How to Build a High Retention Sales Culture | Unity Technologies VP, Global Sales Laura Palmer

Build a High-Retention Sales Culture. We have a few housekeeping items that I want to go over quickly, and I'm sure you've probably already heard them if this is not your first session, but this is an interactive session and we would love for you guys to have your cameras on but stay muted for the time being. And just so you guys know, it is being livestreamed, and we also definitely want you guys to ask questions. This is time to get things answered, so feel free to raise your hand and we'll call on you when the time comes and/or put it in the chat and we can moderate those as the time is flowing. So without further ado, I will pass it over to Laura and thank you for being here, Laura.

Thank you for having me. Hi everybody. And I can't, I have no idea how many people are out here. I guess I'm seeing just the people who have their screens on. So thanks to anyone turning your screen on and I see a couple of people that I know. So thank you. My name is Laura Palmer. I am the VP of sales here at Unity Technologies. And if you don't know who Unity is, if you have a mobile phone with a game on it, chances are you are using Unity. We make a development platform that powers the world's creators. So people come to our platform to develop anything from a video game, think like Pokémon GO, Call of Duty Mobile, Subway Surfers, to movies like The Lion King. For all you car people out there, Volvo is using Unity to design their new cars in our platform, and BMW is leveraging Unity to train their autonomous vehicles. If you've done a little bit of shopping over this pandemic and wanted to see what that IKEA couch might look like in your living room before you go and buy it, you've used Unity. A lot of really interesting things that we're doing here, but that's not specifically what I'm here today to talk about. What I actually wanted to talk to you about today is something that I'm really, really passionate about, and that's culture. In order to talk about that, I want to back up just a little bit and talk to you about my time here before this, if I can get my slide deck going, at my time at Google. Picture of me and my son a number of years ago at the Take Your Child to Work Day. And for those of you who have never heard about this, It is the best take your child to work day in the world, bar none. So that was my son, Sam, very, very happy to be there. And the only way you can one-up working for Google is you go to work for a company that helps video game companies make games. So I still get to be cool mom working at Unity. But in all seriousness, backing up, like, what I really learned at Google was really about culture. And people flocked to the organization to be part of this culture. And I have a bit of a funny story where I was in the Google gym because that's what you do when you're at Google. I was in the Google gym working out before work and I got a call from my boss and he was pretty serious and he said, Laura, I need to, I need to talk to you. We have a problem. And I said, okay, hung up the phone and my stomach dropped. And I'm sure you guys have all had this experience where someone calls you out on something and you immediately start going through all the things you could have done. To really make that person upset. So I go into Dave's office and he pulls up our intranet. And at the time, they had asked all the Google employees to use 3 words to describe what their mission was, what their job was, just 3 words. And he pulled mine up and he turned it around to me and he said, yeah, we have a problem. Well, my 3 words were make Microsoft sweat. So at the time we were competing with Google Apps head on with all that Microsoft had to offer. And I said, yeah, that's my mission, you know? And he goes, yeah, HR found out about it and they just think it's a little too aggressive. So we both had a good giggle, but it was that first moment when I realized that the cultures that I had come from, which had been really more aggressive selling cultures, that wasn't going to work at Google. And I never forgot about that. The other piece I learned about culture at Google was I used to give a talk in the Google Innovation Center, in our Google Executive Briefing Center, and the talk was the 10 notions of innovation. So these were the 10 tenets that we decided kept Google being a really innovative company. And it was one of the most popular talks at Google. At the time. And what I came to realize, because we'd bring our customers in, customers didn't want to work with us so much because of the technology itself. They wanted to work with us to be a little bit more like Google. They wanted to grab on to, to pieces of our culture and figure out how to implement that at their own companies. And so through all this, I learned the importance of culture and what it could do for an organization. So fast forward, and I land at Unity as the Vice President of Sales. And I was brought in to really take the sales organization to the next level. I run our sales development teams, our inside sales teams, our field sales teams, sales engineering teams, training teams. We have a brand new team called Emerging Products. The leader of that team is on the call today. So I have a big— I have a global team. And, um, really proud of the work all of these guys do. But I, when I came in at the time and you never really know what you're walking into, right, until you get in the door. So I came in and I realized a couple of different things. The first thing was the product was so darn good that people just came and bought it. And by that, I mean, no disrespect to the teams that were there at the beginning. It's a beautiful problem to have as an organization when companies just flock to your product because it's that good. I also knew though what got us here wouldn't get us there. Um, the second thing I noticed was that the sales team that I inherited, with a couple of exceptions, and a couple of those people are on, on today, hadn't really been your traditional selling team. Um, they hadn't been trained in the way many of us have been