How To Structure The Interview Process for All Sales Reps

Well, thank you for having me, and likewise, your reputation precedes you as well.

I discovered sales at the age of seven when I became a Brownie Scout. That’s when I fell in love with the art of cookie sales.

We were selling cookies and there was an opportunity to create repeat purchasing by evangelizing the freezer lifespan of a cookie. So for me, it was really about the opportunity to compete with other brownie troops, but also to spread the love that I personally have for cookies.

As I moved into my career after college, I spent six years in sales at Google where I learned a ton from the machine that is Google. After about six years at Google, I went to business school where I wanted to learn a little bit more about how to run a business. Actually spent a lot of time at Stanford trying to distance myself from being labeled as a salesperson. For me, it’s like nobody likes that word, nobody wants to be sold to. Pair that with a LinkedIn profile touting a college degree in psychology and a published thesis on persuasion.

People start to think you’re extracting something from them in every interaction.

I think there is incredible value in learning how to sell something that people don’t yet know that they want. The best skill you can develop in sales is an insatiable curiosity about what’s possible and truly the instinct to ask for forgiveness rather than permission.

Think it’s kind of like approaching rules as a suggested set of guidelines. I think it’s thinking about outside of the box. When you’re having a conversation with a potential customer, you’re spending time helping them really realize the pain that they feel today without you and without your product, which is an uncomfortable conversation. Nobody likes to sit in their moment of pain. And so as a salesperson, you really do need to be comfortable taking someone to a place that makes them very uncomfortable, but then it is your responsibility to catch them when they’re falling.

That’s the opportunity to ask for forgiveness because you’ve helped them through a challenging conversation and really sitting in what their lives would look like if they didn’t take any action or do anything. But then you take them to a place that they can’t get to on their own.

Well, I think it starts with an outside in perspective. You ask about the current state. You get the potential customer to really define what their current world looks like, feels like, and what frankly the negative consequences of their current situation are. The types of questions are always open ended, tell me about, describe for me, that kind of thing. You don’t want to lead with yes, no questions because you’ll miss the opportunity to really uncover some good understanding of what they’re truly experiencing. What we do is we try and pair a current state with the negative consequences of doing nothing or taking a different approach.

And then you start to ask about future state. Imagine what a future state could look like for your business. If you could x, y, z, what would that unlock for you? And then you take them from future state to what are the positive business outcomes associated with that future state? And really help them articulate not just like, oh, a technical solution would enable this technical thing to happen. It’s like, okay, so what? And then what? What are the implications on the business? Is it revenue driving?

Is it cost saving? Is it risk mitigation? Is it accelerating time to market? Those are the types of value drivers that you would wanna make sure you’re uncovering as an early sales rep.

I think outbound has a bad rep. And it’s sort of a limited way of describing engaging with customers in a way where you’re meeting them where they are, providing them with something relevant. So for us at Fivetran, one of the ways that we go to market most effectively is with partners. In particular, when you’re investing in data movement, which is what we do at Fivetran, you’re taking data from someplace and sending it to someplace. So you would never buy like plumbing alone. You would only want to buy it in association with a destination for that data.

And of course, you have data sources. And so we work really closely with a number of our partners, Snowflake, Databricks, GCP, AWS, and go to market with their sales teams. So I think actually the value of co selling with sales teams at other businesses that are in your ecosystem where a customer would benefit from the compilation of what we call a modern data stack is really overlooked in sales. A lot of sales people grow up thinking, oh, partnerships, what are they really driving? What are they doing?

They’re setting up lunch and learns. But the reality is when done well, that’s the best way to do outbound as you describe it, going to work with partners.

The role of the salesperson, especially in an earlier stage startup, is equal parts sharing the story and the vision of your product, but also doing research and development. Give any salesperson an opportunity to give customer feedback to product, and they will be chomping at the bit. So your question around consistency or breadth of exposure to that information, yeah, I mean, are ways that you can make it more programmatic. Right? You wanna make sure you’re capturing all of that in your CRM system like Salesforce, but we do number of ways of communicating the experience, not just to other departments, but also to other sellers.

