20Sales: What is Sales Engineering? When and How to Hire Them? How They Should Work With AE's? How to Measure Their Success? How They Change Close Rates and Sales Comp Plans with Zach Lawryk, Head of Solutions Consulting @ Rippling

So I think what has changed and what has broken about most sales organizations today is they're still trying to sell like they're in control of that process. When the truth is they're not, the buyer isn't controlled the process. And it's more about buyer enablement than it's about selling anymore. We are back and welcome to 20 sales with me Harry stepings. Now in the show today, we discuss something we've never discussed before, but so crucial to so many sales teams, sales engineering. We discuss what sales engineers are, how they fit into the team, how to measure their success and how they work best with AES and joining us is the OG of sales engineering, Zach Loric, head of solutions consulting at Ripling. Prior to leading the solutions consulting team at Ripling, Zach was VP of solutions consulting at Slack where he scaled the SE team from 10 to 200 and before Slack, Zach was head of solutions engineering at Optimizely and before Director of Sales Engineering at Box. I do also want to say huge thank you. This was all down to Maggie Hart for the intro and some amazing questions. Questions today, but before we dive into the episode today, finding your next customer is hard, but it doesn't have to be. If you're wondering how to drive more revenue and finally accounts, then looking for your solution right now, zoom info is the answer. Zoom info handles the full revenue pipeline from marketing to sales, even ops, all based on the number one ranked business data. It's a single best way for B2B professionals to find their next customer, close their next deal and streamline their operations. Best of all, it's all in one place. So your revenue teams can collaborate easily and close deals faster. Customers include the likes of Snowflake, workday paypal, drop boss and thousands of startups and growing companies. Now 30,000 customers and growing and zoom info is making their go to market playbook available for free for anyone to try. 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Yeah, well, I'm happy to be here, humbled to be included and it's an honor. Not at all, this is a very special 20 sales app. So now I want to start with a little bit of contact. So tell me, how did you make your way into the world of sales? How did you make your way into the world of solutions engineering? And most recently, end up at the wonder that is rippling. So long story short, I started university with the idea that I was going to complete a computer science degree as 1999 right before the bubble burst. That was the best way or the best path to making great money. Halfway through it, I realized I didn't want to spend all my time in the lab because that was most of the initial course for a computer science degree. I pivoted and said I'm going to be a lawyer. So I did political science instead, but never got away from technology. I always love the intersection of business and technology. And frankly, I stumbled into technology sales. I started a company in college. I had no idea what I was doing, but was sort of on the business and technology side. I worked for a company that got me to San Francisco. I luckily got a job at Salesforce. I knew nothing about the company. knew nothing about the job was just happy to get paid a little bit more than what I was paid previously. And long story short, I'm in a training room. I started my job at Salesforce. I was like a premier support person basically. So I had a set of accounts. I was the Salesforce expert help them set up their Salesforce instance and manage it. On one side of the room, there were the technical support people like myself. On the other side of the room, there were sales engineers. The sales engineer side of the room was having a lot more fun than I was. And I looked across the room and I said I wonder what that job is about. It looks like they're having a lot more fun than we are. We're taking this so seriously. Long be old. It's true. It was a much more fun and rewarding career. And I never looked back. That was like around 2006. I interviewed for my first SE job. I didn't get it the first time. I demoed. They said you're going to need to do that again. That was pretty bad. The second time around, they said that was okay. Come on and board. I've never been more excited about getting a job. Can I just define some normal creature for anyone that doesn't know? How does a sales engineer differ from a sales rep? So the sales engineer or solutions consultant or pre-sales consultant, there are a lot of different words these days. Any solution consultant is the proper term. We are a product expert, an expert in the solutions that tie to business value to help support the sales rep and the execution of their quota. Got you. That was fantastically succinct. But I want to ask you, you spend time at obviously sales. Well, as you mentioned there. But also Slack, where you worked with many incredible people, Maggie being one of them. Incredibly tough question. But if you were to take away a single biggest takeaway from each of those experiences that really impacted your mindset, what would be one from each? I would say also while I worked at some really successful companies, there are some companies that didn't live up to expectations. And I've learned just as much from those experiences as I did from Slack, Salesforce and Box. And now I would say the common denominator is I've always followed great people. That is a good proxy for understanding whether or not the company is going to be successful and is on the right trajectory. It's the quality of people you're surrounded with. And that's the comedy that I've followed throughout