How Revenue Leaders Scale Beyond Hero Sellers with Jason Forget, CRO Behind Multiple Startup-to-Scale Journeys

The number one priority of RevOps is to be the trusted advisor to the business. The trusted advisor to sales leadership. If you want to help sales leadership be great coaches and do the proper inspection and help teams prioritize, be their trusted advisor. Help them see the business. Help them view the metrics in the KPIs and be out ahead. Don't wait until you're asked why the pipeline is lumpy or why did it jump up by 100% week over week. You should inform leadership, get ahead of it, come Monday or Friday. This is where I saw in the business, here are the leading indicators that are linking red lights or green lights, whatever they are. Number one priority. Be the trusted advisor. Your job is to enable sales productivity. Welcome to the Revenue Builders Podcast, a weekly show featuring B2B's sales leaders and executives, posted by 5 times CRO, John McMahon and Force Managers. The management co-founder John Kaplan, the show takes guests in the barrel, behind the scenes with the people who've been there, done that and seen the results. Revenue Builders covers best practices for scaling and growing your business while sharing the pitfalls to avoid. Welcome to Revenue Builders with the John McMahon and John Kaplan. Today they sit down with Jason Forget, president and CRO of Cockroach Labs. Jason brings a unique perspective from his career building and leading revenue teams. He shares how his early foundation in finance, revops, process, metrics and customer facing execution, shape the way he thinks about predictable revenue growth, sales leadership and scaling behind a few heroic top performers. They talk scaling enterprise sales motions in open source and PLG environments, why sales motions have to evolve at every stage of growth and how leaders can create a stronger middle class of sellers. Here we go. So Jason, you mastered basically taking open source technologies that developers use for free, like when you were at Redis and Cockroach DB, and you turn that into developer ground swells, which really resulted in like multi-million dollar enterprise deals. Can you just talk a little bit about the methodology and how you do that? Yeah, no, definitely. It was sometimes a double edge sword in the sense that it sometimes created a false sense of security, especially with our AEs. Because on one hand you're excited, right? There's already usage. It's similar to when enterprise companies try to use PLG motions, it's very similar. It gives you this kind of false sense of like, "Oh, they love the product and it's true." They love it. They're excited. The problem is that often, you know, developers are very important and they solve important problems, but they're tactically fixing or building applications and things. They're not ultimately solving for the larger problems that organizations are trying to achieve, in terms of scaling, solving a business problem, solving a cost problem, solving things that executives think about. Yeah. Having you profitability risk. Exactly. Yeah. We were selling to a very prominent business retail or the gap in San Francisco. And the developers loved Redis and they were solving all these types of problems and everything. But we weren't getting traction and we said, "What are we trying to solve?" And what does it mean monetarily for the business? And what we found out was, it was an amazing statistic, is when you fill your shopping cart and it deletes everything in the shopping cart, 80% of people, if it empties on you, will not go back and refill the shopping cart. I don't. I don't go back. Yeah. Who would, right? Or you're just like, "Oh, you know, I'll come back later and then you don't." So you could extrapolate an 80% reduction in the shopping cart not filling times with the average shopping cart and you come up with a number and you say, "Hey, who can give me the right conversation, who got any speak to that says, what's this worth to you?" Like, if I can solve this problem for you at scale and be secure and be compliant and meet your regulatory requirements and help you sleep a night because you're not going to go down on Black Friday because I'm going to be your throat to choke. Like, all of these things was where the real magic was. So it was great to get that ground swell in that open source adoption. But you had to navigate into that conversation and have that business outcome conversation. And that's how you would get even these big deals. And that's how you get from that technical win. Let's call it because a couple of developers are using the product to, and let's call one of them as a technical champion. But they're not really a business champion, like you said. So how do you get from this technical champion to the business champion to get you up high enough where you can talk about the effect that it has on revenue and profitability? Yeah. So we would have to build ground swell within the organization, in terms of not just adoption in a singular area of the business, but in multiple groups, and building the noise within the organization to get that attention. And I always would joke with the team, we have our AEs, and I'd remind the SCs, I'm like, you know the SES, S is sales, right? It's not sitting the back and waiting for the POC. Like what lunch and learns are you doing? What are you doing out there? Like you, you got a dinner budget, take people out to dinner or lunch, like, and build that ground swell, because then we could, you know, enable our champion, our true champion, to act as a champion and get us that meeting up upstream, you know, in the organization, really develop a champion, not a cheerleader. There are a lot of cheerleaders, a lot of people that love dust, but like people that will like, we'll go do something for us to get us that introduction higher up in the organization. You said a couple things there, one, define for people what you mean by a ground swell, and then also talk about, you know, build the noise, talk about what you mean by build the noise. Yeah, sure. So the ground swell is, it's great when you have one team in a large fortune, 1000 organization using your product, but when you have like five dispersed teams all using it, that creates a ground swell in the organization, which matters. I was on a plane once and sit next to CIO of one of the large telecosen. Just coincidentally, I had on a screen a slide, it said, you know, redis is part of the architectural, So I started talking to her like, how can I help you? And she's like, my job is to get developers what they want, make sure it meets requirements, meetario and a scalable way, bring them the tools that they wanna use but do it in a way that is secure, compliant meets regulatory requirements so I'm in a NAB el eer. So when I can raise the ground swell, it's goin over here, it's hear, it's hear, it's hear, you have a scale problem, you have a distribution problem that you have to get control of in the organization. The noise, the noise, and we did have this in one customer, a conch wrote which was, we had 17 different order cycles with 17 different renewal dates, driving the purchasing team crazy. And there's a conversation to be had to, like let's get this into one contract on one date, there's economies of scales for you and for us, that's how we can put it better, win, win, deal together. So that noise, it was a lot of distraction for a lot of organizations that would support all of these projects. So that's the ground swell, that's the noise. And those are important because popular open source can be everywhere but it's really how you tie of them all together to not just trying the big outcomes but how do you make it more scalable for an organization to leverage that open source product in that company? - How do you know when it's the right time to go with the business champion? Like what do you need? Do you need any certain metrics or any proof of value that you say, okay, now it's time to go? - Yes, the things that were like the metrics or the pain that we're trying to qualify, the pain can be things that we qualify for around, for example, the database space, the pain is