Episode 3: EIR & Former CRO Dini Mehta on multi-product strategy and building high-engagement teams

How much do you think is luck? And at what point did pinking the right companies become a skill game?

I think a lot of it is luck, if I were honest. I mean, there's signals, things like founder quality, the mission in the market that they're going after, the team quality that they've assembled, and investors to some extent. But I think a lot of it also ends up just being luck. And so I'd be silly to say I knew exactly going into these roles that these companies were going to be massively successful. So a lot of it is luck.

Yeah. I loved your podcast with Robert on Science of Scaling, talking about how you were quite thorough in the lattice evaluation. Obviously by that point you were starting to be a pretty sharp picker, but to have three of those is awesome.

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Hello and welcome to the Revenue Leadership Podcast. I'm your host Kyle Norton and today I'm joined by Dini Mehta who is an executive in residence at Peak 15 Ventures, Peak 15 Partners, formerly known as Sequoia India and had two amazing runs at Drawbridge where she was the VP of Global Sales and then Lattice where she was the CRO taking both those companies from single digits to 100 million plus outcomes. So really exciting. Excited to dig in and we're going to spend time on two topics today. One is how to go multi product as a revenue leader, which is a massively important and complex topic. And we'll also get into how to lead high engagement teams. So thrilled for the conversation and thanks for joining us, Tini.

Thank you Kyle. Thank you for having me. I'm super excited to go deep on these topics and yeah, there's, I've had a lot of hard earned lessons and so hopefully sharing these lessons can save folks making the same mistakes I did.

Yeah, I'm sure they will. So let's just give folks like your 60 second background. Tell us a little bit about the career story and how you got to peak 15.

Absolutely. So originally I'm from India, born and raised there, moved to the States for college, fell into tech because I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life and then definitely fell into sales. The first few years I tried to do every other job and go to market except for sales because I had this negative impression of what it meant to be in sales and then eventually realized that there's a lot of positives and decided to make familiar story. Yep, yep, we all have. A lot of us have that story. And so got my first taste of sales at a company called Quantcast, which was in Hypergrowth. I was an AE there and, and you know, for two and a half years we went from like 10 million to 200 million in revenue. So it was like really fast, rapid growth. And from there I wanted to see. I loved management, fell in love with management, which is what took me to Drawbridge, where I joined as the first sales hire and was there for about five and a half years. We went from a single product to three products, eventually sold the business to LinkedIn and finally my most recent operating run was at Lattice, which is an HR tech platform. Completely different than what I'd done prior, which was mostly selling to marketers and doing large enterprise sales. Versus Lattice was an HR tech platform, plg, high velocity transactional sales and so learned a ton, was a great run. Also joined at about 3 million and was there past 100. And now I'm in residence at peak 15, helping a bunch of founders on their own journey of scaling go to markets.

Very cool. That's awesome. So Quantcast, Lattice and Drawbridge, all quite a magic touch. How much do you think is luck? And at what point did pinking the right companies become a skill game?

I think a lot of it is luck, if I were honest. I mean there's signals, things like founder quality, the mission in the market that they're going after, the team quality that they've assembled and investors to some extent. But I think a lot of it also Ends up just being luck. And so I'd be silly to say, like I knew exactly going into these roles that these companies were going to be massively successful. So a lot of it is luck.

Yeah. I loved your podcast with Robert on Science of Scaling, talking about how you were quite thorough in the Lattice evaluation. Obviously by that point you were starting to be a pretty sharp picker, but to have three of those is awesome. So in terms of queuing up this conversation, the topic we want to really go deep on is how to go multi product. And so Jack Altman, who was your founder CEO, who's on our board at ONR and said wonderful things about you, gave a talk at Saster last year about some of the unexpected ways that going multi product benefited Lattice. And it wasn't all just expansion into the base. It was about higher win rates, bigger ACVs at the top of the funnel. Really fascinating talk. The other side of that coin and that was, you know, product centric. And the other side of this, this coin is how the heck do you do it and go to market. You know, you, you go from selling one single product to many and there's so many complexities that we want to unpack. So maybe just queue up before we get into the details the, the Lattice journey, like where they started and, and where they were in terms of this multi product journey. And then we'll dig into the how.