trained. They didn't know sales methodology. Most of them hadn't come from a Salesforce or an SAP or another true sales company, right? One person, when I joined, did come in and we had our first one-on-one and he made it very clear not to call him a salesperson. He didn't like the word sales and developers really didn't want to talk to salespeople. So I just had that kind of like deep breath moment where I was like, okay, what am I going to do? What am I going to do? But I had a couple of things working in my favor. The first one was I had very clear support from our CEO and CRO. And they had, you know, let me know you have full authority to go in and make the changes you want to make change and we will back you. So I had a lot of support there. The other thing is I started working with an executive coach at the time. His name is Dennis Adsit. He's amazing. And we sat down for the first time and explained the task at hand that I had. And, uh, and he stopped me and he's like, Laura, you're not just building a sales team. You've got to go build a sales culture. And it was at that moment that the light bulb really went off for me. Not just build a sales team, building a sales culture. So if there's one thing that you all walk away from, and this is whether you're in sales or you're running a marketing team, or you're the CEO of your company, My advice is take a step back and really focus on the culture you're building and the rest will follow. So how do you go and build a culture? I have no idea. No, I'm just kidding. I totally do. I know. That's why I'm here, I think. So 5 steps. I'm going to go through them quickly and I'd love to save some time at the end and take questions that people out there might have. The first step, you've got to define it. And it sounds really boring, but I will tell you it's really hard. You've got to think about what you wanted to build. And I go back to the time at Google, right, knowing that using the words "make Microsoft sweat" was not going to work. That wasn't the culture that they were building there. So I feel so grateful to have had the opportunity to get to put this in action, right, to get to think about it. And I did not want to do it by myself, of course. So I pulled a bunch of remarkably smart leaders into the room that work on my team, and we talked about it, and we got together in a room in San Francisco on a whiteboard, and we started talking about the kind of culture that we wanted to build. As we went through this process, we knew one thing: it has to fit into the core values of the organization you're working for. So at Unity, that's users first, best ideas win, in it together, and going bold. I am sure at all your organizations you're seeing something similar, right? But it's got to fit in with the Unity values. Again, going back to the Google example, that wasn't going to fly with the Google— with the Google values. So we knew that everything we were going to build, it had to fit in here. These are some of the words that we came up with, right? At the time, The concept of a sense of urgency was something that felt really new to a lot of people inside of the organization. And you have to define what you mean by sense of urgency, right? You have to define what you mean by all of these, all of these pieces. Proactive was a big deal. When I first came in the organization, it was interesting, our sales engineering team, instead of focusing a lot on presales work, they actually were more engaged in post-sales work. So we had to make a move in effort to design, you know, to build out this culture, to move them more into a proactive way of thinking and to focus on pre-sales rather than post-sales, right? Going back to that sense of urgency, we had to train people that the sense of urgency wasn't just with your customers, but it was also going to be internally in the way that we interacted with our peers. Customer-focused, which I'm sure you're all a fan of, right? Really important, really went back to the Unity values. 10x thinking. The company had been around, I guess when I walked in the door, about 12 years, and we're going to have our 15th birthday this year. But even just after 12 years, there was a lot of that thought process that, you know, this is the way we do things, this is the way it's always been. And so we wanted to go in and challenge people to think a little bit differently. We wanted to be data-driven, and that meant plugging in a lot of backend systems that we'll talk about in a little bit. We wanted to be team players, and we wanted to be collaborative. I had worked in a lot of organizations that were not collaborative, right? Everybody was competing with everyone. I want some competition, but we wanted more than anything to be collaborative. The words you don't see up here that I would add coming into 2020 that, that really stands out is this concept of empathy. And I think one of the leaders on my team, Dan Dackham, he talked a lot about 2020 was the year of figuring out how to balance accountability with empathy. And so we talk a lot about that. So that's a new one I'd add to this slide. Based on COVID and everything else that we've been through. How do you hold your teams accountable while still feeling like you, you know, you have empathy and are thinking about what's going on in the world? Diversity was another big one for this team. So these were the words that we came up with. And then we literally created a definition. And at one of our global team meetings, we put this definition up there and we announced to everybody, This is what we want to build here. Does anybody have any input? Do you have any— anything you see here that you don't feel is right or could contradict our company values? And we didn't get any pushback, and this is what we've set out to deliver. So step 1, define it. We even went one step further. And if you're in a role where you're building newer teams, especially if you have younger talent, I think this is really, really critical. So we called it the 60/40 kind of plan. 60% of how we would look at people's performance in these sales roles would be, would be based on revenue, right? Hitting quotas. But the