So deal reviews, fireside chats, postmortems, any way of storytelling, I think the art of storytelling and using that as a data collection mechanism and a way to really move the product roadmap is incredibly valuable.

The word playbook is like a little prescriptive for super early stage startup. If what we’re thinking about is first couple of hires and what they actually need, their job is to go out into market and collect information about your addressable market, feedback from the customer that can inform the product roadmap. Like I said, the founder is the first seller. Using the founder’s vision and the way that they tell the story of the positive business outcomes that they’re solving with their product, how you start, the sellers need those add backs.

For me, the way that I learned, like when I started at Segment, I started as an SMB AE. And that was the best, most humbling, but best decision I could have made in my career because the number of at bats with those small, faster, higher velocity sales cycles that I got when I was learning a product that I’d never sold before, which ultimately allow you to build a sales playbook was critical for me to understand and accelerate my ramp as a seller.

There are companies who can succeed with just a sales led motion. I think often companies wait too long. Founders and product are like, yeah, this product sells itself. Like I don’t think there’s always an appreciation early on for the skill set that actually is selling. And so often I see startups going too long just relying on product led growth. But the reality is in an enterprise product, it’s not just a couple of users and then you’re done. Like you do your first deal with some big logo and it’s just like really narrow land.

The reality is there’s the only enterprise sales teams can actually expose and create recognition in a market for a product across the whole enterprise. That like top down sales combined with product led growth is how you truly drive momentum.

In enterprise, it’s critical. Multithreading is critical. Critical. Every time I’m reviewing deals with my team, we’re always asking about the different roles. Who is your champion? Who is the competitor’s champion? Who is the champion for doing nothing? Right? That’s even before you get to the economic buyer. And then what you do, you wanna pull together current state, future state, negative consequences of current state, positive business outcomes of future state. You don’t just get that from one person and then call it done. You ask someone those questions and then you ask someone else those questions.

You say, hey, I talked to your colleague. This is what I heard from them, feedback. And then you tweak it and you iterate. And finally, you’re getting input, enough input such that when you go to the economic buyer, who’s the person who has access to discretionary funds and can actually make a decision, you have said, I’ve met with your entire team. This is what your team is saying about their needs, about what’s holding them back from achieving the outcomes that you’re trying to drive. And then the economic buyer is like, oh, you’re not selling me.

You’re not persuading me. You’re doing the research that I needed to do about my own company. And so it ends up being that you’re not selling. You’re helping them participate in their own rescue.

I would say, who with the company is telling you that this is the problem that they need to solve, this is why they need to solve that problem, and this is when they need to solve that problem, and that our solution is what they need to solve it. So at Fivetran, we say, why do anything? Why do it now? Why do it with Fivetran? And those are the questions that you need to be answering on every deal. And if you don’t have an answer to why do it now, slipping isn’t even the right term.

It was never going to be a deal this month or this quarter. Right? So that’s when we really need to battle test what is the biggest business problem that we’re attaching to? What is it that, and this is when I was talking to you about like taking a customer through a journey that’s actually quite painful for them thinking about their current state without your solution. It’s only if we are able to really identify and align with the buyer on how painful their problem is that we can then tie a reasonable and predictable timeline to it.

Because if it’s just kind of an annoyance or a pinch for them, there’s no reason you’re gonna get that deal done in the time frame that you as a seller wanna get it done.

I don’t really buy into discounting or relationship selling personally. To me, that’s a sort of cheapening the value that this company is going to get from their investment in your product. It’s less about artificially accelerating the timeline, and it’s more about helping a customer realize how long it’s going to take them to realize value from their investment. So we do a lot of like backward timelines like, hey, we talked about the positive business outcome we’re trying to achieve. When do you need to achieve that by?

Oh, well, it needs to happen by the end of q four. Okay, great. So in order for you to get that, let’s walk backwards. Right? It’s a mutual action plan, but you do it in reverse. That’s how you help accelerate urgency in terms of the timeline. But what you’re not cheapening the outcome or the impact that your product is having. You’re really just helping them participate in their own rescue.

