Sales Assembly's #ScaleSmarter Virtual Roadshow - Denver 6.26.20

Welcome, everybody. Good morning. My name is Jeff Rossett. I'm the CEO of Sales Assembly. Welcome to our seventh and final edition of our roadshow this week, for those of you who might not be overly familiar with Sales assembly, just a real quick kind of education on what we're up to. So we're a Chicago based organization that has built truly the first ever one stop shop for just about everything that revenue organizations on the B2B tech side need as they continue to scale. We've been at this since 2017. We have the pleasure of working with close to 150 of the best B2B tech companies across the country. Brands like Upwork and G2 Sprout, Social, LinkedIn, Glassdoor, the list goes on and on. And really we set out to build a platform that works with CROs, VPs of sales, heads of marketing, all the way down the food chain to the SDRs and account executives and everyone in between to help get access to the types of things that B2B tech companies are really looking for as they continue to grow. So, strategy and resources around sales, enablement, revenue, operations, plugging all these folks into various peer communities that they can connect with their peers to share ideas and compare notes, pipelines for talent for all the open roles that they're hiring for. And then of course, what we're kind of known for is our very robust training and development curriculum where we do well over 100 events a year, from certifications to roundtable discussions, to peer calls and everything in between. And it's been a lot of fun. And what we decided to do here this week, we planned this a couple of months ago, just given everything that's been going on obviously throughout the world. And then as it translates to the business community, tech companies right now are kind of in a unique situation where there's really been a very sharp turn that they've had to make from being in a environment in Q1 of this year and before where, you know, VC money was flowing in, every company that we talked to was actively hiring for a ton of positions go to market strategies were out of control. Everyone was growing, growing, growing. And it was a great time to be in B2B tech. And then Covid happened and the brakes got pumped in a lot of different areas and a lot of the revenue leaders that we work with had to take a step back and think to themselves, okay, what might have been working in February of 2020 might not necessarily work for us in July of 2020. And how do we really build out strategy and infrastructure to really scale our business, but scale it maybe in a little bit smarter of a way as pertains to the type of technology that we're using, as it pertains to sales enablement, how we're onboarding our reps, the types of roles that we're hiring for, so on and so forth. So we decided to put together this roadshow series where we wanted to focus not only around the of what goes into really building a scalable effort in a smart way for B2B tech companies, but to infuse a local flavor for all the events that we did. So as I mentioned earlier, this being the seventh of these roadshow events, we've already hit Boston, New York, Seattle, Austin, San Francisco and Los Angeles. And every event follows a similar format where we're going to kick things off with a panel that's gonna consist of three different experienced revenue leaders from the local community, moderated by Christina Brady, who I'll turn it over to in a moment. Then we'll have some time for Q and A after the panel is over and then we're gonna transition directly into a keynote thought leadership presentation. Today's being done by Russell at Showpad and then we'll have some Q and A with Russell and we'll close it out here in a little bit. So with that, really excited to turn it over to our brand new president who started a couple of weeks ago, Christina Br. I'm going to let her take the reins and get going with the panel. Christina, over to you.

Awesome. Thanks, Jeff. I'm really excited to be here. Like Jeff said, I'm a couple weeks in, but very, very eager. So a little bit about me. I have been in sales for 14 years and in tech sales for 10. The majority of that in leadership and in executive leadership. My most recent role was at Glassdoor and that was actually how I was originally introduced to sales assembly. So Glass. Glass. Glassdoor is one of the members of sales assembly and as a revenue leader and leading the SMB growth org there, I immediately saw the benefit of my reps, attending trainings and up leveling. We saw increased roi, increased confidence and just increased skill sets not just amongst the ICs, but also amongst my leaders. And so I was definitely a believer in it as a member. And when Covid offered me the opportunity to find a new home and a new career, this one was a no brainer. There was an opportunity to come on board and help make everybody feel the way that I did as a revenue leader and to sort of pour some jet fuel on it so here I am and very, very excited to be launching in a city that I love in Denver. So we have an incredible panel today who can introduce themselves far better than I ever could. So I'm going to go ahead and turn it over to you one by one. If you could just talk to us a little bit about who you are and your company and what you do. So Brad, who I had the privilege of knowing and working for at Groupon, good to see you again. Could you kick us off?

Nice to see you as well. Good morning everybody. My name is Brad Merkavich. I am the chief revenue officer with Conga. I have run sort of go to market organizations so pretty much everything customer facing probably for the last 12 years. I've worked for some industry leading companies, Glassdoor and concur along with Conga as well. And I look forward to discussing, you know, strategies here with all of you this morning.

Awesome. Welcome. We are so glad to have you. And Rich tell us a little bit about you.

All right, thank you. And Christina, welcome obviously to the new leadership role. It's fantastic just to see the growth, the trajectory for sales assembly and branching out from Chicago, going nationally is really exciting. Rich park, good morning. Good afternoon everyone. Depending on where you're at. I am currently the vice president of pipeline strategy and business development at zora. ZORA is based out of the Bay Area. I'm actually out here in Denver. Everyone across my teams are remote these days. I'm responsible for two things primarily obviously strategy that's several quarters out and working cross functionally with marketing, product marketing, different groups in order to build specific strategies, programs, integrated efforts to build pipeline across the company. My history I've been in the sales space for about 21 almost 22 years. I started my career as an SDR way back in the late 90s and worked my way up to being a bag carrying ae. I've been a management consultant working on sales effectiveness, sales operations programs. I've been a director of sales, a VP of sales. I've run channel programs and I think that the perspective I certainly bring at least here in Denver is what works, what doesn't work. And I'm really excited to just be here with the community and get a chance to share some of this.

Thank you. You warm my heart a little bit. When you talk about starting as an SDR and working your way up. It's like for so many people that's the ultimate dream and I'm sure you got there of your own grit and tenacity. But also you Must have had some incredible leadership and guidance along the way that helped you to develop into now being someone who can do the same for so many. So I'm really excited to dig in and just learn more about throughout this. And then last but certainly not least, Melanie, tell us a little bit about

you and what you do. Yes, good morning everyone and sorry, can't be on video experiencing a little bit of technical bandwidth issues here, but I'm Melanie, I'm the CEO and co founder of Speck it. We're a relatively newer company in the digital enablement space and we're based in Denver, so we have a small office in San Francisco, but all of our go to market teams are in Denver. So marketing, sales success, they all report report up to me and we're currently in that like building phase of the company. So we're hiring our sales leadership, our sales team, growing our success and our marketing orgs. And so my mind is very much so immersed in that phase right now. But my background is leading business operations, sales operations at other growing technology companies. And so I came up with the concept and idea of specket when I was leading business operations. And so sales enablement, sales ops all led up to me at this company called Realty Shares. And so I'm really passionate about just, you know, leveraging different technologies, putting different processes in place to help organization skills and ultimately help, you know, reps be successful. And so super excited to be here today as well.

Wonderful. Welcome. All right, so to dive right in, I'm going to do just a little bit of an icebreaker. Easy question, Brad, I'm going to come to you first, but I would certainly love to hear anyone that has thoughts on the topic. But when you think about scaling smart, we have so many people listening today and so many people who will listen who want and need to scale their companies. Maybe they're stuck at a certain revenue target that they just can't get past. And as you're thinking about what are the things that you need to do to scale efficiently and well and quickly, if that's the goal. What are one to two things that a company would need to do or keep in mind in order to do that?

Yeah, I mean, you know, obviously there's a lot of things to do with scale. I think a lot of it starts especially today with the virtual world with a lot of really strong communication and alignment. What I've typically seen, you know, I've started at several companies between like 40 million and 100 million in revenue and scaled them to, you know, much larger, you know, numbers. And typically there's always been alignment issues, you know, so it's really getting to align the organization and make sure that they understand what KPIs are actually driving their business. I know that sounds super simple, but in reality, what I've seen in a lot of companies is they don't really fully understand what problems they have. So it's really hard to make decisions to actually change it and scale the company more effectively if they don't understand actually how they're going to do that. And so that's what I would say. I would say communication is huge, alignment's huge. And then obviously the one huge important thing is just hiring all the right people, making sure you're hiring people that fit within the culture, that agree with the mission and values of the company, that can also be a derailer if you make some mistakes there. But I think those are some key issues that I've seen in order to scale more effectively.