my career. Did you know they were super high quality straight away? One of the biggest mistakes I make in hiring. I fool for people who are good at selling themselves and then they're not actually that high quality. And then actually some people acquire it, but really high quality. And I miss them often. I think about the advice that I give the folks earlier in their career. You go to some place where you're surrounded by people that are smarter than you, but also people whom with you think you can collaborate effectively. Because the people that you work with are really what make every single day tolerable. It's all about the people. It doesn't matter how fast the company is growing, how great the technology is, how big the total addressable market. If you don't feel like you're learning from the people that you're surrounded with, then you're in the wrong spot. Now, I want to dig deeper on the sales industry itself. I kind of deconstruct different parts. But if we start on the sales industry itself, I spoke to Maggie before. And she told me that I should ask this one as a starting point. What is broken about sales today, Zach? Broadly speaking, most technology sales organizations are selling the same way they were 20 years ago. We've got to do some deep discovery with you. We're controlling access to resources, controlling the sales process. It's a very seller-centric approach, which I think is totally broken. The way things have shifted, and this began before COVID, but it was accelerated with COVID, and the fact that we're all staring at 16 different screens on a daily basis, is that attention spans have dwindled. And I don't know, have you ever purchased software before? Many times. Yeah, it's not an easy experience. And it's not very fun. You can imagine when somebody is trying to withhold information from you, it also makes that experience far worse. So I think what has changed, and what has broken about most sales organizations today, is they're still trying to sell, like they're in control of that process. When the truth is, they're not. The buyer isn't controlled the process, and it's more about buyer enablement than it's about selling anymore. Kenneth, is that really the case still when you see the rise of PLG, when you see the, hey, have a play? It is the consumers option to go deeper. It is the consumers option to buy more and engage with the enterprise team. Is that still the case that it's so seller-centric? I think PLG is a really fancy word these days, and there are a lot of people that kind of use that term loosely. But at the end of the day, it's a great way to get exposure to a product in a self-service fashion. People still want to talk to people, but they want to talk to people on their terms. So Forester has this concept of sense-making. What's the term they use that it applies to modern, complex selling? And I really like it because it's what it's really about is, your job is not to sell something to somebody. Your job is to help your buyer make sense of a really increasingly complex world. And that's what I think selling is all about. It is seller-centric in the sense that you're addressing the seller's needs and you're considering what they need and what they're trying to accomplish. But they still need your help and guidance to make sure they're making the right decision and making sense of all this information that's out there. Is outbound dead? Because in terms of sense-making, you have to get them through a certain stage of the funnel to get to sense-making. It's traditional outbound dead, do you think? I don't think outbound is dead. I think outbound is just fundamentally changed in terms of the methods that you need to use to engage prospects. And you have to take like a multi-channel approach to that. And it's as simple as creating different forms of content to capture people's attention and the way that they consume information today. Tick-tock style approach to selling. You and I, we're going to get off this podcast or whenever you take a break and really look at your phone and consume about 16 different pieces of content and articles and probably read half of those articles. We don't have time to consume long-form content in the way that we did. But we're selling as if people have time to read these elaborate emails. We've got to capture their attention where they are and where their brain process is information. What I think too straightaway that when you say that, though, is the blurring lines between sales and marketing. I see marketing now easing up so much more of the sales funnel where, bluntly, the prospect knows that they want to buy rippling very quickly in the process because they've been sold the content, the story, the vision. Before they've ever engaged with a rap, do you agree with me in terms of this blurring of sales and marketing? And how do we see the future of sales as a result of that complete blurring? That's a really good point. And that's why I see, especially in my world, where the solutions engineering function was predominantly a really guarded function or resource. Where you couldn't even talk to somebody on my team 10 years ago, unless you've gone through an hour discovery call and you've been well-qualified. We're starting to encroach earlier in the process. And that's okay. We want our team to develop content that will be consumed earlier in the process. So we're creating things like short-form videos and demo vignettes and slides that are easier to consume in new formats in a way that helps the customer educate themselves earlier in that process. So by the time they get to us, we're very well aligned on what they're trying to do, what they're trying to accomplish. It makes our jobs easier, more precise, and more valuable. And it makes the buying experience much more enjoyable as well and effective. Is there really a