Absolutely. So I had some experience with multi product from Drawbridge and so when I joined Drawbridge we had a single product that was majority of the revenue and then at about 50 million we decided to add in a new product. But this was like we decoupled our platform and said now we'll sell parts of the data, parts of that product as modular pieces to different Personas. So I thought going into Lattice, I know how to do multi product. This is like check, check, of course we've done this. But coming into Lattice it was a completely different experience. And I'll touch on sort of on the high level. When I joined we were about 3 million in revenue at Lattice, 35 people in the team and we were just getting, when I joined, two months in, we were getting ready to launch our second product. So our first product was the performance suite which was like performance reviews one on ones feedback. And our next product was this engagement surveys. And it was a big bet for the business because we were fairly small team. On the end side, a lot of our capacity was going into building this product for the last, I think 8 months, 12 years, 12 months. And so High risk move. We had advisors telling us that this is too early to be going multi product. You know, you've got a good thing going like continue sort of going down that path. But the founders had good conviction and so they, they'd taken this bet and my job was to come in and figure out how do we like how do we go sell this thing. And we did that and from there it sort of became our playbook where every year we had a new product. And in my tenure there over four and a half years we went from a single product, like four different products. And so yeah, a lot of learnings of like how the complexity also increases incrementally increases as the scale of the business and the new products get added on. But yeah, definitely a fun, fun thing to navigate for sure.

And now they're a full blown hrs which is a whole other can of worms. Another huge, you know, bet the company type of thing. Which is, which is fun to see.

Yep, yep, that was a.

So let's unpack the, the first time going multi product and launching the, the engagement product. So, so you're two months in. How did you try to get with us with a small team I would imagine at that point, how did you think about preparation for going multi product? How did you think about the go to market messaging? What were the key components that you needed to, to put in place to be able to sell that second product?

Yeah, I mean I think first of all it was understanding what the product is and so what we were launching was engagement surveys. Secondly, understanding how does this second product connect to the current product. Third was like is it the same Persona? What I was used to in my prior job at Drawbridge was selling to different Personas, which is a different version of multi product where you're selling into the same account and it's primarily expansion based but selling to a completely different Persona versus here we were selling a new product to the same Persona. And so first was understanding what the product is, then how does it fit into our current product story? Is there a connection or is it just an added SKU that we're adding onto the platform? Third, how do we tell that story? Because now we are no longer a performance management company. We're now transitioning from performance management to what is the thing we're transitioning to. So working with marketing, working with the exec team, which is fairly small at that point and figuring out what is our messaging. And then we were at that point, gosh, how big were we? We were like five AES fairly small, like early. This was five AES, couple BDRs. Our marketing team was like three people, including our head of marketing. Um, so it was very, very lean team. And we were like, I think a week away from launch week, one week away from like launching this product. We're like, well, we need to like, figure out how we're going to train the team on it. We've got to do something. And so this is the chaos of startups where the like, I literally cleared my calendar for two days and the CEO and I, we just locked ourselves up in a conference room and said, we're going to do certifications for every person that's client facing. And so we had, we came up with materials for the team saying, you're going to study this, we're going to, we're going to do a demo, we're going to tell you what the positioning is. And then we locked ourselves up in this room, came up with a rubric and basically did all day for two days certifications across AES, BDRs, CSMs. Wow. Yeah, early days, fun. Tastes very cool.

And in subsequent product launches, did you still run a similar certification process? Obviously more robust, but was that always a part of it?

Yeah, thankfully a lot more robust. Run by enablement, not with just us sitting in a room because that wasn't the best use of time, but at that point it was the earlier days and it set the tone. We also sort of made sure people knew, like, not everyone passed on the first go. So it wasn't just like a check the box type of certification. We really wanted people to feel the importance of what it meant to represent a second product and make sure that we're telling the right story. Because a lot of times when you launch a second product, it's easy to be like, yeah, I got it, I got the main features, I'm going to get out there. And then what happens is you sort of still keep selling the primary, the first product that you launched with, you undersell your new product. And so the goal was to like really stress the importance that the reason we're sitting in this conference room and the reason we're doing certifications and partly keeping a high bar on who gets certified, is to make sure people knew this is an important part of our new messaging, our new sales plays. So, yeah, we definitely got more robust, but it was, it was like a good signaling to the team of how important it is that, that we're doing this right now.

