How To Hire Your First VP Of Sales -- The Original Edition

This is the topic just by way of background on me. Hold on, let me clip this on something I appreciate thanks to everyone here that's sort of part of this Saster community, you know that by way of quick background I was CEO and co founder of EchoSign was acquired by Adobe from inception. The EchoSign and the Adobe Web Services business will do over 100 million this year. So I sort of experienced that journey, a lot of it on the other side of the acquisition unfortunately. And we shared a lot of those learnings back on Saster. Now we got over 300,000 views a month on our content in general and on Quora. Saster is the fifth most popular content. So when you think that only write about SaaS, that's pretty cool. So thanks everyone for the support there. And now I'm investing in companies in SAS as a managing director at Storm, which invested in me and Marketo and MobileIron and lots of other folks, folks in recurring revenue very early. So that's me. And the topic that maybe we can be interactive on is how to hire your first VP of sales. And I'll only ask one audience question, but how many people have worked with the VP of sales that didn't work out? Yeah, only half. Okay, well if we go to the. Or do I have a clicker? Yeah. Ah, forward is completely counterintuitive. Okay, very good. Well at the top I'll just say my non scientific study of about 80 startups is about 70% of the SaaS VP of sales don't make it 12 months. And what I learned is, you know that's a terrible number, right? From a CEO or founder's perspective, it's a disaster because it's your fault. I feel like at least for the first 50 employees, anyone that doesn't work out is your fault, Right? You screened them, you made the decision and shame on you. So why is there such a high attrition rate? And it turns out actually the problem's even worse than that. It's not just that they don't work out. The problem is when you hire the VP of sales, right, Sometimes you'll hire the VP of sales on day one. I guess that does happen. But the more common pattern for a SaaS company is you get a little bit of something going, right? You get to 20,000, 50,000, 100,000 mrr. Sometimes wherever you are, you get 101,000 customers. Maybe you've got a couple reps and you want and it's outgrown your skills or your time to manage Them, you bring someone in, wherever you are, if you make their wrong hire, it just dramatically decelerates your progress. It's a disaster. Right? And I made that mistake myself. And I'll walk through mistakes I made on this chart. I did make a mistake for the first VP of Sales. I got attracted to sort of Mr. Dashboards and misgo big, which I'll chat about. And what I learned from this process in sales, especially up to A certain point, 10, 20 million in revenue, is as CIO got obsessed with the metric of revenue per lead. Okay, it took me a long time to figure this out, but once you have that inbound meeting going, as we were just talking about, the leads come in, what's your revenue per lead? And I think ultimately, at least up to a point in your SaaS startup, that's the job job of the VP of Sales, however they get done, is to increase the revenue per lead. And we went through sort of our bad year, our year of hell. And what happened in the year of hell is we had a bunch of traction. Maybe we were doing less than 2 million at the time and getting there, and our growth sort of flattened. And I really didn't know what was happening. Was it like the Lehman Brothers stuff and the economy? I really didn't know it didn't work. And then I still didn't know, and then that didn't work out. And I hired our real VP of sales, Brendan Cassidy, and he comes in for the job and I say, brendan, I'm a totally transparent guy, I gotta be honest with you. I say, if we don't double revenue in 90 days, we're going bankrupt. And he looks at me, he looks at the numbers, he's like, I've never seen this many leads at this stage. He says, no problem, right? So turn around. And not saying anything was easy, but in 90 days, our revenue was doubled. And the way that really happened was our revenue per lead went up, it doubled. And so I kind of want to walk through a lot of those learnings quickly. And maybe we can share war stories here because it's fun. But I was asked to speak on this topic. I think the problem that almost all tons of SaaS first time founders make again and again is, you know, you get attracted to the name, right? You want to hire someone from Salesforce or LinkedIn or maybe Pudge someone out of HubSpot or Dropbox, and that's great, but it's highly unlikely that those folks did it, right? It's more likely if you hire someone out of salesforce Matt, what was the revenue when you were there? 