Josh James & Domo: DoubleUnicorns How Things Are Different Now And Things That Never Change

All right, let's give it up for Josh James. Very exciting. Thanks for coming, man. So we're going to have a little bit of fun. If you haven't read it, Josh James has his own rules of sales, which basically is all of the 4,000 Quora posts and blog posts I've done distilled into 52 slides. So he should just be running faster. Other than that, he's running his second unicorn. So I want to just spend five minutes chatting with Josh, and then we'll spend the rest of the time having some fun, going through his rules and getting some great war stories. But before I get into it, couple things. First, tell everybody about what Domo does and sort of where it sits in the whole bi landscape so we can get up to speed.

Great. Yeah. So what we do, we change the way you run your business. We take all the data from every system you have in your company and put it on your phone. So if you want to get a text message that says your sales are up or an employee left or you're receivables have increased, you get a text message about those things and it's all right there on your phone. And the way we came up with it is I was running Omniture and Omniture, we were the fastest growing public software company all three years we were public. And we thought we knew a little bit. And I'd go see Expedia or ebay and they're like, they know everything about their business because it's all online.

Yeah.

And then they would be like, so how many employees do you have? And I'd make up a number because I don't know specifically. I maybe know from the last quarterly update, and it just never made sense. Like, I know that number lives in like three different systems. Why isn't that digitally transformed? And on my phone, in an app that I can see that, plus how many Instagram followers we have and every other metric that we want to see. And so just said, if we did that for online marketing, let's see if we can do it for the entire business. So that's where it came from.

Got it. And any things that you thought having had a huge first success that you thought would be easier the second time that actually weren't?

Well, I thought it was handful of things. Easier, easier. And you guys all know, for starting companies, it's not easy. And I think you just get older and more tired and still like, no one's picking up the ball and running with you. Still. There's things you have to do. I think there's higher expectations. So there's a different type of stress, you know, the first time around, no one has expectations. Everyone thinks you're gonna fail. And so it's just kinda like it's.

Comforting in the early days.

Yeah, it is. Like, you know, if you do, it's not a big deal. You get a badge of monitor this time around. People have expectations and they throw money at you and that's definitely nerve wracking. And I think the other big lesson or big difference is I figured let's go get some of those same people that we worked with last time.

Yeah, getting the band back in, get.

The people that have been there, done that, and we will upgrade in other places and get more people that have been there, done that, and then you lose that. Wonderful thing that happens in a brand new startup with brand new founders is everyone's trying to make a name for themselves. Everyone's putting everything on the line and it's all been there, done that, and it all kind of ends at 6, 7 o'. Clock. And there's not the 11:30 text messages. So we had to make sure we pulled some of those. I mean, generally speaking, younger people in and promoting them and making it their life and having that kind of energy is extremely important.

So there's the energy and then also sometimes everyone wants to get the band back together. Right. It's the easiest way to repeat lightning.

Sure.

But do you find that sometimes they only want to do things sort of the way that they were successful? Was that an issue as well? Yeah, that's what we want to do. We know how to crush it one way and the world evolves.

Well, I mean, even with me. I mean, there's things that I was sure were going to work the same way. Yeah, there were some things I knew that we screwed up and I'm like, we've got to improve those things. And you definitely shoot people in the head a lot faster because you've learned that lesson a million times. But there's things like we at Omniture, it was really easy to sell. It's like, do you have a website? Okay, here you need a web analytics. Yeah. And Domo's not as easy. People don't understand. They're like, well, it's bi. We're like, no, no, no, no, that's. And they're like, oh, it's BI 2.0. And I'm like, no, that's kind of like this sucks 2.0. Because bi kind of sucked. And so it's Understanding how to be much more consultative in the selling process and training the whole organization on that process is something we had to, we had to completely relearn. So that was different.

And you need different DNA in the.

Team, you think some DNA difference? Yes. And I think I'm really comfortable. I mean, if people come into my office, which they often do, to come and complain about somebody else on the team.