We talked a little bit about the role of a seller in collecting information about the market. Right? That’s when you’re really early stage. You don’t need someone who has spent their career scaling sales organizations and building out a ton of process. You need someone who is willing to get out there, kick down doors, and ask the hard questions that will allow you to take that feedback and use it to improve your product or your messaging. And so like I said, you don’t need it to be someone who is like a tenured head of sales.

What you do need though, when you’re thinking about hiring the first sales rep is someone who can run process. A lot of times we say, Oh yeah, you can hire like a renaissance AE or someone who’s just like a more of an artist than a scientist and they’re going to go out. But the reality is how are you going to learn from that person? If they’re just doing something different in every sales cycle, there’s no pattern recognition there. So you need someone who has this like great intersection of fearlessness and ability to operate within ambiguity, but someone who can show you, hey, when we ran it this way, we got these results.

We tweaked it and did it this way. We got these results. This is what we need to do from here.

I wouldn’t call it the hunger games for reps. I would think of it as how to distill signal from noise. So I agree. You do wanna have multiple sellers going at the same time. Otherwise, let’s say it’s Lauren and Harry. And if it’s just Lauren, and Lauren is a terrible salesperson, then you didn’t really learn anything about your product or your messaging or your customers. You learned about Lauren. But if Harry comes in and actually gets completely different results, then you’ll actually get signal rather than noise about a certain individual and their skills.

What’s really important when you’re interviewing salespeople is that you don’t leave it open ended for storytelling. Any good seller can sell you a dream, right? And so unless you are testing for the specifics and the metrics and the repeatable performance, you really don’t know what you’re getting. So in terms of structuring the process, it’s really important not to just ask theoretical like, oh, how would you ramp in your first ninety days? They could have read an article ten minutes before the interview and they say, oh, this is what you do.

You build a thirty, sixty, 90, like, no. You want to be asking people like, hey, tell me about your payment the year before. Oh, interesting. Okay. So how did you get there? Who else was involved in those deals? What could you have done differently? One of my favorite questions to ask is tell me the name of the logo of the deal that you’re most proud of. And someone’s like, oh, Bank of America. And I’m like, cool. I don’t wanna talk about Bank of America. Tell me about your second, the deal that comes behind that.

Tell me about the deal you’re second most proud of. And all of a sudden it’s like, oh shit, I didn’t prepare that deal for this conversation. And then you start to really get to the meat. Right? Like, what do they actually do? They’re thinking with you live. And that’s more telling about what it’s going to be like to work with them because it’s raw and it’s natural. And so making sure that you’re identifying what their actual impact on the outcomes were, getting to the meat of it, and then trying to get past the questions that they prepared for because a seller needs to have a plan, but also needs to be able to pivot when the nature of the conversation shifts.

A couple of things. First of all, you’re making a good point about the time that they were at the company that they worked at. So where in the company’s maturity phase or where in the company’s phase of growth they were employed and they were successful because a lot of times, I mean, happened to me when I was interviewing at Segment. I was actually rejected when I first interviewed at Segment because one of the pieces of feedback was, well, you came from Google. We don’t think you’re likely to be that scrappy.

And you’re used to a breadth of supporting resources. And I was, oh, okay. Well, thanks for that feedback. Here are 10 examples of scrappiness or working. Right. So the point I’m making is, and they were right to be asking those questions. The conclusion they came to ultimately was wrong, but we sorted that out. I think the type of questioning should be around, okay, when were you at this company? When did you have this impact? Who else was involved in the deal? What was your actual contribution versus their contribution?

And then I do this a lot when I ask about tell me about a deal that you lost. And the reason I want to learn about that is because you get a really good signal about someone’s locus of control. Either they have an internal locus of control and they’re taking responsibility for their role in a loss, or they have an external locus of control and they are saying, oh, well, the product didn’t deliver, we couldn’t prioritize this on the roadmap, or my champion left, or whatever it is like what you want to look for is that type of instinct like, hey, accountability, I had this role in this outcome that wasn’t ideal.

And here’s what I learned from it and what I’m going to do next time. Those are the types of indicators that will, at least at Fivetran, make sure that they’re successful.