600 people even that's a little big, right? You know, yammer was sizable when you went. Right. Going from there to scripted without a rest stop in between can be challenging. Right. But you're attracted to that. The problem with a lot of the guys, the other guys, is they don't have that experience, right. They worked at some startup and you know, they won't scale. So how do you resolve this paradox? I don't know the perfect answer, but what you really want at the end of the day to find is someone like Brendan or Matt that's done all of it, right? Because you end up just hiring someone that looks good to your board, but they end up being Mr. Dashboard. Right? They're good at doing that piece, they're good at going big, but they don't know this phase, which is make it repeatable. The other problem that I see a lot is if you hire this guy to do this, it's too big of a jump. The other one that really attracts us a lot is what I and others call the evangelist, right. Sometimes this is someone that they're super smart, super high iq, they're great middlers, right. They can talk about your product forever. High iq. You love working with them and you ask them how many salespeople they've managed and they kind of fudge the answer, right? Well, there was a team of 30. Right. Or 20 or 10. And you dig in and they only directly managed a handful of people, right. And so that's a huge risk hire. Because will they really be able to scale and hire a larger team? I don't know the answer, but I think what I've learned is nine times out of ten, Mr. Dashboards doesn't work out in a startup. That's before say 10 million in revenue. And the evangelist, if you hire them, maybe five times out of ten they have to transition, right? They become business development or partnership or something else. But when it comes time to scale, they don't pan out. So number one reason I think 70% of them don't work out is wrong stage. The other thing I realized going to some of the other talks is you start too late. This one took me a while to figure out. But when you go to hire, when you're ready to hire a VP of engineering, that's a unicorn hire, VP of marketing, too. Demand gen's a unicorn hire. But if you actually find the right person at the right time for them and you have the most amazing product, like as John was talking about you can convince them, right? You have to sell the dream. The challenge with a lot of great VP of Sales candidates, and my learning, I didn't really realize this before, is there's obviously much less incentive to jump, right? If you're making huge cash and you're already a Director of VP of Sales, someone else, you've got it dialed in. Even if the job has become boring or stale because your company got bought by Microsoft or Adobe or Google or whatever, it's so dialed in that even if the most exciting company comes along, what's the incentive to jump? Right? The more incentive is to wait, see what happens for three months, six months, 12 months, you'll probably still get the same amount of equity, the company will improve, and maybe by then they can close the gap on cash. So I think the real problem is you don't decide to hire that VP of Sales until. Until the week or the month that you need them. And that has a huge impact on the candidate pool, right? And so I think my uber learning is when you have 10 customers, you should start recruiting a VP of Sales, right? And even if it's just meeting people, coming here, talking to people, it may take you 12 months until you can show the right candidate that it's time to jump. And when I look back with Brendan, I realized it took 20 months to recruit them. Now, if I'd actually tried more actively, maybe I could have done better, right? But he was my customer. I got to know him at LinkedIn and then somewhat coincidentally. But when the time was right, we already had a relationship. We had enough of a base that it was a good role for him, and you get him, right? But recruit that guy in one day, one week, 30 days. I just think today it's impossible. So you start too late and as John said, spend 20% or 50% of your time recruiting. I think for this role, you just got to start way early and just be constantly talking to folks in the space. And then maybe this is obvious to a lot of folks. I knew it. But when I talk to so many people, this is the other reason the VP of Sales thing just falls flat in their face, because they have this really cool product. And what they want, the VP of Sales is to be the magician, right? I did the product. Your job is to go get the revenue, right? And I think that that could work for the evangelist. But you have a conflict here, because I think, as we all know, I sort of force ranked my list of what a great true VP of Sales does. And number one is recruiting A team, right? Number one is putting the team together and whether it's training them and managing them, however you're going to do, get the people in and manage them to success. Down 5, which isn't even on this chart, is closing, right? Because as soon as you even got a couple million of recurring revenue in this company, the VP of sales cannot be working on most deals, right? They can probably, maybe they won't even work on any deals depending on your deal size or maybe just a handful of your biggest deal. So the huge mistake so many founders make, especially if their background is product, is they want a player coach. You know, I'm not ready, it's so expensive, you know, I'll have this guy, he'll have an equal quota with the rest of the team. That might be okay, but it's so far down on the list. And so thinking through it, what you really want is the world's best manager. That's a good fit for your ACV and for the time of your company, right? Recruiting, building in the team, helping the rest of the team, figuring out tactics, which we chatted about today, strategy. And then I really feel like sales is fit. And maybe others disagree, but I think this is not obvious for a lot of people. I think this is why so many people make this wrong mistake. And the magician, he just doesn't show up. And I learned the clear sign in the magician is pipeline. And so when you're bigger, when you're at 20 million or larger, pipeline is this sort of a wonderful thing. But the clearest sign that at early