you have all of these legacy databases that have end of life or you need legacy expertise to run them or they have outages, they have down times. Like there's a lot of things that we try to qualify through all of the discussions we have to kind of identify all of these pain points. Part of a manager's responsibility and the leaders of the organization is to help the teams kind of triangulate all of those points and say, hey, we can build a business case or prepare our champion to have the conversation upstream like enable them to get us that introduction based on, hey, we can make you look good. This is what's center for you. Here's our findings. You know, we've noticed that you have down time, you have these legacy systems. I mean, it's always amazing how many companies still use mainframes. I think every credit card processor in the US still runs all of our information on mainframes. So it's insane. So a lot of that comes with 65 year old cobalt developers you still have to figure out how to find which has a cost, right? So it's really triangulating part of the account planning process and doing the account reviews with teams and spotting these pain points and amassing them in a way that can enable our champion. If we're obviously calling and trying to get access to executives and doing a bunch of other things as well, but at a minimum, we're trying to triangulate these. So we can inform a champion to go upstream and be prepared to present and have those discussions and get us the introductions. If we're not there already, of course, we do a lot of other things to get access at the exact level as well. But it's an ongoing nurturing process of developing those and making sure you're really good at, not just asking the questions, but documenting them, informing an account plan, continuing to revisit and test and revalidating and then deploying the team, continually trying to go get the more enterprise-wide deal. - Yeah. - So Jason, you have an incredible background of being at least in one of the companies, being like the first seller, and then the full arc of going to like the CRO. So I love your background. And then an open source. I would love for you to give the audience some insight into, you know, you've seen it all. You've seen what it takes, what capabilities need to be had to get a technical discussion going if the company strategy is kind of a land and expand. So there's certain capabilities that a seller has to have. And, you know, there's a mix between technical capabilities and business acumen and business outcome connection. You've lived in the world, you've taught in the world, you've designed in the world. Could you give us some, and now, you know, I know we're gonna go to AI, but we'll wait for that till the end, 'cause it's a good topic. - Yeah. - But, you know, what's an advice when you're trying to design the most efficient, go-to-market strategy, motion, when you're coming from an open source environment, or a land and expand environment, or a PLG environment? - Yeah, first you have to be a glutton for punishment. That's the first, you know, you gotta be prepared, 'cause it's hard. But rewarding. The one thing in, you know, doing this a couple times is your motion, you have to first be prepared that your motion is going to change at an ongoing basis, right? When I first joined Redis, I was employed number one, outside of the R&D team in Israel. And I was at the trade shows. I was opening the office. I was, you know, getting, like, literally everything, which is very early. But, you know, I was an SDR. I was the rep and then, you know, started to hire out the team. There's a lot of things you do there that have to evolve. And you see this as a kind of failure mode across a lot of companies these days, and quite frankly, a lot of sales leaders. There's a lot of these initial CROs, ahead of sales at these small companies, and their model doesn't evolve. And by evolving, what I'm talking about is, like, that first deal, that first million, that first 10, that first 20, the first 50, then 100 and the 200, like, just, you have to come to terms with the fact that your motion is going to change through those. You got, like, acknowledge, like, don't get married to anything you're doing. I always tell people, like, that first, you remember that first deal that you sold your soul to get, like, you know, 98% discount, but their public reference, you can use their logo, they'll speak it to conferences, but they got one hell of a deal. Like, you do those and you hold your nose, but it has value in terms of getting the next enterprise customer and the next enterprise customer. But then you got to bring that discipline down as, okay, get to 5 million, get to 10 million, you do all of those things. The responsibilities of me as a CRO changes, my first line managers change, the expectation on STRs, and then, you know, what we're qualifying for. Because in the early days, you're bootstrapping, and you're so excited, like, have all this open source adoption, and you're just running around trying to find a live one, have the conversation, find the value, land it, go to the next, then you start to be like, okay, we'll get a little bit more sophisticated. We're gonna start doing more count planning and think about big picture and how do we leverage our solution architect team. We call them solution architects 'cause it was not as scary to developers as S.E.'s, but all of these things in terms of, like, pivoting your motion as you go. The good news is like the fundamentals of qualifying a deal doesn't change. It's just what you focus on, and how you're scaling for the longer term happens, and the more that you learn about understanding your business. Like, a lot of early stage CROs, I see it, they get obliterated by the board because, like, it's like Shark Tank, you know. You don't know your numbers. Yeah, you know. Yeah, right. You know, it's like the same thing. I'm like, I've talked to so many. It's like, it's about the winning of the deals and those things, but it's also like, how do you see around corners? How do you become more predictable? And it's all based in the fundamentals that you guys talk about all the time. It's like, Ransom repeat, the basics, MedPick, MedPick, like, just keep banging on those things, how you react to them and scale. It has to adjust over the time, but those fundamentals are just continually gonna be the same. But as you grow, a manager has more time to look at an account plan and think bigger and go broader and leverage executives and accounts, et cetera, et cetera, to get those bigger strategic wins. How did you stay adaptable, relevant? There's very few people on the planet that have done what you've done. And there's some good stories like our friend Chris Dagnin and like, there's some good stories that being the, you know, doing the arc. Sure. What was the key for you on being that type of individual? Like, there's people that are, you know, trying to make decisions that are listening here. They're like, hey, do I go to this startup, you know, AI company, do I come from a bigger company? Just any advice on what it really takes to be like, employee number, you know, in the single digits to, you know, to an IPO. Any advice you give? Yeah, first one, easier said than done is leave you ego at the door. Like, I mean, it's like, you can't be married to anything. And I knew, you know, my background, from talking to early is not traditional. I wasn't rolling in with all of this baggage of like, oh, I did it here. I did it like, you know, I was truly wanting to learn and evolve. You know the quote, there's no extra credit for reinventing the wheel. Like, I love bag borrowing and stealing. I've talked to Chris. I've talked to Cedric who you've been on this podcast before during COVID. I would ping each other and share notes and talk about. So, you know, at the end of the day, the point is, I'm trying to steal the best from the best and I'm going to make it my own. And I'm not married to anything that I'm doing. And I'm going to involve, evolve. You know, we always joke, you know, sometimes in sales leadership, one of our jobs is to untie people bad habits. Like, it is a pandemic of, you