How Top Sales Leaders are Adjusting Their Sales Process and More with Atlassian and Brex

I have to give folks just a minute to come back. Never mind, I guess we'll start right now. A little bit of a bump. Sorry about that, everybody. Can everyone hear me? Raise your hand if you can hear me, everybody here. Do I hear quorum? Okay, everybody out there. Thank you. Sorry, I didn't mean to cut off the video, but learning Zoom bumps. But I think we have 905 folks in, coming up on 1,000. So I'll do a slow roll to start instead of the rest of our video. Welcome to everybody as you roll in. I'll do some background before we start and let us get up into the quadruple digits. But, um, please grab, um, grab a coffee, join us. Um, this will be the most informal session of the day, but probably one of the 2 or 3 topics that I think folks are still struggling with today, which is how to iterate your sales process. How do you change how you think about sales? Um, how you deal with a whole set of issues that seems to change daily, um, not just weekly. And we will do— we'll have more time, I hope, for Q&A today. So I'll bring it up again, but as folks hit the Q&A, add your questions. We'll see how this session goes. We will likely run out of time, but with extra questions, I know I will trick Sam into coming back later and answering some. I think I can trick Kristen into coming back some. So ask, ask all the questions. We'll see how much time we have. And this is a, I think, a great open group to have these discussions because we've got a mix of experiences that I think is most, maybe most relevant to folks here. Kristen Haybach runs EDR sales at Atlassian, which I got to check today, $40 billion, $50 billion company. I don't know, lots of billions of dollars. I remember when Jay Simons came to the SaaS Annual, they just gone public, it was worth $4 billion. We couldn't believe it, Atlassian was such a big company. But Kristen was at Trello before. So usually the problem with big company folks is you love their logo, but they don't understand what's going on with smaller companies. she's done it all, right? She manages a huge global team. I don't know, how many people were at Trello when you joined? 4 people in the sales department?

Well, there was none in sales when I joined.

None. Yeah. Okay, so there's only, Sam has some parallel different experiences. There's not that many people that have been the first salesperson in to managing a global footprint at a cloud leader. So I think we'll get some great learnings there. And then Sam's pretty much done it all. And in a bunch of environments that are hybrid. Not only did we work together back in the day at Adobe Sign, EchoSign, he's been head of sales at Brex, did it at Flexport, did it at Rainforest QA, and worked with a whole bunch of other leaders on all different types of revenue and Zenefits as well, from free products to expensive products to freight forwarding to e-signatures to ERP in the early days. But we'll, we'll talk about it, and I think Brex will be interesting because it has a couple of components. It has a portion of its revenue that's very sensitive to the economy, right? And a lot of startups in the customer base, good and bad, right? And we're seeing a lot, we're seeing pockets of strength. And then we're seeing pockets of startups that overnight, not only are struggling, but might even wanna immediately stop their spend, right? Everyone is looking at their credit cards today, even irrationally and saying, what can I cut, right? I remember in the '08 and '09 downturn, I never looked at our credit card statements as a CEO. And I'm looking at it and I'm like, Who's got the Wall Street Journal subscription? Let's cancel it. And it's, you know, it's $9 a month. It's not going to move the needle, but we do irrational things because cutting, we can focus so much energy. So Sam will have a lot of interesting perspectives on how he manages his team through these times. And hold on, let me just figure out the— apologies, I forgot the Zoom. Just going back and then briefly, just for a couple minutes on the day, and then we'll kick it off. And get back to questions. It's a full day, um, but everyone should have a schedule. Um, most of this times we'll have a couple of tracks, um, and our goal today is to mix it up. So I won't read every session, but you can go to saster-summit.com if you haven't seen it. You can still register for sessions. Uh, it'll be a mix of sessions like this. We'll have— and we'll have— we have a lot of OG SaaStr folks. Like, we have Megan Eisenberg. She's one of the best marketing leaders I've known. Sam and I sort of competed against her back in the day, and she's CMO at TripActions, which has a lot to think about, right? Travel is a challenging part of the industry today. So she's going to talk about how to, how to, how to pick, pick which arrows to pick from your quiver and go through it. We'll have folks like Goddard Abel that can see everything at G2, right? Because everyone's using G2 to evaluate vendors. So he's going to tell you what they see. Patrick Campbell's got thousands of SaaS companies and pricing and issues. We'll keep going through all of this. All day long. Salesforce will tell you how they're changing their sales teams. So it'll be just like, just like this panel but different, because I think they have more salespeople at Salesforce than Atlassian and Brex have combined. But we'll hear from that. There'll be fun ones all through the day. We'll have, we'll have 3 great VCs. We'll have Gary Tan from Initialized that everyone loves. We'll have Mark Sister from Upfront, and we'll have Byron Dieter with Jeff Lawson at Twilio talking about all the lessons learned from the past, which ones work today, which ones don't. And Jeff's always great. I don't want to read all of it. We'll have an incredible panel with team from Zora, who we all— who's OG enterprise with two CIOs talking about what people are really buying. And then we'll end the day with me and Stewart Butterfield. And obviously Slack is doing well, but Slack also has a massive SMB base and its challenges. So it's going to be a pretty, a pretty interesting conversation to kind of wrap up the day. So that's how it all works. And you should be able to watch everything at SaaS for Summit. It should be framed, it should work. All the nice pretty graphics and everything should work. But if they don't, we have a backup URL, sapster.events, and it just goes to a Google Doc here that just gives you the individual Zooms. It strips out all the Chrome, all the other stuff, and you can just go there and click into URLs for the day as that sort of a backup backup plan, because all the stuff is kind of new. We used to do it all, we used to do it all in person for the most part. And then lastly, related to that, this— the whole point of today is bridging the gap. We did a couple webinars, a thousand people come. The goal is as quickly as possible in these crazy times, let's learn together what leaders like Brex, Atlassian, and others— what are we doing right now today? And then that's all we're gonna do today, but we'll have two more virtual events at least. We'll have one just with VCs in a month, And then we'll have a big SASTR biannual. And just for folks listening, for today it's about bridging the gap, but ultimately the most valuable reason to get a community together is to share learnings, to do mentorship, to do interaction. So you'll see a lot more of that added subsequently. But today it's basically workshops and discussions. And again, just a reminder, fill up the Q&A. We may not get to all of them today, but we will try between here and later to get to as many as possible. So So click on that on, on Zoom. And so I'm going to come back to this slide. I added one. This is an agenda that we may not get to. What's going on with all the inbound? How are we managing our pipeline? Downgrades and pauses, CSMs, BDRs, and quotas. But to Kristen and Sam, I actually wanted to use this slide I had in it. I wake up every night since quarantine at 3 AM. I don't know what time you guys wake up, but you'll see a consistent pattern on me. At Twitter at 3, but this revenue retention is the magic of SaaS, but logo retention wins the wars. How are you guys thinking about just keeping customers even when they're under stress? Because that's a meta issue that— how you think about it as a company, and then how you think about it as sales leaders, because sales folks want to close the biggest deal and they may not like downgrades or logo retention. So how are you thinking about this, this issue?

