Top 5 Ways to Scale a Sales Team with Zoom CRO Ryan Azus and SaaStr VP of Sales Bryan Elsesser

Hello, hello everyone. Thank you, Caitlin. Hi, welcome to SaaS to Scale. I am Brian, also known as SaaS Ryan. I'm really excited to chat with you today. Um, before we really dive in, do you want to kick off like what we could expect to walk away with?

Hopefully some good takeaways. You know, I know we're going to have lots of different folks here that are driving their business, and hopefully some things to think about for scale. I'm probably at a different level of scale now than many in our audience, but I've been on all sides of this over the multiple decades I've been in SaaS software.

Fantastic. Yeah, I'm excited to get into the weeds here, 'cause there's some real cool things to unpack. Before we do, let's just get started with an introduction of yourself. Why don't you give a little bit of picture into your background?

Sure, I'm happy to do that. So again, I'm Ryan Azuz. Today, I'm the Chief Revenue Officer at Zoom, and I basically run the go-to-market customer-facing team. So as you'd expect, the direct sales, the indirect sales, the solution engineering, the account management, CSMs. Support teams, professional services, basically operations, the teams that make it happen for the customer at the end of the day. My passion is really about leading winning teams. That's what I've been about for quite a long time. And if I kind of, irony in this job, I've been at Zoom now for just about 10 quarters. As a sales leader, you talk in quarters. But before that, I almost been preparing for this probably for the last couple decades. Right before I came here, I was actually at RingCentral, And I joined RingCentral, you know, probably about 30 people in the United States. I really started sales outside of one person in BD in the US for that, and basically got it on a run rate to $1 billion in revenue. And, you know, that was a great run where I ran global sales and also services. And then before that, I actually almost spent a decade at Webex. And so I was employee number 200, came in just below for IPO, started literally carrying a bag and selling, quickly moved up to the management, different leading operations and a variety of different sales leadership roles over the years, all the way through acquisition with Cisco. And so somehow I feel like the culmination of those jobs has kind of led me to this time and place with the opportunity here at Zoom.

I love that intro. And, you know, Thomas, as a young VP of sales, I have a lot that I can learn from today as well. So I'll be diligently taking notes on my end. But that said, this is exciting. I think one thing that you just called out right away is that you're an individual that has a passion for leading women, lead, leading winning teams, and at the same time, uh, someone that really focuses on that, that anything to do with the customer end. And I think if anybody's focused there and truly focused on the customer, that's when that magic happens for leading those winning teams. So I'm excited. Um, let's paint a picture, right? So you've just joined Zoom, things are going well, things are scaling, you're relevant, And suddenly the world decides to pivot on a dime and bam, the rocket ship is, is, is a whole new speed. It's like a warp speed, right? I know we're going to talk about, we've kind of trimmed this down to 5 ways to scale a team. But before we get truly to those 5 points, can you tell me a little bit about, you know, you've entered this and you're, what's going through your brain? What's going through your mind as this happens, as this shift takes place?

Yeah, I wish I could say we had a lot of time to think, but just like the world, honestly, we had to react. Yeah. And we were not that different. I literally remember that, I don't remember the exact day, it was in March of last, a couple years ago now almost, and around the first week and got everybody in the office and we kind of, I gathered people kind of near me in my floor and said, grab your stuff, we're gonna go home. You probably don't understand this, it's kind of an abundance of caution. We just wanna be really safe, we're a little early. But, you know, we see this thing coming. There's some things going on in the world. You know, go ahead and literally take your chair, take your monitor. You know, God willing, we'll all be back here in 2 weeks and we'll be ready to roll. And, you know, here we are, not quite, but getting close in a quarter or so to 2 years later, and we're not still fully back in the office. And so just like everybody else, you know, you have to adjust. And that's one of the great things about humans is you kind of find a way and you make things happen.

It's incredible though, because having— I love that you said that you had to react. I think everyone was in that same boat, right? I had the same conversation, but my, my HR came over to me and whispered in my ear, hey, we're closing tomorrow, we don't know when we're coming back, take your things. Like, it was like, okay, this is a little interesting. But like, you're, you're, you're Zoom, you're in the heart of what now is, is, you know, considered an essential, essential tool to business in order to combat the close down, if you will, these shutdowns that we all had to endure. Like, so can you tell me a little bit about how you've had to spin that reaction into maybe more proactive planning? 'Cause I can't imagine anything like this was anywhere near anybody's docket as like, if happens, take this plan out of the drawer and execute.