Yeah, I love that especially too. I always think about the difference between simple and easy and creating KPIs or getting the right KPIs should essentially be simple, but it doesn't mean that it's easy and it doesn't mean that it's easy to build. So there's an important distinction there. And then, Rich, how about from you?

I couldn't agree more with Brad's points. And I think the one that resonates the most that I would say, you know, if you're a revenue leader out there at a startup, you're a founder, you're somewhere in a position where you're really thinking about scaling. Now, Brad's point about sort of the hearts and minds and the people, I call it maybe the culture aspect of it. But too often, too often, I've seen this. I've seen dozens, scores of companies. Their lens on scale is process. And like a hiring model and like it's all just sort of. They double down on the linearity of process, they scale or they do all this stuff, but they don't pay attention to, again, the talent model. Do we have the right type of people to do this? Do we have the right leader for this specific phase of our business? And hey, why do we have all these tools? These tools maybe will help us in the next phase, but will they help us now to get from 1 to 10 million? And when you take that, what can the people do? And how are the people going to stay ahead with us as we scale? That's something that's often overlooked. And I think the biggest thing to pay attention to is it's generally a human effort. In most cases, you have people who need to stay ahead with you. Otherwise the whole scaling effort sort of passes their ability and capacity to be able to do it. And you get a lot of confused salespeople, confused marketers, confused people in products, and worse, confused customers from that type of scaling. I think the thing I would say there is just as you scale, don't forget about the dimension of your culture, the people and what capacity do they have to be able to absorb that and execute on all these designs in order to effectively go into market early on.

Don't leave your people behind as you're growing. Don't leave the people who got you where you are in a cloud of dust. That's a really, really, Melanie, for you, coming from more established companies and now you mentioned your company a little bit newer. I'm sure that scaling and doing it in a smart way is really front of mind for you. So what are some of the thoughts that you're having in terms of how you're going to scale and what you're going to do?

Yeah, absolutely. So I think, you know, what Brad and Rich touched on is absolutely true. I mean, your team is ultimately your number one vehicle to scaling. And so I think making sure that you have the right team for the right needs of the company is super important. And hopefully identifying people that can scale.

Right.

Sometimes your seed round marketing director might not be your Series D round marketer and in some cases they will scale a few. And so I think kind of as a leader, recognizing that ability in people to scale a few and then secondly, making sure that at least in my opinion, investing early on in the tools that will help you scale. Having been at a company that only invested in Salesforce at after we reach Series B and then having to go through that entire process of migrating to using a CRM for the first time. Once you're 80 people, it's hard to do. And so we took the approach where we had Salesforce from day one in the company. We invested in tools like Chorus that helped us record every single call and sell. When I've onboarded reps, I'm like, hey, here are the different playlists we've created on these different objections, these different kinds of demos, these different Personas. And just seeing their ability to onboard and ramp so much faster, which is such a critical component to scaling, is like how fast not only can you recruit top talent, but how fast can you get them delivering the kind of value that you're hoping that they will is such a critical key. And so I think for us, like, not only identifying those right. Those right team members, but also making sure that we had the right kind of enablement to help them scale and to help them add value quickly was really important.

Yeah, being deliberate with tools and enablement and training is big. And actually tools is a good topic because I imagine when you're thinking about your tech stack or the tools that you're using to enable your people or figure out how to train them, what we were using three to four months ago may be very different than what we're using right now. So, Brad, as you're thinking about the evolution of the last three to four months, have there been any new additional tools or resources that you've put in place to help your company navigate working in a virtual world?

I don't know. There's been new ones. We had a different issue with Conga, so I would say we had tool atrophy. So we bought a lot of stuff and weren't using it very well. So I, the last year have really been spending a lot of time making sure that we're getting value out of the investments we've made and leveraging some of those tools to their fullest. The one advantage we've had with COVID a little bit is obviously, you know, a lot of these tools work very well in a virtual environment. And so, you know, things like Salesloft that we were using and some components of the people were using it, we then got it expanded across sales and the CS team more effectively as opposed to just the SDRs using the tool. So I'd say that we've really been trying to just expand the use of a lot of our tools that we already have purchased and then also trying to leverage data more effectively in the fact that getting much smarter at territory planning and prioritization of accounts. You know, Conga has sort of a very large. We're very similar to Salesforce because we're one of the largest ISVs, so we have the same sort of segmentation. So that obviously our SMB business is quite large. And so really getting the teams to be able to, you know, know where to go, focus, both from an SDR perspective and from a sales perspective has been helpful. But I'd say, yeah, we probably have a little different issue than people starting new tools. We've tried to make sure we leverage the tools that we have.

I don't think it's that for. I mean, I don't think it's that foreign. It reminds me of something that I often call the Vitamix effect, which is you go out and you buy a Vitamix because it's really, really shiny and you feel like you have your new apartment and you should have one, and it does all these incredible things. But if you don't actually use the tool for what it's meant for or even know what it does, then you have a $500 blender. And in so many instances, we lose logos and we lose value retention because our product becomes the Vitamix where people bought it for all that it could do and then never uses it for what it should be.

That's right.

I used to say all the time at Glassdoor, like, don't let it become a Vitamix. Like, use everything that's there. Buy it with a purpose. So I think it's a very interesting point that you make just about buying tools and doing it the right way and making sure that what you have sense. Rich, I see you laughing a lot. Have you experienced something similar?

Well, you know, I. Sometimes I use similar analogy. Same thing. You got a blender, it's here for your health. You bought it because you want to do great, but hey, you keep putting vodka and ham in it. It's all about inputs and the data. And I get pulled into conversations all the time, both, you know, in my current role and in the advisory work I do. And sure enough, it's the PE firm and they're asking about tools for their portfolio company. And it's always like, what's going to give us the advantage? What's the new shiny thing? And when you start asking questions about, hey, well, what's the data set this tool is going to be working within. You're trying to unleash all this. You've got 50 customers. Do you really need something like gainsight? You got 50 customers, do you really need to go and do that? How about you really drill in some other ways to go figure out, like, what's valuable, what's another adjacent product fit for the new. The new shiny thing you guys are doing, working with like the data that you have and fixing your data, fixing what's in CRM, fixing your customer records, your customer master. It's so much more valuable to a sales team than buying a whole nother set of tools to go find other customers to mess up your CRM and customer master data. So I just think what you put into the blender is so important. And I always try to caution teams and always tell them like, if we don't fix the rock in the shoe of our salespeople right now, which is their dirty data, why are we going to spend another 300, $400,000 on another tool that's going to weigh them down or make it harder for them to walk? And I just think it's really critical for a lot of us, and we're all into it. We all love tools. We're all in that world where we look for that thing that's going to give us the advantage, like some of my clients have. But I just think it's important to take a step back and realize there's a time and a place for them, but look at the foundation of where the data comes from to really create the magnification and amplification of sales effort.

Yeah, Melanie, it looked like you were going to chime in for a minute. I didn't want to miss you.

I was just laughing about just the statement, garbage in, garbage out. And I felt like that was essentially, you know, what you were really focused on. And I mean, everything you said, I absolutely agree. I mean, I think a lot of it has to do with making sure that you're, you know, you're not over engineering some of these tools too. I think that's, you know, mistakes that teams make really early on, which is like, we need to track every single data point on our sales process or on our customers. And, you know, when you overwhelm your. Your team with, like, how much data entry they have to be doing, you know, at the end of a, you know, long day where they're on a demo with customer, you know, three, four calls with customers, and they're, like, looking at just like, how do I ensure that this, you know, these different conversations move to the next steps that I recap our conversation, like, at the end of the day, like, that is what truly matters. But, like, you know, as leaders, we need to get the data in the. In, you know, your CRM as well. And I think, like, when they're looking at that and they're like, oh, my gosh, I've got 30 or 35 or 40 fields that I know I need to fill out on these different conversations. Like, that just all of a sudden is really. It just discourages them from even wanting to log in in the first place. And so one of the first things we focus on is like, what are the couple key data points that we truly, truly, truly care about that are going to help, you know, give our team, you know, our leadership team the visibility we need into our pipeline and help us really understand, like, whether these are real deals or like what the next steps need to actually take place. And we ended up like even at Specket, stripping down a lot of the fields that I've initially built out because we realized like, while they were really valuable from like a, an eventual data analysis standpoint, they weren't helping us in the short term, like really understand what was happening because people just weren't filling things out correctly.