know, hey, I'm going to wait to close a close loss. I'm going to wait and close loss and want to have a win. So, I don't get attention. Like, drives me absolutely berserk, right? Part of that's lack of discipline, lack of proper inspection. I mean, this reasons that we've, that that happens, but that's bad behaviors that we just kind of train because of the way the industry is. But the ego, check the ego, be learning, you know, that was the biggest thing for me and not married to anything that we've been doing in the past. That serves you really well. - To set the context, just we talked about it off camera, but on camera, like, you have a very unique background. So you come from finance, you go into operations, you wind up in sales, could you just share that briefly and then any insights on how you think that's an advantage and what you would encourage other people? - Yeah, sure. I, you know, so first to go to college in my family, I knew I like to make money. I liked money. So the advice was going to finance, okay? - He's got the people's money. - Yeah, it was going to finance. So I went to Northeastern, got a degree in finance and did some work in investment. I was like, "Ah, it's not for me. "So I went to corporate finance. "Worked at your let here in Boston." And they paid for my MBA and it was great. And then this dot com thing was happening. I'm not going to be in the razor business. I mean, how boring. I mean, so we've more than databases, right? So like, so I, you know, got into tech in FPNA and a lot was happening then. I think in the early 2000s, there was this kind of, an appreciation that as much as it's selling as an art form for the top five or 10% of sellers, it truly is a science for the rest. And I was like, with my process and finance background and my first company at FPNA, I would talk to the investor relations. I was hanging out with sales, I was doing the comp plans, I was presenting pricing in a customer. Like, this is my, these are my people. This is my people. My CFO said, you know, you should go run revops. Like, that's your place. You should go over there and that and a tegrity in the early 2000s, I made the change. But that upbringing that I had, you know, around process, KPI metric, informing the business, understanding how to quantify the science element of anything. And at the moment, where technology was enabling us to kind of package up the science of selling, you know, it's like, oh my God, Salesforce.com. what it was revolutionary, cutting-edge thing that we were implementing at the time, kind of informed my foundation to help me get into ultimately leading sales because I had everything else. I just needed that customer experience, which I just craved and would do any customer meeting. I could run shotgun anywhere, be involved in any conversation I could because I knew that was the piece I was missing. So at Improva, I worked up into that, and ultimately was leading revenue. It wasn't called CRO, the time called field operations, but it was a great experience and filled kind of the final gap of having more of that customer being with customers and selling a technical solution. So that that background informed kind of the building of the middle class, Harvard, the Harvard Business Review, like 15 years ago, had this great article. They talked about like sales teams. It's like sales teams like an economy. Strong middle class, great economy. So you're going to focus on the middle class. Top sellers in general will crush. They're going to make a lot of money, they're going to be great, they need some coaching, of course, but it's an art form. How do I bring that art form of that top 5 or 10% and turn it into a process? For my leaders and for my salespeople, they can leverage that art form and help them be better. It's a system. I mean, you force management, you guys know this better than anybody and it's been the foundation of leveraging my background to bring that to grow these teams. I love that. I've never quite heard it said that way. He's focusing on the middle class. I like that. That's what it is, right? Yeah, you're not going to get there just because the top 5% of your teams did 150% of your number. I want as many of them there, but the reality is that that middle group is really where the bread and butter is and where makes my life better. So I enough to have a heart attack at a quarter end because it's way more predictable because that's ultimately what we have to do is provide predictable revenue growth, not just the revenue. It's hard to be a rapops person to work for you if you're background or tell me. Yeah, it is. It is. It is. It is. It is. It's a great rapops person look like Johnny and I have been focusing on that last few months. It's really changing rapidly. Great rapops. What's it look like today? Yeah, I got a great lesson in this. So first time, I worked at a company, I am Logic Eccache. I worked for Jim Drill, another disciple. He was traveling and was like, hey, you're going to cover the board meeting for me. It's great. My first time going to go to the board meeting is like 2003 and talking to the CEO. He was like, so what are you going to talk about? I was going to talk about comp plans and the systems and he's like, you don't get shit about any of that. Like what the care about is the business. They want to care about customers and outcomes and all of those things. So I formed my main focus for rapops. The number one priority of rapops is to be the trusted advisor to the business. Yes, the systems are important and compliant. Like all super important. I do not minimize any of that. They're all keys to moving an organization together. But if you want to help sales leadership be great coaches and do the proper inspection and help teams prioritize, be their trusted advisor. Don't wait to your asked why the pipeline is lumpy or why did it jump up by 100% week over week? Like you should inform leadership. Like get ahead of it that come Monday or Friday. Like, hey, this is where I saw in the business. Here are the leading indicators that are linking red lights or green lights, whatever they are. Number one priority. I think the best ones like to your point, they give them really good insights. Some insights that they can't see themselves because the CROs run around. Exactly. Like lots of organizations they want the sales leaders to also be FPNA people. They're meant to be coaching with customers, doing those things. And you also want them to be FPNA analysts. Like, it's not the reality of the world or their skillsets and not quite frankly. They like to do sales people don't like to do that either. Exactly. You don't like to do expense reports. Yeah. I mean, that's why I earn my key. Two different sides of the brain. I mean, there's literally two different sides of the brain. Exactly. And if you're a rev-ops and you want to move beyond that or do more, E or CRO or VP of sales like right hand person and give them the insights into the business, they will continue. A lot of the people will rely heavily on their rev-ops people because it's giving them those the lens that will inform their decisions and what they do. Don't make them go have to figure out how to help themselves. Like, yeah, I think my found knowledge that rev-ops people, when you go, if we ask 10 different companies right now exactly what do you need your rev-ops people to do and what are they held accountable to? You're going to get close to 10 different answers. It has really been well defined by a lot of companies. Yeah. And I think one way to make it simple is your analogy that you started with Jimmy drill when he said, hey, take over for me. I think rev-ops people have to think about just like great sellers. How do you take the technical things and the data that's going on and go to market and make it relevant and attach it to business outcomes that a company's trying to achieve? That's what a board cares about. I think great rev-ops people are the ones that can translate that language of what's going on in revenue and attaching it directly to company outcomes and making it clear what needs attention. Where do we need help? Where do we need investment? Where do and the numbers don't lie? So it's not just being a numbers person, but it's understanding how to tell a story about the numbers. 