Speaker 1Hey everyone, this is Mark Roberge with the Science of Scaling podcast. So we're new. Welcome to you and me, I guess. Each week, I'm talking with the most successful sales leaders in tech to learn the science behind how they're scaling their teams, their operations, and their business. So today I'm joined by Kyle Parrish, the VP of Sales at Figma. Prior to that, he was one of the early sales hires at Dropbox, a company that many of us know. So he has seen the inside of some rapidly scaling companies, played a big leadership role in those. Specifically, PLG, product-led growth companies that both Dropbox and Figma are known for. He's going to elaborate on a lot of his experience, but one area we don't talk a lot about that's critical to this scale. We talk a lot about hiring the first sales leader, but not on integrating them. And that's something that I think Kyle did exceptionally well in his part, and that Dylan Field and the rest of the leadership team at Figma did as well. So let's hear that story right from Kyle. There's so much talk out there about the first sales hire, especially in PLG. Not a lot of talk about integration. That's what we're going to spend a lot of time on. We're going to spend a lot of our time there. But that said, when I get a call from a sales leader or a sales rep, like, hey, Mark, I'm looking for my new thing. What should I look for? I often point them to PLG companies. It is so exciting to walk into a company that has 10,000, 50,000, 100,000 weekly active users. The users love it. And now you get to go sell into that. And gosh, did you pick two winners between Dropbox and Figma. So bless us with your vision. Vision there. What would your advice be to like, okay, I looked at 500 PLG companies. How did you know Dropbox and Figma were going to be winners?
Speaker 2Dropbox is where I grew up as my first tech experience. And I think one of the first things that opened my mind to, hey, you're in a new environment. I came from working in a large company, siloed sales team to all of a sudden I'm walking by this woman's desk. And she was one of our interns from MIT. There was a lot of MIT folks from Dropbox. And she's doing the Rubik's Cube. Hitting this timer, doing the Rubik's Cube, hitting this timer. And I'm watching the thing. I'm trying not to, you know, be too nosy, but I'm watching it. And it's like eight seconds, nine seconds, 11 seconds. I had to say something. I go, excuse me. I'm sorry to bother you, but I'm just curious. Like, what are you doing? And she's like, well, I'm, I'm, I'm training. I've got the, uh, Rubik's cube competition. I placed second last year globally. And I was just like, that's when it sunk in. I was like, wow, this is an entirely different environment and I couldn't test what a great engineer looks like, what a great product person looks like. But you know, when you're around brilliance and greatness, I think Dropbox was one of their claims to fame is just bringing in a high caliber people across the board.
Speaker 1And so for the Rubik's cube champion, that's it now.
Speaker 2Yeah, it was unique. And I think when I started to look for my next role, uh, in Figma, like you said, I think you're looking for something where you see some big trends or some trends that I was following the rise of design, you know, in, in technology that was disrupting some of the biggest markets out there. Um, early on the former COO, we just talk about the user love, the community around Figma, even then, which was pretty nascent in 2018, you know, people were just ecstatic. So to be a salesperson, to be a good market leader and come in to something where people are truly finding value and shouting it from the digital rooftops, you know, that's, that's something you can, you can work with.
Speaker 1Hey folks, it's just Mark here. That point Kyle made. That's an important one. If you're out there looking for the next Figma as a PLG company, PLG has been really hot. I would say over the last 10 years, current macro conditions make it a little more challenging, but I'm still extremely bullish on the long-term impacts of PLG. It's not applicable everywhere though. And Kyle, he brings up an important point around disrupting a field. And I've written about this. If the category already exists and is understood. But it just hasn't been PLG'd, quote unquote. It's just, it's just easier for some, oh yeah, like I've used CRM. Oh cool, a free CRM. Like, oh yeah, I've used a designer tool. Oh cool, a free designer tool. I already get the category. So that, that's something to kind of think about as you look for the next winner. The other thing that's sort of hidden in his discussion there that is so key and it's critical for me as an investor in PLG is the first question I ask. It's not like revenue, believe it or not, it's, it's wow retention, weekly active user retention. So like, fine, you signed up a hundred customers in like the second week of November and now it's four months later. How many of those a hundred customers still use the tool? If you like dive into the depths of PLG execution, that's key. And that's, I think what Kyle means by creating value. Creating end user value, that's what you want to look for. So let's get back to him. So contrasting to typical environments where you're walking like, yeah, I got five beta customers. We have a product, we have like 700,000 in revenue. Now go stand up a cold calling team to try to like bring this to the world. Instead you're walking like, yeah, we've got a hundred thousand users. Now let's try to sell them something. How, it's amazing.