No, we didn't have that plan. It's funny what you said about essential. We worked with a keynote speaker recently who's very popular professor. Adam Grant, who talks a lot about the future of work, and he kind of came and talked to our group and kind of called us essential workers. Now there's people doing much more essential work than us, to be fair, but just like some of the importance of the services we were offering to keep people connected. And it's funny to think about from a sales point of view, there was sudden and instant demand, as you would expect, for our services. And it's kind of like, on a sales point of view, quarter end's fun for those that are in the audience that are carrying a number, or if you're a CEO, you like, I'm sure, you're watching. And there tends to be, especially in B2B software, kind of an uptick that you see. Yeah, yeah. At the end of a period, at the end of a month even, but even an end of a quarter. Um, and then you have this kind of big peak, and then there's a little bit of, okay, now let's get the wheels going, let's build pipeline, let's go. And so it was kind of like quarter end, and then you woke up the next day and it was like quarter end, and you woke up the next day and it was like Saturday and it was like quarter end.

It's Groundhog Day for sales.

There was. And you, as a sales leader, you would almost think that's your dream. And then you just realize your people, your processes, your systems aren't just— they're just not built for this. Yeah. So, you know, you really have to adapt. And, you know, for us, there was a lot of stretching, and it was some pretty extreme stretching, to be upfront, in the early, early days. I mean, our, you know, we went from around 10 million active daily users, you know, free and paid, to over 300 million in a pretty short order of time. And so not just in sales but throughout the company. If you think about enabling and what a product— thank God we had the right architecture as a company. Thank God we had a lot of great workers. Thank God we had many channels and routes to market, um, to be able to support that. Um, but definitely, you know, we, we kind of say we stretched but we didn't break. Um, and then, you know, humans adapt, and then you start putting plans in the process. And the first plans are, they're a little bit more about survival, in all fairness. But then it's more about like, okay, we survived, now we have to thrive. And you adjust. And it's funny to look that even over a multi-month period, how what was honestly a bit of chaos initially just becomes routine and it becomes habit and it becomes expected. And that's just you adjusting processes and systems. And even things like order, like just systems that weren't built for this, like teams that came in at the end of a quarter, but they come in and they work all night, but then they go home and they're not really that busy for the next few days. But now you're asking them to do this for 10 straight days or 15 straight days. Or so you just, you kind of start seeing, you have things about your lead management system. Maybe it was built for a certain volume, you're doing certain lookups against data. Well, those lookup APIs don't work anymore. And so really literally looking at each process, each system in the early days, and seeing what things had to be turned off, turned down, which things had to be adjusted, and realizing what you did in the past wasn't going to work. Um, and so, you know, you had to take a lot of the good, but you had to be willing to say, I know this is how we do it, but this isn't— we don't need to do this right now. Like, we need to turn this off or turn this on or make an adjustment. And we made many adjustments, then over time, they're not really an adjustment, they now become your new habit.

You said 10 million to 300 million active users, which is, that's unfathomable growth, right? But you have a team there that obviously needs to support that kind of growth, not just in product, but let's just talk about sales as like, as the focus, right? So when did you know, like you said survival first, cool, everyone stretches to a point, That's great. But there had to be a moment where you're like, we need to hire, we need to hire quickly. We're remote. This seems challenging. Like, can you walk me through kind of how you tackled that issue? Cause I can't imagine what that was like.

No, that's great. You know, it's funny for sure you needed people, but then it takes time to hire, especially talent.

Yeah.