And when you launched engagement surveys, was the focus to go upsell a Bunch of existing customers. Was it more about enabling people to win new business? What was the priority?

You know, we thought the focus was going to be primarily selling to new customers. It was mostly about growth and we thought this was going to attract a mid market customer. At that point we were primarily an SMB business in terms of the segment that we played in. And we thought this is gonna, this is gonna be more interesting to mid market customers. That was our assumption when launching the product. And we thought, yeah, maybe some of the existing customers might be interested, but this is gonna really allow us to sell to a different customer base. But that wasn't the case. Our existing customers were interested in consolidating or at least looking product. We also had a lot of interest from SMB in this product, for this product. So there was a certain level of the assumptions we had and that happened with most of our product launches. The assumptions we had around who's going to be interested versus post launch. What we'd learn was there was always new learnings in that, which is like, oh, interesting. We didn't think this was based on the research we'd done and the product work we'd done. We thought this was going to hit this part of the market. But actually, so we learned to stay open.

Interesting. And when you got more sophisticated, how much validation were you doing? You know, like you have this surprise. So in future launches, did you go out and try to like validate that stuff ahead of time or did you say, you know, if it's new or existing, we're happy either way. Like how much rigor did you put around that?

You know, we talked, we were, we were very good about talking to our existing customers around product strategy, what we're thinking about and making sure we were building products that we think would resonate with the customers. So we definitely did our validation. But there's still sort of, you know, you can't, you're not doing every segment and every cut of the market when you're validating. And so there's, there's still consistently like parts of it. And it was, it was mostly healthy surprises, which is like we didn't realize that this was the impact we're going to see in this part of the market, which is interesting. So yeah, it was a big, you know, when we launched it, it was primarily to like, can we open up a new segment of the market? In reality, it helped us, it increased our win rates, it increased our ACVs, even to the existing base that we were selling to, which was a, which was a Happy surprise.

And so what were the other big benefits? So increased win rates, increased acv, you got expansion revenue. What other big outcomes did you find with launching subsequent products?

Yeah, I think the win rate and the ACVs were the highest pieces that also led to healthy attainment rates for the sales team. The other part was like, we're in a fairly noisy space. Lots of companies were doing the same thing. Like you could get a performance management suite for free if you have adp. So like in some ways we were competing with free. There's a ton of more mature competitors in space that had five years of heads up on us in terms of product build outs and there's a ton that were like copying us and we're cutting their price in half. So it was a fairly noisy space. So the chance to have a second product and saying we were the first in market to consolidate performance management and engagement surveys was powerful because now we could say this is the first time you can connect and see how are your top performers feeling. Because those two things should be overlapped and you don't have that insight today. And a lot of times you're surprised when a top performer leaves. What if you could do something about that proactively? And now because we are connecting those data sets, we can help you proactively manage that if there's like hotspots that aren't doing well. And so it was, you know, I think that positioning and that story really helped our. The sort of increased win rates. It translated into increased win rates, higher ACVs. It also opened up drops, I would imagine.

I would imagine, yeah.

Stickiness, Stickiness and then consolidation. Folks wanted, they didn't want multiple vendors. And so it opened up new types of opportunities for us. People that were coming in and would say, well, I only want engagement, but a completely different icp. And so, you know, understanding if that would be a good fit for us. But it did open up a lot of our top of the funnel conversations we were having. And you know, eventually it became the thing that people knew in market that Lattice launches a new product every year. So product velocity and product breadth became a core part of our strategy where it was like competitors knew like every year we're going to launch a new product.

