Speaker 1If you're a rep and you don't have two customer meetings a day, at least, something is wrong. There was an operational cadence around there in a weekly meeting to ensure the entire organization was like out there in the market, getting new business and progressing.
Speaker 2Just wrapped up an awesome episode with Nick Bogaty, Chief Revenue Officer at FirstSell. In the conversation, we talk about selling to developers.
Speaker 1I think the biggest thing is intellectual and technical curiosity. We're in this very, very privileged state right now where like on weekends, you can go build websites and you can go build agent like you and I can, not developers. I think salespeople should go do that stuff. And if they aren't, I think they're at a disadvantage in the market right now. We also talk about how to effectively interview salespeople. In general, it's just I try to test for intelligence. I give people very direct feedback on calls to see how they receive it. Like Coach. And I think people who are immediately defensive is like there's a red flag.
Speaker 2Right, 100%. How they're using AI in go-to-market at FirstSell, using the tool in order to create leverage inside the organization.
Speaker 1We run our entire business on tools that FirstSell has created. Territory planning, forecasting, consumption signals. Literally every single salesperson is using that every day for their jobs. And it's just been like incredibly like liberating.
Speaker 2Enjoy the conversation with Nick, fellow New York guy. Fellow Nick's fan, fellow Suffering Mets fan. And now on to the episode. Welcome to the Crew podcast, where we have conversations with the top go-to-market leaders at AI natives and SaaS startups. I'm Chris Belestris, co-founder of Crew, a go-to-market recruiting, media, and investing firm helping seed through Series D AI natives grow. Now on to the episode. This episode is brought to you by Parallel. Parallel is where AI agents find answers. They've indexed the web from the ground up for AI specifically so agents can get accurate, low-latency, token-efficient web data. They power agents at the fastest-growing AI native companies and Fortune 500s. And if you sell for a living, most of the people listening do, go-to-market engineers use Parallel to run real-time monitors on their accounts, catching funding rounds, exec changes, and product launches as they happen in real time, and to automate account research and enrichment applications. Get started for free at Parallel.ai. Big thanks to our sponsor, Attention. Sellers were hired to sell, not to fill in the CRM. Attention records and understands every sales call, then automatically updates your CRM, sends follow-ups, and scores reps against frameworks like Medic, Bant, or your own custom methodology. Next best actions are proactively generated from there. You get a clean pipeline, coaching on every call, and forecasting you can actually trust. Thank you. Thanks to our sponsors, Attention. Sellers were hired to sell, not to fill in the CRM, sends follow-ups, and scores reps against frameworks like Medic,
Speaker 1Bant, or your own custom methodology.
Speaker 2happens when you're working in tech and we're here right now. And I guess it's like Union Square, maybe the Tenderloin or Knob Hill. I don't know. I got to get my neighborhoods down a little bit, but you know, I was super excited to have you on. I think in our prep call, you dropped a line that was kind of blew my mind a little bit. So I thought you had longer sales background is, you know, most people work 15, 20 years for the CRO seat, especially at like a rocket ship like Vercel. Your first official sales job was the CRO of AppDynamics. Walk me through how that actually happened and like the moment that you said yes to a sales career as a former product guy. Sure. Look, I
Speaker 1think like generally, you know, I talk to people a lot about sort of like career progression and there's sort of people who have like super linear careers. You know, they start as a BDR and then they become a commercial AE and then a major as AE and then frontline leadership and like, you know, do that. And then there's lots of people who have like non-linear careers. Like my career was non-linear. I, for 10 years, I ran open source projects. Like I made a ebook file format standard. Then I started running product teams at Adobe. And I always had like a commercial mindset. You know, I was always like closing deals, just like not officially in sales roles. And then I went to AppDynamics. I ran the post-sales organization there and then was lucky to move to run all of go-to-market. So that was sales and post-sales.