other 40% was going to be based on, on everything else. And we literally defined what that 40% looked like. I've pulled out 3 key bullets, but this sheet is actually, it's a spreadsheet of the kinds of behaviors that we're looking for inside the team that drive the culture, right? Consistency, thought leadership, coming to the table with, with ideas, coming to the table with solutions and not just problems. Presence in everything that you do, whether that's an email communication with a customer or an email communication internally or presentation that you're giving in front of your peers. So we went through and we very, very clearly defined it. So step 1, define it. It sounds boring. It's not. It's hard work. Pull in your team to help you do that. Step 2 was I knew I couldn't do this in a bubble. So it couldn't be just the sales team. I really needed to reach across the aisles, and I needed to bring others in. My story here for you is last year I presented actually to the IT team. Our CIO asked us to come in and spend a little bit of time with, with his team. And so I was thinking about what I wanted to say, and I decided to go in, and similar to this, we were in a Zoom meeting, and I said to the IT team, I want everybody to go into the chat and I want you to tell me the word or set of words that you think of when I say salesperson. And it was just as you might imagine. I heard used car salesman, all you care about is money, liars, money, money, money, right? All the things you would expect to hear. So we had a good laugh about it, and I explained what we were trying to build in sales and what we've been busy building. And I give this analogy all the time. I've also given it to our development team as I try to gain buy-in from them on what we're building. And I say, you know, if I had to describe to you what I think a good salesperson is, I'd actually use the analogy of a doctor. And I think everybody starts scratching their head like, where is she going with this? I said, think about it, right? The doctor walks into the room and if you look at the patient and don't say a darn word and give them a pill, you could kill them. Instead, a good doctor walks in and they ask a bunch of really good questions and they begin to assess what is wrong and then hopefully they have a drug that they can give to make the patient better. And if they don't have a drug, it's probably better to tell the patient to go see a specialist and recommend somebody so that the patient will trust them. And that's what I really think about sales. So I, I told the story and they all kind of sat back and it's like, oh yeah, I get where you're going. And I said, that's, that's the team that we're building at Unity, right? We're going to go out, we're going to take care of our customers and be customer first. That's a very specific way that I went and, and got buy-in from an organization. I did the same thing with the development teams, and I continue to do this every step of the way. So you've got to gain buy-in from your peers because you really are stronger together, and what you can do will be even better. The third thing, another area that I'm very passionate about, is you've got to then, once you've defined the culture you want to build, once you've got buy-in from others in the company, you've got to go hire the right people and promote the right people who reflect the culture that you're building. And it's not easy to do. Hiring is one of the trickiest things, again, regardless of where you are in your organization, what part of it—marketing, sales, ops, CEO. Hiring the right people is critical. I learned a lot about this at Google, and I like to think I've brought the best pieces from there and brought it to Unity, and we've added definitely some things of our own. We take this really seriously. Four of the things that I try to do here, again, in order to ensure we're bringing in the people that will help us build this higher retention culture, these four things. The first of all is we partner really closely with recruiting. And when I say partner, I mean it. We've got weekly one-on-ones with recruiting. All of the leaders on my team understand that it is— recruiting is not a part-time job, it's a full-time job. And the more your recruiters know you, the more they understand you and what you're trying to do, the better they can help you. And if you're lucky enough to have a recruiting team to work with, I encourage you to do that. We have the recruiting team come to our sales kickoff. I have the recruiting team attend our QBRs. I want them to understand what we're doing and the people that we're working with. If I've got a— got an open leadership position right now and I bring the recruiting team in to attend the team meeting, so they'll get an idea of what the team's like, because I feel like that gives— that puts them in a— in a more powerful position, more knowledgeable position to bring in the right talent. We never hire alone. We have a minimum of 4-person panels. Oftentimes it's even bigger than that. When I also first went into a room, I went to a debrief that one of my leaders, Rafael Ruland, had done. He had been interviewing a number of people and I went into the debrief. I had interviewed the individual and I remember sitting there and it was a lot of the individual contributors on his team and somebody said, do you think they'd fit in with our family here? And I kind of stopped for a minute and I thought, oh, wow. Yeah, yeah, that is what this feels like, right? So that's, that's really how we think about it. When you take that much time to hire, and when you're that cautious, you will build a team that stays with you. That's how you retain really good talent. You're very careful when you bring them in in the first place. And then of course, you enable them and you invest in them. But I was really impressed with the job that he did. So 4-person panels, don't go it alone. If somebody has an issue with one of the people, You've got to make a decision on whether that's enough to sway it or not. That's best done through a discussion with the team. So bring everybody back together who's been on that panel and