How Revenue Leaders at Box, Calendly, & Lattice Created Sales Acceleration Moments

Please welcome to the stage mark weyland, CRO at box. Dina mehta, former CRO at lattice and operating partner at operative collective. Kate ollering, CRO at calendly, and mark robersch, co founder and managing director at stage 2 capital.

Kill it. All right. Hey, good morning, everyone. Gosh, I feel so cheesy sitting at this desk, but I hope everyone's had a great show. We have four or three esteemed CROs from the stage two LP base and we're going to talk about the pivotal moments in their current companies. On what actually caused this to happen. On revenue from three great companies. Before we do that, I'll let each individual give a quick introduction. Denny, you want to start?

Sure. It feels like a Jon Stewart setup. Hi, everybody. I'm Dini Mehta. I have spent majority of my career in startups just building and scaling different revenue orgs of all shapes and sizes. Most recently I was the CRO at Lattice, which is a people management platform in the HR tech space. I joined the company when we were about 3 million in revenue and helped scale it past 100 million. A lot of fun stuff. And I'm originally from India, born and raised there. Very proud immigrant that fell into tech, fell into sales and I'm forever grateful for it.

Good morning, everyone. Yeah, that's worth applause, I think. Good morning, everyone.

Kate.

I'm Kate Ollering. I'm currently Chief Revenue officer at Calendly. Prior to Callanly, I had a good eight and a half year run at a company called Glassdoor where we grew from about 10 million to into the hundreds of millions during that time. Career making experience, experience of a lifetime. And before that I had a series of sales and go to market leadership positions at software and tech companies and hard to believe. I've been doing this for two decades now and it's good to be with you.

Hi, everyone, I'm Mark Whalen. I'm the Chief Revenue officer at Box. I've been with the company for four years and before that I was CRO at Tanium, an enterprise security company. And then before that 10 years at Salesforce, a few years at gartner, and started 30 years ago just across the highway selling hardware for Northern Telecom. So that's the wayback machine. But great to be here with you all. Thank you.

All right, excited to dig in and learn. We had a chat prepping and we decided, you know, we're going to kind of go through one story and then hopefully get to Q and A pretty quickly. So I'll Point that out and we can go to the mic and we just want to be attentive to what questions you have for the group. But Denny, starting out Lattice, I know you came in really early. You want to paint that picture. And there was, that was your pivotal moment. You want to tell us what you did there?

Yeah, totally. That was one of the pivotal moments. So taking it back, I joined. We were about 3 million in revenue, about 40 folks in the company. The go to market team was about 10 people, sales was about 7 people. So really, really early days. And I was hired because we were seeing a little bit of softening in our new business growth. Folks weren't hitting quota and so was brought on to help diagnose what's going on and help us scale the business. I get there and I'd seen the numbers in terms of the output, but what I couldn't connect the dots on was all the activity that was happening on the ground. Reps were taking four to six calls a day. They were doing lots of demo volume. So we had top of the funnel volume. That was one thing that was like interesting. There's a lot of volume, but it's not, we're not seeing the output. Two, we were closing really small deals, like $1,200 deals on one end. And we were also talking to really large companies like hundreds of thousands of employees. And so both ends of the spectrum we had interest which was great for a product market fit. But clearly from a go to market execution standpoint we, we weren't focused where we were spending time closing thousand dollar annual deals and also talking to these really large companies. And the third phenomena that I saw was we had a product led growth flow on our website where you could go to the website, buy Lattice for your team and run with it where you don't have to involve, you don't have to bring in your HR leader, you can buy it for your small team, small podcast and run performance reviews, run feedback, run one on ones off of it. Awesome. But we also had a sales team that was out in market selling the full solution wall to wall to organizations. And so there's a bunch of stuff happening. The good news was there's a lot of activity and we had a lot of initiatives in play. Bad news, it wasn't really driving the results we wanted. So I came in and after looking at the data around Churn, looking at the data around usage, talking to some customers, learning more about the Persona, made a few key changes which was nerve wracking at the time because I Was like one month in. Coming in here with all these, like, let's make all these changes. But it just felt right talking to folks and looking at the data. We said, we're going to put a minimum in place. We're not going to sell to anyone under $4,000. So, like, that was the first thing I did, which everyone's like, what? In the sales team, like, how are we going to like, get to our numbers? Like, most of my deals and demos are coming from that, from that early stage, folks. And we knew that those people aren't getting the value out of Lattice today based on the numbers. So we said, all right, we're going to put a minimum in place. Two, we're going to put pause on the full product led growth motion, let people come in and experience the product, but we're going to sell through our sales team. We've got a sales team here. The best way a customer finds value on Lattice is by using the full product. And so we're gonna focus in there. And then three, we defined our icp. We said, here's the types of organizations that see value in Lattice. We've got limited resources, we've got a small team, and we really have to focus in because the opportunity cost. It's very tempting when you're a startup to do everything in early days, you have to, because, you know, you're sort of testing a bunch of stuff. But at some point, to drive operational excellence, you've really got to focus in. And so we said, we're going to focus in on this is our icp. Put a minimum contract size in place and put pause on plg. And all of a sudden people's calendars went from like six calls to two calls a day. Still a lot for two new business calls a day. It's like very healthy volume, which is like, okay, we got to add more capacity. And all of a sudden, even though the activity dropped, we started to see productivity go up.