solution to opening up you and your colleagues so earlier in the process? Because you are a much more valuable resource that is constrained in terms of availability. If I'm your CEO, I couldn't put you front and center or much more available because we don't have the resources or bandwidth. Yeah, and that's where, especially now, we have to think about scale. We think about what we do on a weekly basis, how we're engaging with customers and how we might productize some of those engagements in a way that can be scaled earlier in the process. So it's not us physically getting on a call with the customer earlier. It's us creating content and messaging and solution material that can be leveraged earlier in a sales process. But we don't have to get involved directly when we do it at scale. You mentioned the word scale there a couple of times. You've worked with and mentored many early stage tech companies and startups in terms of sales and product market fit. You said before to me that in sales and product market fit, it isn't as hard as many technical founders make it. Naturally, I was incredibly inquisitive but also going tell me more. So tell me more of that. Why isn't it as hard as many technical founders make it? Yeah, it always boggles my mind and I was thinking about this morning as well. I think it's because the process of starting a company developing a product is a very personal journey. You're really wrapped up in yourself and you sometimes don't take the time to empathize with the actual customers that you're selling the solution to. So when I tried to mentor folks or earlier stage companies that have no sales expertise or background, think about who you were actually to sell this product to. Matt out their pains and gains. It was a Marty Kagan. Is that the guy that you just had on the pot? Yeah, so he said something and I was listening to this yesterday in the car. He kind of alluded to the concept of these business value canvases. It's a really empathetic exercise that anybody can walk through where they identify who their customers as an individual and a business person. The pains that customer has, the gains your product potentially can provide. And you essentially you connect your potential customer with your product and solution and essentially just try to map what your solution does to the outcomes that your customer is trying to achieve. That's a vast over simplification there but it is a really powerful exercise to walk through. And you imagine the power if you actually have that sort of visual in your head as you're developing your product and talking to customers and talking to investors makes things a lot easier. How do you think about the challenge of multiple buyers? And what I mean by that is especially today we're seeing CFOs become a lot more involved in buying decisions across every different software product that the teams are buying. How do you think about the challenge of incorporating suddenly multiple different buyers including the CFO? Yeah, I think it's a healthy forcing function. We're all scared about the current macroeconomic climate. Particularly in sales. Now we're forced to really think about how we're going to sell this if a CFO is scrutinizing every detail. Having the CFO involved is always tough but it forces you to think about true ROI. Dollar Eyes ROI, which is not always easy. Especially for early stage founders that should be an exercise that they go through. If you had a CFO come into this conversation and had to justify the spend on this amongst all the other software that they're purchasing or investing in, how would you do it? So that same exercise where you would identify a primary buyer you could do the same thing for every potential buyer or influencer as a part of the process. And if that's the case, it's something that's required necessary. The idea to think of these shows is like metaphorical discussions where you're an angel and an advisor to me as an early stage founder because we have so many founders that listen. When we think about solutions engineering and structuring our team today, why do we need solutions consultants, solutions engineers, fundamentally? What does their need first? There's two things. One is it's a highly technical product that requires new expertise. Oftentimes you can't have the same person be the account executive who also is going to go to that level depth of the customer. There are some solutions where very early on, you just have to have a technical expert on every call because it's that detail and that technical product or solution. On the other hand, if you're competing in a market where you're competing sales teams have a solutions engineer or consultant as part of the sales team's composition, that's when you have to think earlier about adding a solutions consultant to your team as well because part of what we do is provide that deep expertise, solution expertise, presentation, differentiation through process and approach. But also, it's a competitive differentiator in how you approach a sales cycle and how you appear to a customer. And if you show up and you're there's only an AU who's trying to handle this end-to-end and you're competing for a large ACV or a dollar amount, it's really difficult to compete without the right resources in place. And what size dollar ACV does it make sense to really have your solutions engineer, solutions consultant as part of the process? It depends on the volume. I mean, I just talked to a CEO yesterday. We were talking about the ideal AU to SE ratio and his average ACV was about like 35k. But it's all about how many opportunities you think your A's can manage and how many opportunities you need your SCs to help manage. And then you think about the win rate and if it converts and it's worth the investment that you're making that additional resource. When SCs sit