I really want to understand the customer experience with them. So often I’ll say, what would your customer say about working with you? Who would say that at the customer? Would you put me in touch with that customer? Ultimately trying to get some validation outside of just, when we talk about references and how important references are, rather than saying, Oh, send over some references. It’s like their best friend and someone they wrote the reference for. It’s like, Well, tell me about a customer that you sold to, right?

Well, what would they say about you? Okay, great. Can I reach out to them? And if you’re a candidate, you’re not gonna say no. But then that’s when you really get clarity into what the experience is to buy from them.

I’ve done it both ways. I’ve spent a lot of time hiring people where they had to come pitch their product. That’s not usually that valuable because often the people in the room, like on the panel, they haven’t been in the seat of the buyer. And so no one really knows what to ask and it becomes a monologue and not super engaging. And again, then that’s not a good indication of what real life is like. I’ve done it where they need to pitch your product, which also has its own implications like everyone in the room is like ready to ask them the tough questions that they just faced on their last call and they kind of like, I don’t know.

I mean, you sort of lose the ability to tell if they’re actually good because you’re like, ah, subbed them. They’re not good. Right? So the pitch is a tough one. So we talked about it’s really important to identify the actual material impact in previous performance. But when we’re talking about trying to recreate real life scenarios, I often will just do a role play with them that they’re not prepared for. Something like, alright, real life situation that I’m facing, we’re deep in procurement with this customer, here’s a situation, okay, you’re the sales rep.

I’m procurement. Let’s go. I just do it live off the cuff. Again, this is about being so prepared to listen to a customer and to be able to bring any conversation back to the business outcomes that you’re driving for them, that they should be able to pivot along the way on that conversation.

Making assumptions about their experience. I hired someone once, we were doing pitches, and his pitch was so smooth. And I was like, oh, great. I was very comfortable off the cuff, blah, blah. And I had asked, but I hadn’t done the work of digging deep into what are the types of deals that you’ve done before. How did you drive the outcomes that you drove? The specifics that I was talking about earlier, I ended up hiring this person and it turned out what I thought was enterprise experience was actually commercial experience.

And different companies call segments different things. And I hadn’t done the important work of like really diving deep into deal level experiences like really early in my sales leadership career. A great lesson.

Are we talking about a first sales rep or just anyone that we’re onboarding?

I was talking earlier about how valuable it was for me when I started a segment to be getting those at bats. It helped accelerate my ramp. I think the most important thing you can do when you’re starting your sales role is getting exposure to customers. So whether it’s listening to recorded calls, whether it’s joining the founder or the hiring manager on sales calls, we did something taking a call that a BDR would normally take so we can just get some at bats to get someone ramped is something that I did back at Segment.

It really helps because it’s like lower risk. Right? You don’t want a new hire to take that call with First Republic and say, hey, right, that’s not the time when you’re hiring people in enterprise stuff because it’s like few and far between opportunities. And each of those at bat in a long enterprise sales cycle is actually very high impact, high leverage. And so the onboarding process needs to be driven by three things. One is exposure to customers. They can really understand the impact and the value that we’re having with customers.

Two is exposure to what has worked and what hasn’t worked so far.

Yeah. Recorded sales calls, having like a library of recorded calls is really valuable as people ramp. And then just capturing postmortems, lessons that we learned from a win, lessons that we learned from a loss. I’m really big on running deal reviews and making sure that we capture learnings that we can then amplify when people are joining the organization.

You will have some of those early customers that are more than happy to talk with new hires. Right? In terms of like a specific period of time, it really just depends on how quickly they ramp. So in a past life, we did practicing with the pitch, and then you would go through a certification. Right now at Fivetran, we have like a full ninety day plan of onboarding where you come in and you have like very structured, these are the things you’re learning about the company. This is what you’re learning about our pitch.

This is what you’re learning about our customers, our value drivers, etcetera. And then just depending on how quickly you can ramp up, we get you out in the wet.

