How to Build a Winning Sales Team for SaaS Startups

Welcome to the Switchgear Show, where we bring actionable insights from outstanding leaders across the journey of survival, success, and significance. Today, our guest is Simon Horrocks, and Simon is a serial startup leader who has worked with Harness, AppDynamics, and ScienceLogic, building teams and revenue from the ground up to $50 million ARR. So, Simon, welcome to the call.

Thanks very much, Priyan. Thank you for the generous introduction. I hardly recognized myself.

Now, it takes a special kind of person to become a repeat startup builder of companies. And it's definitely not for the faint-hearted, given how many leaders I've spoken to. So tell me everything in terms of challenges and lessons that from starting from zero, what is it like? And why did you decide to work for companies like this?

Yeah, thanks. So I'm 7 startups in at this point, so clearly I'm a glutton for punishment. But the truth is, in EMEA and in Asia-Pac, you're right, 3 of them have been from essentially zero, or at least zero revenue, zero customers in this region. But the truth is you're not really starting from zero. If you're running EMEA or the Asia-Pac region, then, and you're working for a US vendor, then you're going to be working with a vendor who's already found product-market fit. They've already found their first few customers. They've got it right. They might even have got it wrong a couple of times, but they got it right and they're starting to scale out. If you're in Asia-Pac, they've sold in EMEA, so they've sold internationally. So there will be a playbook and there'll be a template, so to speak. My approach always is, first of all, it's easy to be busy, right? And that problem is worse the better and more funky, more cool the technology that you have. So you have to be very careful of that. So I always want to look at the template, see where it's worked elsewhere, maybe go and see one or two of the customers either in the US or Europe. and then look at the template, the playbook really, that the sales teams in those regions have built. Essentially, I'm looking for which job titles, in which industries, in which companies of which size are buying the solution and why. So, ready to get started, having worked that all out, we want to create a list, as small a list as possible, to be quite honest, and then go and attack that list as high as you can in those organizations with a value statement. And that takes a lot of preparation, of course, but I think if you do that, it keeps you on track. Fun story, when I started ScienceLogic here, I sat down in the very early days with Abe Batashi, who was our first TDR, or inside sales guy, as we called them then.

Right.

And we created a list. We knew that ScienceLogic was— yeah, he's at Adobe now, I think. He's doing really well. Great guy. We created a list of 100 MSPs because we knew that MSPs were the real secret sauce for ScienceLogic, at least at that time. And we created a list of 100 of them. And the first one on the list was called Azuri Communications, by alphabetical order, of course. And we sat down and we together cold-called into this list. And the first one we called was Azuri. Turns out the managing director answered. That never happens. Turned out they were just about to buy one of our competitors. That never happens. So, we stuck a foot in the door, so to speak, and it turned into our first customer and it was a 6-figure deal.

Oh, wow. Wow. That's a great story. So, on that note, and you said we cold-called the list together. And I know that you have a reputation of being leading from the front. I know people who've worked with you who said you'll sit there and you'll make calls with them, which is not the case with everyone. So, How do you surround yourself with people who have the same DNA? How do you build that initial go-to-market team in region? So you figured out the playbook, you've got your, you've got your persona, you've got your list, but now you've got to get sure you've got the right people around you. How do you recruit that team that will get you those initial runs on the board?

Yeah, great question. The most important thing that sales teams do is to forecast accurately. By the way, that's absolutely the most important thing for any sales team. The sales managers or the sales leaders, the most important thing that they do is to recruit. Because that, what you really want, excuse me, is a process of people being promoted from maybe the first rungs on the ladder right up and through the entire organization. When I ran AppDynamics here, we had about 50 people over the course of 3 or 4 years, and we promoted 20% of them. So, we're always looking for people to come in who are hungry, who want to scale the ladder, and that's really the kind of appetite, the kind of hunger that we look for. I've learned a couple of things along the way, and first of all is to have a process. As with anything, you want to have a great process for recruiting. And one book, I won't share my process on this call, it'd take too long, but one book I've used along the way is just simply called Who, and it's by a guy called Jeff Smart. So, if your listeners want to go and look that up, that's got a fabulous set of processes in for recruiting. But recruiting, of course, is never perfect. And you're occasionally going to get it wrong, and that's fine so long as you strive to hit more than you miss. One thing I've learned along the way is never hire with your gut. So, trust the process. And if your gut says yes, your gut is a really bad adjudicator, especially when hiring people. So, never hire someone on your gut. If your gut says yes, perfect. Put them through the process, but complete the process all the same. If your gut says no, however, Seems to me, my history at least, is that it's almost always right. So, avoid hiring people on your gut, I would say, but never hire with your gut. Just put them through due process. And that process, of course, includes interviews with a number of people in the organization. A couple of things I've learned along the way, because I've got it wrong probably more than I got it right in the earlier years, is don't put too many steps in the process. Don't have junior people running through 7, 8, 9 interviews in the organization.