And you also had to realize like, this isn't like a one-day blip or two-day or 10-day. Yeah. And so we really did rapidly adjust. You know, the good news is we had a foundation in place. If you think about like, you know, capacity models for recruiting, what kind of recruiters it took, what hiring, we had process in place. And there's certain things that like being remote made easier. And there's certain things that, you know, even at Zoom, we, I mean, we are a global workforce, but we tended to be in an office workforce, even ourselves, even though we used our tools, of course, and we had the blessing of our tools and services, But there are certain things, and ironically, one of the processes that actually got easier in a completely, not even a hybrid, honestly, a remote world, was hiring. And that was one of those things where you just break some of your habits. Like we would sometimes fly, not for all roles, but for more senior roles, we'd fly you in, we'd wanna break bread with you, we'd do a stand and deliver, we're scheduling it while other people are maybe traveling or remote. Maybe Brian, don't come in next week, but on Thursday, you have a meeting. And you just go through all this. Well, guess what? When all of a sudden it's completely remote and you just remove the filter of time, people really aren't traveling. And even you, let's just say if you were— happened to be our candidate— even you as a candidate, guess what? You're not like, oh well, my boss is here on Tuesday, we haven't— like, you're kind of at home. You have a little bit more freedom and a little bit more flexibility just to get on a call for a half hour. And so in a weird way, recruiting is actually one of the processes that in a— what was then a completely remote world actually got much easier. And that was almost removing our own habit of scheduling and time really helped condense the cycle. And then of course, you know, it's a lot of sales management burden. There's no easy answer for that. But when we got to a point where, you know, my team, we're hiring hundreds of people per quarter. Yeah. And think about doing that, how many people you actually had to interview and how many you had to screen. And so there's a lot of sales leadership hours. And there, what we didn't find an easy answer when we started looking at how many people are interviewing, what does that look like as a process? Um, but many, many, many sales leadership hours, but Adding quality people is definitely, you know, if not the most important thing you can do in a business. Like, people are how you get there, and so you have to make sure you're investing in that.

It seems it's a challenge I don't think a lot of leaders have ever really had the opportunity to have to come up against, right? Hiring hundreds of people in a quarter. So that's very interesting. I'm curious, just to think about that too, you were talking about the support mechanism behind it. I promise everyone, I'm gonna get to the 5 steps of scaling here. This is good stuff. So can you tell me a little bit, you had a leadership team underneath you and obviously they're trying to now manage maybe something they've never even had to deal with before, your frontline leaders, maybe your VP of sales. Can you talk a little bit about from your element, like where you sat, how did you help enable your leadership team to keep them focused? Where did you have them spend their time? Like that would be an interesting thing.

Yeah, I mean, in the early, early days, and this wasn't a, you know, a lot of engineering teams and product teams do this. I mean, we were doing some daily standups kind of with senior leadership in the company, just making sure we're all very focused. Yeah. 'Cause it was a very intense environment. Yeah. You know, as time went on for my team, and we've definitely had the gift and blessing of time, you know, since then, there's been a lot of, we did a lot of like really bringing the next level of leadership. And ironically, when I came to Zoom, one of the reasons I came to Zoom originally was to help it scale. And even though the company was great, been through an IPO, was very successful, there's another level of scale needed. And thankfully, we had started that process, that mindset of like, it was the next layer. It was not that we need a bunch of layers. But, you know, think maybe not the VP of a segment or group, but the director, the, you know, someone that's, you know, overseeing multiple teams and managers and putting in that structure, just to give a little bit more coaching, a little more guidance. And so we had kind of started setting that in place already. And then, of course, you know, with the rapid growth, we had to accelerate it quite A bit more than probably— more than definitely expected.

Very interesting. I just— to shift on one more topic here, because, um, it's— someone asked this in the Q&A, so I'm going to tackle it right out the gate. I think it's really relevant. I always thought about, as a leader, a good leader has almost like a circle of trust. There are people that they lean into and know. They probably are outside of your org. They're almost like your own board of directors. Would you tell me a little bit about yours? I'm sure you have some, some mentors, peers that you work alongside that maybe even helped you. And how did you even formulate it?

Yeah, I mean, always learning. And that's, you know, one thing that Eric, our CEO, is, you know, amazing about is continuous learning. And he has networked with every CEO, at least in the modern technology world, and through the large enterprise. And so, you know, the quality of people that we bring in as a company to do fireside chats, to learn from— and, you know, for me, it's never been like one mentor, like, this is the person. Like, yeah, you learn even people that you don't know. Like, I don't happen to know Warren Buffett, and not because he's rich, but I actually find him extremely interesting because if you read his stuff or you listen to him, he takes things that are extremely complex, like financial markets and what's happening in the world, and he simplifies them. Yeah. It's such a like, oh, that makes sense. Like a very base, almost Mark Twain type. Yeah. And so, you're reading things from him and you're seeing, you're like, okay, you're learning this piece. And it's almost like watching great people do great things and thinking about, You got to be yourself. I think that's one of the most important things in life is you really need to be yourself. But if you surround yourself with greatness, if you listen to it, if you absorb it, if you talk to people, how do you take a little piece of them and a little piece of that and seeing what others have done and how do you kind of learn and grow from that?