Very cool. The more top of funnel one's an interesting one because there's just an entire new category you can go rank for and be featured against. And it's like a totally new way to come in if somebody doesn't need the first product at that point and.

Then it's you Know, it's so much of it is like the story you tell even if someone comes in with employee engagement. Because we kept a single sales team selling all products, which was another debate.

Okay, I wanted to get here.

Yes. Because that was, you know, it was like every time we launched a product, we thought about, well, should this product be like a specialized team that just focuses on this product? And we consistently made the decision of like, no, we're going to let train our current teams and have them sell all products. Both those approaches have their trade offs. But ultimately we decided to like stick with our current team learning the product, just given the sort of buyer experience in that. And also like you can pivot if somebody comes in and asking for product two, but you know that you could really help them see the value in product A and then bundle and give you, you know, sort of make commercial discounts happen to get them to buy multiple products. That was a core part of the sales strategy which was easier to deploy when you have a single AE selling all products versus multiple AES selling different products.

Right. So how did you make that decision? So, so we talked a little bit about the outcomes, like the buyer experience, the ability to have more things in your bag to sell in that moment. Bundling, like, what's the other side of it? In what situations would you have a specialist rep? Or like, what's the. What are the pros and cons of each?

I think especially in a drawbridge, we had specialist reps that even within the same account, these were large enterprises, but within the same account we'd have rep A sell product one and rep B, sell product two. And it made sense because they were different Personas and there wasn't a ton of, so I think Persona. If you're selling to the same Persona, that's one reason to think through. Like, does it make sense to have multiple reps sell to the same Persona under the same umbrella, which was the chief people officer. Two is the velocity at which you're shipping new products to. If you're shipping them twice a year, I would think. And you know, even this was like, towards the end it definitely became more challenging to train the team on. We've got four products now you've got a fifth one. So you've got to remember as a rep, lots of breadth but also depth in each of those products. And so it becomes a training and enablement challenge. So that was the flip side of it. Third, it's like, who's accountable? Because yes, reps are going to maximize ACVs and try to maximize win rates. But ultimately if your product through two and three like ultimately who's owning the quota for those specific products? Like those are the trade offs we thought about. And ultimately, you know, my answer was I'll be accountable to make sure we have the right comp plan, the right incentives, the right training structure to make sure our current team sells all sells through products on the in new business and then expands it post sale.

Okay, I want to come back to incentives. So in terms of the structure, buyer experience, the Personas, bundling, like if you don't, if you don't bundle a lot then maybe the single threaded rep isn't necessary. And so the reasons to not the reason to have multiple reps would be like maybe the technical breadth. What else would get you to have multiple reps selling the same product as.

Opposed to one technical depth would be one, just the ability to go really deep on a specific product and be the specialists on that product. Two, the accountability per product, revenue per product would be another piece because now you've got quota assigned to a specific product versus sort of general quota assigned against all products. So it's accountability. And third, it's like the rollouts become so much simpler because now you've got basically a GM structure where the product manager directly talks to the PMM that's associated with that product talks to the sales team versus in this org even though you've got specific product managers, they've got to go sell to all of customer facing employees which is, which is a challenge. So the complexity internally of launching new products, there's a real overhead to that on the, on the, on the flip side.

Yeah. So when I joined Shopify it was to greatly expand the sales led motion for our point of sale product. Point of sale had been like a down market product led thing and they rebuilt the whole suite. It was ready for primetime. They wanted to take it up market and needed a sales led motion. And it was interesting being a new team over on the side that had no connection to the existing sales team. Like we didn't even roll into the same CRO. The, the two org charts didn't overlap until basically the CEO I don't think because it was owned by a VP of product who owned that category that had its own marketing team, own sales team. And the decision there was look like this other team's never going to pay attention to point of sale. Their number for next year is like a billion dollars in net new revenue. And my target was like 130. It's not worth paying attention. And so to give it its own life and its own space to be successful we needed a totally separate thing. And then we got it to a level where arguably we were too successful for our own good. And they wanted to collapse everything together and bring it under one roof. But it was really challenging to be a separate thing and then try to bring it all together. That product basically didn't stall out, but didn't grow anywhere as fast as it should have in the year. We tried to bring it together because now it was a small thing that, you know, wasn't going to drive the main number and now it's come back to prominence and they've restaffed it. But it was interesting for me to see the other side of things. There were three different sales teams that never overlapped in the org chart. Yeah. Financial products, point of sale and then our core plus product. And now everything's all together and it's, you know, I think, I think for many organizations that's a, that's a more effective approach. If the rep can handle it.