Yeah.

First thing I do is call that person, say, hey, come in here. Okay. Say it again. And you know, it makes people uncomfortable, but they learn real quick. Like, we're not gonna walk around and complain about each other. We're gonna get in a room, we're gonna figure it out, we're gonna fight, and we're not gonna make it personal. But if you're gonna come in here and say something about somebody, then that person's gonna be walking in here two minutes later. So. But I think, I mean, that's what's fun. Fighting and trying to make things win and beating the heck out of competition. And that's fun.

Yeah. And what else? Other learnings? Cause that's fun. And then I wanna dig into some of your meta lessons learned. But what else is different today than in the amateur days? What's different?

Well, I mean, at amateur we had, we were begging for money. It was my credit cards and my student loans, and I have much better credit cards now.

Did you have to IPO to raise money? Was the IPO actually a financing event? That's real old school, isn't it?

Yeah, it was $100,000 in credit cards and student loans. I mean, basically I got as many credit cards as I could, applied for them all at the same time, and then ran them all for like two days before anyone knew what happened. And this one? Yeah, people were throwing money and on the one hand it was nerve wracking and I wasn't sure if we wanted to do it. I was like, you know, it'd be cool if I went public and I own 95% of it and that'd be pretty awesome.

It has a certain appeal.

It doesn't really work out that way. But the interesting is when we started bringing in investors, we started bringing in really smart investors. And it gave us the extra pressure, which was good because like Matt Kohler at Benchmark, he asked me, he was our first PC in this one. And he said he had two questions. And one of those questions is, why? Why are you doing this again?

Why are you doing it again?

Yeah, And I said, I said I sold to Adobe and you know, we left on okay terms. There was lawsuits afterwards. So read into it how you will still friends at the mall. But it kind of pissed me off. And I was like, I'm gonna, I wanna go make them. I wanna, I wanna. This is what I told Matt. I'm like, I wanna make amateur look like that cute little thing we did when we were in elementary school.

Yeah.

And you know, it's you guys, all, you guys have all met, you know, executives and CEOs of these big companies. And I've met them all. And you meet them, they're no different. And so then you look at the Michael Dell's of the worlds, and they're all intelligent, they're smart people, but they're no different. If I was in high school class with them in calculus or something, I would have, I could have hung with them, you know. And so I just think, what do they have? Well, they got the market opportunity, right? And then they had decades in front of them. And so this time around, you know, want to make sure that we can do it for decades. Let's see how big of a company we can make.

So it has to be an order of magnitude better the next time, right? It's got to be at least 10x bigger.

That's another thing. Yeah, it's like. And I told people, they're like, there is exactly zero percent chance this is gonna be worth between zero and $1.8 billion versus what it's not gonna happen. There's a zero percent chance it might be zero or it's gonna be more than 1.8, but it's not gonna be in between. And it's not. I mean, we're grateful for the opportunity, certainly, but at the same time, that's what the investors put the money in, knowing we're gonna swing big. And if you can't afford to lose money on this thing, don't put it in, because we're gonna swing big. And that's what we've done with Domo. I mean, Domo's applicable to every single person at every single company in every single vertical. You know, we've got the CEO of Target using Domo. He walks into any store, he pulls out his phone, picks a store, and literally up to the second data about how that store's performing compared to the other stores, compared to how it was doing the previous year. Got the CEO of UHG, Fortune 6, and the guy that runs analytics there told me, he said, this is nirvana. I never thought this could happen in my life. And I was talking to the CMO of another Fortune 5 company just a few days ago. And he. She said, because I don't want to give it away, that it's been his. Her dream to show that their CEO a real time dashboard of their business. And dang it, she's like, you've done it right here and it's already done. And I can't wait to show this. So it's really fun to see. Like, I mean, we've got the coolest data about. This is a software as a service conference. So magic number I got to invent with one of my VCs. And you know, that's the way we ran our business. And there's so many other metrics now to think about. But the coolest one I think is magic numbers. Really important, but retention's equally important. And revenue retention. Domo has 240% revenue retention of its customers.