I think that's really great because you don't necessarily need to have those mentors around to call. You could easily learn from a mentor that's passed or not around because they wrote it. But Warren Buffett, I think it's interesting. He because he reads a new piece of literature every day on the financial markets and tries to do a deep dive on it. Something, a habit he has. I think he says 2 hours in the morning every day or something like that. So that's, that's an interesting person. Um, all right, well, let's pivot into what we're here to talk about today. So you had these learnings, there is several that have come from it. I actually think it's interesting because you say that this was almost the role that you came into at the right time, right? There was, there was, uh, this world of career, Webex and RingCentral, and then you're at Zoom and And you have this ability, this, these learnings that came away, and it was the culmination at Zoom. I'm going to talk a little bit into some of that background as well because I think it's very relevant in the 5 lessons we discussed today. So the first one, right, you, you highlighted is leverage every channel. So how do you think about channels at Zoom or even at any organization, and what are some of the ways you're leveraging them?

Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, channels have a couple different meanings, like You know, in this case, with leveraging, you know, every channel, really thinking about, you know, segmentation and leveraging kind of like direct sales partners, of course, we'll go into, um, that's definitely one of them. But also, you know, leveraging even online, um, you know, thankfully at Zoom, we did have an e-commerce channel, um, and, you know, not just like a global— and especially with our global audience, um, there was demand from places around the world where we didn't have folks in that country, or we didn't have the scale of folks in certain countries to support the demand that was there. Yeah. So really being able to leverage that out, um, and have, you know, a scalable, repeatable e-commerce that, you know, despite a rep not being able to get to you because they, you know, day one hit, like, there wasn't the capacity to keep up with the demand, but there was still an outlet for customers to be enabled, an outlet for customers to be serviced. And maybe it wasn't the number one way they would want to, in all fairness. Maybe it's not their normal buying channel, but they did have an outlet. And I think that was a critical— I don't, you know, wish I could say it was part of our master plan and, you know, that's where we ended up. Um, but in hindsight, it was definitely a critical aspect that made it very— helped us a ton.

Interesting. It's, um, you know, I think a lot of people spend, uh, a lot of founders spend a lot of time developing that SMB channel and putting sellers against it and developing out how that flow goes when they make that transition to like an e-com model. That's a decision, right? So in fact, how many times— I'm sure you've heard that question many times— when do I start selling more in enterprise? How do I know when I can start shifting there? Do you see the different segments as like at this stage, this is when you employ this plan, or how do you envision that growth?

You know, I wish there was a Bible for selling and running a company, and here it is, and this is how it should be done. Part of it is you have to— like, we all have to respect our market, just like we have to be ourselves, we have to be ourselves as a company. And what I mean by that is like, what is your— who's your customer? What's your product market fit? And spending time and thinking about like, okay, are you something that's new? Are you replacing existing service? If you're replacing an existing service, you know, how was that bought? Like, even if it was RingCentral in the past, and we started, you know, partner channels there. And at one point, when I stepped back from what we were selling at the early core, it was a phone system. And yeah, Webex, you know, channels weren't a huge part of our go-to-market. We had channels, but they weren't huge in the beginning. Later with Cisco, definitely changed. But initially— and but it was really stepping back and looking at and thinking, okay, how the previous product or service we're trying to replace was bought by some trusted advisor or some part. So I think it's really important. I also think it's really important to segment. And I know depending on the size of your business, let's be clear, when you have 5 sales reps or 20 people, like, just get it done, right? Find a way. There's no segmentation. Everybody grow or bust.

That's it. Yes.

Yeah, yeah. But, but, but as you start scaling here, okay, $100 million in ARR, like, that's different. Well, what I've always found in my career is that focus equals success. And what I mean by that is, even at the most simplistic level, if you take something like, um, an inbound, a BDR or an SDR, like, separating someone that's getting like an inbound versus you're proactively going outbound like, and separating those processes, you know, of course separating small business and whether you define that as under 10 or 10 to 250, like people have 1 to 99, like separating that out and separating enterprise. I mean, at Zoom we sell to individuals, consumers, prosumers, we sell to small businesses, we also sell the largest companies in the world, like, you know, almost half the Fortune 100 uses Zoom, you know, the Global 10, you know, uses Zoom. And so you know, you sell to those customers and then you sell to the mid-market, but we don't do it with the same sales process. We don't do it with the same sales reps. We don't do it with the same go-to-market tactics. And not that there's not things that leverage over or kind of connect over between different groups, but the reality is we start with like, well, what's needed for this customer? How are they buying? What's the competitive market? What does that look like? And then, you know, what do we need to do differently? And then also, you know, what's somewhat traditional, what's, what's worked, what hasn't worked. And then you try things and you adapt from there.