Yeah, I think that's the big question mark. Like can you handle it?

Yeah. I almost think as hearing you talk it through, the default answer should be give it to the existing reps. Unless it is so complex that they can't do it. It's so different and it's going to take them away from their existing things so much that you need a specialist. But the default should be try to make it work with one rep. Even from a buying perspective, buyer's perspective, that, that would make sense to me.

Yeah. Or you know, it's like there's clear reason to do it if it's a different Persona. I think HubSpot had done that where you know, they, they've done it really successfully where they, they've had this motion going and then they sort of seeded a new one with plg. Actually they started sales, led, then added PLG and then consolidated it all. And I think it can be done but there is just so much complexity and there's complexity on both approaches. I always, when I thought about all the things I faced at Drawbridge when I had two reps in the same account with the two different products, it was like the sort of attribution challenges and the confusion on the buyer side, even with toot Personas is. Yeah. So I agree with you. The default, especially if you're a mid market SMB focused business selling to the same Persona is default to the same rep and through enablement. And eventually we added in a layer of SES that played specialists, product specialists, so we could pull them in for like. And I wish we did that earlier. Like in hindsight, we waited too long to like add, add that layer in instead of continuing to like force reps to learn everything. And we could have just said here's a SME, a specialist that'll help you with anything related to comp compensation or anything related to okrs. So maybe that is one learning in hindsight.

That's a really interesting takeaway. Yeah, I think that's one that I'm going to put in the old memory bank. So let's go to incentives. How did you think about incentivizing? It's this new product. I'm not really comfortable. It's harder to sell. The market doesn't get it. How do you actually get a rep to be excited to go sell this new thing when all of our status quo bias would push us away from embracing that new thing?

Yeah, I mean I think using Spiffs was really big for us in the beginning. And then bragging rights, like we had a, we had a huge culture of celebration on, on deals and watching a rep being able to turn a 7k deal into a 13k deal because they added on a second product and seeing what that did to their quota and how they were able to navigate it and the fact that they get bragging rights of, you know, so we had, we had fun contests of like who sold the first 10 deals. And because so much of it is just creating momentum in the beginning because once you get that initial momentum people pick up, sort of drive it. But changing the status quo and letting inertia win is the challenge. And so spiffs were huge, contests were huge. A lot of this was like we tried not to touch the comp plans because when you touch comp plans it's like there's always trade offs to it. So we tried to sort of focus more on like what are like short term spiffs and what are the cultural things we can do to really celebrate. Like even at Company All Hands we talk about, oh, these folks closed the first five deals for this new product. And so I think folks really tried to live up to that and then it became part of the fabric of the culture of like we launch a new product and I want to be the first five on the leaderboard that sells it.

Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. I'm reading the Power of Moments right now by the Heath brothers and one of the things that they talk about is like the, is the importance of the recognition feedback loop. So they talk about this research by Carolyn Wiley and so she's University of Roosevelt University. And so they did a study of like employee engagement over 50 years in UM. The thing that came up every single time in every survey they did across 50 years was as, as the only thing that stayed a top two. A top two input in every single one was continuous, ongoing recognition. And not like a recognition program. The point they're making is it's not a program. It's just like every week are you, is there a drip feed of recognition going to your, to your employees like a one to one basis? And all the engagement research, like the Gallup Q12 stuff that I really. And so I think that's a really interesting piece of it. Like, you know, it doesn't need to be just about the money. It could be the, it could be that recognition and the reinforcement.

