The Sales Playbook for 2022 with Co-Sell CEO Brendon Cassidy and SaaStr CEO Jason Lemkin

Hey everybody, it's Saster. I wanted to bring back one of the truly OG members of the Saster community, Brendan Cassidy, to talk a bit about sales in 2022 and beyond. Brendan and I have worked together since the dawn of SaaS. Well, not really, but for quite a long time. He was VP of Sales. He was first head of corporate sales at LinkedIn, then our head of sales back at Adobe Sign, EchoSign, then VP of Sales at $10 billion Talkdesk. And he helped build the sales teams at Gong Hackerrank, a bunch of other leaders. And today he's also co-CEO of a next-generation SaaS referral platform called Cosa, which we'll chat a little bit about. So, um, I think if you've been part of SaaStr over the years, if you came to Day Zero at SaaStr Annual this year, you've read a lot of Brendan's thoughts, which, um, I think have been many of the iconic ones in building sales teams, initially inside sales, now all sales teams. And I, I just want to use this time to catch up on, as we leave the COVID world, where the heck sales is going to be. So Brendan, thanks for joining us today.

Yeah, absolutely. Excited to hear we're leaving the COVID world too.

Well, we're at least in the next 18 months.

I think it's hard to tell from my cottage, you know, it doesn't necessarily give you kind of that macro view, but I think you're right.

Yeah, I mean, everything's changed from distributed teams to sales stacks to growth, right? It's just not the world We're not in the world, at least in cloud and SaaS, we're not in the world we were before COVID anymore, are we? It's a different world.

No, I mean, we're not. I don't know that that's just because of COVID Like, I think it's general sort of the SaaS space in general, but yeah, COVID certainly has helped accelerate some things for sure.

Yeah. So let's chat, um, let's chat a little bit first about hiring, um, because there's so many SaaS companies today doing hiring, right? Wanted to chat about a couple of things. Let's start, um, let's go with like AEs and sales teams and then talk about our classic VP of Sales like, uh, that we've been chatting about for years. Um, sales reps, what— first, let's talk about comp. Is there—

have you—

do you see inflation in sales reps' comps? And how do we pay for some of the high comp expectations of sales reps? There's only so many dollars that come in for each deal, right? How much of that $50K deal can Can we give more than all of it to the sales reps? Like, how are you seeing inflation expectations going on with sales teams, if at all?

Yeah, I mean, I think— I don't think there's any secret, you know, there's no— it's not an accident that usually the best performing sales teams pay their salespeople really well.

Yes. I was—

I'm a big believer in 1 1 2. And so, you know, everybody does it differently. Obviously, you know, we've done it We had a unique way we did it at Echo Sign, right? That actually worked out really well. But yes, you have to me, from the view of a sales leader, having some sales, you know, usually not every salesperson is making half a million dollars, right, in startup. But having some salespeople that just absolutely crush it and are the highest paid people in the company is almost all net good, you know, from a, you know, they're probably— you're paying them a lot. Maybe they're even overpaid, but like You know, that there's a, there's a, you know, cascading effect of that, not just within your own team, but like your hiring brand and all the rest, right? I think, I think that, you know, to me, it's, I don't know why people, there's a lot of companies that are trying to, you know, sort of cut, cut, cut at the margins of that. And I think it's like, I don't understand that mentality. Because it's hard enough as it is. But like, when you're saying, let's— how do we like pay the least amount for the people that are the most successful, that kind of thing? It just seems contradictory because it is— it's hard enough, right? I mean, like, you know, most startups are not super successful. So it's like, you know, and a lot of times it's the ones that don't, you know, that are the most confounding ones are like, they don't have a lot of successful salespeople. So like, why are you sitting around thinking about how you can pay your salespeople less? You know, that kind of thing.

Yeah.

In most— yeah, that's, that's the way I look at it. I want my top salespeople to make a crapload of money because that's proof for other people. Right. And that's part— that becomes part of your hiring brand of like, you know, certainly at EchoSign, that was a big deal, right? We had, you know, We were talking about this kid, Sam Blum, making a, you know, a ton of money. And we're like, go talk to him, ask him how much he makes, you know? And for more experienced salespeople like, you know, Paul Donati or Riley Devine or others, you know, that was big. That was a big deal. They said, hey, if Sam can make a lot of money here, I think I could make a lot of money here. Not that they view themselves as more talented than Sam, by the way, but like, it's proof, right? Because for sure, in any startup, Certainly startup, I mean, you know, there's a difference between, you know, a 10-person sales team and a, you know, 100 or 200-person team that's scaling. But like, yeah, in any startup, it all sounds great. Everything sounds great on the surface. But if you can, if it's validated with proof of success, that a certain, certain person or a certain type of person can be successful, it's a benchmark for for good salespeople, right? That's what they're looking for. They're gonna be really hard to get a really good sale, a really good sale, you know, salesperson to come in with no proof, right? Like, hey, can I talk to a salesperson and sort of ask, you know, how much they make, you know, how much they've closed, how much they make? And you're like, well, we don't really have anyone. We don't really have anyone that's done that. They're not coming, you know. So Yeah, the best people are more risk-averse than ever. I would say that's a theme.

