose to use your product every day. We'll find a way to make some money off of them. Right? So, so it's examples like that if you gotta. You gotta kind of play venture capitalist and get yourself into the right context, I think, like, where you can. A relationship with the board, you know, like when things go, when things go south and a company struggles, the board starts asking, should we get rid of the CEO? What should we do here? And the CEO has one get out of jail free card and that is firing the VP of sales.

Right.

So it's like so like you, you know, to have a good relationship there and also have a good relationship with the board to make sure that I.

Don'T disagree with you. But what happens if you're shielded from the board and you don't get access? That, that happens.

Maybe it's something happens a lot. Yeah. Maybe it's something you diligence when you're right. When you're interviewing, maybe you're asking. I talk to your.

But I think that you were talking about that.

Yeah, yeah, I want it. I'm never going to take a VP of sales job if I haven't talked to the board. Never.

Yeah.

Because I like if they're, if I want. First off, I want to. And second off, just that, that realistic expectation. I mean, I don't know. And I'm trying to do a lot of evangelizing around this because I feel pretty strongly about it is I don't know why most entrepreneurs and boards, they, you know, they're sitting here, you got a nice series A company had a great year. You tripled revenue from like a million to 3 million. You've got.

It'S great. And then you do a 10 million dollar series A and the next month they hire 12 reps. Why do they do that?

It kills companies. How can you, how can you hire 12 reps in one month when you're a 40 person company with three reps? Like I've seen it happen 50 times and 50 times, like there's two reps left after a year. Right. So I need to, I need to talk to the board just to see their take on that. Like, how do you, how do you want to think about scale here? Like, I'd love for you to come in and just like add 10 reps right away. All right, let me talk you through how that might be challenging. You know what I mean? So I just want to, I need to make sure we walk through some of those, some of those disconnects.

So anything else beyond that, like get, get good play vc. Get good at picking the. Right.

Yeah, yeah. Then it's your own execution. Right? That's, that's the surround sound. Then it's just around pret Predictability. Right. Like my, my thing with, you know, the, the cornerstone of my book was my mission and my role is predictable scalable revenue growth. And I joke with every founder that when it, when you get to the, the port of your pitch to raise money on your sales strategy, just start with our mission is predictable scalable revenue growth. All the VCs are like, this is awesome. I love this. This is exactly what I've been looking for. You know, and, and then. But it's underneath that. That was like the machine, which is if I could hire the same successful person every time predictably using data and train them in a very quantified model so that my training is very data driven and provided them with the same quality and quantity of leads each month and hold them accountable to the same sales process that's measured through data and process. That is a factory that produces predictable scalable revenue growth. So the surround sound. Yeah, play venture capitalist, board relationship, CEO relationship. But then that's our job, right? Is to create that. Create that predictability.

So I want to. We've had a couple of conversations around this, so might put you on the spot. So sorry, but not sorry.

No worries.

You know the four year cliff, right? So we know that the average tenure of a VP of sales is 18 months. We know the average tenure of a head of marketing is maybe 27 or 28 months, again, depending on the data. Do you even know where like this whole, you know, four year cliff came from? Because it doesn't really align, you know, for your vest. You mean for your vest on the one year.

Okay, yeah.

You know the four year vest on a one year cliff. Do you even know where that even came from? Because it seems very misaligned with.

I don't know. But I know who will know. It's Tom Nichols. He's one of a very famous faculty member at HBS in the entrepreneur department. He teaches this class that's so popular called the managerial something like the history of managerial capitalism or something. And he basically takes all the students back to the 1800s when all this stuff was invented. Like, you know, vesting and management fees and carry. And he will know. And I can ask him because when I read that, Tom is unbelievable respectful. But when I read the class, I'm like, who's gonna sign up for that? But he's so amazing to be able to see where all this comes from. So you can challenge it to your point, Richard. Like what? Where does this come from? So I'll do some digging, I'll see if he knows.

Yeah. How do you feel? How do you feel about it though? We had a conversation with Max Altshuler and He was a proponent of like stage appropriate vesting. And here's how I. My interpretation in that my whole career has been spent taking companies from 0 to 25 million. ARR. I do it in somewhere between two to three years and that's it. Like, that's what I'm here to do. I'm gonna get you from seed stage to Series C and then I really, you know, I don't want anything else to do with it. That's my job. Right. So if I do my job and I take you from being worth, I don't know, 10 million bucks to 500 million dollar valuation, how is it fair that I don't realize all of my equity? Because I didn't stick around for four years.

Totally. Yeah, I see that.

Do you have a hope they would make you. I hope they would make you whole. I don't know. That's, that's interesting. You kind of have to look at that with your, with your value. You have to do some more thinking about that. I will say that along these lines where you're poking.