Beautiful. Okay, I'm gonna come back to you with a quick one on, like, how did you know from the close rate that it wasn't working those six meetings? Cause I think a lot of founders are like, what should my funnel even look like? And then also how you actually define the icp. Okay, but before I do that, I wanna highlight a couple points from Denny that we see a lot. First off, stopping plg. Okay, that's always a question. It was like, you're going to market, should we do PLG or not? That's a tough question. And, you know, if you Ever have a question about that? It's a good idea to give it a shot and because you could always kill it later. And basically, like, the reason it probably didn't work is there needs to be a low time and effort to value use case. And Lattice is kind of like an operating system. It's not something like a single person's going to download and start using it like a, like a Dropbox or a calendly. And so, like, intuitively, there was probably a big question there. But regardless, they didn't waste their time by trying it. They found out that it wasn't working. And what did they end up with? They ended up with a really easy to use product. Great. Let's switch to sales led. Okay. The second point I wanna highlight that we see a lot at this stage that Denny did a great job on is the segmentation of the salespeople. It's totally cool to come out of the gate and sell to a lot of different people. You don't know what your vision's gonna stick with. But a year later you start to get a sense. And when we walk into organizations and you have five salespeople and all those salespeople are selling $3,000 ACV deals and $100,000 ACV deals, that's not gonna work. Like, usually sellers are tuned for one way or the other. And so that was an obvious change that Denny did a great job on that we see at that particular stage. So let me come back to you with those two follow ons. A lot of founders are like, how do I know what a good close rate is? And you said that these, they were doing five or six meetings a day, but you weren't seeing yield. What was the actual numbers?

Yeah, I mean, I think early on our close rates were like 20%, 15 to 20%. And then we changed, made the change and it bumped up doubled, went to 40%.

And do you remember the CAC? Like, what was the old CAC and what was the new? Okay, that's okay.

Yeah. I mean, and I think what's really crazy is as we started adding capacity, everybody on the sales team is like, we can't add more capacity. My leads are gonna go to new folks here. My calendar's gonna get emptier. And the win rate continued to creep up.

Nice.

Because they just had more time per op. And so you were going deeper with customers. These were quality customers. We were really optimizing for that OP cost.

Cool. Okay. And then, so the other common thing we see is now is the time to Refine your icp. I spoke about this yesterday is a lot of founders try to sell a big product to everyone out of the gate because they raise venture capital. And that's what the VCs want to see. But as VCs, we just want to see the vision toward it. We don't want to see you boil the ocean out of the gate. It's much better, like, find the best market to get to, like, 5 or 10 million. So how did you go through that process of defining the icp?

Yeah, we looked at our existing customers that were power users, so really high usage. They're renewing. These were raving fans. They loved the product. They were giving us feedback, really helping us build a better version of the product every month. And so we said, okay, who are these folks? And then we defined it off of that and said, we're just going to focus in here. And yes, there's a lot of interest in a lot of different places, but.

If we do that, there's boom, all star. Because most people, when they do that, they look at the close rate and the cac. No, you want to look at where you're creating customer value to drive that decision. Okay, thank you so much, Denny. All right. So related to plg, a lot of people are trying it, and at some point you get so big that it's like, hey, can we sell big deals now? And that's what really Kate did at Calendly. You want to talk us through that, Kate?