Speaker 2Well, it wasn't that high then, you know, there was still a lot of risk and you have to follow the trend and then it's the people. I mean, I spent time with, you know, Dylan, our CEO, and from the get go, you know, you could tell that he had already built a reputation of someone who is just extremely, extremely curious. When you spend time with them, you can see his drive, his intention. And early on, you know, you have to pick leaders and founders that you believe in. Last but not least, he had a really strong moral compass. You can just tell him that he was a really good human being. So I was excited to come work for him and work for this company and it was a big privilege to like build out a sales culture. That was unique, quite frankly, then maybe some of that more, more negative, uh, connotations out there about, you know, sales bros or whatever it may be in tech.
Speaker 1I love what Kyle's talking about here. I think we get this, like we're joining a company. Like we look at what the company does, the product, talk to customers. The founder is a big deal. That's a big deal is to our decision. What is a good founder? What is not? I bet that's going to be strongly correlated too. The ones that win. And he's talking about all these awesome things about Dylan and his perception. I think he's coachable, he's data driven, and that's the type of mentality that we should be looking for in our CEOs, our founders, our leaders. All right, let's get back to Kyle. Paint the picture of your perception of the Figma culture and how you sold yourself to get them comfortable with, with you.
Speaker 2Yeah. Well, I guess one of the caveats that people should know when trying to join. A product-led growth company is that early on self-serve is key. So I did meet Dylan and the former COO, and it was a good six, eight, nine months before they eventually called me back to come interview. I don't think I could have ever predicted the journey that we went on the four or five years after, but I really saw these trend lines that led to an opportunity to disrupt with collaboration, being in the browser, seeing that the design function was going to grow exponentially. And I think the other big part of it was that what I. I was lucky to, to learn second, third sales hire Dropbox was working really closely with engineering, product design, all of those teams. When you come in as the first sales hire, you're not rallying a sales team to make cold calls to hit numbers. There was no sales team. I was spending time with engineering, product support, design, understanding this audience that we were going to go sell to, but also like figuring out all the stuff on the product side. Like there was so much that we had to do to unblock this thing to, to eventually. Kickstart the commercial side of the business and be able to monetize our enterprise tier. And just some of the pricing flows that, you know, weren't thought about, they weren't tentative on having a sales team. So early on those decisions were not with the fact that, Hey, there may be a full on sales team selling this product into this market. So I tried to pitch myself on, I could be that person who understood how to build and scale could grow, but also knew how to work with these internal teams. But if I pushed too hard early on, you know, that, that might do detrimental. And so I was like, okay, I'm going to build this product. I'm going to build this product. existed or there was sales culture from day one, it starts with listening. It's just like doing good discovery from a sales perspective. So I think for me, it was paramount that I learned the product. I think I told you in the past, but I spent a month on the support queue early on, which is Dylan's idea, ended up being a really brilliant one. I just spent a lot of time with the folks that were building these products and understanding like, hey, where are we at today? Where is this thing going? Part of sales, as you know, is selling the roadmap. So it's really hard to talk about future things that are coming and how to communicate that to potential perspective customers if you don't know where the product is at today.