Yeah, maybe that's the meta point. I was initially teasing on inflation and maybe higher OT expectations for the same attainment, but the meta issue is with so many SaaS startups that are successful, the best folks are more risk-averse, right, in many cases, right? Or they're delaying. I think $10 million is the new $1 million in terms of risk for many folks, isn't it?

For sure. And like, you know, there's a lot of people doing now what I was doing like 4 years ago, right? 5 years ago, right? Which was like, you know, you can, you can have a sort of, sort of part-time or sort of advisory or consulting role with a lot of different companies. And first off, do really well and not have a lot of risk, professional risk in that. A lot of people are doing that. Hopefully I don't wanna be, hey, Brendan start, I don't know that I started that trend, but there's a lot of people doing it. There's a lot less, I'd say a lot more people who are less experienced that you'd say, hey, like, huh, you know, like usually it's somebody that's had like, you know, some sort of big exit or win or multiple wins or whatever it is. But, you know, brand is currency. And like, you know, there's a lot of people that have created really strong brands as like, you know, thought leaders. But yeah, so those people, you know, there's a lot of opportunity for those people. They're super risk-averse. And if they were to ask me, hey, should I be risk-averse? I'd say, yeah, you should generally, right?

Well, that's interesting. Related topic. You're right. There is— there's a much larger pool of interim or consulting VPs of sales and others, marketers too, than there were just a few years ago. Folks that would like to help 2 or 3 startups at a time, probably make 50% more cash than they would with a third of the stress. When does that work? And when do you need to graduate beyond that? When should you make that trade-off when you don't have that hire?

Yeah, it depends on what kind of impact you want, right? You want, you know, do you want someone like me to help like in like certain areas? Hey, if you could help us in this area now and you know that getting help in that area would be super creative to the company. But then if you want like true bottom line impact, like, you know, I think it's like some sort of like interim come in for 6 months or 12 months. Right. But you're, you're either fully committed or almost fully committed to the cause. So you have, you know, there's some, there's some skin in the game there, right? I do. I think that can work personally.

Yeah.

And whoever it is that's risk averse can sort of have, you know, sort of two feet in, but it looks like they have one foot in. So they preserve whatever the optics are that they want. But like, that's like a more committed role. Hey, like, you're here, you're here 4 days a week or 5 days a week. And we want everything you can bring to the table for the time that you're here. I think that can work. And I would, you know, if you could get a great person in and say, can you give us a year, right? Give us a year of the absolute best you have, right? Like, I would do it, you know, if that was what it— if that was the, you know, those— if that was the terms of of that being possible, I would do it versus saying, let's not do it. Let's pass on this and let's go out and look for that person, but somebody that's willing to put two feet in reality and optically. And then the problem is, is I view like these sales leadership roles are like sort of listing a house on the market, right? The longer it's on the market, The harder it gets to fill it because, you know, there's more community within the sales leadership community than ever. Right.

Yeah.

You know, with, I've, I've been a huge proponent of it, but that you have things like, you know, Revenue Collective/Pavilion, that kind of stuff. But like, you know, there's more, we help each other more and we, we reference stuff off each other more. And so it's like, huh, why has this job been, you know, on the market for, you know, 120 days, right? And then people talk and then they're like, oh yeah, I talked to them, you know, like for whatever reason didn't take the job. And then even if they say good things, you're still like, well, he, you know, she passed on it. I don't— it has that sort of real estate kind of, you know, sort of parallel. You know, it's a good market. Why has this been on the market? You know, why is this house been on the market for 150 days? What's wrong? And that's— there is that element of it, you know, and I think that's— how do you deal with that? I'm not totally sure, but like, I have ideas on how to deal with it, but you know, it's a good point.

That is an issue. And there's a related one of being the third or fourth VP of sales that were there, but in today's world, they're much— there's much more transparency around this and much more sensitivity, right? And Maybe that is a good point. If it's going to take you 6 months to hire a VP of sales, maybe don't have it hang out there for 6 months, right? Having an interim person can actually help because they can manage it so that it is not a stale listing, right? A stale seller.

