How to Build out a Sales Org from 0 reps to ~100 in 18 months | @FlockSafety's CEO Garrety Langley

and CEO, and Alex Latraverse, the VP of Growth at Flock Safety. They're going to be talking through scaling sales teams and building a sales organization from 0 to 100. Thank you guys so much for joining us. Before I pass it over to you, just a couple housekeeping reminders and things to keep in mind. We have 20 minutes today for our session. We do hope that this is an interactive session and want to get your questions answered. So we encourage you to keep your cameras on, mute yourself during the presentation, but of course, feel free to come off mute if you'd like to answer any questions live. You can also drop any questions into the chat. They're going to be reserving the last couple minutes for questions. Um, these sessions will be recorded and available on demand post-event, so be sure that you subscribe to SASTR's YouTube and follow SASTR on SlideShare. Thank you guys both so much for joining us. I'm going to pass it over to you to take it away.

Thanks, I appreciate that. And, uh, my name is Garrett. I'm the CEO and founder of a company called Flock Safety, and with me I have Alex Lashrevers, who runs really all of our revenue organization, sales and marketing and rev ops. And per the note of the— this kind of next 20 minutes is to talk about like, how do you go from a sales org of 0 to a sales org of 100? And ideally you do it in 12 months. And so as a quick kind of agenda, we'll spend just a minute or two to give you a background on, on our company, um, kind of what we do, just so there's some context. And then I'll spend the first half talking about from a founder and CEO's perspective, when do you decide to scale? How do you make that decision? Because I don't think it's a trivial one. And then really hand it over to Alex to walk through, so the CEO's decided to do it, and you just got hired as a VP of sales or VP of revenue, what do you do next? How do you do it? And how do you make sure you don't mess it up? So with that, I'll jump right in. As a background, the company is called Flock Safety. Unlike a lot of our peers today, you might have never heard of us. We are focused on eliminating crime. We do that in 3 steps. We detect objective evidence, typically through cameras we develop, we decode it with machine learning, and we deliver that in the hands that people can actually stop crime. So you look at a company, we're live in over 1,000 cities, uh, and we will solve about 30 to 40 crimes every single hour throughout the day across the country. That's an incredibly impactful company, and we tend to serve two core markets. We go in and sell to neighborhoods and small businesses. That looks like an SMB market from a traditional B2B sales perspective, and then we sell into law enforcement agencies and cities, which from a contract size looks more akin to mid-market or enterprise depending on what you look at. So we actually serve really everything from $2,000 ARR up to, you know, half a million to a million dollar ARR contracts and everything in between. So it's a quick background on, on who Flock is and kind of what we're selling. We are a hardware-enabled SaaS business, so while we do have a hardware component, we are a pure SaaS from a contractual perspective. So to give you a quick timeline on the company, you know, we're just over 3 years old and it was about, you know, 18 months ago that you can kind of see when this timeline starts, when we had about 5 to 6 reps. I was still predominantly the number one sales driver. I was booking a lot of deals and you can see there's just an inflection point at the star when clearly something changed. You look over the last 12 months and despite COVID, despite all the things in the middle, we've taken the rev org from roughly low single digits to almost 100 and we'll be well past 100 by the end of this quarter and by going into Q2. So if you are looking for a job, we are actively hiring for, you know, middle, middle-level frontline directors, sales leaders, and AEs. So if you're listening to this, check us out, flocksat.com. But so the question is like, what happened at this star? Right? Like, what changed? And so I want to point out kind of the 3 things that led me to making the decision to really start ramping up our sales organization. The first was product-market fit. I think everyone has a different definition for this. For me, it was really around predictability. So we have a very field-heavy sales. You got to get on the plane, you got to go, you got to go talk to the customer face-to-face. And generally speaking, for 6 months straight, every time I got on a plane, I came home with at least $40,000 in ARR. Like, it was just predictable. Like, I could spend 1 to 2 days in a city, I could have 10 meetings and walk away with at least $40K. And like, that to me is the true sign of product-market fit. As like, as the CEO is like, yes, you have to have demand, but like, can I predict that if I