We did something different at HubSpot that I try to implement a lot of companies and it's different than what the most, because most, when they hire the CRO or whatever, they kind of give them their equity and it's sort of expected. That's kind of your equity. Like that's it, that's what you're getting. And there's this big negotiation. I think that's very wrong. Like, how do we know? Like, so what we did at Huzbo was we'd say, okay, you're going to come in and this is what our entry level equity positions are. Now it's a little lower than market, as you see, but it's because we give equity every year. If you're good and in fact like over 50% of our. I don't know if we still do that, but when we were in the zero to IPO range, that's how we handle it. More than 50% would get re upped on their equity. That makes a lot more sense to me. Like I'm hiring the CRO and I'm going to like give them the right to own like 2 to 3% of my company, like right out of bat. No, like, here's the deal. First year I'm going to give you half a percent and, or a 1%, whatever and it's going to invest over four years. And if in 12 months we decide you're doing a good job, I'll give you another half a percent to 1%. And after that if you're still here, I'll give you another. Now it's all overlaying and that's how I think we should be thinking about. I don't know about. I hear your question Scott though and I don't have the solution to that is how do you get your fair shake if you're, if you're like a 10 to 100 million dollar person or.

Something, you know.

And to some extent even beyond just simply because of the fact of like wait a minute, I just took you from 0 to 100 million, which we now know you're going to a billion. You're going to get to that billion for what I did. Some ways it feels like it's worth More than 1%.

Right.

Or two. Yeah.

We could do a whole conversation on that. I'm sure.

I know everybody's up against time, so the one thing we always like to do at the end, Mark, is just say how can we help you? What do you have going on.

Of things that we can help?

Yeah.

I've been talking a lot about the reestablishing of growth, the science of that, really taking a much more scientific approach to product, market fit and what I call go to market fit to, to basically answer like when should we scale, where should we scale and how should we scale? And so, you know, feel free to look up that stuff. And also like it's all on the Stage two Capital blog. You know, that's probably where you can most help with your, with your folks is Stage two Capital is the first VC fund run and backed by sales leaders. So our first fund that we raised last two years ago was backed by 97 sales leaders, marketing leaders, customer success leaders from, from most of the unicorns across the U.S. you know, like Atlassian, Dropbox, Zoom, Asana, you know, SurveyMonkey, you name it, we have representation there.

Salesforce 99 again, buddy.

We just missed the cutoff, Richard.

Nice. So yeah, now we're out raising fund too. It's been going well actually, despite Covid. I think we've got like 50 signatures now and we're raising a $50 million fund. I think we're around 10 right now. So we hope to have like 200 or so of those folks and we actually launched the Emerging leaders Syndicate because there were a bunch of folks who are coming up through gone and drift and the next folks who can't be an alpine of VC yet, but they will be and they can contribute to our mission which is to help these companies with Finding the talent and find it for us to find good deal flow, etc. And so we basically put them through an Investing School for 12 weeks and we expose the deals we do. We carve out some for them to participate in at like roughly $10,000 checks. So it's pretty cool. Like, it really gets me up in the morning to be, you know, grooming the next generation of sales leaders, but also helping them bridge to the investor community as well, which I think we need more of. And then if you, you know, for our deals, we usually come in between the C's and the A's. We love, we love deals with a remarkable customer retention. Right. And sounds obvious, but like, I do find that most VCs are focused on triple, triple, double, double, like very top line revenue focused. I'm very focused on customer retention. So if you hit a million or 2 million in revenue and you have north of 85% customer retention, north of 100% revenue retention, very interested. Even if you're not doing triple, triple, double, double.

That's awesome.

You just found your other. Like, we need Kevin Gaither and Mark Roberge to build a company and just let Scott run it. And like.

I love it, I love it. I'm in. I'm in.

This is absolutely his wheelhouse. Mark, man, this has been fat. Like I can't believe we're almost at an hour. And like, this has been fascinating and so appreciative of you giving us some time today, particularly during all the stuff that's going on. So thank you so much. We're really, really appreciative.

Yeah, Thanks a lot.

Yeah, thanks for organizing, guys. Thank you, Scott. Thanks, Richard. Much, much appreciated.

And next time you look, you're gonna have to get down to surfing sales. You've already got the hair, so by.

All means, yes, I'd love to. Where do I get a haircut around here? You know, no one's open, so what can I do?

Let your kids do it. That would be it.

Oh, gosh. Yeah, I did.

I let my 10 year old give my. Actually shaved my beard off and oh my gosh, gave me a buzz cut.

That looks pretty good.

Yeah, he's got a future.

Yeah. Awesome.

All right, Mark, thanks again so much.

All right, guys, take care.