That's the magic, isn't it?

And it's like, this thing's gonna be crazy. And people still don't know what we do. And that's okay. I'm totally fine with that. But it's about to get crazy.

You gotta be three to four years in until you feel the lift that you get from that. Right?

Yeah, you do.

And do you have the NPS religion that I've grown to have the last couple years? Is that part of net negative churn?

Well, you know, the first couple years of Domo, the NPS was really a depressing thing. So we didn't really adopt it too greatly. And then when it was low.

When it was low in the beginning.

We kind of figured things out about two years ago and got the product we were thinking and. Yeah. And so now it's definitely a big part of what we're doing. And we use Qualtrics for that stuff. And it's been a really good.

Is it a core metric for you? Is it a core.

Absolutely, absolutely.

And so in the beginning, because everyone wants to have a 70 MPS, but there are a lot of reasons you might not start there. I think the most important thing is driving it up over time. The most important.

Well, I mean, I'm not sure we literally had 100% retention for the first six years of the company. Yeah, we never lost a. We'd never lost a customer. It wasn't revenue retention. We had 100% nominal retention. And so they go from that to then, you know, we start this new product, like, hey, everyone's gonna like this. No, there's a million problems with it. That was really painful and so working through that, working through that and finally getting that to where retention's great now and customers are really happy, it's a much better place to be.

In Omniture, when you had that, was it all because you had the special sauce figured out? It was because of your market position and the importance of the problem Amateur.

Solved in its time. We kind of got lucky in the architecture that we chose. We had a lot of competitors. Cloud was not accepted yet. And then if they're like, oh, you're cloud, why the hell are your costs have been sold so screwed up? We're like, well, we have 100 times the amount of data that Salesforce has, so we have a lot more expenses. So, you know, people could not comprehend that. So they're like, you guys don't know how to run your technology. We're like, what? And you know, I think the biggest thing we got right with Omniture was we couldn't afford to buy at the time, sun servers and Oracle databases. So we did MySQL we did the lamp stack.

Yeah.

Because we had to. And that was by far the most efficient. And so we could scale up to, you know, that's why Walmart. There was a board member that was on the board of Walmart, on the board of Walmart and on the board of Coremetrics, my competitor. We never thought we'd get Walmart. Coremetrics goes down at Christmas. We get the phone call from Walmart and we get them as a customer because we just scaled really, really well and we got that part. We got that part right.

Got it. So then, so then. And in domo, you, you, you had that step function where in the beginning you had to work it out and it's stronger now. Did. Had any, any approach to customer success or being in the field with customers? Yeah, that's evolved over time.

That one we kind of. We got right at Oninsure and we just 10x. We just 10 doubled.

You double down on it early. Right.

Which is, that's the trick. The second time I hear any customer that's going to be a problem. Like you talk to like sales and marketing experts and like you got to find the target customer and you only get that target customer if it's not the target customer. You shouldn't do it. You don't want to get distracted and do and jump all over the place just because the customer's telling you that you'll never have a strategy to a point. But when I hear there's a customer that's breaking Everybody that's extremely complex that says there's no way we're gonna handle their business. I'm like, take our five best people, put them on it, let's fix it, let's make it work. And if we get that right, then we're gonna get dozens and dozens of other customers from that one example. So we look for the complexity.

That's my view. So you have a big customer that comes in that wants to push the limits on deal size and everything. If it's vaguely in your wheelhouse, you do it and you just put a team on it and learn from it.

Yep, absolutely.

I think the advice of like those are outliers and don't do it. Distract is often terrible advice and they can be distracting.

And you do. I mean it's like a portfolio approach. There's some customers that you end up spending half a million bucks on and you don't get anything out of it and then the guy moves on and you lose the contract. I mean it happens. But if you think about you doing 10 of those, maybe three of them don't work out, but six, seven of them are going to be amazing and it's going to be your long term business.

