# Inside Figma's $1BN ARR Revenue Machine Why We Do Not Have Customer Success or SDRs · Why I Do Not Believe in Sales Quotas with Shaunt Voskanian, CRO @ Figma 20Sales · Mar 21, 2026 · 63 min · 12,269 words Speakers: Shaunt Voskanian, Harry Stebbings Source: https://www.996.fm/episodes/20vc--ep-89657947/ ## Cold open **Shaunt Voskanian** [0:00]: We don't actually have a traditional CS team. We also don't have traditional SDRs. My perspective is quotas are kind of made up. An average enterprise rep here might have three to four x their OTE for a quota. Focus **Harry Stebbings** [0:13]: and specialization as early as possible. This is 20 Sales ## Intro **Harry Stebbings** [0:17]: with me, Harry Stebbings. Now 20 Sales is the monthly show where we sit down with the best sales leaders to unpack how they hire, train, and retain the best sales talent. Today, we have Shaunt Voskanian joining us in the hot seat. 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This is my career. **Shaunt Voskanian** [4:16]: It happened kind of by accident when I was going to school, graduating high school, thinking about college. I mean, there was obviously the sales profession, but it wasn't something you really studied. I ended up going to school at BU. I was studying advertising. The summer after my freshman year, we had to get a summer job. And I remembered just like the year before, I got my very first cell phone. So this is back 2000. Cell phones were becoming a thing. You didn't have them when you were much younger than that. And I remember when I got my phone, it was in a mall. It was in one of those kiosks. And I remember asking the woman who worked there. I was like, hey. How did you get this job? She was like, well, I'm a law student, and this is a way to make extra money, and you can do really well. And I was like, I wonder if could do that. So, you know, I went to the same kiosk in the mall, met this guy who was working there, and I said, hey. How how does one get a job like this? I had no idea. But I'm, you know, I'm home for the summer. I'm looking for work. He said, Well, why don't you start by just writing down some information here about yourself? So he gave me this piece of paper. I wrote down my name, my address, my phone number. He's like, Okay. Great. You start Tuesday. I was like, What do you mean? He's like, Yeah. Cool. You're hired, man. And I showed up Tuesday. He handed me some pamphlets. He was like, these are the planes you wanna sell, and you make money. These are the ones you don't wanna sell. No one cares about the phones. You sell whatever is in the in the bin. Go to work. And he left. And I was like, oh my god. And I started figuring it out. **Harry Stebbings** [5:42]: Knowing all you know now, you can call up that boy with those cell phones and give one piece of advice on how to be successful in sales. What piece of advice would you give? **Shaunt Voskanian** [5:53]: First thing that jumped into my mind was be curious and really try to understand the person that you are trying to sell to. What's their situation? What's their circumstance? Do you have **Harry Stebbings** [6:04]: the time today to be curious? And what I mean by that is people are very cautious and hesitant with giving their time to anything. It's more like, Sean, I know that Figma is this size company with this x and this problem. Do you not need to know the customer today because you don't have time to be curious? Like, if you're gonna do qualification on me, I don't wanna be qualified. You should figure it out. **Shaunt Voskanian** [6:28]: So I I do think it's a skill. And to be honest with you, I believe right now, more than anything else, if you wanna be great in enterprise tech sales, it's not just about being curious, it's about being prescriptive, and that's an interesting balance. Right? Because you're right, people are busy, and what they really want is insights. They want to know, What can you teach me? What are your other customers, your best customers, doing that we haven't figured out yet? And that's very much what we are preaching to our sales team every single day. But you have to mix curiosity in along the way. And I think that's the art of it, is you have to be able to do both at the same time or else you're not gonna be successful. **Harry Stebbings** [7:05]: Can I ask with you in jumping? When you look at Figma, say, it's a beautiful product, and it's a PLG motion in so many ways. In a world of PLG, is sales less important than ever? **Shaunt Voskanian** [7:16]: I don't think so. But what's really unique about Figma as a company, this was what so I joined up in here about four and a half years, and I started talking to Dylan five and a half years ago. And at the time, it was really early in the journey, but it was unique in that Figma has been around since 2012 and really spent six years building the product, studying customers, really trying to perfect it. Really not something that I had heard happen very, very often. And then once you started monetizing, this is end of twenty seventeen, end of twenty eighteen, really took off. And it took off very much in this, not even PLG, I would say self-service way. Most of our customers, even today, at some point they started by going online with a credit card. Someone bought a couple of licenses, started sharing links internally, and that's how things took off. And that happened really, really fast. And so when I joined four and a half years ago, we were a 100, maybe $50,000,000 company, but in terms of our penetration in the market, we had tons of customers, way more. So I joined Datadog, my previous company, similar stage in terms of revenue, nowhere near the number of customers. So in many ways, the job at Datadog in the early days was much clearer than it was at Figma. In Figma, we'd acquired all these customers so quickly. And at the time, to your point, mainly what people were doing on the sales side was PLG. The sales role four and a half years ago was almost exclusively responding to existing customers that are on self-service plans, and all we are doing is upgrading them to the higher tiers of the product. That was the motion. You fast forward to today, it's very, very different than that. We are global. We have multiple segments, SMB, mid market, enterprise, strategic. And if you look at what most of our sales reps are doing, especially mid market plus, it's very sales led. The PLG motion of upgrading people to new tiers, expanding seats into the existing accounts, there's some of that. But so much of what's happening actually is what we were talking about before. It's being prescriptive. It's going into the customer with insights. When you say sales led, do you mean it's outbound? Oh, yeah. A 100%. A 100% of our business outbound, but a 100% in that what the sales team is doing at Figma is majority outbound today. Now, it's outbound, though, into an existing customer base. That's the part that's unique. These are companies that are using Figma, but they think they're happy using Figma. They figured out how to use us in a particular way. But we, through curiosity, through understanding patterns from how other customers are using Figma, we are approaching them with proactive insights for how they should be thinking about doing more with us. **Harry Stebbings** [10:03]: Who is responsible for that? Is that account execs? Is that CS? How do you structure responsibilities in the team when you have that? **Shaunt Voskanian** [10:11]: We don't actually have a traditional CS team. When I started, we had a lot to figure out in terms of what is the motion. And what we realized is, coming back to that earlier premise, most of our customers found us through a website and a credit card, they made their own decision on what they thought the value is that Figma could deliver to them. If you look across our customer base, and this is even true today, you compare what an average customer is doing with Figma compared to what we think they should