Yeah, absolutely. So when I joined Calendly, we had just completed our Series B. We took 300 million in venture, and we were at about 100 million in ARR. So it was the point where we were thinking about kind of the next great growth horizon. And we had some data that showed that teams were interested in using the product. So if you're familiar with Calendly, it's scheduling automation. Our roots are in plg, and predominantly in the beginning, it was solopreneurs, prosumers, and small SMBs that were coming through the funnel. What we identified as a pattern where there were some key use cases that emerged. So it was quite a horizontal product. But these use cases began to show up prolifically. And so the use cases make sense if you think about the folks in your organizations that do the most scheduling. It's sales, it's customer success, and it's recruiting. So as we began to work with these customers, folks in those use cases started to ask us for deeper and richer solutions that were integrated into their workflows, making it easier for large teams at large organizations to stay in their stacks but also use calendly. And so from an R and D perspective, we made investments in what we call vertical solutions to support that. And what happened is the composition of our funnel began to change. We started to see IT administrators show up in the funnel. We started to see line of business leaders and rev ops leaders show up in the funnel. And in response to that, we had a small but mighty group of inbound sellers who could take a high intent lead and convert it. But to take a high intent lead from a large company and turn it into a large deal, we identified this was just going to simply be a different skill set. And we made the jump to invest in enterprise. And so what I'll share with you though is it's not just about hiring enterprise salespeople. Yes, that's part of it. In my experience, both at Glassdoor and at Calendly, there's an enterprise ification that needs to happen across your org to really be ready for this. And I just have this simple framework in my head that goes product, people, process. So from a product standpoint, you might think you have product market fit, but selling to large companies is different. You have to have the right security and administrative features and requirements. It's just far, far more intense to support a large organization than it is to support a mid sized organization. From a people standpoint, do you have the right profiles? At Calendly we had to go out and hire a different profile, not just in sales, but in cs, in kind of less intuitive parts of the company. Like in marketing as an example, in the early days, marketers just kind of like buy you leads and as you progress into the enterprise, you need solutions marketers, you need collateral, you need selling tools to support the sales team. And that's a different skill set that's required in marketing. So just some examples of how the composition of the team and the folks that you need to bring in change too. And then from a process standpoint, you have to sincerely be ready to invest in enterprise sales and build infrastructure to make sure that these relatively expensive salespeople can be successful. So you have to build rev ops, add some enablement resources, deals desk legal in kind of the early days of exploring enterprise, getting an enterprise company to commit to investing in you is like literally less than half the battle. Getting through monstrous MSAs, getting through infosec questionnaires and getting through the paper process at these organizations really becomes the challenge. And what's required is a whole bunch of infrastructure to support your Sellers in completing those tasks. So if you think about across all of those things, you have to be really, really ready to enterprise your company and it takes sincere investment and you have to be prepared and model the return that you think you're going to get from those things. Which is, which is what we did at Calendly all driven by kind of this need from teams to have more vertical solutions.

All right, beautiful. A ton of stuff to recap there. My two follow ons so you can think about them. Cause I just. We're gonna ad lib this right? So what do you look for in enterprise rep compared to like a mid market? And then we're gonna talk about the PLG trap and I wanna get your take on that. So just to recap Kate's experience, first off, this is a common like blueprint. You start SMB, it's not a good idea to start selling to the enterprise unless you have to. It's just a long slog. So it's good to start SMB Mid Market. You hit 10, 15, 20 million lots of times. Going upstream is a great way to go. Now do not like come into the year and be like okay, cool, we're gonna go from 15 to 30 and oh man, our regular funnel only gets us from to 15 to 25. I have an idea. Let's go upstream and tell the board we're going upstream and let's commit to 5 million. No, this is a long journey. Like we have to hire new reps. That's gonna take like three months. They have to onboard two months, build pipeline six months. So this is like, like a test that's being done and you want to be testing this before you need it. Okay. And so that's number one. Number two is it is a test because you have to refine product market fit. Don't let your ego get afraid. This is not gonna translate that easily upstream. It's almost like the beginning days again. So give yourself that time. The other thing I commonly see that happen with Kate and Calendly I think to some degree is inbound is probably not going to drive enterprise. It's really rare to get an inbound lead and be like, and then three months later like, oh, we have a million dollar account. It's like, it's cool, there's little triggers happening but this is very much like account based marketing, account based selling. There's like dozens of people who are going to influence the sale and someone were coming inbound and you're going outbound and it's like really moving this boulder along. Okay, so let's come back to first enterprise rep because that's key is we got to hire our first two. Well, what's the difference between hiring a mid market versus enterprise rep?

