Scaling a SaaS Sales Team While Building Culture with Figma's VP of Sales, Scott Pugh

My name is Scott Pugh. I'm the VP of Sales and GM of Figma here in APAC, and one of the cultural values at Figma is about building community. So really pleased to be here and give what I've learned, give a little bit back to the SaaS community from what I've learned over the years of building SaaS sales teams here. Yeah, I'd like to call it out. I'm sure there's a lot of people in the room here that could get up and do a presentation like this and have learned a lot from your years, and I look forward to networking and learning with you all as well. And yeah, I just want to call out a couple of the people that I've learned a lot from my career. I've got Pierre Belin and Dan Dackam, two people that I've followed at the last three companies, and a lot of what I've shared today I've learned from these guys as well. Before I share my story, I want to get a bit more of an understanding of people in the room and and the companies that you work for, and their location. So if you can just raise your hands, and if the company you work for, or the majority of your port codes if you're a VC, if you are based in Southeast Asia? OK, there's a few there. In Greater China region? No? ANZ? India? There's a good few from India. Any from EMEA? Any of the companies with headquarters in EMEA? Okay, and any from North America? Okay, just no one from North America. And the reason I ask that is that the majority of my experience has come from helping US companies open up in Asia Pacific. And so yeah, I'm gonna share a bit. And what we're gonna talk about today is recruitment, enablement, and building culture. And it's something that US companies actually do a really, really good job at. So I'd like to share some of these learnings. Bit about my story. So I started working in SaaS around 11 years ago, and I started working at LinkedIn. Any LinkedIn alumni in the crowd? Eh, sweater over there, nice one. So yeah, I joined in 2012. Prior to that, I'd been working in media and online media for many years. And yeah, this is a picture here of me and my old boss Adam Gregory on the first day of the Hong Kong office. We launched the Hong Kong office there. And now I know what you're thinking. There's something eerily familiar about that photo, right? Yeah. It's very similar, isn't it? It's eerily similar. Now, I know what you're also thinking. Did he honestly just liken himself to Steve Jobs? No, definitely not. I just wanted to call out that Adam Gregory, my old boss, is a doppelgänger for Steve Wozniak. So I like— he's just as handsome, yeah. But yeah, we had amazing, amazing 7 years at LinkedIn. And I think I was managing the LTS Talent Solutions business and working with the recruitment and staffing company. We grew to a team of 20 people, over 20 million ARR, and it was very formative for me in terms of learning about building culture in companies. And there's a lot that I'll share today that I learned from, from that experience. 2019, I joined Mixpanel, leading product analytics company, the leader in the region, I'd say. There might be someone speaking later that would contest that, but yeah, leader in the region. And we started with a team of like just 7 people in 2019, and we scaled to over 50 in the 3 and a half 4 years that I was there. When I joined, we were around 12% of global ARR here in APAC, and by the end, finished up the end of this year with 20% of global ARR. So with real hyper growth through 300% revenue over those years, really fun ride. And shout out to the Mixpanel crew over here. I can see a couple of ex-Mixpanelers there, yes. And so end of last year, 4 months ago, I got the opportunity to join Figma to help launch the APAC business for Figma. And for those of you who don't know, we our design UI/UX design software, but really what we're doing is transforming the way companies build products from brainstorming, ideation, whiteboarding, through to the design, through to the handoff to the development, and in a really collaborative, unbelievable transformational platform. So incredible tool, and we're building an incredible team here. There's a couple of the Figma crew in the crowd here as well. And so we've got 10 people on the ground now. We're going to be scaling to 50 by the end of this year. So really, really exciting journey. Many of you would have heard about the imminent acquisition from Adobe, and obviously Jason M. Lemkin mentioned it earlier as well. I had nothing to do with that, unfortunately. I can't claim to have had any influence on that. It went through before I joined. But I'm really happy to be part of the next stage of the growth story for Figma. So today, really keen to talk to you all about how my experience of scaling SaaS teams whilst building culture And it's broken down into 3 areas, starting with the recruitment, how to hire the best talent to scale your sales organization, how to enablement and how to set those, that team up for success and invest in their professional growth. And finally, but probably most importantly, building a culture and developing subcultures within sales that enables the team to successfully scale. And so we'll kick off just talking about the recruitment piece. And there are two types of SaaS companies, those that are either a category creator or they're a challenger of an incumbent technology. And in either scenario, a lot of the time you can't find the— you can't hire from a competition. So if you're a category creator, there is no competition to hire for. So you need to be really creative on the type of profiles that you hire. That you hire. Same if you're a challenger. You don't necessarily— unless you're Salesforce with Oracle, you don't really want to hire from the company you're trying to disrupt. At LinkedIn, for example, we were changing the job board business with our talent solution, but we didn't really hire people from job boards because they were transactional salespeople, and we really needed solutions-based SaaS salespeople. So we had to really think broader around the type of talent. Similarly, at Figma, there really isn't sort of a competitive technology really within our space, and we don't like to hire people from sort of adjacent technologies. So what I like to be able to do