Speaker 1The 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 and 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 that come Monday or Friday, like, hey, this is what I saw in the business. Here are the leading indicators that are blinking red lights or green lights, whatever they are. Number one priority, be the trusted advisor. Your job is to enable sales productivity.
Speaker 2Welcome to the Revenue Builders podcast, a weekly show featuring B2B sales leaders and executives hosted by five-time CRO John McMahon and workforce 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 John McMahon and John Kaplan. Today, they sit down with Jason Forge, 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, rev ops, 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.
Speaker 3So, Jason, you mastered basically taking open source technologies that developers use for free, like when you were at Redis and CockroachDB, and you turned that into developer groundswells, 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?
Speaker 1Yeah, no, definitely. It was, you know, it was... It was sometimes a double-edged sword in the sense that it sometimes created a false sense of like security, especially with our AEs, because on one hand, you're excited, right? There's already usage. It's similar to like 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, is that often, you know, developers are very important and they solve important problems. 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. Revenue, profitability, risk. Exactly. Yeah. Like we were selling to a very prominent business retail with a gap. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. 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 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? 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 can I 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 at 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. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right. And I think that's where the real magic was. So it was great to get that that groundswell and that open source adoption. But you had to navigate into that conversation and have that that business outcome conversation. And that's that's how you would get even, you know, these big, you know, these big deals.
Speaker 3And 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. They're not really a business champion, like you said. So how do you 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?
Speaker 1Yeah. So we would have to build groundswell within the organization, you know, 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, you know, we have our AEs and I'd remind the SEs, I'm like, you know, the SE, S is sales, right? It's not sit in the back and wait for the POC. Like, what lunch and learns are you doing? What are you doing out there? Like, you got a dinner budget. Take people out to dinner or lunch like and build that groundswell because then we could, you know, enable our champion, our true champion to act as a champion and get us that meeting upstream, you know, in the organization, really develop a champion, not a cheerleader. A lot of cheerleaders, a lot of people that loved us, but like people that will like, will go do something for us to get us that introduction higher up in the organization.
Speaker 3You said a couple of things there. One, define for people what you mean by a groundswell. And then also talk about, you know, build the noise. Talk about what you mean by build the noise.
Speaker 1Yeah, sure. So a groundswell 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 groundswell in the organization, which matters. I was on a plane once and sit next to CIO of one of the large telcos and just coincidentally had on a screen a slide. It said, you know, Redis is part of the architectural. So I started talking to her and I was like, how can I help you? And she's like, my job is to get developers what they want, make sure it meets requirements, but do it in a scalable way, like bring them the tools that they want to use, but do it in a way that is secure, compliant, meets regulatory requirements. So I'm an enabler. So help me enable them. So when I can raise the groundswell of like, it's going over here, it's here, it's here, it's here, it's here. 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 at Cockroach, which was we had 17 different order cycles, 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 a better win-win deal together. So that noise, you know, is a lot of, you know, a lot of distraction for a lot of organizations that would support all of these projects. So that's the groundswell. That's the noise. And those are important because popular open source can be everywhere. But it's really how you tie them all together to, you know, not just drive the big outcomes, but like, how do you make it more scalable for an organization to leverage that open source product in that company?
Speaker 3How do you know when it's the right time to go with the business champion? Like what, what, what do you need? Do you need any certain metrics or any proof of value that, that you say, okay, now it's time to go? Yes.
Speaker 1You know, with 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, you know, for example, the database space. The pain is, is you have all of these legacy databases that have data. You know, end of life, or you need legacy expertise to run them, or they have outages. They have downtimes. They like, there's a lot of like 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 in it for you. Here's our findings. You know, we've noticed that you have downtime, 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, in the U S still runs all of our information on mainframes. So it's like, it's, it's insane. So a lot of that comes with it. A lot of that comes with, you know, 65 year old COBOL developers. You still have to figure out how to find, which has a cost, right? So it's really, you know, triangulating part of, you know, 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. 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 exec 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 triangulating those to leverage that to go get the more enterprise-wide deal. Yeah.
Speaker 4So, 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 in 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 going to go, you know, to AI, but we'll wait for that till the end because that's a good topic. Yeah. But, you know, what's some 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?
