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

Hello. Hello everyone. Thank you, Caitlin. Hi, welcome to Sasterscale. I am Brian Elcessert. Ryan, I'm really excited to chat with you today. Before we really dive in, do you want to kick off like what we could expect to walk away with?

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

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

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

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

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

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

We didn't have that plan. It's funny what you said about essential. We worked with a keynote speaker recently who's very popular, Professor Adam Grant, who talks a lot about the future of work. And he kind of came and talked to our group and kind of called us essential workers. Now there's people doing much more essential work than us, to be fair. But just like some of the importance of the services we were offering to keep people connected. And you know, it's funny to think about from a sales point of view, there was, you know, sudden and instant demand, as you would expect for our services. And you know, it's kind of like, you know, on a sales point of view, it's, you know, quarter ends fun for those that are in the audience that are, you know, carrying a number or if you're a CEO, you know, you, like I'm sure you're watching. And there tends to be, especially in B2B software, kind of an uptick that you see at the end of a period, at end of a month even, but even an end of a quarter and then you have this kind of big peak and then there's a little bit of, okay, now let's get the wheels going, let's build pipeline, let's go. And so it was kind of like quarter end and then you woke up the next day and it was like quarter end. And you woke up the next day and it was like quarter end Saturday. And it was like quarter end and.

It'S Groundhog day for sales.

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

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

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

Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Helped us a ton interesting. It's, you know, I think a lot of people spend a lot of founders spend a lot of time developing that SMB channel and putting sellers against it and developing out how that flow goes when they make that transition to like an E comm model. That's a decision. Right. So in fact, how many times. I'm sure you've heard that question. Many times. When do I start Selling more in an enterprise, how do I know when I can start shifting? There's. Do you see the different segments as like, at this stage, this is when you employ this plan, or how do you envision that growth?

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

That's it. Yes.

Yeah, yeah. But as you start scaling here, okay, 100 million in AR, like, that's different. Well, what I've always found in my career is that focus equals success. And what I mean by that is, even at the most simplistic level, if you take something like an inbound, a BDR or an sdr, like separating someone that's getting like an inbound versus you're proactively going outbound, like, and separating those processes, you know, of course, separating small business and whether you define that as under 10 or 10 to 2, like people have won the 99, like separating that out and separating enterprise. I mean, at Zoom, we sell to individuals, consumers, prosumers, we sell to small businesses. We also sell the largest companies in the world. Like, you know, almost half the Fortune 100 uses Zoom. You know, the Global 10, you know, uses Zoom. And so, you know, you sell to Those customers and then you sell to the mid market. But we don't do it with the same sales process, we don't do it with the same sales reps, we don't do it with the same go to market tactics. And not that there's not things that leverage over or kind of connect over between different groups, but the reality is we start with like well what's needed for this customer, how are they buying, what's the competitive market, what does that look like? And then you know, what do we need to do differently? And then also you know, what's somewhat traditional, what's worked, what hasn't worked and then you try things and you adapt from there.

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

There's, there's probably what can I imagine sometimes actually.

Yeah, yeah, right. Because the amount of support that's needed for that is what different than the support of that, you know, maybe a smaller support level transaction, 1,000%. Right.

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

So let me just ask one question further on this. When you were building out the ring central team and you were employee sales employee number one, right. And you're building out that team. Did you stack that out? Like how did, how did you decide? All right, we're going to focus here on the growth then we're going to stack this in. This is part two. Like what did that look like?

Yeah, I don't know if I was one of them. That top Few. But what we, you know, to be up front, what we did is so we didn't have like the whole master plan of complete segmentation sitting there when you have nothing to do.

Right.

You started honestly getting on the phone, talking to customers, thinking about what our talk track was. But I mean, that was from the days of, like, literally, you have a Salesforce instance, but that means you bought Salesforce, but, like, it's in the wrapper. You know, like, you had a, like, really great process, and then you just start creating some process and some repeatability. What's working, what's not. You kind of get on the phones and you make it happen. And then you adjust and you scale and you scale and then over the years, over the, you know, you look over time and then you look back and you've kind of built this machine. But I can't say you're sitting there master planning the whole machine on day one. That's not the truth. You're learning and adapting, learning and adapting, learning and adapting, and you're adjusting. And even at, you know, just about every company I've been in, what were the segments and what they are the couple years later, and not initially, every year you're changing them and what they are years later, they're different. And how you focus. So even those things, it isn't like it's a constant. It's adjusting to what's appropriate and what's needed.

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

How do you prepare for this faster? I mean, that's like, you know, ideally, there's levels of scale, there's level of people and hiring and process that you would have done quicker. Like day. Sometimes you can't be prepared for everything. But that's, you know, sort of like life. I mean, I hate to say it, but, like, the Monday morning quarterback is undefeated.

Yeah.

So it's really easy to play the game. And so, you know, one thing is, you know, there's some planning exercises where, you know, think, you know, it's easy to say, gosh, like, let's just take the, you know, especially at a time like this, you know, we're rounding a calendar year and there's a lot of reflection and goals for next year and what you're doing. But, you know, how do you put your team in an exercise where they're, hey, three years from now, what are we going to be? What's that going to look like? And, you know, sometimes you remove the frame of time, like, you push it out there, so it lose a lot of the motion, a lot of the protectionism, things that you might run into. You remove those things and you get people to think about, like, what it would be. And then if you can align around in a vision for what that is, then you start peeling it back and you say, okay, great. What are the things we need to do now to get there so you don't have to play Monday morning quarterback? And let's be clear, we all know and runs a perfect playbook. We all have plenty of things. I wish I did a little of this, a little bit of that, you know, for Zoom. You know, probably getting the channels earlier, that was, I mean, when I got here, day one, that was something we started pushing. But I wish there would been maybe earlier investment would be an example.

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

Tell me what you mean by that.

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

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

Got it.

If a partner wants to do it, we're 100% behind and they doing that and helping them be successful there. The key is they just need to be able to do it at a high quality. Right. Because it's all about the customer and the, the customer experience and that's what we need to protect.

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

Yeah, I mean we have a pretty incredible. I mean we added about 3,500 partners over the last. Is a major area of investment.

So we've added 3500 partners. Oh my goodness.

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

Is there like an accreditation for those partners for you so that you know they're representing you? Right? Like how did you, you scale them? Because 3500 is a lot.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You're talking to a guy that actually you can't see it because of my background, but I built the office in my backyard. I'm actually in an office that I built for my backyard so that I can have a place to go to work. All right, moving on. Number four. Here we have invested enablement. I'll just briefly say, there are so many companies that don't take this seriously early on. Right. The younger you are, enablement. Is like a nice to have versus a need to have or perceived that way, perceived as a nice to have. How do you see enablement in different segments? What can somebody do to just really enable a team fast?

I think enablement's core and of course I kind of have an army of enablement now because I really believe. But we can always have that. And when you're smaller you can't. But I think when you're smaller, you know, it's really important to be listening to the customer.

Of course.

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

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

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

Sam.