I'll jump in. So, uh, Jason, thanks so much for having me. Uh, morning everybody, excited to be here, and thanks for putting on the event. Um, yeah, so I, I think anybody that follows Jason on Twitter has seen a lot of different messaging around the, like, new world that we live in and everything else. I think for, for the way that we think about this particular tweet There's sort of an expectation that companies will take a top-line hit during a pandemic like this. We don't want to also take a reputation hit. So we're doing everything we possibly can to continue to service our customers and have them have a really positive experience during this time. And I think that's sort of like a really positive consolation that if we come out and we've helped our customers through a challenging time, that we actually come out stronger than we entered.

Yeah, I mean, I absolutely agree. And I think it's one of those things, you know, it's one of the core values of Atlassian. You know, anyone who's familiar with us, we have a value that's don't F the customer. I think I can say that here. But I think it really does ring true. And I think in moments like this is when your values are tested. And this is the time to really show if you put something up to have pretty words or if you put something up because it's how you really feel. And I think that's one of the things that we're thinking about, I'm thinking about. And you want to make sure that when this comes out, you're absolutely right, Sam, it's a reputation thing, right? People want to have had a good experience and they'll remember how they were treated when things weren't good, not just when things were good. And so I think this is a great time, you know, for what it's worth with all the other things going on in the world, it is a great time to kind of really show that you mean what you say.

And like, so give me an example. For example, we've got like Roman from Gorgeous and Sam knows at the end of the day talking about dealing with SMB churns. They did something interesting at Gorgeous. They have almost 3,000 SMB customers in e-commerce, and they said they did two things that were very interesting. They first said to all the customers that are shrinking, like if you send us your receipts that your e-commerce business is shrinking, the product's free for 6 months. Not a COVID edition, but literally, if your business is under stress, you know, you don't have to pay for 6 months. And here's the interesting thing I didn't know, um, they're paying the reps a full commission because they didn't want it— he didn't want to create disalignment or confusion. So he's paying a full commission on 6 months of no revenue. That's both for existing customers, right, which they may already have it, but for new ones that come in, they're paying a full commission on this. So Any— you don't— any, any— how do you get the sales team aligned on the great customer experience and the logo retention when they, when they're focused— their DNA is bookings?

I mean, I think it also depends on how your teams are set up, right? So it's not always necessarily the same. I don't know how it is at Brex, for example. It's not always the same groups doing that. Um, but I, I do think that you have to look at your quotas and your goals for your team. You have to look at those incentives, but then you have to also look at what you're rallying your team around. Are you going to have OKRs around this? Are you going to have things that sit outside of this? And I think, again, it's like a good time for everyone to come together and people understand what the needs are for the business and get people aligned with that and treat your people right during that process to get there as well.

Yeah, yeah, I totally agree. And I can give a few examples. I think with, with So there's customer acquisition and then there's your existing customers. And with existing customers, there are a couple ways of thinking about, uh, things that you can do. I think the first is trying to find a mutual win. For us, it's been migrate things that you have on invoice over to card. Um, of course that's a win for us because that's our business, that's, that's how we make revenue. And it's one for a customer because they get the rebate on the card spend. So what they were paying today over ACH, tomorrow they can start to get a point and a half or whatever it is in rebate back. So that's one thing, like try and think of some mutual wins, reach out to customers with that as sort of a value prop.

And then the other thing— Let's just take a minute, 'cause there's less, but Sam, let's just break into that because I see so many SDR emails these days that I just wanna like, I just wanna roll my eyes, right? That is a pitch, like if I understand it right, switch from ACH, take your issues over to our credit card, you can get some float out of this, right? This is going to help your business, right? At least at the margin, right? What's the language? What do the SDRs say? Do you have your SDRs doing it and how are they doing it that doesn't sound opportunistic in these times?

Totally. So, uh, the, the, so with existing customers, we reach out and we just explicitly say it. I think with new customers, we want to acknowledge the situation, but we also want to make it relevant. So an example of something that we do would be something like, We're regularly hearing CFOs are looking for ways to preserve capital during these unprecedented times. We can help. So you acknowledge the sort of unprecedented times, but it's relevant to why you're reaching out. And Chris, you probably have similar thoughts at Elastic.