Speaker 1Yeah. First, you have to be a glutton for punishment. That's the first, you know, you got to be prepared because it's hard, but rewarding. The one thing in, you know, doing this, a couple of times is your motion, you know, you have to first be prepared that your motion is going to change on an ongoing basis, right? When I first joined Redis, I was employee 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, uh, 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, a lot of these initial CROs are heads of sales at these small companies and their model doesn't evolve. And by, by evolving, what I'm talking about is like that first deal, that first million, that first 10, that first 10 million, that first 20, the first 50, then the hundred and the 200, like just, you have to come to terms with the fact that your motion is going to change through those. You get like acknowledged, like don't get married to anything you're doing. I always tell people it's like that first, you remember that first deal that you sold your soul to get like, you know, 98% discount, but they're public reference. You can use their logo. They'll speak at your conferences, but they got one hell of a deal. Like you, you, you do those and you, you, you, you hold your nose, but it has, it has a value in terms of getting the next enterprise customer and the next enterprise customer. But then you've got to bring that discipline down as, okay, you get to 5 million, you 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 SDRs. And then, you know, what we're qualifying for because in the early days you're bootstrapping and you're so excited, like you 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. And then you start to be like, okay, we'll get a little bit more sophisticated. We're going to start doing more account planning and think about big picture. And how do we leverage our solution architect team? We call them solution architects because it was not as scary to developers as SEs, but 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, they get obliterated by the board because like, it's like shark tank, you know, you don't know your numbers. Yeah. You know, 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, and those things, but it's also like, how do you see around corners? Um, how do you become more predictable? And it's all based on the fundamentals that you guys talk about. All. Time. It's like rinse and repeat of the basics, med pick medic, like just keep banging on those things, how you react to them and scale just, 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
Speaker 4cetera, um, 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 Dagnon, and like, there's some good stories of being the, you know, doing the arc. Sure. Like what was the key for you on being that type of individual? Like there's people that are, you know, trying to make decisions. They're listening here. They're like, Hey, do I go to this startup, you know, AI company? Do I, I come, I come from a bigger company, just any advice on what it really takes to be like employee number, you know, in the, in the single digits to, you know, to an IPO, any advice you'd give?
Speaker 1Yeah. First one easier said than done is leave your ego at the door. Like, I mean, it's like, you can't be married to anything. And I knew, you know, my background for talking 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, I was truly wanting to, 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 talked, you've been on this podcast before during COVID, I would, we'd 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 unteach 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 when I 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, there's reasons that we've that happens, but that's bad behaviors that we just, we kind of trained because of the way the industry is. But, um, the ego check the ego be learning, you know, um, that was the, the, the biggest thing for me and not married to anything that we've been doing in the past. Um, that, that serves you really well
Speaker 4to 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,
Speaker 1sure. I, you know, it's the first to go to college in my family. I knew I liked to make money. I liked money. So the advice was going to finance. Okay. Use other 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. And I was like, ah, it's not for me. So I went to corporate finance, worked at Gillette here in Boston and, uh, they paid for my MBA and it's great. And then this.com thing was happening. I'm like, I'm not going to be in the razor business. I mean, it's all boring. I mean, it's even worse than databases. Right. So like, so I, you know, I got into tech in FP and a, and a lot was happening then I think in the early two thousands, um, there was this kind of an appreciation that, that as much as it's selling as an art form for the top five and 10% of sellers, it truly is a science for the rest. And I was like, with my process and finance background and, you know, my first company FP and a, I would talk to the investor relations. I was hanging out with sales. I was doing the comp plans. I was presenting pricing to customers. Like this is my, these are my people. This is my people. My, my CFO said, you know, you should go run rev ops. Like that's your place. You should go over there. And that integrity in the early two thousands, 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, where, where technology was in enabling us to kind of. package up the science of selling, you know, it's like, oh my God, Salesforce It was a revolutionary, cutting edge thing that we were implementing at the time. Kind of informed my foundation to help me get into, you know, 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 Imperva, I worked up into that and ultimately was leading revenue. It wasn't called CRO at the time, it was called field operations, but it was a great experience and filled kind of the final gap of like having more of that, you know, customer, being with customers and selling a technical solution. So that background informed kind of the building of the middle class, the Harvard Business Review like industry. 15 years ago, I 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, like they're going to make a lot of money. They're going to be great. They need some coaching, of course, you know, but it's an art form. How do I bring that art form of that top five 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, you force management, you guys know this better than anybody. And it's, it's, it's, it's been the foundation of kind of leveraging my background to bring that to, to, to grow these teams.