Yeah, yeah. I can only imagine right now that the pipeline fiction increases because it's hard to identify a real buyer right now and it's hard to learn what urgency means. And it's scary to take a deal that looked great three months ago out of the pipeline and accept the fact that maybe it's not a deal right now. And when we talk about tools, you know, one of our biggest tools is our human equity. It's our people. And so, Brad, for you, when you think about the effect that Covid is having on pipeline and we think about the effect it's having on how we interact with our customers, we can't go see them in person anymore. We're lucky to get them on a zoom. Everything is over the phone. Do you see pipeline gaps happening because we're having to change the way that we sell. And what do you see happening in the future as you work through it?

Yeah, definitely. So, I mean, I think every company is a little bit different in the fact that, you know, whether they're more enterprise or SMB oriented. Clearly a lot of digital marketing works, works really well on the SMB side and tends to not work as well on the enterprise side as where the events come in. Conga works across all of those segments. But we were definitely heavy on the event side. So I'd say our marketing team probably over indexed on branding and events. And events to us could be anything. It could be, you know, we're large isv, so it could be Salesforce events, it could be small regional events where we take, you know, some in funnel deals in Boston to a game or something like. So events was a broad brush, but it was a, it was a big component of our pipeline. So as you can imagine, that all evaporated in, in March. And so what we're seeing is clearly, you know, we're doing much more digital. We're having to change to, you know, our nurture campaigns were relatively simplistic. We're now looking at more like vertical micro sites doing more complex nurture campaigns, probably more from a vertical perspective. We're testing out like where you would have went and met your salesforce rep. You know, we have reps doing like, you know, they send them grubhub things and then plan a lunch on like Friday and get people together so doing some creative things to try to do things that they would have done, you know, in person previously. And some of them are working, some of them aren't working all that great. I mean, we're sort of in testing mode right now, I'd say. And. But clearly with, you know, the. I don't think we see events happening until at earliest, possibly like summer of next year in any type of large fashion. So. So we're going to continue to test a lot of these different areas and, and try to, you know, the challenge right now is everybody's doing virtual events. And so I'm sure, you know, we can hear other people provide some feedback. But yeah, it's.

It's hard.

It's hard to get attendance, at least what we've seen. And so I think we're gonna have to continue to be creative and try other, you know, digital efforts to do that. As far as working from home and actually the sales being over, like that was pretty typical for us anyway, a decent chunk, you know, similar when we work glasses, where a lot of things were done over the phone. And virtually, anyway, that hasn't been as big of an issue. I think on the pipe generation has been where the big hit has been versus actually managing the sales cycle virtually.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I think just we think about how we have to change as companies in terms of our people and how they're interacting with our products and with our customers. And if our products have to change, like to your point, in person events, who knows what's going to happen with those. And they're probably never going to look the same and certainly not at the capacities that they have been. So there's a lot of agility and movement that has to happen. And rich for you, you've gone through some incredible growth headcount at your company. Talk a little bit about what it looks like for the level of reps specifically in Denver and what it's like to hire there. And if there is any kind of difficulty, difficulty getting people who are more tenured ramped up to speed very, very quickly. What does the talent overall look like?

You know, I think Denver continues to be a place where if what you're looking for is going to be more kind of commercial, more of an SMB inside sales kind of hybrid inside sales that Tends to be the majority. There's obviously exceptions. There's always going to be a smattering of very talented enterprise reps who maybe left a big public SaaS company and then moved to Denver for lifestyle and they work out of their homes. There are plenty of them. There's plenty of leaders who are remote, like me, that are just in the market. But I think that the largest population, the biggest part of the curve, if you will, is going to be generally an earlier to mid stage, mid market enterprise, sorry, bottom of the enterprise, more mid market commercial SMB rep. And that's kind of what companies have come out here to do. Companies have left the Bay Area and they continue to be. I mean I was on a panel call with another PE group and they were just talking about the different companies that are all basically building the same type of organization here. It's either the, the, it's either an inside sales function, they're looking for real estate or they're building their customer success function and they're moving it out of, you know, moving out of San Jose, Santa Clara. And because they figured out that's a big talent profile here, you can build a big, nobody calls them call centers anymore, but you can build a pretty large group, right? You can get a fairly large population and then you've got a bunch of hungry first line managers here who you've been in the market and know it. So to answer your question, I think challenge number one is just a recognition of where our market is in terms of maturity of our industry now. That said, five years from now, 10 years from now, we will probably have plenty of enterprise sales organizations and groups out here. It's very likely to happen. Given the footprint and the growth of some of the big companies that we have right here, born in Colorado, they're going to be there. Challenge. The challenge is how then do you scale and how do you build an organization where you're teaching people to be in an environment? Here in the Denver market where in Francisco you can have an inside sales team, they'll get started and I've talked about this before, they get started and they work till maybe 5 or 6, but they start at like 9 o', clock, they come into the office at 9, they pound the phones, they work, they're on zoom, then they leave around 5 or 6. Denver's different culturally. People come in at 7 and they leave at like 3:30, 4 o'. Clock. You know, everything just sort of happens on a different kind of expectation, calendar and timetable. So I think challenge one is culture Here in the Denver market. Excuse me, two. Challenge one is you got to recognize that the bulk of talent here is kind of inside sales earlier, mid stage career. Secondly, it's culture in Colorado and that people like to start early and get done a little bit earlier. And I think the third challenge here is increasingly around real estate. You can't just go get an office in Boulder anymore because it's cool to be out there. I mean, I know we're working from home now, but companies are still thinking about footprint and space and we've kind of outpaced ourselves in terms of real estate. There's a lot of class C real estate in Denver, but who really wants like a class C building? Everybody wants A or B somewhere in lodo. Everybody wants a really cool office near where Conga is out there in Broomfield. I mean there's. There's not a lot of spaces like that. Right. There's just not a lot of great spaces. And that's another challenge out here too is people. People don't want to be out in sort of like the fringes of the metro area as much or outside of a center like, like Broomfield, where Conga is, that's a center. There's a lot of other great companies there. There's centers in like dtc, Greenwood Village. But real estate's a challenge. I think those three as companies want to come here. They're tackling all three of these questions like, is this the right place for us? How are we going to do it? And we're starting to see OTE start to ratchet up too. Last year, 2018, when we have data was the first year we saw jumps in ote. This is not the cheap, low cost place that it was six or seven years ago. And I know Melanie and Brad know this as well because they've hired a lot here. We're starting to see us ratchet. We're nowhere near a Bay Area or in New York, but it's not what it was years ago. We can't get away with paying an SDR 40,000 OT anymore. We've kind of ratcheted that up. And so I think that's going to be another challenge for the next few years is the talent we're getting. How do we scale up real estate? And then where are we from a labor standpoint compared to other markets where they could scale as well?

Yeah, a lot of really amazing and juicy points in there. And what I want to hone in on for Melanie is this idea of talent acquisition and paying people based on where they located. And three months ago that whole thing got shaken up where we're all working from home. So this idea of like where do I work and versus where do I live and what do I get paid. So Melanie, as you're thinking about talent acquisition and recruiting and where you're looking for talent and what it looks like, what does it look like for you right now, hiring in this landscape and has anything surprised you?