Speaker 1Yeah, that is a challenge. And I'm not sure a lot of the founding engineers and product folks would have had as much foresight and experience as Dylan and his team to embracing Kyle. I think they are, I don't even know if intimidated, but scared that it's going to ruin their culture. And I think Dylan's flirting with the product. I think Dylan's flirting with the product. I think Dylan's flirting with a pretty interesting way to position yourself is not to walk in and like set up commissions and hire all these, these bro sales cultures and drive customers. It's like, hey, how many times do you talk to customers every week right now? You're all heads down writing code. I don't know, three, four, five customers. What if the organization could talk to 30 customers a week and deliver back to you, insights, patterns? How do you feel about that? I think today's modern product engineering team, that's what gets them excited. I think that that's what gets them most excited about the first sales hire. And we know other stuff's coming, customers, revenue, predictability, it's necessary. But I think as we hear Kyle, that might be the best way to position ourselves as the first business hire, the first sales hire to align with what they want at this stage. All right. Let's hear more from Kyle. You've glanced over a lot of this integration playbook, which is so important. We have to unpack it so that as folks approach this, they know exactly what to do. The first thing you talked about was Dylan said, hey, come on over Kyle, but start in support. It's not the first time I've heard that. I wonder where Dylan got that, if that was his dad. I'm sure someone might've told him about it. Maybe that that happens. And I think it's brilliant. Can you unpack that for us? Looking back, why do you think that was so important? Do you have any sense where he came up with that? And tell us about that experience and how it created the foundation for you and the company to do what you need to do.
Speaker 2Yeah. So going back to the summer of 2018, Figma is a series B company. We were by no means a household name, I wouldn't say. I think the technical aptitude was really important for Dylan in terms of earning trust and being able sound intelligent, talking about our product, where our product's going. And so we spent so much time. I was doing bug bashes and hanging out the support queue. I didn't do anything proactive. It was all reactive. And I was hanging, it was physically in our office with all the support team numbers. And they were so kind to let me into the crew. And I kept apologizing for all of my stupid questions. And I think one of the things that I would say was most brilliant about it was, A, I learned the product, but most importantly, I learned the respect of the support team members. They could tell, like, this guy is not just in here trying to turn a quick buck and be some sales jargon, doesn't understand what he's talking about selling vaporware. I was in the details with them and they could see my dedication and quite honestly, gotten even more passionate about what we were doing as a company, what our platform was doing for our customers. And so when it was time to graduate and move on to sales, I felt like I had a really, really good foundation. So yeah, I'm very, very grateful for that time.
Speaker 1I love that. That's what I feel like engineers love is like, let's talk about product. Let's talk about the feedback. So it wasn't really limited to the support team. Like this was the whole organization through that seat you were in that you allowed to build those relationships.
Speaker 2And I think for every company, the support team looks different for Figma. It's such a critical part of our business and especially in our early on journey because they had built a reputation for being extremely responsive. We were coming out of a beta for our enterprise product. The fundamentals where I think it allowed us to be successful was that product feedback loop. So you had support, you had engineering and product, you had QA and a few things along the way. So what we were adding with the sales customer facing team is we were now going and talking to customers, doing deep discovery, you know, taking long form notes. The beauty of working in selling to designers is you ask a question and they'll give you a page full of answers. And so we were tying that back to what were we seeing on the support side. So you may talk to a leader, you know, in a design org, say Airbnb, and then all of their users are having an issue with some small thing, but like you're not able to tie those two dots together. If you're not having the conversation with someone who's maybe driving some of the decision-making around tooling and process, and also understanding what's happening under the hood for the people that are using this product, eight, 10, 12 hours a day. So I think that was probably the earliest signs of payback we saw in spending time in support was that those were really important things that we were able to do. And so I think that those relationships were there. Those kind of channels were already being defined so that as we added more salespeople, we had a foundation and it wasn't so brittle and breaking right out of the gates. We already had something working when it was myself and in our first two AEs.