Yeah.

And focus on these people as human beings. You know, there was at least one experience I had with someone coming through a number of interviews before they got to me, and I looked at their CV and they were— they happened to be a triathlete, which is interesting to me.

Right.

So, I went straight after that and I asked them about their training and what kind of races they do. And they shared with me that, look, I'm 5, 6 interviews into this company. That's the first time someone's showed an interest in me. That's an awful experience for the candidate. I'm always mindful that the candidates are human. They want to feel human. We want to see them as human. We want great people on board. So, we have to treat them with that respect.

Wow. I would actually love to find out a little more things as part of your process in the— how do you find people who are going to succeed in a startup environment? Because it's all hands on deck. You don't have the power of a big brand in region. You don't have there's more that you don't have than what you do have, right? You have a list, you've got a product, you've got— so how do you pick those people? What are some of the things that you look for in people that tells you that this person's gonna be more successful here?

Great question. So the 4 things I look for, intelligence, character, coachability, and experience. There's various ways in your process, your recruiting process, that you can test for that. But I think when you think about the startup world, I think character is really important. To come in, to drop into that trough of disillusionment about 3 or 4 months in, to push through that, and to come out on the other side and make a success of an organization where no one knows your name, no one's heard of your product, no one even knows they need you in some cases, that's, it's pretty demanding stuff. So, you need a lot of character to get through that. So, that's one of the things that I always test for. The other bit of advice I always give people on recruiting, and you'll love this, of course, Is don't screw your recruiters on margin, right?

Oh yes.

I made this mistake. Candidly, I made this mistake a few years ago where I negotiated with a recruiter. I knew what their standard rate was. And I got, I think, about 5 or 6% off their standard rate. I'm high-fiving my partner and we think we've done a great job. And of course, what I didn't realize is when that recruiter gets the A-player candidate, that candidate's going to go somewhere else first. Because they make more margin on the candidate. I think I realized that about a year later after I lost about 20 candidates. That's another little nugget that I'd pass on.

Yeah, that's good. I think all recruiters have a zone of tolerance for rates. And sometimes when you go beyond that, depending upon the market, it can sway behaviors. But you were talking about, you've talked about Intelligence, character, coachability, and experience. That's a great framework. We've actually had that conversation before with Ankush, who came out of AppDynamics as well. Tell me, did you hire the triathlete?

No, we didn't hire the triathlete in the end. I think some of that, it didn't work out on both sides. But I think some of that may have been a disillusionment with the process that nobody showed an interest in that person as a human being. Which is why I mentioned this story. But no, I didn't. I have hired triathletes, by the way. I don't exclusively hire triathletes, but not in that case.

Okay. No, that's great. Thank you for sharing that. I'm always looking for little clues outside of their numbers to tell me a little bit more about the person other than the numbers that they're self-reporting, which is important. What can I see from outside of their life which will tell me something about Yeah. Now, in terms of building your sales process and your sales cadence, which is so important in that early stage, tell me more. What are some of the things that you've done right and perhaps done wrong and people can take away from this?

Clearly, I'm going to gloss over the things that I got wrong, but we'll try and suffice to say I probably got more wrong than I got right. But let's focus on what maybe I got right. The first thing I'd say about sales process, and I know you've had Ankesh and another number of really interesting people on this podcast series, I'm delighted to be in such great company. And I know you've talked about MEDIC, so I'm not going to dive into MEDIC. But what I will say upfront is there seems to be a common misunderstanding that MEDIC is a sales process. It's not.

Mm-hmm.