If I were a founder, which I am now, by the way, so, you know, everything I say is advice to founders, really advice to myself. But if I were a founder looking for a VP of sales right now, I would be, and I didn't, you know, I didn't have, you know, a big network of sales leaders that I knew or what, you know, whatever the terms of the scenario are, like I would be meeting with people in a sort of unofficial way, you know, sort of like a, you know, would love to learn about your thoughts on like what type of person we should hire. And you build this like almost like a council, right. Of, you know, sort of people that you're talking to and like, you know, and like you're, That's what I would do. And you've always sort of been a proponent of that, but like, that's, you can't do it and say, hey, I'm looking for a VP of sales, can we talk today? You can have the conversation, but you've, you know, but now you just started the clock ticking, you know? Yeah. Versus when you're sort of doing it in an unofficial way and you're building relationships that, you know, there's no immediate transaction to be had, And, you know, like, I think we'd all be better if we did more things that didn't have an immediate sort of transaction from one place to another in everything we did, you know, generally, you know. Whoops, sorry.

I also see, do you think, maybe a detail point, but let's talk for a couple minutes about VP of Sales and let's talk about selling, but I see a lot of folks with the bigger market, I see a lot of responses for candidates are, I'll sort of take that potential position under advisement. What I mean is folks are looking at more and more positions over more and more time. And I don't think this is bad, whether in reality or in their minds, they have more and more leverage over the startups, right? Sometimes I think this is delusional with some folks I know, sometimes I think it's reality. Do you think if a, if a, if a VP of sales or similar doesn't fall in love with the opportunity, can you convince them over time or should you move on from these sort of folks that are meeting with 100 opportunities?

Yeah, I think if you have, if you've built a relationship with that person, right? Yeah. Where it's appropriate that you can continue to still sort of check in and touch base with them. I mean, you, when I was like, when we were talking about EchoSign, you were sending me emails, forwarding me emails. You know, this is before I decided to do it, even though I wanted to do it anyways. But, you know, you would forward these emails about like, hey, like, you know, here's a lead that came in today, or here's a deal we closed today, that kind of stuff, right? Where you weren't like selling it, you were just forwarding an email. And that's proof, right? And that's, you know, you want to get a great VP of sales, you're going to have to somehow take as much of the perceived risk off the table somehow while they— while understanding that, you know, there's risk period for whoever that person is that's taking that job. But that kind of stuff, it's about super validating and a lot of founders don't do it. Yep. Right. They don't, they don't, you know, like you're having a sort of an unofficial conversation with somebody. Maybe you're not explicitly like recruiting them to be your VP of sales, but like that's an opportunity for you to, you know, like maybe they're advising you on, you know, like whatever the capacity is, but like, you know, where you're, you're giving them more proof points that this is a real, a real thing with real opportunity and success. And then, you know, and that can take a long time, but I would do it. And that's, that's a general, I think, rule of thumb is you should do more things that are, you know, you can't always play the short game. You know, and everything we do. And I think that's, you know, it's really hard to view the world that way, but like, you should— there should be a lot of things you're doing that like are strategic that, you know, will not produce some sort of outcome immediately and, or even in a week or maybe even in a month or whatever. There should be a lot of things you're doing around that stuff, uh, as a founder, you know, that I'm all— I'm learning all that stuff too. By the way, I'm learning a lot of things. The first time founder, co-founder, that, you know, that's, it's been, yeah, it's been an awesome experience. And yeah, it makes you respect, certainly makes me respect the founder experience even more than I did, quite frankly.

Let's get to that just next. There's just one other thing I wanted to, let's wrap up this part of the convo. But before we started, you and I had a really interesting conversation about a tough topic, which is being topped. And one of the toughest scenarios, both for an executive and the founders, are when you have someone on your team and it's clear you need someone above them. You have a VP of sales, you need a CRO, you need a CMO. We can talk about sales in particular. And you had an interesting insight about how that's changed and maybe what's your general advice on handling phase transitions, right, as you scale.

