Sales Executive Scott Mullin On Early Stage Sales

So Scott, you are a seasoned go to market leader. You have been the VP of Sales, the first VP of Sales at some of the fastest growing startups. You were the VP of Sales of Fire Hydrant, you were the VP of Sales at Cortex, and now you're the VP of Sales at Stig. What is one piece of advice you would give to a first time VP of Sales?

Yeah, thanks Ethan. It's a great question. I can't speak on behalf of being a VP of Sales at a large enterprise or an RVP in a big company. As you mentioned, my domain of expertise is going in at a company around a series A and helping chart the path up through a series C. And I think it starts even before you take the job. I've done this now three times. I'm so passionate about this problem. I built a business around this called Bond, which is a private network to help solve this problem directly. But it really starts with how do you evaluate not only the opportunity, but your fit within the opportunity. And so the first thing I look for is beyond just product market fit, what is the market potential? Right. And do we have the right team in place to be able to capitalize on that opportunity and win not just for today, but over a sustained period? And that comes from the product. Assessing the competitive landscape, defensibility or durability in the early stages is really about how fast you can move. So evaluating the engineering team and their chops and their ability to keep pace with the market, and then a big part of it is evaluating the founders and specifically the founder fit. When you sign up for a VP of sales job, you're really getting married to these founders. And that's a marriage that's gonna last you ideally for multiple years and through some big ups and downs. And so who are the people that you wanna go into battle with? Right. And you wanna do this with every day. And I look for founders that first of all I would follow in, that are credible, that have learned secrets about the market through real operator experience. They've got that domain expertise, they're not just out there looking for a problem to solve. But then also it's the cultural fit. You know, I have two speeds. I'm hyper competitive at times, a bit obsessive. And the other speed is I like to have a lot of fun and that's how I like to lead teams. And that's a relationship that I've had with all the founders that I've partnered with. I would say it's first making sure you end up in the Right. Opportunity. And then the second and most important thing is, you know, when I took my first VP of sales job, I had one sticky note on my monitor and it just said, keep your growth curve ahead of the companies. And what I mean by that is the company's going to change every 90 days. And you need to be thinking, what are the challenges you're facing today? But what are the challenges that are coming tomorrow or two quarters out? And then how do you surround yourself with mentors, advisors, you know, what are you listening to, what are you reading? And so in my role, what I do is I talk to a lot of smart people now in the community that we built on. I read and consume a ton of information. I'll do that typically while I'm on my bike riding around New York City. And then I use all of that, if it's a problem I haven't solved before, to try and triangulate on what I think is the optimal solution for the situation we're in. But it's all about constantly pushing the boundaries of what you know and what you can go learn to give you an edge.

That's a great answer, man. That's great. Really appreciate it. And we'll, we'll cut these up. We'll make it awesome. We'll get for approval. So I'll move on to the next question. Okay. And by the way, because these are shorts, you might hear the intro that I tee up. Each question is somewhat the same because they're individual shorts. Okay.

Yeah. I trust you. Do your thing. Cool.

Scott, you are a proven sales leader. You have deep expertise in scaling go to market teams at the early stages, particularly technical software companies. You led sales at Fire Hydrant, Cortex. And now Stig, with a front row seat to how AI is changing things like DevOps. Let me start over. All right, that's it, that's. Now I'm doing it.

No, it's all good. It's all good. Which, which question? Before we do the question, this is.

The what's a bull prediction you have about AI in B2B.

SA? Okay, this is my spiciest take. All right, cool.

Okay, so. And I'll, and I'll do that moving forward. I'll say the question.

Okay, cool, thanks. Cause I just have a couple bullets to keep me on track.

Cool. So Scott, you are a proven sales leader. You were the first VP of sales at fast growing startups like Fire Hydrant and Cortex. And now Stig, you helped reshape DevOps infrastructure and product led sales. What is a bold Prediction that you have about AI in B2B SaaS.

I'm going to take a bit of a unique angle on this one because I think a lot of people are answering this question in a number of really great ways. I'm going to talk about this through the lens of what this means for a seller or a sales team. My bold take is that AI companies represent a tremendous W2 opportunity for sellers and employees who join them, but are extremely risky in terms of the liquidity or what that might mean for the value of your stock options as an employee. And, and so if you think about what I mean here, typically you'd have to join a sales team and be a member of that team for three to four years, where in the first year you're planting seeds, the second you're harvesting those and you're really, really the benefits in years three and four. AI compresses all of that. Right. Deal cycles move incredibly fast, so it no longer takes you two years to ramp up a territory. You can ramp up much faster in a lot of the pipelines inbound. And because of that, you can make a lot of really great money. The challenge is that if you look at the world's top VC in the world, double.

That's all right.

That's all right. Cool. All right, let's hit it again.

You're good. And we're going to cut these too. Like we can literally piece them together. Even my guys.

All right, so I did need to stop there. Okay, got it.

Yeah, you don't need to stop, but you can. And my guy's good. And we'll get everything edited and approved, but we'll do it again. It's good practice. Okay, cool. And we got plenty of time. We only have like two more questions after this, so. So, Scott, you're a proven sales leader. You were the first VP of sales at some of the fastest growing startups. You were the VP of Sales at Fire Hydrant Cortex, and now Stig. You have had a front row seat into how companies are reshaping DevOps and infrastructure and now pricing strategy at Stig. What's a bold prediction that you have about how AI is going to reshape B2B SaaS.