MEDIC is essentially a method for inspection of deals. A wonderful set of parameters to use when you're doing a deal review, for example, but really a sales process needs to be a chronological set of steps that you take yourself and the customer through to get to a deal, and the sales process for me includes things like discovery, scoping, meeting with the power person or the economic buy, the EB as we sometimes call them, validation, Business case, proposal, negotiation, and close. And that's your sales process. But really, more importantly than that, I think the sales process needs to be focused on the real North Star, right? And the North Star is what problem are we solving for that customer in business terms? And by the way, can we solve that problem in a unique, compelling, and valuable way? And all the Solution selling, customer-centric selling, SPIN selling, whichever one, whichever flavor you prefer, all of those playbooks, all of those methodologies, if you will, are all aimed at working out what that problem is. Now, that problem can be a goal or a need, and sometimes you'll come across a very senior person who has KPIs that you can chase, but the truth is, if you don't understand that problem, and I had a great boss once, a guy called John Biermann, who, he used to come out of the first meeting with a customer, and we'd be coming out high-fiving each other, what a great demo, Customers hanging off our every word, they love the technology. And he ignored all of that, he cut straight through it. And the first question he'd ask as we came out is, what problem are we solving?

Hmm.

And if you couldn't answer after that first meeting, if you couldn't answer what problem were you solving, I don't care how positive you felt about the meeting, that was a terrible first meeting. So, that was quite humbling for me when I first came across that as a concept. But that's been my guiding light, as I say, my North Star.

That's fantastic, Simon, because I hear, and we all hear, solution selling, value-led selling, and trusted advisor words all the time. But if you aren't actually solving a problem, how can you be any of those things? Because it all starts and finishes with solving a problem which somebody is willing to take action on and derive value from it. I think that's really good insight, which is just problem-led. Yeah.

Absolutely true. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you, but absolutely true. I couldn't agree more. And you think about it, when a customer is taking the time out of their day to listen to what we have to say, they're almost certainly looking to fix a problem. People don't typically have time on their hands. And you've gone to the days when people bought software because it was cool, right? People only now buy software or any other technology for that matter, To solve a problem or to address some kind of business goal or need. And it's okay to be curious as well. John McMahan, in his book, talks about— McMahan's the ex-Pyrametric, ex-BMC CRO, and he talks about, I think it was Carlo, one of his sales reps in Italy, and he talks about him being the most consistently successful sales rep in the whole world at that particular company. And the one word he used to describe him was curious. And the reason that's important is if you turn to a customer and you got— some people turn up, I've seen it done, with a list of potential problems. You got any of these? The customer's just not going to buy into that. But if you turn up and you're genuinely genuine, you're genuinely curious, what kinds of problems do you guys have right now? Talk me through that. Why does that matter? Who cares about that? Who's responsible for addressing it? What's the impact in revenue terms? Why would you address that before anything else? Is it a top 3 priority? These are all great questions that get you into the conversation with the customer. And genuinely, if you convince the customer, very difficult to do this unless it really is genuine, but if you convince a customer you're interested in helping them to solve the problem, they'll open the kimono for you. I remember one of the major banks, I won't say which one, but it was one of the big 4 in Australia. We'd been through a number of pitches to them and they'd have fallen flat. And finally, we went into a war room ourselves and thought about all the people we'd met with this customer, what their real problems were, and what they'd asked for, and whether we'd delivered it or not in our various presentations. We put together a presentation. It was essentially a playbook based on what they told us. I'll never forget when we turned up to the next meeting with those guys and we said, look, this is what we've heard from you, and correct us if we're wrong, but it seems like The real problem is X, and we can help you to address that in these ways. It's going to take this amount of time with this amount of people. I'll never forget that my senior person in the room stood up and he said, this represents— you might suspect that we haven't been doing a great job of it prior to this because he almost seemed surprised. He said, this represents a wonderful attempt to listen to the real problems that we're having. And yes, we should go ahead and do this. 2 months later, we had a $2 million deal with those guys. And 18 months later, we did a $13 million deal with them. And I always remember that meeting as the light bulb went on because they got that we were trying to understand how we could help.

That's fantastic. That's a great story. And that is so good because even today, when I see both scale-ups and I'm talking to reps and leaders, Every day, every week. And one of the common issues when I see around enablement and onboarding, there's still a focus on product-led training and far less on customer-led training, right? People are very good at being able to describe the solution that they want to sell, but not very good at describing the problem that they're actually going to solve by selling that solution. And I think that in itself is a massive opportunity for Even reps and managers to focus on the problem as much as they focus on what they're going to sell. So, thank you. Tell me, tell me a little bit more about metrics, both leading and lagging metrics, as you've put that process together from identifying the deal to closing that deal. What are the metrics that you track to ensure that you are maintaining a healthy cadence and you are on target?