Yeah, that's a really good question and I agree with Rich's points around just ot. Like I think all departments other than sales are actually a lot more cost effective in Denver than they are in the Bay Area. Like I think if you look at marketing supports success, the OT and the comps are significantly lower in Denver. But sales, if you're looking for that enterprise rep, that mid market rep, you're going to be a lot closer to Bay Area OTs than you think. And so that was a little bit of a surprising, I guess realization for us over the last year or so. Just really trying to recruit top talent now in terms of how I think about talent acquisition. So we've got our design and product team base in San Francisco and you know, the number one reason is that my co founder who leads our product org is out there and so she wanted that that team to be based out there. And I think, you know, ultimately that's where a lot of that talent is right now in the market. Though I do see that changing over the next few years. Sales, I think, you know, you can find, it's not easy, it's not as easy as Bay Area, but you can find the right kind of talent here in Denver largely because over the last few years you've got the zooms and you know, the iterables and the udemies of the world that have all kind of opened their second third offices here in Denver, brought some of that Bay Area talent, recruited some of that top talent in Denver and really brought some of that sales culture, that that scaling school culture to Denver. And then you've got some of Denver's own, the ibottas of the world, the ping identities of the world that have had a lot of success, the vertafores which obviously Rich is really familiar with, some of those teams that have demonstrated the ability to scale large go to market teams here in Denver. And so I think the talent pool is a lot better than it was five years ago. Like if you asked me like hey, you're looking at to build a go to market org, are you ready to scale in Denver? Five years ago, my answer, frankly, just would have been no. I don't think I would have felt as confident in my ability to hire the talent that I need right now and the talent that I'm going to need over the next two, three, four years as we really, really start scaling. But I think that that answer is quite different now. And I think it's largely because more sales leaders are coming here, like, where we're looking at a few different roles that we're hiring for. And I'm starting to see a lot of folks from the Bay Area that again, five years ago, their answer would have been no moving to Denver. Right. But now they're seeing, like, wow, you've got, you know, a lower cost, a significantly lower cost of living. You have the opportunity to actually own a house here, like, in, in the Bay Area. That's just not something that's top of mind until you're like, much later in your career. Like, everyone kind of, you know, works hard, play hard. Like, you're just not safe. You're not in that saving mindset in Denver, like, like, my network is buying homes, like, like second homes left and right. And it's just a different mentality. Like, you are earning to be able to buy a house and build a life. And that's just a different mindset than San Francisco. And so I think, you know, more people are starting to realize that about Denver, that, yes, you can get access to some of these really, really cool companies and roles and also build, you know, a real life that you want for your family and everything. And so I think that's becoming a more attractive opportunity for top talent.

Yeah, and you're honing in on some of the ideas around just the specific culture in Denver and what that culture looks like. And so, Brad, we know that the culture in Denver is very different than, say, a San Francisco or even a Chicago or a New York. And so when you're looking to build and grow an organization in Colorado, how do you scale the culture that you want and combine it with the culture that already exists?

Yeah, I mean, I think. I think some of the fundamentals aren't really much different. I mean, I agree. I think Rich's point is accurate. I think there are some cultural things. I have the same exact thing that Rich explained. They come in earlier, tend to leave earlier, which, to be honest, I don't, you know, as long as people get done what they need to get done. And, you know, and I don't really have an issue with that. So I think there's Some nuances. And I've lived overseas as well. I lived in Europe for five years. And everybody wants to say they're different, but I think the core fundamentals of what I'm going to try to hire and the people I'm going to try to scale with, I don't know, those really are going to be different. I think there's definitely some cultural stuff that you'll deal with Denver, but, you know, trying to find the people that are, that are highly motivated, you know, hard working, you know, mission driven, all of those things are still going to be pretty core, whether I hire a team in Colorado, whether, you know, we ramp up the office at Glassdoor in Chicago like we did there as well. And so I do tend to think that they're pretty similar. And I have a great group of people, to be honest, at conga here. And we've been able to. A lot of our SDRs that we've hired have moved into our SMB sales and then have moved up into, you know, some have even moved up to enterprise sales over like four years. So we've been able to see some great progression. I do agree with the enterprise point, but enterprise sellers in most companies though, you're typically wanting them remote anyway and you're wanting them in market. So I haven't seen as much of a challenge there because I'm not necessarily hiring a significant number of them in Colorado per se. So from a scaling perspective, I think some of the fundamentals are going to be the same regardless if you're in Denver, Chicago or San Francisco.

Yeah, absolutely. And rich, when you think about culture and scaling culture, you know, I remember being able to say things like, we have a ping pong table, we have cool snacks, you know, like, like Brett, we were always able to be like, last door is the best snacks, you know. But so like, you know, and those things we've all realized aren't culture.

Those are perks.

Perks are not culture. So when you think about the growth of culture and how you do that in a virtual world, what does it look like?

I think this will be particular to what I was saying about the bulk of the market for talent in Denver again, earlier. Middle stage sales professionals, customer success professionals. My answer, we scaled up at Vertafore very quickly. Close to 90, 100 reps brought into the organization inside of like two months. Selling their first deals in the first 45 days. There was a lot of scaling. So my answer is, I think through the lens of what you've done in Denver, but it applies Just like Brad said, in many places. And here's the answer. I think what's really important from a culture standpoint is it's not the perks, it's not the Soylent Green in the refrigerator. It's not like the free food and candy that's almost become table stakes at a lot of places. What's really important is the realization of one of your new hires that even though today is day one and they're going to learn and they're going to go through a boot camp, learning experience, whatever you've got for them, there's actually a two to three year path and a set of learning and capabilities and a growth trajectory for them that's become like the new mantra for what culture is, because that's what we find that early stage and mid stage professionals care about. They want the next level. I've talked to many. I led a panel a few years back with top sales reps. Every single one of them was the number one, number two rep in their company. And they were at like amazing, you know, public, public software companies. And it was funny. Each rep was like, yeah, I've been to president's club four years in a row since I first started. I think right now I kind of feel fatigued. I feel a little bit, it sounds terrible, but I actually want to be a leader now. I want to be a team lead. I want to teach people how to sell and how to hunt and how to crush it. And everyone on that panel said they were looking for the next step. So I think, you know, 15 years ago, 20 years ago, when I got started in sales, the salespeople who are the best, they wanted to just continue to make money. And I'm continually surprised at how many earlier stage, kind of younger, if you will, salespeople, they want more than just hitting their number. They want learning opportunities. They want to go work in the office overseas and sell in Sydney, Australia. They want opportunities to go like, can I do a rotation in product management? And I'm continually surprised at how few companies see that culturally as being really important. You got to have a culture of learning, a culture of opportunity and a culture of growth no matter what your size is. And that's sort of the new, I think that's the new standard, it's the new expectation of our workforce in sales and marketing. Like, they just, they see that and cool, great, you got a full fridge. But if there's nothing here for me to get to my next level or stage, I'm going to be out of here. And I'm going to go find a company that has the fridge but also has the opportunity. And it's just, it's important. I think all leaders on the revenue side need to kind of drill in on that and focus on that because it's a source of attrition. It's a source of like poor employee engagement scores. Even though you might be fully at quota and you might hit the number every year in the org. It's that hidden sort of dimension of culture that you got to have it around learning and opportunity.

I absolutely agree. It looks like Christina actually might be stuck, so I'll just pop in on that. No, I absolutely agree. And I think, you know, if you just look at just the statistics and just the general trends, especially with the next generation, I think I always forget the names. I think it's like Gen Z or something, but whole minimal.

We're running out of letters.