Speaker 2Yeah. You created like the EPUB or what was the, or you were part of that? Yeah. Yeah. So it's the standardization of what you would use a Kindle for? Yeah. This is a, this is a real deep dive, but this is a
Speaker 1deep, this is a deep cut. But like I was really, I was really interested in, you know, how people read and digital publishing. And we basically made an MP3 file format equivalent for electronic
Speaker 2books. Well, you went from product and a post-sale. Why'd you even make that move in the beginning to like the AppD post-sales team?
Speaker 1We went to AppD, a couple of people from Adobe went over to AppD in preparation to go public. Got it. And there was a lot of need and requirement at AppDynamics at the time to make a really good post-sales organization. We had a very good sales organization, not a great post-sales organization. And so I just jumped in and ran that. It was, wasn't, particularly a conscious effort and more like what the company needed at the time.
Speaker 2I see. So you're at AppD, you had a great run there. Jeremy Duggan's been mentioned a couple times on different podcasts. I believe it was when we had Graham and we've had a bunch of these other MongoDB disciples. They've mentioned Jeremy, would love to have him on the podcast actually. But you said something that, you know, you went from a product guy and a post-sale guy to then being like, I want to get into sales because of what Jeremy Duggan ran his sales process. Like, tell us more of what you mean by that.
Speaker 1Yeah, sure. There was a moment when I started AppDynamics and I was invited to SKO, the first SKO that I went to at AppD. And I went to SKO and my experience prior to with sales teams was largely sort of like relationship oriented people. And I went to SKO and I saw what they put on. By the way, it was Jeremy Duggan, who was running AppDynamics and also Tom Levy, who was running the enablement program. And for the first time ever in my life, I saw a sales team scientifically approach a market and a sales team who literally was trained to know more about the businesses that they were selling to than the people that they were actually selling to. And I thought that that was just like an incredibly inspirational and like attractive thing that I saw at that SKO. And I thought that that was just like an incredibly inspirational and I was like, I want to get close to these people. I want to learn how they do it. I want to learn the craft. And I was just like, totally, totally sold. And thankfully, those two people, Jeremy and Tom, received me with open arms and taught me the ropes.
Speaker 2Yeah. You bring this up. It's like, hey, my experience with salespeople is always the relationship or it's this whole like art is a art and a science. It's a combo of both. Maybe some sales are more steak dinner-y heavy and some are more technical. It sounds like the AppD sale needed that science in that. I'm all about the science. Yeah, we'll get into that with what you and Gene are doing at Vercel of us too, because there's a lot of what I would define that as like sales is a science very much so. When you say you saw them at AppD do this like science-based approach, anything that come to mind of what they were specifically doing that like you think other sales orgs weren't doing or was unique?
Speaker 1Yeah. Like I'll just give you like a very specific example. So like the concept of a value pyramid where you're trying to align company objectives and the personal objectives of the person you're trying to sell to, to your product. The actual like artifact of a value pyramid is all about like putting customers first and understanding what is going on with a customer before anything, before you talk about yourself. And so like often, often what you'll see in, you know, sales campaigns and sales teams is that it's all about like them. It's all about the company. You know, it's all about, hey, it's AppD, AppD, AppD, AppD. Oh, by the way, let's talk about you. They totally flipped it on its head and said, it's company, company, company. It's like company at the high level, strategic objective. It's company at the departmental objective. It's company, company. And then it's finally, app dynamics. Yeah. That is like a really attractive thing. I think it's like really important. I think it's more important today than ever. And you know, that, that team at app dynamics, like really live that ethos.
Speaker 2Yeah. You mentioned this twice now. It's like they knew their customer better than you've ever seen a sales team do that. How do you hire for that? Is it like, Hey, if you sell a technical product, make sure they've sold to developers before. Is it, Hey, we're testing for IQ. Like I think a lot of sales leaders would probably agree with that, but maybe they don't execute it well or don't know how, what are the things that in order to create a sales team that can do this that you should do or hire for?