So that's a great question and one of my favorite subjects. And I think, at least in the past, our industry has typically looked at lagging indicators. And by lagging indicators are things like qualified pipeline. Qualified pipeline may help your forecast, but it doesn't really help with your process or doesn't, certainly doesn't help to improve your process all the way through. And again, I mentioned one of my old bosses, John Beerman at NetCorder years and years ago. He introduced me to the concept of conversion rates. that again, how did I never spot this before? But his view was, if you know what your target is and you know what the ASP of your product is, then essentially you know how many deals you need to land in a given year to make your number. And if you understand how many negotiations you need to be in to get a deal and how many proposals you need to put in to get into a negotiation, then you can work all the way back through first meeting, deep dive, POV, ROI, proposal, negotiation, deal close. And if you understand all of those conversion rates, you ultimately understand how many phone calls you've got to make.

Absolutely.

And I think if you look at the leading indicators as opposed to the lagging indicators, now, I'm not a big fan of measuring nonproductive activity. So, for example, I don't really care how many phone calls you make. I care about how many new business meetings you're finding with the right people. I care about, from that, how many deep dives you're doing, how many PIVs you're doing. I care about how many new opportunities you're creating. So, if you measure all of these things and you understand your conversion rates, not only do you get to be much more accurate in your forecasting, but if you're measuring early in the process, number one, you can understand a better or a worse process. And number two, you can fix it before it becomes a problem. If you're only fixing qualified pipeline, then that's a little bit late. And if you're going to drop off the edge of a cliff in terms of revenue, it's still going to happen. But if you find it early, I'll give you an example. One of my organizations I worked at, we understood that if your boss was in the room with you at the first business meeting, you had a 2x chance of finding an opportunity that ultimately went to POV. I think the numbers were, I think 17% was the conversion rate if there was no boss in the room and 34% if there was a boss in the room. Massively different. Now, this isn't because the boss is a superstar, right? It's because—

Right.

First of all, there's probably a lot more preparation done and a lot more care taken around the preparation when the boss is going to be in the room. Secondly, probably more Importantly, there's one more set of eyes in the room. But my point is, if you understand those stats and it's early enough in the cycle, you can make that adjustment before it leaks through to your revenue.

Yeah, that is so good. And that resonates so deeply within me. I got into the sales force in the late '90s and I made club as an account executive. I made club in my second year, not my first year. Maybe I was a slow learner. So I got close in my first year. But I— the difference between me and the ones who were going to club was that they knew from the start of the year what activity they needed on a daily basis to build up to a good quarter and build up to a great year. I, of course, had a big deal that didn't close in that first year and missed out narrowly. But the second year, I was determined that I was going to go to club. And I, from my second year on, I, it just changed how I looked at it. And it was simply, if you look after the numbers daily, the numbers will look after you. So that was my big aha moment. And of course, yeah, I made club, I made every single quarter. And it, yeah, it was very good. Now let's shift gears for a moment. And let's talk about culture. So you've, you know, outlined a really good process around recruiting people, the process, the metrics. How do you engineer a winning culture that people— it's a hard job. It's a difficult job for everyone on this early-stage ship. So how do you build good culture? What are some of the recipe elements in the recipe?

Yeah, that's a great question. And I, fairly early in my career, I saw the benefits of a great culture. I was at Cisco back in the day, at the turn of the century. How old does that make me sound? When Cisco was, this is in the dot-com boom, when Cisco was essentially a startup, they were a public company by the time I started, still behaving like a startup. And the one thing I remember from those days is you'd walk in that sales office in North Sydney, and if you had a problem, you'd talk to someone about a problem, about 5 hands went up in the room, how can I help? And everyone—

Wow.