So I can imagine too that, you know, you're scaling from just a few individuals trying to make it work and seeing what's essential to eventually having, you know, someone that owns that, that relationship, right? That Fortune 10 company is— that's an owner, right? There's probably— what can I imagine?

Sometimes, actually.

Yeah, yeah, right? Because the amount of support that's needed for that is a lot different than the support of that, you know, maybe a smaller support level of transaction.

1000%, right? But at the end of the day, they're all customers. And so how are you going to serve them? And even from a support point of view, some of that might be with more automation, it might be with more self-service. Yeah, even the largest companies in the world like self-service too. Like, it's not just for small companies, meaning when people are searching or solving a problem, they just want it solved. Like, the quickest way to get that done. Now, at the largest end, of course, you have, you know, even in the mid and the largest, we have account managers, we have a very active CSM group And for our largest customers, you know, we have the ability to do kind of, you know, premier support programs where they'll have almost dedicated or semi-dedicated people that 100% know their environment, that help manage things internally around them, and really are kind of their advocates internally, that are, you know, almost badged employees basically is how we do it for the customer.

So let me just ask one question further on this. When you were building out the RingCentral team and you were employee, sales employee number one, right? And you're building out that team. Did you stack that out? Like, um, how did, how did you decide, all right, we're gonna focus here on the growth, then we're gonna stack this in, this is, this is part 2? Like, what did that look like?

Yeah, I don't know if I was one of them, that top few, but, um, what we, you know, to be up front, what we did is— so we didn't have like the whole master plan, a complete segmentation sitting there when you have nothing to do, right? You started honestly getting on the phone, talking to customers, thinking about what our talk track was. But I mean, that was from the days of like, literally, you have a Salesforce instance, but that means you bought Salesforce. But Like it's in the wrapper, you know, like you had a like really great process. And then you just start creating some process and some repeatability. What's working, what's not. You kind of get on the phones and you make it happen and then you adjust and you scale and you scale. And then, you know, over the years, over the, you know, you look over time and then you look back and you've kind of built this machine. But I can't say you're sitting there master planning the whole machine on day one. That's not the truth. You're learning and adapting, learning and adapting, learning and adapting, and you're adjusting. And even, at, you know, just about every company I've been in, what were the segments and what they are a couple years later. And not actually every year you're changing them, and what they are years later, they're different and how you focus. So even those things, it isn't like it's a constant, it's adjusting to what's appropriate and what's needed.

I love that. I think it aligns perfectly. So, um, thinking about this one other way too, you, you're, you're going back to leveraging every channel. So we talked a little bit about, um, we kind of brushed past channel partners. We can talk to that next in a minute when we talk about Lesson Number 2, but I think there's interesting here because whereas everything went really great for Zoom, I imagine if you went backwards and wanted to start leveraging your channels again and thinking about how could I do this differently if the same thing happened, do you ever, if you have, you done like a retrospect and what would have, what would you have done differently?

You know, how do you prepare for this faster? I mean, no, that's like, you know, ideally there's levels of scale. Um, there's level of people and hiring and process. That you would have done quicker. Like, at the end of the day, sometimes you can't be prepared for everything, but that's, you know, sort of like life. I mean, I hate to say it, but like, the Monday morning quarterback is undefeated. Yeah. So it's really easy to play the game. And so, you know, one thing is, you know, there's some planning exercises where, you know, think, you know, it's easy to say, gosh, like, let's just take the, you know, especially at a time like this, you know, we're rounding a calendar year and there's a lot of reflection and goals for next year and what you're doing. But, you know, how do you put your team in an exercise where they're, hey, 3 years from now, what are we going to be? What's that going to look like? And, you know, sometimes you remove the frame of time, like you push it out there so it leaves a lot of the motion, a lot of the protectionism, things that you might run into. You remove those things and you get people to think about like what it would be. And then if you can align around in a vision for what that is, then you start peeling it back and you say, okay, great, what are the things we need to do now to get there? So you don't have to play Monday morning quarterback. And let's be clear, no one runs a perfect playbook. We all have plenty of things I wish I did a little of this, a little bit of that. For Zoom, probably getting the channels earlier. I mean, when I got here day one, that was something we started pushing, but I wish there would've been maybe earlier investment would be an example.

Is services a channel or is it a support structure for a customer?

Tell me what you mean by that when you say services.