Yeah. So let's hit. I want to have some time. Let's see if these are queued up for these slides because let's find some fun stories out of it. Are these. You guys got them? Oh, can you go back one? I think maybe. Or is this the first one? Roll back. Is this the first one? It's all good. Let's start with this one. Even if it's the second because I love this one because I was so go to. What's your blog? What's the URL? Everyone's going to magically copy it.

Josh james.com.

I know how to get it on Google.

I got like 50 something startup rules there.

50 startup rules.

It's when we had no product at Domo. I was trying to make noise. We came up with startup rules.

Did it work as a content marketing strategy?

Actually yeah, it worked really well.

So this first one, I think it's pretty obvious, but I want to think about it. This is your second time. You're sorry, recruiting. You can see it right there. No good employee will walk through the door. Must recruit. Like you sell big customers. So in the Utah Salt Lake tech community, you're fairly well known and I.

Assume there's a. I'm big in Japan.

You're big in Japan.

I'm big in Utah.

So what is this? What does this really mean.

I lived there for two years. I actually am big in Japan.

So recruiting is, once you have traction is all that really matters at the end of the day, isn't it?

It is, yeah. But, you know, it's like it says, they don't walk through the door, and the best ones are always employed and they're happily employed.

Happily employed.

And recruiting, I think, is a big deal. And I've noticed over the years, I remember being in college and hearing about a guy that got recruited from Microsoft, and he was so impressed. Even though he had a business that was making him, like $200,000 a year, Microsoft came and recruited him, rolled out the red carpet, gave him, like, a leather coat and a couple laptops to give to his wife and himself, and he just, like, couldn't help but take the job. And then six months later, he quit. But he was so enamored with the process. And so we try to do the same thing. Like, an employee comes in, roll out the red carpet, get in the drivers, make sure you, you know, send stuff to their house, to their spouse, you know, give them a bunch of gear and make sure that they are treated really, really well and everyone has the background on them. And an example of this, when I was recruiting my CFO, he was CFO of SuccessFactors.

Yeah.

And so every software, as a service company wanted this guy.

He's number top three obvious list, right?

He is. He's amazing. And. And I called Lars that ran success factors. I said, how good is Bruce? He said, 12. Like, I didn't even finish my sentence. 12. Okay, Lars, got it.

Thanks. Done.

And so we're recruiting him, and of course he lets us know that he's going to take his time because he's cooking, like, eight things at the same time. And they were really hot startups. And so we interviewed him, and then we lined up methodically with all of my board members and my investors and my executives. I had, like, 14 people on the list because he said he was gonna make a decision on Sunday. And we took. We took like, 16 hours, the whole team, including Bill Gurley, walking over to his house and knocking on his door. And Bruce is like, well, I have guests. He's like, that's fine. And here comes Bill walking in your house and spending an hour with you. And it's Bill. So of course Bruce is gonna be like, well, I can't tell Bill to leave, so I guess I'm gonna spend an hour with Bill. But I think methodically going through these things and acting like It's a big deal. You're trying to win is extremely important. And that's. And we all know, I mean you get the right person and they really, they make 10x the difference of the next person.

Yeah. And how much of your time do you spend recruiting these days?

Much time do I spend recruiting?

Recruiting of your, of your adr?

I go through, I go through phases. Certainly. I, you know, the last, the last 12, 18 months I spent, I spent, I'd say 25 to 33% of my time just recruiting early on. I spent half my time. I wanted to meet every engineer. I was really protective of the culture.

Yeah.

And then, you know, pull back. Okay, we met everybody. Manager then. Okay. Now I want to meet every director. And now we have certain people that have to meet. I know every director, every vp, so just kind of pull back as it goes. But then personally recruiting, you know, I think makes a big difference on the VP level. Certainly. So do a little bit.

And one, a lot of founder, first time founders, they're crappy at recruiting. It's not a skill.

They're crappy at recruiting.