Yeah. And we saw that even with like other things like when we launched Outbound and like getting people to actually go into Outbound. It's a challenge when you've got good inbound demand and you're in a place where you can find your way, find your way to quota just through Inbound, like getting folks to say no, now let's spend time on this thing. That's painful, but it is important long term for you. I think using recognition and creating that culture of bragging rights really went a long way where people wanted to step up and help figure it out. So yeah, I couldn't agree more with that.

And making it a thing, making it a moment. This is the thing that is sort of everywhere in our ecosystem in the company. The shout outs, the leaderboard, the spiffs, you know, that, that all that added momentum. That's cool.

Yeah. And I think it's like important to only do one or two things. Like what you can't do is like have 10 things that are all we're going to get recognized and they're all important. And so like you've got to pick one thing for this quarter. It's like we're going to launch this product and do an amazing job at it or we're going to launch Outbound. So yeah, I think I agree with like making it a thing across the board.

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That's great. And so just going back to incentives, did you change the structure of the comp plan outside of Spiffs or did you, you were still just going to pay on ACV and this was a way to get more acv or did you have your comp plan broken down by product and like certain products got higher percentage? Just walk me through what the comp plan looked like.

No, we thought about it almost every six months. We'd be like, should we change our comp plan? Should we add in the product based quotas or give people guidance? And we decided against it because it could lead to odd behaviors. I did that for outbound, which was a mistake where we actually said we'll pay you more on outbound deals than inbound deals to just incentivize action on outbound. And it actually drove the, the wrong kind of behavior because people were like, well, I don't want to share this lead with, with marketing when they're running because I want to get credit or I'll spend more time on a $5,000 outbound deal than a $10,000 inbound deal. So it's like weird incentives. And so we decided to, instead of changing the comp plan, educating the team on the upside, if you sold these additional products, what does it does to your ACVs, what that does to your quota attainment? Like you have to sell less deals to get to same or higher levels of performance on a quarterly basis. So we put in resources around your, you know, quota calculators. We'd sort of talk about it in all hands saying, here's Kevin. Kevin's crushed selling new products. He sold less deals but has produced more revenue. Here's what it meant. So so much of it was less the comp plan changes and more, you know, again part of like just beating the drum on the advantages that you have. The company has a ton of advantage of selling multiple products, but you've got, you can give yourself a raise by adding this to your Playbook. Yeah.

That comp visibility is so important. Quotapath does a good job with this. Their whole shtick is like we're not going to just calculate quotas for finance, but we're going to show the rep and help you incentivize people. I think that that gets. We don't utilize that enough as revenue leaders. Like helping people see the math and visualize, you know, like, hey, this is like a $12,000 paycheck if you can get X and Y by selling these new things. So the whole time you had just an ACV based comp plan, nice and simple accelerator.

Yep, we had accelerators. And that's it.

You were listening to Robert. Simplicity is a part of the comp philosophy from sales acceleration formula 100%. That's awesome. So I wanted to go into enablement. So let's maybe fast forward beyond you and Jack in a boardroom certifying what did a great enablement and rollout look like? How far before you launched did you start doing stuff? Just walk me through what best in class enablement looked like.

Yeah, I'm a huge believer of enablement. I think a lot of times.

Me too.

Yeah.

Revenue leaders underutilize enablement and think it's just training. But enablement can be so much more. Like it always reported directly into me. Partly because I wanted to make sure people it's strategic. If you leverage it, such can be the glue that really connects all the pieces of the org. Because as you start to scale, the thing that's hardest is like how do you make sure? Especially in a remote hybrid world where we're not all in an office all the time. The risk of people coming up with their own versions of what this product's meant to do is so high. Like just their own versions of reality. Forget, you know, product launches, but for anything. And enablement can play the role of really making sure product marketing, product sales, customer success are all sort of saying the right things. So product marketing is like pre product. When you're building, the product plays that role of the quarterback across product eng marketing, content, all the pieces. And then once it's closer to launch, that's where enablement takes over. And enablement is responsible of working with product marketing and saying, okay now how do I translate this new feature, this new product and make it relevant and translate it for the different audiences and stakeholders. So a BDR doesn't need to know all the details about every product, but they need to be able to speak to the value and what it means. A CSM might need to go in much more detail and explain sort of how an existing customer might see value and the reporting advantages or whatever the feature advantages are. Sales has to tell the story. So I think there's like different ways to construct enablement that is personalized to the different stakeholders in the business. Which I think a lot of times people think of enablement as like, well, they take stuff for product marketing, create a deck and train the team.