in the stack also with then customer success because you've got A's and then SCs that then move to customer success, is there a handholding process between SCs and customer success to ensure the smooth integration and the A's leave at some point? How does that work considering customer success as well? In an ideal world, yes, there's a perfect handoff. There's also a modern movement for SCs to take on more of that responsibility. Surely customer success isn't technical enough in a lot of ways to suddenly manage to process from an SC who's done incredible work, got them to that stage. They've been impressed by the depth of knowledge and then you hand over to CS who I'm sure is fantastic. But they won't have the depth that you have and it's almost like a letdown. Yeah, that's the modern movement. I think Frank Slutman and the idea that he doesn't want to have customer success at any of his. But I think what he's really saying is that he wants the sales team to take more responsibility for the success of a customer. It's not that they don't have CSMs in the traditional sense but that they have more responsibility to sell good deals so that the customer doesn't churn. When you extend the solutions consultant deeper in the sales process or even post sales and ensures customer success. And early on, I would say a company of less than 50 people that your SC is going to take on more of that responsibility and that's good. It's healthy. So A's are often associated with being coin-operated, being very financially driven and incentivized, whether we agree or not, a lot of their comp is based around closing customers and closing dollars. When you have an SE in the room, it may sell life a lot easier and it takes a lot of weight off them. How does that impact comp for sales reps? And does that mean the comp is then in the hands of the SE? How does comp change when incorporating an SE into the process? If you're going to invest in SE resources, you're going to have larger quotas for the A's, for sure. Because the idea is you have to believe that by adding additional resources to the equation that they'll be able to execute on a much larger quota at the same rate with additional SE resources. And the SEs are from an SE-com perspective should always have a variable component. You want them to have some skin in the game, but there's less risk involved. Typically, you've got the A was 50/50 base, 50 variable, and the SE in an ideal world is 70/30. And you want the SE, in my opinion, to have as much skin in the game as possible and be connected to the same number as the sales executive, because they need to have a shared destiny and they need to be considered sales people as well, in my opinion. When should we hire our first? Often we hear about hiring the first, sales are happening two by two. When do we hire the first SE? On average, across a wide variety of products. When you get to about five to seven reps, because you're starting your first sales team, you probably need to hire more capable, multi-faceted A's for the first five. But then you get to a point where they can't be handling all the demos and handling all the follow-up and handing all the technical details and solutioning. You're going to achieve scale by adding another sort of central resource that'll five to one ratio, who can get scale beyond and handle some of the back-op of stuff as well. A great example I joined a company called Get Satisfaction Long Go. I was the first SE and I think we had about five or seven reps or so. So if we use that as a start point, we now know where SEs sit in the process. We know when to hire them. I need to hire them now. I got five to seven and you're going to help me hire my first. Thank you so much. How do I structure the hiring process for an SE? It's pretty simple. There's something that we did at Slack, which we haven't yet implemented at Ripley. I'm not sure if we will, which is sort of a chronological interview. And it seems like it's a lot of time to spend, but we would spend an hour and a half going through a person's background, job by job to understand their motivations, why they joined a company, why they left the company, especially if you're in a lot of interviews. It's really difficult to get to know somebody and really get to know their motivations and the work they've done. And whether or not their resume is actually reflective of the impact that they've had over time. That's not just you need to SEs, but that's something we did. And I thought it was really effective and helped us get to know and hire really great people from basically zero to 200. And then you also want to have an opportunity for the demonstrate the craft because there's very much part art and science in this role. Deep expertise is important, but what's also important and what makes SEs the most successful is if they are also great presenters and can articulate value. So you need to give them an opportunity to do that. Can I ask, in terms of demonstrating the craft, the thing I find really hard is, if they demonstrate a product that you don't know so well, you'll just be easier to impress. But if you get them to demonstrate your product, you know it so well, you'll automatically think less of them. How do you get them to demonstrate their product in a neutral environment where they have a fair chance? That's an age-old question, Harry. Ultimately, where I stand today, is you get them to demonstrate your product and understand the value prop better than any button, like you understand the target customer. You just have to do so with the understanding that it's not going to be the best demo of your product that you've ever seen. But you have to understand how to measure for competency or evaluate for competency as a release to that. So what we do and what I've done in the past is you give them a stripped-down