Speaker 1It's a little intangible, but like you got to hire for like business sense. Like I don't know exactly, you know, what it is, but like, you know, people who go to business school, go to business school to learn business sense. But there's plenty of people who don't go to business school who have that. So like, you know, testing and understanding and like going to people and saying, hey, there is a business case. Go research that business case and tell me about it. I think is like, you know, that's the key. That's the key to all of this. And understanding how, you know, understanding the needs of your customer as opposed to the needs of yourself, you know, like the Amazon ethos about know your customer. I know it's a tagline, but like, I really believe.
Speaker 2Yeah. Yeah. I think you're overestimating how much I learned in business school as an MBA here. I just partied for two years. My apologies. Yeah. Yeah. But, but hey, if that's, if that's the sentiment is that we're learning a ton, it's like, dude, I was just, I was like, you know, doing app raise, like ski trips and stuff. No, that all makes sense. I like, why is it that I keep hearing that AppD and even Mongo, right? They get brought up in the same, I know Jeremy was an advisor for it. What else about AppD made it great? That everybody's like, oh, I don't know. Everybody keeps talking about the lineage and like what you learned there.
Speaker 1I think there's like two things. One is what we, what we already talked about of just, of just like the focus on the customer. The second was the operational cadence for how the sales team was run. What that really was about is like a relentless week over week process that everyone in the entire organization from reps to frontline leaders on up believed in and ran week. It was, it was all about like compounding gains. It was literally the entire sales team was going to the gym every week. And then after 30 weeks or 50 weeks or whatever it is, the sales team was stronger as a result. And specifically what I'm talking about with the operational cadence is like operational cadence around pipeline generation.
Speaker 2Got it. Yeah. Is it, was it similar to AppD, which we hear of the Mongo lineage of like, Hey, PG Wednesdays, there was a specific day or is it similar to AppD? Was it like, you mentioned the inputs here. So is it like, Hey, based on what we've seen in our data, you need to make X amount of calls, X amount of emails you got to get on site. Like what were the actual inputs that you guys would test for to make sure that the outputs would eventually occur?
Speaker 1We had things called leading indicators and basically what it, what it boiled down to was like, how many meetings were you having weekly with like net new customers and how many meetings were you having in total? The net new customers was to drive new logos and like top of funnel pipeline. And then the next thing you know, you're going to have a lot of new customers. And then you're going to have a lot of new customers. And then the total meetings was, um, you know, inclusive of that and deal progression. Okay. Okay. And so like, basically what it really came down to is, um, you know, if you're a rep and you don't have two customer meetings a day, at least something is wrong. Um, and there was an operational cadence around there on a weekly meeting to ensure not on a weekly basis inspection, but like trending that the entire organization was doing. And so, um, you know, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was like out there in the market, getting new business and progressing. So like, I didn't really care. And I don't think anyone really did about, um, you know, call volumes or email volumes. That wasn't the point. The point was, are you meeting with customers and are you meeting with the market and are you meeting with the people that we want you to meet?
Speaker 2Yeah. Makes sense. You also brought up a real interesting thing. Everybody always says this, uh, well, this will be here as a recruiting firm and there's in the market. Yeah. Get me somebody who has sold the third or fourth best product. And I'm like, okay, I'm going to do this. I'm going to do this. Because it's going to build grit. And that makes sense. But a lot of times you don't know of the third or fourth best product. It's usually like a no-name logo. It's just sort of paradox a little bit. You had said that part of what made the app D team great was it was like the fourth or fifth best product. Um, how did you, what were the tactics that you guys would then have to do to like one retained talent and not get put, but like two is actually win deals. Like any strategies around that, that come to mind?