put something in, I know what I'm going to get out? And so like, that was in place. Like, and I had 6 months, I had multiple quarters of like super consistent growth that I was driving. And the next question became, okay, how much of that is the founder effect? Like, am I just better at sales because I've committed, you know, this decade of my life to this company because I have to be good at it? And so we made the decision to run a really small test and say, okay, let's remove the founder, let's remove the CEO from the sales equation, and can we replicate that predictability with sales reps. And so in our case, it wasn't clear what the right model was. And so we actually intentionally ran two teams in parallel with very, very different go-to-market motions. We had an inside team and we had an outside team. Um, and we were constantly just measuring how are they ramping? How are they building pipeline? What is the profile? Uh, within about 3 months, it was very clear the team that was doing about 10x the results as their counterpart. So like we knew that the product market fit, we knew that this could be profitable. We also knew that sales reps could do it. Then the step 3 was like, okay, I gotta go find someone to do it. I think it's really, really abnormal for a founder or CEO to be the right person to scale a sales org. I think the steps required to, as Alex will walk through, like are just not natural. For a founder to want to do and to get excited about. I loved getting on the plane and meeting early customers. I didn't love doing 50 interviews in a single week. That wasn't what I was going to be good at. So to me, the step 3 was like, you got to make a decision that you're going to go hire a VP and someone who's really done it before. So that's when we really started to think about like, okay, now we should start to scale. So you've hired your VP, right? I hired Alex back in January of 2020. And the first decision that we had to walk through was like, what's going to be our approach? Are we going to look for linear growth on our sales org? Are we going to try to flood the market? And that's like a really important distinction to make because the risk profile attached to that is very different. And in our markets, you know, we're fortunate that we can actually take a pretty high risk profile in terms of the success of our candidates. You know, if you're in a market where you only have, you know, maybe 100 logos or 500 logos to target, You can't afford to hire bad reps. And so you really want to sit down with your VP and say, okay, are we flooding the market or are we going linear? What, what's acceptable to us in terms of the quality of candidates? If you take the flood approach and you could try to hire 50 reps in 30 days, in 60 days, in 90 days, you're just not going to bat 100 and you have to accept that. And then if you know whether you're going to go linear flood, if you know what your risk profile is going to be. Then it just becomes a budget question. Like, are you really up for swallowing that pill? Because it's incredibly expensive to dramatically ramp your sales org. To just give you some like fast napkin math that, that we did before making this decision is we said, okay, let's assume we're going to hire 20 reps per month over the next 6 months. They're going to give them a 3-month ramp, which is pretty good. It's not, you know, it's not 0 days, but it's also not 9 months or 12 months like an enterprise sale. The recruiting costs alone are going to be $400,000. Like, it's highly unlikely you're going to have the in-house recruiting to do this. Salaries over those 3 months, you're looking at half a million. So before you even got into supporting other orgs, before you even got into what's going to be our attrition, before you get to actually even any bookings, you're almost a million dollars in burn-in. So if you're going to do this for 5 months and actually go from 0 to 100, you need to be ready to assume that you're going to burn an extra $5 million in cash. So going the flood approach with a high-risk profile is like not for the faint of heart, and it's also not for a company that has perhaps just closed their $10 million Series A. Like, you're putting your company at risk. And I think for us, we had to look at it and say, what if we get it really wrong? Like, are we, are we putting our company at risk in doing this? And we were fortunate that we, we've very much aligned our capital raises with this approach, where we closed a Series B in January which is the same month we hired Alex, which is the same point I said, okay, look, we're doing this. Like, we're going all in. We need to go build this army. I want to cover the market, the entire market for us within 12 months. What are we going to do? Um, and that was a big part of my interview process with Alex was saying, hey, I want to know your plan. You know, you said you've done this before. Tell me how you're going to do it at Flock. And that's what he's going to walk us through.

