Building a Distributed Sales Org to scale from $5-$100M+ in ARR with Autodesk West Area Leader

Hello everyone and welcome back to SAS/TER Annual. We are so excited for our next speaker. We have Kevin Halter from Autodesk. Kevin, over to you. Lauren, thank you so much for the introduction. I'm thrilled to be here and to be a part of SaaStr. It's my favorite event and it's great to do it virtually. So I was asked to speak today because prior to Autodesk, I was part of the leadership team at PlanGrid where we built a distributed sales org and grew the revenue from $5 to $100 million ARR in under 4 years. So I'm going to share a little bit about, you know, the best practices there. So, yeah, that's, you know, PlanGrid was acquired by Autodesk, you know, a little over 3, a little after about 3.5 years later. And we were, you know, when I joined, it was around $4 million ARR. My colleagues, Thomas Ricks, John Donahue, and Bill Smith, we helped build out the global sales org, taking it, you know, in basically, you know, 3 to 4 years to $100 million plus ARR. There was a $900 million acquisition by Autodesk. And we grew it from 20 to 150-plus person sales team. And we had a distributed sales org in all top 25 US metros, as well as in global metros such as Sydney, Hong Kong, London, and grew it from North America to a global expansion in 3 years. So we had a successful outcome for about $900 million by Autodesk about a year and a half ago. What am I doing now? Now at Autodesk, we're actually building a startup business, a new business unit within a publicly traded company. So if you ever read the book Zone to Win, it talks about really building an independent operating unit within a publicly traded company till it's a significant revenue source. So we are focused on building a billion-dollar ARR, recurring revenue unit within Autodesk, and it's Autodesk Construction Solutions. So we're focused on the construction market. So, you know, what— why distributed and remote? Why did we, you know, do that at PlanGrid? You know, first and foremost, it was closer to clients, whether it's time zone, it was a regional business, whether it's events and associations, the ability if needed to drive to a client, a tighter R&D feedback loop, but it really brought us closer to clients. So for a customer-facing org, it had a lot of benefits. What are some other benefits, whether you're client-facing or not? Speed of hiring. It allowed us to hire much, much faster when you're not just recruiting and trying to retain talent in the Bay Area. You're able to hire more experienced talent that doesn't want to commute to an office. You know, they may have kids at home. You were able to get much more experienced talent. It helped us retain talent. You know, whether you have kids or not, you may want to live closer to family. You know, you grew up in Houston, Texas, or you grew up in Denver, Colorado. It allowed us to hire retain top talent. Also increase our diversity of talent. You know, when you're only hiring in one ecosystem, it does limit your diversity of backgrounds. When we're able to open up to many more metros where we can hire top talent to our team. I think the final point is there's no echo chamber. You know, sometimes when you're building software and selling software, it can be really— you're in this Bay Area bubble, Silicon Valley bubble. This opens it up, you know, to more regions and parts of the country and the world that you really want to serve if you want to build a big business. You know, one of our strategies was clustering together. Ideally, you're not putting one person in Phoenix, Arizona. You know, you're putting a couple people. They could be working from their home office, but it's nice to build a cluster so that, hey, if someone wants to grab a beer or grab a coffee or grab lunch, you have at least a little team in that major metro and especially in that same time zone. So we cluster together a lot of the client-facing roles. Wasn't just sales. It was business development. It was technical services. It was customer success. It was renewals. It was consulting. It was field marketing. So all these customer-facing roles we cluster together in major metros. R&D started to follow suit. They start to hire top talent in those metros where we had people and that there was talented engineers. So you start to see R&D adopt a distributed remote hiring model as well. We did local meetups, and that was a great way to develop, you know, our teams, our culture, and to have that cross-functional collaboration and advantage to visit local client sites where it was, where it made sense for the business. For us in construction, it could have been a project site, a job site. It could be in an office, could be a headquarters. It could be an industry event, an association event. It could be our own sponsored event. The ability to visit clients when it made business sense and not having to hop on a plane and fly multiple time zones, it's a much more cost-effective way and faster way to be where your clients are. Okay. It's also easier to connect with your clients. If you're in the same market, you know what's happening, what sports are playing, you're in the same time zone, you know what the weather is. It's much easier to connect when you're