100%. We like to call them actionable insights. You know, like these are the things like I don't need to read out. I don't need to call if you read to me that it's 30% year-over-year growth. That's great. Or it's flat. Right. We need a rev-ops person for them. Just take a finance person and just have them give you the data dump on the numbers. You need a journalist not a not I've heard this. You need a journalist not a well weather person. Exactly. You know, the weather is here today. It's doing this, doing that. You need a journalist to tell you a story about what's going on. And you also got a prepple to say, look, I want bad news. You know, one of the one of the one of the things we do is we cadence our like we bring the teams together to cadence pipeline, like at the management level with all the attributes, SDRs, partners, expand land, all of that. And I've always prepped these calls with this call is not to read out the numbers. We want to know the problems. And this call is about problems. This call is not about complimenting that we had a good show last week and we found a million dollar deal. I'm excited about that. That's great. Right. It's awesome. But that's not why I'm here. This is a problems call. So don't get upset. Don't get offended. We all have problems. If you organization's perfect, then I'm going to be the most worried because it doesn't exist. And one of the things that we're getting stuffed upon within the various parts of the funnel with its SDR, marketing driven or expand motions, where reps are expanding themselves, what the partner ecosystem is bringing in. So don't try to sell me the positive. You're not like it's all about where the challenges or where the investment areas are to double down on. So I see that a lot sometimes. It's like, yeah, this is like, you know, if you look at it this way, I don't give a shit about that. I don't care. Like just tell me where the problems are. You said tell me the story. Don't be a magician. Exactly. You're not trying to sell me. I'm already I'm already I'm already bad news. Can't wait. Bad news can't wait. Like I need to know the bad news now and I might be able to help you turn the situation around. But if you wait and wait and wait, what I've always found is something that's like the size of a little mouse when they could tell you about it. All of a sudden you turn around a couple weeks later. It's the size of a gorilla. And like, now you got you got a big problem on your hands and they could have told you. So I get really mad when, you know, people don't own up to like we have a problem. Yeah. So that's not just for having a ops Johnny. That's like that's like kind of like a foundational attribute for leadership, right? I mean, I always I said to somebody this morning. They're willing to give you bad news, right? Can't be penalized because they gave you bad news. You got to say, okay, good. Now what's going on? Would you do about it? What do you think we should do about it? What's the next step? And let's let's go let's go fix this thing. I looked into a zoom call this morning really close and the only thing was showing was my eyeballs. And I said to the rep, I said don't lose alone. Oh, oh, lose alone. Exactly. We were losing. And I said don't lose alone. You know, everybody talks about the great what's the saying? You know, the greatest wins in the company have a thousand mothers and fathers. Every loss is an orphan. Yeah. She was involved in that deal. Yeah. It really speaks to the culture you set and that you don't, you know, you don't over rotate in penalizing or punishing mistakes if they're honest and they were trying. You know, it goes back to us talking about earlier. I'm like, hey, I'm just going to push my losses out because I'm going to get beaten up on a loss. So I'm just going to wait till I win a deal to do a close loss. right so. You got to practice what you preach in your culture and reward that because you took the words right out of mouth. I was gonna say, don't lose alone. And quite frankly, the best reps also don't win alone. The best reps are the ones that can pull the other parts of the team and to help them win. It's like, I don't want superheroes. I don't need a superhero. Like if you've got to leverage 18 people in the company and it's an appropriate deal and deal size and qualify and all these things, like, let's go. We're gonna all win it together and then don't lose alone. - Okay, take us to Scaling because his background is so-- - Yeah, I want to talk about Scaling in a couple of ways. The first one I want to talk about is like you talked about like when you're Scaling, you're constantly adapting, right? And so like what I found is like the sales process fundamentally stays the same, but there's certain things that you're tweaking as you're Scaling, you know? Because you want from like small deals, to mid-sized deals, to big deals. You know, what is it in the sales process that you've seen like definitely changes as you scale? - Well, I think first of all, is how you formalize the process and the tools that you use to get leverage across how you, you know, qualify deals, how you bring insights across deals. So that's changing really rapidly today, with AI and some of the tools that are out there, to the effect where, you know, you don't have to hunt and peck around anymore to find some of the parts of the deal and the things that are going on. And I think those that lean into that can accelerate very quickly through kind of, you know, early stage, mid-stage, late stage of how you think about, you know, scaling a team for consistency. And that's really important because if you, you know, you grow and you've got four sales managers and they're all doing it differently, that's a problem because if every deals, you know, vetted differently, then I don't actually know the quality of my pipeline and therefore I don't know how predictable I really am because what you may think an economic buyer is maybe different than what they think an economic buyer is. Or you, you know, you don't really put pressure on the champion and what you really got a cheerleader and you haven't asked the, you haven't standardized that, will you can you question like to really test whether the champion is going to go do things for you. So there's all of these things that as you scale and formalize and run those motions with consistency, you start to get really good in tell about your pipeline, about your business, about your predictability, about your win rate, when you lost rate. And all of that has a more multiplier effect because the better you understand all that information, the better you can train your people and enable your people and hire more managers and scale your managers and all of those things. What's exciting with AI, which is what's happening, is that you can now, you know, we've built a tool called Deal Pulse and MCP server tied to all our data sources, stored data sources, built upon our sales process and qualification and in essence, inform the quality of a deal, whether it's director, indirect across every data source, which makes it kind of is helping deliver on the dream, the dream of spend most of your time selling and spend more of your time coaching and doing inspection as a manager. And as much as you have a process and you document and you do all of these things, the more you can pull insights from Gong or from Confluent or any of the tools and you can infer and challenge, like we'll have a deal and we'll say, economic buyer is inferred from a Gong call from a conversation you have, but it's not a, the person's not identified as an economic buyer. That's a good question to have because me as a manager, could I go and like try to listen to calls and be on all the calls, but that's just impossible. But I can get inference around the economic buyer and test that, which is tremendously powerful, really, really powerful. So I'm not spending time making sure the rep asked the question and pulled up the sales process and vetted it. I can move right to, hey, I can see you don't have an, I'm infers you have an economic buyer. So