Yeah, I think it starts with, it starts with having the right icp. So when we say enterprise you immediately go to, you know, the 20,000 person company. And for us enterprise was sort of mid market and the lower enterprise segment. And so you're looking for reps who have done these deals, let's say 30 to $50,000 deal sizes, have a handful of years of experience doing that. And the big key that we needed to find and transition our org to was team members who had experience value selling. So you know, often you'll inherit an org of very well intentioned, smart, scrappy people who are selling features and functions because of your PLG roots. It's like, hey, just show them the product, get them into the product, they'll convert. Selling to a different buyer, a line of business owner, a key business stakeholder in these larger organizations takes a completely different motion. You have to talk about business value and be able to make a business case for the value that your solution creates for their organization. Completely different skill set. So we really tested for that primarily in our hiring profile.

Another really cool work that happened that's relevant here by one of our other LPs, Oliver Jennifer. O.J. was one of the early reps at Dropbox to take them into the commercial world. And he was the founding CRO at Asana and he has written a work called the PLG Trap which is quite instructive for early stage PLG companies which says like your ability to sell an enterprise deal, like you learn very little from your PLG experience because the PLG product was built for the end user. But an enterprise sale has to really hone in on the C level decision maker and rarely do those customer value props match up. So you have to have that sort of vision and strategic mindset from the beginning is like, is this going to create a stepping stone for us to have a customer value prop that also resonates with the C suite? Did that happen at Calendly?

Yeah, and we're still in process of. I think that's a continuous improvement project for us. One of the things that I'll highlight is it's different for product too. It's not just your revenue organization and how they go and talk to customers. Your product teams have to think about a different customer too because as Mark said, your user is not your buyer. And so Going out and meeting with different types of customers is really, really important for the product team. And I think as a CRO, you have to be able to influence your product team in that direction. Just you, you know, as one example, our executive buyers want to see quantifiable analytics and results. You know, what productivity did you drive? How do you improve my revenue outcomes? And so part of what we did across calendly was begin to invest in analytics so that we could tell a better story around the ROI of investing in scheduling automation. So it's like one of these examples of how the entire org has to go with you on the enterprise journey.

Great. Thank you, Kate. All right, let's finish up with Mark. So Mark's going to talk about being CRO and walking into a company that's having a little bit of a churn issue. And unfortunately that's happened with a lot of companies right now. Whenever there's volatility in a macro environment, that typically leads to churn. And I can't think in my career of like 30 years a time of like worse churn, because like we were like before COVID We're selling this thing and all of a sudden Covid hits and everyone's remote and we change our value prop and then all of a sudden the there's a grow at all cost situation in tech and we're selling into that and then that changes overnight and now it's all about efficiency and that just leads to a lot of customers that signed up for something that is no longer relevant in a very short period of time. So there's a lot of companies going through this and Mark has come in into box and done a great job. Can you walk us through that story, Mark?

Yeah, sure. So I joined the company four years ago. We were about 600 million in revenue four or five years past the IPO. And as a subscription business, you're always growing, but the rate of growth was not where we wanted it to be. And generally when a company's bringing a new VP of sales or a new CRO, they think they have a sales problem. And very often they do. And we did have sales problems. We still have sales problems. We're still working on them right now. But what I found after I arrived is that we had a churn problem that was, I would say, like on the unhealthy range. And I think the thing that we did as a team was really understanding why we had a churn problem. And when we went from, you know, the ocean to the bay to the rivers to the lakes, to the streams, up to the snowpack. When we got to the snowpack, we found that we had a product problem. And so we made some changes to the product. We made a number of acquisitions. We changed pricing and packaging, we changed messaging and positioning. And when we did that alongside all the improvements that we made in the sales organization, then the growth returned. And you know, we had dramatic improvements in churn. And you know, you know, it's much easier to sell to an installed customer than to a net new customer. And so when you churn a dollar, you know, if you look at what your net retention rate is, if you, if you're, you know, 110%, if you're 120, you didn't just lose a dollar, you lost a dollar 20 when you turn that installed customer. And so if you have a leaky bucket, if you're a really high growth company, you might be able to outrun it. But if your growth is, you know, we're sort of rule of 40 dynamics, we're more kind of balance in terms of growth and profitability. If you're not growing at 40% on new ARR, you just can't afford to have a leaky bucket. And so that's really the thing that we did as a company is get the whole team together. We would have these all hands meetings where when I would talk to reps and I'd ask them about a renewal and they would say that that's not my job and that's a problem. And we do these all hands meetings that say raise your hand if you're on the renewals team. And just the renewals team would raise their hand. And, and we did this thing like get the whole company to raise your hands. It's the most important motion in SaaS is your renewals motion. If you have a problem there, you can really put yourself into a death spiral.