is actually think about some of the personality and the startup skills and the softer skills to be able to hire from. And a couple of things to point out here is just around the grit and resilience are really important. Important to me, and they should be for any, especially startup SaaS salespeople, people that can deal with rejection, people that can go through tough situations and be able to bounce back through them. And this hiring profile should really define the type of hiring process you do and the type of questions and the kind of, that you ask of candidates. Diversity is really important when scaling your teams, and for me what this means is representing the customers that you serve or that you aspire to serve. And here in the Asia-Pacific region, obviously an extremely diverse region covering many, many different, many different geographies, ethnicities, cultures, and yeah, it's important to represent those. But diversity within gender, as I said, within ethnicity, but I think an important The most important one is introvert-extrovert. No one wants to work in a team where there's a group of extroverts all shouting over each other, so that's a really good balance to have. And in addition to that, educational background, sexual orientation. There is, however, one diversity that you definitely don't want in your organization, and that's positivity and negativity. If there is any negativity within your business, you need to cut that out. It can be like a virus, and it can bring the entire team down. And a way that I'd identify this is through the recruiting process, making sure that you're asking questions around— and if any candidate ever gives negative feedback on their prior companies or their prior boss, immediate red flag. And it's something that would mean that I'd discount them from the hiring process. So moving on to hiring process and your recruitment partner. I probably spend 30% of my time recruiting at the moment. We're in, we're in hyper, hyper growth mode. And if I was to— and having a, an exclusive recruitment partner, either in-house or an RPO, but someone that's exclusively helping you, will make sure that they are focused on the outcome and only delivering candidates to you that are the right fit for your company. If you're working with contingency recruitment companies, they're focused on a fee. They're focused on getting a deal done. And so having an exclusive partner that you can really work very closely with, that can understand your hiring profile deeply, will make sure that you minimize the amount of time you spend interviewing. So I probably reject 5% or 10% of the candidates that both my recruiter, in-house recruiter at Mixpanel, we used and that works with us. And we use a company called Hire as our RPO for Figma. And my rejection rate for that first interview is very, very low. I think getting the right hiring panel in place is important, the right questions around the hiring profile that I mentioned earlier, doing really in-depth background checks and back-channel background checks. Often the referees that a candidate will give They're generally always going to be there, you know, they're always going to give positive feedback, they're hand-chosen. Use your network to find out what they really are like to work with, to get a 360 view of the candidate. And then finally for me, it's around creating an exceptional candidate experience. We talk a lot about creating great experience for our customers, and I believe that we should do so for our candidates as well. We want a candidate that even if they've been unsuccessful in the process to be able to go and speak to their friends, their network, and say, spoke to Figma, it wasn't successful, but really like the company, like the product, like the team. You should definitely go and speak to them as well. It's going to really help your employer brand. And then hiring talent magnets, hiring people that have a track record of bringing people with them to their new companies. And that people follow. As I mentioned, my last 3 companies I've worked at, I followed people there. Establishing a really generous referral fee is a great way to sort of fuel that as well. We offer like around $5,000, very generous, around $5,000 US referral fee. I think we did the same at Mixpanel. 20% of our hires at Figma are from referrals. And the team, my initial team that we've built in Asia Pacific, around 60% have been from my personal network as well. Now, there's been— it's a pretty tough time in the SaaS industry at the moment, and I think a lot of companies are overhiring at the moment. And actually, when I joined Mixpanel, I remember my first day, I expected to hire around— it was around 10 to 14. I was in my interview process. Build the sales team too initially for APAC. And on my first day, boss sat down and he said, you need to hire 22 salespeople and you need to hire them tomorrow. And I was like, okay, well, it's a tough hiring market. And, and then I— and then at that point we didn't have any marketing, we didn't have SDR, we didn't have enablement, we didn't have any partnership program set up. And so really I— it was a concern for me that we weren't going to be able to help these people be successful. One of the recommendations here is to like stagger your recruitment process. What we do at Figma is we, we set an annual plan or like a hiring plan, but then we only enable— we only release that plan every quarter for the, for the two quarters ahead. So it means that we can assess where the business is, especially in this constantly changing market. Are we— is it the right time to add on capacity going into into the next quarter. OK, moving on. Enablement. You've hired the team. How do you set them up for success and invest in their professional growth? I love this quote. I'm sure many of you have seen it before. CFO asked, what happens if we invest in developing our people and they leave us? What happens if we don't and they stay? And I've been lucky to work for some incredible companies that have invested in my enablement over the years. And actually at LinkedIn, for Shweta, remember, the first day you join LinkedIn, they tell you, when you leave LinkedIn— so on the very first day, they're talking about when you're going to leave the company— we want you to go