Yeah, I can never remember. But the next generation after us, I think it's Gen Z. You know, they're every, every statistic shows that like when they're looking at jobs, like what they're looking for is growth opportunities, right? They're, they come from a more minimalistic mindset. Buying all the things, having the cool cars is much less of interest to them than having the experiences. Right? From like a, from a vacation standpoint, like if you look at how they spend, if you look at what they look for in their job opportunities, like there's just, it's a different culture, it's a different mindset. And so I think companies that are able to recognize that like not only do they need to cater to, to their employee base today and some of that culture that might come from, you know, those, you know, older generations, they also need to realize that the next generation is just interested in very, very different, different things from a fulfillment standpoint. And I've always said, you know, like at my last company, we had all the things, we had the ping pong tables, we had the pool tables, we had the beer and all that. But like that's not what you brag about to your friends. Like that's what you, you say when you first join a company and you tell your friends about. But that's not what you want an employee bragging about to their family and to their friends six months in, right? You want them telling like, I have learned so much. Like we had one of our sales reps tell me in one of our one on ones, like, I've learned more in the last four months that I've learned in the last 12 years of my career. And that is what you want instill in people. Like, that's the kind of feedback I think as a sales leader and as a, you know, me as a founder. But like that you look for in feedback because that is what they're telling their friends. Like, you're gonna learn, you're gonna join this company and you're gonna set up not just your career over the next couple years, but your career path over the next couple decades. And that is what I truly believe people are excited about, you know, bragging to their family and friends about. And so I think over investing in learning, over investing in the right kind of, you know, tools and enablement. And I don't know if you guys saw MSP did this study recently where they looked at, you know, what are the. They looked at. It was a survey on basically like, what are the growth expectations and forecasts over the next six to 12 months. And all the companies that had a higher. That rated their ability to deliver on their goals and to exceed their quotas. The two main things that stood out to me is like better use of technology. Right. So leveraging tools to drive both operational efficiency as well as just productivity, but then also over investing in training and coaching. And I think those two levers are becoming more and more important for companies to invest in.

Agreed. This is Jeff popping back in. Christina dropped off. She had some WI fi issues that popped up right at the end, but it was good timing because we didn't want her back anyway because it's time for the Q and A and I was going to hop in. I do have a couple of questions here that came in throughout the discussion that I'm just going to fire off to you guys. And real quick, just on one of the points that you all were just talking about around, I think it was rich what folks are really looking for these days. It's funny, we work with a lot of really great B2B tech companies. And about a year ago, we had some of our members that began asking us if we could put together like a little graphic and a badge that they could then use to put on their career pages and their job descriptions to show candidates that they were members of sales assembly. So when they're talking to candidates that might have three different job offers, they can say, oh, well, here's another reason why you should come work with us where we invest in our team. You're going to have the opportunity to do all this stuff. And, and I'm not sharing this as a plug for Sales Assembly. But it just, it goes to show you like companies now realize that if they're Talking to a 28 year old account executive, it's not just about the W2 and it's not just about the job description itself. It's about being invested in and having an opportunity to grow. And I can't say whether or not having a little badge that said Sales assembly members actually converted folks over to accept positions or not but that was something that they certainly saw value in having a discussion with potential candidates on. So it just, I think it goes to show you that's that's what's on top of mind for a lot of, a lot of sales reps these days

compared to maybe past past years.

So a couple of questions that have come up. So there was some discussion around maybe a little bit of a lack of like enterprise experienced talent in Denver. So the question is if you're looking to build out an enterprise team physically located in Denver and you're starting from scratch given some of the lack of actual talent available that have enterprise SaaS experience but you want people working in Denver, how do you go about kind of getting that team started?

I mean I think there's one probably to rich it's going to depend how big the team is. If you're going to try to hire 100 enterprise salespeople in Denver quickly, you know then that. But again I think it really depends on sort of the numbers. There's definitely talent here which I think Richard brought up. It's just you know, there's people like you know, myself, I've lived in Denver for 20 years. I've only worked for one company that was based in Denver. So you know I've been a CRO for several companies that were based somewhere else. So there's definitely some enterprise talent that lives in the state. It's just, you know, it's probably not as plentiful obviously as the Bay Area or maybe Boston or some other tech areas as well. So I think just depending on the size, you know, like anything really understanding the profile that you're looking for in the backgrounds, being realistic with what the market has and making sure that you have the Runway to hire the amount of people that you need.

Yeah, I would add a quick point to that. Everything Brad's saying is right. Yeah, it depends on the number how many. I've advised a couple of clients over the last year or so who had the same thing. They wanted about a 5 person to a 10 person team out here and both have been successful. In these enterprise efforts, primarily because they both did well. It wasn't just the advice I gave them, but they had designs to do this anyway. They instrumented the sales process in a way that wasn't too heavy. What I mean by that is if you're going to have an enterprise team in Denver and you want to use tools, you want them to be able to have the right set of initial enabled kind of things around them in terms of tools and processes, you got to have some instrumentation and both of them focus on. What I mean by that is the sales process. The entry exit gates in the sales process at the enterprise level are so important. You've got to know how and when to engage in red lines, security reviews, security audits, working with procurement, going laterally in an organization, working with the financial buyer, the technical buyer, the business buyer. And that's why it's so hard for reps who don't have that experience. Because enterprise sales will blow up your time if you don't know how to use resources internally, if you don't know how to use your executives, your head of sales to help you, your sales engineers. And so having an instrumented sales process is one of the best things you can do, especially in Denver. Reps here who've kind of grown up here, they've been in inside sales organizations, they know that. And then once that sort of is exploded and magnified at the enterprise level and now not being able to interact in person, it's got to be really clear and tight. The sales process has to be crisp and you don't ever want to overdo it because enterprise sales have to have some degree of art to them. They have to have some judgment on the part of the rep or the manager helping with that. But I think that's the one thing I'll add is just good focus on value. Selling and instrumentation can really go a long way, especially in Denver as you're trying to scale up.

Awesome. That's great.

Thanks, Rich.

Another question, and this will probably be the last one. If you are a newly promoted sales manager first sales management position and you're working in an environment like this when you don't have a chance to even interact with your team in person or get like face to face one on one mentorship with other leaders in the organization outside of zoom calls, any advice that you would share for a first time frontline sales manager team lead in their first management position going through Covid right now.

I mean one of the things I the first, I think piece of advice I'd Focus on is just that, you know, more is not better. Right. Pushing your reps to do more activity, to build more pipeline, to do more of everything is not necessarily what's going to get you the results in this environment. I think more than ever, like over indexing on quality, meaning spending that time with your teams, coaching them, listening in on calls, making sure that you have, you know, the talk tracks around your objections and the framework that they can replicate across different customers and verticals. I think really focusing more than ever on quality in this environment would be the number one and then I think the number two and it's pretty aligned to that. But really just taking a step back and mapping out your sales process and really looking at what are identifying the three key things right now that you need to focus on on in your sales process. Right. Like we were looking at our pipeline and we realized like a lot of our deals are in that stage three phase where we've got all the right people in the room, but we just haven't figured out like how do we sell our product and get that to that stage five. Right. Like we've got people excited, we've got people seeing the value, but like how do you actually get to that stage five where they're, you know, we're signing or signing the deals. And so we realized that like we'd been focusing on the wrong pain point early on in discovery, like we'd just been selling on the wrong pain point for the customer. And so, you know, taking that step back and like really looking at your data and seeing like what key insights can I, can I pull and themes that I can identify and like over invest on solving those would be, I think the number one thing I'd give to like an earlier sales manager right now. More is not better. Like telling your VP of sales, telling your CRO, like, hey, look at all the pipeline we have is gonna sound great for the first few weeks, but the only thing that's gonna matter is are you able to actually deliver? Are you able to actually close? And like that's where that coaching, that training, that investment really, really comes in.

Yeah. The only additions, I agree with all of those. I think that's right. What I always explain to frontline managers when, when they first go in is they have a tendency of they were really successful the way they operated. And so they obviously have a tendency to think that that's the best way to do it. And so it's just really important to have a framework. And framework could be all of those things, like whether it's sales process or whatever, but a framework that your team understands on how you're going to look at the business and how you're going to judge that. And then to me, it's how you style flex with each person. I think what's super important in today's business is that people are different, you know, and you may have six reps and the strengths of two of them may be similar. The two are very different and you have to really work with that. And you got to try to accentuate the things that make that individual going to be more successful. And that sometimes can be the hardest part of the job because they may operate in a way that's very different than how you operate operated. And I think when you first go into a management role, that can sometimes be challenging because you just have a strong viewpoint based upon what made you successful for several years. And so you sort of got to step back away from that and realize it's an algebra equation, it can be done several different ways. And people are going to be much more motivated if you're actually helping them be successful in the way that they operate. And so that would be the advice that I would provide. You know, when you become a frontline manager, I don't think it matters whether you're virtual or in person or whatever. It's really just honing in on those individual people that work for you and making sure that you're working with them specifically to make them successful in the way that they can be.

