In this interview excerpt, Veeva CEO Peter Gassner explains that revenue at Veeva is driven by people, emphasizing the need to hire talent now to generate revenue four to five years later. He cites the launch of Veeva's largest product area yet, for which they hired 30 people this year, projecting it will become a $100+ million business in the future. Gassner also discusses sales team sizing, questioning the traditional bell‑shaped distribution of sales performance and warning that long lead times for sales reps to become productive make attrition especially damaging.
There's sort of two models that people come and ask. Does revenue drive headcount or does headcount drive revenue? And it sounds like you're squarely in the former camp, that you drive headcount from revenue.
No, no, I actually drive revenue from headcount, but I make sure I have enough stocked away. Any revenue that's generated in Veeva is because of people. Full for sure. Yeah. And you gotta, you gotta hire those. If you want revenue 4 years from now, you gotta hire those people now.
Yeah.
Right. We're starting up a brand new, probably our biggest product area to date. And this year we hired 30 people. Those people produce real good revenue for Veeva 4 or 5 years down the road. That's when that'll be a $100+ million business, but you gotta hire 'em now. So Revenue follows the people.
How do you think, related to that, how do you think about how many of your sales team should perform? Like how do you think about that? Do you believe in that bell-shaped distribution? In terms of salespeople? Yeah. If you're waiting 4 years for them to perform, it's terrible if you have that attrition, isn't it?
Yeah. No, I'm really thinking more about the product, the ingredients and the product people. That's like a soup that has a— They start to hit their stride. A product has a 4-year cooking cycle, right? It's the soup. They're like, oh my god. I want to eat it 4 years from now, I got to start cooking it now? Really? That's not good. But yeah, product takes a long time. With sales, you know, we have a philosophy that we say we don't overcover. So we want to leave top-line revenue on the table. We don't want to get all the top-line revenue. Because if we push all the way for that, we will get some inefficiencies, and that's not so good. But also, we will get bad customer feeling. Yeah, because a desperate rep will do desperate things, and the reps in front of the customer, and they'll feel it. You don't want those desperate things, do you? No, because for us, we have many customers that are, you know, they're over— well over $20 million a year customers from us. Do we want them ever having any relationships, right? Yeah, this is— these are 20-year relationships. Do we want somebody in there saying, I got to close this thing on my quarter because of my commission, and I don't really care that you're paying us $20 million a year. So you, the way you do that is you, you don't, you sacrifice top line revenue and you don't put too many reps on there. So then the rep is not desperate.