be doing with Figma, there's a pretty big gap and a pretty big discrepancy. And so our job is how do we go and proactively educate the customer on the more that they can be doing? And so we asked ourselves, is that a CS function? Is that an account management function? But where we landed is, for the most part, that is a hunting motion. That is a motion where, in order to be successful doing it, you have to go in, and you have to actually get, in some cases, existing champions, but in a lot of cases, you know, new prospective champions and EVs to be really excited about something new that they haven't learned about Figma before. **Harry Stebbings** [11:15]: What is the primary role of those, generally speaking? Is it product expansion? We want the same people to use more. Or is it we want more people to use the same product? I know it's both. But if there was one more **Shaunt Voskanian** [11:30]: Honestly, it is both. I think for the most part and by the way, this has evolved too, as we've gone from single product to multiproduct. I would say right now, it's probably a little bit more in the using new products side, and it could be the same people using those new products. But oftentimes, we're talking about new personas, getting new individuals exposed to some of the things that we have to offer. **Harry Stebbings** [11:51]: When you think about going multiproduct, I very often have companies which go multiproducts that I'm invested in. And the reps honestly know that verticalized solutions are better at point function things. That's obviously not the case with Figma. But what would you say if you know that your product is not as good as the vertically focused one, but you're selling the platform? **Shaunt Voskanian** [12:16]: I mean, I think, frankly, the best sellers are not the ones that are focused on this feature is better than this other company's feature in this product. I think they are better at understanding where a company is trying to where their business is trying to go, and connecting the value to the overall solution to those things that they are trying to accomplish. And there's a storytelling aspect. There's obviously the curiosity that we're talking about there. But I think you have to be generally just honest with yourself about where is the customer really going to get the most value from what you have to offer compared to the competitor. And if that is through the point solution, then that's what you're focused on. And I still don't think you use feature and function to get there. I think you focus on value and value drivers. But I think if it's the platform, then that's the narrative that you want to get the customer to believe in. **Harry Stebbings** [13:08]: When we think about that platform expansion and product expansion in terms of usage, you know, everyone is saying that seat based pricing is dead. Do you agree? If so, what comes next? **Shaunt Voskanian** [13:19]: I think it is hard to predict the future on this one, honestly. But if you look at our own business, I mean, we had our earnings call a couple of weeks ago. We added five points on our net retention. Pretty significant. I think it went from a 131% to a 136%. Obviously, today, we're in a pretty much exclusively seat based model. Now you might also know that that's changing in just a matter of a few days where we're going to start monetizing our AI usage through credits as well. But so far, we haven't seen that in our business. Part of that, I think, may be just the fact that because of all the things happening in the world and in technology, there's just more and more builders, I think, coming into software as it exists. So is that part of the reason? I don't know. But there's nothing that we've seen in our business yet that suggests that's dead. I do think it's a tough one to predict long term. **Harry Stebbings** [14:07]: Well, I think it's because your business is predicated around product people and designers. And if you're in customer support, you can't have a seat based business. You've to have an outcomes based or a consumption based or in a lot of other businesses where you're replacing labor. If you sell seats and you're replacing labor, you're in a tough spot. **Shaunt Voskanian** [14:24]: Yeah. I mean, like, it makes that makes sense. I'm just not as knowledgeable about what's happening in those, you know, other BUs. From what I can see in our business and the people we're selling to, that doesn't feel like a thing that we've encountered yet. **Harry Stebbings** [14:37]: Totally get that. It's an interesting kind of pushback on the traditional narrative. Another aspect that I see more and more is like the destruction of the role of the SDR. Does the role of the SDR survive in two years time? Do AEs just be completely responsible for pipeline generation PG? How do you think about that one? **Shaunt Voskanian** [14:54]: Well, I'm kind of smiling because we also don't have traditional SDRs. We've really tried to be first principled with how we built the go to market at Figma. And by the way, this is coming from someone who had, by the time I left my previous company, maybe 200 person SDR team, a pretty traditional one. So here's what I'll say. First is, AEs have to be responsible for their own PG. Full stop. That is consistently true anywhere I've been, and firmly believe in it. I think with SDRs, I've always tried to be really thoughtful about where is the SDR actually adding clear incremental value in a business where you expect AEs to PG as well. Honestly, anywhere I've been, it's always been a little bit challenging to really isolate, Okay, what did the SDR do versus the AE do? Do you have them share accounts? Do you have them split and have the SDR work on some and the AE work on some? It's hard. Honestly, it's hard, and I think I've always kind of struggled with it. At Figma, there's this other unique aspect, which is, again, our problem is not acquiring new customers. Right? We have a lot, and so much of our focus is how do we expand in those customer bases. And yet, even having a lot, what we've been trying to figure out is what is the job that needs to be done? We've tinkered with SDRs, partnering with AEs to go expand into specific personas and do things like that. But actually, recently we made a new shift, and we said even that, we're gonna take the focus away from, and we're using them now in a more pointed way on existing customers and managing small transactional renewals to get those off the plates of some of the more strategic AEs and the strategic work we want them to do. So we're always kind of tinkering with what's the best way to deploy that resource to get value? And then, of course, they are a talent pipeline as well. They're they're our future reps. **Harry Stebbings** [16:45]: So we have no SDRs and we have no CS. So just so I understand, the sales team is structured with AEs. What else do we have in there? **Shaunt Voskanian** [16:55]: Yeah. When I started, it was basically we had AEs and AMs. We had two segments, mid market and enterprise. And if you looked at what mid market and enterprise was doing back then, it was effectively the same thing. They were doing PLG. They were upgrading people. It was a single product company. And then AMs were effectively doing CS type of work. They were driving seat expansion, but really, they were doing support. They were trying to be really responsive to the customer. It necessary for the point of the business we were in. When we looked at it, we said, Okay, what do we need in the future? One of the things I believe in the most is you need to have focus. The best sales teams are the ones that are really, really focused and specialized. So if you're asking a rep to do 14 different things, it's too hard for them to be good at all of those things. So we looked at our business and we said, Where are there places where we can create focus? And the first thing we realized is, Let's isolate this PLG motion. So when we