talk about it. That will help you ensure cultural fit. Always resist good enough. This is one of the ones I brought from Google. We've all made mistakes in hiring. We've all made cultural mistakes in hiring, right? Hired the person just because they're really good at closing business. But culturally they clash with everyone else in it, it's really disruptive and you'll pay for it in the long run. The other thing that I think is really important if you're in a smaller organization— I know many people are coming from startups that are out here today listening— you've got to take the time to think about the kinds of people that you bring in and how they deal with failure. Because in these crazy worlds that we all live in, that's a part of it. And one of the things we wanted to build into our culture is that failure is okay. It's okay. But you've got to respond a certain way to failure. So what I like about somebody who's come in and can, in an interview, clearly articulate a— the time that they failed and what they did and how they learned from it. That, that makes me feel really good about that hire, right? It shows perseverance, shows who they are. If they've got a big ego that might clash with the culture you're trying to build, it will typically come out when you ask a question about failure. So I'd encourage you to, to focus on that as well. Step 4. Now you've built, you've, you've gone out, you've decided what you're going to build, you've gained buy-in, you've You're hiring the right people. You've brought them in. Now what do you do? Right? How did Google get to the size that it is and keep that, keep that culture? At Unity, we're about 4,000 people today. I think our culture is as strong as it was when I started 3 years ago, if not stronger. Right? You have to reinforce the culture. And you do that through all the communications that you've got, but you also can use— this is when you kind of pull in process and technology to help you drive the behaviors that you want to see. So one of the things that comes to mind here for me, right, it's accountability. One of the words that we had up on the slides, how do you hold people accountable? It might be something as, as just basic as like, when you show up to a forecast meeting, you've got to have your stuff filled out, right? You say you're going to, you're going to deliver this much business. You've got to deliver this much business. And if not, let's come talk about why. You want to set up compensation plans. That drive that culture, right? So for us and our compensation plans, net new business, of course, is utterly important to us. But so is renewal, right? So we've set up the compensation model that clearly articulates the importance we see in both of these things. And this is when those operations people, they need to be your best friends. I spend a lot of time with our operations team Ensuring that we've got visibility across the organization, which helps drive the accountability. And when there's transparency, when there's data, people are willing to collaborate, which was also— again, it's a really important part of our culture. And finally, step 5, iterate. So this is my favorite picture from before COVID I took my family to Europe. And this was our last stop. We had gone to like a ton of different places. This was our last stop on our 2-week tour. And this is my son Sam again out in front of him. That is the first time he ever saw the Eiffel Tower. And it is like, I would love to tell you, you go out and you do all this and like you are done. It will never be done. So think of the inside of a cockpit of an airplane, all the dials you have. As a leader, you are going to be constantly turning dials. Right? Turn a little bit here. We're going to turn this down here. I need to put a little more focus on new business here, right? You've got those dials, but remember to take that step back as you're iterating, right? And think about it from a cultural standpoint, not just that day-to-day tactical, those tactical things that you do. So define it, gain buy-in, hire the right people, reinforce it, and iterate. If you do that, I think you're gonna find some amazing results. So what did it look like for us? Great, Laura, you built this great culture. Well, first of all, we did this. So I feel really grateful for that. We are now part of the New York Stock Exchange. We went public in September of 2020, and that's quite an experience. I'm sure many of you have been through this and know what that's like, and if you haven't, I hope that you go through it. It's a fantastic feeling and I'm really proud of the work the team did. We tripled the size of the business to get to this point. Over the last 3 years, we've quadrupled the size of the team. So it's been really fun to be in growth mode, right? But even more important, we've unlocked some really phenomenal things. We signed a deal with the country of Senegal and we are— this is an example of 10X thinking in real life, right? What it looks like. This is our organization. The woman on the left, Johanna, is on my team. And we've set up a center of excellence there training young individuals in that country how to become game developers. So it feels really good to be at a place that you get to drive business, right? But you get to do something like that. Diversity. I'm all about diversity. It's one of the reasons I came here to this organization. This is our sales kickoff, our women's happy hour. We were overlooking the Eiffel Tower in Paris. Being international is also a big part of our culture here at Unity. But this kind of thinking, this kind of culture drives diversity, and it's something that I know not just the females on the team, but everybody on the team enjoys. So huge push for diversity. So again, Three things: write it down, gain your buy-in, hire the right people, and you are never done. I hope that this is something for you to take back and think about how you might implement in your organization. If anybody out there has any questions, I would love to hear— just comments, anything you think I got wrong, I would love to hear from anybody. So thank you for taking the time to listen.