living in that market with your clients, or at least that section of the country. A big thing for us was hiring profile, especially when you're hiring remote distributed teams. Our number one thing was fire in the belly, hiring for grit. Second was top performance. We want to see a history of success over multiple years. We don't wanna see job hoppers. You know, if you only been in a company 2 years, 2 years, 2 years, Did you actually perform? Did you actually grind? Did you actually ever have success in that role? You know, did you see career progression at that role, promotions, you know, sales clubs and so forth? Do you have a history of success? What's selling motion? We were a land and expand SaaS, bottoms-up sales motion. Are you used to landing net new accounts and expanding? Are you experienced that motion? Obviously segment. Are you selling enterprise clients, mid-market, SMB? Our sale was a mid-market, is a mid-market business, so we hired for mid-market AEs. Ultimately, I want to know why here. Why do you want to work here? What drove you? What was that internal drive and passion? Did you have a family member that worked in the industry? You know, why did you want to work at PlanGrid? So that passion, that grit, that top performance over multiple years, And that perseverance, those are things that we are looking for in addition to what was your selling background, your sales motion, your segment. Have you ever gone to clients on site? Have you ever worked in an inside motion and so forth? I asked this question when we talk about high profile. What drives you? I was a former Ironman triathlete. I had endurance, perseverance, grit. But what have you overcome in your life? What gets you up in the morning? Incredible stories from people about why they want to work at your company, why they want to be successful, why are they driven to succeed. So in my experience in hiring, we saw— we hired a lot of immigrants, we hired a lot of people with military experience, we hired a lot of people with non-tier 1 college or, you know, software company experience. You know, maybe they overcome some personal struggles. Or something athletic. But it was amazing to me how many people that weren't hired from the same couple schools or the same couple companies that were our top performers because they were driven to succeed. So I, I really encourage everyone, expand your hiring profile. Don't keep it so narrow-minded. There's so much talent out there. If you expand what metros you want to recruit from, what schools you want to recruit from, what former companies you want to recruit from, what backgrounds You know, please be open-minded. Everyone has a story. Listen to that. Why do you want to work here? What have you overcome in life? What drives you? Why are you driven to be successful in life? Build a cadence. You're managing a remote distributed team. You have to have a regular cadence. There's no water cooler talk. There's no, oh, hey, I bump into someone in the morning over coffee or go to a happy hour. You have to build a consistent meeting cadence. Cadence, not just on your team, but cross-functionally to keep that ship running. I think cadence is one of the most important parts of building a successful high-growth SaaS organization. So weekly cadence around forecasts, tactical calls, special topics, cross-functional calls, sales and marketing, sales and customer success, sales and R&D, BDR, renewals. Ultimately, SaaS is a renewals business. Don't forget to have virtual all-hand calls, celebrate success, Recognize top performers, recognize top metrics that people are hitting that ultimately leads to success. Share how the company is doing. How are we doing towards our target, our revenue goals, new logo goals, customer retention goals? Okay. Make the time for peer one-on-ones. Okay, great. You can't just go out, go out with marketing to have a quick beer. Great. Schedule that one-on-one, that one-on-one personal time virtually to connect. How are they doing? Not just professionally, but personally. Build that time in to connect one-on-one, not just with your directs, not just with step-down calls, but with your peers cross-functionally on your sales leadership team, as well as in other departments like marketing. Okay, build those relationships. Talk about building a cadence. It's really important to kickstart the year with obviously sales kickoff, quarterly QBRs, mid-year meetings, And don't be afraid and bring in sales clubs, spend the money, celebrate success, take people on a trip they will never forget, and recognize those top performers. I encourage people to, you know, after COVID, to periodically bring people in person to connect, you know, in person. So we did our sales kickoffs, our QBRs, you know, our sales clubs, obviously in person. Bringing people together to connect in person is invaluable, and that will never go away. So as much as I was building a fully distributed remote team, we would bring people together on a regular basis, minimum quarterly. Overcommunicate. People assume the worst. Have a consistent and regular cadence of communication along with meetings. Overcommunicate. We leverage tools like Slack, you know, and Zoom, but also pick up the phone and call people. You know, but have those