looked at it at the time, where is the PLG, that upgrade? When I say PLG So by the way, maybe to define this for everyone, I think we kind of have three distinct businesses at Figma. One is self serve. That is, people go on the website, they put in a credit card, they buy what they think they need. And you can buy our lower tier plans directly through the website. And then you get a link, you send it around, and you grow. Then we have what I'd consider our PLG business, which is really concentrated in what we call our SMB segment. Those are reps that are covering zero to 500 employee businesses. Then we have our Sales Led, which I'd consider Mid Market, Enterprise, and Strat. Those are just basically smaller book sizes, smaller companies. That's the way we're set up right now. That PLG motion, we said, Let's isolate it to SMB. Because we looked at the companies that were typically in that position to be upgraded from self serve, and almost all of them were under 500 employees. Basically, was new startups that were coming into the ecosystem. They were buying licenses themselves. Then we try to be really sophisticated around when is the right time for us to proactively reach out to them based on product signals, maturity that we see happening, to then have a conversation around, okay, you need to move up tiers. **Harry Stebbings** [19:05]: I'm a founder with a PLG motion. What is the one piece of advice you would give to me on the right time to intercept? Could be duration, be usage, could be CD scan. What is that sign? **Shaunt Voskanian** [19:17]: I don't think it ever hurts to do it a little earlier than a little later, because I think what we do still find is we think it's the right time based on our formulas. You still have to convince someone that that's the case. And that might take a couple of go runs. Our SMB team, they'll often lose a deal, as in an upgrade transaction, and then they'll win it a couple of months later. That's very typical. It was typical of my last company as well. But the what, I think, is dependent on so many factors around how people are using a product, which features you're gating, how they're interacting with it. Don't know if there's one specific answer to that. **Harry Stebbings** [19:51]: When your business is basically expansions and upgrades, do you have pipeline reviews in the same way that it Oh, **Shaunt Voskanian** [19:59]: yeah. So by the way, just to finish, what we did is we said SMB, that's the PLG motion, everything else is sales led. Everything else we do, mid market enterprise strat, which is the majority of our team and the reps that we have, it's running like a very traditional SaaS sales business. Again, what's unique is they're PG ing primarily into what you would consider to be a customer. We almost don't think of it that way. The job of a sales rep, they get their book of accounts, and every year we've created more focus around them, and we've had to do ruthless prioritization on which accounts are we going to really go deep on. But once they get their accounts, the job is you map it out. You map out that org, and you basically have a vision of what does a best in class deployment of Figma look like based on your understanding of this type of business? Where are they today? And that gap between those things is your job. And you need to go figure out how to do discovery, how to do new business meetings, how to actually go build champions to get them to go from where they are to that future state that you want to bring them to through insights and a point of view. And that is 100% they do PG, they create opportunities, we do pipeline reviews constantly, We do forecast calls every week where we're digging into it. Nothing super unique in terms of how we run that part of the business, except for the fact that it's not traditional net new that a lot of other companies would use as a definition. **Harry Stebbings** [21:29]: What's your single biggest advice for how to create champions on steroids within a customer base? **Shaunt Voskanian** [21:34]: There's a few things. So first is you have to bring them insights. Insights that are relevant to what they do and what they're thinking about. That value, I think, is the biggest thing that makes a champion go, Okay, I'm all in. It's not just, I love your product. Of course, the Figma community is incredible, but you wanna build an enterprise champion, educate them, teach them something that they don't know that's going to make them and their teams more effective at their jobs. That's the first thing that comes to mind. **Harry Stebbings** [22:04]: When we think about kind of teaching them and converting them, I think sales comp is a very hard thing to get right. We've had the CRO from 11 Labs on the show. They have a 20x quota. Is that a new world of PLG? Is that 11 Labs specific? And how do you think about the right quota setting? **Shaunt Voskanian** [22:21]: I've got controversial, I would say, opinions on quotas in general. My perspective is quotas are kind of made up. What I mean is, I think there's this kind of prevailing wisdom with quotas that I've seen, especially when you're going into planning and you're trying to map out your year, where you kind of go, Okay, how much ARR do I need to generate? How many people do I have? How much quota do I need to then dish out to feel like I've got enough coverage where if we're trying to add $500,000,000 next year, if I've got $600,000,000 of quota out there, that means even if people end up at 80% attainment, I'm good. And I just think that's made up. I don't think that has anything to do with how people are actually going to do. The way I think about quota is it's more about philosophy that you're trying to implement around what is the work that needs to be done and how much reward do you want to dish out for that work that needs to be done. I think it generally comes back to that. And so I don't have a singular philosophy. **Harry Stebbings** [23:21]: Can I ask, if you don't have quota or don't believe in quota, how do you think about setting urgency, setting incentives? **Shaunt Voskanian** [23:29]: I believe in quotas. We have quotas. What I'm saying is I don't necessarily believe you completely de risk your year by making sure that you've dished out enough quota to cover your target. I think that's a bit of a false sense of comfort. What I believe is that with quotas, you want to try to determine what are you trying to accomplish. And the way I would think about it is I don't think there's a single answer. And I think even at Figma, we've evolved. In the early days of Figma, which may be similar to what's happening at eleven Labs right now, the job was primarily take this product, make your customer really happy, know the product really, really well, support them, and then viral expansion would happen. And frankly, if you think about the job to be done, there is a pretty wide population of people that could likely do it. If they come in and they care about learning and the product, etcetera, that's one thing. And so if you have that business, you have to think about what is the reward for that? What is the population of people that you can do that job? **Harry Stebbings** [24:33]: Dude, is that is that job not quite easy? You're essentially an order taker. When people are pulling the product out of your hands and desperate to use it, kind of easy. No? **Shaunt Voskanian** [24:41]: I mean, I I think there's things about it that are hard. I don't wanna say it's easy, but I think the way I think about it more is, like, how many people out there could probably do it if we brought them in, trained them, and they had the right personality, they had the willingness to learn? I think about it as don't need to have twenty years of sales experience to figure out how to do that, even if there's things about it that are challenging. I don't want to diminish what the job is. But I think in that type of situation, you're probably focused more on