I like it. It's simple because they've all heard the CFO at the company say, we've got to batten down— like, everyone's responsible for cutting costs, right? So when you— when the SDR sends that email, it's directly on point to what every company wants. It doesn't feel like just you're adding at least some perceived value because it's connected to a top KPI, right?

Yeah, and I think that's so important, right? Because it's, you know, not to toggle to the SDR messaging, but it's so important right now. I've gotten so many bad ones myself, right?

So many bad ones, right?

It just doesn't ring true, or it feels like ambulance chasing, or whatever it might be. And so I think you do— this is not the time to like skimp on your personalization and your messaging and make sure you're not just slapping up like, I hope everyone's okay during this challenging time. Have you looked at my product? Because that's just, for me at least, that's just a total turnoff. And so, you know, looking at things like for us, you know, if you think about something like Trello, you know, Trello was built to help you figure out how to work remotely. How do you collaborate when you're not all sitting in a space? And so really kind of thinking about again, that messaging of, you know, can we be helping you with this? Can we help you understand how to work better as a group? With a consultative touch, you know, I think that's, that's really important. It has to resonate to what that business's challenges are.

Is there— I like the Sam line of the CFO told everyone to like, we can help you cut costs. Is there a— maybe there isn't, but is there a magic line from like the Trello or Atlassian SDR email that you've tweaked or evolved that people could learn from?

I don't know if there's a magic line, right? Because I think it depends on the product and on the industry. But certainly, you know, our folks have been hearing a lot of of folks are being thrown into remote work and they've never— a lot of folks have never done it before. And if you look at some of the content specifically around Trello that's going out, I mean, we're putting out a lot of just helpful information to, to figure out how to work remotely. And I think that we're seeing folks really respond positively to that. So it's a little bit of a softer tone right there, but it is an understanding of like, we're, we're sort of experts at doing this. We were a remote company and we're a product that helps you be remote and you've just gotten thrown into something that that you don't know how to do. So let us help you keep your, you know, your employees and your staff connected during this time. And, you know, people resonate with that because that is a challenge, I think, for the most part, unless you were remote before, everyone's feeling.

Yeah. Let me ask you guys each a follow-up question on that because both your stories are interesting about getting, getting to know remote work and, and helping the CFO's initiatives, right? What I, I think a lot of our resources need to change their playbook today, which we can chat more about. I think what's interesting, I've seen this myself, is when the SDR actually breaks through the noise with an authentic message today, I want that person to be a subject matter expert. I don't want them to hand me off to Sam Blonde anymore. Like when the SDR says, if your CFO is struggling with this, or you, do you need help with your remote workforce? I'm like, yes, Linda, I do need help with my remote. Do you have time not to sell me your product? Do you have time to get on the phone and help me figure out how to use Zoom, Jira, Brax, Notion. I mean, I'm literally— the challenge with these good emails is I immediately— I don't know that you're— that you just graduated from college a week ago. I want— so are there ways to train your— should you repurpose SDRs as encyclopedias and sort of SEs? And any thoughts on that?

I just— one, one thought, sort of reinforcing all this terrible messaging coming from SDR that Kristin nailed, and one thing to certainly avoid is the, you know, these are the, I hope everybody in your family is okay, happy, and healthy. By the way, do you want to buy my product? So I think when you, when you acknowledge that these are unprecedented times, make it relevant. So I think that's just like sort of one, one potential takeaway there. And then Jason, on, on your comment around SDRs needing to be more sort of thoughtful and sophisticated in communication strategy, definitely. We're doing a lot more targeted messaging and custom messaging in this environment than we are doing this sort of standard, you know, send this email sequence and then copy and paste these replies depending on the objection that you get. It's a lot more sort of humanization of SDR selling and being a person talking to people putting more effort into acquiring ultimately what's— what their objective is, is a demo with a rep. And did you—

and in terms of, you know, the classic dump everything into Mixmax or Salesloft or Outreach or whatever, have you changed their KPIs to incent them to do this? Because everyone wants to dump everything into a Cadence, right? Good, bad times, crazy times, they want to load up a tool, hit send, and then, you know, go grab their coffee and hit their KPI. Have you changed their KPIs?

We have changed— we've changed most everything.

Maybe that's where we should have started.

Nothing's the same. KPIs included. And so, you know, certainly targets have evolved, but it's more about pointing the resources in the right direction. Doing things, and we can get into this I think later on, but things like account scoring and targeting certain verticals and sub-verticals where we have more success. But yes, KPIs have changed.

Yeah, go ahead.

No, I was just gonna say, yeah, I would definitely agree with that. And I think in general, you know, we were not a traditional sales model, so we're not as high volume. So we always kind of encouraged most of the messaging to be customized and personalized, not as much in drips. But again, slightly different model with with us. But I think in terms of, yeah, heat mapping and understanding, like maybe now not go after Delta, for example, or an airline or a hotel, but, you know, really understanding who the right folks are so that it's— while KPIs have to change, we also have to acknowledge, like, and give them the assistance because they are junior reps of understanding, like, who are we talking to, you know, and how should those conversations go. And we can't expect them to understand that completely on their own either.

They can't. Is it as simple as like, as re-bucketing prospects and opportunities into sort of green, yellow, red categories, or is it more nuanced than that?

Um, yeah, I mean, I think it depends, but I think maybe there's certain, you know, we're, we have multiple products. So I think there's some that it's more a green for a certain product than another product. There might be some of those contingencies, but, but definitely that. And then I think there's that mix of them making sure you're doing your research, like go and see where their press release is, what have they done? And then that last, have their CEOs made an announcement recently? Like, the whole heat map for you and help you understand who to spend time on and who not to. But you still also need to like put that human element onto it and be a researcher and be more than just an email automation tool because you're a human and you got to take a look at what's going on too and understand what the approach in that account is.