Speaker 1Yeah. So first of all, a little explanation, just so I'm not throwing shade to the entire, uh, app D former product team. I think like over time, by the time I got to app dynamics, um, you know, the, the, the company was, I think like $120 million in ARR when I left it was 700. Um, so in those early days, I think app D had like a very real, uh, product and competitive advantage around something called business transactions. But I think over time as, um, especially as like cloud computing happen and observability sort of came into the fold, um, you know, the product sort of tailed off. Like we didn't capture that data dog incidentally did, um, much to our, you know, eventual, you know, demise. Um, but we had the best like enterprise go to market by far. Okay. And so that made up, that is what caused the, you know, 120 to 700 million, even if we didn't have the best product in the market. Um, and you know, what that really came down to is, you know, we hired the best people and the grittiest people and the smartest people. Um, I think we hired better than anyone else. Um, secondly is the stuff that we had talked about is like value pyramids and understanding, you know, I, I remember there was times that we would have, uh, customer meetings in like boardrooms and we present to an economic buyer and we talk about their business and everything going on in their business. And there was times in which the economic buyer was like, how do you know all this information? Almost to the point of like, do you have a mole in my company? Um, and I don't think any of the other companies that we're competing against even nearly did stuff like that. Um, and then the final thing was like, we did pipeline generation better than anybody. Yeah.
Speaker 2Um, it's like they respected it so much that you knew a lot about their business that they just forgot. I would think the fourth versus the first, there's not so much, obviously if a product is that much far, off, you probably don't end up getting in that room. Yeah. But at that point they start to respect you. It worked. It was in the ballpark. Right, right, right. For sure. Exactly. Yeah. All right. So you're doing a lot of the post-sale move. Um, you're seeing all this, seeing Jeremy work as magic with the enterprise sales team. Yeah. How does that conversation go that you move into CRO? There must've been some SVP of sales that like was also probably gunning for the CRO role. Why did they make the decision to go with somebody on post-sale versus somebody that came up through a traditional net new closing background?
Speaker 1It was a little bit, so it was a little like I was, uh, fortunate a little bit with the timing of it. So I moved into the CRO role actually after the Cisco acquisition. Um, and so the needs of a company after they're acquired by a big company are like different. Um, the timing was, was good. Um, the, the second thing I'll say is just like there, I think was a broader understanding that especially as that market and especially as that business was maturing, that, you know, there was a lot of, there was a lot of, there was a lot my experience in product and my experience in servicing the customers would actually serve the sales team well. We were on like a huge growth trajectory. That growth trajectory started to slow with Cisco. And so like this was like, how do we nurture this market that we're already in in a better way? Jeremy and Tom Levy were like really instrumental in like inspiring me to like move over there. In moving into the CRO role, there were some leaders on my team at AppDynamics who were like really instrumental in teaching me the craft of sales, like the actual daily operations of sales. There was two people. There was a guy named Phil Cody, who is the CRO, just recently was the CRO at Dataiku, now is at Chainguard. And there's a guy named Jake Yount, who runs the enterprise business at AppNormal. They were very open to a non-salesperson coming into this role and were very open to teaching me like the mechanics and the operational cadence of a sales team. So what was the moment?
Speaker 2I know you said with Jeremy, like learn it, but like that had flipped. You're like, oh, wait, I really like sales. And it's what you want to now be doing versus going back to anything that's more post-sale or product.
Speaker 1Jeremy and Tom were running these like sales leadership meetings for sales leaders at AppD at the time. And I was running post-sales and I was basically like, hey, can I be in those leadership meetings so you can teach me? Yeah.
Speaker 2What was the hardest thing? If you had to name one thing that was the hardest thing to get over? Learning the craft of sales. Yeah. What was the hardest thing to get over? Learning the craft of sales that took the longest learning curve?
Speaker 1Sort of the discipline around it. Like the discipline around the compounding gains. Like that's a real, real thing in sales. Like you can be the smartest person in the room, but if you aren't disciplined, if you aren't doing PG every week, if the whole sales organization isn't doing PG every week, you don't have a predictable process. Yeah. And the importance of like going to the gym was the, was the biggest thing.
Speaker 2Yeah. I'll make sense. Yeah. The AppD run, you're like, I'm a CRO now. Yeah. I've transformed.
Speaker 1I've changed my career. Third transformation. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2Totally. And you're like, I really enjoy this. You had a CRO run after that, but then you were, you know, you recently landed at Vercel for the last six months. Tell me like a little bit of thought process. And the reason why I asked this is because there was a lot of people listening that are looking for their move into AI. Like how did you diligence and know that it was the right fit at Vercel?