So, Jeff, I know we just got a couple minutes left. I actually gave this exact advice to a mentee in my network who got promoted during this whole Covid thing. And they said, what can I be doing right now? I want to get my name out there, I want to network. I interpreted this question a little bit like how do you network a bit while all this virtual Covid stuff is going on? So here's what I told her. I said, make a list of everybody, director, vp, manager, or pull it out of workday or wherever you get it. But make a list and work over the next five to six weeks of setting 30 minute to 45 minute introductory calls with those cross functional leaders. Make the list in your sales organization first and then do marketing, customer success, even do like finance and make introductions and ask them, have an agenda and say, tell me about your org, tell me about your charter, tell me about how you guys work with sales. And then finish the conversation with are there cross functional initiatives for managers to be able to work together from your department and Mine and document those. And just doing that alone gives them a chance to really network because other leaders want to actually interact with new people in the company. So that was the advice that I gave to this new manager. Don't be afraid that, hey, we're all on zooms and we're in a Covid environment Network. Create a little list, meet cross functional leaders and find out where they intersect with your org. And it'll really serve you well during this time to kind of network and get your name out there.

Yeah, that's great. And just as a very direct follow up question, Rich, are those pink pineapple on your shirt or what are you writing on there, buddy?

They sure are. They sure are. These are. These are pink pineapples. Yeah. I'm a big fan of bonobos. Bonobos. I don't know how to plug them.

Jeff, you have very good eyes. I didn't even notice that until you brought it.

Yeah.

Incredible vision.

I'm very impressed.

Conversation just looking at people's zoom backgrounds and wardrobes. Okay, great. Well, with that, I'd like to thank the panel for joining us. This was a fantastic discussion. Thanks for all your insights. And Denver, thank you for Jay Cutler.

You're welcome.

With that, we're going to go ahead and turn it right over to Russell, who's going to take us the rest of the way. Russell runs global sales enablement for a fantastic company that we've done a lot of great stuff with over the years called Showpad and Russell. Take it away. And when you're, when you're wrapping up, we'll bring it back for some Q and A.