scenario, something that would be easy for any technologist to grok but helps them demonstrate whether or not they can connect value to what your product does. And I think it can be structured in a way that's fair to anybody and fair to the right candidate. Who do you have in that demonstration? What parts of the org is it just you? Who else is in that? I usually have a panel. So it's myself, depending on how many people we have involved, you want to have the hiring manager, potentially front someone from the sales side if they have the time and scale, because it's always great when you hire a new SC to have endorsement from sales counterpart to say this person's great and another SC or SC manager. Do you have problems with traditional sales or apps in terms of people thinking stepping on their toes, feeling a little bit of encroachment in terms of their role and how SCs play into it? Yes, especially when you hire the first one. Or especially at a company that has grown up from very quickly. You've had a lot of capable reps who've done all of what SCs are doing and perhaps more because they had to. They didn't have those resources in the past. And it's something that just takes some time to work out of. You have to help those folks understand the value of having additional resource and also understand the value of team selling. One thing that I think is important to understand about SCs and team selling in general, but even if both people could do the exact same thing, there's a lot of value in having just two people on a call because a prospect or customer is going to answer questions differently coming from an SC than they would from an account executive. Because they have this perception that the account executive just wants to get them to close the deal. And the SC truly cares about the business, which is true, but it's just this dynamic that continues to play out. When you are valuating SE talent in the interview process, when you review your own process, are there common questions that you ask? Are there common ways that you try to identify talent or characteristics? Over time, we've developed like a competency-based hiring model. We like to have them really talk through experiences where they have demonstrated value. The way they can articulate how they approach learning about something, taking that information and putting it into sort of presentation form and articulating the value of something. That can be really telling about whether or not they are capable and have the competencies to be really successful in the role. Another component that's critical, especially in this role is that it doesn't matter how smart or good of a presenter or how technical an SC is. If they can't work with their AE counterparts, they're never going to be successful. So we really want to make sure that they have a history of collaborating with people of all different types. And that's really important. How do you know if you're into me? Yeah, I got on great with my team. We were great friends. You got to continue to ask questions. Show me an example. Show me an example of how you dealt with conflict on the team. And that can be really telling you. Once you start to break through, everybody's got a set of prepared interview questions or retords, but you've got to ask that second, third and fourth question to continue to break through and say like, so what happened when you had a conflict? Tell me something about your job that you hate. Tell me what you really don't like about the job. Tell me what you really didn't like about the team that you worked with. Those sort of questions can be really revealing. I know there's no right or wrong answers, but there are bad answers. What's a bad answer to how you managed and handled conflict? Because everyone's going to go, "Well, I shot them." [laughter] Bad answer, and I would say thank you for your time. I'm hired. I think what's hard to hide is an SE who is generally like a very high IQ smart person, right? Sometimes they have a low tolerance for working with folks of varying levels of aptitude or experience. And that's really critical in the SE role, especially as you're onboarding in new account executives. You have to sort of be tolerant of where they are in their stage of growth. It can be really revealing to ask some questions about what happened when you dealt with somebody that didn't know what they were talking about. Or what happens when you deal with an A, who's early in their ramp? Like, how did you help them? Describes and examples. It's very easy to cut through the BS there, determine whether or not they're somebody who is tolerant and can help mentor and evolve the reps that they work with, or somebody who thinks the world themselves and is not going to be a collaborative individual. Okay, so we have that, but when I think about that, I think about the Mr. Social and then the bunny Mr. Nerd. Sorry for boxing people. But then when we think about, and this was Maggie's question, so I have to give her credit, she said, "Should we then lean towards more technical-focused people, or should we tend to lean towards more sales and charisma-focused acumen?" How do you think about that? Technical versus charisma-sales-focused? Don't think that mutually exclusive. I don't think that actually like charisma necessarily corresponds to sales actually. I think that there are a lot of folks that may not have like the traditionally-categorized charisma that have this strong sales aptitude because they think about the benefit to the customer. Like, it's all about, again, going back to value. Like, can somebody really take the time to empathize with the folks that we're selling to to understand how the technology is actually going to apply to business outcomes? And you can get a sense for sales aptitude pretty quickly. And you want to make sure that they have a blend