Thank you, Laura. We definitely have some time for any questions you guys have. If you want to raise your hand or throw them in the chat, we'll be happy to take them. I appreciate all the pictures. Thank you. If not, if there are no questions, Laura, if you want to plug yourself on social media, we can— people can shoot questions that way as well.

Yeah, I mean, you can look me up. I would love to tell you I'm really active on Twitter. I'm not that active on Twitter. Let's see. But if you look me up on LinkedIn, I'm also happy to have a conversation.

LinkedIn. I always forget about that one, even though that's, that's crucial. We do have some questions rolling in, so I will push these over to you. First one is, how do you make sure that the company culture gets correctly to each member of the organization? Basically, how do they— how does that company culture internalized correctly by each member of your organization?

How is the company culture or the sales culture? I'm not sure I totally understand the question. But I think it's internalized by the actual activities that we do every day. I'll give you an example of one. And we used to call this at Google, we called it No, God, what— how did we term it? Basically, the thought was we weren't going to do anything weird at the end of a quarter to go close a deal. So, um, and maybe I'll stop sharing my screen so I can just have a conversation with people. Yeah, thank you. Oh God, that feels better. Um, so no unnatural acts, that's what we called it at Google. So, um, you know, Ideally, the actions that you take need to lead up to that thing, right? So it's really easy at the end of a quarter to go do some crazy stuff to bring a deal in, right? But if you've gone through all of the other things and pulled that into your culture, chances are you don't have to do that at the end of a quarter, right? I don't know if that's the clearest example I can give, but from whoever's asked the question, let me know if there's anything else I can add to it. I feel like that's a very bad answer to your question.

We do have another one. How long did it take for the initial solid draft of the sales culture to be created?

How long did this— can you say it one more time, Caitlin?

How long did the initial solid draft of the sales culture take to be created?

Oh, it was fairly fast. I mean, we really, we locked ourselves in a room and sat down and debated those words. I mean, that's what I would recommend. Like, go in and just start with words. What describes it? What doesn't? What you didn't see up on that slide, you didn't see words like super competitive, right? You didn't see combative. And I'm not saying those things are bad, by the way. That just wasn't what we were going to build. Right. So I would say that probably took us a couple of weeks by the time we rolled it out to the sales team. It took longer to go and gain buy-in from, from all of the other people that we went and talked to.

Words. What about words like aggressive? Would you consider that?