And you can, can you, and how much, but like, how do you get someone most SDRs are relatively new to a sales org. How do you get them to do more research in these times when they're not used to it? I mean, how do you— are you doing that for them? How do you get them to do that work?

Yeah, I think it becomes, you know, and I don't want to dominate it all, I'll let Sam chime in too, but I think it is a KPI thing going back to that, right? It does have to be a quality versus quantity thing. And so then you can be looking at those conversion rates, right? We might be expecting less individual hits, but we expect expect those hits to convert at a higher rate. And to do that means maybe assisting your, your SDRs to say, your morning block is your research block, and you'll review that with your manager, and then you'll roll those out into customized messaging. And giving them, because they are still junior, giving them that structure of— if you just tell people to research, I don't think they can do it right. They need to kind of know when to research, what to be looking for, a set number of accounts, do that every day. That's part of your sprint that you're doing as part of your campaign that you're rolling out. Working on your manager with that. But then really saying, you know, instead of doing 100 calls or whatever it might be today, we're going to go less and we're going to expect those to convert better because you're being more targeted, you're being more personalized, and you're, you're playing in the field that we expect to convert better.

I gotcha. All right, well, let's dig into some of these topics. But Sam, any— um, because I want— I'd love to hear all the changes you made, but on the SDR, anything that would be helpful to other folks in terms of a KPI change, like a a discrete change that you made that you think other people could adopt?

Well, I think just taking maybe 30 seconds and walking through, um, the sequencing here. I think March 16th, I think, is when it really hit the fan for us. It was that week. Um, and then we made a bunch of changes April 1st. So we had a couple weeks there to learn a lot. And, um, what we did basically April 1st was we went through and we did like pandemic lead scoring.

Um, starting to slow me down because I haven't done pandemic lead scoring that way. You call that pandemic lead scoring?

Pandemic account scoring. Exactly.

So yes, okay, and how does this work, pandemic account scoring?

Well, they're gonna, they're gonna be certain verticals, and then just slow me down just because I think it'll help.

By account scoring, I mean Brex has a lot of customers, so you, you literally went through the— I mean, you have— I don't know how big your team is, tell us, but you went through every single potential account and scored them manually.

No, so it was, uh, we, we thought we have about 80 folks in the sales org, um, split between sales development, sales, and then, um, relationship management. What we did was we looked at, again, we had a couple weeks of data and we knew which verticals were being disproportionately impacted by this event. Um, nonprofit is a good example. So nonprofits, a lot of events and a lot of fundraising. And that stuff wasn't, you know, really on fire or doing well, uh, during, during this time period. Tech is surprisingly, um, an area that's doing really well. And then even within tech, at least for us, even within tech, there are these sort of like sub-verticals. So on one end of the spectrum, you've got folks that are in the work-from-home productivity space, and then on the other end of the spectrum, you've got folks in the travel space, and then there's everything in between. Yeah, and we really wanted to focus on the businesses that we thought had the highest probability of being interested in something like this. Um, the next thing we did was we changed resources dramatically, um, moved basically everybody out of nonprofit, as I said, onto tech. So a lot of resource changes. We're fortunate that we didn't have to do anything like a layoff, but, um, people are in different roles selling into different types of companies today based on where the demand is. And then we started on messaging, and messaging wanted to be really specific to cost savings. Um, we found something that works. We can save companies $100,000 on their AWS bill. Everybody wants to save $100,000 on their AWS bill right now, so we want to tell anybody that listens, you can save $100,000 on your AWS bill. And demos are actually as high as they've ever been in late-stage tech.

Got it. Okay. So, and then, so just, and just to help. So, so you did things that a lot of people would like to do. You repurposed a lot of your team into verticals that are growing. Um, the third category was like account maintenance or account support, right? Or I forget what you did. Did you repurpose them or are they still roughly covering the same accounts, even if they're in the struggling categories?

What we've started to do is we've started to introduce relationship managers a lot earlier in the process. And so it's, it's even more focused on making customers successful right now.

Got it. Got it. All right. So let's tie that in and get some— because the first one, this is a— this, this slide's a bit of an eyesore, but it's good that you tied the next one. I'll try to simplify the next one. Is this— in many of us, and I think you and you and Atlassian Trailblazer are probably seeing it for similar but not the same reasons— growth in the top of the funnel. Right? Growth in the pipeline. So you said the nonprofits and travel and events are struggling, but at Brex— but as soon as we said we can save $100 grand in tech, uh, there's a lot of things coming in. But, but sometimes like it's confusing because not all these deals are going to close, right? And, and people get— I— there's so many stories, everyone hears it, of, oh my God, my, my opportunities have grown. But I don't think they're false positives, but the sales cycles may be longer, right? Or there may be caution. So how I think even in all, all except the most impacted categories, I think people are seeing some version of this, some segment where at least nominal leads are up 300%. How do you cope with this? Kristen, you have any thoughts on it? Because you must be seeing it across the board, and they could— I think tire kickers is the wrong term, right? But it's something, it's confused because the metrics have changed, as Sam said, right? The metrics have changed on top of the phone.