I mean, yeah, I mean, there's obviously there's different scenarios of when and why you're talking to somebody, right? Like sometimes it's because you guys have done incredibly well, right? And it's like, we want to go to the next step and we want to go public. And, you know, we just think having somebody with more experience there, you know, will help us in those areas, but we don't want to really change almost anything we're doing kind of day to day. And I think in those scenarios, it's super important to keep, you know, keep your— keep the people there that did it, built it, and happy. So I'll use an example. So when the CRO for Gong went there, you know, he came in, he had been at LinkedIn, and he's like, what one piece of advice would you give me? And I said, just make Jameson happy. That's the piece of advice. I mean, he's got this incredible team. They're incredibly loyal to him, right? And like, just, you know, make him feel, you know, make him feel good, set up for success and all the rest because there's, you know, there's not, you know, it's working really well, right? And so you look at that team, they're all there, right? That they're all there, all the people that built it, the sales org are there. And so I give that Ryan, who's the CRO, I give him a lot of credit. I would look at Outreach as another example, right? It's all well and good to say I see trends in the market, but like, it's really happening, right? You look at Mark, the VP of sales for Outreach, he was there from almost day one. Yeah. And so you keep that continuity in that culture. As long as they're motivated and all that kind of stuff. And it's important, you know? And I think if you look at, You look at the alternative scenario, it's usually worse, right?

No, it's almost always worse. If they've done well and they leave, it's almost always worse, right?

They've done well. If you're, yeah, if they've done well and you bring somebody in and they come in and they're like, yeah, I'm coming in here to basically tell this person that I'm better than he or she is and that I can get better people in here than he or she did. Yeah, then that's over, right? And by the way, they can't, right? The amount of like, you know, sort of sweat equity and intellectual capital that's been built there with that team is not replaceable most of the time. And so yeah, that would be one learning. I don't know that there's a massive sample size to support it, but like, you know, I think that's— I think it's real, you know.

And how do you— how do you— and when and how Do you have that conversation with your VPs of sales and others? Is it a regular check-in? Do you spring it on them? That one, the springing on them, I think is always suboptimal than having had a check-in, right? But folks also, folks react to it. They have emotional reactions in many cases too, right?

Yeah. I mean, it's, if I think if you're a founder or CEO that has some experience, right? Because if you have no experience, it's probably gonna be hard to know unless you have some really smart people around you with a lot of experience on how to handle it. But like, yeah, the earlier the better. Like, I don't, you know, I feel like, you know, you can say, hey, like, I'm, you know, love everything you're doing. And I feel like, you know, we're on this great track to get to $20 million. And I feel like beyond that, here are the things that I think are things we need to, right? Like, these aren't things that I don't, there are things I don't think you can do, there are things I wanna know that you can do. And I think these are some of the areas that we wanna be prepared for at $20 million, right? That indicate that all of us can take the next step. That's how I'd have the conversation.

[Speaker] Got it.

[Speaker] And so they're aware, and then when you get to this point, it's not like, oh, by the way, I need you to hire a 100-person field sales team, or I need you to hire somebody to run Europe or whatever it is. And they're like, oh, I don't really know anyone who can do that. So yeah, preparation for that I think is good. And then if you get there and you've been, and then it's like, okay, clearly I don't think this person can, can handle all the things that we need to do now for the next whatever, then you do it and it's, and then it's not, it doesn't come as a shock. That person, I think they're more likely to stay, you know. And it's almost never done that way. It isn't.

It's almost always mishandled at some level, right? Yeah. And do you think— one last question of this, and let's talk about sales tools and sales vendors— but do you think flat bookings is the clear sign you've waited too long to add a more senior person in the position? Is flat bookings for a quarter the sign, or is that not a sign?

Well, I think there's things that are ahead of that, that would result in that, which is, I mean, obviously you have to look at like, can we scale sort of demand as a company, right? To support the growth.

Yep.

And can we get more revenue out of our existing customers? So there are other factors there, but like you should have, if there's an issue there in any one of those areas, you should have visibility pretty quickly and like, at least solutions, perceived solutions to those problems before they, you know, sort of hit the board meetings kind of thing, you know? Yeah. So cool.

Well, let's talk a little bit about tools and what you've learned at Co-sell and in the market, but at a high level, now that we're in sort of SaaS sales 3.0 or some evolving new world, what parts of the good old-fashioned sales toolkit aren't working as well anymore? What's decaying in terms of its efficacy with so many vendors and so many solutions?