Speaker 4I love that. I've never quite heard it said that way. It's focusing on the middle class. I like that.
Speaker 1It is right. Like, 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, is that that middle group is. It's really where the bread and butter is and where it makes my life better. So I don't have to have a heart attack at a quarter end because it's, it's way more predictable because that's ultimately what we have to do is provide predictable revenue growth, not just the revenue.
Speaker 4Is it hard to be a RevOps person and work for you with your background?
Speaker 1Yeah, it is. It is. It is. It is.
Speaker 4What does a great RevOps person look like? Johnny and I have been focusing on that the last few months. We, it's really changing rapidly. You know, great RevOps. What's it look like today?
Speaker 1Yeah, I was, I got a great lesson in this. So first time I worked at a company, I Am Logic. Actually, I worked for Jim Drill, another, another disciple. And he was traveling and was like, hey, you got to cover the board meeting for me. And I said, great. My first time I'm going to go to the board meeting is like 2003. And talking to the CEO, I was like, so what are you, what are you going to talk about? Like, oh, I was going to talk about comp plans and the systems. And he's like, they don't give a shit about any of that. Like, what they care about is the business. They want to care about customers. And outcomes and, and all of those things. So I formed my main focus for RevOps. The number one priority of RevOps is to be the trusted advisor to the business, the trusted advisor to sales leadership. Yes, the systems are important and comp plan, like all, 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, help them see the business, help them view the metrics and the KPIs and be out ahead. Don't wait, you know, until you're 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 what I saw in the business. Here are the leading indicators that are, you know, blinking red lights or green lights, whatever they are. Number one priority, be the trusted advisor, your job is to enable sales productivity.
Speaker 3I think the best ones, like to your point, they give them really good insights, some insights that they can't see themselves because the CRO is running around.
Speaker 1Exactly. Like lots of organizations, they want the sales leaders to also be FP&A people. They're meant to be coaching with customers, doing those things. And you also want them to be FP&A analysts, like, not the reality of the world or their skill sets. And they're quite frankly,
Speaker 3sales people don't like to do that either. Exactly. They don't like to do expense reports.
Speaker 1Yeah. I mean, that's where I earned my key.
Speaker 4Two different sides of the brain. I mean, it literally is two different sides of the brain.
Speaker 1Exactly. And if you're a RevOps, and you want to move beyond that, or do more, be your CRO or VP of sales, like right hand person, and give them the insights into the business, because they will continue. A lot of the people, you know, will rely heavily on their RevOps 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 it out themselves.
Speaker 3What I found though, is that RevOps people, when you go, if you, if we ask 10 different companies right now, exactly what do you need your RevOps people to do? And what are they held accountable to? You're going to get close to 10. You're going to get close to 10 different answers. It hasn't really been well defined by a lot of, a lot of companies.
Speaker 4And 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 RevOps 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. You know, I think great RevOps people are the ones that can, you know, translate that language of what's going on in revenue and attaching it directly to, you know, company outcomes and making it, you know, clear what needs attention, where do we need help? Where do we need investment? Where do, and the numbers don't lie. Like, so it's not just being a numbers person, but it's understanding how to tell a story about the
Speaker 1numbers. A hundred percent. We like to call them actionable insights. You know, like these are the things, like, I don't need a readout. I don't need a call for you to read to me that it's 30% year over year growth. That's great. Or, or it's flat, right? What do you need a RevOps person for
Speaker 3then? Just take a finance person and just have them give you the, you know, data dump on the
Speaker 4numbers. You need a journalist, not a, not, I've heard this. You need a journalist, not a weather person. Exactly. You know, the weather is here today. It's doing this, it's doing that. You need a journalist to tell you a story about what's going on. Yeah. And you also got to press the
Speaker 1button too and 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 your organization's perfect, then I'm going to be the most worried because it doesn't exist. And what are the things that we're getting stepped upon within the various parts of the funnel, whether it's SDR marketing driven or expand motions where reps are expanding themselves and 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, where the, 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.