Yeah, thanks Garrett. And I will say first and foremost, there is a lot that goes into successfully and effectively scaling a revenue organization. I'm gonna, I'm gonna go deep on like one element of it here and touch on a few others, but one of the best resources I've personally come across on this topic is the Mark Roberge keynote from SaaStr in 2019, I think it was. If you haven't seen that, check it out. It's phenomenal. But when Garrett, when I was interviewing with Garrett, he told me that, he's like, we have product market fit. We think we have go-to-market fit and it's time to scale. And I want you to hire 30 reps in your first 30 days. And so I kind of said, all right, well, you know, how many recruiters do you have and how much pipeline do you have? And the answer was none and zero. I was like, you don't need a VP of sales. Like you need a small army of recruiters. So let's start there. And I actually plugged him into the recruiters before I even started to get that pipeline built. Um, but that was kind of what I was tasked with was we, we, we really want to scale the team. We want to put like heads on the team in different markets and go. And so where did I start? The first thing I started with was building a profile and pipeline. So what is the profile of candidate we're looking for? And I'm not talking about a job description that looks good on your website. I'm talking about like, if you are a recruiter or you are handing this to a recruiter, what are they actually punching into LinkedIn? Like, very tactically, who are these people? Where do they work? How much experience they have? What types of companies? What stage company? Where do they live? Like all of those things, like think like a recruiter. And if you're, if you're handing this to a recruiter, what are they going to search for in LinkedIn? Um, and really designing the profile around what you know leads to success based on your current reps, or what you hypothesize is going to lead to success based on your business. I was really starting with the latter. Uh, and then just building pipeline, like sales itself, like you have to build pipeline. I'm doing about roughly 8 to 10 interviews for every person that we hire, um, to give some context. The next is running a repeatable and consistent process. And I really bolded this one intentionally. I think this is one of the things that we have done very well. And I've spent a lot of time thinking about, again, a great resource here is the Sales Acceleration Formula, Mark Roberge again. Um, but I've stolen a lot from that. But this idea of like, I run the exact same process with every single candidate, the same amount of interviews. I ask the same questions every time. I ask them the same way. I phrase them the same way. We do a mock call as part of our interview process. Like we give the same information and discovery. We throw the same objections. Like it is extremely consistent because that allows us to develop pattern recognition. And also we're interviewing candidates from all different industries, from all different tenures, experience levels. And so it's a really good equalizer because it puts everybody on the same sheet of music. So I spent a lot of time thinking about what leads to success, how do we build a profile for that, and how do we build a repeatable and scalable process that tests for the key things we want in a candidate. And then after every Start class, really reevaluating the assumptions we've made and messing with the model. The first, really the first hiring profile I had, we hired 6 reps on that profile and 3 of them didn't make it. So I was batting.500 on my first assumption of what would lead to a great rep at Flock, which is not great, not acceptable. Since then, knock on wood, we're close to batting 1,000. So we made, we made changes very quickly based on what we learned with those initial start classes. And like, that's key. That was one of the conversations I had with Garrett, is I get you want me to hire 30 reps in 30 days, but like, do you really want me to do that, or do you want me to hit a certain revenue number over the next 6 months? I said, don't hold me to a headcount number over 90 days. Tell me where you want me to be in 6 months and let me manage to that. Um, I asked for a little bit longer period of time so I didn't have to bring in 20 reps in the first profile. I could bring in 5, let them go for 30 days and adapt it. Um, the next is compensation. This is actually one of the first places I started, like in my first 2 weeks at Flock. And I remember Garrett asking me like, why are you spending so much time on comp? Why are you starting there? Like, it doesn't make sense to me. It's like, if you think like a sales rep, your comp plan is extremely important. It's a, it's a well-designed comp plan is not only, not only does it put the business in a financially secure place and positive place, not only does it allow reps to earn a great living, but it becomes a great recruiting tool as well. I'm not going to go through my whole comp plan here, but a few things I've done that I think work well in those different, you know, in those different levels is build a plan that rewards consistency. So my plans, in order to hit your OTE, it's your base salary, your variable commission, and a quarterly bonus. That bonus is included in your OTE. Why do I do that? Because I want a plan