of both. You've seen and reviewed many different hiring processes for many different sales teams and sales people. When you review them now, what are some of the biggest lessons learned from hiring hundreds of sales pros across your career now? I think the biggest lessons learned is I think as you think about building your own sales process. At every stage, you should feel like you're receiving data and information on that candidate. It's going to help you make a decision one way or the other. And especially as we get to the end of that process, however you design the presentation should be done in a way that is going to help you make an objective decision on the candidate. I say that because where I've seen it fail or fall down is we go through this process that we've designed for probably our own benefit and for the benefit of the candidate feeling like they're going through a professional process as a company, but at the end of the process we're basically just justifying your own bias. And we're just like, yeah, you know, I kind of like that person. They come from sales for us. Let's hire them. And it didn't matter how they performed or what they did. And that happens all the time, I think. It's really critical for you to, like, be really objective at the end of the process and be able to service any objections or conflict at the end to make a decision effectively. I totally agree with you in terms of getting more and more based from every interview and instance. I do want to move to post hiring process now. We've got this incredible SE with very excited to have them in our startup. I've never onboarded before though. Fuck, what's the ideal onboarding process for SEs and how do I structure it? I think pretty simply, you obviously will have some sort of product training depending on what state of growth we're at. When we were at Slack, we've sort of built it from scratch. They had some well-documented product documentation, etc. We used something called work ramp to walk a candidate through a six-week process. Where basically they have some self-service training they go through. They get exposure to a lot of customer calls. And they get a lot of exposure to the ideal customer profile as well. And the blend of both, I think, is critical. It can be done in a lot of different ways. I don't think it takes a number of months to get somebody ramps depending on the technical depth of the product. And it's very easy just to put together a product training and enable in an onboarding, customer training, enable in an onboarding. And you want them coming out, understanding and feeling confident, how to present and demonstrate the product, and confident in understanding the ideal customer profile and who the buyer is. That's interesting. So a lot of people say we should put them with customer support at some point too. They clearly understand might identify the problems. Do you see a point in putting them with customer support? If you have the time to do that, that can be a helpful way to accelerate product expertise. I just think logistically that's difficult, depending on the size. If you're a smaller company and you're hiring your first SC, I think that's a great way for them to get exposed to the kind of questions that are coming through. For sure. Would you rather an SC have experience in your market or they have experience selling that level of ACV? Which would you lean on if you could only have one? Early stage in the market. I think it's hard to make that sacrifice, especially when every hire has to ramp more quickly. When you get bigger, you have a luxury of spending more time developing talent and giving them more time to get familiar with the industry. They were saying they had a domain expertise on the market, matters more to use in their experience, selling a certain level of ACV. Yes, early stage. Because SC's job is all about credibility and you can get them comfortable selling a deal of a larger size or talking to a customer of a different stature. But if they don't have any credibility, talking to that customer is all for nothing. So having something that come in with industry credibility and expertise, I can train them more easily on the sales side than I can on the industry stuff. That is the AE's role and the SC's role and when it comes to actually closing the deal. So they bring the credibility, the product now's the technical ability. Do they then hand back to the AE to close? Do they close? How does that closing process work with SC's involved? I believe that there is the AE's responsibility to close. So we have the concept of a solution win that we work towards as SC's. Our job is to ensure that the technology aligns to what the customer is trying to accomplish from a business perspective. And depending on the product or service you offer, there are certain check boxes that you just need to check. As a valuation, sometimes that's a security questionnaire that everybody has to fill out or they have to have received the security presentation. And we would have to ensure that they have all the right requirements and technical requirements that they are a fit for the solution or product that are service that we provide. And then it is the AE's responsibility to close. It's as the AE's responsibility to close. Often close rates is how you measure success, especially for AE's. How do I measure the success of my new SC? This is my first. How do I measure if that's successful or not? This is also a very challenging question over time because there are a lot of non-correlated factors to why ANC is on a deal, right? And you could look at close rate. That's the easiest way to say that for a deals where there is an SC, we should have a higher close rate. But at the same time, an SC could be a great way to qualify deals out early stage and save us time. So we're working on the