Yeah, yeah.

You know, as the base level, it's like the most at the foundational level. That's what it is. But I think at its best it can truly be the glue that connects all the pieces together.

For sure. I've been very lucky to work with awesome enablement people and I'm super picky about it, but it's absolutely such a strategic asset for me. So shout out to Mel and Rob and Ray, who wrote the narrative. So when you took things to market, who wrote what the rep said?

It's a good question because it was a joint effort. Because when we had it where it was just marketing doing it or just enablement doing it, it had its blind spots. So what we learned is for every product launch we'd pick a small team that would workshop the positioning. So it start with product marketing would lead that exercise. So they come to the table saying, here's what we're thinking, here's the positioning, here's the story, here's the market. And then sales would come back with, well, I don't know if that resonates. That doesn't feel like how I talk. So how do I now turn this positioning document into something that's usable at the different levels? And so we'd have one or two AES from different segments, we'd have enablement and we'd have marketing. For smaller features, enablement would play that role. But for large product launches, we'd create that group like a couple months before launch. And so we're workshopping it. Yeah, so we'd, this was when we were fairly mature and had enough resources, when we weren't planning two weeks before launch.

And so when would you have reps in the like, would you have reps pitching the product before it's officially announced? Would you like sell it ahead to get feedback or how did you stage like, okay, we're, we think that our customers are going to want this product and we've got this messaging and we're, we're building it. But like when did you go validate with real world conversations and ask people for money? Like, how did you Think about getting. Because, you know, it's asking people if they want it and asking people for money are two very different things. When did you start to do those things?

Yeah, I mean we'd launch it to our existing customer base a month in advance typically. And so that was our like first like let's get them to use it, let's get some feedback. So our CSM teams in partnership with the product lead would have those conversations. We'd get insight from that and then the sales team would start practicing pitching the product a couple weeks before the launch at a minimum. And so we'd have it launched internally on our demo products, but wouldn't be. We weren't allowed to show it to customers till we publicly launched it. And so for two weeks we had certifications going on. People were pitching it. We wanted to make sure that we were ready. So as soon as we launched, that's basically where everybody would start having the conversation and the race starts to who's going to sell the first 10 deals.

So the first time you pitched it was after the public launch?

Yeah.

Okay, interesting. And did you guys considered like getting people to pitch it before the public launch in order to get the kinks out or what was the reason to, to stage it that way?

Yeah, I mean we did it with existing customers, so would pitch it early on. So we like would, you know, through those, through those cycles we'd get a sense for like, what are the bugs, what are the things we need to like clear clearly misses that we need to fix. But on the new biz side, when we're talking to prospects, typically the whole team was got the go at the same time.

One big bang.

Yep.

Okay, ready to go. Very cool. And so no selling ahead like that. You could, you would announce it and then that product was available and live like ready to sell and implement that day.

Yeah, no selling ahead. Which was hard because reps were like ready. They're like, well I have it in my demo, I can already start selling it. Which was always the hardest part because on the flip side then the product's like, well, we don't want to get all these features into the demo if we're going to already start selling it because we haven't launched it. So that was a hard thing the first few times. But then we got to a place where we were good about just holding, saying, hey, this, this launches Tuesday. That's when we talk about it to give it the surprise element in market.

Probably the right customer centric way to do it because, you know, many Companies, you've got a product launch coming on January 1st and it's September 26th and we're pitching, oh, we got this thing, it's great. And then you're just sort of sandbagging the implementation until it's actually ready.

Yeah, we were very conservative with that and you know, there were debates on that, like, should we be more aggressive? It's like, launch it six months before it's ready and start pitching it ahead. And we just never did that. We're like, we'd rather just wait.