I think they're pretty bad at recruiting. I don't think we all naturally learn.

That college, what's that highly technical term? Crap?

It is. We're bad at it. I mean, I still struggle to get better at recruiting. Right. It's a huge effort. You have 15 people. So any great advice to the team to get better? What's one big learning? I like having every single person on the team go all in. But what else.

I really like in recruiting? Saying something that's gonna throw em. I like when like the guy that's my president of my company now that I hired to run sales at Omniture, you know, they come in thinking of the big man on campus and they walk around like that. And you gotta make sure that they're pitching you as well. And so I like. And that's the same thing with a vc. If you're gonna talk to a vc, I don't go in and just pitch. I go in and pitch and I got three questions to ask, including a couple things that are gonna make him uncomfortable.

Yeah, even with your CFO from success factors. You made him uncomfortable. Absolutely. Good.

Absolutely. You know, I'm like, I heard you're an asshole. Talk to me about it.

Not judging, just asking, right?

Yeah, just asking. And that's actually the exact same question that I asked to my president. He was, you know, I'm like, you know, I've spent, I've interviewed, you like, four different times. And it seems like you've got a little bit of asshole potential.

Yeah.

And, you know, just. I don't know if you got that feedback before or not, but talk to me about that. And he's like, he tells me afterwards, he's like, spinning. He's like, what did I do? But I want them to pitch me too. And I want to come across as a nice guy, and I want to make sure that they know that I'm going to take care of them and love them and do everything I can to make sure that we go to the promised land together. But I want to make sure that they're pitching me as well. Because when you feel like you can't have something, you want it more. So I think that's an important part of pitching.

And your CFO and these others, did you lure them from the Bay Area to move to Utah?

Yeah, probably. Maybe a third of the management team over the years.

Yeah.

So one thing we don't have in Utah is like, software as a service. CFOs, we don't have a stable to choose from. So you end up bringing some executives like that in and, you know, for us, if we can get them on a plane, we can close them.

Yeah.

And, you know, bring them in. And for us. There's a lot of companies here, I know that aren't based here in Silicon Valley. You know, we call our. We call Utah Silicon Slopes. We make sure that the other, like we use the other CEOs in town to help recruit my CMO or my CFO to make sure that they know everything else that's going on, just in case they move there and their kids go to high school. They don't want to move away. They hate you. Are there other opportunities? So we do a lot of that. And then the other thing that we do is because sometimes, and this happens in Utah, too, like we'll have Utah companies and they won't pick other Utah companies because we're like, oh, it's a Utah company. You can't be as smart as people in Silicon Valley. What? Kidding me? But that's what they think. So when we have people come in, we just show them customer use case after customer use case after customer use case. Because ge, Target, Walmart, that says something that maybe you can't say yourself.

So I have a super strong opinion. But let's say you're in your position, you're in Utah or anywhere, you're in Bangalore, and you find someone you think is a decent first VP of Sales but they're in the Bay Area. Does that ever work? What do you think about that remote service?

I hate remote employees.

It's hard, right? I hate it. But not everyone will move.

I hate all of it. I will only do it for just a few people. And I will only do it for a few people that have done it before and proven that they can make it work. And even my best ones, I still even like. Even Bruce, my cfo, who I love to death. Even if he tells me he's working, I don't believe that he's working on Thursday and Friday when he's not there. I just don't.

You need to feel that collaboration vibe.

I know what it's like. You don't really work the same.

I don't believe in working from home either. So, yeah, that is a tough one. So let's talk about this one. Because I wanted to unpack this little one. I almost get it, but it's pretty cool. I only care about sales. I get that. Don't talk to me about marketing, even. Right.

Booth.

Hr Comp. Legal. That being fixed later with dollars. So this is. This is about early stage debt, right? What debt can I fix later with money and time and what isn't? So even marketing.