driving efficiency in the business. Where we are right now, in that SLG motion in particular, which is, again, mid market enterprise strat, what we're asking people to do, the stuff you just heard me get so warm and fuzzy about when I heard customers talk about in terms of bringing insights and building champions, That is strategic work. You need people who can really understand how businesses operate, who really understand not only the product but the landscape that we're operating in, who are able to PG and build these relationships, bring these insights, manage complex multi stakeholder deals, that is hard work, and it's very, very strategic work. So our philosophy now at Figma is kind of the opposite, which is we want to have really aggressive, as in relatively easy, quotas compared to what's out there in industry standard, because the work is hard and it's strategic, and we wanna really reward people that are doing that great work. And we also realize the population of people that are capable of doing it is smaller. Right? They need more experience. They need certain qualities and attributes. So, again, I think what eleven Labs is doing is probably perfect for them. I'm in the opposite side of the spectrum right now, where it's like, I want people to feel like Figma's a place where you can come in, you can do this hard strategic work that's really driving value for your customers, and then you can be outwardly rewarded by it. And so an average enterprise rep here might have three to 4x their OTE for a quota, and we're happy with that. **Harry Stebbings** [26:34]: You can have someone who's sold that size of contract before or who's worked in or around the industry problem area that you solve. But you can only have one. Which one do you have and why? **Shaunt Voskanian** [26:47]: If those are the two options to choose from, I would take the person with the experience doing the deal. Because I think the industry experience you can teach to the person who's got the right willingness to learn and the curiosity. And obviously, you need to make sure you have that in a person and you test for it. I'm kind of making a bit of an assumption that with those two choices, the person who's done the really big deal hasn't just got a bluebird. Right? That they've managed multi stakeholder, long sales cycles, have to build a lot of champions, have to get to EVs. They're likely leveraging something like Calm, and they're using Medic, and they're familiar with these concepts. There's a lot more confidence that I think that needs to be built over time for people to be really good at that. And I think, generally speaking, smart people can learn industries and landscapes in a shorter period of time. So if those are my two only choices, I would probably take the person who's got the deal experience. **Harry Stebbings** [27:36]: We're running a process now for hiring people. How has what you looked for in sales reps changed over time? **Shaunt Voskanian** [27:43]: I don't know that it's changed that much, to be honest with you. I mean, the first thing, there is, I think, what you see on paper, and I think that matters. And I think increasingly, I've become more opinionated on what I'm looking for there and what I'm not. I I have to admit, some people don't agree with this. I have a usually a pretty visceral reaction to people who are super jumpy, you know, in terms of a a resume. **Harry Stebbings** [28:06]: And when we say super jumpy, I know it sounds awful, but this is, like, one year, one year, one year. Exactly. **Shaunt Voskanian** [28:10]: Like, twelve months here, eighteen months here, twelve months there. There's so many reasons why people would encourage me to have more of an open mind for it, and I get all of that. But generally speaking, when you're doing this at scale I I don't know, Jay. **Harry Stebbings** [28:22]: I think it's total bullshit. You if you've done it four times. Right. It's saying something. Yeah. Once, it could be culture, it could be family, it could be whatever. But four times? **Shaunt Voskanian** [28:32]: Yep. So, I mean, look. Then when you're talking to someone, it's a lot of the obvious things. Right? Can you learn from them that they have the grit, that they are willing to persevere? That's a really important one for me. How do you tell? Oh, God. It's so hard. I don't know. It's really hard. I think what Dan would tell you, and I think he mentioned it when he spoke to you, is he really wants to get the full history of the person kind of going back to school days and how they made their decisions. I will do that from time to time. I don't always do it. Frankly, the thing that tells me the most on that front is the resume. Looking at the places they were and having a sense of the arcs of those places when they were there, is this someone who was just chasing something that was easy, or were they really actually sticking with something and making success out of something that wasn't successful? I think that's a big part of it. Even you can create a process that forces perseverance through it in terms of an interview process. So we always make people a challenge or an exercise at the end that requires some heavy lifting in terms of learning a bit about our business, but also showing off your basic sales skills around discovery. So I think that's a way to do it too. But it is hard. It's hard. What the challenge or exercise? Is it a take **Harry Stebbings** [29:50]: home assignment **Shaunt Voskanian** [29:51]: for a It's take home assignment. We've evolved it over time. But it's kind of a combination of disco demo. It's basically like we want to give people a use case, a case study. You're gonna go pitch to this customer. Here is some information about them. Learn about them. And come in prepared to lead a conversation, do some discovery, and then turn around and get in the product a little bit show us a quick workflow that you think would be interesting. Personally, I'm much more interested in how they do, frankly, on the discovery side of that because I think it's probably a little bit unfair to expect someone to be doing this amazing demo of your product with just a few days of playing around with it. But I do think actually the product piece we've kept in there, because it does show an element of perseverance. If someone is actually willing to spend the time to learn a little bit of it, I think it's telling. And then the way they approach the discovery part, I think, tells a lot around, you know, their ability to actually be curious and do all of those things. **Harry Stebbings** [30:50]: Okay. So we're really impressed with this candidate, me and you. And we're thinking, great, we should hire them. And we move to office stage. Is there anything in the offer stage that gives you green lights or red lights around a potential sales hire? **Shaunt Voskanian** [31:04]: One of the things that I always try to do is back channel. And I think that's a little bit outside of the question you're asking, but I think getting signals outside of the process in some ways, I think are the most valuable insights that you can get on someone. I think on the offer stage itself, look, you have some people who are gonna naturally negotiate. You're gonna have people who are not I I don't necessarily make strong judgments there because I actually think, oftentimes, the person who's not negotiating is not negotiating at the end because the hiring manager, the recruiter have done a good job of positioning ourselves and our offer in a way that makes them really just happy to jump in and take it. The biggest thing I'm looking for at that point is someone's got to be all in. They have to be really excited to come on board. And look, I understand people have choice, and I fully respect going through a process with multiple companies. But if at the end of a process with Figma, spending a couple of weeks doing all of this work, if you're not like, All right. I'm in. I want to do this, it