Speaker 1Yeah. Sure. Sure. So, uh, I was at Adobe for, for, um, uh, for a long time. Uh, I wanted to be back in, uh, which I'm sure a lot of your listeners have the same sentiment, is the world and the market is changing very significantly, and I wanted to be in the middle of it. It was as simple as that. And there was basically two questions that I was really interested in, in how things are going to change in the future. Number one is, how are people going to design in the future? And that's very much in my lineage and my interest around at Adobe. The second one is, how are people going to build for the future? Those are the only two questions I was really, really interested in. And there's a very small handful of companies that actually are trying to address those two things. Vercel actually happens to address both. And so that was super, super
Speaker 2interesting. What were your findings? How do you think that we're going to design and build in the
Speaker 1future? You know, agents are going to help us do these things. In the case of Vercel, let me just sort of step back, because there's a big transformation of infrastructure and how people built with data centers versus how people built with cloud computing, okay? And that transformation, what it allowed developers to do when they could all of a sudden access AWS services. I know it sounds like a gazillion years ago, but when they did that, it unleashed like an unbelievable amount of freedom for developers to get access to computing power where it was a total pain in the ass to get access to before. And people starting startups could start startups without huge capital expenditures for infrastructure. We take it so for granted now, but like how people build as a result of AWS and, you know, Azure and GCP, it just like completely transformed the landscape. I think we're at another stage now where, um, a developers are building stuff and they don't want to deal with the complexity of infrastructure and managing infrastructure. That's number one. And two agents happen to be building, you know, along with or for those developers and agents really don't want to manage complexity. You know, agents want to deploy somewhere. Yeah, that build piece
Speaker 2makes a lot of sense. Tell me more about the design piece because, uh, I find this very interesting the way, you know, when I'm doing our, our website, we just rebranded a crew. Like I, you know, you listen, I I'll go down rabbit holes of Steve jobs, how he took like a typography class randomly and like how he got like very deep in a sans-serif font. And it's like almost become like the trend of tech and like every website looks very similar. Yeah. Um, tell me more about how you see design and how Vercel is like a unique POV there when it comes to like front-end development.
Speaker 1Yeah, sure. Um, this is, this is something that's like, I'm very, very, very passionate about. Um, so, and I, a couple of diversions for you. One of the things that I like loved most about Adobe, I joined there like pretty early in my career and, um, and it was small. Like, I think it's like 35,000 employees now. When I joined, it was like 4,000. Like it was, it was small. So, um, Adobe was one of the only companies in the world. I think Apple is probably another one that, that were hiring artists. Like there was a whole, and I loved hanging out with these people. There was a font team who literally were designing fonts. They were like carving fonts out and then like getting them on a computer and doing it. And I love those people because they were like obsessive about fonts and spacing and, you know, kerning and like all of that stuff. Yeah. And there was such a, like a craft, you know, what Adobe did is like absolutely incredible. Artists used to, it used to be like a very small group of people. And because they transferred that to like the computer age, like more and more people designed, like vastly more people designed. And I think like what we're at now is a stage where vastly more people will have access to design high quality things. Uh, because of, you know, agentic stuff. Yeah. Um, and I think now the, the attention to detail and like, I know it's overused, but like the, the taste quality, the taste of this is wildly more important. I will also mention like this, this desire with this, uh, love that I have for design and building at Vercel. Like Vercel designs its own fonts. Um, and so like, I saw that in Vercel and I was like, oh, I'm coming home.
Speaker 2Yeah. Um, it makes sense for your Adobe background. I think that, yeah. One thing I've changed seen in the last, I don't know if it's the last five years or so is like the whole, it used to be like, get the MVP out there. It doesn't matter if it's ugly. It we've come to like software needs to look good from day one or else people won't use it. And I think that that's like a very interesting trend that I'm at least seeing. I, um, I actually am very curious of like,
Speaker 1by the way, I think software needs to look good. I also think it needs to look good for machines. And what I mean by that is, like, yeah, is like the APIs and the access to the underlying software needs to be accessible by machine. So I think it needs to look good for humans. And I think it also needs to look good for machines.