this is going to move really quick like this year, which is really exciting and kind of deliver on the promise that we've all been chasing for decades, which is spend more time selling, spend more time with customers, spend less time of this internal searching for things. And you can do a lot of things from that, in motion, enablement and a bunch of other things. - Let's go back to scaling, nobody, and with recruiting. And talk to me a little bit about the people you're recruiting when it was you, and you have to hire a couple sales people at Redis. And then you start to scale and talk to me about type of people you were recruiting then. I'm sure that you'll change. - It did change, you know, in the earlier days, you leaned towards, you always want the grit, you always want the people that are willing to do the work 'cause in the early days, it's a different type of grind, but it's a grind, it's, I think it's exponentially more disappointment in the earlier days. - Let's talk to the students that they have in the early days versus, you know, once you start to get 50 people, 100 people. - Well, the traits is they're more transactional. They'll end up doing more deals. There's less of these big deal cycles 'cause you're just trying to knock down those early wins. We always tended to look for people that, you know, if someone came from a home that had a family business, really like those people. People did sports in college or military, just like people that just, you know, grind it out and just had to continue to react and be tactical and find those things. As we grew over-- - They're resourceful, right? They can-- - Very resourceful. - Round, like I remember that I was on the board of this company and I thought this one guy that wanted to be a CRO, put him in the CRO job. And called me and said, you know, they don't have like expense reports here. Like, yeah, making expense report. - Yeah. - I mean, later when you said, you know, they don't even have a laptop. I said, okay, so get on the line and buy some laptop. Like, I realized like within a week he was just absolutely the wrong person. Even though he did really well in a mid-size company, he was just awful when he needed to start out. - Yeah, no, you have to be-- - You have to scrounge. - Yeah, you gotta put all those things together. You're not gonna get a silver platter of all these things, you know. - I had something here on this topic. - Yeah, yeah. - The big part for me is identifying what's required in the role like you guys are talking about. But then having on this, this is why I feel we just miss it too many times. We're not honest about whether or not somebody has that energy to do that. And it has nothing to do with age. It has nothing to do with intellect. It is like, will that give you energy? So a lot of times I'll say to somebody, hey, I like this person and oh, can they do this? I look at the job profile, they can do this, they can do that, they can do this. I say, yeah, okay, I got it. And they give you new evidence. Is that what they wanna do? And I feel like people miss that. They get the check in the box saying, yeah, they done it. They were at this company, they did this, they did this, they did this. And I just feel like how that's evolved for me now. And I didn't ask that too much back in the day. When I ask it all the time now, I'm like, does that give them energy? Well, it may come feel like less than 1% of the population in the world who wakes up in the morning and says, I'm doing exactly what I'm supposed to be doing. - Do you ask them why they wanna do it? - Well, I do something similar and I did it more with reps and I do it more with when I hire leaders now and I ask them a question and I ask it relative to wherever the cycle of the company is. If it's a rep in an early stage or if it's a manager now, but the context is the same. The question is, first I'll say, I don't wanna answer to this question, I'm gonna ask you a question you need to reflect on it and you really get to think about it. But the question is, you're gonna tell me all the things why you want this job and why you're excited and what it entails and what it's going to do. And you're a salesperson, you're gonna tell me exactly what I wanna hear because you know yourself, that's the best product you know how to sell is yourself. But think through 90 days from now. Are we gonna have a conversation? 'Cause we're disappointed because you can't deliver on the expectations of the role. 'Cause it will come. We're not just having this discussion on what the requirements are on the role in this time. But the conversation will come in 90 days. So let's anticipate whether we're gonna have a good conversation or a bad conversation because you know we weren't honest with ourselves in terms of what the expectation of the job. I used to do that a lot more, you know, in the early days I would absolutely speak to every rep and get harder as we get bigger. But I certainly have this conversation with every leader that we hire 'cause I make sure I speak to every sales leader we hire. Is that that question? Don't, like I would always say, don't tell me you like updating salesforce.com. You're lying, if let's bullshit, but you're gonna do it, right? Like because in 90 days, I'm not coming with my broom to clean up your business because-- - Oh, but you don't do it. - 'Cause we can predict that that's gonna be a problem. So don't answer the question, but like assess if this is really for you. And that was always a good filter, like with reps in the early days, like it's gonna be chaos. Yeah, you're gonna be an SDR. Yeah, you're gonna-- to go to the show. You're going to stand at a reinvent for 12 hours and lose your voice in that damn dry conference center. Like, yeah, that's what we're going to do. Don't tell me a 90 days it is not for you. Like, because that's the job. I'm doing it. You're going to have to do it. That's it. So sometimes like, and I've had people bow out. They're like, yeah, you know what? That was a good question and thought about it and you're right. I'm better off at a 10,000, 10,000 person company and I like to have all these people helping me with these accounts because that's the other end of the spec. Like, that's the other end of the spec. People just can't survive. And then it works both ways. Some people thrive in chaos and they're great at it. You know, it's, that's, they get energy out of like scrambling and running around and doing those things and that's fine. Like, you know, there's different types of people for different types of stages, but letting them like answer the question for themselves. Like, it tends to work. Otherwise, they're going to tell me what I want. They want the job they're trying to sell. I don't times they don't know. Like, so I'll ask them, okay, so you're talking to me. I'm a real startup and I'll say, okay, so what are the companies you're looking at? Well, I'm looking at Salesforce. I'm looking at ServiceNow and I'm looking at IBM. I go, you're talking to me. Yeah. It doesn't make any sense. You don't know what you want yet. Yeah. You're talking to those companies and me. You have no idea what you want. Yeah. The answer is I want the options. Well, yes, but that's not the reason. Like, it's a reason, but you're, you're setting yourself up a disappointment. In the early days, talk about some of the leaders, for the leaders that you're going to hire. What is some of the traits you're looking for in the leaders? In the early days? Yeah. I think excellent, excellent, you know, folks that can deal with ever changing environment. As we talked about earlier, like, you may be pitching a certain product market fit or use, like, whatever it is. And you have to be adapt and a spot. Like, if that's not resonating and kind of be the conduit back into the business in the early days, because feed on the street, you're hearing it, you're testing it. Like, you got to have a good sense of all of that so that you can take that back and share what's not working because it's early. And you don't go to it all figured out, especially in the first couple million bucks. Like, yeah, you get some customers by. One episode, what I say there is like in the early days, the salespeople, a part salespeople, part product manager. Yep, 100%. I'm ready to be part product manager for a raw startup. It's probably not the right job for you because the products are not going to do everything. That says it's going to do or is intended to do or eventually will do. So you have to sell around that at the same time, getting really honest feedback from the customer and giving that to development. 