Yeah, I mean, I think you, you need to still look at what has obviously worked before, and you want to keep those scorings in place. And then I think adding that, you know, we didn't have anything nearly as catchy as pandemic scoring. But, but the concept of that, layering that on, and then I think getting into those conversations. And this is a time, and again, this is something where you put your SDR on this a lot of times, and it's such a crucial skill, and we tend to not talk about how important these folks are in the cycle, that they need to be doing really solid discovery before this is being handed off to your AEs. They really need to understand like, who is this person? What's going on at the company? You know, what process would you historically follow in a buying cycle? How has that changed? You know, things like that, where it needs to come across very sincere and very genuinely curious, but they need to really understand the lay of the land to understand. And again, combining that with that research to understand if it is somebody who's just like, I got a— I had to look at this, or I was bored because I had some extra time on my calendar, or folks that are really sincerely in it. And then in terms of if you knew your cycle was 30 days or 90 days before, you know, what, what's changing at that company? Have you guys changed any of those processes? If it's an existing customer, you know, hey, is this— is it still going to be this person or this person involved? Has anything changed along those lines? So it is, I think, at least it's a lot of discovery up front and a lot of kind of pulse checking in with the customers on that.

But is there like any sort of new, like, part, you know, SDRs can only do so much, right? And even AEs can only do so much. I, I, there's nothing worse than I hate as a, as a, as a prospect than being qualified. I hate it when I can hear that smarminess of whether I'm worth somebody's time. Yet you have to do it. I think there's almost a, there's always been a middle category, but I think it's grown, which is probably can buy, but won't be tonight, right? It's going to be tougher. How do you treat those folks like human beings? Like, this matters to them, right? But it, but it's no longer as exciting a lead to, to, to the SDR, but it's real, it's bona fide, it's going to close. Is there any change in this middle so I don't feel like I'm thrown out the door the minute I don't make the commission for this quarter?

For the rep? Yeah, I mean, I think that again, it has to be a conversation where you look at what those those KPIs and OKRs are. And I think, you know, for us, it goes back to that conversation with retention too, which is how do you treat somebody? What's their takeaway? What's the feeling that they have? And I think, you know, you still have to get those folks in, give them the demo, let them see what they can see, keep tabs on them. You know, I think you have to treat them, at least in my opinion, you still have to treat them like they're an exciting prospect, but you have to be able to manage that in what you're working so that it doesn't, you know, overtake the things that are more urgent. But we don't know when this is going to end, right? And so you don't want to burn somebody and then all of a sudden, you know, this, this clears up much sooner or goes later, whatever it might be. But, you know, I think it's— we can't assume that it's going to be a year until they buy or 18 months until they buy. I think things are moving so quickly, we have to treat everybody if they're qualified, right, as best as we can qualify, you know, how the best we can. And then if they're not, we have to figure out a good way to still get them what they need in a way that doesn't waste the time of of the reps or the customer.

Well, Kristen, let me ask you one follow-up, and then Sam, I really want to hear how you've changed things here. But Kristen, is it— challenge me on this— but in categories that are growing in interest, right, of which, you know, I'm sure Trello and Atlassian segments as well. I mean, you have to say you have categories that are impacted and categories that are on fire. But if you think about an SDR or an AE at top of the funnel, if they're in a good category, shouldn't they— shouldn't you almost be forcing them for a KPI to be doing more demos and more calls? Don't you almost have to torture them and make them work? I put harder in quotes because otherwise people aren't going to get enough attention, are they?

Yeah, right. I think it does depend on how have you done your segmentation? Are you vertically segmented? Or are you, you know, what are your reps focusing on? And so I think, yes, if somebody's in a field and we're getting more leads on them, and they're their conversion rates should be at least held true to that. If not, you know, look for an increase off of that. I think depending on how far along your team is at to look at your, look at your top performer, see what kind of impact they're having. It's not like that person suddenly stopped knowing how to convert or, and see, like, can you, can you level set off of somebody like that? You might be getting more leads, but their, the quality is going down. And if you have somebody who has that historical rate, you can start to understand how that's impacting things.

I'll just give you one personal example, and Sam, I want to hear what you say. The minute, whatever it was, March 15th, we went, we went, whenever we had to postpone this Astro Annual, reschedule it, every single vendor that did virtual events, their SDR inbounded like 8,000 times. I mean, my inbox, I can't, I'm already overwhelmed with email. Literally, there's only so many vendors. It's a small category, like top to bottom of my Gmail was inbounded, right? Everyone wanted to do it. By the time we got back to them, like our dust had settled in a week and a half. Only one, only one SDR would even take our call. Only one. Now think about it, it's obvious why, right? They went from having no business to relatively small startups, literally. And we're— Zapster's not tiny, okay? Like, if you scored us properly, we're not Salesforce, okay? You could probably charge Salesforce like $10 million for like a $50 piece of software, okay? But we have some budget and we have a brand, and if we promote you to 10,000 20,000 CEOs and founders, there's downstream benefits, right? Only one vendor responded to us, right? And I'm not even being critical. It's a telling moment of like this top of funnel weird discovery thing. Like if you don't properly handle the segments that are growing, people are gonna have a worse experience today. They could have a much, much worse experience. I didn't know, like Trello's cool, but like I didn't know, whoa, I need help. Like my team, I'm not saying it's literally happening in Atlassian, but this is my example— literally one vendor out of like 15, 2, okay, 2, 2, I can think about it, but just crickets, crickets, never had it, right? Amelia inbounded this one vendor, like she emailed them like 10 times, not a single person responded. So just a thought, I don't have the answer, but I do think everyone has to be cognizant of there are segments where they— there's overload, right? Not just underload, and the prospects deserve that attention. right? So anyhow, just my experience. But Sam, what are you, what are you doing here at top of the funnel? Then we can rotate to the next topic.

Well, I think, um, at a minimum, touching on the experience that you just shared, Jason, um, making it easier to buy, it sounds like, for, um, the businesses that weren't returning your, your calls. I mean, that, that's to your point, like, Zester's not a small company, um, and even if—

well, company, not a small organization though, right? I'm sorry, not a small, small company, like if you got your, if you got your, your data, but not a small organization, right?