Speaker 1It's usually broken at these organizations and it's a shame because you have so many touch points. I mean, that's one thing I love about modern product folks and engineers is they are obsessed with the voice of the customer and they are obsessed with having more of the voice of the customer. And a sales team is such an amazing way to amplify. Unfortunately, the reputation of sales is when an engineer says, "Hey, what are you hearing?" I think the reputation is a salesperson will gravitate to that last call. It's like, "Oh, if you just had this feature, we would sell millions." Recency. Right. Just that last one, right? And then that engineer falls for it and they build a feature and nothing happens. And so somehow you avoided that. Can you tell us more how did you avoid that recency effect?
Speaker 2I think what we did well as a team was we worked with product leaders, support, and other functions around the business. And we took stuff that was like, here is a notes document. And we would circulate that early on. We would take feedback requests, product requests, whatever it may be. And we would put it into these fields in Salesforce, which would then kick it into Slack where the majority of the company would join these Slack channels so we can see in real time specific areas. And then we would actually be able to tag it to an area like a core product pillar. And then what Dan was also doing was pushing it to Kona, which our product team uses to table and organize for their product roadmaps. So then they actually had specific to which pillar, which was typically aligned to like a product manager. And of course you could see like potential revenue attached to the whole thing. So we took something that was a little bit more tribal knowledge and we turned it in something a lot more scalable so that as a sales team, we started to have this system.
Speaker 1So- You talked a little bit about, you were very appreciative of this culture you were walking into. And I think you're, I'm imagining that your experience earlier on in Dropbox prepared you very well for that. And so as you thought about that, how did you think about the sales culture you would build?
Speaker 2For me, my perspective is the best salespeople are consultative salespeople that do more listening than they do talking. And so first and foremost, it was how do you bring in people that are excited, curious, have that technical aptitude to go deep enough on the product and are collaborative. So the first five to 10 hires were so critical. Every one of those people, I wanted to make sure it wasn't your Sharky kind of in my own switchboard, you know, swim lane salesperson, crushes numbers, goes home and that's that. That wasn't going to work. But I think it's really important to think about how do you connect with your customers and the community that they're a part of. People should be really excited about selling a product that's not a nice to have. Figma is critical software used by people 8, 10, 12 hours a day. And so the early folks that we brought in, I think Dylan's dream was that they were as technical as the designer, which probably in reality that overlapped with technical designers and relevant sales experience. Salespeople was pretty small, but the technical aptitude of our first five to 10 hires was really, really high. I mean, these people were almost pseudo sales engineers.
Speaker 1Just to dive into that, because I've seen people try this and I'm not advocating this approach. I want to get your feedback on it. And I'm sure some people are kind of thinking this, so I just want to put it out there. Based on everything you said, why not not hire a salesperson? Why not hire a designer? Why not hire more of a customer success manager profile? Why not hire that sales engineer profile? Is that maybe a better approach in that early days?
Speaker 2I don't think so. I think that what you're going to get from someone who has sales experience and who's really just like hyper-focused on driving the business forward by acquiring customers, expanding customers, as many PLG companies are, Figma is a land and expand product. So We did create a team that I think was pretty unique in the market at the time. time called the designer advocate team. That was the equivalent of the sales engineer at Figma. These are practicing designers who are so excited about Figma and the community. They came work at Figma and they helped create content. They help with onboarding and scaling the programs. They help with met new conversion of customers. But at the end of the day, you need a salesperson as your quarterback driving next steps. As you started to make that pivot, whatever it was, two years in to doing outbound, that is a journey. You've talked about this in the past, but for any culture that goes from, hey, we've got PLG, we've got inbound leads, the name of the game early on in the core North Star metric for me was conversion. Once you feel like you're really nailing conversion of customers coming to you, you're growing and scaling the sales team. It's not enough to just live off of that. So we went through that journey of taking our inbound sales team and everyone pivoting. Over time to outbound. And so you need that historical context. You need people that want to be a part of that journey. And for many, many reasons, most of these people self-select not to be salespeople. Sales is not an easy profession. And so I think we were really intent that we wanted a performance-based culture where you have variable and base compensation and we're bringing in salespeople to grow the business.