100%. And I think that's a very early stage skill. I think, guys that have been at the hot, the other side of scaling, you have processes and ways to, you know, product marketing, product management teams and a lot of other insights that you can glean those things and you're trying to innovate forward based on customer feedback. So that becomes less of a need then. But that's one of those things is that ability to be that is gold. It's in the interest of the business, you know. I just had a conversation with a guy the other day. And he was telling me what he hated about his job. And it was that the product doesn't work yet. And I went back to my notes when I was talking to him. And I said, Hey, are you sure? It's like, yeah, I've been done startup. I'm a startup person. And this is where three months later, I said, I didn't ask you if you've done that. I said, you obviously have done that. And you did it well. Is that what you want to do now? And the reason why he didn't want to stay in this company was the frickin product doesn't work. And but, but the company and the customers don't think the product doesn't work. That person's frustrated because they picked a company that didn't have right comp plans that were, you know, going to acknowledge that fact that we're going to have to get feedback from customers. So like you got to participate in your own rescue. Yeah, you know, you can't tell yourself, I've done it before I can do it again. There's a lot of things in my life I've done before. Damn, I don't want to do that again. But tell people I've done it, but man, I don't want to do it again. Exactly. You got to be honest. Exactly. You got to be honest with yourself. And, you know, that's the ego thing. It's all of those things and evolve your expertise and what you can leverage and be successful. And there's so much opportunity and everything's evolving so quickly that you're just going to be, don't jump at the first thing, have the patience, do you do diligence? Because ultimately, like everything, it's going to fail. You can debate the statistical chance of like your miserable like what did you do? But I love about your question, Jason, when you got us on this topic, I think it's great leadership and it's great connection. And people are looking for real conversations with real people when they're being recruited. And you're going to take me to a place in the conversation that I probably want to got to on my own. And you're going to ask me to reflect on not just what a home run looks like. What does failure look like? And I want you to sit in that moment of pain. And let's just talk about like what your comfort level is there. So that for me, when I heard you say that, I don't think enough people do that because they try to sell the job. Oh, you know, you're going to kill it here. You're going to be on the law. Now, the other thing that I think people miss out on is I cannot believe how many people do not check references. Because when I say, Hey, did you check the references of this? I tell my hard man, says, but did you check the references like John references are going to be great. And I'm like, okay, I got a problem because that's I'm expecting for the references to be great. But why are we not using an opportunity for that reference to ask them for three more names if we're hiring people like that? Like, who else is like this person? We love this person. We love Jason. Can you give me two more people like Jason? So it's a recruiting tool. The best question I've ever asked a reference is along the lines what you said, Jason, it's going to get hard here. And it's going to get difficult. And it like we love Jason. And we want to hire him and prepare me to be the very best I can be to help Jason out of difficult situations. Where does Jason get into difficult situations? So first of all, you're asking your reference who wants to be very, very positive for the person who, you know, you're telling me you're going to hire the person. They want to give you the right information. I've gotten some of the best information, real raw information. Well, every now and then John gets a little edgy. Well, what do you mean by that? Well, John gets frustrated by the little things. And sometimes we got to remind him that he's got to focus on what he can control and what and not what he can't control. This is a reference purpose as he's talking about himself right now. Of course. Of course. You know, so, so, okay, so now I know what I'm getting into. Now, John's and let's say, not me, but let's say this person's an A player, but I want to know where they're going to struggle. When it gets hard, what does it look like for them? And I cannot believe how many people do not do that. They don't ask a reference that. For easy how many people don't do back that don't back channel and get references. Yeah, but even asking somebody who cares enough to be a reference. So they don't already care about the individual. They're going to tell you from the heart what to look out for. It's like, why don't you be successful? Yeah, it's a great question because obviously, who gives bad references? Hey, talk to these people. They're going to say bad things about me. So you have to, you know, it's like inverting a question to from a yes to a no question. You just kind of invert it. So why would you not move forward with me? Would you not move forward with me? No, yes, no, yes, you know, so it's the same thing, which is great. But yeah, it is amazing. And how many actually don't want to do references and like John said about back channel, like those are just as valuable. Like always like every once in a while, I get a, I think we're going to hire this person and it's like no one's connected them to my LinkedIn. I'm like, doesn't that tell you something? Like, who doesn't know what is money? Like, come on, like, I mean, like, where have you been in a cave? Is this a real LinkedIn profile? Like, you know, it's all of it's all of those things. But that's a great, that's a great question. And hope everybody. That's the one you're scaling too, because, you know, you never can make mistakes, right? But when you're scaling and you're in a position of, you know, I'm fit higher, whatever you can't make it up, like you're going to burn cash, that those stages you got to be right. Yeah, you got to, you got to be right. You got to take your time. Richard Branson has this great quote, which is, it's about to have a hole on your team that an asshole. I, use it all the time. It's like, it's like genius, right? And the second rule is fire fast. Like, you know, if you've clearly made a mistake, you know, address it quickly and move because, you know, we were carrying quotas, quote, a coverage, you know, is someone who's producing something better than biting the bullet and getting reinvested in someone better. It's always that question that the leaders take. So it's, it's important to, you know, you will make a mistake. It's very painful. But the next level for managers is, okay, so what are you going to do about it? Like, are you going to address it? You're going to bury it? You got it? Like, I admire when people say, look, I made a mistake, whatever it is. I got to figure this out. Great. Let's take corrective action. Let's move forward. What do we learn from it? You know, ask that reference that question next time. I had a very spirited conversation with a group of people today that were getting my advice on how to fire faster. And I was like, well, first of all, I think there's another problem here. If all of you people are asking me about how to fire people on your team, it means that, you know, we have a responsibility that we recruited these people. - 100%. - I remember Johnny, you know, back in the day, I can't remember what you