Totally. Um, to your point, you have budget, um, especially for, for the types of things that you were looking into purchasing. Um, and so, uh, I think making it easier to purchase the product for that segment at a minimum is something people should be focused on. I think for us, um, we, we do a lot of qualification at the top, and so by the time that we're outbounding to somebody we almost know that they are— or not almost, we know that they are qualified. And so Jason, you talked a lot about, um, this like experience going through SDRs and spending time with them and going through this like qualification cycle almost before you get to a demo. We bypass that entirely, um, just based off of who we're reaching out to. As soon as somebody agrees to talk with us, the SDR's directive and their KPIs are around scheduling qualified meetings. And we want the first experience to be really focused on the customer. So there isn't much qualification on our end outside of some basic like discovery on the call. But the first, the first sort of human in-person interaction, with the exception of a cold call, is going to be on with a sales rep talking about their business and hopefully with the qualified company.

Got it. So there's no two-step pro— there's no classic two-step process at Brax?

Not really, not really a two-step process outside of the SDR doing outbound in scheduling of the meeting, but there's not an initial sort of like discovery call that takes place with the SDR as a gate to get to an AE.

Got it. Um, okay. It's cool. Um, we'll keep chatting. I think we talked a little bit about this, um, changing communication. Feel free to share any other stories on changing communications, because I think those are frankly some of the very most interesting ones. Let's chat if you guys are— what you guys are thinking about this just for a couple minutes on customers that are struggling, right? And maybe, maybe, maybe we've picked two case studies where it's a smaller issue than others because Brex has some variable revenue. And for Trello and Atlassian, you have a bunch of different impacts, but how are you dealing with downgrades and pauses? How are you dealing with customers that are struggling? And when folks don't like the revenue hit, but the logo matters. I know we hit this, but any actionable examples of how you're dealing with that, with shrinking accounts?

Yeah, I'm happy to jump in with just two thoughts that come to mind. So the first is our revenue is sort of two different types. We've got travel and entertainment, which has taken a big hit. And then we've got purchasing card, which is the typical marketing spend, servers, anything that's like recurring card spend. We're hyper-focused on the purchasing card type spend. We mentioned at the top that we can actually say move things over from ACH to credit card, and there's a benefit to doing so. I think one other, just one other sort of tactical example, um, or potentially something that might be helpful for others. If you can think of something that your, your business is uniquely positioned to be able to help with that has no benefit, no sort of revenue benefit to your company, and you do that for customers, it's really, really meaningful. So for us, um, we were able to help our customers, hundreds of them, get PPP loans, um, when they were struggling with their other banking partners. And for us, it actually created a bunch of additional work. We had to manage the process, we proactively reached out to customers. But by doing that, and it showed up immediately in NPS comments, people were just really thankful that we went out of our way to do something like that. So if you can find something that your business is uniquely positioned to be able to help with for your customers, that doesn't necessarily benefit your business, really try and take advantage of that because It's been extremely impactful for us.

Yeah. And just to follow up on that as a teachable moment, how do you— that's a great story. How do you implement it? Because your average AE that's on a quota does not want to spend her time doing PPP loans, right? Even if it benefits the company and even the sales org. So how did you— who'd you pick to do it and how'd you roll it out?

It was done through a combination of just automated email messaging to all of our customers. And then when folks would express sales or marketing, or which department—

I know it sounds specific, but who did that? Who, who said, you know, I'm going to do the work internally? I'm going to do it.

It was a combination of, of product marketing, marketing, and then relationship management. So, um, depending on the size of the company, there are different people that are sort of responsible for that type of communication.

Got it. Okay. Um, Yeah, that's a good anecdote. And Chris, on this last one, 'cause this may be most on point for you, it might not, upgrades. Upgrades is like, this is the secret sauce to SaaS, recurring revenue, getting more seats, selling more products, tapping into the Atlassian, the wonderful Atlassian suite. What does Confluence do again? How are you thinking through upgrades, which, and yet being thoughtful about the current macro environment? Any tilt, any change March 15th there?

I mean, not honestly, not much. You know, for us, I think that, you know, again, a lot of the upgrades that we look at are things that help people work remotely. It might be things like moving to the cloud, which would allow you to access things faster, easier, instead of having to VPN back into your server or upgrading for better control or more, you know, power-ups, things like that. And Trello, if you want to integrate. And so, you know, a lot of that messaging goes back to the problems people are experiencing. But I think in general, like that, that push in that conversation, you know, I think what Sam said about, you know, trying to help folks out where you can, you know, I think people remember that. And so again, it goes back to like, if they can't do that upgrade now, but we know that they're a good candidate for it, you know, having them have that good experience so that in 6 months, 12 months, whatever it is, we can have that conversation again. That's really meaningful. And people remember that and will look to you before they look to somebody else. I think if they've had that experience.

All right, that's good. I think we hit a little bit of this, but just tell me if you have anything to add in terms of segmenting customers, having the right follow-up and messaging for different companies. Do you— have you guys, um, changed any of your, like, like specifically changed different goals for different segments? Logo versus churn versus upsell. Is it— is it— are there 3 categories? I know we hit this a little bit, um, Or even what has the role— in any cases, have the interface between sales and customer success changed? A lot of folks are trying to recruit more and more sales into helping out with CS.

Any—

no need, we could go on to the next topic, but any specific learnings here on changing in the sort of post-sales KPIs?