Well, services. So thinking about maybe a larger, thinking about your RingCentral days. I, we, you and I share the telephony background, you know, right? So I remember having like some more complex issues that came up with more complex SaaS and having a services team that can help do those custom builds. You have a choice to make. You can hire that team internally, you can hire it externally. Like that's, that's where I'm going. Is that a channel that you can leverage or is that something that you just need to plan for and have in place if you're a more cost, a more complex product?

Yeah, fair. One of the great things about Zoom is it just works. So it's much easier from a service perspective. But with that, To be fair, with services, there's a couple things. You know, one thing I would say, um, is it's a, it's a yes and yes. And what I mean by that is we enable services, um, at the end of the day. And what we do is we do have ability to do full service. When I say full service, I mean help manage the environment. If professional services are needed, go ahead and do that. And that's because there's plenty of customers that want that, that need that. Some customers want to do themselves, Some customers want you to do that for them and you need those capabilities. At the same time, we work with a ton of partners and for a lot of partners that is part of their core go-to-market, that's their revenue stream. As a SaaS company, that's not how we're valued, that's not core to our revenue stream. And so I don't wanna say the wrong way, but we almost do it 'cause we have to, because the customer needs it and that we do anything the customer needs, that's how we think.

Got it.

But if a partner wants to do it, we're 100% behind in they doing that and helping them be successful there. The key is they just need to be able to do it do it at a high quality, right? 'Cause at the end of the day, it's all about the customer and the customer experience, and that's what we need to protect.

Yeah, and they're representing your brand. So that's 100%. All right, so it's actually a natural transition to lesson number 2 here, which is building out your partner network. So tell me more, Mr. Customer, what are we talking about building out this partner network? How did we get there?

Yeah, I mean, we have a pretty incredible, I mean, we added about 3,500 partners over the last, this is a major area of investment. So we've added about 3,500 partners.

Wow, 3,500 partners.

Oh my goodness, programs over the last year, you know, we've doubled our team that helps those partners. We're making investments in programs and automation, lots of work done. And about today, about 25% of our non-online business globally comes from partners. And that's, you know, and that's something that we're watching grow. That's more than double, um, since I kind of came in here a couple years ago plus. And, you know, one thing I'd say is partners don't come in any one type. And so again, you have to think about your business, what you're selling, what the need is, is, you know, what's, you know, what's been traditional, what isn't. But, you know, there's everything from, you know, you could think like global system integrators at the top end. There's master agents that happen to work in the UCaaS world that we live in that kind of work more as sales agents, very successful channel. There's VARs, there's distributors to enable those VARs. And also, you know, and there's a variety of other types, you know, some that are just more service-oriented. And then it also changes by country. And so we do have some mappings, but it's for our business. Of, you know, one is like if you look at key markets and countries and regions we're in, what are the core channels? So like you take something like Master Agent, it's a very successful program, very scaled, very, you know, great for you, Cass, in the United States, but that program doesn't barely exist in Asia. Yeah, Asia, it's going to be a lot more of a core reseller, someone that's going to probably be pricing and packaging and servicing your product. Like, and so, you know, one thing is it's not a one-size-fits-all, it's really what's needed sometimes by the segment, but also for the market. And then, you know, understanding the needs of those partners and how do you add more value. But they're definitely core to our go-to-market. You know, they really help us extend our reach and offer greater value. And also a lot of relationships that they just have that you just couldn't get, you couldn't build enough in enough time where they really help you win together.

Is there like an accreditation for those partners for you so that you know they're representing you right? Like how did you scale them? Because 3,500 is a lot.

Yeah, yeah. We do have certification programs and badging. And in fact, that's something that we're working on right now in our program, how to even do that to the next level, and really kind of scaling and differentiating amongst these partners better for our customers. That's one of our initiatives as we go into this current year. And again, you know, some of these are some of the largest companies in the world that you would know by name, you know, and take, you know, a company like a carrier service provider, like a Lumen, take, you know, a CDW, you know, an Insight. And some of these could be, you know, a few folks that are working together in a small business, but guess what? In Des Moines, Iowa, they know everybody in healthcare or everybody in the downtown, and they're trusted and they're advisors and they have relationships. And so there's not, you know, they're very diverse is what I would say. Yeah.