away having changed the trajectory of your career. So we want you to leave the company being a better professional than the day you joined. And yeah, it's a really nice way to think. And it's very pragmatic, right? You're not going to spend— We're not in Japan. We don't work for the same company for our entire life. And so it's a really upfront social contract that you're going to leave eventually. Hey, let's make this the best experience that we possibly can. And so investing in the enablement process is a really important thing to do. And part of that is hiring sales ops and hiring an enablement team really early on. Then investing in the right tools. To be able to help that enablement. And so at Mixpanel, and early doors when you don't have a really robust enablement program, you might use a sort of project management software, or we use Notion at Mixpanel to build out an enablement plan. At early days at Figma, we had Asana to be able to go through the process. We've kind of moved on here at Figma now. We use WorkRamp, and we've got a very clearly built out enablement program that, that covers like the, the product, it covers the, the, the market and on all of our customers as well. And it's like a 1-month onboarding program to set people up. I'm also a massive fan of revenue intelligence tools. We use Gong at Mixpanel, we use Chorus at Figma, but this enables people to actually go and listen to calls and be able to learn from what some of the other salespeople have done. As a sales leader, it's really good to truly analyze deals on whether they're real or not and to be able to go a bit more in depth. But yeah, big, big fan of those, those products as well. As you're scaling quickly, I, I have like 10 reports at the moment, and, and it's difficult to be there for, for everyone all the time and to be able to coach each individually. And so setting up a buddy system where you have your more tenured salespeople supporting and enabling and training your newer hires is a really good program and a scalable program to set up. It creates an opportunity for those people to, you know, learn coaching, to be able to learn leadership skills, and be able to set up for future leadership. And as I say, it just makes it really scalable. And so I recommend setting up this kind of buddy system. And then it's important to show empathetic leadership, to give room for your team to fail, to grow, to learn. I think that we're often so fast to say, oh, if you're not successful, then you may be going on a performance plan really quickly. But you really should sort of trust your hiring process. If you've hired the right people, then you need to then trust that they're going to be successful. And if they're not, there's probably some other things you need to fix in your business, whether it be product, whether it be the market they're covering, et cetera. This is going to be especially the case in enterprise, where the deal cycle can be much longer. And so focusing on both the quality and the quantity of their output and their work is really what you should be looking at. And then setting correct goals for the team, and for the sales team, and the right ramp for their quotas as well. Typically, we see like a 5-month ramp for an enterprise sales rep, and for SMB mid-market is typically around sort of 2 to 3 months. So give that room for people to sort of to grow into achieving their numbers. It's also a good idea to potentially reassess the quotas, and so maybe doing 6-month quotas, especially if you're in hypergrowth mode. Predicting a year ahead is quite difficult, so you might want to do 6 months, and then you can either reduce or increase depending on what's happening with the market and the product and the and the product-market fit. OK, last but not least, and for those that have worked with me in the past or the companies that I've worked at, we know culture is extremely, extremely— something I'm very, very passionate about. And I love this quote from Peter Drucker, culture eats strategy for breakfast. It doesn't mean you don't need strategy. It just means that without culture is absolutely absolutely useless. And at LinkedIn, Jeff Weiner joined, I think it was around 2008, and he really sort of profoundly changed what the culture of that company was. He joined when it was 400 people, and he had come from Yahoo, which is a very traditional media, online media company, who didn't really value culture and values. It was like BS. It was that stuff that was written up on the wall that no one really adhered or listened to. And then when he joined LinkedIn, he went through a process of codifying the culture and values. And bearing in mind, he wasn't the founder. Reid Hoffman talks about him as like every company has many different founding moments. And Jeff joining sort of 5 years into this lifecycle of the company, it was a founding moment. And he worked with a guy called Arvind Rajan, who was the previous GM of APAC for LinkedIn and was at HR, he ran HR at the time. And essentially what they did is they created this sort of belief system and this culture. My wife used to talk about me, about drinking the Kool-Aid that I was obsessed by. I still am, as you can tell. But essentially what it does, when you build culture, it helps democratize decision-making across the business. It builds a framework to enable people to make decisions without having to go up and ask other people. And at Figma, we've also been through a similar process. It was only 3 or 4 years ago that we recodified these culture and values. And just recently— and I talk about you need to iterate on those culture and values. And just recently, we announced our 5th culture and value, which is play. And for us, it just— I've only been at the company 4 months. But it really is a fun, playful company to work for. We just got back from our SKO in Miami, and those that were there, it was like an absolute rocking time. But also, it epitomizes the product that we sell. For anyone that's used FigJam or Figma, it's an amazing, fun, engaging, and playful product to use. So consistently iterating on your culture and values, and don't just having them be set in stone. They can evolve over time. And they change with the scale of your business and the stage of your business. Now, it's also important