Great. I have a couple follow ups on coming in as an executive to that and influencing it. And also the process you all went through to diagnose that this was a product issue and the research you did to figure out what needed to be enhanced, if you can walk through that. But let's start with, you're coming in, you're kind of like the new guy on the block. You probably can't walk into the board meeting and be like, yeah, the sales issue is in product. That's going to politically piss a lot of people off. Like, how did you handle that?

Yeah, I mean, so I left Salesforce six years ago and I think that one of the things I've seen where my friends have left a place like Salesforce and many of us maybe stumbled on our first role, I did after I came out and I would take that job again, I would do some things differently, but I made some mistakes there. And the mistake that I made, that's the classic mistake that a lot of I think revenue leaders make when they leave A big successful company like salesforce is what I refer to as the game and the game within the game. So the game that we are playing as revenue leaders is to deliver the number. It's real simple. It's a very binary job that we have. Either you're successful or you're not. But when I've seen people not do well in that first job after leaving a place like salesforce and is generally what I call the game within the game, which is the way we show up as a part of the executive team, the way we interact with the board. And when you see challenges in the business that are maybe outside of your domain, you know, my job is to lead the sales organization. But if we have challenges with product or with customer success or with marketing, the way that you drive consensus, the way that you get everyone on board with that, is often where people move themselves out of a job where maybe they're winning in the game itself. You might be doing well against the target, but you're failing on the game within the game. And so I think that's probably the biggest lesson I've Learned in my 6 years since leaving the big company is like, how do you. How do you get everyone on board with what your vision is for the company and where you're seeing challenges? And I think the big thing that I did when I was at Tanium, I was vocal about some things that were outside of my domain within the first few months. And that didn't go very well for me, you know, because it makes it seem that you're taking your eye off the ball. And I was not. But if you have a quarter, that's tough, then the board and the executive team has to wonder, like, is our sales leader on top of what we hired him to do? And so when I got to box, a lot of these, you know, challenges, I think sort of presented themselves. But my. My thinking was coming off of the prior experiences, I'm really just gonna take notes on everything that I'm hearing about what's going on in the market, and then I'm gonna validate it with first party experience. I'm gonna go meet with customers in all Segments and all verticals all around the world. And I'm gonna validate what the sales team is telling me because the sales team will tell you things that aren't always true. You know, they, they, they'll tell you things that they want you to fix. That maybe it's just one deal. Recency bias is a big problem. So after validating all of that and then, you know, hopefully building a good relationship with the executive team and the board after a year, I sort of said, hey, here's I think some things that I think we need to focus on. And then I think by waiting that that was the right move because then we got the whole team on board and, and to make that big of a shift as a company. And it was a, a pretty big, you know, strategic pivot for us. We needed everyone together. It couldn't be like one or two executives pushing it.

I'm going to squeeze in like a little sub bullet question there too because like, and I'll let you think about it and make a point real quick, Mark, but like if you were to, if a founder was to look at Salesforce for a leader, you probably could see some people over there that would be great at jumping into a startup and some that wouldn't be. And like how should a founder look at that right before you do that? To Mark's point, like I got some, I watched some great coaching from an advisor that was coaching, coaching a team and he explained the difference between a functional leader and a corporate executive. And that's an important transition that you need to make when you get the C level position. When you're like a director of sales and you're in the sales org, you're living sales all day. You're with the sales team, you're just thinking about sales. But once you become CRO, you're going to get into trouble. If you see your role on the senior leadership team to represent the needs of your people, you're gonna get into some trouble. You need to look at it as a corporate executive. Yes, when you are out with your team, you're leading your team, but when you're in the senior leadership team meeting, you're a corporate executive where you, everybody should kind of like remove their biases toward their function and operate as a single team toward a North Star. And I think we're hearing a great example of that from Mark. So Mark, like for over a decade, so many VCs have come in and be like, okay, here's a series B, now go find someone at Salesforce and Hire them as your head of sales. So tell us, like, you know, as you go through all your peers over there, what should a founder be looking for there to hire someone out of a big company? That would work and what should they look like as a red flag?