I'm going to take a bit of a unique angle here because I think there's a lot of people that have been answering this question a number of great ways within the market. My bold prediction here is that AI companies represent a fantastic earnings opportunity from a W2 perspective for the sales teams that join them. You know, historically it would take you three to four years to ramp up on a territory and really reap the benefit. Now with AI you can do that much faster. I think the risk there is ultimately what does that mean value of your options from a liquidity perspective? And so what I mean by that is if you look at the top VC in the world, historically going back to the SaaS days, they would expect 1 in 20 seed companies to make it 50% of all investments, go to.0, 7% of their companies, return 85% of the profits. And today I think that all gets dropped on its head. Right. We don't yet know what AI means for this market. And so it's extremely difficult not only as a VC but as a seller to go in and pick a winner that you can get in and win at for not just one year, but maybe three, four years. Right. And that's where that earnings and the W2 comes from. But beyond that, when you think about liquidity on your stock options, the market's moving so incredibly fast. Do you think that company is still going to be winning in five, six, seven, eight years such that it can get to a liquidity event to where you actually walk away with some earnings for your hard earned options?

Scott, you have spent your career helping technical SaaS companies move up market. You were the VP of Sales at Fire Hydrant Cortex and now you're the VP of sales at Stig. And many times you've helped lead the sales teams when usage starts with really a single developer and you help scale it into six or seven figure deals. So I'm curious, how do you turn self serve usage into enterprise pipeline?

Yeah, it's a great question and I think, you know, I think it actually begins before that. Right. Because we have so much telemetry these days about what our customers are doing before they even hit our product. Right. You've got the entire user journey or click path of a customer coming to your site. What are they clicking, what pages are they landing on, how much time are they spending there? Right? And then that can give you the signal to then either take that and go outbound or ideally if they do convert into a, you know, a product signup or a demo request, that can then arm your sales team with the ammunition to be able to go and have a value add conversation with whoever that prospect is. But I think from a product usage perspective, particularly working in developer tooling, if you don't have a self serve or a free trial or plgmotion today, I think you're at a huge disadvantage because most of your competitors will. And I think you really have to play that to your advantage, play that to your strengths. So Tomer, the VP of Go to Market at Cursor, I did an AMA with our bond community a couple weeks back and I thought he put it really well. He said, look, you've got to leverage the product, play that to your strengths, lean into the product, being able to build technical champions within an organization and build that affinity so that you can then lean on those technical end users to then go work your way up the org, chart through the different levels and be able to do a top down enterprise sales motion where you can have a, you know, value based business level conversation with the higher ups. But it really starts with leading with product, getting people to love your product and to vouch for you and build that consensus so that your sales team has a wedge into the organization to be able to do the enterprise sales motion that we're all so good at.

That was a great response. Love it. Awesome. All right, I got one more and then we can do any extras if you want to do any extras like for your stake and stuff. Okay, so this question is how do you think AI will impact pricing strategy in SaaS? Okay, so Scott, you are the VP of Sales at STI, which is a dynamic platform that allows software companies to build and optimize their pricing and packaging with speed and flexibility. You have a front row seat to how pricing drives growth because you have been a VP of sales at companies like Cortex and Fire Hydrant and now Stig. How do you think AI is going to impact who pricing strategy?

Yeah, Ethan, I appreciate the disclaimer up front that you, you added because as the VP of sales at Stig, where we sell monetization infrastructure for the new AI native era era, I'm solving this problem day in and day out. And I would say, look, the AI landscape is changing pricing and packaging faster than it's ever changed before. And the companies that are winning in this new era have adopted that as a growth lever as compared to a potential threat to the business model. And you know, I think it's obvious that the way that these new AI products are bill completely breaks traditional pricing and packaging billing technologies. But I want to provide a real world example that I think will provide some, you know, context into how we see this, you know, from the front lines at Stig. So let's take for example, a publicly traded software company doing a billion dollars in annual run rate. Maybe they have a few product offerings, maybe they've done some they have both a SLG led motion with a big enterprise sales team and then they have a PLG offering. And the way that they price and package today is either on fixed fee or per seat or per widget. So now what happens is more and more companies are getting born in the AI era. A lot of startups are coming out, they start to threaten the business model where they chew out a new use case and take away some users or some mind share. So the CEO board and the revenue leaders get together and they say, look, we're going to launch new AI offering, but to be competitive with this AI offering and it has to be priced on a per usage basis because predominantly AI products today are being adopted in a self serve model where single user comes in and the pricing needs to be able to be consumption based and be tied to the value that they're getting. So how many queries are they using as an example? And so in order to get this product out to market, inevitably what this call to Tiger team does is they go to the product and engineering team and they say, hey, we're going to roll out a new AI offering. These are our goals for this. What do you think? The product and engineering team says okay, well of course this needs to be built on top of AI native infrastructure, right? And LLMs, GPT, Claude, which are all expensive but with variable cost and usage based considerations where every single token or API call means your margin could change on any single product offering at any given point. And that causes a ton of complexity because now it's no longer just a finance exercise of how we want to price this. Now you need the real considerations of how do you actually deliver a monetization infrastructure that can allow you to meet those new demands. So inevitably the product and engineering team goes to whatever systems they have in house today. And typically what we see is combination of homegrown legacy infrastructure, Zora, Revenera, companies that were maybe built for the old world of 20 plus years ago. And the reality is that these new credit based, usage based AI offerings just simply break these 20 year old technologies. And so some companies we see really struggle with this and it requires them to scramble. And obviously that behooves our business. And some companies have adopted this and they're using a platform like Stig and they can get to market quickly and iterate fast and get new solutions to market. But I'll tell you that this is exactly what's front of mind for the executives of not just small companies, but big companies and everything in between on many of our sales cycles. We're seeing CRO, cto, cfo, active in the deal to buy an engineering LED product within the first two or three calls. So there's never been a better time to work at Sting.