tends to be a little bit of a yellow flag for me. If they're actively trying to pit you against another company, I just get nervous because we've seen some people who we've hired like that. And then as soon as things are tough or they didn't have the initial success they expected or that other company that maybe they didn't tell you but they're actually more excited about came back with a better offer or a different offer, they leave. And so do all the investigation you want to do during the process, but then by the end, both sides should feel like they're all in on this candidate. **Harry Stebbings** [32:39]: What do you do when you have to ramp a sales team hiring plan fast? Is it better to fill seats and bluntly get rid fast and be quick with decisions? Or is it better to go slow and miss hiring plan? **Shaunt Voskanian** [32:54]: I think it's between those two choices, I would prefer to go slow and risk potentially missing the hiring plan. Because if you make that wrong hire, it doesn't matter how fast you move, you've cost yourself time, in my opinion. Look, it's a balance. But look, at the end of the day, if someone comes to me and they're like, Hey, I know I've been sitting on this open head count for three months. I have someone. I'm not that excited about them. I think they could maybe grow into, like, a solid B player. I'm never gonna say hire that person. I'm just not going to do it, even if it risks the hiring plan. **Harry Stebbings** [33:25]: I met a founder yesterday, they were increasing their sales team by 200 reps in the next twelve months. And I was just like, Honestly, how many do you think will be good? And he was like, Probably 20. **Shaunt Voskanian** [33:36]: Yeah. I think it's slightly different than resigning yourself to hiring that BRC player. I think it's facing the reality that you can build the best process, you can have the best instincts. And I still come back to the little joke I made earlier, which is really figuring out if someone's great in an interview process is actually freaking hard. You have to realize that only part of the job is getting the person in. That's when it actually it really starts, where you have to figure out, do you have someone who's going to be able to grow and be successful? Or did you make a wrong hire, and do you have to do something about it? And I also think that it's not always as simple as right hire, wrong hire. I actually think most people have the potential in them. Some don't, and you might make some mishires. But a lot of people, I think, have potential. And there's so many factors that actually contribute to, are they going to be successful or not? How great is their leader? How great is the enablement? How much of a chance did you actually give them? I've got people who've gone on plan. The person I'm thinking of actually from my last company went on a performance plan and was really struggling, but we kept looking at all of their inputs. There were so many great things that they were doing, and we said, Let's focus on just coaching around the areas that are gaps. And came off of it. I'm long gone. That person is still there. Multiple promotions. One of their most successful reps. So I actually think that it's not as simple as, Did you hire the right person or the wrong person? But did you put them in an environment where they can succeed, and are you actually holding them accountable to the right things? **Harry Stebbings** [35:11]: Can I ask you, how big is your sales team today? **Shaunt Voskanian** [35:14]: We're probably pushing 500 in my whole org. That's not just sales quota carriers, but if you include some of the supporting resources, etcetera, yeah. **Harry Stebbings** [35:23]: Will sales teams be larger or smaller in the future? Is Dylan pushing you to be more efficient? **Shaunt Voskanian** [35:29]: No. I think we're kind of going the opposite. Truly, we talked a lot about efficiency in our early days, and I think now like, how much more efficient can you get? Right? You've got a half million customers you're trying to support with, I don't know, 300 quota carrying reps, whatever the number is. Like, you're pretty freaking efficient already. So I think this might be like a unique Figma thing that for us, I'm pushing, and Dylan is on board with more headcount in sales to do more of this strategic work with customers that we really are seeing great results from. I think we're going to continue investing in sales headcount. **Harry Stebbings** [36:03]: Going back to the hiring process, when you've made a mishire, what did you not see that you wish you'd seen? Like for me, one is like when I'm constantly pushed by the candidate on role and they want an increased title, And I always push it to back. I'm like, oh, they're brilliant, so of course they want to be a x. No, no. It's always the problem, and it always ends badly. What's yours? **Shaunt Voskanian** [36:24]: I think it's anything like that that suggests mercenary versus missionary. And look. We're all in sales. Like, there's little mercenary in all of us. And I get it. In some ways, we're in sales. This is kind of what the profession calls for. But it's some of my best people over the years where money wasn't the first thing that they were thinking about. Now, career growth, learning and development, different. That's very, very different to me. But I think the best people actually know that if you're prioritizing those things, the money comes. And I think, in fact, some of the people who've been the best earners that I've been around in the past ten years, they haven't been the ones that were focused on, I gotta maximize my W2. And in fact, I've seen people who, when they're chasing that, it goes the other direction. So, that probably is my answer. I think there needs to be a passion for growth, for career acceleration, for learning development, for collaboration, people who want to just get better. The growth mindset, I think, is the biggest thing. And so, if people are too focused on things that aren't suggestive of growth and is more focused on the individual and this point in time thing, **Harry Stebbings** [37:37]: that's a that's a yellow flag for me. So we made this hire, and it's time for them to ramp. And I'm a I'm a founder. You're an angel investor in my company. I'm sorry. You've just probably burnt your money. But go with me on this journey. How do I ramp new reps effectively? Effectively? Take Take me me into to an an enterprise enterprise rep rep and and give me their onboarding. **Shaunt Voskanian** [37:55]: I think for an enterprise rep, one of the things we wanna do is kind of as quickly as possible, even before we teach them all the product stuff and the sales skills, which hopefully they're bringing some with them, we kind of want to get them into their account and their territory. First thing, kind of throw them into the fire on you've got one or two accounts, and these are accounts that are spending a lot. There's so much work to be done. Before you came in, likely there was another rep that was working on it, or the manager or director is talking to them. Let's get you engaged. Let's just get you building relationships and learning that business. And then, I would say, after a couple of weeks, they've gone through, they've got their laptop, they understand what account they have, they've maybe been on a few calls where they've listened in, now we want to get them into a proper onboarding. And the way we think about that is, what are the things that this rep needs to know to be really good at their job? A strat rep, in this example, they better understand the landscape really well. So they need to know the product, obviously, in our platform, but even more so, what is happening in tech around our ecosystem? **Harry Stebbings** [39:05]: Do you create a playbook for them on that? Is it like, here's a file of flats. Go learn it. This is **Shaunt Voskanian** [39:11]: To be honest with you, we're rebuilding this right now. What