Yeah. For me, this is all throughout. It's so hard to get the whole company focused on sales. It's really easy to get a good sales team. It's easy to find people to support them. But to truly get everyone really focused on it. Anytime someone comes and brings me something, depending on the phase that we're at. But I've been through phases where I've said, okay, if you're going to bring me $100,000 spend, tell me why that $100,000 spend is better than a rep. Because this is what a rep's gonna return to me.

Yeah.

Every rep I get in here, you know. Cause you're like, okay, we gotta hire 10 reps. And you think that my cash flow cost you million and a half bucks before it starts paying itself off. But for some reason, the next million and a half dollars is not gonna be 10 reps. You're gonna end up spending $4 million. Cause you're doing all this other crap along with it. Yeah. If you want to spend $100,000, tell me why I should spend it on that instead of another rep. And I just make. I don't care. It's legal. You know, why do I need to spend it on this extra patent person or this extra contractor? Why can't I hire Another rep instead. And you got to justify it, and it's for your own good and help them understand that. And we did things like we were trying to win a customer back in the day, and I got 4,000 little squishy balls and put the customer's logo on it and put them all over the office, and everyone's throwing them at each other, but everyone's sitting there staring at that customer logo name. You know, I gave everyone. We were trying to close Walmart that one time. I gave everyone. I think it was probably stingy. So it was probably 50 bucks, but it was 50 bucks. And, like, when we got customer 100 here, you know, pass out $100 to everybody and just get them really focused. And then at Domo, we were focused way too much on all the other things because we have all these people that have been there, done that. So they're trying to put all their systems in place. And so we put, like, Kmart blue light special blue lights from all the ceilings everywhere. No matter which building it is, we close the deal, Lights are going off, and we're playing music. And then everyone comes in there and they're complaining about, I want to call. And then, like, this music, because we let all the sales guys pick their own music. So, you know, like, welcome to the Jungle starts playing and you're trying to do a pitch.

I'm like, I don't freaking care.

You're going to have to explain to the customer that a deal just closed. But, you know, we were only able to sustain that for about a year. But it kind of really taught everyone how to think about things and how we think about things as a company.

Yeah, yeah. As you add a team especially, it can be confusing, especially if you have. If you've raised funding, like that multiplier effect of each rep, the rep cost, this. But why I need all this in marketing and all this other. And all of a sudden, the fully burdened cost is like 3x the OT.

For every rep, for every service, six reps. We're gonna have to hire another manager because, you know, there's no way you can manage more than six people.

Like, yes.

I'm not really sure that's true. I like pushing on that a lot. I like having them screaming. I like when they come. This has happened to me. I like when 6, 7 reps come in my office at one time and do like a sit in. Like, we really would be more effective if we had another manager to help us out. Like, okay, we've reached that point. Then you know, until then, no, I'm not doing it.

But yeah, it's tough, it's good. But this is actually way people spend all the money. It is, right? They are actually capital efficient for a certain point. And then sales efficiency tends to plummet somewhere, whether it's 10 or 20 million in revenue or it's 10 or 20 million in fundraising, and they just bolt on all this and they're not quite sure why they're spending what they're spending.

Yep.

Yeah.

Yep. For sure.

So next one. I know this sounds simplistic, but this is an important one because incentives matter.

I freaking love this one.

You love this one?

I love this one.

Spend a few days each year on detailed comp plans, the most powerful operation weapon you can have. So one of the most popular things that I wrote in the early days was my Hacky sales comp plan. And it's like top of natural search on Google. So what have you learned here? What can you share with us?