that rewards consistency. I would imagine that a lot of people on the line are in quarterly-driven businesses, like hitting quarters are important. So if they're important for the business, make it important for the rep. So if you hit your annual number, but you miss, miss, miss, and then blow it out in Q4, you make less money than if you hit, hit, hit, hit. So I build a plan that actually, in order to maximize your earning potential, you have to hit every quarter. Accelerators and MBO. I spent a lot of time thinking about accelerators, like at what, at what performance level, at what quota attainment is the company in the black on a rep, and where can we afford to pay accelerators? I really want to reward my top performers for overperformance. I also want to make sure that we build in variable earning potential for reps who are ramping along the way. So I think about accelerators for ramped reps and MBOs and ways to earn variable, um, comp while you are ramping. Because the last thing we want to do is spend all this time doing all those interviews to bring a great rep in just to have them leave because it takes 6 or 8 months to ramp to really start earning good money. And then half-year quotas. I think we made this mistake last year and adjusted this year, but in a company that's growing as quickly as ours, it's hard to predict a year out. And so really everything we've done from a company perspective, comp plans, quotas, and even company targets is focused on first half. Um, and so I have established here's the Q1, Q2, and first half targets for the sales team and sales reps. And everything we're doing is focused on that. Now I worked with Garrett and the board to build an annual comp plan. It's like, I know what it's based on, but we left the ability to either go slightly up or down in the second half of the year based on performance in first half of the year. So we left ourselves optionality there. Uh, and then onboarding and sales process. Like, I think the tendency is to have reps start as soon as possible, and that's fine with a small team, but onboarding new reps is a pretty labor-intensive process. We mix in a lot of different resources. It's the sales managers running most of it, especially in the early days. And so if we're doing 5 or 6 start classes a quarter, you're taking a lot of people out of the field and out of their day job to do it. So I very quickly moved to, I don't want more than 1 start class a month, preferably not more than 2 a quarter, um, because I believe at this point, especially, and even once we were like 10 reps, the quality of the onboarding mattered more than speed. I know that it's, it's tough to look at the operating plan and say, well, if I, if I don't push those 3 reps into February and I wait to March, here's what it does to the plan. But like That's what the numbers say on a spreadsheet, but the reality is the quality of that onboarding is more important than just getting it 30 days earlier. And think about like the opportunity, the lost opportunity cost of all the people that are involved in that onboarding to make it successful. So we very quickly moved to start classes, um, and then repeatable and consistent sales process. Like, this is one I'm not going to go deep on here, but I felt like it was important enough to put on this slide. Garrett told me they more or less had go-to-market fit. So that's not where I started, but this is another key area I've really been looking at over the last year and, and working on is like, do we have a process that works, is repeatable, is teachable, that we can take any rep off the street, plug them into the system, and they can just execute the playbook? So, uh, definitely spending time thinking about and working on the sales process is a key part as well. And then building a supporting cast. This was another conversation with Garrett. It's like, you know, it's not just adding reps and leaders, it's adding all the people around the sales team to support the growth of the sales team, to allow us to grow this quickly, um, in an efficient manner without going off the rails. Um, so your rev ops department and the tech stack of the sales team, like, don't forget about that. Build rev ops early. I think one of the things I've learned over my last two roles is one of the first things I would do as a VP of sales is establish a CRM, preferably Salesforce, and make sure the data's right and make sure we have like the basic blocking and tackling in place from a rev-op standpoint, because it's really hard to change that later on. Like, get it right early, invest early. Um, marketing— I know a thing or two about sales and marketing alignment. I spent almost 4 years at Terminus, and so this one's near and dear to my heart. And I actually sit over the marketing team here, which I consider myself very fortunate for, but definitely spend a lot of time thinking about what do we need to do to support the sales team from pipe gen to increasing win rate and also customer marketing. Enablement is key. We just made a, a really solid hire in our enablement team to help, to help us scale this. Sales engineers, other supporting roles. I mentioned sales process data and forecasting and just all the things that come with supporting an organization of this, uh, of this size, which, um, could probably do a whole nother webinar on these things, but I think you get the picture.