I mean, I would just say that I think, and we kind of talk about it on our side as like pod collaboration, I think that pod collaboration with CS and sales, you know, understanding loyalty, that is going to be, I think it was important before this happened in general. And I think those teams don't always necessarily talk enough together, but I think it's, it's really important. And, you know, for my teams, we're looping in those groups as we talk about account planning and account strategy, it informs outbound, it informs inbound, making sure that we know completely what we know about that account from all the different players inside of that. And that might be a technical account manager, it might be a partner, it might be an SE, But involving those and the CS to sales side, those lines are just blurring more and more in my opinion every day across every company I interact with. And I think those two teams have to work really closely together, especially in a situation like this.

Thank you. And sort of reinforcing that, I think we have put additional emphasis on onboarding right now because onboarding onto a new product, issuing new cards, all of those things is likely more challenging in the remote environment. And so we've added resources to making customers successful right out of the gate.

So just slow down for a minute, 'cause that is an interesting thing I should have thought more about. A lot of things are much more challenging in a remote environment, right? There's elements, I mean, a lot of Trello and Atlassian, I mean, I've been using Trello since the '80s. A lot of this is built for this, but a lot, a lot of dealing with finance and the cross-functional thing is harder remote for some folks, right? So what is that? How do you implement that, Sam? Is there anything, any sort of teachable moment or actionable thing for that? How do you get that extra time? I guess the question is, how do you find that extra time? And it's great to say we're gonna spend more time onboarding, but your headcount's fixed. Where did you reposition the time or repurpose the time?

Yeah, so for us, we typically had new customers sort of ownership with the account executive for a period of time, and then a transition at 60 or 90 days into the experience on Brex. We moved that handoff point at the point of approval. So the minute that a qualifying customer is approved on Brex, they receive an introduction to the relationship manager, and there's this like overlap period where the AE and RM are both working with the customer and making sure that they're successful in things like integrating to their ERP, migrating existing merchants, issuing cards, whatever else they need. Um, and before—

is bringing, bringing the CSM or whatever you call it at your company in earlier.

That's right.

Brought her or him in much earlier in the process. Um, and did you— what kind of— was there any quick team level change you had to do for those? Sales probably didn't care as long as they didn't think the person deluded their effort to get a check. But did you, how did you, what did you, was it a one email thing or did you have to train the success team to come in earlier?

We have an awesome enablement person that has put together a big training program on this. We've rolled out new messaging that makes the introduction, what the process for the customer is. There's, you know, the first 30-minute implementation call? How do we think about, like, you know, too many cooks in the kitchen? So we, we were pretty thoughtful about this, but the ultimate change is around just more dedication or more time being allocated to our customers at onboarding than was done previously. Okay, good.

I want to hit this one last topic so that we can take some questions live rather than later. 'Cause this is quotas, quotas and AEs, right? March 15th is when things changed. March 15th at like 3:01 PM, everything on my LinkedIn was quarterly. Every single thing on my LinkedIn feed, right? Every single, 'cause I don't know what your LinkedIn's look like, but for some reason mine's all revenue professionals. Like my LinkedIn's just full of them talking about everything, right? Everything's about my, my, you gotta talk, Jason, we need quota relief tonight, you gotta talk to all the CEOs, we need quota relief. So thoughts on that, and then these 3 questions, and then the second one which I really would like to hear what both of you say, 'cause both of you touched on it, but I wanna talk about quota relief. What can we learn from top performers today that is different than 45 days ago? right? Because top performers are always— we, we learn so much from them, right? They're like the future to me, right? They're always the future. They're— whether it's learning new ways to sell, whether it's what the organization is capable of, um, is the gap growing, is it shrinking, is it weird? But let's dive just into these two topics so we can take a couple questions.

Kristen, you jump in.

Okay, I was waiting to see who wanted to go first. Um, Yeah, I mean, I can probably combine those statements, right? Which is that I think every salesperson wants to jump right to quota relief. So the fact that your feed blew up is— They want it every time it rains outside or, you know, traffic was heavy. So I get that. That's pathetic. I am, I am. I, you know, I've been there too, so I get it. But I think that quota relief is one of those things, you know, as a sales leader outside of this, what I've always said to my folks as I've built up teams is that, you know, we will do what's right by you. The— if you are struggling through no fault of your own, right? Like, we don't want you feeling that pain. We want you committed to building the business. And what that means is if we're wrong, we'll fix it. And again, outside of this situation, and that goes for like comp plans, if people are like, this comp plan's insane, you know, if we're wrong, we'll fix it. But we have to go now assuming it's right. And I think that's important with the quota relief comment, because I think you're right, it depends on the industry. And some people are seeing a lot more, some people aren't, it just depends across the board. But the last thing I personally want to do is say, let's cut it before we even know what's happening and, and demotivate or freak people out or whatever it might be. I think it has to be an open dialogue. I think that honesty has to be there. But I don't think a lot of people, at least I don't know around the world, but I think a lot of people, it's only been a month, right? I don't think we have good baselines of are going to be. And I think we have to say, you charge. And if we're doing the KPIs we should be doing, and we're putting the effort in, we will make sure you're okay. And that goes back to, I think, the top performers. You know, I mentioned it earlier, they didn't suddenly stop and forget how to sell on March 13th or 15th or whatever day it was, right? Like, they're good canaries in the mine, you know, to say that it's a problem outside of what we're doing. It's not like all of a sudden our process broke. You know, you might have to iterate off of that. But if those folks If folks, their conversion rates had always been at 5% and suddenly they're at 3%, it's not like they forgot how to do it. And maybe that's the kind of edit we need to see across the team. And then you adjust quotas or whatever it might be to accommodate to that. But look at how the people who've given you a year, year plus of data have started to perform. You know, that's a good indication of what's happening.