Yeah, definitely. I like sales plans. And then CFOs and other people come along and this is too complex. And lawyers get involved and we're not going to be able to be. Starbase is Oxy compliant with all this stuff. I'm like, you know what? Figure it out. That's what you're paid to freaking do. So, you know, well, we can't do this. We can't do things on a spreadsheet. Well, then go write some freaking software. Like, I don't really care if it moves the dial, then I'm really interested in it. But I think it goes beyond. It goes beyond this. So we were having trouble one time at Omniture where we had. I literally had my CFO walk into my office in a panic, shut the door, and he's like, we can't take any more deals. We can't close any more deals. We need to stop. Take a breath, bro. Cause that's not the answer. So he's like, cool, we need to get more money. We can't buy enough machines. Cause AWS didn't exist back then. And I'm like, okay, we'll get more money. I think we can figure that out. And he's like, well, we need it now. I'm like, okay, well, let's go get some more now. He's like, and we can't install them. They're coming too fast. We can't install them. It all comes to the end of the quarter. We can't install them. And that was a legitimate problem. We were having a hell of a Time getting client services, do implementations. And this guy that I had running it is extremely anal about making sure that he's got the right people, and he will not budge on that. And so I love when, you know, their limiting factor. The limiting factor is he's not gonna bring anybody other than quality. So I went and gave him a really stupid incentive. For every person you hire uncapped, I'll give you a thousand bucks, he hired 150 people.

It worked.

It worked. And every single one of them was good quality because he cannot live with himself if they're not good quality. And we had another problem. We went public at Omniture, and we had 55% gross margins. And we knew we could get it higher, but we were just keeping things on. And I tried so hard to get gross margin improved. And I went to my cto, and he's just. He's like, well, you know, if salespeople wouldn't sell under price, if they wouldn't underprice their deals, then we'd have better pricing, and that'd lead to better gross margins. I'm like, true, but I don't really want to. And if the network operations guys didn't always feel like they needed to have so much capacity, we'd be okay there, and they won't push us. I'm like, you know what, Mr. CTO? I'm gonna give you $50,000 for every percentage point that you increase.

Yeah.

And he's like, well, that's not really fair. I'm like, I don't. I know. And he became the czar, man. I'm like, if? He's like, well, I have to get involved in pricing. Like, you go right ahead. Get involved in pricing. And so he's making every. He put all these stipulations in place so that he was able to get. And he made $600,000 that year on gross margin increase. And the company made. I mean, three years later, we made probably an extra $50 million in cash on that. So it was a massive return, but it was just a comp plan.

Yeah. So you like. I love it, too. You like incentives for as many folks as you can make it work across the country?

Yeah. Just last quarter, I paid my telesales guy, my enterprise sales guy. They both had about the same number of reps, and I needed to have a big quarter. We're getting ready to raise some money. And I said, okay, jump all. All or nothing. 100,000 bucks, whoever sells more. And that's all any of us heard about for the next three months. And one of them won by about. It was about 60,000 bucks and it was $10 million deal. So it was pretty fun.

That's awesome. And what about. You talked about getting the gross margins up with your cto. What about incentives for other folks on the team? Engineering, marketing, customer success. Have you evolved anything?

Yeah, engineering is really tricky. I'm sure there's some in here. Your kind, you guys are motivated by.

20% in product and engineering.

Be careful. Yeah, but which is okay. I mean, I love finding the engineers that are motivated by money. They're not as many of them, but you find some of them and I love them. And then I think. But you know, doing other really interesting things, whether it's like, we'll send you all to Disneyland if you get this thing done on time, you know, or we'll rent out Star wars and you can just invite your friends, you know, so we definitely get creative and that stuff. Yeah, I love. It's fun. It's fun. And everyone's accomplishing it together, so I love it. I love incentives.

You may not have one, but any good stories of misincentives? Because it can go the other way too, right? What you incent, you get.