said, but you said you gotta go look into me or I can't remember. - It's up, you know, it's either that you can't recruit. - You're gonna get somebody you gotta take accountability. So you can't recruit, or you can't coach and lead. - Yes. - Now what I want you to do is go down to the bathroom, look into me or-- - Yes. - So come on back and tell me which one you can't do. Because we have to fix it. - Or so he was a shit bird, so we just let him go. No, you hired him. - It happens in those cultures. When everybody's talking about how fast, like you get a badger courage to excuse me to fire fast. And I'm like, those companies never make it that have cultures like that, because they're not learning anything on the turn. What did we learn? - Yeah. - It's normally in the success profile, it's something that we missed in the energy. Like we are complicit in this. - Yeah. - It's actually our fault, not the-- - On our first fault. - It's our fault. We let it happen. We missed something. We didn't hold ourselves accountable. Yeah, it's on us, 100%. - But it always comes back to. You know, you have skills, you have knowledge, and you have characteristics. And what I found always comes back to a characteristic. It doesn't typically come back to, especially if you have good training. The leaders could be good coaches. You're typically going to hire people that are at least smart enough to gain the knowledge of what your product does. And good coach can help them develop some new skills. But where they usually check out is that they don't have the traits that you need. At that point in time, a company along the scaled growth, because there's different traits that make it at different stages of your company's growth. And I found that usually it's because they're missing or lacking a trait. If you wanted to ask me, what do you think is the number one? I'd say it's probably coachability and adaptability because the products change in, the companies change in, the customers are getting smarter. Competition's coming after you. Messaging has to change. The weight cell has to change. And if you don't want to change, because you're not coachable, or maybe you are coachable, but you can't look in the mirror and say, you know, I really need to adapt. I need to develop a new skill or gain some new knowledge. But you refuse to do that. It's over. - Yep. - You know what I'm really bullish on this principle right now, 'cause the more I look into it, even my own history, like we all go through cycles. You know, have we always been energetic, have we always been like everybody's gonna have a bad day. Everybody's gonna have some crap that happens to them. Somebody's gonna pass away or something's gonna happen, and you know, your family or whatever, just bad things can happen. What I find is when we talk about these traits or characteristics, most of the time, because we hire for this, most of the time, something happened in the exchanges inside your culture. Something happened. It's not an excuse, but I always try to figure out, especially people that have, like, I call them level fours. They have high skill and they have high will. And all of a sudden, I'm showing up in a QBR, and they're telling me this person's a crap bird. Well, I know a high skill, low will person, can only come from one place on the planet. It only works that way in the model. It comes from a high skill, high will person. So what the hell happened? I have found amazingly, when I'm in tune with this, I find that there's stuff, life happens sometimes. Life happens, somebody needs a break, somebody has some crap happens, somebody, or stuff that's out of my league. They're struggling with drinking, they've got problems at home or whatever. But very rarely is this characteristic. Now, the job could change, which causes another character trait to highlight, but that's why I always encourage people to first ask, ask questions to this individual, why and what, what happened and why? 'Cause it's got some unbelievably great stories. - This goes to the profile of, we're talking about, like, obviously reps and things, but it's like the profile of your managers and the capability, right? Like, it's just important as you qualify what their roles are. And how they're getting out there with their teams and asking those questions and validating of what's going on in their life and being open to asking those questions. A lot of people are like, "Oh, I'm not gonna ask that. "It's none of my business." So I encourage teams like, hey, even if you don't have meetings to go to, but you haven't been out in that territory with that team, go out and spend the day with them. Get a conference room or a wee work, sit in the room, make calls together and just do some motions together, whatever it is and be there as part of assessing what's going on and building that relationship. You're right, life is tough. You have to manage for everything that people have going on and changing, but you also wanna have the relationship where people open up and tell you this is what's going on. 'Cause some people won't tell you. They're pride, and like you said, everybody's got challenges and things going on, but if you have that relationship and people open, you can navigate around that and set expectations accordingly and give them the coaching and support. So that's key. It's important how we're hiring managers as well. It's as important 'cause they're gonna play that role. - I wanna give a little plug to our buddy, Coach Brian White, who wrote a book called The Locker Room Is Not For Sale. And the book is, yeah, he is an incredible football coach, but it's not about football. It's about being intimate with the, you know, people don't leave programs or leave companies. They leave people. And I think he's just got a really good take on earning the right to get really, really close to your people in an authentic way, which is an incredible skill for a leader to have. - Yep, yep. - A must have. - Very important. - I'm gonna go back a little bit of scaling again, maybe we can go and we wrap this thing up. So what happened when you see in a lot of startups is, and even they start to gain some traction some size too, where you get 10 reps and two of them, carry in the weight of everything. They're doing the big deals. And, you know, maybe two more barely making quota and the rest aren't making quota. And then you get to like 30 reps and four or five are carrying 80% of the deals. And, you know, five more are making their number, but the other guys aren't making their number. And then they get even bigger. And then you can tell me, these guys just are having the difficulty, either recruiting the wrong people, they're giving them to the wrong leaders, they're not onboarding these people correctly. Why can't they get the rest of these people to make the number? What do you think's going on there? You see it a lot because on the surface, people go, wow, this company's unbelievable. You can peel back the onion and go like, oh shit, there's nothing really going on there. - Well, I think it's hard to speak, that first we kind of talked about earlier is that they're not peeling back the onion and they're not actually assessing what is going on. First, it's being honest with yourself and what's going on in the business. And you'll see this, it's like, yeah, we crushed our number and it's great and then lift up the hood. And like you said, it's two out of six people. So that's the first being honest, being honest. The second is digging into what the people, like you spend a lot of time celebrating and looking into the people, the two people that hit it. But what is your process and your cadence for continuing to inspect what's going on in the other four or six people? And what are you learning from that? Because there's a lot of things you can get insights from. It could be, you know, those two people, they've been here for five years and they're just good at it. Or they have, they happen to also have the two best essays in the business. Or our business is very tech-centric and they happen to be in the Bay Area and that's our core customers. And we put a bunch of people in New York 'cause that's what you do. It could be the