What's not working? Yeah, I think, I mean, I think, I don't think anything's not working enough to say you shouldn't do it anymore, but like, definitely, like, I think there's been this massive shift in the last, you know, 10, 11 years from like You know, Mark, you know, and this is important, you know, because it used to be when you talked about how do we grow, how do we drive growth and opportunity, they used to be, oh, well, talk to the marketer, you know, talk to the VP of marketing. That's her problem, right? It's not anymore, right? It's very much a shared burden between marketing and sales. And so you've seen this big shift from like marketing owns it to sales sort of owns it almost entirely around like going outbound through like Outreach and Salesloft and all that kind of stuff. And all these sort of tools around optimizing that stuff, whether it's emails, calls, and all the rest that go into it. I think those, personally, and I've seen this trend for a while, and that's part of why I'm doing Co-Sell, but like those aren't working as well, period. Trying to like inundate the market with just this massive amount of like quasi-personalized communication, right? Everyone's wise to it now, and you just can't mass produce that, uh, and have, and have success, in my opinion. To expect to succeed all the way to the finish line on the backs of that are not— it's not enough. Um, that's my opinion, and that's, you know, that's why I'm doing this. It's just the whole thing, the co-sell missive, is, you know, is we just want to make it easy for people to get referrals and warm introductions. From people that can help and are willing to help them, um, of which we have people like that around us, period. And so it's like, it's, it's low-hanging fruit that we, you know, that we just choose not to pick. And that's not a good equation for success, in my opinion. And I think that's in our conversations that we've had— by the way, this is not an ad for CoSell, but like That's what every VP of sales I talk to complete— there's no argument, right? There's certainly an argument about how do you do it or a discussion around how do you do it or how do you do it most optimally, but it's like, what's the problem? There's no argument. There's— it's 100% consensus that the sort of, you know, sort of brute force growth model is not going to you know, sort of ring the bell the 12th round, you know. Yep.

So let's step back because let's spend our last couple minutes on that. I liked your insight because I tend to be a little binary, and that's— that can— but it's more subtle. I think your point is that the efficacy of some of this pseudo-personalized playbook is decaying, but that doesn't mean don't do it. It just means it's not as— you got to do it. It just means you can't count on it the way you could have a couple of years ago, right? So I think that's an interesting insight. You should be running, you gotta run all these playbooks. You just have to add to the playbooks because their efficacy is decayed, right?

Yeah. There's sort of three, you know, three eras I look at it. You have like, and they're all in parallel really, but like you have marketing, you have sort of the marketing demand era. You can't just do that now. You need to do sort of outbound or brute force and, you know, our belief is, and you know, that will That'll be proven right or wrong over time is that sort of referral selling is like the last referrals and introductions is sort of the last untapped channel there. Right. And so that's our belief. But like, yeah, I mean, it's certainly been the last 5 or 6 years. You know what, one thing I was saying to somebody the other day that they completely disagreed with me on, by the way, and actually took personal. Took it personally and like got upset at me about it.

Yeah.

Which only validated I was right for her, by the way. But like, is there's less dependence on Salesforce, which is not, this is not a slight at Salesforce at all, but like companies in the sales cloud are less dependent on Salesforce to, than ever maybe, right? Like to like, to create sort of categories and many brands and of customer success and acquisition.

Yes.

And I don't know exactly what the answer, the why of that is, but like, that's a, that's, you go back 10 years, right? You remember?

Well, the world's changed. If you look at revenue or market cap, Salesforce has grown incredibly, right? To almost $200 billion, but its share of total revenue and total market cap is half of what it was 5 years ago, just because the rest of cloud got so big. Salesforce hasn't shrunk.

I've never heard it described that way. Yeah.

It's just the rest got so much bigger that you can make, you can attach to Shopify, you can attach to other ecosystems. And back when things were smaller, that was it. That was the only game in town. Right. So Salesforce is still great.

And Salesforce is also focused. They're not, they're focused on the Marketing Cloud and Service Cloud and other things. Right.

Yeah. I mean, sales is, what are their smaller clouds now? Even Service Cloud is much bigger.

And that's probably a pretty good explanation for for it, but like, you know, that's also like, you know, that's an opportunity there, right? I think. But yeah, that's—

but let's go back. Let's— before we run out of time, let's go back. You made some interesting points. And so we have, in terms of the evolution of what sales has to do to hit the number, right? And we go from demand gen to getting better and better at traditional outbound, right? But it's still cold. Outbound is still cold. So something that's interesting about co-sell and other solutions is you're turning cold into warmish, right? Because a referral is a warm intro, right? And that is profound. That— and then ABM is some weird term that has gone out of fashion, but I still think ABM is just better outbound, right? To me, ABM is actually writing one email, not writing— that goes to one person that you've researched rather than then rinse, wash, and repeat. And you still need to do that playbook, but ABM is also decaying a bit, right? Because it's not warm. And warm is interesting because warm is powerful, right?