we're talking about right now, we're rolling out. We actually did this week. We're doing our soft launch of the new version of it. But that is what we are striving toward. It's very much like a We're also moving to classroom style, in person. And in the COVID days, we kinda got away from that. But we're going back to classroom style. We're going back to in person. We're bringing in the thought leaders across the organization, across these different pillars. And, absolutely, we're gonna educate them on, this is what's happening in the tech ecosystem. These are the different players that your customers are going to be thinking about, potentially using. Here's our positioning in that conversation. Here is what our best customers are doing. Here are the things you need to understand about the product. And then, of course, here is our sales process. They need to understand our sales process, beginning to end, all of the resources that are available to them along the way, all of the things that we're going to do to help them, pipeline reviews, forecast calls, the operating rhythm that we've built here. So it's taking them through all of those things. Again, once they've got a little bit of footing underneath them, and then it's ongoing enablement. It's something new happened in the market. How do we make sure the whole team is educated on it? So we have recurring enablement stand ups that we do where it's like, okay, something new happened, whether it's a product launch on our side or something launched in the ecosystem that we think is important to keep people updated on. **Harry Stebbings** [40:33]: What sales communications platform are you on? When you think about you as a team and there's an update in the market, is it Slack? Is it email? How do you ensure synchronicity of knowledge across teams? **Shaunt Voskanian** [40:44]: I think, honestly, we have work to do there. I think if you talk to our reps, it's one of the things they'd complain about. If I'm being completely honest, we have improvement to do there because we kind of use it all. We have our sales enablement platform. Then, of course, we have Slack, our Slack is as noisy as a lot of the other companies that get to our scale. We are doing things in person. We are doing things on Zoom. We have content everywhere. And again, we have so many customer stories that they end up in multiple systems. And of course, have our I didn't even mention our CRM, that I think we have more work to do to make searchability better across all of these different places, or to just say, look, we're going to take a different approach, and we're going to have everything go to one place and have a singular approach. So I'm being honest, we don't have that solved yet. **Harry Stebbings** [41:33]: How do you think about pushing the boundaries of sales technology adoption within the team? Like, again, Jason's one of my best buddies. He is so versed on Qualified, Momentum, Artisan, all the different providers. Do you worry that you're too focused on execution, that you don't pull your head up enough to invest in the future of sales tools? **Shaunt Voskanian** [41:56]: I do worry about it, if I'm being honest. Like, that is not something that has been top of mind for me historically. I've been much more focused on the inputs. What are we doing every single day? Getting better ourselves, the conversations we're having with our customers. So to your point, just in these last few weeks and months, I've been much more passionate about where can we invest more in either agentic solutions or exciting tech that can make some of this stuff easier. It just comes back to, I wanna make the job of our reps easier. It's very clear where they're really happy and where there's frustrations. I think every company, you're going to have both. And I think the frustrations on our side right now would be from the fact that there's a lot on their plates. And I think if we can leverage some of these new technologies to remove some of the friction on the duplication of data entry and those types of things, I think it's not a hard thing to do that will make a meaningful impact. **Harry Stebbings** [42:52]: I don't mean this badly. Do you think you and the team are equipped to train agents in the way that they're needed to be trained? Again, I go back to Jason. Jason is so good now at training agents, and he assumes that everyone else is. I don't know many sales reps that are that versed in how to train the next generation of sales agents. **Shaunt Voskanian** [43:13]: Yeah. I don't know. I don't know that we are. We we will need to explore and figure out if we're capable. And if not, we're gonna have to, you know, learn how to bring in more resources and knowledge on that subject. It's certainly not something that I'm an expert at personally. **Harry Stebbings** [43:26]: This is why consulting businesses will do very well in the next few years, my friend. Seriously, implementation and adoption, I think, will be one of the biggest things that you can learn and improve on as as a company. You mentioned sales performance and hot takes there. What are the hot takes around sales performance? I'd love to hear those. **Shaunt Voskanian** [43:41]: Probably my hottest take on sales performance, which is not a new thing I've said this for a very long time is I don't care if you, as a rep, hit your quota or not. And what I mean by that is, first and foremost, similar to the discussion we're having before, I've been in situations consistently where we're doing our best to set a quota based on that philosophy. Right? I just shared our philosophy right now is to try to do aggressive ones, really reward people. I've been in other situations where it's, hey, we're focused a little bit more on efficiency based on the job to be done. Whatever the philosophy is, I've been in situations multiple times in my career where the year starts going and you realize you didn't actually get it right. And that could be in either direction. You set them too high. Oftentimes, you set them too low. Whatever. Compared to what you expected, I think of quota as both something that's more systemic than something that is entirely on the individual. Also, the other reasons for this is I just think it's too much of a lagging indicator, and what my fear is, it creates lazy leadership if we're performance managing based on the idea that someone got to their number or didn't get to their number at the end of a month, quarter, or year. If you're a strat rep, we don't really know how to judge you until the year is over. If you have one account and you're building towards this big renewal at the end of the year, from a quarter perspective- So **Harry Stebbings** [45:04]: then how do we judge people? If it's not on quota, how do we **Shaunt Voskanian** [45:06]: judge I am obsessed with behaviors and competencies as the core facets of a performance framework. **Harry Stebbings** [45:14]: Okay. Then how do we make that specific, behaviors and competencies? **Shaunt Voskanian** [45:18]: You write it out. So we have written out and by the way, it's probably, if I'm being honest, maybe too detailed. But one of the first things that we did is we wrote out a performance framework. We said, by the way, Quotas part of it. There's a results category, and I'm not dismissing Quotas entirely. But there's a results bucket, and that's just one bucket. And that is not just results from a quota perspective. It's PG. It's all the success metrics that we are tracking. And then behaviors. And we documented what does that mean. And then competencies, we documented all of the competencies that we actually care about. **Harry Stebbings** [45:53]: Can we just dig in? What what is behaviors and competencies, though? Because if you have curious and ambitious dude, I can be curious and ambitious and sign no contracts. **Shaunt Voskanian** [46:00]: Yeah. Well, I mean, I think the behaviors one is is probably a little bit simpler and straightforward. It's