Speaker 4You said, tell me the story. Don't be a magician.
Speaker 1Exactly. You're not trying to sell me. I'm already, I already bought, I'm already
Speaker 3bad 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, 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 here.
Speaker 4So that's not just revenue ops, Johnny. That's like, that's like kind of like a foundational attribute for leadership, right? Right. I mean, I always, I said to somebody this morning.
Speaker 3They'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? What'd 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.
Speaker 4I 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. Boom, boom, boom, boom. Exactly. We were losing. And I said, don't lose alone. I, 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. Nobody was involved in that deal.
Speaker 1It 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, I was talking about earlier around like, Hey, you know, we're going to push my losses out because I'm going to get beaten up on a loss. So I'm just going to wait until I win a deal to do a close loss. Right. You got to practice what you preach in your culture and reward that. Because you took the words right out of my mouth. I was going to say, don't lose alone. And quite frankly, the best reps also don't win alone. You know, the best reps are the ones that, you know, can pull the other parts of the team in to help them win. It's like, I don't want superheroes. I don't need to be a superhero. Like, if you've got to leverage 18 people in the company and it's, you know, it's an appropriate deal and deal size and qualify and all these things. Like, let's go. We're going to all win it together. And then don't lose alone.
Speaker 4Okay. Take us to scaling because his background is so.
Speaker 3I 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. Going from like small deals to midsize deals to big deals, you know, what is it in the sales process that you've seen like definitely changes as you scale?
Speaker 1Well, I think first off 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. And 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 deal's, 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 over here, you don't really put pressure on the champion and what you really has 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, and run those motions with consistency, you start to get really good Intel about your pipeline, about your business, about your predictability, about your win rate, when your loss rate, and all of them has a 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, 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 can in essence inform the quality of a deal, whether it's direct or indirect across every data source, which makes it kind of is helping deliver on the dream. The dream of spend most of your, 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, you know, 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 dent. 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 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. I'm not spending time making sure the rep asked the question and pulled up the sales process and and vetted it. I can move right to, hey, I can see you don't have an echo. Oh, you, it 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, you know, searching for things and you can do a lot of things from that, you know, in motion enablement and a bunch of other things.
Speaker 3Let's go back to scaling Nova and with recruiting and talk to me a little bit about the people you, you were recruiting when it was you and you have to hire a couple salespeople at Redis and then you start to scale and talk to me about type of people. You you are recruiting then I'm sure the profile changed.
Speaker 1It did change, you know, in the earlier days you lean toward you always want the grit. You always want the people that are willing to do the work because 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.
Speaker 3Let's talk to the traits that they they have in the early days versus, you know, once you start to get 50 people a hundred people.
Speaker 1Well, the traits is they're they're more transactional. They'll end up doing more deals. There's less of these big deal cycles because 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, grinded it out and and just had to continue react and be tactical and and find those things as we grew over the resourceful,
Speaker 3right? They can very resourceful rounds. Like I remember 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, make an expense report. Yeah. I mean later and he said, you know, they don't even have a laptop. I said, okay, so get online and buy a fucking laptop. Like I realized like within a week. He was just absolutely the wrong person. Even though he did really well in a mid-sized company. He was just awful when it came to a startup.
Speaker 1Yeah. No, you have to be you have to scratch. Yeah, you gotta you gotta put all those things together. You're not gonna get a silver platter of all these things, you know,
Speaker 4add something here on this. Yeah. Yeah. The big part for me is identifying what's required in the role. Like you guys are talking about but then having this is why I feel we just miss it too many times. We're not honest about whether or not somebody has the 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 could do that. They could do this. I say, yeah, okay. I got it. Let me give you new evidence. Is that what they want to do? And I feel like people miss that they get the check in the box saying, yeah, they've 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? Will it make them feel like less than one? Percent of the population, the world who wakes up in the morning and says, I'm doing exactly what I'm supposed to be doing.