Yeah, it's a great question. So if you're thinking about hiring someone from a big company and your target employer might be a salesforce, it might be another great, great SaaS company out there. The common thing that founders, the common conversation that founders have is like, you know, is she going to be able to work in this environment? Or you know, is he going to be able to keep up with us or work in a startup? And there's almost this undertone of it's like work ethic or something which I've always found really comical. You know, in my 10 years at Salesforce I worked 365 days a year. The work was intense. Like I didn't have a blood pressure problem before I went there, but when I came out I sure did. And it's so like the idea of being able to keep up is I always found funny. And you know, when you work at a place like that, you're, you're not like overloaded with resources. You know, I was booking my own travel and managing my own calendar and doing my own expenses like it was work. Like we, we were working. The thing that actually is that people struggle with when they lose, when they leave leave a place like that is when you work for a company that's really well run and you have first party experience of things being done right and then you go to a startup where things are resource constrained, then what ends up happening is that some executives struggle with the resource constraint. So if you've seen a marketing event, maybe a customer event like this, done the right way, or you've done a CIO dinner the right way, or you know how to do territory carving the right way. Then when you go to an environment where it's, it's not that things aren't being done right, but they're just not resourced. And if there's 10 things that you're used to doing the right way and you can only afford because of bandwidth to do three of them the right way. I think the thing that with some people when they leave a big company is that they have a fit when they can't have everything done the right way. It's not that they can't keep up and that they're not working hard and they're not willing to roll up their sleeves and get down and dirty. It's that they have sometimes not the right level of sort of patience and accepting that we're just not going to be able to do everything the way that I'm used to. And like, you know, at box there's all sorts of things that I would like to be doing differently. But we're all living in a rule of 40 world now and we can't go fund every little thing that I think would make a difference. You have to choose what are the three things that we're going to do really, really well. And I'm just going to have to let go of these other seven things.

Beautiful. We can go to questions. I see a mic here if you want to come up and line up. If there's other mics around here, just go ahead. Yeah, go ahead, sir. Cool.

I have so many questions. We'll pick one. Denny. To focus on the new icp, was it more important to dial in the lead flow or in the sales op processes or is it more about education and alignment? Hey, we're doing bigger deals.

I'd say it was more about aligning the go to market organization around our lead flow and spending our time where we knew we'd have the highest focus and build the most value for customers. So a little bit of both. But I'd say initially was definitely for aligning our go to market everything from lead flow on sales ops to what reps are talking about, what engineering's building towards. So not just one piece of it really helping shape the flavor of who are we focus, who's our customer today?

Yeah, getting the whole comedy around it 100%. And Kate was going up market more about navigating your current pipeline with sales and changing the site and marketing messaging, or is it more about pulling it out of the prospects and the new sales?

I would say probably more towards the former. And you know, inside a PLG company, when you decide to go up market and add an enterprise motion, you really have to continue to do PLG well too because PLG feeds your enterprise motion. And so we added a whole bunch of value. Positioning and updated messaging enabled the teams on, you know, how to go in position with customers and talk about value. And that was a big part of our first year is just realigning the teams and the market and the message. It was less about the existing pipeline because the existing pipeline at the time was more reminiscent of our PLG roots. You know, it was small teams and it was SMB and we want to make sure that we find A way to service those customers as efficiently as possible while building, you know, this whole new motion going up market.

So did that translate into like a big, big change between now like customer success and the product team work with sales and drive leads to them. Like, because that could be like customer success with referrals or it can be like product pulling data out of your customer base and you know, refining and filtering it. Like what team do you think was more important than working with sales?

I think they're both very important. So if you're thinking about aligning. Yeah, I'll take the non answer. Answer. If you're aligning a go to market, all of these different channels are really important to pipeline generation. And so again in the PLG environment, we are fortunate to benefit from product. Product qualified leads.

Yeah.

Where you know, we have a bunch of intent data coming from the product. Our CS teams who work with our customers also source opportunities for us primarily, you know, seed expansion, you know, things that are not super complicated, not new use cases as an example or upgrades, but aligning all of those that we're saying the same story from, you know, lead acquisition all the way through to renewal and expansion are really important. It takes a bunch of work and time.

Cool. Awesome. These are great questions, man. Thank you very much. The third one, I have to charge you an extra hundred dollars. So thanks. All right, go ahead.

Thank you for a great presentation and Atlanta based company as well. So calendly, it was great seeing you rise up and being as great as you are. But the question that I really have is around what you mentioned around the cultural fit. If sales is having a bad quarter, there doesn't seem to be any sort of consideration around how sales feels when they're put on the carpet saying you're having a bad quarter. But you mentioned if you say product is the reason, all of a sudden all the feathers are ruffled. So what have you seen beyond what you mentioned already to really get people excited about the fact that it's not like we're casting dispersions against product. We are trying to diagnose the root cause and to get people rallied around solving the problem versus playing the political game. Because ultimately we know many times what our customers are asking for. There was a point made yesterday around attaching a dollar amount in Salesforce to every feature that we don't have. And we're looking losing deals for that's red and that's black and white. And so how do you then take the emotion out of the product team feeling like we're Going like this and really actually solve the problem, Mark.