There are a number of important leading indicators. I think that’s one of the things that’s so fun about enterprise sales is it’s a collection of small milestones. And truly, need to build an acquired taste for that. You don’t get the adrenaline hit of a close one deal hitting the win Slack channel every 30 days. You get the long and sustained satisfaction of a strategic full team coordinated game play by play. And so when you’re trying to assess whether someone is doing well, you’re looking at early indicators.

It’s not just, hey, how much pipeline did they build? It’s, hey, when they took that first call, did they progress the deal? Did they get follow-up? Right? What is the follow-up? When they move a customer into a trial, for example, have they earned the right to expend our resources on that trial? Or are they handing out trials like candy? Right? That’s an investment from our company, from our sales engineering team to actually do a proof of value. And so you look at that type of thing.

Did they get alignment with the economic buyer before they invested more of our resources in it? So these are early in the sales cycle. There’s no win yet, but you’re really getting a sense for process and accountability.

How can you tell?

I’d say in the first thirty days, you can get a sense of whether they’re gonna be successful because you’re looking for things like what are they doing to get organized? What are they doing to start to learn about your product? Are they as curious as they sounded in the interview? What are they actually doing with their team? Have they ingratiated themselves with cross functional folks so that they can learn together? There are they attaching themselves to our top sellers and learning from them? And there are a lot of leading indicators you can see.

I think deal reviews should be conducted very frequently and there are different levels of depth, right? We can do more of like a storytelling, you’re all hands for the whole company. You have a sales rep come up and talk about, hey, this is what we did. This is how we won. Here are the things we learned. And here’s what we would do differently next time. Those are the two most important things. Otherwise, it’s, hey, we got this logo, everyone apply. There’s no learning for everyone. There’s like, that’s more broad strokes, but it’s important to sort of bring the rest of the company along with you.

In terms of the real specific deal reviews, I think it’s really good to run them weekly. You don’t need to be reviewing the same deals over and over again at that kind of cadence, but great opportunity for the sales rep to step up and lead it and bring it. I would never expect it would just be the AE alone. I would expect them to bring their cross functional selling team. So the sales engineer, for example, if they’re working with a partner, someone who’s helping them, like just so that we can get all perspectives, all angles so that we can uncover where are the gaps and work together to close those gaps.

But that frequency is important so that you’re constantly making progress. Like I said, sales, it’s not a high velocity deal, but every baby step along the process really matters.

If it turns out that we don’t solve the problem that they’re trying to solve, that means we missed on qualification and qualifying them out of our pipeline. And that’s a huge miss. So on one hand, as a sales leader, it would be wildly disappointing for me to know that my sales team had invested cycles on trying to provide a solution for frankly, a problem that we’re not intending to solve. It’s incredibly valuable for us at Fivetran to be very hyper focused on the problems that we do solve.

And so if we’ve missed that in qualification, that’s a painful loss of time and resources, but it’s something that we can coach. For me, that’s like, it’s painful, but it’s solvable in teaching people how to better qualify.

I think it depends on the competitor. If the competitor is do nothing, which is often a competitor, then no.

So if we lost to the competition, it’s always important to know is like one of the main competitors is don’t change at all. That inertia can be really challenging to compete with. But to your point, exactly right. If that happens, my reaction is what was the identified pain? How painful was it? Did we miss an opportunity to attach to a bigger business problem? Because a lot of times when you’re selling technology, you’re like, oh, I found a practitioner who wants this thing because they’re doing this project.

And then all of a sudden it’s like, oh, actually they deprioritized the project. Okay, well, wasn’t the biggest business problem that you could have attached to. And so where can we go back into the company to understand, well, what are the things that they’re really trying to solve? How are they trying to use data as a competitive advantage? And how can we help them?

I think I’d say transparency and direct communication. I try and create a culture and an environment where people feel safe talking about mistakes. And it’s important to me that people are comfortable owning their learnings and sharing learnings with other people on the team. So How do you make people

I try and be really honest and transparent about mistakes that I’ve made and share them with the team. So taking accountability, modeling accountability when I could have done something differently so that it’s clear that I value people being honest about where they’re struggling and where they want to learn. And I’ve gotten that feedback too, very like, I’m a great direct communicator and have certainly gotten feedback that when I first became a sales leader, I remember I was practicing deal inspection. And I’m asking question after question, I’m thinking I’m really getting to the meat of this, I’m really helping this seller.