That's great. And thanks again, Jeff, and the sales assembly team here, really excited about this. And I'll apologize again for Jake Hutler. Sorry again for that. That's actually a good lead into the session here. And hopefully I'll get my screen shared here and we'll just do a quick tech check. Jeff, can you see this? Okay, They've lost you there. Okay, looks like we're good to go. All right. So funny enough, you know, we segue into the session and I definitely didn't set this up, but it just happened to work out pretty correctly in terms of our 2020 predictions. And, you know, everybody had a lot last year, and I thought I, I'd revisit some of those. You know, just thinking about predictions. I'm, I've been in DENVER for now, 20 years, growing up in Iowa, so I was a bit of a Cubs fan. Pivoted to a Rockies fan now. But of course, we're in Broncos country and, you know, back to predictions are really, really hard. The Broncos, everybody predicted them to get 10 wins, make the playoffs. Nobody predicted them to lose four straight games, end up three and six. So really, really tough, you know, so predictions are really hard because we do try to rely on a lot of data. And that's what this conversation is going to be about, is thinking about our experiences and our data. Another prediction that was hard, you know, is the telephone. Western Union came out and said that the telephone had too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication, which, you know, obviously we can laugh at at the time. But again, back to predictions. Who predicted that everybody would carry a phone in their pocket now, but nobody really uses it as a phone. You know, we use it to take pictures of food and cats and send this all over the Internet. So. So predictions are really hard, and I think it's becoming harder and harder. And I'll talk about some of the theories I have about why those predictions are harder and how it applies to sales and sales enablement. But part of the problem is, you know, that we have enormous amounts of data. And, you know, I think Brad and Rich were talking a little bit about that in terms of the data that we're generating. You know, so much stuff comes into the blender, the Blendtec or Vitamix, whatever it might be, and we're constantly trying to apply some computing power, AI and ML, and help us guide our decisions. And it's still really, really hard. You know, nobody's predicting all of these ups and downs, all of these things that are going on. And I'll talk a little bit about some of my theories about why and what we can do about that. And it boils down to how we started and were taught in business school or engineering school about doing predictions. So my background's in engineering. And so I've grown into the sales, sales nail and marketing roles because I wanted to expand my thinking beyond what I was taught in school. Economic evaluation. This approach that we took in school was all about how do we calculate and predict return on investment, net present value? Looking at fairly closed systems. You know, these are factories and well defined machines that they taught us as engineers. If we replace a part or build a new factory, what could we expect as that return on investment? And this worked really, really well for about 20, 30 years because we were dealing with closed systems, well defined, documented, the processes were well executed, and there wasn't a lot of variance in there. There was always some risk and always some oddities, but it was mostly because these are machines. There was no people factor. And what we're dealing with now is people. I don't know if everybody caught on that, but the prior conversation with the panel was all about people and that our 21st century businesses are really, really complicated and heavily interdependent. You know, technology ties a lot of this together, but it ties a lot of people together as well. And these people are really complicated and it's not all that predictable. Back to the conversation about how do you draw people into your culture and your company? You know, ping pong tables and beer gardens. They had the right idea, you know, try to bring people together and create a community. But in fact, it really doesn't work unless you have a culture club, unless you have a purpose for coming together. You know, those, those things really aren't a significant driver. And one thing to think about in terms of, of prediction is automation. We're seeing a lot in AI ML and automation that creates all these efficiencies in systems, but they're not able to react to a lot of unknown changes. And I'll talk a little bit about that next. And that's, I think, what we're struggling with. And we need new analysis and two things to think about with this past crisis over the past four months, would anybody have predicted that we'd have such a massive glut of food that we can't get to people, and yet such a buying supply spree of things like toilet paper? And it's interesting, I won't talk a lot about this, but two quick data points here. This farm that this picture came from, from the potato farm in Idaho, they actually opened it up to the public and they had 3,000 people come in taking, you know, 10 to 15 bags of potatoes each, and they still had mounds of potatoes left? In the meanwhile, people were panic buying toilet paper, even though 99% of our toilet paper is produced in the US and we've had no disruption production, no disruption in that supply chain. But again, it was this human behavior that changed. People were no longer going to restaurants, getting meals that had fries or baked potatoes on the side, hence the potato glut. We had just this panic buying where a handful of people started stocking up and everybody else wanted to get in on it. So nothing really could have predicted these reactions and these behaviors. So we almost need to take a different approach because now a lot of businesses are trying to improve their prediction. You know, the art of sales is always, how do you predict how do you get a better forecast? How do you get a better forecast? Will have better pipeline, healthier pipeline. And so I wanted to. I've talked about this before in my past about thinking about aspects of people and data. And I come to baseball. You know, baseball is really the sport and business of statistics. It's the rare sport that you can measure just about everything that goes on in that sport. Unlike basketball or baseball or football, every activity in baseball is tracked and has been for over 100 years. And we all know this story. You know, with Moneyball and how it was the art of winning an unfair game, the Oakland A's took advantage of a system that really wasn't measuring and valuing things that could make a change in the game. Very simply getting on base, whether it's hitting a single or getting walked to get on first base, versus buying up all the talent that they could, which is what the New York Yankees were doing. So it was about how you could strategically invest and buy the right things, buy the right people doing the right things. And the story was great. I think we've all probably read the book or seen the movie or heard the story, but again, fantastic. If you compare their spend and investments in people compared to the Yankees and how they had reasonable success, we're kind of seeing this now and how we're all trying to invest in the right technologies and the right people to get the right results. But in the past, I think we've seen a couple companies that would invest and do some things differently, trying to compete with those that had big coffers, that had big investments, and you could hire just the best, most experienced talent. But were you building the best team, revaling the right things? The Ace had that advantage. But what we saw was after a few years of doing this analysis, everybody caught up. And in 2016, those techniques started losing interest in Moneyball, because even though the data still available, Billy Beane said it best when he said, we're all valuing the same thing now, and we're all trying to now compete in the same way. And so that competitive advantage of how they were valuing talent had changed. There was no longer competitive differentiator because everybody was valuing talent the same way. And so we've got to think about that in our own game of sales and marketing and compare this to baseball right now. The things that we can measure is pipeline movements, revenue, deal velocity. But layer on top of that, all these technologies that marketing and sales buys. I'm gonna keep this up here for just a minute to talk about it because I'm sure that we all have five, 10, maybe even 20 different technologies that are somewhat integrated, generating data, trying to understand what are customers doing, where are they at in the buyer journey. We're looking at impressions, click through rates, open rates. We have never had such an embarrassment of riches of tools, but we really don't have the best process to analyze them. And to quote Billy Bean, we are now starting to evaluate a lot of the same things, and we've got to think about different ways that we can differentiate in terms of what we're trying to value as customers are going through their different journeys. Again, this is just one of many different flavors of a buying journey. A buying cycle or a sales funnel has a lot of different names. But again, how do we assess this and how do we take a step back and think about it a little bit differently? I was fortunate a couple years ago in working in consulting. Again, I had a heavy engineering background, so I was all about spreadsheets and pivot tables and actually got into software development, writing Visual Basic to analyze data and spreadsheets a lot better. But it didn't tell us. It didn't complete the answer. You know, even though an engineering school and MBA school, I could assess all this data, I could analyze it, I could write formulas. There was a missing piece. And as a software developer, I would always build what was required, analyze some of the results. But it wasn't until I started talking to people and doing a little bit of business analysis and consulting to really understand what they were doing and what they were thinking. So when I met Christian, we started talking about this concept before he wrote the book. And then I was able to get a copy of the book and read it and start applying it to my own life. It really is about how do we apply the power of humanities in this age of data and AI and ML. And there were a lot of themes, I think, that the team brought up in the prior panel about this, about how do we start start looking at people differently, how do we apply the power of humanities in this age of the algorithm? And I'm going to talk about some of these principles today, and hopefully you gain a little bit of insight from it. I've got a call to action at the end, but really to summarize some elements of the book, and I'll cover that in the next couple slides here. Think about the first bucket, I think was we're in that game of sales and marketing. We're kind of in this area looking at data statistics and trends and correlation. We have all that data, we put it in our Vitamix, we kind of mix it up and try to see what comes out of that. We're trying to make sense of a lot of these things and draw that correlation, which, it's good, it sets a direction, but it's never the best thing to give us a good decision. That good decision really needs to be based on that experience, the people side of it. On the right hand side, what are people's behaviors, our sellers and our buyers? What are their experiences? How do our buyers experience that pain and problems we're trying to uncover in sales and marketing? And how do we reach them? What's the experience of trying to reach them? Not just publishing a new blog or a white paper, but how do we connect that in there? How can we do constant hypothesis and testing some of these theories out, relying more on our intuition and that experience to create a hypothesis and test it, but not just use the data on the left hand side to validate it, but our own assessment into the behaviors to validate those approaches. And so this is where we need to combine kind of a broader science view of data and human analysis. And what I'm really excited about my role in sales and able to try to do this, connecting those dots between sales and marketing, most importantly the customers, the people that are out there buying in the enterprise today, trying to solve problems. And so some three insights I'll share with you as I read the book. And I'm trying to apply this in my own principles in life and encourage others to think about the same. First off is we can see what happened when we look at the data. It tells us what happened, but it really doesn't tell us why did it happen. That's really where we got to look at a people process and a methodology. And a good example is the story in the book talks about a grocery store. They had all this data as we all go in. A lot of us know King Soopers and Safeway here, being in the Colorado and Denver market. We go in, we use our rewards card. It tells us exactly what was bought, who bought it, what was the demographic, but it didn't tell us why we bought. And a grocery store chain actually worked with Christian on this in some research and they had all this data, but they didn't really understand why people were buying, what they were buying. Were they trying to cook that evening or that weekend? Were they trying to cook for a small family or a big party? And it wasn't until they expanded their thinking in cultural anthropology start doing More than just market research, but really doing cultural research, cultural interviews, asking questions in different ways, not to validate the what happened in the data, but to really understand differently. Why did it happen? So that business, that grocery store chain, changed their model of how they advertise so that they could more powerfully couple the what happened and why did it happen? Again, you've got to couple those things with those in person interviews and in person discussions and observations. Things that really aren't easily measured with digital transactions that happen and generate a lot of data, but don't necessarily provide most effective actionable insight. The second key insight I got from the book is that frictionless technology that we have, all this automation, it really gets us in this filter bubble. Again, we have have no lack of these digital systems and digital transformation that tell us all of these things that happen with data, but it doesn't really tell us where we get exposed to the same things over and over and over again. With this data, we've got to try to think about getting out of that bubble of frictionless technology delivering us all that data and getting out and trying to avoid that potato glut story or that toilet paper panic. And again, this involves taking a deeper look of getting beyond the technology that provides that data and into the humanities, into the analysis where we can do roundtable discussions with customers, do interviews instead of surveys and other ways to think about getting avoiding that frictionless technology bubble. Third key insight, and I'll spend a little bit more time on this in a later slide, is just how do we categorize all this knowledge as we're learning, we use a lot of things that we can bucket into that objective knowledge and maybe a bit of subjective knowledge as we're generating some of that data. But the harder thing to do is getting that shared and sensory knowledge. The shared knowledge is all about us and the teams and the human experience. Kind of like we talked about, what draws people together and why they want to work for company. It's no longer compensation, as the panel discussed before. It's that human experience. What can I learn? What can I gain that there's no value to that you can put my comp plan, it's a value that I gained from being mentored from people that have been there before. And then that sensory knowledge, again, these are things that only develop from experience. People that are fortunate to get that mentor that can share some of their intuition, their personal stories, their experience in different roles, different markets, selling in different selling in different verticals, these things in sensory knowledge, again, it's hard to document, hard to replicate. But these are the things that we should think about as we empower our sales teams and our marketing teams to perform better in sales, to create better marketing content. And so those action items, what are these things out of this book mean for sales? I'm going to summarize this up here in some guidance that, that hopefully help everybody think a bit differently about their approaches to their sales strategy or marketing strategy or enablement strategy. So first, back to that knowledge, that objective knowledge. We get a lot of this meaningful sales activity and marketing activity today with outreach, the number of meetings and connections with contacts. And we're very trying desperately to use a lot of this activity driven data to help guide us in terms of what we need to do differently. But one thing I haven't seen in terms of a lot of companies I've talked to is how are they baselining their reps today? Are you putting all of your sales reps in a single bucket in terms of trying to measure them? Are you thinking about that objective knowledge in terms of their activity? These people need different things. Whether you're a ramping rep, a fully ramped rep, and then if you're fully ramped rep, can you think about these categories as a sales leader and sales operations categories of overachievers, people that are performing, people that are underachievers, that need different things. Second area of knowledge is that subjective knowledge and skill. And as we're enabling our sales teams, I try to create these buckets of categories of things that they need to be enabled on. Knowledge and skill. Knowledge are things that we can test them on. These are things that traditional E learning or reading can provide, that we can quiz on and test on more, pass, fail, but provide that information. But the harder thing is the thing at the right, the skill development. So enabling and skill, we can provide some of that human experience and share knowledge there. But this really comes with one on one conversations with first level managers, with coaches and with other reps that are very experienced in these areas and trying to cover some of these categories. So this is the subjective knowledge that you've got to be able to build upon to deliver to your sales teams to more effectively enable them to sell. And so this is one of the approaches we're taking, as I've done in the past and now at Showpad is thinking about these categories of how do we enable sales. The third to be able to build that knowledge, we've got to have that shared knowledge. Well, and that shared knowledge. Well, what I mean is A central place can be a wiki, can be a Google Drive or OneDrive, but well structured. We can have some of the subjective knowledge that comes in in terms of the testing and messaging where we can share some of that objective knowledge around wins and losses and market research. But most importantly, how do we share some of the stories and techniques? This needs to be part of that community creating that human experience that that shared knowledge will becomes powerful. Then that we can deploy out to help our customers better understand solutions, help sales overcome objections and deliver some of these stories a little bit more effectively. Last call to action I have is developing that sensory knowledge. And the sensory knowledge, this is really tough. It's just that it factor. It's really, really difficult to put into a definitive guide. But these are things that we know when we see it. Things like our videos that we see of good reps doing discovery and storytelling. Objection. Handling and positioning. These things come about as people are playing the game. But it's hard to extract these certain elements. So the more that you can create a structured situation, a scenario and a role play, see how the game comes about and then extracting these key components of discovery and storytelling. Objection. Handling into the chapters to create those stories of enabling sales to then learn how good people do it, how they do it in other situations. The best way to do it is set up or a good way to do it is to set up some of these scenarios ahead of time so that reps can come in, they can practice some of these activities. But even better if you're seeing it live in action, in the moment, the best reps that just know how to do this instinctively, you see how they do things like focusing, having a thoughtful pause, not a quick response, how they ask a lot of really good questions and try to answer those questions that customers have with stories. Again, a lot of these techniques, this fits into that shared knowledge. Well, just gathering the game tape, whether it's the practice tape or the live tape that you're watching from an actual sales conversation. And so my last slide here and just bringing it all together again, the panel alluded to this a bit. You know, very simple call to action I had here because it's very easy, you know, to go and find these folks on the left hand side in operations and finance and sales leaders that have a lot of data and statistics and we can talk to them about what they see and how they're analyzing trends and clients correlation. Spend 30 minutes a week with them is my guidance. And then the last side on the right hand side, spend 30 minutes a week with salespeople and managers that have a lot of these. The experience in terms of customer behavior, sales rep behavior management behavior, how they're constantly doing a hypothesis and testing that as they're going out and selling. They may not be thinking about it scientifically, but I guarantee they are. They've got a hypothesis of a message or something that might work and they test it and see what what works and what doesn't. And this feedback again can go back into that shared knowledge. Well, to help develop that intuition that it factor that you can try to capture that lightning in a bottle and share it with the rest of your sales team and your marketing team to really improve their performance. And last slide here before I leave you with this, or I'll leave you with this and I guess we'll go back to some Q and A here. Hopefully I'm landing the plane on time. But Christian had a great quote in this book that I really liked and I think it applies more now in the past couple weeks than it has at any time. And that's that human factor is really the most important factor in making sense of this world. Again, a lot of data helps guide us. We've never had more data. But the more that we can talk to people, engage people and think about those interactions coupled with the digital interactions, that really helps us make sense of this world in a way that we can add value to our companies, add value to our customers. And Jeff, I think now do we open it up for Q and A? Oh, jeff, did I lose you?