how are you showing up? Are you collaborative? Are you lone wolfing it, just looking out for yourself? Are you collaborating with your teammates? Do you have a growth mindset? Are you someone who's negative constantly in the office and impacting the people around you? So, I mean, there's some basic things there. Competencies, which I think are the most critical, those are, Hey, if these are the things that we've defined as important for you to be good at your job day to day, what are they? So that's the ability to do PG effectively. That's the ability to do discovery effectively when you're talking to a customer. The ability to actually manage your pipeline effectively, leveraging our medic framework. When you're doing discovery, we teach comm. We call it Figma value selling. But are you leveraging our methodology when you're doing discovery? So it's all of those details. And then back to just quickly the point around the hot take on quota. Where I come back to is, if someone says, Hey, this person is not doing well. The first thing I'll ask is, Why? And if they say, Well, they didn't hit their quota, I'll immediately go, Okay, well, let's talk about why they didn't. And let's get into those competencies, and let's get into those behaviors. And if someone says, Well, actually, this person's totally busting their butt, and they're grinding. They've got amazing work ethic. They've got a great attitude. Every day, they're trying to get a little bit better. And oh, by the way, their PG is really good. It's just taken some time. It's not translating. When I listen to their calls, they're executing calls really, really well. Pipeline is being developed. It just hasn't translated to their number yet. My argument is, if you're gonna move that person out of the business, what are you hoping to get to take that person's place? **Harry Stebbings** [47:50]: I get you. But if you're doing PG really well and you're doing qualification really well and you're showing up to the cause, you will convert. **Shaunt Voskanian** [47:58]: I agree, with the exception of what if we got it wrong? What if we got the quota wrong? What if we set it too high? And that happens. It truly does. And I agree with you, Harry, but we're trying to manage things at scale. And what I don't want is to create a culture of lazy leadership. I want leaders to be in the details. I want leaders to not be talking about, Well, I gotta move this person out because they didn't hit their quota. I want them to say, It's because this person isn't showing up right. Like, they're they're not working hard. They're not capable of, you know, translating our enablement into conversation, because that tells me the leader is in the boat with the rep. You know, they're not lagging indicators. They're they're more real time. **Harry Stebbings** [48:39]: I'm a lone wolf, but I make a lot of money, and I close. And I'm not bad for the culture, but I'm not collaborative, and I'm not a team player. You got a problem with me? **Shaunt Voskanian** [48:48]: I think that there's a place for that, honestly. And I know some great reps who you would probably define that way. And actually, when you talk to them about it, they don't even want it. It's not like they're proud of being a lone wolf. It's just that this is how they're wired. The job means something different for everyone. So I don't really have a problem with it, and I think I've actually seen people who are categorized that way, where once you talk to them and you say, hey, buddy, like, you're great, but you know that, like, some people are defining you as a lone wolf. Is that how you wanna be known? And they go, oh, shit. No. I didn't even know. That's what people thought of me. Thank you for the coaching. And there's others who, they're like, you know what? I'm going to be a lone wolf, but I promise I'm not going to poison any Wells. I'm not aspiring to be a leader. I just want to do my thing, make money, and be successful. And I think that's also perfectly okay, as long as it's not negatively impacting others. **Harry Stebbings** [49:42]: That's one thing that I've really learned. I've allowed bad apples to persist because they've made money, and I've forgotten how damaging it is to the rest of the apples. **Shaunt Voskanian** [49:51]: That a different situation. That is a problem. And I think you can't move fast enough in those situations. And we've seen them. We've had those experiences. Multiple companies I've been at, you can never move fast enough is my opinion. I will say, sometimes, I don't know that they know. Even in those situations, starting with giving feedback and coaching, I think sometimes you'll find that people are like, Oh, wow. I didn't realize I was coming across that way. Other times, it's very apparent, and it is more malicious. So I still feel like you give the feedback, give the coaching, but then it's still persisting. You have to make a move. **Harry Stebbings** [50:26]: We were kind of aligned, actually, in what we were saying around quota. And you said, well, like, sometimes you just set the wrong quota. **Shaunt Voskanian** [50:32]: Mhmm. **Harry Stebbings** [50:33]: You're advising another sales leader or me, a founder of an early stage company around how to set quotas effectively, pretty hard to do, thumb in the air. I think it could be this. What would your advice or lessons be around effective quota setting? **Shaunt Voskanian** [50:46]: I think it's start with what are you trying to accomplish in what you're trying to do with your sales team. And be really honest about where your business is right now. And is the market pulling you? Are you pulling the market? I think it starts with those things. And if where you're ending up is, Hey, we have an opportunity. We love what we're doing, but we have to push it to the market, and we have to do that in a very proactive, strategic, outbound way, and we need x type of people to do that, then index towards giving people more favorable quotas to entice great people to come in and do that kind of hard work, and you're going to reap the benefits of it. If you're in a position where the market's moving so fast and there's so much market pull and you're just trying to figure out how to keep up with it and its job is more transactional at the time, then you probably want to build in some safety nets and focus more on the efficiency pendulum. I think it starts with what are you trying to solve for? **Harry Stebbings** [51:48]: How do you determine when enough is enough and when the rep's not performing? Is it better to fire fast and make the decision, or is it actually better to give people more time? **Shaunt Voskanian** [51:59]: I think it depends on where their challenges are. And again, I am generally pretty patient. If you tell me someone's working really hard, and they're improving, and they have a growth mindset, and the tools are there, it's just not quite coming together yet, I generally tend to be more patient. Because again, I'm always thinking about, At scale, I need hundreds of people, right? What is the alternative to this person who's busting their butt and getting better every day and has the desire to win and seems to have the aptitude and it's just taking time? Like you said, if you hire 200 people, maybe 40 of them are good. It's hard to find great people, and I think those characteristics are really fundamental in what great people look like. If the problems are different than that, if they're, like we talked about, they're bad seeds or they're not working hard, they're complaining, those types of things, then I think you have to move much faster. I have super high bar impatience for the people that are doing all the right things but it's not clicking yet, and I have a very low bar for the people who are not exhibiting the will because that's just so I feel like it's so in our individual control. You might not be able to control the quota. You might not be able to control, did we give you