Speaker 2Yeah. It's like a new thing that needs it. Right. I think it's a really good point. All right, y'all quick break. If you're getting value from this, do me a favor and hit the follow button on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple. It helps way more than you think. Now back to the episode. Speaking of just like what you've seen in the last six months at Vercel, love the Lenny's episode with Jean. Yeah. And she brought up a lot of how you guys are using AI for the GTM team. Yeah. Tell us a little bit more. It's like six months since that episode. Yeah. I think there were numbers around like, oh, we shrunk our SDRs or GTM edge from like 10 to one. And tell us more of like, maybe some tests that you've ran and what you guys have learned and how you're becoming like AI pilled at Vercel on the sales team.
Speaker 1Yeah, sure. Um, you know, I think, I think Jean in that, uh, in that episode was talking about like, Hey, if you can map it, map out workflows for go-to-market, you can, you can agentify it. I think that's true. And just to give you, just to give you an example, if, if you have inbound interest, that inbound interest can definitely be like agentified to give those people a, what they are looking for and be actually like a really good experience. And so we did that and we moved inbound, um, you know, SDRs into outbound folks. Okay. So we just like made an agent there to handle inbound. And then we moved all those folks to do outbound pipeline generation on the contrary. Like you look at salespeople, it's like map out an enterprise sales, uh, sales campaign for me. Yeah. It's really hard. Like that is the extreme opposite end of this where I think it's very hard to agentify that, but there are some things that, that we are very much believe in to, you know, further agentify like, um, value engineering as an example. So value engineering has always been a thing in enterprise sales. You're trying to create a business case for someone that they can justify the investment in your company. Um, we, you know, are building agents to do that for our sales team.
Speaker 2You're building that internally. Are you using Vercel to do parts of that? Like, I guess, how are you guys using it internally? Like, do you render it in front end and like a V0 app or something or?
Speaker 1We, we build like all of our go-to-market tooling. Got it. Okay. Uh, so build by, by Vercel, uh, PG, um, systems built by Vercel. Yeah. Value engineering built by Vercel.
Speaker 2Yeah. Let's jump into, and this could be just like learnings that you've had at Apti and like some other CRO runs. And then now at Vercel, I want to dive into hiring and I want to get into like, just selling to devs. So like you had said here that you learned a lot during hiring. You said earlier in this episode. Yeah. Um, one thing that when we were chatting was like, you are very like, Hey, logos are a decent signal, but you want to make sure, is it the person or were they just riding the wave? Yeah. How do you test for that in an interview? All salespeople are super good and they're savvy and charismatic and yeah. Uh, yeah. How do you test for that?
Speaker 1Um, look, I, I think that there's two sort of like buckets of people to recruit from. You can find people who have, who have like been part of a run of legendary companies. So, you know, Hey, were you at Snowflake during the time of hyper growth? Were you at Abdi during the time of hyper growth? Were you at Datadog at the time of hyper? And the experience that those people have are, you know, is unique. Um, and so it's worthwhile to talk to those people for sure. Then there's like a group of people who are, uh, unique themselves, but they're in at a company that is not, you know, that is not like gangbusters because for whatever reason, because they're not hitting the market at the right time. I think both of those are completely valid, uh, you know, um, ponds deficient. What you have to do on the people who are at the time of hyper growth is you have to really, really inspect their own personal contribution to that growth. Um, as opposed to being like, okay, I'm just going to take, you know, the Snowflake person. Um, and I think what that really comes down to is getting very, very specific on, on stories. Yeah. How did you PG into an account? How did you, uh, build a champion? How did you justify an investment? Tell me all the specifics of it. Send me artifacts, like send me work product that you actually did. So those are those are like, you know, I think I mentioned to you when we were talking about this is like the skill of discovery in a sales campaign is discovery skills and in talent recruiting. So like you really have to dig into it.