Russell?

Yes sir.

Sorry, I was having some trouble on my computer there.

Can hear me okay Just fine now. Yes.

All right.

Awesome man. Well thank you so much. Appreciate that. So I'm just going to dive into a couple of questions and fire them over to you and feel free to share some additional thoughts if you don't mind. So I'm just reading off here, a couple that just came in. You mentioned a shared knowledge. How do we as sales rep, how do we get our sales reps to be able to be comfortable sharing their losses or failed pitches as well as their successes?

Yeah, absolutely. And I think the more that we we can get away from any systems that are often blame tracking systems or blame assignment systems and more about sharing what was done and what could be done better. It's a very difficult way to get people to be that vulnerable because hindsight's 20 20. Sorry, pun was not intended there. But I think probably starting with a one on one conversation, first level manager and the rep go through and detail the opportunity and say, what did you do? What could you have done better? And try to draw upon things that you know where either, you know, coaching them if they would have prepared a little bit differently or better, or maybe they did everything they could, but maybe there was something unknown at the time that they could have done differently. That that's the lesson you really want to highlight and draw from and share with the broader sales organization. So less about the mistakes that the rep made, but more about different techniques they could have done but maybe didn't get the chance or opportunity or didn't know to do during that deal. So that way it's less about that personal failure and more about maybe a procedural process failure that you can fix for other reps that might step in that same trap.

That's great, great advice. Thank you. Another question here. You mentioned bucketing reps into different categories like ramped reps, reps that are ramping, etc. So once you've bucketed bucketed reps into different categories, what tweaks or strategies can you really alter to make sure that you're managing them all in an effective way?

That's great. And the reason I do that. So onboarding is fairly easy. We know reps that have been less than a year. They're in that onboarding stage. There's a lot of coaching, a lot they need to know. The reason I'm thinking about the ramping reps and having them in some of those categories is that I get hit on a lot from product or marketing or operations, that they want to throw everything to sales and say we need to enable sales. Well, those fully ramped, overachieving reps, they're probably aware of what's going on. They don't need all the same noise and information that other reps do. And so you'd want to make sure that you're targeting things like for either your performing reps or underperforming reps, how to use things that marketing might provide like the latest blogs, the latest events really take advantage because they're doing a lot more cold calling. They're doing of a lot lot more prospecting. Their motion is just a lot more different versus those overachieving reps. They probably have a great book of business, book of contacts. They've just got that it factor figured out. So they're already doing that accurate and effective outreach. But the other thing is you want to be able to have them be the heavy contributors to that knowledge well and understand what they're really doing the hardest Part is asking those reps what they do to make them successful. The easiest thing to do is watch what they do and try to draw from that.

Got it.

That's great. Great sage, because I'm just always interested in kind of predictions from folks that are kind of in the trenches. And the answer cannot be just everybody should purchase more licenses to show that. That being said, like, what predictions do you see or what do you forecast as being the biggest trends or the best thing that organizations will be doing as a sales enablement strategy or standpoint in the months or years to come, say between now and the end of 2020?

I think for the next year. Everybody's right now just assessing their tech stack. There's no lack of software that people have in their environments. And we talk about digital transformation. Not really go into the what really happened and why it happened. And what happens was people bought more product. Why did it happen? Well, it was no longer the purveyor of what's possible in software and marketing. Had an endless budget to spend. And so marketing led the way, followed by sales, buying a lot of SaaS, software buying a lot of point solutions, thinking it would solve one of those discrete problems, and thinking about that whole game of sales and marketing. And I think the next year you're going to see kind of a step back. Okay, we bought all these things. We've got kind of our team and our tech stack here. What are we really trying to do with this? And I think the panel alluded to that is really start with that. Why? Why are we doing these things? What do we value? What do we really want to measure and how does this fit in terms of how each company is trying to play their game going out to market and how it's going to either provide them the right data to analyze or supports the right teams to be more effective and really bring that human factor to scale.

That's great. Yeah, I mean, we obviously, we're talking to companies every day about sales enablement strategy and I think there's just. Sales enablement is still kind of one of these areas of revenue growth where it's still kind of a wild west. Everyone's still trying to kind of figure it out. There's. There's obviously really experienced folks like yourself that have been in the practitioners for a number of years, but I'd say a majority of companies probably have somebody more junior trying to lead enablement. And when you can combine the lack of experience with the consistent change that companies are going through with new technologies that are coming out on a seemingly daily basis. It's just kind of hard to keep on top of of everything that they can and should be doing in an effective manner.

No, it is. And I think folks are being overwhelmed because again, there's so many answer, there's so many solutions out there. But you're not going to find an answer unless you first define your problem.

Right.

That's great. Well, with that I think we're going to go ahead and call it a day. Russell, thank you so much for joining us this morning. Great insights. We always appreciate everything that you and Showpad do for our community and for everyone on the call. I appreciate you joining us. We're going to send out a follow up email afterwards with a recording so you can share with your colleagues and a little bit more information about some of our partners on these events. So that's a wrap. This is seven out of seven with our roadshow. I will just quickly plug that. Sales assembly is doing two to three events a week, some for members only, some that are open to the public. So please visit our website, let us know if there's anything that we can do for you or if there's a program coming up that you might like to join us for. Just feel free to reach out, let us know and happy to help any way that we can. And with that, hope everyone has a great rest of the Friday and close to the month and quarter and we'll see you next time. Thanks so much for joining us. Take care.