And that's a cultural thing that was, you know, basically, you know, you were highly customer centric. Is that the reasoning that was just.

Yeah, we didn't want to. We didn't want to like lose customers trust by pre selling. And now they're getting a bad experience and we're figuring it out. So we wanted to be buttoned up when we showed up and sold a new product. And so they had high confidence in. At Lattice, when they pitch a new product, they're ready.

Yeah, and HR tech is such a small ecosystem that buying community is pretty. I sold to HR tech for like three years and you know, it's a unique one and they've got, you know, very tight groups. So that makes a ton of sense to me. I want to talk a little bit about. So when you were talking about the comp plan and incentives and being able to basically guide people to this new outcome without having to do, you know, like crazy comp plan magic, it really sounds to me like you need a team of people that are willing to do things for the company. And, you know, that's more missionary versus mercenary, as oftentimes people say. So I would imagine that the culture you were able to build enabled you to launch a product and just be like, please go sell this and have them say, okay, let's go sell this versus, you know, I've seen many companies where you need to like triple commission for the new thing and you're, you know, putting like specific KPIs and you don't get any commission and you sell certain, this certain amount of the product. I'm guessing that this was possible because of the like, engagement and mindset of your team. Am I, am I right there?

100%. Yeah. I think there were people deeply engaged and cared about the mission of the company. Not just one of our values was ship, shipmate, self. And it was one of my favorite values. And so I think people like very deeply internalized that, which was, I've got to put the company first. My team second and myself last. And it's the hardest to implement and live up to in sales given that it is competitive, it's high stakes, it's high pressure. But I was very proud of the team that really lived up to those values and sort of put the company first in scenarios where it was hard to cool.

So let's transition to how do you get to that point? How do you build an engaged enough team where they are legitimately ship shipmate self and maybe just start with your business case for engagement. Because I think people hear this and they think it's squishy and soft and maybe not in some of the sales DNA that exists in our world. And so how would you make what, what argument would you make for the business imperative of driving to engagement?

Yeah, no, it's, I feel very strongly about it and I've always felt strongly about it but now that I've seen the results that it can drive, it's like I have very high conviction that building a high performing team that delivers consistently starts with a people first approach and a highly engaged team. Like there's just no two ways about it. You can get performance from people through transactional approaches, through fear, through scarcity, which is what a lot of sales orgs are built on. They're built on a foundation of fear and scarcity. When I first started in sales I was surprised at like we're all part of the same company but somehow you're like pitted against this different region and you're not supposed to share best practices and it's just odd. Or managers would tell you things in a one on one or team meeting and we'd all agree that yep, we'll do that and then you leave and people are like we're not going to do that.

Yeah, there's no way.

And it's just my mind was blown. Like what kind of team doesn't just tell the manager that I'm not going to do it and here's why not. And so yeah, one of the reasons I went to Lattice after Drawbridge was to try to build a different type of revenue org because a lot of people asked me like, why would you, you know, you sort of just went off of a big run. Why would you go to a $3 million Series A business? Like that's, you know, it was sort of a head scratching move for a lot of people that cared about me. But the reason partly was of course I believed in the market. I really hit it off with Jack. But part of it was also the chance to build a different type of revenue org where a younger me would have felt more like I belonged and felt like it didn't have to go against the grain. Because I think there's this misconception that salespeople are coin operated and all they care about is money and it's just not true. Like everyone from engineers to even commission driven salespeople want the same things. They want to feel like they're part of a community. They want to feel like they're getting growth and they're, you know, getting the development on a, on an annual basis and if there's a purpose that they're going after. And I feel like those three pillars make up so much of highly engaged teams. And you know, I think there is a huge opportunity for sales teams to embrace that.

Yeah, and what are the business outcomes? Like, you know, what does an engaged team get you that a more mercenary style team doesn't get you?

Yeah, I mean I think what I've seen, it's like it drives. We had over 100% attainment for the four and a half years I was there. We missed.

But like why, like why like what I'm trying to get you to make the argument to the skeptics like, you know, what's the thing that translates like engagement to outcomes in your mind?

Yeah, I think it's people just.