I think the intention of ABM was all correct, right? Yeah. But I think it's like on some level there's a required behavioral change, right? That not everything is about sort of like, how do I load up, you know, a crapload of data? And click send and just expect it to do the heavy lifting for me, which is like, that's the fantasy of like a lot of these products, right?

Yeah.

That you can just, oh, like you don't even need to do it yourself. You just load it up, you know, it'll do it for you. And I've always believed like, you know, like even a cold email, if I send a cold email to somebody in my career, That's like the amount of research I put into that. The amount of time I spent thinking about what my approach or the angle is, is, you know, there's a lot of time spent on that. Like, yeah, hey, what's the angle so that if we're going to do this, that it gives us the absolute best chance to result in something. So like, we're at an era where like, we need to start thinking that way. It's like, how do I What is the most strategic way that I can engage with the customer? Not just like, what is the easiest, like, you know, sort of mass-produced way that I can try to interact with customers? And so, you know, we're sort of at that. We're right there. We're on the front lines of that sort of discussion. And, you know, and so like, it's a needed behavioral change. Generally pretty good consensus around that. And I think, you know, most meaningful in my experience, most meaningful products that I've worked with or sold, there was a pretty— there was a behavioral change component to it, right? Yeah. It's not just, hey, we do X just 3% better than Y, right? Anyways, yeah.

And so just briefly, then I want to hit one more last thing and then we'll break, but So how does co-sale help create that warm referral, that sort of outbound plus plus? How does it work in practice?

Yeah, so we like, we're not, we've definitely evolved a bit from day one. I would say day one we were like more sort of like Crossbeam-ish, right? Which by the way, I like, I think Crossbeam's cool. Product. That's not what we do. So there's still some people out there that think we do what they do and we don't, but like, we allow companies to basically like create, you know, sort of private sort of referral networks where they can essentially invite anybody into their network that they can sort of connect with and sell through. So that could be an investor, advisor, influencer, anybody that has a network that has some vested interest in your success or some incentive to participate, you can connect with them and sort of bring them into your co-sell network. And so we've made it, which doesn't maybe sound that easy, it's actually pretty easy to do. And so, you know, it's, you know, so for instance, like, you know, Outreach is a customer, Gong's a customer, high spots are customers, these are all early customers. And, you know, the vision is, hey, you know, let's imagine Outreach was an A-round company today, right? What would be the most strategic go-to-market path they could take, right? Well, you know, would be who's around us, right? That has, you know, we have our investors, we have our advisors, we have all the people that, you know, have some, you know, some vested interest in our success. We can sort of bring them in and connect with them and then find out where does who we wanna sell to intersect with who they know? And we've made it and done it in a way in which our customers own that network and it gets bigger and better over time. And it's our belief that this is gonna be table stakes in 12 to 18 months.

Yep, and who's using it? Is it the VP of sales? Is it sales op? Is it individual AEs?

Yeah, so like it's really driven, So far, there's a lot of learning, by the way, for us to still to come. But, you know, VP of sales drives it. In some cases, the VP of sales is driving sort of introductions. Yeah. Other cases, it's like RVPs, right? So like Gong's gonna have all their like, you know, sort of RVP equivalents kind of, sort of driving it. And really in a way it's like, you know, it's how can our sales organization help carry some of the load, right? You know, at least within sort of strategic and substantive, you know, potential customers for us, is this just a way for them to do that? Right. And that, by the way, is another behavioral change that's, you know, probably required, right? Where you can't just say, hey, SDR team, you own 100% of the demand gen burden. That's part— I think that's part of the problem. And so, yeah, but yeah, with us, any company that like wants to referral sell, they can just start sort of inviting their— anyone, you know, investors, advisors, anyone to sort of join their network, and then they can see, hey, like, you know, Jason knows the VP of Sales at Adobe or whatever it is, right? And we do it in a way in which— so we have these sort of two two profiles, sellers and co-sellers, which is not the best, in my opinion, the best sort of verbiage around that. But sellers are our customers, co-sellers are, you know, whomever the sort of referrer or the gatekeeper is to that relationship. And yeah, like, Garnet's gonna roll it out with all their investors, all their advisors, and that's powerful, right? There's powerful You know, like how much, how much reach is involved? There's a lot.

Yep.

Much. Much of it. Yeah, it seems afterwards. And that's what we believe, right? Is that there's all this low-hanging fruit around us that know people that are of strategic value for us that we don't even, we just ignore. And we go and we do more difficult and lower ROI things. And we just, that's the vision that we have. Just make it easier to be much more strategic in how we go to market and how we sell.