to align your teams around your culture and values. I think it's all very well Dylan, our CEO, setting a culture and values. Here they are, all going live by them. But it's important for the team to really take them on board and feel a certain degree of ownership with those culture and values. And when I joined Mixpanel early doors, we actually got in an external trainer, a company Explore Performance. —performance. Friend of mine, Grant Axe Rawlinson, call out to him. He's a legend. I recommend you work with him. But he's an external trainer, and he came in and he did an experiential session around decision-making using our culture and values. And we also did a breakout session going through each of our 5 culture and values at Mixpanel and defining what behavioral statement we wanted to put behind those. So it went from, OK, this is the company's culture and values. Go live by them, to actually us saying what they mean to us and having some degree of ownership over them. And what came out of that is that we actually aligned around one team as our main culture and values, and we came up with this behavioral tenet, which is to support each other to win together. And honestly, I believe that this was a really important part of our success over the last few years and continues to be. And yeah, like we, 2021, 90% of people hitting target, we delivered 110% of plan 3 years running as a region, and largely because everyone adhered to this statement that the team had come up with and bought into. It's tough out there in SaaS at the moment, isn't it? There's lots of external factors that are impacting what we do. I'm a big fan of Simon Sinek, and I don't know if you've read the book. Anyone that's read the book Leaders Eat Last, I recommend you get your hands on it. It's a great book. And he talks in the book around the concept of creating a safe space within your organization and focusing on the external factors as being the danger. And that could be macroeconomic, it can be market, it can be competitors. But essentially, you want to create an environment within your organization where you feel safe and that you feel that you're looked after by your colleagues, by your leaders. And an example of this being like before I worked in SAS, I worked in a media company in Hong Kong. And your environment can create the culture as well. And in that company, we're in the middle of Lan Kwai Fong. And in that building, all of the offices for the executives were round the outside of the office. They all had this fantastic view of the Hong Kong harbor and everything. And then all the minions were in the middle. And they were surveying over the minions. it had this really insipid culture of this dictator-style culture and honestly felt there was a certain amount of presenteeism. You couldn't leave your desk until your boss left. And it was honestly like really horrible, horrible culture. Switch that to when I joined LinkedIn and walked into this environment where it was an environment of autonomy and trust and going out and doing it. I've never worked harder in my life as an individual contributor and great experience. And similarly with the office, all of the execs' offices, although many of them worked on the floor, were actually in the center part of the building. And all of the salespeople had the window seats looking out to the amazing views. And yeah, so I think your environment can create the culture as well. Now one thing just to note on here, your work is not your family. You're not going to put your kid on a performance plan. I mean, saying that, I probably need to put mine on a performance plan to brush his teeth and go to bed on time at night, but I'm not going to fire him. Maybe. But yeah, it's important to know that, like, remember, your work isn't your family. And so as leaders, we need to lead from the front. We need to— when I was at LinkedIn, we had a leader called Mike Gamson that used to talk about, as a leader, you need to set the standard. You need to demonstrate the standard, and then you need to hold people accountable to that standard. And that goes with the culture and values. It also goes with many other things within the organization. For example, at Figma, the interview process that we do for salespeople, we do very similar for our sales leaders. So me coming on as the GM and VP of Sales of the region, I had to do a discovery and demo to our CRO. And I had to demo the product to our CRO. Likewise, our enablement, I had to go through exactly the same sales training that our account executives and account managers go through as well. Okay, now lastly, creating an environment of recognition and feedback I think is a great way to build culture. And at Mixpanel, we, every QBR, we used to actually give, put out a survey, just a Google Sheets, Google where people would vote across 4 categories, the Rookie of the Quarter, the Cross-Functional Partner, Silent Hero, and the MVP. And we used to actually get people to give verbatim feedback about each other, and it was all very positive. We used to share it with each— I used to share all of the verbatim feedback, and every quarter we'd do this, and it would create a really good environment of people recognizing and And especially people that weren't in sales, like earning big commission checks, those that were just in the supporting function, gave them the recognition. And what the— yeah, and then we would share this publicly. But I am also a great believer in giving constructive feedback as well. So I don't know if any of you have read the book Radical Candor by Kim Scott, but I highly recommend it. And really it's about— giving direct feedback, but really caring about people as well. Now with that, it's important that if you're giving constructive feedback, it needs to be in person, one-to-one. But if you're giving positive feedback, doing it externally and letting other people hear it gives the nice feels for everyone as well. Very good. So that pretty much caps what I wanted to run through today. Really, if you can combine these three areas of recruiting the best talent, enabling them to be successful, and setting and building a culture that makes people love what they do and do good work, then your sales team can be the engine for you becoming the next billion-dollar startup.