Speaker 2I think there's like two sides to this equation. There's the hiring manager that probably is listening that wants to learn. How do I test for this? How do I go deeper? Maybe they think that they're not going deep enough and they've been like duped by a salesperson just being very casual. On the flip side, there's the candidate who like maybe has these great deal stories, but isn't a good interviewer, doesn't know how to demonstrate that. How do you maybe feel free to start with whichever side of like, how can they do that interviewer to the candidate or the candidate? Okay. Let's start
Speaker 1with the candidate for a second. So I think I also mentioned to you like there is this tidal wave of like sales content on LinkedIn. Okay. Information of here's what I do to, you know, whatever, progress a deal or here's what I do to PG. And it's just sort of like, you know, it's it's there's a lot of like slop out there. What I really what is really important for. Candidates is to talk about specifics and customer stories. So specifically, how did I break into an account? And like, I want to see the messaging. Like, I want to see the email. I want to see the research that you did. I want to see like, you know, I'm a history major. I want to see the primary evidence of you doing it. Yeah. Anyone in the planet can say I build champions. Anyone in the planet can say medic. Yeah. I don't really care about that. What I really care is like, I want to see the goods.
Speaker 2Yeah. So if I'm hearing you correctly, if you're a candidate, almost be ready in those interviews. But hey, you could just share my screen. 100%. And then you do that so that it like, okay, because in your brain, you're like the fact that they're even like proud to show me this. It could even be like a B plus product. But the fact that like now cross that chasm that you're like, ah, they checked that box.
Speaker 1100%. Yeah. And I'll just give you another. Another example, I, at Adobe, I hired a pretty, there was a team I was building out and I hired a pretty young and career team. And so I would, I would hire like commercial reps or even BDRs into AE roles. And there was this one time that I was interviewing a BDR candidate and he was like, yeah, I meet with customers all the time. I meet with, you know, I. I got, you know, I'm, I'm out there. I'm like killing it. Facing the place, baby. Yeah. And I was like, do me a favor, show me your account. Yeah. Yeah. And scroll through the last. Get some white like a ghost. And through roles, scroll through the last three weeks. And there wasn't anything on there. We had, I ended up hiring him, but we had a real conversation about that. And so I'm just like, you know, show me the receipts. I want the receipts.
Speaker 2Right, right, right. Yeah. On the flip side of that. So that's good stuff for the candidate side. If I'm a VP of sales listening to this podcast right now, and I'm like, I feel like I've gotten burned for the last year. The last couple of times by some smooth talk and salespeople that don't, didn't show me the receipts. I want to, before they show me the receipts, like, is there a line of questioning? Like, how do you get deeper? How do you do this discovery and lead the discovery as a hiring manager?
Speaker 1Look, I think it's, I think it's like, it's just the, it's just the flip side of the same equation. Like, I think it is discovery of asking why, why, why, why, until you have a kernel of truth that distinguishes that candidate. From the rest of the pool of people. Yeah. And I think that's like, I think that's the trick. And I think the sooner you can get to that kernel of truth and testing people, the better.
Speaker 2I've heard this with Chris Dagnonis and this on a few podcasts. And then we had Tomer, the VP of go-to-market at, actually formerly Vercel. But now at Cursor, same thing. They stay in the lane and they like peel back the onion and they see how deep he like compared it to like, you know, you take the SAT or like a test or you want, you know, you threw out business school earlier. We're not saying that GMAT, like the questions get progressively harder. As you take them. And that's like what you're testing for. But do it in the first interview. Right. Don't waste your time.