Speaker 3Do you ask him why they want to do it?
Speaker 1Well, 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 him a question and I ask it. Relative to whatever the cycle of the company is, if it's a rep in an early stage or if it's a manager now, but if the context is the same, the question is first, I'll say I don't want an answer. To this question. I'm going to ask you a question. You need to reflect on it and you really got to think about it. But the question is you're going to 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 going to tell me exactly what I want to 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 going to have a conversation because we're disappointed because you can't deliver on the expectations of the role because 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 going to 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. It gets harder as we get bigger, but I certainly have this conversation with every leader that we hire because 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 that's bullshit, but you're going to do it right like because in 90 days, I'm not coming with my broom to clean up your business because because we can predict that that's going to 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 like, Like, hey, it's gonna be chaos. Yeah, you're gonna be an SDR. going to go to the show you're going to stand at 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 in 90 days that it's 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 i sometimes like and i've had people bow out they're like yeah you know what that was a good question and uh thought about it and you're right i'm better off at a 10 30 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 spectrum 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 uh 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 because otherwise they're going to tell me what i want they want the job they're trying to sell you
Speaker 3a lot of 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 other companies are you looking at well i'm looking at salesforce i'm looking at service now and i'm looking at ibm like oh what are you doing 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 what you want yeah the answer is i want the
Speaker 1options well yes but that's not the reason like it's a reason but you're you're setting yourself up a discipline
Speaker 3in the early days talk about some of the leadership for the leaders that you're going to hire what are some of the traits you're looking for in the leaders in in the early days yeah i think um
Speaker 1excellent 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 feet on the street you're hearing it you're testing it like you're gonna 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 get it all figured out especially in the first couple
Speaker 3million bucks like yeah you get some customers but i just want to emphasize what i say there is like the early days the salespeople are part salespeople part product manager yep 100 i'm ready to be part product manager for a raw startup uh it's probably not the right job for you because the product's not going to do everything it's it's it says it's going to do or is intended to do or eventually will do um so you have to sell around that at the same time getting really honest feedback from the customer and giving that to
Speaker 1development 100 percent and i think that's a really good point i think that's a really good point i think that's a very early stage skill i think guys that have been at the other side of scaling you've you've you have processes and ways to you got 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 that's one of those things is that ability to be that is gold it's it's in the interest of the business you know i just had a
Speaker 4conversation with a guy the other day um 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 i've done startup i'm a startup person and and this is where three months later i said i didn't ask you if you've done that i say you obviously have done that and you did it well is that what you're saying what you want to do now and the reason why he didn't want to stay in this company was he the freaking product doesn't work and but but the 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 i would tell people i've done it but man i don't want to do it again exactly
Speaker 1you gotta be honest exactly you gotta be honest with yourself and you know that's the ego thing it's 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 just got to be don't jump at the first thing have the patience do your due diligence um because ultimately like everything it's gonna fail you can't
Speaker 4debate the statistical chance of like you're miserable like what what 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 on my own and you're going to ask me to reflect on not just what 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 blah blah 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 hiring managers 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 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 a reference who wants to be very very positive for the person who you know you're telling them 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 the reference purposes he's talking about himself right of course of course you know so so okay so now i know what i'm getting into now john's let's say not me but let's say this person's an a player but i want to know where they're at when it gets hard what does it look like for them and i cannot believe how many people do not do
Speaker 3that they don't ask a reference man crazy how many people don't do back that don't back channel and
Speaker 4get references yeah but even asking somebody who cares enough to be a reference so they already care about the individual they're going to tell you from the heart what to look out for yeah they
Speaker 1want them to 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 they're going to say bad things about me so they're going to say bad things about me so they're going to say bad things about me so they're going to say bad things about me so they're going to say bad things about me so they're going to say bad things about me so they're going to say bad things about me so they're going to say bad things about me so they're 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 but would you not move forward with me no yes no yes you know um so it's like it's the same thing which is great but yeah it is amazing and um 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 i think we're gonna hire this person and it's like no one's connected them to him on linkedin i'm like doesn't that tell you something like who doesn't know anybody 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 uh hope everybody when you're scaling