That's great. Yeah, I think we have to keep adding smarter and smarter strategies as these classic ones just decline in the efficacy and we've got to leverage it, right?

Our customers are like, so we shouldn't use Salesloft? I'm like, no, you should absolutely use Salesloft. Don't just use Salesloft. Or outreach, that's not good enough, right?

Just like, we just got to add to it to hit the number.

Anybody 5 years ago, you know, like outreach was probably saying, don't just do marketing, right? You know, like you got to do more than that. And I think at that point now where it's like, you know, it's just, it has to happen. Like there's no, you know, even like SDR leaders who you think would be like, oh, this is potentially a threat to me. Even SDR leaders are like the best SDRs, SDR leaders I know are looking at this and they're like, yeah, there's just no choice. We have to, like, it's, and I'm one of the best SDR leaders in the world and I can see that everything's getting harder and, you know, declining response rates, declining engagement. So there's no, we don't have a choice. We have to go down this path. And so that's what we believe.

Yeah. Last, I wanna wrap this up. That's good. I find that, you know, everyone, I think that's, Everyone learned we have to have an outbound team, right? That's table stakes for anyone but the small, the tiniest vendors. But I also have learned, I've also observed that the teams have to get better and better because the crappy playbook, sometimes it doesn't work at all. The SDR leaders have to be really good to, and I'm not an expert at it, to bring in those big deals, to break through the noise. They need to be smarter and better than ever to break out in many cases.

Yeah. If you Like the reality is in a start— in most startups as a VP of sales, you're gonna have to be super involved in outbound SDR stuff, right? Yeah, it doesn't work out hiring and training. And like, by the way, the number of VPs of sales that actually want to be in the weeds on that stuff is like 0.0, right? Like it's, which is, it just, it sucks in the worst way, right? Because You're like, oh great. Like this 23-year-old kid made a great call today to this person that rejected them. And then God, I'm really not that close to revenue right now. Am I? You know, like it's just not where you want to be. And there's certainly, there's some that, some that, some that are great at it, but like, you know, it's, and so people are like, oh, well I can have, I'll just hire a great SDR leader. No, there's like, it's, that's brutal hard. Right? Like, It's a really, really hard hire. Like, you know, I was talking to this guy, Kevin Dorsey, the other day who was at a Patient Pop, who's like, I would consider one of the best, like, you know, sort of SDR leaders maybe in the world. And he's just like, dude, it's so hard now. He's like, it's really hard. It's never been harder. And like, and so, yeah, but there's a small list of people that I, that are like on my list that I'd be like, that's who I know I can hire that can go figure that thing out almost entirely. Because yeah, nobody wants to spend a ton of their time on like, you know, setting up Outreach or Salesloft and like writing these like outbound SDR scripts and all this, you know, it's just, that's not what, you know, that's not what, and that's why most The best VP of Sales, the first question they ask is, how many leads do you have a month? Right? Inbound leads. Yeah. And when the answer is zero, they're like, cool. All right.

Next.

Immediately they've met.

Well, maybe that's an interesting point we should, we can wrap on, which is that it's interesting that because it's, because it's harder, because the mass campaign, the low, the nuts and bolts approach works not as well. A VP of sales has to be more involved, right? And they don't want to, right? And I think it's a good reminder, one of the biggest flags I see when I meet VPs of sales candidates, one flag is when they don't really have that experience, right? Because it's tough to get on the job, right? But the bigger flag is when they say they're going to go find a director of inside sales, right? A director of outbound, right? That's their answer to the issue, right?

Yeah, it indicates— it's, yeah, when you see somebody that doesn't understand what the burden is Yeah. Like, that's when it's like, okay, maybe not, right? Because if you don't understand, like, I have to go in and we have to literally create from nothing all this outbound demand and interest. They don't understand how hard that is. Like, you know, that's not a good sign, right? Like, it indicates that they've never had that burden, right? Like, versus somebody that does understand how hard it is, and maybe they're just like, I don't know that I want to put myself through that right now. I would rather talk to that person because at least they understand how hard it is. Just like with any good sales leader, most of the best sales leaders I know are pretty humble, quite frankly. Like they understand that like, you know, it wasn't just about them and that there were, you know, there's timing and luck and other elements involved that are real. In some cases, right? Like people ask me about LinkedIn all the time. And I, one of the things I say is like the team we had at EchoSign was so much better. By the way, there's some great people on our team at LinkedIn, by the way, phenomenal people that have had great success. But overall, the team we had at EchoSign was way better. It was a way better team generally, almost everywhere. Right. But like, you know, we didn't have this, you know, sort of self-serve, like opt-in, you know, sort of network, right? Where people were just like, yeah, I'm gonna put my profile here, you know, like, and so like, but that team was better, right? And like, just the reality is, is like, you know, LinkedIn was this network that was super viral, they didn't have to spend any money to build it, quite frankly. And that's, you know, that was the most, you know, sort of enduring thing then and now, right? It's the virality of it and all that kind of stuff, right? But like, that's luck mostly, right? Like, I think I did some good things there, by the way, but like, you know, the level of difficulty, you know, in other things I've done was much higher, quite frankly, right? LinkedIn was relatively easy because you had this dataset that was just like, yeah, here's more. You know, and they're like, oh, I don't have to convince you to come. No, no, no, we're just going to come and we're going to keep that data fresh for about 20 years. Is that okay? So that's like, you know, that was, that's on the scale, easy. I mean, there were definitely some super, you know, super tough, important decisions we made early that were right, I think. But like, yeah, that's what I would say.