meetings to be direct and honest and transparent. Share, overshare. You want to communicate what's going on, good or bad. What do we need to get better on? Where do we need to improve? Where are we excelling and need to double down? And always leave time for Q&A. Open it up, listen, be heard. Make sure your people, your teams are being heard, especially the people on the ground, the individual contributors. You need to have a North Star goal. You need to have that rally cry. What are you shooting for? Are you shooting to get to $100 million? You know, are you shooting to retain all your renewals? What is the big rally cry this year? And what are the couple strategic initiatives around that? You have to focus people around a big goal to unite your teams and get people fired up to get up in the morning and be motivated to win. Be bold. Our teams were extremely bold to ask for the business for our clients. If you want to build a high-growth company, you have to hire people that are motivated and driven to succeed, but have the courage to be bold. Be bold externally with clients, be bold internally with stakeholders to say, hey, why aren't we doing this? You know, in a respectful way, but be bold. Made us very successful at PlanGrid. Build a bench. If you're building a high growth SaaS company, who's going to be the manager next year? What does your bench look like? Who's going to be your next AE to promote? So we invested heavily in our BDR organization and we promoted from within. We drove a culture of promotion from within. Then our district managers promoted from our top AEs. Did we occasionally bring in external you know, hires to diversify our bench? 100%. We brought in external AEs, we brought in external managers, but we promoted over half our people from within. Hire and develop talent. It's much easier to bring them into the org, develop them, and promote from within than constantly hiring externally. Ultimately, as the business grows and expands, the role may grow past them. So as new roles popped up, we moved AEs to the right roles where they could be successful. So maybe it was a CSM, maybe it was a renewals role. So as the company grows very fast, sometimes you have to move people in new roles so they can be successful, have a big impact on the business, and ultimately be happy. So some of the key takeaways: hire for grit, that perseverance, that drive, that drive to succeed and win. Build a cadence. Communicate with your people on a consistent basis. Have a rally cry, a big goal that you're all going after. Rally the troops. Be bold. You're not going to build a high-growth business without being bold and asking for the business. And when you're building a business, you need to build a bench. It's too time-consuming to constantly be hiring externally. You've got to build some talent internally so you can promote from within. And with that, One of my recommendations is always leaving time, enough time for Q&A so you can listen. Definitely want to open it up to Q&A. You know, Lauren, I don't know if any questions are coming in. Okay. In our communication slide, what do you feel is the best tool that you've used to store everything in those communications in? I am a big champion of Slack. Slack is the number one asynchronous tool to get communication out there. Works great on mobile, works great on desktop. I live on Slack. That is a great opportunity to have asynchronous communication. With regards to— we also leverage, you know, obviously Zoom recordings. Any webinar that we did for sales enablement, we'll record it, send it out same day. So if people are on other calls, they could watch that recording that day, that next morning. That was really helpful to always be recording the webinars or team meetings. I always record my team meetings to send them out, especially with people in different time zones. You know, we at, at PlanGrid, we leverage, you know, Google Docs to store those. We also— I'm a big fan of having an internal site for all your people, one place to go. You know, they have one place to go to get all relevant information. So at Autodesk as well as PlanGrid, we had one site for all salespeople to look at. Hey, maybe they're on vacation. Any meetings they missed, those are the webinars, those are the recordings, the decks. You know, they had all the content in one place. So we typically had built an internal site to store all information that was searchable in folders. People could access it easy, easily. For enablement, we've also used SalesHood. They do a really good job recording, but ultimately you need an internal website. Okay, now it looks like we got some— can't see the questions. So Lauren, I'm not seeing the Q&A questions pop up. Let me just maybe stop the share. Here we go. Stop the share. Okay, building a construction contractor, except that's an industry-specific question. Great question. How do you measure grit when interviewing new hires? That is all about like, what have you overcome in life? So, that's what I look for. You know, why do you want to work here? What drives you in the morning? What gets you up? When you're talking about someone working from home, what gets them up in the morning? What gets them out of bed, on the— onto the— into their— onto their desk, on their