Speaker 4too because you know you never can make mistakes right but when you're scaling and you're in a position of you know of unfit high or whatever you can't make it up like you're going to burn cash um at those stages you got to be right yeah
Speaker 1you gotta you gotta be right you gotta take your time richard branson has this great quote which is it's better to have a hole on your team than an asshole i i use it all the time it's like it's like genius right and um the second rule is fire fast like you know if you clearly made a mistake you know address it quickly and move because you know we we're carrying quotas quota coverage you know is is someone who's producing a lot of money and you're not making a lot of money you're not producing something better than biting the bullet and getting reinvested in someone better it's it's always that question that that leaders take so it's it's it's important to you know you will make a mistake it's very painful um 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 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 did we learn from it
Speaker 4you 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're you said you got to go look
Speaker 3in the mirror I can't remember you know it's either that you can't recruit somebody you got to 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 in the mirror yes with yourself and come on back and tell me which one you can't do because we have to fix it so he was a shit bird so we just let him
Speaker 4go no you hired him you learn what happens in those cultures when everybody's talking about how fast like you get a badge of 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
Speaker 1we are complicit in this yeah it's actually our fault not the person's fault it's our fault we let it happen we missed something we didn't hold ourselves accountable yeah it's on us 100%
Speaker 3what it always comes back to you know you have skills you have knowledge and you have characteristics and what I found this always comes back to a characteristic it doesn't typically come back to especially if you have good training 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 you know 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 of company along the scale 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 it could be if you wanted to ask me well 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 competitions coming after you messaging has to change the way you sell 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 I'm really bullish on this
Speaker 4principle right now because the more I look into and even my own history like we all go through cycles you know have we always been you know energetic have we always been like everybody's going to have a bad day everybody's going to have some crap that happens to them somebody's going to pass away or you know something's going to happen 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 and I have found amazingly that when I 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 happen somebody or you know stuff that's out of my league you know they're they're struggling with drinking they got problems at home or whatever but very rarely is this does this characteristic now the job could change which causes another character trait to to you know 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 because I've heard some
Speaker 1unbelievably great stories this goes to the profile of you know 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 you know they're getting out there with their teams and asking those questions and and you know validating of what's going on in their life and and and being open to asking those questions a lot of people like I'm not gonna ask that it's none of my business or um you know I encourage teams like hey if you 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 we work sit in a room make calls together and you know just do some motions together whatever it is and and be there as part of you know assessing what's going on and building that relationship you're right life is tough it's it's uh you have to manage for everything that people have going on and and changing and but you also want to have the relationship where people open up and tell you this is what's going on because some people won't tell you their pride you know and and like you said everybody's got you know challenges and things going on but if you have that relationship and people are open you can you can navigate around that and set expectations accordingly and 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
Speaker 4because they're going to play that role I want to give a little plug to our buddy uh coach Brian White who wrote a book called the locker room is not for sale and the book is yeah he is a 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 uh I I think he's just got a really good take on earning the right to get really really close to your people uh in an authentic way which is an incredible skill for a leader to have yep yep a must-have a little bit of
Speaker 3scaling again maybe before we wrap this thing up so what happened what you see in a lot of startups is and and even they start to gain some traction some size too where you know you get you get 10 reps and two of them are carrying the weight of everything and that's that's that's that's what we're doing 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 man these guys just are having a difficulty they're either recruiting the wrong people they're giving them to the wrong leaders they're not onboarding these people correctly why can't they do it 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 when you peel back the onion and like oh there's nothing really going on there well I think it starts to be at