Got it.

And Talkdesk in the early days, Talkdesk, there were some hard times there. Like when, you know, when the, you know, when you were like, hey, the phone doesn't work, right? Like, and we're selling this call center solution, right? But the phone doesn't work. What do we do then? So those were some, those were some challenging early days that obviously got fixed. But yeah, I think there's, you know, there is an element of luck in everything. To do and timing and all the rest. Right. For sure. And I, you know, I realize that most of the best people I've known understand that, that there's, it's, you know, it's not just their greatness that, uh, that got, you know, sort of accomplished everything that they, that's happened for them. So, yeah. All right.

Let's wrap it up with one more fun thing just to tie together some of these themes.

Sure.

Beyond anything we've chatted about now, What are some of the things that the best sales teams do to beat the others in a competitive space? What are just a couple of things that they do that you're like, crap, they won that deal again and again, but their product actually isn't better. What are a couple of quick insights that we can wrap that you see the best folks do that just the good or the mediocre don't do as well?

I think the best sales orgs in competitive selling just have this just crystal clear black and white understanding of why, you know, why should we win? What are the reasons that we should win and beat them in a deal? And what are the reasons that they should beat us? Right? And so they know, you know, like, you know what all the sort of, you know what their playbook is, you know what your playbook is, and then you sort of understand that it's gonna be, it's a battle. You know, it's a battle for a mindset, like, Certainly at EchoSign, we said, hey, we know if the deal's about this, we win. And we know if the deal's about these other 20 things that it could be about, we know that they win, right? So we just said, we're gonna make this entirely about this. Everything that happens in the sales cycle will be centered around this narrative. And we will not be pushed off that mark at any point. And that, you know, and so the other guys were like, hey, we have all this other stuff and we're like, none of it matters. The only thing that matters is this. And so I think that's the— I think realizing what you're— not just what your strengths are, but what your weaknesses are and then weaponizing that before your competitor exposes it as a liability, right? Taking— why should we lose? Okay, we— if we know why we should lose and why they should beat us, then we know that, you know, like, okay, then we know that we need to make the narrative about this and we need to minimize the impact of the other 20 things in everything that we do. Um, and I think that works, you know, like, um, yeah, I mean, I think Yes. I was talking to a friend at Adobe the other day. I said, I wonder what it'd be like if we all came back in, you know, obviously DocuSign's worth like $60 billion now. Could we reframe the narrative? Because that's really, that's what it is, right? It's like, hey, like, if you know how your competition is attacking you, then that's— and so, you know, I thought we did a pretty good job of understanding, hey, We know that they're— this is how they're attacking us. We know that this is where our flank is exposed. And I think a lot— most sales organizations don't understand that. They don't want to understand. I think in some cases, right, sometimes it's easier to sell and not, you know, not ignore what your weaknesses are or where your vulnerabilities are. And we call it flying blind, right? But like, I think that's the best competitive sales organizations knew it inherently. Like they knew everything that their competition was gonna do and that was already baked into their playbook, right? So good summary. Yeah.

All right, Brendan, thanks so much for catching up. This was great.

Yeah.

Let's sell together with our partners and vendors at co-sale.com, right? Yeah. Let's add onto our toolkit which we still need to do the old stuff, but it's just not working as well as it used to.

Got to do the marketing too.

We got to do the demand gen.

We got to do it all.

Our goal in 2022 is we got to add a few layers. We got to add a few new systems and processes to reach the flooded, the fatigued markets. Right. Um, so yeah, good insight, my friend. All right. We'll chat with you soon.