Yeah. So scaling out that partner network and helping enable them so that they can speak to it, that's got to— I mean, are you deploying technology behind that? Is that something that you're—

For sure. Lots of investment, um, in partner portals. You know, how do you get information? We're rolling out something right now that, you know, one thing that depending on the size, some of the largest companies are great at this, but one thing I find in the partner where one of the strengths isn't usually marketing, to be upfront. They're really good at technical, they're really good at servicing, they're really good at selling, but tech marketing is not always their core. So we're, you know, rolling out some software now that enables You know, how do we take all of our assets? How do you let them re-logo it? How do you help them? How do you, you know, maybe you want to run a field event, but how do you do that in a way where, you know, you could basically on their behalf help market to their people, invite people, get them in and do a co-marketing event where they help bring the audience and then you help bring the presentation, and then together you go ahead and, you know, offer more value to the customer.

I love that.

I love that.

I have one more question on this one before we, we skip to the last one. I'm realizing our time and I'm like, I want to have an time for questions. So it goes fast, goes fast, Ryan. Here's my— here, let's switch this, this mentality of partner network for a second into integrations. There's, there's a, especially with the way in which APIs are being used to help enable different programs to work together, integrations can really help be that almost another channel or extra partner network for several SaaS brands. Can you, can you talk a little bit about like, how do you balance integrations? Like, how do you work alongside as a sales leader with the product team to help like give the feedback on, on ones that are going well, ones that aren't going well, where the need is, like, just paint the landscape for me, will you?

Yeah, um, closely is how we work is the short answer. But that's one thing about Zoom. Zoom's, you know, all about delivering happiness to the end customer, and part of doing that is listening to what the customers need. Yeah, you know, not just listening but actually turning that into actual product. Yeah. And so, um, there's a lot, you know, between our sales teams and really our solution engineers kind of act as the centralized resource for this. And collecting that data, passing on the product management through engineering. And, you know, we're very proud and we've built a very robust set of integrations, as you might imagine, into the leading applications that offer value. Think of a ServiceNow, think of a salesforce.com, you know, all kinds of applications that offer value for our end customers to be used in a more integrated fashion. We actually have a Zoom Marketplace, you know, with hundreds of apps. So you can go to the Zoom Marketplace and get those integrations out of the box and, you know, You have to buy third-party software, but the integration's at no cost. No, you know, we want to offer value to our customers. And then we actually have our Zoom apps, which takes that even to the next level and even tighter integrates that into Zoom. So doing that for our customers is core. And, and then we've even taken it to the next level in reverse, and it's like, well, how does Zoom integrate in everything else? And so we have a really robust and large ISV program where you could take Zoom and you could use Zoom as you know it you could take Zoom as a client and maybe integrate it into your own company's third-party systems, applications, things. Or maybe you're, I don't know, you're out there creating a dating app, or you're out there creating something where video is a piece. It's not the core. You don't necessarily need the whole Zoom experience, but you need a piece of Zoom. And we even enable that now for our partners to tightly integrate in a very seamless way. Maybe you're building a telemedicine app, um, you're a large healthcare organization. And so but you're building into an overall framework. Well, how do you customize that in the way that you want and offering a lot of flexibility?

So if I, if I may, it sounds like when you think about integrations or think about the opportunity to open up your own API, your, the thought process is really around what is the customer going to use this for, how do we help enable them, and then you bring on your integration to support that. Is that a good summarization of what I think it is?

Um, and I I think one thing I'd say is integrations are key in the SaaS world. I mean, you know, is that you have to be connected. You know, people want more seamless workflow at the end of the day. Yeah. There's not many products or services that do everything for the customer. You're gonna need to connect to other applications. And so I think that's core to being successful in SaaS myself.

I got like only a few minutes. I gotta speed up my process. Let's just, let's pop through the last 3 here and see if we can get through 'em. So the third lesson here was enabling a hybrid Salesforce I think we all are accustomed to that part right now. I think the one question I have here, right, is you see more companies coming back together, in-office elements coming back. I'm curious, like, when you think of enabling a workforce that is truly in two places, what are some of, like, just the key tips that someone should put in place to make sure that they're going to be successful in doing so?

You know, depending which way you're coming from, from all field or from inside, From coming from inside going out, what are the metrics? What are you managing? What are you watching? How are you enabling? Where do people go to find information? It's one thing when they're walking up and down the hall and you can lean over their shoulder and hear someone say something. It's another thing when you're not right over their shoulder to answer a question. So really, how do you find information? How do you create culture and make sure teams are doing stand-ups, they're getting together, even if it's virtually? You know, how do you— you know, sales has ups and downs. How do you find those pick-me-ups and what does it look like? And then, you know, for us, there's a lot of things around technology, using our tools, you know, things like, you know, we have Smart Gallery in our rooms environment where, you know, you have people back in the office. It used to be if you're remote, you were the second-class citizen, you know, room, they're shuffling their chip bag over the speaker and you're trying to listen in on a call and you're running between airports. And now, you know, some people have really set up their home environment. They got their dual monitors, their lights, they got everything. Now they walk in the conference room and they're like, oh wow, I'm just sitting here in the back. Like, it's not the same. And so there's things we're doing with technology to really reframe those people. So the folks that are remote don't feel like, oh, I can see the corner of Ryan's head and the side of Ryan's ear. But how do you bring them into almost a square like we're doing right now? So using kind of some technology to help with that too.