Yeah, and I think to that point, this was from the CEO's perspective one of the more challenging parts to kind of swallow, because we talked earlier about the, the budget requirements of just building the sales force. You're talking about millions of dollars in burn. That doesn't account for the fact that if you have 50 sales reps, you got to have enablement. Like, you have to have support for those people, otherwise you're going to have 50 versions of your story for your company, for your product, and you're not going to get consistent results. And that's what you're striving for. Like, your investors and yourself should be striving for consistency when you're scaling up. And then I think the last thing— yeah, go ahead, Latt.

No, I was going to say, this is one that, uh, I think it's easy to lose sight on, but we talked about scaling the reps. It's easy to do the math to say, okay, well Every time I add this many sales reps, I'm going to add this many managers. Um, so it's like reps, managers. We talked about some of the other like revenue-specific roles to support the sales org, but don't forget about the other departments. Like for your company to be successful, every team needs to move down the field at the same pace. Like don't let your sales team get out ahead too far of your product team or your delivery team or your customer success team. Like in order, especially for a SaaS company to be successful, you have to be firing on all cylinders. And I think it's easy to overinvest in sales and underinvest in other areas, and it can really come back to bite you, especially as you're thinking about tackling new markets with your sales org, whether it's moving from, you know, SMB mid-market into enterprise, or for us, tackling new markets like federal or something like that. Uh, something Garrett and I and our product leaders talk a lot about is not just when is the sales org ready to do that, but when can product and engineering dedicate the time and bandwidth it's going to take to build the products to nail product-market fit in those new markets before we go attack them on the sales team.

Yeah, agree. And so just to kind of wrap up and then we'll jump into some questions, you know, I think it's the CEO's decision of like when to scale. Uh, it's going to be a massive financial decision if you decide to go really fast, and so I think it's got to be on the CEO's back to make that call. And but I do think you got to make sure you're doing it in a way that doesn't position your company to fail, like completely go out of business. If you get it wrong, because to Alex's point, our first class, we bat— we got a 50% and it wasn't because we hired bad people. We had, we hired the wrong people and that was on us. And I think you got to build in that buffer to make a few mistakes. And I think one of the things that was hard for me was to, you know, just fully accept that, hey, this is not going to be my strong suit. I got to hire someone that understands process and consistency, understands how to run a recruiting process. You know, I need to hire 2 or 3 great people a year and I'm doing my job. Alex needed to hire 100 people in a year. That's just a very different recruiting process. And to that point, that's where we spend all of our energy thinking about how we're building a world-class recruiting organization, how we leverage outside recruiters, have a really, really specific profile so that when we do get someone into the process, we know if they're going to be successful or not. So I know there was a few questions and I, and I think the first one came from one of the audience members, which was, you know, you mentioned field sales, you know, boots on the ground as your core go-to-market motion. How did you prospect and lead gen? Are your, are your reps doing that? Was there an SDR component? Um, this is an area I actually feel pretty strongly about. Um, and I know it's a pretty, I'd say the modern sales stack is to have SDRs and BDRs that feed AEs. I'm personally really against that. Uh, I know it works for a lot of companies. I feel really strongly that like your best sales rep is running a full sales cycle. Um, and it's even pretty involved through the onboarding process. Um, Alex and I had a lot of debates about what are the supporting roles, SDRs, uh, sales engineers. Uh, we are just now exploring sales engineers, you know, with a fairly large sales and sales team. Um, I just generally think there's a lot of value in a rep that really understands their territory. Um, in our case, you know, we have very, very focused patches of dirt that a single rep owns. And so I expect her to know who are the 500 or 1,000 accounts in your territory, where are they in your stage, who, who knows who. It's a very interconnected model. So for us, we just generally felt like, you know, SDRs weren't going to be a fit. Um, Alex, I think this is a question for you from Nancy, which is, you know, how many recruiters positions did you have open? How did you have them targeting different geographies? Maybe just spend a little bit of time thinking about how you structured your recruiting kind of team?

Yeah, so I still use primarily external recruiters today. Um, I've got 3 that I work with that I've worked with before that do a really good job. Um, they're like the first people I brought on at Flock. I look at them as a true partner, like I treat them as such as well. Um, and so at Flock, we really— Garrett told me we want reps in the top 100 metros in America as quickly as possible. So the first thing I did was say, okay, like, we're not going to hire in 100 metros all at once. So if I was forced to prioritize that list, how would I do it? And so that was like a thought exercise in and of itself. It's like, okay, if we want to be at 100 by the end of the year, what are the first 20 we want to tackle? So once we had that answer, I just provided a really clear profile to the recruiters. Like, I'm talking about, like, it's pretty detailed, but it's very specific about what I want out of a candidate. Like I said, Like what markets are they coming from or not coming from? How much sales experience? What type of product are they selling? Like what's the ACV sales cycle like that they're selling to today? Are they inside or outside? I mean, just a lot of different things like that, but 3 recruiters, a clear profile. I started with about 15 to 20 markets that I said, I want people here. And then it was just like wherever I found those people, whichever market came I was hiring them.