So, first of all, you know, very often if you lost a deal because of a missing feature, that's not because of the missing feature, but that's because the sales team failed to communicate the overall value proposition of the platform. So, like this idea of putting dollars against features that are missing, that's a, that's a worse practice. Like, don't stop doing that right away. Definitely don't do that.

Just why is that?

What's that?

Just explain why that is. People are doing well.

Because the problem is, is that, you know, sometimes you do need certain features and sometimes there is a direct connection between deals lost in that feature. But sometimes, you know, the market is moving and if you're an innovative company, you don't want to chase the past features. And so like in, in the world that we're in, we are replacing, for instance, legacy enterprise content management systems that were built in the 1990s. And it would be a bad idea for us to go like, dig up an RFP from 1997 and go build every one of those features in the cloud because the sales team says that we need every one of those features. Some of them, we do need, some of them are really, really important. But if you're trying to change the way that people think about a product or about a solution, then you can't go chase the old market's features. So that's a dangerous game. And recency bias is a real problem. Like, we just lost this deal today and it's because of that feature. You can't go move the roadmap because of that. You got to think about what the, you know, what is the end goal that we're trying to deliver? What's the problem that we're trying to do? Are we creating a category where we're trying to get the market to rethink about the way that they solve the problem? And so I think that that's a little bit of a dangerous game. And so, you know, I think underneath your question, the important thing for a sales leader is if there are some changes that need to be made with the product, and they're very often are. How do you drive consensus around that? And it can't be like, let me show you this report of all the deals that we lost and like, bully them with data to get them to move the roadmap. They're resource constrained as well. So I think it's really got to be a thing of consensus. And I think it's to Mark's Point around like my job is not to protect my team. My job is to help lead the company to help us grow revenue and that ends up spanning responsibilities that are within my org, people that report to me and it's about how do I drive change and influence across other parts of the company that don't report to me and doing that in a partnership and I think that, you know, weaponizing data is not a good way to do it.

Thank you.

A lot of product people in the room.

My question was pretty much around that product, but I kind of want to expand on that as well. So let's say you have a company that is doing very well in SMB and now is seem to see the growth on the enterprise side and you all have experienced that and shared that today that you have to bring the entire company along the journey because your product, your cx, everything has to be more enterprise focused. So as a sales leader, how, how do you drive that? How do like what are some tactical best practices that you would recommend on how you bring those other leaders along the journey? Because now you're looking at products, you're looking at marketing, you're looking at every department that needs to be more integrated.

Prize.

Yeah, I can kick off and maybe others will join in. I, I'm living this as we speak. I do think it starts with good strategic planning. And so if you're aligned at the executive level that this is going to be a key initiative for your business, then that should flow through your okrs or whatever your goal setting mechanism is into the various functions. And that was certainly our experience at calendly. It was identified as a top three initiative for the company and each and every functional leader took some objectives related to that. So I think that it starts there. I would also say that I think really encouraging your functional peers to get some empathy for the customer matters. And so again your role as a CRO is to bring them into some customer meetings, give them the readouts from closed or loss reports. All of those types of things matter too. So they can start to understand what customers are doing and why we might be doing this. And the final thing that I would offer is if you're servicing SMBs today, it doesn't mean you have to go jump to the largest enterprise companies tomorrow. Even if you're getting some inbound interest in my experience, really winning the bid market, proving out your model and your motions there and bringing the company along on that journey because their requirements are going to be less intense than the largest of the large. So if you can figure out the transition point. That's what I would recommend too.

Thank you. And just a follow up on that. So let's say you have identified that you're winning an SMB. You have proven that now you are at a stage where post pandemic a lot of competition has gone down. Enterprise is really interested now, but a lot of company resources investment is focused on SMB. Cause that's a winning model. Your machine is running inbound. Is there? So how do you keep that tempo but build the new tempo on this side?