stage, at a couple million revenue, VP sales isn't going to work out is all you hear about is pipeline, right? When you're doing a million in revenue and the guy generates, or she generates 10 million in pipeline in 90 days, you know, you're dead right. It's just because all that matters here is revenue. Nothing else matters. It's closing. So the. I wish I had the perfect answer to how to deal with this, but I think in the interviewing process, if all you hear in early stages, pipeline, pipeline, pipeline, and all you see is pipeline, pipeline and nothing else, those guys just, they just never work out. The pipeline keeps growing and the revenue doesn't close. And then sort of my last thing, you know, and I'd be curious other people's thoughts about it, but the last, you know, for so many SaaS startups, hiring the VP of Sales becomes this hyper stressful situation. And if you look at this data, which is certainly not biased toward the Bay Area or you know, tech centers. What's the average comp for a VP of sales? Well, it's about $300,000 and up. Right. It's possible it's even slightly higher than that at hot startups. Could be a lot more. Right. How can you possibly afford to pay this? Right, because if the VP of sales isn't going to have a quota, this is going to be a huge cost center and they want to hire a bunch of reps. All of a sudden the cash just seems out the door. And you have this other problem. If you look at it, they're hiring these VP of sales and they're getting all base and a relatively low percent of bonus. So they're taking home a huge amount of guaranteed cash and doing their best efforts to get there to hit their ote. And so I'll chat about this, but this is a stress point. And I think the key thing, and this is maybe most people in the room know this, but I, but I know it's not obvious, is to de stress this whole situation. You've got your VPs. Sales has to be accretive. Okay? It has to be accretive. And that's easy to say. I'll talk about it in a second. But I don't believe the way to accretive is to give them a full quote in a bag for 12 months. That's not accretive. But what you want to know is that whatever you pay your VP of sales, the VP of sales is going to bring in a multiple of that revenue back to the company. That's accretive. Right? And so there's only two ways you can do that. One again is the bag. I don't think it works. And the second way is the metric. We talked about increasing revenue per lead. Right? If you're doing 2 million and you've got potential to do a million next year, and that VP of Sales increases it to $1,500,000 dollars, he or she's more than paid for itself. So that's why, at least in the early days, I just think this metric is so important because this is the way this really stressful hire that doesn't work out 70% of the time. You can completely de stress it and understand is the key is making it accretive. So my kind of summary, and then I'd love to open it up talks is, okay, so those are the, you know, usually try and talk about all the good things. Those are some of the challenges of making the high water don't work out again, you know, My summary of what are my learnings to make it work. We talked about start early. I really do think that 10 customers is the time to start, especially as a founder CEO. It's got to be a huge part of your job. The second one, which is sort of the impossible paradox. But don't settle, right? You want, you want that linked Intersection, Salesforce or Dropbox DNA on the resume. But if they don't have some experience, at least at the next stage, and I think here's where you can give. If you're doing 2 million and they've done 10 million up, that's fine, you'll be there soon enough, right? If you're doing 2 million and they've done 200 million and up, it just won't work, right? And so you can't settle. It's impossible. But you've got to be meeting with as many people as you can for a year or longer. And eventually, if you're tenacious, I think they'll make it work and then do it yourself first. Probably this audience knows that I think that the classic founder mistake they make, they haven't done it themselves and they want to bring in the magician to solve it. You've got to close a couple big customers yourself or you'll have no idea what you're doing with this hire. If you haven't done it before the fourth one, which I've blogged about and talked about, and it's worth spending some time on, I believe it's very important. And this is a big mistake you can make at school, start to pay very well, right? And so how do you. If you're doing a million in revenue, how do you pay a VP of sales builder 2 million, right? Well, if the hire isn't accretive, it's impossible. There's no way to do it. But if you pay essentially on performance, if the bonus is extremely generous, right? If the percent of the deal size that the reps take home and that ultimately also your VP of sales gets from your overall company deal, you can actually afford to pay over the variable, right? So I've talked about this. The general program that we worked out at EcoSign, which de stressed my life dramatically once, once we got our act together was we basically paid our reps double what you might think they would get. So, for example, we paid our reps on average about 25% of the ACV they brought in. And if you look at a lot of SaaS companies, it's less than the higher deal size. But if you look at most SaaS companies, about half that. Right. But what we did is we put in a program where they had to pay