Was on it. Everyone was successful. Everyone was great at what they did, it seemed. Everyone was positive. It was infectious. It was contagious. And I just remember the support. Around the room. So, that, for me, was the very definition of a great culture. So, I've always been very keen on making sure we set the right culture in the teams. And I guess if I was to put it together as a recipe, as you say, number one would be ethics, great business ethics. Number two would be high energy, high cadence, which I think in the world of the startup is really quite important. And thirdly, I'd say customer focus. Having a, excuse me, a team that is very customer-focused is going to bring us the wins along the way. And just to pick through each of those in turn, in terms of ethics, I often say to the teams, we may lose one or two deals. We may have a competitor who lies about their technology or worse, lies about ours. We're not going to get into those battles. We're not even going to defend it. We might defend ourselves positively, but we're not going to start a slanging battle and talk to the customer about their not being honest with you. We'll just be honest about our products. And again, to my point earlier, the problem that we can solve uniquely in a compelling way for the customer. And if they ask us about the competition, as sometimes happens, I would hope and I expect that any of my teams will be very positive about the competition. If a customer asks about the competition, typically I would say, we think they've got a decent platform. or a decent product or solution. But rather than say they can't do this, or they said they can do this and they can't, I'm going to say, I'm going to look at our capabilities and I'm going to say, when we first met, we told you that we could help to, whatever the story is, reduce FTEs by a certain number, reduce costs by a certain number, get product more quickly to market. We can do that too. So it's a yes, and, if you will, as opposed to a yes, but, or anything more negative than that. So we stay positive and I believe that's going to win us much more business over time. In terms of the energy and the cadence I talked about, obviously that's important at a startup. You've got to keep getting back up every time you get knocked down. But I remember one day, one of my old CROs, Mark Smith at Infoblox, he was known for wanting energy, high cadence. Every time he traveled, he wanted 3 meetings in every day and a dinner in the evening. He wanted most of those meetings to be new business, and you didn't really want to be in situ if you hadn't got those meetings booked. So he announced to me, He's based in the US, I was based in Europe. He announced to me he's coming to Europe for a week. I thought a week was a long time. In fact, I was sure he was coming over to fire me. So, I scheduled 5 seminars in 5 countries in Europe in 5 days and 28 customer meetings. We ran through Europe for the entire week. I think by the end of the week, I think I left him at Hamburg at the airport on Friday night. I think he was sick of the sight of me. We created about $5 million worth of pipe. In one week and we closed about 2 of it. So that was probably my most extreme week. You'd have to ask Mark whether it saved my job or not, but I got promoted a couple of months after that. And we had a great time at Infoblox.

Oh, that is such a good story. That is outstanding. I love that.

Wow.

28 meetings and 5 seminars, multi-region. That's cool.

That's really cool. It was quite a week. And We were doing dinners as well. Of course, I had to do 5, at least 5 follow-ups each evening because there's no way you can get to the end of the week and do 28. So it was a tough old week. And again, you asked about recruitment before. I want people to know it's going to be tough, especially in a startup, but I don't want to lead with, this is going to be the toughest job you've ever had. It's going to be the hardest you've ever worked. But I do say to people when they come on board, I want them coming on board with their eyes open. I do say the expectations here are that we're going to win business by being quicker, better, faster, and smarter than everyone else out there. So that's, that's the challenge when people come on board.

That's very good. So you've talked about, in terms of culture, you've talked about energy, you've talked about really ethics, and then you were basically rounding up on the last point. So can you expand that a little more?

When you say the last point, you mean customer obsession?

Yes.

Yeah, sure. So, I think it strikes me that too many customers sit with a vendor pitching in front of them, and instead of asking questions, the vendor's pitching all about their product or platform. But worse than that, the customer very often feels, I think, that they're being taken through your sales process. And I'm very keen for the customer to get the idea that we're actually— our job is not to take them through our sales process. Our job is to assist them through their buying process.

Yeah.

And it might sound like I'm playing with words there, but I think if I'm the customer, that's really important to me. And people throw terms around trusted advisor a little bit too easily, but I think coming back to John McMahon's rep, Carlo, over in Italy, I think if you're genuinely curious, if you really want to know, if you keep asking why, but for the right reasons, then I think the customer's going to engage with you. And if you are helping them to solve a problem that they know is going to address issues they have in their business, reduce costs, bring them more revenue, hit a KPI, whatever. If they believe you're focused on that, then they're going to work with you. And customers, if they feel they're being taken through their buying process instead of being thrust through your sales process, then they're not going to buy off you once. They're going to buy off you multiple times at this company and probably the next place you go as well.

Yeah, no, that is gold. We had another conversation on the MedPic conversation was around building a champion. You've got to have people with high conviction that you're actually helping them improve something, you know, and achieve their goals rather than achieve your goals or your quota. I just always cringe when I'm, you know, interviewing a rep and it's all about them and their quota. And you can see clearly why they start losing trust and come across as super salesy instead of someone who can achieve both objectives, which is helping the customer win while achieving your objective as well. So. Thank you. That's really good. So, Simon, you have shared some really good information around this whole process. But I want to hear about you. It's clear from the names that you've mentioned that some people have had a significant impact in your own leadership development and who you are. So tell me some of the things that you've learned with working with some really good leaders in the past.