chair, and start, you know, outreaching to customers, scheduling meetings, picking up the phone and dialing? What drives them? How much of a role do you have to give to non-performers? Do you allow them a role change? You know, if you're a non-performer, I'm usually coaching you out. You know, um, when I have someone that's performing at a level, uh, but the role is changing, and so they may have performed the past 2 years well, but now they're struggling. So they have a history of success in that, in that role, but now the role has changed. That's when I look to move them to another role where they can be successful. But if they enter your organization and they are unsuccessful in that role, no other department wants to hire someone that is unsuccessful. They'll happily take someone that was successful in that role, but now they're more passionate about something else or the role's changing or quickly modifying and putting them in another role. A great example, my team, we had some top AEs, but the role had really changed. We started doing SMB deals and became larger mid-market deals. And some people didn't want to carry the larger quotas. And we started a technical services organization. And a lot of people had— came from industry. Some had industry experience and they raised their hand. It was perfect. Those individuals have grown their career tremendously, not just at PlanGrid, but now at Autodesk. So, but they were top performers. I believe top performers find a way to win and succeed in any role that they're in. They may just not love it. They may start to struggle. And that's when you want to put them into a different role to be successful. What sales tool would you recommend? We use, we use Saleshood. We leverage Saleshood. That's a really good virtual tool. Great for the recordings, great for tracking, reporting, as well as walking people through. We did do a lot of due diligence on that tool. I personally love hiring a great sales enablement leader. Please invest in that. That can build that cadence, that can organize the right people to be on the call. And having the Zoom recordings and sending those webinars out, those live Zoom calls, so you can have live Q&A, but also send out the recordings are extremely valuable. So what kind of things did the team do for fun, given the team was 100% remote? So, you know, we've done— right now everyone's remote. So even at Autodesk, yeah, obviously we do, you know, virtually happy hours, virtual lunch, Uber Eats, and so forth. But I would encourage everyone, it's also really nice just to do some calls, you know, and just not talk about work. And then just, how are you doing? How are you doing personally? Especially now with COVID-19, we talk about client care calls, you know, how's their business doing? How are they doing personally? The same thing should be true of your troops. How are you doing? It's amazing what people are battling outside of work these days. And that can be a really nice— actually, it's not a fun team building event, but when people feel heard and listened to, man, it is super energizing. And when you talk about having fun, talking about stuff that's not obviously not work-related, maybe it's their kids, maybe it's their passions, maybe you're going for a walk, you know, and so forth. So just keep the topics off of work, but really Virtually, it's happy hours, it's sharing food, Uber Eats. I think food and drink bring people together, but we've seen some interesting things virtually around, bring your pet to work, bring your pet to Zoom or bring your kid to Zoom, which has been fun and so forth. Yeah, what do you see the biggest difference between 2 to 10 million, 10 to 30? Yeah, the, the biggest thing that we had, we had like one of our north star goals when I first joined was get to $40 million. Once you get to $40 million ARR, your chances of success go up dramatically. You're either gonna, you know, pretty much get bought by someone bigger or go public. Um, when you're in that $2 to $10, you can still go under. So it was a real north star goal to get to $40. Then obviously once we got to $40, it was let's get to $100 million, you know, with which we did. But yes, when you start going up, you start going upmarket, Tariq, that's basically what it is. So that's where you start saying, hey, maybe someone at $2 to $5 million could be very successful as like an SMB profile rep. Now you start, the deals start getting bigger, bigger ACV, bigger TCVs. You need some midmarket reps, you need some more experienced reps and so forth. Now hopefully some of your SMB reps can grow into a midmarket rep, can grow grow into doing more enterprise deals. And that's the hope to develop that talent during that timeframe. But you also probably gotta add some external talent along the way to make up for those holes. I feel like with remote work and my team is working more. That is 100% true. Everyone is working more. When people say that you're working remote, oh, you're slacking off, you're out goofing off. That is not true. When you're working from home and there is no separation and you're not driving to the office or taking a bus or train to the office and having a little separation. You wake up, you're at your home office. You could be checking email, checking