the right enablement or not? But you can control your attitude and how you show up every day. And if that is not there, I have no patience. **Harry Stebbings** [53:19]: Final one for you, dude, before we do a quick fire. I believe in verticalized sales teams a lot. I think specialization and focus drives efficiency and outcomes. What would be your biggest advice to founders or sales leaders on when and how to verticalize sales teams effectively? **Shaunt Voskanian** [53:34]: I think focus and specialization, no question, as early as possible, in my opinion. Now, if we're talking about verticalization, that by definition, peeling off specific industries and focusing people in a subset of types of customers, I think that is, again, highly dependent on the product, the platform that you're selling. So I can tell you at Figma, we, to this day, have not actually done any type of industry based teams, but what we have done is we thought about sales motions, personas that we're selling to, and creating In some cases, it's been trial and error, but some overlay teams. You may know we acquired a company called Weavee not that long ago, and the way we're going to market with that product right now is is in a little bit more of like an overlay motion. And what we're coming back to is, like, what are you asking one person to do? And is it too much? You have to just make the call. At the point where it's too much for one person, you have to think about how do you create more specialization. And that might be segmentation, it might be verticalization, it might be overlay, you name it. But that's where I always come back to, is like, are we asking reps to do too much? And too much means understand the product, the vision, the landscape, PG, manage deals, etcetera. One of the equations will be, if we're then asking them to go master a new persona or a different type of motion, that might be too much. But I think it depends on on each organization. **Harry Stebbings** [55:01]: Dude, we're gonna do a quick fire. I say a short statement, and you give me your immediate thoughts. Does that sound okay? Okay. Which sales org, other than your own, do you most respect and why? **Shaunt Voskanian** [55:11]: Datadog. I mean, I did work there, so I maybe cheated a little bit. But they have been able to keep great people there for years and years and years. They really believe in promoting from within. And they're another one of those few companies where they've kind of mastered all the segments, SDR, to very, very strategic. **Harry Stebbings** [55:30]: What is an outdated sales tactic? No longer is relevant. Sending gifts? Sending gifts? Yeah. You don't think that still plays? **Shaunt Voskanian** [55:39]: I mean, I've never understood it, to be honest with you. I think I have, like, a pile of GIFs that are sitting in some office in San Francisco that I don't occupy right now for me. But, like, it just feels so transparent to me. It's called a bribe. Yeah. Like, I don't it just feels to me. I don't I don't get it. Could it work? Maybe. Doesn't feel right to me. Are **Harry Stebbings** [55:59]: remote sales teams dead? **Shaunt Voskanian** [56:01]: Are they dead? No. Are they harder? I think so. It just puts a lot more pressure on the system, I think, if it's fully remote. But are they dead? I don't think so. I honestly think if you go completely the other direction, I think you're probably keeping yourself from being able to hire some really talented people that they've moved to cities where they're not gonna they have families now. They're not gonna go to New York. They're not going to go somewhere else. So I do think it puts more pressure on leadership, for sure. I don't think it's dead, or you're missing out on some real talent. **Harry Stebbings** [56:32]: What was **Shaunt Voskanian** [56:32]: your biggest **Harry Stebbings** [56:33]: regret, and why that? **Shaunt Voskanian** [56:35]: I try to not live with a lot of regrets. I will say, going back to my early days at Figma, I feel like I had it in my head that I really wanted to come in and not be the guy who's just coming in hot, trying to change something I didn't know anything about. And so I probably went maybe too much the other direction in terms of too much time observing, trying to understand the culture that existed. And that's not to say we didn't start implementing some things quickly, but I think I maybe overdid that. It's not a regret, but I think looking back on it, I think it's something that I maybe would have approached slightly differently. **Harry Stebbings** [57:16]: Final one. I like optimism. I'm a positive dude. What are you most excited for in the next ten years? Personally or in It can be anything. So like for me, mom's got MS. I'm very excited about drug discovery for kind of rare diseases or kind of maybe chronic illnesses. Think that's super exciting. **Shaunt Voskanian** [57:33]: Well, and we could take this offline, but I had health things surrounding me, and I feel very similarly. I'm always I don't know if it's real or fake, but I'm always reading stuff about the advances that are happening with AI medicine. I'm very optimistic that that's one of the really good things that's going to come out of this new wave of technology. So I've got kids. They're nine and seven. I feel like I've got maybe five years where I'm still, and their mom are still, the most important people in their lives. I really, really want to do my best to enjoy that and just be in it with them. So that, I'm interested in obviously continuing to grow this team. And I'm really excited about the future and just how the landscape is evolving and where we're positioned in it. So there's lot a of things I'm really excited about. **Harry Stebbings** [58:25]: It's fascinating. By the time your kids are 18, they've spent 92% of the time they will have I **Shaunt Voskanian** [58:30]: know. I've seen that. **Harry Stebbings** [58:31]: It's appalling, isn't it? **Shaunt Voskanian** [58:32]: It hurts me, and it's really scary. And I'm always are you trying to be so in it? And I think I am, but then I'm always asking myself if I could've done better, and I think that just comes with the territory. **Harry Stebbings** [58:45]: You know what? The older I get, the more I think we need to forgive our parents for their errors. Oh my gosh. No one really knows what they're doing. **Shaunt Voskanian** [58:54]: Oh my gosh. 100%. 100%. And my my parents, you know, were trying to make ends meet. And to their credit, I look back at my childhood, and I thought it was wonderful. You know? And and and there was plenty of drama mixed in, but they did the best that they could. And and that's all you can ask for. **Harry Stebbings** [59:12]: Dude, thank you so much for being so brilliant. Thank you so much for putting up with my inquisitive questions and meandering thoughts. **Shaunt Voskanian** [59:18]: Dude, you're amazing. The curiosity is incredible. And just a privilege to be on the show to to get to meet you, to, you know, be amongst all of the other really brilliant people that you've had the chance to speak to. So thank you. **Harry Stebbings** [59:32]: But before we leave you today, ## Sponsor read **Harry Stebbings** [59:34]: a quick shout out to a company I've been genuinely blown away by and have been tracking closely, Rox. I've been watching this team closely and the speed they're operating at and the level of applied AI talent they've assembled, it's honestly remarkable. Rox is pioneering revenue agents for the global 2,000, plugged into your data warehouse and CRM, and delivering board level ROI in just ninety days. These sales and revenue agents handle the end to end sales process for large enterprises from research prep to deal risk, outreach, and opportunity management, So sellers spend more time with customers and less time in tools. This isn't another productivity app. Christ, we've all had enough of those. 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