This is a really good question because I think in startups so much of the game is scaling the thing that's working while seeding the new bets that are going to help you grow next year. Because if you don't do that to Mark's earlier point, if you're not seeding enterprise years before you actually need it, you're going to be in trouble. And so, so much of. But you want to separate the two because you've got the scaled machine where you, you know, the focus is on efficiency, focuses on less discounting. Very different mindset versus here you've got this experimental thing that you're doing. And so at Lattice we, for the first year we hired a senior leader who came on board because we had a lot of interest up market but we didn't want to distract from what we're building in our SMB and mid market funk market segments came on board and all they did for the first two to three quarters was customer discovery. Go in and talk to folks, what do they like about Lattice? They're interested. What do they use currently? What are the gaps? What would we need to build? How do we need to change our product marketing, our positioning, how we service these customers, how we run implementation. So the end to end customer journey really did a lot of research on that. And then we came together as an exec team because that's my team number one as a revenue leader and come back and say okay, do we want to go here? Here's the upside, here's the risks, here's the resources. We're going to have to. But I think separating the two, the scaling piece and the experimental piece was I found really helpful because otherwise it can really start muddying the waters.

Thank you and come tomorrow. Julie, I don't remember her last name, she's this new CEO of Workiva which is a very successful public company. She's a fantastic rising female leader in the public SaaS arena and she's talking specifically about this on how they ran Both of those teams in conjunction and went upstream. Go ahead.

All right, so this one in specific is for Mark. In the transition between Salesforce and Box, what was the most difficult lesson you had to learn in transitioning from that really enterprise environment to a lower level thing?

We are an enterprise environment.

Oh, well, I mean, sorry about that.

That hurts right here.

Sorry about that.

Not sure if I was specific enough with my question, but kind of what's, what's the most important challenge you had to learn in going from, you know, such a huge, huge organization scaling down.

Or vice versa, working in a smaller company, not who we're selling to.

No, no, no, no.

Yeah, I'm with you. Now.

The transition down, what was the most difficult lesson from there?

I think it's just about. About resources, you know, I mean, when I started at Salesforce, it was only 1400 people. And when I started at Box, we were 2000. So like, it's a familiar environment in terms of company size. But I worked at Salesforce from, I think I left it maybe, maybe 20,000 people. So it got really big. So we're heavily resourced on everything. And, and so I think just under. Just, just being patient and understanding, like every. Everything is not going to be resourced the way it is in another company. And that I have to be patient. And like four years later, there's a number of things that we're not doing that I'd like us to do. And that's okay because if you can get everyone focused on, as I said before, like a small number of things and do them really, really well, then you can drive results and you just have to accept that you're not going to be able to have everything done the way that you want it. When I, when I worked at Salesforce, like in the years that I was there, I've been gone for six years and the years that I was there, I think it was the best run software company on earth. And like, everything was done with excellence and I could really focus on just my role and responsibility. I didn't have to like, ask questions about marketing. Like, I didn't, I could never go. Like, if the marketing team would just do their job, they were doing an incredible job and every part of that company was doing a great job. That's a very freeing experience. But you can't just go elsewhere and expect that to be the same. And I think the other part is there if you move from one company to another, there's a part of your playbook that applies, but not the whole thing. So like you can't, you can't. I can't lift and shift the Salesforce playbook and bring it to box. There's a lot of similarities in our go to market motion. It might be like a 70 or 80% overlap. So you just have to like use your brain on what are things that I learned there that are applicable and what are things that are entirely new here that are different and we have to think of different ways of handling them.

Thank you so much.

I'll make this quick because I know we're close on time, but our SaaS product requires hardware and right now we're selling that hardware through distribution. How might we do a better job motivating our distribution network given how resource constrained we are?

Just so I can better understand the question, are they not motivated because the volume's low? Am I seeing that correctly or.

It's a good question. I don't know why.

I think my answer would be find out why they're not motivated. Is it because the unit volume is too low? Is the margin not enough? I would just find out why are they not motivated and then figure that out.

Thank you.

Last question.

Last but not least, I hope. I have a question about building up a sales team when you start working with enterprise and whether it's innate. So nurture versus nature versus nurture, how do you get reps to move from a more transactional volume based working with SMBs to working with enterprise or. Yeah, can they do both? Can they? Or how do you get them to shift to the enterprise mindset?

Yeah, I'll give a quick answer based on my experience at Calendly. Sometimes it's new people, it's a new profile, and sometimes it's not. But you have to think about what is the methodology that you're employing, what is the sales process that you're employing? And if you can't answer those questions, you need those things. So go out and find a great value based methodology, build your sales process so that it's repeatable, and then continue to just listen and learn from customers. But you have to have that foundation and make sure you have the right people and process in place.

Thank you.

All right, thank you so much. You have busy jobs out there and we really appreciate you coming out and spending time to drop knowledge. Let's thank our panel.

Thank you.