Slack, you know, you're getting a phone call after hours. It's very hard. You got to build in that balance. You got to build in time with your family, dinner with your family, time with your kids, time to work out, heck, time for just going for a walk and have some mental health. So treat your calendar with a lot of respect and build in that time. Schedule that time just like you schedule time to prospect, just like you schedule time for one-on-ones. Please schedule that time. 100%. When you work remote, work from home, people tend to work more. That's why companies are loving it. They're like, wow, productivity is up, people are accomplishing more. But I would argue my employees love it because they have flexibility to pick up their kids from the school, you know, attend a soccer game or so forth, or just not deal with an hour and a half commute each way to and from the office. It's not just the Bay Area. There's heavy traffic in Austin. There's heavy traffic in most major cities these days. How did you onboard your new hires? With onboarding, we did bring them in person. So I am a big believer in that. Just so you know, when you build remote distributed teams, it doesn't mean it's 100% remote like this. You bring people periodically for in-person team building events. So that's how you have fun. You bring them together, you talk about business, but then you make time for team building events and taking people out to dinner to connect personally. Especially true, we treated onboarding extremely seriously as a 2-week onboarding. And that first week you're out to dinner with executives, we treated it very, very seriously to really get people fired up for being there. Okay. Doing it virtually, I would still say if you're doing it virtually, try to have the onboarding, getting executives, getting leaders involved, the company to tell them a little bit about their business area and answer any questions. It's great when you join a new company to meet people higher up in the organization. What do you recommend you have for a small SaaS company to build a remote sales onboarding process? Hey, we were a small SaaS company, you know, at one point in time, then we grew. We were less than 20 people, less than 20, you know, salespeople. You got to have someone own the onboarding process. You got to delegate to someone to own it. In the beginning, it could be, you know, you know, ideally you get at least one headcount for that, but usually it starts with a senior rep. Or one manager leads that process. Okay, I'm just gonna jump back in here. We are just over time. Let's take one more question and we'll wrap it up. Uh, okay, we're talking about celebrating success. Do you have any thoughts how to not actually turn that into a demotivating movement? So, Phil, what I like to celebrate is not just net new ARR, you know, success or new logos, but what metrics are successful. So are they, you know, landing new accounts? Are they building a lot of pipeline? So they may not be on the top of the charts now, but they're doing all the right things. So what are those critical metrics that you could celebrate and reward that performance? Okay. For people that are struggling with metrics and with the results, they're just struggling. And honestly, by recognizing top performers, If you are a future top performer, that should motivate you to improve on your metrics and improve on your results. I wish we had more time. There's, there's a ton of great, you know, questions here. But I think overall, now that everyone's fully remote and there's no in-person team building event, there's no in-person QBRs or sales kickoffs or, or, you know, sales club events. You know, it's one of these questions are about cadence communication. Increase the cadence, you know, make sure you have a cadence, increase the communication, have your door open, have open office hours, have a regular meeting cadence where you are sharing how the team's doing, how the results are doing, how the company's performing, good or bad, where they need to focus, what are the critical metrics, what are the critical strategic objectives. Keep people focused because there's enough distraction, not just at work, but outside of work in the world. There's a new distraction every day. How can you keep people focused on what they need to focus their time and energy on to be successful? Keep that regular cadence, overcommunicate, and also be honest, open up. It's okay to share as a leader where the business is struggling, where you're struggling personally, where you're maybe struggling with COVID-19. You may have childcare issues, you may have— it's not a great home with you and your wife working from home. You may have some challenges there, but Be a person, be a human. Everyone has different challenges at work, outside of work. We could all get better as sales professionals, as human beings. I think it's really important these days to be a real human person, open yourself up, be transparent, be direct, be honest with your people during one-on-ones and team meetings. On where they're doing well and where they need to— can step on to accelerate that, but also where things need to get better and where we all need to improve. All right, thank you so much, Kevin. Thank you everyone for your time.