You do. Yeah. I mean, salespeople are a complete whores. And it's just true. They are, and I love them for it. And any way they can make a buck, they will. And you know, I've had my comp plans every single year. And this is funny, actually, my CFO would get so mad. I remember he'd bring me in the office. He's like, I can't believe you employ all these unethical people and you're okay with it. And I'm like, take it easy, Mike. They're just doing what we asked them. They found a loophole, pay it, you know, and he would close the loophole, sure enough. So there's been. Yeah, tons of disincentives or misalignment in sales plans that I've created over the years. You know, where you start paying for. I mean, even paying a dollar, whether it's from renewal or from upsell, I mean, that's the simplest one. And I mean upsell or a new contract. And if there's a bunch of upsells to be had and they can hit their number, you might. Your new logo growth might shut down completely. So moving those dials, even if it's mid year and saying, sorry, I mean, we just had a really embarrassing one. I'll tell you guys a horrible thing. I Cannot believe happened to me at this stage in my career. Cannot believe happened to me is we were struggling. We weren't being efficient enough in getting new leads. And so the marketing and finance got marketing to spend a little bit less because the efficiency wasn't there. So the leads were coming down. So the sales team wasn't being fed. So since the sales team wasn't being fed, sales came down. Which is not the real problem. The real problem is then your sales guys aren't making quota, then they're not making their dollars. Then they're like rats on a ship, they're the first ones off. So they start getting ready to run. And I had four sales guys quit in the same week. Four of my enterprise sales guys. And I almost had a heart attack. I'm like, if they leave, and they were the smart ones, if they leave, everyone here is gonna know that there's.

Something wrong and I'm not gonna have.

Time to fix it. So I went, I'm like, here's $100,000, here's $50,000, here's guaranteed comp next year. And I had to do it and I did it. And then we're like, the rest of the sales team must be the same. So we lowered quota for everybody. We brought quota down by significantly by $150,000. Which seems like, okay, we'll fix it again next year. I told the board, we're gonna have to, you know, we need these guys motivated and they're not gonna make the money anyway, but we need them motivated to get the accelerators. And they're like, okay, well the idiocy that happened in my company that I'm responsible for. But it's just, you look at it, you're like, how did these smart people do this? And how did that not catch them? This, we built out our entire model to the new quota. So we generated leads to the lower quota. So it was self fulfilling. So all we did was just completely shoot ourselves in the foot. So we get in, you know, a quarter and a half in, and we're like, what is going on? Why aren't we selling what we used to be selling? Yeah, we don't have the freaking leads. Well, why don't we have the leads? Well, we hit the model number. Well, what's the effing model number? Oh, it's built to this quota, to the lower quota, you know, and it took us another six months to recover from that. So yeah, I mean there's. Sometimes you have mass that was entire company wide misalignment. That we just recovered from two quarters ago.

Wow.

So, yeah, I mean, it's embarrassing, but, you know, happened.

It does happen to the very best of us. Is alerting. All right, I want to get through all the slides, but we're over. But I want to hit one last thing. I want to go back to Domo. Just tell me one or two things for this year. You're excited about Domo. What's going on that gets you jazzed?

I think. I mean, Domo's going to be. Domo by the time we're done is going to be tens of billions of dollars in revenue. It's going to be one of the most significant software companies that's ever been created. We got lucky. I was just frustrated that as a CEO, I was not able to get my data. I didn't realize that in order to get the CEO the data, that means that all the VPs need to put the data in. In order for the vps to put the data in, their people have to put the data in and their people have to put the data in. Next thing you know, you gotta build something that works for everybody in the company. And we've done that. And we have customers that are Fortune 50 customers. With every single employee in the company using our product and getting real time data and saying things to me like, I never thought that I was gonna be able to see this or have this or do this. I never thought this was possible. And we just had one of our managers, one of the account, one of the guys, he bought $50,000 worth of Domo. Now it's a several million dollar account. He's been promoted four times in the last about 15 months. And he just sent me a text last week, Fortune 50 company. And he's like, never thought I would be hanging out with the CEO. And sent us a picture of the CEO getting on the corporate plane with him getting on the plane right behind him. And he's like, my one complaint is Domo over WI Fi on the corporate plane sucks. And I was like, this is a good conversation to be having. So, yeah, I think that's. We feel like the tipping point's not here because we still. People don't know what we do, and they still gotta come and look for us and we still gotta go out and evangelize. But I mean, we're 100 million growing 100%, and it's going to get crazy.

It's awesome. All right, everyone, give it up for Josh James. This was amazing.