for themselves and until they paid for their fully burdened cost, they didn't get any bonus. Right. And so if you hit sort of your quota, it's kind of similar to what you're going to get at some other company, right? Where you get maybe 12 and 12 or 10 and 10, but if you blow it out, you can make a huge amount of money and so create a virtuous cycle where the folks that make huge amounts of money automatically are profitable for you. Right. And what this meant for me as a CEO is since Brendan had a recruiting engine in place, I knew every single hire would be accretive, at least after a couple months. That meant I didn't have to worry about any of this. I didn't have to worry about how much money they were making. I didn't have to worry about money going out the door. All I had to worry about was that our revenue per lead kept going up and that however many people needed to be hired to service that there was no stress and no issues. So paying better than you intuitively think, but paying for success I think is key. And then this last one, I know this one sounds blindingly obvious, but I'll leave it for last. I see so many founders, CEOs hire VP of Sales with a great resume or looks really good in a jacket, you know, six foot five, whatever the look is, but there isn't trust, right? They're so desperate to get someone in help, there isn't trust. And I think, I'm not sure why this is for other positions. I think trust is a prerequisite up to a certain point, but if you don't have trust, it's just too hard to go into war every day. Right? You're a team and without that you've just got to pass. But those are my learnings on sort of the unicorn. But I think if you do that, you create kind of this amazing culture. Culture. And it just, it just builds on itself. So any, any thoughts there or any, any war stories on, on these hires or things you figured out better than your boss or your boss did? Yeah, Yeah, I wish. You know, maybe others have like the world's most perfect answer. I'll tell you what we did, right, which is first you have to decide, you know, at the margin how important cash is to your company. Right? Because you know, at least for a startup, a multi year contract is a gift from heaven. Right. I remember we were Doing what's that? Cash up front. And when we were doing like $30,000 a month, we got this huge check. We blew it on the $100,000 check. I mean that extended the Runway like six months right there back in the day, right. And then you get to the point where it simply doesn't matter, right. Whether you're cash flow positive or you're so big you have so much capital, whatever, it just doesn't matter, right. So as an independent company before acquisition, cash did matter. We were, we did something which is pretty tough to do, which is we grew over 100% a year in SaaS with a sales driven model and was cash flow positive after 4 million ARR. And basically what we ended up doing there were variances and at the end of the day my VP of Sal did whatever he wanted to do and it was all good. But the rough structure was to give people half of the commission on the outlying years that they'd otherwise get. If you kind of sink doing the math, they're probably going to give a discount anyway on the multi year contract. It's not the hugest, it's not going to incent horrible behavior to ram it down their throat, but it's enough so that they'll make it, that they'll ask for it and try and get it. What's that contract value for every company on the planet or for whom? Oh you mean for how much? I curious other people's thoughts. I'm not sure it matters. I mean obviously at some extent it matters, right? When the deals start to get into the seven figures or the mid six figures, people are expecting to take home a lot of pay and ultimately the larger deal size is that, you know, if you, oops, sorry, down is up. But no matter, people are going to be expecting higher comp. But I think, but I think for most, for a lot of business, especially across multiple segments, you have some natural issues or floors which is that it's very hard. You know, other people may have other examples. Maybe HubSpot or. I had an interesting conversation at Zendesk about how they do very low price point sales. They do it with stay at home moms and dads. But for most folks, unless your price point's around 4 or 5,000 ACV, you can't afford to have a sales rep, right? There's just only so many demos you can do a month and so many you can do a close, right? So you get that five figure, that four figure tier, right? Transactional sales, you get that five figure, that 2040, 50,000. That kind of Brian Jacobs talked about where it's important thing and then you get six figures. But I think, you know, maybe to back into it. I think what you generally see is when you're in that four figure range, it's hard to hit in most cases a quota more than like 4 to 5 or 600,000. Right. When you get in that five figure and up, hopefully a rep when your business is going can hit a 800 or a million quota and up from there. And I think you can back into it. Yeah. Can you ask that just a little bit louder for my old ears? I, you know, in my experience, I think it's, you know, not. We could talk about the topic more broadly. For me personally, I think it's one of the most important things in the world. Right. I basically sat not in the middle but adjacent to the sales team. Right. The whole sales team listened to me. We listened to each other at least when the team was smaller. Right. And I, you know, at least