I think Kristin nailed it on sort of the, the approach on, uh, Quota relief, we're, we're fairly transactional. And so, um, come the sort of period of March 16th through the end of the month, we knew what the hit was going to be. And, um, we did go back and adjust for the month of March. It was totally outside of rep control, um, and so we wanted to make people whole on that. I think the good news, at least for our businesses, we seem to have made like a sort of full recovery. In fact, in certain verticals actually accelerating in the month of April. And so the hit in the quota relief was a bit short-lived for us. And on the top performer gap, it's higher right now, the gap between top performers and low performers. And it's because I think when you're in the office, people are in the office for a number of hours a day, they're sort of there, they're doing activity. And at home, you, you don't have the reinforcement of people around you doing activity. You don't have your manager right next to you. And so you have to be really self-sufficient during this time period and hold yourself accountable. And so the things that we're doing to mitigate for this, we're monitoring activity more closely. And one just good pulse check that I do, just look at calendars. You'll know the people that are being really aggressive and scheduling lots of meetings by how busy their calendars are.

Got it. But, but so that's always helpful. But, but how does that interact with the top performer and helping the lower performers when they're stuck at home?

Well, I think one way of identifying the people that are, that are being self-sufficient during this time period and really making sure that their performance isn't suffering is by making sure that their activity remains high and that they're staying busy by having calendars with lots of things on them. So I think that's one way of sort of identifying a symptom potentially and where you may need to check in with somebody.

Got it. Let me grab, in our last couple minutes, I want to check out all this, but let me grab a few questions from the group. And this one, I think you guys more have opinions than data given the nature of your products, but do bigger discounts help more today?

I can't answer that.

We don't discount. Go ahead, Kristen.

I was gonna say, we don't discount, so I can't answer.

I think anything that helps with a company's bottom line makes— resonates more today. And so Jason, you gave the example of like a 6-month free trial with one of— I think it was Gorjus. I imagine that's impactful for them. And for us, it's, you know, the AWS credits and it's getting additional rebate by moving your card spend over. So certainly anything that has to do with finances seems to be resonating more today than it has previously. Because even this $100,000 AWS thing, it's crazy that we would send this to people and they wouldn't care as much. But in this environment specifically, everyone wants it.

Got it. I think there's a bunch of questions. I know we already chatted about it, but it might be worth a last minute or two, and we'll try to do one more and then we'll wrap it up. A bunch of folks are asking how you really help SDRs understand verticals and subs they target today. Like any, any, like any particular tools or weekly trainings, or is it their boss? Have you, like, how do you really get these, these— and I call them kids, they could be 70— but how do you really get these kids to finally understand these verticals and subs that they're targeting?

Yeah, I think that it's, it's a combination of things. And so, you know, doing like lunch and learns with our experts, if you have TAMs or SEs who've been vertical-specific, or salespeople that have been that before, getting your enablement team engaged if you have a group like that. I think, you know, things like, we use Gong, being able to listen to people's calls with vertical-specific tags so that they can see what are the messages that are resonating, using, you know, tools to do the research on the PR, like TagTarget, what are those folks looking at, you can definitely go all those ways. But I think quick digestible bits of information on a regular basis, like 25-minute, like grab a cup of coffee, we're going to give you a primer on this and then come back in 3 days and we're going to go with the next step. Like people are busy and we don't want them off the phones, we don't want them off email, whatever it is. But you got to have those educational things be those TL;DRs that they can get to really quickly and you got to move on.

I'll go with sort of like a counterintuitive comment here, which is we, we generally like to keep things pretty simple. And I think if we— the more sort of educated, um, somebody is on a space and the more that they try and get involved in sort of like conversation that goes deeper about what's going on in a vertical, it's especially at the SDR level, um, that can potentially get in the way of the ultimate goal, which is trying to schedule a demo. And so one thing potentially to be mindful of, well, I think it's important to be educated on the companies that you're selling into. You also don't want to be almost too educated, if that makes sense.

Yeah, I would agree with that.

Yeah.

All right, last one, because I want to make sure folks can, can jump off. But both of you have a— I'm going to tweak this question a little bit. Um, both of you obviously have freemium elements to your products that are critical to it. Free elements as well. A lot of folks are all of a sudden trying to roll out a free offer, right? Or a more freemium offer, all of a sudden do this. What's your top tip today to making that authentic and making it work, making free/freemium actually work? What's the top tip that you've learned for COVID-19 plus?

I would say with freemium in general, the biggest thing is to make sure you're not just giving someone an extended trial where, you know, if they get to like 5 views of data or, you know, the fourth card that they're adding on the board or whatever, they really just have to upgrade to it. So making sure that the offering you have, it can be a scaled-down version, but make sure it's not really just that you've given somebody a 14-day trial and it breaks after that without just saying the word 14-day trial. I think people who do that with freemium, those are the ones that read the most insincere.

Yeah, I worry about that all the time because I see those all over social media. Now we have a 30-day trial. Come spend weeks of your, of your scarce time using our product for free for 30 days.

Yeah, sort of related. First thing that comes to mind is I would say invest in making sure that people are successful on the free trial. And so it can almost be a negative if you give somebody access to the product but don't set them up for success on it. And Jason, you spent some time talking about like AE compensation. That may be something that you tie in during this period that if you can get a certain number of people on a free trial and they reach some certain milestone with that trial, that that's actually a KPI that you're tracking towards. And so just offering the product but not necessarily making sure that people are successful while using it is probably a miss.

Yep. All right, I've got a bunch more questions, but Chris and Sam, we should go let you go and work with your sales teams in these crazy times. Thanks to everyone. We'll collect the rest of the questions and we'll find a bunch of answers. And you guys have been great and we'll see everyone else during the course of the day. Thanks everybody.

Thanks for having me. Thank you. Yeah, thanks.