Yeah. And I think to add to that before I get to the next question, one of the things we also, I think, got right was we hired an in-house coordinator really early because we were really satisfied with the pipeline we were getting from our external recruiters. And although it's more expensive, we were really pleased with it. And where we hit our first bottleneck was, you know, we were doing, you know, 20 interviews, 30 interviews a week, all funneling through Alex. Like we needed someone just to manage the calendar, just manage all the inbound. Alex, and this is another question for you, which is really, you know, what would you say, you know, that first class we had, you know, you and I've talked about, they're all great people. They actually were all very successful in their prior sales careers. I bet you they're successful in their current endeavors. What do you think we got wrong? And like, what do you feel like we learned from that process?

Yeah, like, I mean, my first hiring profile, the hypothesis was let's go find people that are selling products to like, let's go find people that are selling tech products to our current customers today, whether they're coming from customers or just like other companies in our space, and let's bring them here. Like, it felt logical, it felt right. Um, come to learn that our type of sales, like our, our sales cycle, um, just, just like the style of sales, the process we run here is very, very different from the norm in the industry. And so, uh, it looked good on paper, but it was flawed because most of the companies in our industry are more of an enterprise sales, like fewer accounts, fewer transactions, longer deals, more relationship-driven. And the team we're building here is more like a velocity mid-market team. Like the team that I'm building here looks very much like a B2B SaaS team, not what you would, what you would typically see in like a public sector sales company. Um, so that was really the flaw was Um, just, just, just the wrong hypothesis or assumptions up front.

Yeah. And I think the follow-up to that question we got was, you know, how fast or how early did you realize that it wasn't working? And I can answer that one quickly. Like, we knew generally within weeks because we had— we knew what we would need from a pipeline generation to be successful. Like, if you don't have pipeline, you can't close it. And we knew what quotas were realistic because I, my opinion to Alex was like, I don't expect our reps to hit the quotas I was hitting. Cause like there is that founder effect, but they gotta be close. And if they're not even close to building that pipeline, which they weren't, we knew something was wrong. So we're talking about weeks. Yeah.

And there was another related question on MBOs, but one thing I'll add is like the reps we hired that didn't work out, it was on me. It was us, not them. Like they were, they were like really high performers at their last companies. They just weren't like, it wasn't the right fit here. Um, and yeah, I try to be very prescriptive with my sales teams. Like, there's, there's 3 metrics I care about. It's: did you hit your pipe gen goal this week? Did you finish in between your commit and your best case forecast this month? And did you hit your quarterly quota? Right? If you do those 3 things well, like, that's 80% of the battle, and everything else kind of falls in place. So we set very specific goals with new hires around pipe gen and number of opportunities to create over their first 90 days. And so because we know the math, because we're very prescriptive on the metrics, it's easy to tell in a matter of weeks whether somebody is like on plan, off plan, or materially off plan. Uh, and I try to align MBOs. I've done it a little bit different at every company. It's something I evaluate like every 6 months, but I try to align variable comp to non-revenue driven outcomes. So like, did you create X number of opportunities over Y period of time? Did you hit your, um, you know, did you hit your ramped booking quota, which is like revenue-driven, but I like that one too. Um, you know, have you added a certain number of contacts into Cadence? Did you get certified on all the things you need to get certified on? I usually get MBOs over 30-day MBOs over the first 3 months of progressing difficulty. So like your first month MBO might be learn the certification, add 100 people into your Cadence and set 3 meetings, right? And you get your MBO for that month.