up until you're maybe 10 million in revenue, you know, maybe always. In fact, you learn so much from the sales team. It's so interactive. Right. So you want to be together. Having said that, you know, I think a challenge a lot of folks face if, especially if they're outside of the Bay Area. Right. And there's certainly examples. Clearly HubSpot's been able to attract a lot of sales talent to Boston. But a lot of folks feel like they have to have sales in the Bay Area attract talent and remote or the flip side, a lot of folks selling to media have to have a team in New York, etc. Right. So you do what works. But I gotta tell you, I think it's a huge benefit because you want, you want to me until you're huge. You want your head of sales and your head of marketing to be your right and left hand man and woman, right. You want this to be integrated LinkedIn. If you're not together, the collaboration is tough. Yeah. For growing, for hunting and farming. I wish I had the perfect answer. But I'll tell you what I've seen and what I'm thinking. So I think generally speaking in most cases I find duallys fail. So the VP of sales and marketing that one really like that one really doesn't work out. I mean these are not the same function, right? VP of sales and customer success. Right. That's what's. Where do I prioritize? It's really tough, right. And I think a lot of the great VP of sales want to sell, they want to close, right. And then they want their wingman to carry the customer through the life cycle. Because in most SaaS businesses, you know, you'll keep the customer for years, three, four, five, seven years. Does the VP of sales really want to manage the customer forever? So I think viewed tactically, I'm religiously opposed to VP of sales and marketing and I like to have a division between sales and client success. Having said that, what I've seen lately, and at first I thought this was nutty, but now I see that it's a great idea is more and more companies, earlier notwithstanding C title inflation, are having a chief revenue officer, okay. However you title it and the chief revenue officer brings in a VP of sales under them and the VP of sales and the VP of however you upsell reports to that person as well. It's tough to do that in the early stage, but I think if you can pull that off, it's a great way to have both. Right. Because ultimately in any SaaS business, the majority of your revenue is going to come at least indirectly from renewals, word of mouth, second order revenue. Right. So you want someone owning that whole thing. And I think ultimately having the co own it all is suboptimal when you scale. Anybody else. Just curious, what kinds of things did you guys do for lead gen? That's my whole question overall. Yeah. When you were at Echosign. Well, I will tell you, I mean I could answer a lot of questions. I'll tell you where we, what we focused on is we're religiously focused on folks that got into the funnel and closing them. So we were very, very good at. However, and I'll answer your question in a little bit more detail. You know, you do get a brand or at least in the early stages. There's a concept I like to talk about. I've written about a mini brand, right. Once you get something going, even if you get to a million in revenue, a lot of people have probably heard about you, not in the grand scheme of things, but in your little ecosystem or space. So what we, what we got really good at, especially when we got the right VP of sales on board or when I was running sales in the early days is we got very good at the second someone came into the spiderweb, as I think about it, in luring them into the bottom. Right. We never really, because of that, that was what we were good at and we specialized in. We never did a ton of outbound. Right. And I think especially when Aaron talks a lot about this I think especially when you get just a little bit bigger should definitely, you know, you can't lose or from the HubSpot conversation as a layer. But mostly we focused on customer happiness, right. And building on that mini brand and that created. If you combine viral word of mouth, SEO and search. Right. Even from like, from like maybe month nine through many tens of millions in revenue. That was 90% of our. Of our lead source. Right. Was by keeping the. Keeping the existing customers happy and building on that either as a direct or indirect viral loop, you know. But we could talk more about it. I mean, you do everything, right? I mean, you know, do paid webinars work. I mean, you know, you'll get a few, right? Your $100,000 booth at Dreamforce, you know, you'll get a couple. But a lot of that stuff, it's tough in the early days to make that scale. Right? Thanks. Could you talk about increasing revenue per lead? Because you said it was kind of the single loss to border metric for you. So strategies and hacks. Yeah, well, I'll talk about it, but I'll tell you at the CEO or founder level, the way to do it is to hire a great VP of sales. You should not be doing those hacks yourself. And what a great VP of sales can do a lot of things, but what they'll almost immediately do is increase the quality of talent in the organization. Right? And that alone plus whatever other processes and training and that stuff's all important. Right? But by increasing the quality of talent through the higher quality talent in the organization, that. That was the magic, right? Brendan came in. In 90 days, our revenue per lead doubled. Was that. Do we. Do we launch better features? I