You're talking to a guy that actually, I can't see it because of my background, but I built the office in my backyard. I'm actually in an office that I built for my backyard so that I can have a place to go to work.

Um, all right. But moving, moving on.

Moving on, number 4 here, we have invest in enablement. I'll just briefly say there are so many companies that don't take this seriously early on, right? The younger you are, enablement is like a nice-to-have versus a need-to-have, or perceived that way, perceived as a nice-to-have. How do you see enablement in different segments? What can somebody do to just really enable a team fast?

I think enablement's core. And of course, you know, I kind of have an army of enablement now because I really believe But we can always have that. And when you're smaller, you can't. But I think when you're smaller, you know, it's really important to be listening to the customer. Of course, how do you make your products? What do they need? What's working? What's not? And you're adapting. But then also, what's working across the sales floor? How do you make that repeatable? And enablement is one of the ways, you know, whether between sales or product marketing and others, how do you make— what talk tracks, what processes, like, and how do you do that? And And what's crazy is this technology world moves so fast, the competition, yourself, product releases, the customer's needs, the situations around the world. Like there is so much for sales folks to know. It's almost an impossible task sometimes when you realize what they really have to know. And so how are you enabling them? And like we're doing a lot of investment now in like the next level, like Zoom selling, like methodology to processes to repeatability. We do a lot of things. One thing we inserted kind of during this, period of time that we just had about growth, um, were these Zoom Insights where we created these like 30-minute sessions, like coming in on a subject, we bring in the experts, you know, and it could be on a core product, it could be on a new way to sell, it could be a competitive thing, and really helping enable and educate the sales force. And these very digestible would be another keyword. Um, and then doing a lot with recordings, with online learning, right? Um, realizing that like getting everybody in a meeting and having them all be there, it's somewhat unrealistic. And sometimes your recorded views are going to be higher than your live views. And knowing that, you know, people really need it when they need it, even though they're learning it. So they need to know where do they go find it later and having a good process for finding information. Just because it's like, oh, I learned that, but it's contextual. Well, a week later, something comes up that makes me think I need to know it. You know, unless, you know, I'm, you know, I don't remember everything I learned. And so I have to go back, where do I find it? To go back.

Well, so I love that. I'm gonna just because of time issues, skip to the last one here, which is live your culture and make it a good one. But I will say that, right, you can, you can just to the enablement piece, it's practice at the early stages, find ways to practice with your team. It's then spend the money, invest in the later stages. Let's talk about finally, what's a modern sales culture? What does it feel like today? And how do you know you've done it right? Maybe 2 seconds on, 2 minutes on this, because we're about, we're about out.

Fair. Um, you know, I'd say even versus like sales culture, even a company culture, I mean, Zoom's about delivering happiness, um, and doing that, you know, in a caring, sustainable way. We have like one, you know, core value here, and it's care. And that's our community, our customers, our company, our teammates, ourselves. And, you know, so first, what is your company culture versus just a sales culture? And then how do you bring it down in the sales culture? You know, it's really about, you know, creating teams in a team environment, meaning everyone has their individual quotas and groups, but how do they all win together? How are they all working towards common goals? Like, you know, I, you know, I want players that aren't going to just take care of themselves, they're going to make the people around them better. And we recognize, we reward the people that we promote, you know, from inside into leadership. They're people that did great at their job, they drove results, but it doesn't mean they were the top salesperson. They did it there, they helped others around them, they added value. Maybe it's to their their floor, their office, maybe it's their segment, maybe it's a vertical that they're in. Whatever that is, they're finding ways to lead beyond just doing their core job. And that, at least for me in my environment, is kind of the culture we drive. And then the last one's kind of kaizen, Japanese always improving. And so if you're not improving, you're falling behind. And so how do you keep getting better? And quite often it's the little things. It's not the fancy behind-the-back pass, It's the little things that, you know, make you better at the end of the day.