And the reaction I thought was, hey, I don’t know what your agenda is, but you’re freaking me out. And what I learned from that was, it’s really helpful to share the agenda. Hey, I’m asking this question because of x, I’ve run into a situation like this before and this outcome happened that was less than ideal. So I’m asking you to help make sure that we don’t have that outcome, right? So that’s something that I’ve learned over time as a sales leader is really explaining the why.

What you’re describing is an interview environment where you absolutely don’t wanna share the answers. I think that’s spot on. What I’m suggesting is as a sales leader with my team, it’s really important to be transparent and demonstrate a model accountability so that people feel safe taking accountability themselves.

Well, here’s what I’ll say. As it turns out, sales is a great career path for people who thrive on pushing the limits of what’s possible. You get rejected so often. You start to expect getting rejected. And while the sting of getting rejected never lessens, it’s important to remember that happiness is actually defined as reality minus your expectations. So if you expect a no, asking for what you want isn’t scary anymore. Getting comfortable with rejecting came from starting to expect it. And I think that’s really important, not just for salespeople, but especially for women in sales.

Getting really comfortable asking for something that you know you might get a no to, and that’s okay. The first no is usually an opportunity for you to ask why and uncover the hesitation and really get behind what’s holding people back.

I agree with what you’re saying around confidence being critical. And I’m not suggesting that, in fact, I think in sales, a really important lesson I’ve taken away in my career is either you believe what you do matters, or you don’t believe what you do matters. And if you do believe what you do matters, that enables you to persist when the pressure of carrying a quota and the burnout from the roller coaster of wins and rejections causes you to question, is it all worth it? But if in sales you believe what you do matters, selling is actually curiosity about your customers and their problems and less about persuasion.

And actually buyers, you’re talking about coming in super confident they’re going to say yes, buyers will resist sellers who attempt to persuade them. Instead, in sales, if you’re asking insightful questions and you try to solve your customer’s biggest business problems, the buyer’s gonna persuade themselves. So ultimately, that’s what comes back to why believing what you do matters is critical in this business, and it’s liberating. It gives you the confidence to ask for something you don’t think you’re able to get.

I think what makes a good storyteller is someone who has the combination of, again, believing what they do matters, having customer proof points that they can actually use to illustrate what they do, and is a really good listener. So that they actually understand the type of story that’s gonna resonate with the person that they’re talking to. A bad salesperson just gets out there and says, hey, this is my favorite feature of the product. No one cares what your favorite feature of the product is. Is it aligned to the problem that the customer is trying to solve?

Oh, it is? How have you done it differently than other companies? Oh, great. Where have you done this before? Tell me a story about that. Now as a buyer, I’m imagining myself in the shoes of this incredible iconic aspirational business who got to the solution that they wanted with your product and with your team. And now I wanna be like them.

My career has been a stream of rejections. I mean, even just back to when I was in eighth grade, I wanted to go to a specific high school. I applied to five private high schools in San Francisco, got into four, didn’t get into the fifth, was waitlisted. As an eighth grader, I was like, well, all right, I’m gonna give them another opportunity. Marched into the admission office and said, hey, I think there’s a great fit here. Long story short, I ended up at that high school.

Same thing happened when I applied to business school. I applied to several schools, got waitlisted at Stanford, got into Harvard, got into a number of other schools, but I really wanted to go to Stanford. And so gave some feedback to the Stanford admission office. Thank you for giving me the opportunity. It’s encouraging to do a better job sharing with you the impact I’d like to have at Stanford. Long story short, ended up going to Stanford instead of the other schools. And again, when I interviewed at Segment, I got rejected.

And for me, this is where it comes back to like, what’s holding you back from asking for what you want, not being afraid of getting rejected. Rejected. In particular, when interviewed at Segment, the feedback that I got was the recruiter actually didn’t want to give me the feedback. You know how it goes. When she called, I interviewed at Segment on Friday and that next Tuesday, this poor recruiter called me to relay the bad news and I asked her why. I can just feel her physically squirming through the phone, trying to provide as little concrete information as possible.