Yes, it's a great question. And when I think about the great leaders, I've been very fortunate to work with some wonderful managers and leaders. But what I think of the best of them, and maybe more accurately, I think about how they have affected me in my career. It's not really around the sales process or the sales execution or presentation skills or any of the stuff that you can perhaps learn from a book or in a training course. It's those people who've helped me understand something about backing your people, making a difference to the lives and the approach of the people who are on your team. A couple of managers I call out on that, again, back in the Cisco days, funnily enough, I had a manager called Kevin McCoy based over in the US, and he was wonderful at just giving people the power of belief and then unleashing them on unsuspecting customers. He was just wonderful at getting the best out of people. And I remember when I started there, it was quite early in my career, and I probably had, I definitely had imposter syndrome, probably quite rightly, some people would argue. But I'd often talk to Kevin and say, how am I doing, Kevin? What can I do better? You know, and I was very keen for feedback because I felt I wasn't doing a great job. And he often would say, Simon, you're exceeding my expectations. And then he'd carry on and give me some guidance or advice. But I never forgot the way that made me feel. And I still now, I can remember the way that that made me feel. And another guy, Tony Simonson, that I know you've had on the podcast previously, another great people leader. And when I was working for Tony, I remember I was just starting to do some public speaking at trade shows and events, and I was a little bit nervous. I was probably talking a bit too quickly. And Tony took me on one side and he said, hey, look, you're an expert. You know your subject back to front, and that's clear to anyone who's listening to you. So, just focus on cooling down a little bit, slowing the speech down, You're doing a great job. And what that gave me, first of all, it made me feel great, but what it really gave me was an ability to focus not on whether I was going to get found out, because I did know my stuff, but I could then focus on the presentation skills that I probably was lacking at that time and course correct and do a better job over time. 25 years on almost from both of those managers, I remember like it was yesterday how they made me feel. Something else that great managers, great leaders have done is to be very approachable. And I remember I've mentioned Jim Cavanaugh already. One of the things Jim often used to say when he was working with individual contributors in any of his region, he'd say, when I'm in region, I work for you. That's incredibly disarming when he's probably 3, 4 levels above some of the individual contributors he's working with.

Yeah.

Some people can get a little bit fazed by that. But he's turning the tables there very quickly, very simply, in a very positive way. And that simple phrase, I work for you when I'm in territory, just disarms the whole thing, pricks the bubble, so to speak, and makes it so much easier for those people to perform. But we talked earlier about Richard Fremantle, of course, and he was the guy who was lucky enough to run the Cisco franchise in Australia before it was even a subsidiary. He then ran Cisco Australia, then he ran Cisco in Europe, came back and ran Cisco Asia-Pac. And at that point, I needed to ask him for some support, some financial support actually for a project we were doing. And I chased him down for 3 or 4 weeks through his EA. And we, I think I got rescheduled 2 or 3 times. I finally get to meet him and we had a session. It was about half an hour or so. It went really well, or at least it did from my perspective. You'd have to ask him, but I got what I wanted. He seemed pretty happy. And as I turned to go out the door, I was already feeling pretty good about the session. He called me back. He said, Simon, by the way, In future, don't worry about trying to schedule things through my EA. Just come up to the 14th floor and see me.

Wow.

And again, almost 25 years ago, I can still remember how that made me feel. And as a manager in the years leading on from that, just thinking about how much more productive capacity you get from people who suddenly feel 7 feet tall, from those kinds of conversations. So really, that's what I've learned. I say learned. I've learned by watching them. You have to ask my teams whether I put it into practice myself. But I've seen the very best. And the best thing I see them do is to make their teams feel 7 feet high. Wow.

Simon, thank you. Thank you so much. I think that comes through loud and clear how people have shaped your journey. And look, a lot of people sometimes don't even realize how it is, but you've clearly observed it. You're very self-aware, and you've given honor and credit where it's due. But I am sure along the way, it has shaped you into a successful leader, which is why you take on missions which could go either way, right, when it comes to taking on challenging roles. But it really stands out that when there is this anchoring, because you keep saying, I remember how I, it, you know, exactly how it made you feel. Because the power of anchoring positivity and confidence and just really enabling someone to do their job at the highest level of inspiration and confidence is so much better. Because I think that a lot of people need that from their leaders. And based on that, you can just go on so much more and develop a little more grit and a little more perseverance, especially with things— that last call and the one before that someone didn't pick up and you didn't win the deal. You just keep going. So thank you.