Speaker 1Hey folks, just Mark here. Yeah, I agree with Kyle here. It's like, as he's talking, you would think it's like, oh, you know what, I'm going to do this. And I've tried this. I've seen a lot of people try it. And I've seen it fail most of the time, which is like, yeah, why don't we just hire designers to talk to these folks? That's what we're trying to create. Why don't we just hire customer success folks? And you're missing the sales skill and desire. And it's easy to overlook that as a founder. It's like, and I think it's because we don't really know what that is. And Kyle's given us a taste of it. It's doing great discovery. Like it is so hard in such a skill to get on the phone with the stranger and ask them 30 minutes of 12 sequential opened ended questions where they don't feel interrogated and they open up. That is hard. I don't think a lot of designers have that. I don't think a lot of customer success managers have it. And that's what we need. We need someone that understands what it feels like to progress the sale forward, to get next steps, to hold the buyer accountable. If you're going to step up and do stuff, they need to show commitment too. So there's, there's this other side that even though we, we don't want to hire what we consider that sharky seller, there are critical attributes of that, that we need in this role right now that we're not going to get just by hiring a designer to do this. Okay. Let's get back to Kyle. And I joined early at Dropbox.
Speaker 2We tried this experiment that now is fairly notorious within the Dropbox world, but we did this 50 50 project where early on the sales team, they moved everyone out of the company. And it was 50 50. You could work 50% of your time on sales with customers and 50% of your time on another interest because the business was exploding hyper growth. It ended up being a disaster. Sales is not a 50% time job. You have to be all in. And that's the only way you get that relentless focus and attention to detail is where you're going to see the output that you want as a business.
Speaker 1Sometimes when you layer the sales team in and then, you know, somewhere, you're going to see the output that you want as a business. And then, you know, some organizations, they've had salespeople make a lot of money. Like there's organizations out there where like salesperson had a good year. They've been a million bucks. Did you ever have any engineers were like, why are we paying those people so much? Like, why are those people? Why are some of those people making more than me? When I'm building the product, I have like eight years of schooling on my really scientific field. And some of these folks don't even have college degrees and we're paying them that much.
Speaker 2Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think first there were some questions that came up, you know, there are differences to leading a sales team versus leading an engineering team. But I think for the most part at this point in time, you know, 2018 to now, most people had kind of understood that, hey, this works. There's a culture around it that exists. And that variable call-up is a massive risk that many people don't want to take. And I think just, you know, for our culture, I think being PLG, you're not starting with a culture where salespeople are making a million dollars a year. You're not starting with a million dollars a year. Yeah, for sure. But I think for the most part, yeah, at Figma at least, the engineering and product teams understood the culture and it goes back to the connection. You know, you talked about like immersion of sales and product engineering cultures. And if you feel like it's really this one group, there's less of this divisive, like, why are they paid differently? And, you know, without even getting into equity and like total compensation, if you really want to split the whole thing open.
Speaker 1I've always been perplexed. I'm perplexed by this. Why does variable compensation apply to sales, but nowhere else? Or why do we even need it in sales? Daniel Pink was the more recent person, like in his book, To Sell is Human, where he predicted it would go away. Hasn't been tried. You know, Kyle talks about the Dropbox story. Never seen it work. Trying to think if I have. I don't think so. There might be some situations, maybe like, you know, raising money for non-profits, maybe stuff like that. Pharmaceutical sales tend to be a little less leveraged on their variable comp, but like it just, it just prevailed as an experiment. But just keep that in mind as you try to get creative. Maybe you'll be the first to figure it out, but it's been tried and variable comp still outperforms. All right. Let's hear from Kyle. The last piece we didn't talk about on the integration was the role of the founder CEO. I mean, sure. Dylan did say, hey, go sit in support. Great call. Can you talk about some of the things he did that you felt were critical to the successful onboarding for you? Yeah, I think I
Speaker 2want to give Dylan a ton of credit where he paved the way to give me an opportunity to speak in front of the company often, which was a little nerve wracking, but he did a really good job carving out, talking about metrics, talking about sales performance, letting me come up and speak about the challenges, speak about recent hires, speak about customer feedback. And so that was something that he was really intentional about. That was the missing link at the company at that point. Who's talking to our customers, who's working with customers to get them on current contracts, to hear them expand, to bring in those featured requests, talk about products that are coming, help map out an organization and see who these core decision makers are. And at the time there just wasn't really a culture around that. So I give him a lot of credit in terms of just making that core to his agenda as a CEO and founder, because he had a lot on his plate. He didn't have to do that. But I think he realized that I brought this person in for them to be successful. I've got to kind of pave the way for them to either fail or succeed.