Yeah. And I think there's a couple of questions on MBOs in general. And I think, you know, there's, there's the part that Alex just described. And then I think there's the CEO/VP of finance kind of point of view, which is we know we have a sales and marketing efficiency target. We know that based on the base that Alex said he needs to pay to hire these people and the commission structure, there's a quota they have to hit. And we know what our win rate is. And this gets back to that product-market fit around on predictability. Like you can't go from 0 to 50 or 100 reps if you don't have that predictability, because what you don't want to do is wake up with 100 reps and realize you're upside down on your math. And you've got sales and marketing efficiencies that are horrible. You're burning way more cash than you thought you were going to. Then you are in a really tough spot because if you want to lose a sales org, decrease their compensation and they will all leave. Doesn't matter how happy they are. They will find a job. And so I think for us, what we really keyed in on is like, we know how much pipeline you create every single week, and if you're not creating that, you're way off track. Um, another question, um, that, that came in that I thought was pretty good was, you know, what, what was the decision process to, to scale in 12 months, and why 12 months? Was it based on runway or market opportunity? Um, so this gets into a little bit of, I, I think, the fundraising mentality. I fundamentally believed we were sitting on a multi-billion, if not $10+ billion company. We're obviously not there yet, we're on our way. And I was in a rush to get there. I knew that we had really good metrics. We have incredible NRR, we have almost no churn, we have great sales and marketing efficiency, like all the metrics were there. And so I didn't want to go slow. I had a lot of confidence in Alex and his ability to do the job and knew that we had a pretty good-sized bank account. That I could mess up for at least a quarter or two and not kill the company. We were fortunate that we didn't have any of those mistakes over the last 18 months. But so for me, it was a bit of just my mentality is like, if I see something's working and I have capital, like, that's the entire point of venture, is when something's working to pour gasoline on it. But we already had the fire burning.

Um, one, one kind of sales leader thing I'll add to that is Tangential to that, my last— like, the problem I was asked to solve at Flock is very different from my previous company. My previous company was a very crowded, competitive market, and it was, it was more about like refining sales process and ability to compete. At Flock, we're not in a super crowded and competitive market. It was all about scale and solving for scale. So my recommendation to founders would be especially if you want to scale a sales org at this pace with this quantity, make sure you're hiring a sales leader that wants to be like a full-time recruiter and interviewer. Like, that is pretty much what I do. It's to the point that I do one interview with every sales rep. And so now, like, my sales leaders are doing the rest of the process, but I touch each rep once, uh, and I'm still doing somewhere between 20 to, you know, 25 interviews a week and have been pretty much for the last year.

Yeah, and I think we've got time for one last question, and it comes from Steve, who just asked, you know, how long is your onboarding? How much training and education before reps start to get productive and start booking meetings? And I'll let, I'll let Alex answer that, but I'll provide one comment before I do, which is I'm actually an engineer by trade, and I'm a big believer in what we call our first day push. Like, as an engineer, on your first day, you have to push code to production. Before you go home. It's just a part of onboarding. And for the longest time, and I still think we do this, we have a similar mentality in our sales organization, which is like, on day 1, you should be able to sell the product. Now, did you book a meeting? Are you able to book the meeting? Like, less care about that, but like, it should not take more than 24 hours to get you ready to go. But I'll let Alex give a little bit more detail on like our onboarding today.

Yeah, I would think, like, my advice would be think about onboarding as multi-dimensional. It's what do you have to teach somebody, what they need to know to sell the product, how do you get them integrated to the team and the company so they feel like they're a part of that community, and how do you make sure they just have a great experience. And so like, I think about those things over the first 30 and 90 days. Um, specifically on the first one, which I think was the question's geared towards, we try— everything we do here, we try to optimize for speed. So I actually want reps on the phone calling into their territory and setting meetings on Monday of week 2, right? And so I don't teach them everything they need to know on the first week. I think about the first 30 days, and it's like, if I want them on the phones on Monday of their second week, what do they need to know in the first week? Well, there's HR and like onboarding to tech. They need to understand like the founding story, the product, and where we came from. They need to know the sales deck. They need to know how to run a demo, and they need to know best practices of attacking their territory. So what I just gave you there is Monday through Friday of week 1. They're on the phones on week 2, and then week 2, we come back and we teach them things like, you know, how do you build a deployment plan? How do you manage sales stages? How do you forecast? Then in week 3, we come back and teach them our contracting options and how do you actually send a contract and book a deal. They don't need to know that to get on the phones in week 2 and start setting meetings. So we think about what is everything a rep needs to know to do their job. Over the first 30 days and we break it up over those first 4 weeks to try to optimize them starting to set, uh, set meetings and build pipeline in week 2 as early as possible.

That's awesome. Well, we really appreciate everyone's time. Uh, we hope you got some value out of this. And, uh, like I said before, we are actively recruiting. So check us out, flocksafety.com. We'd love to chat about open roles.

Thank you guys so much.