And I gathered what I could, thanked her for the feedback. And then I asked, Hey, can I speak with the hiring manager so that can help him understand what he missed? And that’s met with audible squirms and some more back and forth. And she agreed to relay my request. So in the meantime, what I did was I wrote an email called Take a Chance on Me. That email, I shared that while I was disappointed, I found the feedback to be very encouraging because I frankly believe that the team’s concerns were quite addressable.

And so I explained, here’s what I think you’re looking for. Here’s how I recommend that you test for it. Let’s do another interview with a more intentional structure. And so I went back in and actually met with Jennie, who then introduced me to Jordan. And that’s how I ended up at Segment. The rejection turned off for something that I have continued to experience throughout my career. It also happened when I went from leading a growth business team into leading an enterprise team. Again, at that time, I’d been in enterprise sales at Google, and I just hadn’t done that segment and I really wanted to get back into enterprise.

They were like, listen, you’re an SMB. We need someone to lead enterprise. I was like, all right. Well, we talked about deal reviews earlier. Let’s do a deal review except I’m the deal. So here’s what we’re trying to accomplish. You’re trying to hire someone to lead the enterprise sales team. Here’s what I can offer to lead that team. Here are the gaps between what I can do and what you’re looking for, and here’s how I propose that we solve those gaps. It’s just like doing deal inspection and really understanding how to solve those gaps.

Long story short, I moved into the enterprise sales leadership role.

That’s great.

Nothing makes me prouder than bringing really incredible talent onto the team. I think I’ll punt that question and say, in terms of bringing someone into the fold where a deal can be bringing a customer into your account base, I’m most proud of some of the sales leaders that I’ve hired and helped enable to achieve their own career outcomes.

I mean, we talked a little bit about qualification before. I think tactics, maybe not the word I would use, but instincts and skill sets, a curiosity. There is no substitute for deep curiosity, which drives relentless discovery and ruthless qualification.

Pricing that’s not aligned to value. Black box, subscription, shelfware, licensing, that model is moving in the past.

This goes back to what I said before about listening. The best thing you can do, then there’s nothing more important than listening to customers.

Like to increase the diversity in sales leadership.

that? I think it comes down to building community and building pipeline and promoting from within and creating opportunity for people to see people that look like them and sound like them in leadership roles. And we haven’t done a great job of that historically. So it’s an important area that I spend a lot of time.

It’s ironic a little bit because one of the things that Fivetran does so well is our product is really simple. It solves a really hard problem and behind the curtains, it’s complicated, but it’s a simple user experience. As a sales leader scaling a sales org, I find that we try to solve too many problems sometimes internally.

And so keeping it simple for my team to be really focused is the biggest challenge I have because you’re looking at, we want sellers to land new logos, we want sellers to expand those logos, we want sellers to make sure that they’re retaining their customers, we want them to drive consumption, and all of a sudden, the laundry list of things that you try to solve with a comp plan becomes very complex and you lose focus. So what’s really important to me is to drive simplicity and focus for the team.

Alignment with the business outcomes that you’re trying to drive as a company.

Often they do not.

We’re in a consumption business. And so it’s really important to align compensation structure with the best outcomes for the customer, which are also aligned to the outcomes of our company. So a traditional bookings quota and variable compensation structure, what that does is it drives someone to land a deal and nothing else. When you start to align compensation with the actual adoption of the product and consumption of what you sold as a salesperson, all of a sudden, the incentives of the AE and the incentives of the customer, and ultimately the company are much more aligned.

Really depends on your philosophy and enterprise. The account executive and enterprise is the CEO of their franchise. And so it is important that the account executive remains intimately involved with their customer throughout their life cycle. So it’s not like in more of a transactional business where you’re signing a deal and tossing it over the fence.

I think the best sales teams are people who have had to be in a category creating environment. The real hustlers that I’ve seen be successful are people who are selling products where there isn’t already an identified budget. And it creates an opportunity for us to really tie value to the product that we’re selling.

Oh, well, thank you so much for having me here. I had a great time.