mean, no. Did we have a PR campaign? No, Nothing. Nothing changed. Right. All that actually changed was he did bring in three folks with him that he knew that he trusted. So we immediately had three additive folks that were great to the team. So that's key. Right? But you can't say that there's anything other than just quality, right? Because nothing changed in those 90 days. So we could talk about hacking, but the real hack I say is start hiring that VP of sales at 10 customers, right? Even though you can't hire them. That's. The real hack, is to start early. I don't know, maybe you'd like to hear more, but it's just talent, right? As John said, half your time has to be recruiting. But I'll give you one little hack in the early days. I mean I. The one. One that ultimately you outgrow and scale but if you're not doing this, the one hack that at least got us a quick boost after that was, you know, if you have, you'll figure out the number of leads that a rep can handle okay. In your organization, right? And first of all, the second that you're giving a rep one more lead than they can handle, make sure you have another rep already there taking those leads because you don't. Leads are precious. Right. And then make sure that if those leads for whatever reason, because usually processes in the early days are not that well defined, right. Make sure you have a cleanup rep and the cleanup reps job is if that rep for whatever reason isn't properly followed up with in 24 or 48 hours, if the second follow up doesn't happen, boom, that lead goes to cleanup rep and that creates this amazing virtuous cycle where all of a sudden like the loser leads, they're never going to follow up on them. Right? But the ones that are sort of the mid pack or just below, if you're going to lose them, all of a sudden you see productivity just grow. So the cleanup rep in the early days was a very productive hack for us. What's that? What's your hack? You got a long list, I'm sure.

Not just stealing the stage, but. Hey Andrew, so one by the way, on that article, stop. Maybe 10x I always say if you can increase your small deals, pay the bills. But big deals help drive growth. So one way to help figure out how to increase your deal size, or as Jason would say, your revenue per lead metric, KPI, whatever is go through an exercise where you think, okay, our average deal size is $5,000 today. What would it take for us to sell a 10 times size deal? $50,000. Which is two things. Who would actually need it and what would we have to deliver that kind of value? So it starts you thinking much bigger. So if you try to 10 times it, you might get a doubling or something. But that's a good mental exercise for that. And there's an article, a blog post about it. Predictablerevenue.com 10x.

That'S good. The other hack, for what it's worth, just to, you know, maybe it's an obvious point to a lot in the audience, but invest far earlier in customer success than you would expect. Yes, right. Because at the end of the day that's more than half that matters. Right? That's your revenue stream, that's your word of mouth, that's your brand. And everyone, in my experience everyone tends to do customer success really good in the early days because it's like the CEO and the cto, right? That's who's doing it and one other guy. And then things get. There's this phase around 3, 4, 5 million, wherever it is for you, where things just get overwhelming, right? And you want to already have customer success processes in place before then because otherwise you're just wasting all that hard work that, that you did in sales. Question about recruiting. One quick question about recruiting, if I could. When you were recruiting Brendan, I guess you were looking at some other candidates. How did you evaluate the candidates and why did you pick Brendan? You know, there's, you know, a couple reasons. One, I was lucky by accident I had, when I'd first spoken with him 20 months before, I instantly knew he was, he was more insightful than 90% of the candidate that I talked to way back when. So I had that right. But at the end of the day, I think this isn't the most brilliant insight, but whenever you're trying to hire for a functional area like this, make sure that in that interview you learn amazing things and that you don't know things that that person doesn't know, right? And usually by the time you go to hire a VP of sales, you know a lot, right? You may not have ever really managed an inside sales team, but you've closed a lot of customers yourself. You know how the process should go. You know what it's like at your ACV and your deal s, which is very different than a different industry in a different deal size. If it's transactional or solution sale, and if that interviewee is in any way dumber than you on your sales, even though they should know nothing, if they know nothing about your company except your website, immediately pass, right? Because the thing about people may challenge me, but I firmly believe that at a given company's size, at a given deal size, pretty much it's all in some way similar, right? You know, a company at 2 million, growing 100% a year, with a $5,000 average deal size, it's a pretty transactional thing. It's probably very inbound driven. There's exceptions, but these patterns emerge and the ones that are great know how to leverage those patterns in their next gig, right? So if you don't, if you're smarter than them, just, just as painful as just pass. Are we out of time, Max? Okay, we'll do it after.