particular use cases that these people focus on. They just don't convert. The loss rate is low. The wind rate is low rather. You gotta be looking on the hood and all of these things and diagnosing kind of what the root causes of those things. This goes back to our RevOps conversation. It goes back to kind of being honest, leaving you ego at the door. But you should not be getting on a call that's the George Bush mission accomplished carecraft carrier at the beginning of Desert Storm. Like right before the mess really began. Like, hey, we're, you know, we did it. That's not what it should be. It should be like deep inspection of the other folks that aren't and really understanding why. And then build your program behind it. If you see that these guys just can't convert from stage to stage and we're getting caught up here. Great. Is it an enablement thing? Is it a product issue or use case for the verticals there were? I mean, it could be a whole bunch of things where you could go on and on. But you gotta be honest. You gotta look under the hood, peel the onion back and truly assess those things that you're looking at and address them. Or you might be just overhiring because you're chasing a growth number and you're playing a numbers game and you don't care how much you burn. I've seen that too. Right. So, you know, I've brought up a whole bunch of things that I've seen. before it's amazing. Try to peel back the money and become the bad. You got leaders, one big one that I see often as a company scales and then they start to struggle with productivity. First of all, that's the number one metric that you got to be looking at as you scale wrap productivity. But it's the opiate of the deals and you get leaders like it's the opiate of the deals. They, you know, some great deal people or great deal people as reps. They might have been able to coach and develop one or two reps. They get a team of five and they got two people that are doing really good. Probably what's happening is they are chasing the deals with the top people and they are not coaching and developing the other people. As tires you get, I think are the ones that are like high skill, a little bit, you know, excuse me, low skill, a little bit higher will. You got to teach them the skill part. But you know, to be a great leader today, I think you have to be accountable. But he's got to hold you accountable for coaching and developing your people. Yeah. But you see it all the time, right? So let's say Kaplan's going to go out and he's got a big multi million dollar deal, but he's done 10 multi million dollar deals in his career and he's going to meet with the EB. Most managers are going with Kaplan to that EB meeting. Even though Kaplan doesn't need their help because they want to say, I help slay the bear and pull it back on ground. There's four or five other reps. They got their first meeting with a technical buyer or a potential champion and the manager doesn't go on in those calls and those people need his help desperately. That's right. So they do what you call, say, Johnny, they chase in the forecast. They're only working on deals that are in the forecast in their ignoring other people that need a lot of help and they're going with people that actually don't need their help. That's a lumpy pipeline and lumpy forecast over time for sure. All the time. See you tomorrow. Well, it's common. We've seen it and that's funny. I first VP sales I worked for way back. He was that guy. Cliping Australia to get the $8 million P.O. is like, dude, you're burning four out four days to go. It's happening. Why are you going all the way there? We've got other deals to do. You can tell through our conversation. All comes back to the leave your ego at the door, be in the details, understand your business, manage your middle class. The basics, but I think it rings through all of these things, all of things. It's basics. But easier said than done, right? It was easy. As I tell my guys, it was easy. They pay us less. I don't feel like we gave Jason a chance to talk about cockroach. What's they're doing there? Or you're hiring? What's happening? Can you give us a little juice? Yeah, no, we're excited. So cockroach, first question I always have to ask is-- I didn't want to ask, but please stop. I hit it right. I was like, cockroach. I mean, I have the customer meetings I have. They're like, you're going to change that name. Are you going to forget the name? It's like, no, I'm like, no. You're not forgetting it. It's the first company my parents ever remembered where I worked. They thought I worked at Reddit, not redis. But now I work at the cockroach company, which is a the first part of the powerful meaning of how powerful the name is because it is their-- It is. The other secondary and more important reason is that what are the cockroaches outside of being disgusting, insects? They're also very well known for the only thing that will survive a nuclear holocaust. And that's, in essence, what cockroach DB is is a very highly resilient, scalable database, a SQL database. And it's really important. It's meeting the moment and why it's so exciting is the moment with AI. And it meets the moment because of its distributed nature and environments are very complex. You have hybrid environments. You're working across data centers, on-prem data centers in cloud. You have multi-cloud. You have mainframes. And you have all this data all over the place, which you obviously want your LLMs and your AI to have access to. So you're going to need the ability to work across all those databases across all of those configuration setups. So it needs to be very highly scalable and resilient. The other, which is meeting the moment, is with AI and agents. The databases and a lot of the older databases aren't going to be able to put up with the parabolic growth pounding that these databases are going to get. We talked about developers and architects and people building applications. But that's going to go up, pick your number, 100x, 1000x, a millionx of people pounding on this distributed database architecture. So that's why we're framing our agentic database cloud that will allow companies to service all of that landscape, hybrid, multi-cloud, portability, regulation. It's crazy. We have a customer hard rock, a digital, every state, or every tribe where they have to settle a bet has to be settled in the state. And then reconcile at the corporate level. Great. Quickly. No one's going to wait a second for their money. So you have an obligation. So that is just the tip of the iceberg and where the market is going. And that's why we're excited. Cockroach is meeting the moment built before AI. But it's one of those things skating to the puck. It was just-- it's a well-aligned opportunity. For us, we're growing really well. We're hiring. Check out our website. Always looking for good people. It's fun, hard work. It's a lot of accountability. But work hard, play hard, old school saying, that that's what we do. Excellent. What a great well-rounded leader that they would work for, Jason. Well done. Yeah, well, I appreciate that. Thank you. This has been awesome, really. I enjoyed talking to you guys. And it's always good to hear. It's good to make sure you're not crazy when you have these conversations and reinforce what-- you tell yourself that you think is good and seems to be good. But you always got to keep going and validating yourself. And this was certainly super helpful for me. When you should hang on after we go off the air, because Johnny says five minutes to tell me how I screw up the interview all the time. You killed it, Jason. Thank you, dude. All right, thank you, guys. Appreciate it. Thank you, Jason, for a shame. Thank you. Thank you, everyone. Thanks to everyone for listening to another episode of the Revenue Builders podcast. [MUSIC PLAYING] Thanks for listening to today's episode. If you enjoy the content, please subscribe. Ray and review the show to help us reach more people. This show is brought to you by Force Management, where we help companies improve sales performance, executing the Rose strategy at the point of sale. Check out Forcemanagement.com for more information. [MUSIC PLAYING]