right deals at the right time. On the flip of that as well. And this is not going to be a direct answer to your question because it's a tough one. But on the flip side of that, you're typically working on deals that have a higher chance of closing because they're better qualified and warrant a more technical resource. One of the things I heard, this is actually, I heard this on a recent podcast, that I think this is the BP of SE at SolarWinds. And I really like the way he talked about this, is that he measures how the deals where they close rate of deals where they've achieved the solution win and all the things that they did to achieve said solution win is their measures for success of whether or not SCs are effective. And so we want to have more SCs on deals working towards the solution win to determine whether or not we were successful as a function. What are the biggest red flags I should look out for in the first three to six months of the SE starting? What are the signs where you're like, they're not lacking? If they can't work with their A's, that's red flag number one. Sometimes you get folks with a deep technical background who don't have a tolerance for sales people and are running into personal conflict or professional conflict. That's red flag number one. If that's not working, it's never going to work. It doesn't matter how smart the person is. Red flag number two is that especially in early stage companies, the person that you hire has to be an absolute self-starter and somebody who's both a builder and willing to work on deals. And I remember my first job as the loan at SC at guest satisfaction was I was building the demo environment so I was building all of the decks. I was working on deals. I was working with business development. You just have to be really upfront in describing that's what the job's about and people have to be excited about if they are willing to participate in all those activities and they're not going to work out. Zach, we're going to do a quick fire. I'm going to say a short statement. You're going to hit me with your immediate thoughts. Does that sound okay? Sure, let's do it. So what sales tactics have not changed over the last five years? It's all about the customer. What sales tactics have died of death? Multi-hour discovery calls. How do you define the sales playbook? I think the sports analogy still rings true. It is a tactic or strategy you apply at the appropriate time for a desired outcome. Who's the single best sales rep you've worked with? Travis Bryant. Why? Because I think that he is an essay at heart and was always very empathetic and a delight to work with as an essay. What one piece of advice would you give to a sales lead is starting a new role today? Take the time to truly understand the business outcomes you're enabling for the buyer and optimize accordingly. What's your favorite sales tool and why? I'm going to say more of like a medium. I think video is my favorite sales tool today. A synchronous video is super effective tactic for welding pipeline and engaging customers earlier in the sales process. Final one for you. What one company sales strategy have you been most impressed by recently and why? There's a company called Vivint that I think does an exceptional job. They create technology for solution consulting organization and solution consulting leaders. I think they've done an exceptional job of engaging and building a customer-centric community around their products and services. And it feels very intentional. And as much as, frankly, as much as I have resisted investing in like technology, they've done a great job of pulling me into that community and using me exposed to their products and services. Zach, I feel like I've learned a whole new kind of depth of the world of sales. Thank you for putting up with my questions. I hope they weren't too basic. But you've been incredibly patient. So I so appreciate the time, my friend. No, again, honor to be here. Big fan of yours, and I hope we can keep it touch. I absolutely love that discussion. I think Zach was brilliant there breaking down the core of YSCs is so crucial to anyone in sales team. But I also think we just need to shine more of a light on SCs and how they can be leveraged to make the best performing sales teams. But before we leave you today, finding your next customer is hard. But it doesn't have to be. If you're wondering how to drive more revenue and find the accounts than looking for your solution right now, ZoomInfo is the answer. ZoomInfo handles the full revenue pipeline from marketing to sales, even ops. All based on the number one ranked business data is the single best way for B2B professionals to find their next customer, close their next deal, and streamline their operations. Customers include the likes of Snowflake, Workday Paypal, Dropbox, and thousands of startups. And growing companies. Now 30,000 customers and growing. And ZoomInfo is making their go-to-market playbook available for free for anyone to try. So if you want to find out how you can use intent data to target key prospects, or how to revive a stool deal by expanding your buying committee outreach, head on over to zoominfo.com/20VC to see for yourself and sign up for a free trial of the ZoomInfo platform. And spare you tools we couldn't live without there. Sales loft is the leading sales engagement platform, helping sales teams drive more revenue with the modern revenue workspace. It's the one place where sales teams can go to prospect, manage, active deals, and get the insights they need to coach seller performance, forecast with accuracy, and find out what steps to take to close more deals. Find out more at salesloft.com. As always, I so appreciate all your support, and we have an incredible episode coming out on Wednesday with Kevin and Mike, co-founders of Instagram and Artifact.