Speaker 1Yeah, we have all these other design constraints, but like, gosh, is it important how the founder talks about sales? You know, I think Kyle's, really giving Dylan a lot of accolades here, and I think he deserves them. He put them on equal footing. I'm not saying that's the right answer. It just depends what you want. Do you want a culture where sales is a second class citizen and engineering is the top? Might be right. And you can create that the way you as the founder talk about them. But if you think that you have to go to market with exceptional product and engineering, an exceptional go-to-market sales, marketing, et cetera, then you have to talk about both of them equally and show to the entire company that you appreciate them equally, especially when you have 46 employees and 45 of them are in product and engineering and wasn't in sales. So I think there's a great lesson there that Kyle is illustrating for us. All right, let's finish it up with him. A lot of folks these days are getting pressure, folks in your seat, to do more with less, you know, we're going through an interesting economic, macroeconomic condition and artificial intelligence is being looked to as a potential answer to how to really change the do more with less formula. Are you all on the sales side? Have you all done anything with the AI side to do that? Or is there anything in like the next six months that you're hoping to explore based on some of like anecdotes you've heard about what's available in AI today? I think one of the areas that
Speaker 2I'm focusing on and looking into is around supporting outbound content generation, basically to drive pipeline for our sales team. So we've got a BDR team today. We've got a lot of AEs and AMs that are doing outreach and basically trying to drum up discovery meetings and pipeline. So for me, I think one of the most clear and obvious ways that we could use AI, there's a number of startups popping up in this space, is the idea around personalization at scale to relevant contacts in an account or a business that you're going after. So we all know that just the spammy, hi, first name, you know, it's something about you, something about them, whatever it may be. If it's not personal, if it's not picking up what Mark's posting about on social media, if it's not talking about some initiative in the K1 or whatever it may, within the 10K or whatever that there's going on out in the internet, then it's not likely to get your eyes out that you're going to respond. And so what we're seeing internally is these examples of people, we've got this Slack channel called PG Tales, pipeline generation stories, basically. and it's all these personalized stories of success but to do that it's a lot of work from our salespeople and you're also asking them to sell move deals forward forecast all these other parts of their job and so we can leverage ai to basically find all these things on the internet populate email address name all the fields be accurate because you don't look spammy you don't want to overly look like you're just using an ai tool i think that could help us just move faster and get more activity out the door i think uh that's one of the areas we're looking into ai but we haven't adopted a
Speaker 1product yet the figna story is just remarkable if we think about in the context of entrepreneurship and compared to other fields it's the equivalent of winning a super bowl an emmy a nobel prize and uh so many people try and so few have that experience so kyle you know congratulations i'm being such a big part of that story and we thank you so much for inspiring us and educating us and being transparent so we can learn from that remarkable ride yeah well thank you i feel
Speaker 2fortunate to be a part of an incredible team and it's been the journey of a lifetime so thank you for having me today mark it's our pleasure
Speaker 1today's episode was written and produced by matthew brown our show is edited by pizza shark productions big thanks to hubspot for startups and to the hubspot podcast network for keeping the audio on hey also we're a new show so if you like what you hear or if you hate what you hear leave us a rating and review over on your favorite podcast player i love the feedback also check out stage two capital we're the first vc firm running back by over 500 cro's cmos ccos so if you're an entrepreneur looking to scale your business check out stage two dot capital all right that's it for today i'm mark reveres see you next week
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