Speaker 1first we kind of talked about it 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 um so that's the first being honest being honest the the second is is is digging into what the people like you spend a lot of time celebrating and looking into the people that the two people that hit it but what 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 and you can get insights from and you can get insights from and 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 they happen to also have the two best se's 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 because that's what you do um it could be um the particular use cases that these people focus on they just don't convert the loss rate is low um the win rate is low rather um you got to be looking under the hood and all of these things and and and diagnosing kind of what the root causes of those things this goes back to our rev ops conversation it goes back to kind of being honest leaving your ego at the door but you know you should not be getting on a call that's uh you know the george bush mission accomplished care craft 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 we could go on and on but you got to be honest you got to look under the hood peel the onion back and truly assess those things that you're looking at right and address them um or you might be just over hiring because you're chasing a growth number and you're playing a numbers game and you don't care what you're doing you're not going to be able to do that you're not going to be able to do that
Speaker 3you're not going to be able to do that you're not going to be able to do that so i think it's before too amazing how to peel back the onion and we got honest about it you got leaders one big one
Speaker 4that 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 productivity but it's the opiate of the deals and you get leaders like it's 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 somebody's got to hold you accountable for coaching and developing your people yeah but you see it all the time right
Speaker 3so 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 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 helped slay the bear and pull it back on ground yeah you know but there's five four or five other reps they got their first meeting with a technical buyer or potential champion and the manager doesn't go on those calls and those people need his help desperately that's they do what you call say johnny they're chasing the forecast they're only working on deals that are in the forecast and they're ignoring other people that need a lot of help and they're going with people
Speaker 4that actually don't need their help that's a lumpy pipeline and lumpy forecast over time for sure
Speaker 1all the time well it's uh it's common we've seen it and uh that's funny i had the first vp of sales i worked for way back he was that guy flying to australia to get the eight million dollar po is like like dude like you're burning four out four days to go it's happening like what why are you going all the way there we've got other deals to do like 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 um they're basics but i think it kind of it rings through you know all of these things all of things and it's basics uh but easier said than done right like uh if it was easy as i tell my guys it was easy they'd pay us less
Speaker 4so you know donnie i don't feel like we gave jason a chance to talk about cockroach what they're doing there you know are you hiring what's happening can
Speaker 1you 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 yeah i hit it right i was like cockroach i mean half the customer meetings i have that like you're going to change that name like are you going to forget the names like no i'm like no you're not forgetting it yeah it's like it's the first company my parents ever remembered where i worked like like they thought i worked at reddit not reddit they thought i worked at reddit not redis like you know but now i work at the cockroach company which which is a the first part of the powerful meaning of the powerful uh how powerful the name is because it is very but the other secondary and more important reason is that what a cockroach is outside of you know being disgusting insects they're also very well known for the only thing that will survive a cockroach deb is is a very highly resilient scalable database uh sql database and it's really important it's kind of 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 you know environments are very complex you have hybrid environments you know you're you're you're working across data centers on-prem data centers and cloud you have multi-cloud you have mainframes and you have so you have all this data all over the place um which you obviously want your llms and your ai to have access to so you're going to need the ability to 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 the parabolic growth of pounding that the databases are going to get um we talked about developers and architects and people building applications but that's going to go up pick your number 100x thousand x a million x of people pounding on this distributed database architecture um so you know that's why we're framing our agentic database cloud that will allow companies to you know service all of that landscape hybrid multi-cloud uh portability regulation um it's crazy we have a customer hard rock uh digital every state or every tribe where they have to settle a bet has to be settled in the state and then reconciled you know at the corporate level quickly quickly like like no one's gonna wait a second a millisecond for their money right so you have an obligation so so that is just the tip of the iceberg in in where the market is going and that's why we're excited you know cockroach is is uh meeting the moment before a.i but it's one of those things skating to the puck it was just it's it's a 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 um it's fun it's hard work it's a lot of accountability um but you know work hard play hard you know kind of old school saying with that that's what we do excellent what a great
Speaker 4well-rounded rounded leader that they would work for jason well done yeah well appreciate that thank
Speaker 1you uh this has been awesome really enjoyed talking to you guys and it's always um it's good to hear it's good to make sure you're not crazy when you have these conversations and reinforce what you know you tell yourself what you think is good and seems to be good but it's you always got to keep going and validating yourself and this this was certainly uh super
Speaker 4helpful for me well 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
Speaker 3dude all right thank you guys thank you jason forger thank you thank you and thanks to everyone for listening to another episode of the revenue builders podcast thanks for listening to today's
Speaker 2episode if you enjoy the content please subscribe rate 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 growth strategy at the point of sale check out forcemanagement.com for more information you
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