Okay. So the word aggressive is so— I was on an interview this morning and I was talking about the word aggressive. I think the word aggressive is seen as very negative. So I would probably, I would probably, instead of the word aggressive, I would use proactive and I would combine it with challenger. And I feel like challenger is a more widely accepted word. So challenger to me says somebody that's very proactive in a very intelligent manner, right, with a, with a message, not just aggressive for being aggressive's sake, but Personally, I don't have any, I don't have any issue with the word aggressive. I probably wouldn't use it though at Unity. Fair.

It's also become very popular. I am going to call out Francesco here because I can see him and he asked a question in the chat. But so if this becomes interactive, great. He wants to know what makes Unity sales culture different from Google or other companies you've worked for?

Passion. So this is like the easiest question for me because, look, people loved working at Google. It's a fantastic culture. People love working at Unity. And I think it's because of the kind of people that we call on are creative. And there is a lot of passion in creativity. So if you go out and talk to a gaming company, they love the work they're doing. They're all in it because they love that work. So I'd say that's the main difference.

It's passion. Okay, I appreciate the honesty. What were some of the pitfalls you faced when building the culture at Unity? And how did you overcome them? Mm-hmm.

Okay, well, when I first came into the company, one of the goals of Unity, the stated goals, was to democratize development. So many people might take that to mean like, we just want to give our products away to anyone that we can. Right. And we do have a free product. So I think one of the hardest things for me was coming in, being in charge of revenue in an organization that in many cases would prefer to just let people use the product. So it was sort of this, this, I don't want to say clash, but it was, it was this moment of going like, We were founded in Denmark, like I said, 15 years ago, and founded by a group of really passionate people that were trying to build a video game. And the video game wasn't that good, but the technology that they built to build the video game was really good. So they just put it out there as a free product and everybody came and started using it. So when you think about that, and then in walks the VP of sales who wants to drive revenue, right? There had to be a reckoning of sorts. To bring those two cultures together. And I think the way that we did that is, and you'll hear our CEO talk about this too, the way you democratize development is you've got to have a strong revenue stream in order to fund the ongoing development of that product. So for those of you who like Simon Sinek, I'm guessing there's some fans out there, he talks about the why, always go back to the why. So when you're asked, why are you so obsessed with driving revenue, let me back up and explain what the revenue enables us to do. And that's how we come to a— come together.

Simon Sinek, everyone, I think everyone has listened to one of those TED Talks here, and he does a great job of inspiring. We have another one here. How do you balance high performance and results with an empathetic and positive culture?

Well, if 2020 has taught us nothing, it's how to do that. Look, I believe when you hire people, you hire the entire individual. And I believe that, you know, 2020 and what we're living in right now never have our worlds merged together, our personal worlds and our work worlds. You heard me use the term family earlier. When it came to describe how a lot of people at Unity feel about the people that they work with, and that's genuine. I think it starts with being vulnerable yourself, and when you're having a hard time, telling everybody you're having a hard time. My teams have seen me on good days, they've seen me on bad days. And then having the mantra I use, and I credit my boss with this, is seek first to understand. So if you can when you hit problems, bumps in the road, times when people aren't delivering, seek first to understand what's going on with them, and then you can act accordingly. So it may be something as simple as, you know, I realize I'm pushing you really hard, right? I think we all feel a big responsibility right now to drive revenue in a time where the world is a very uncertain place. And that's the reason I'm pushing you so hard, but I also realize how hard this is for you. So if you have any problems, reach out and let me know. I mean, it's a human thing. So I'd say it's when in doubt, be human. That would be my advice.

I think that's— I mean, I think that's great feedback. I think when it all boils down, and especially now, like you were saying, for 2020, and unfortunately as we roll into 2021, you're seeing a lot more of people, people be themselves and to be human and be okay with people being human regardless of the company and what it needs to drive. Laura, we are, you helped us close out the day and we greatly appreciate it. And I think this is an awesome note to end on. You know, we all want that positivity in that company culture to really bring us back to where we need to be. So. I appreciate your time, guys. As you have seen already or not, we are doing Clubhouse, which is new to me, but I don't think new to everyone here. And we're going to have just a little gathering on the app Clubhouse and kind of have some talking there. You can find Jason M. Lemkin's room and meet us now or a little bit later to just have some, some chat. So, Laura, thank you. Thank you everyone for being a part of this and joining us. For spring semester for Sasser University. We really appreciate it. Thank you guys. Bye-bye. Have a good one.