Speaker 1Really, really test, really test candidates. I also think like there's a little bit of a reluctance in those first interviews to, because you're in a little bit of sell mode also, because you want a candidate to be interested. I actually think that the best way of getting the best candidates is you've test them hard in the first interview. I want it. I want to be challenged. I want to be questioned. I want to do better. Those are the people you want. If people, if you press candidates and they're just like, yo, you're like, this is too much for me. I think that's people in the funnel. Yeah. I forget. Like there is this, I forget who it was, but when like Steve Jobs was, was interviewing a candidate to take over the role at Apple of CEO, I think a candidate was at Pepsi. I think it was the CEO at Pepsi. Yeah. And Steve Jobs was like, I don't know. Like, do you want to be selling sugared water for the rest of your life or do you want to do something that's going to transform the world? Yeah. That type of questioning is totally valid and totally relevant for sell. And by the way, that's like an incredible advantage for us to have.
Speaker 2Yeah. Completely. And recruiting. Yeah. The one thing before I go into the, um, just like selling a technical product, any learnings that you'd want to chime in on of like from interviewing salespeople when you're CRO, a couple of different things. A couple of different companies that like you were either wrong about or that you like, I failed a couple of times and I learned the hard way. Anything that come to mind?
Speaker 1I failed a lot. Uh, so I feel like with recruiting, you just have to like go to failing less. Like you're never going to be perfect. Yeah. In general, it's just like, I try to test for intelligence. Interesting. Um, you know, it's just like, sort of like coachability. If people can self reflect and, uh, talk about themselves and what went right and what went wrong, I think is like really, really important. And I think people, you know, who are immediately defensive is like, you know, is, is a red flag. Right. A hundred percent.
Speaker 2Yeah. Um, as you think through like building out the AEs who, uh, Gina said a quote on it's take almost up to 10 minutes for my team to not know if they're a product manager or not, or to figure out that they're not a product manager. Yeah. Flips out of that as being like. Hey, I want the AEs to be technical and to be, um, it sounds like high IQ and like, what, what have you learned from like selling a more technical product and, um, maybe some learnings of somebody who's listening that wants to get into selling to devs or selling developer tools or infrastructure, any learnings there?
Speaker 1Yeah. Like, I, I think the biggest thing is like, um, uh, intellectual and technical curiosity. And so like, we're, we're sort of in this very, very, um, uh, I don't know. What, what do you say? A very like privileged state right now where like on weekends you can go build websites and you can go build agents as like you and I can not developers. And so I think salespeople should go do that stuff. And I think they should do it all the time right now. And if I think they, and if they aren't, I think they're at a disadvantage in the market.
Speaker 2Right. Totally. On that flip side, you, you mentioned this in our call the weekend. Warriors. So the people you're selling to then are also doing this. Yeah. Yeah. Um, how do you, okay. That's great that they're using V zero or maybe like other products of her cell, but how do you like meet them where they're at? Use this usage data, but without being like weird about it. How would you advise?
Speaker 1Yeah. Look, um, you know, we have a adverse cell, like we have a very large open source community that we, you know, participate with. Um, we have. A very large, uh, PLG motion at for cell. Um, we have machines now that are recommending for cell as a place that, you know, you can deploy to a clock code and codex. If you're like, where should I deploy this thing? They will say for cell, that is like an extreme advantage for us as a sales team, um, to see those signals and to try to triangulate an enterprise sales campaign on, uh, on that data. The flip side of that is, is those. Communities are sensitive. Like you have to, you have to treat that community with respect and having that balance as a sales team is like incredibly important.
Speaker 2I think the thing that's interesting about your PLG motion and you guys have this open source model as well is like, like you said something like 50% of the build is coming from agents right now. How do you work with a, like, that's not a huge, uh, um, partnership so long. Okay. There's like a lot of these models that are bringing new business. Probably. But then also then there's the agents that are using these products that are starting to build in Vercel. How does that relationship work when that happens?
Speaker 1Um, there's a lot of like, there's a lot of momentum that Vercel has with all of those things. So like, like developers are increasingly not wanting to deal with the management of infrastructure and we provide that for them. LLMs don't want to deal with the complexity of infrastructure. And so we provide that for them. One of the easy things that we could do at Vercel is just like at a certain point, it makes sense to have an enterprise conversation because you need support and you need discounting on your infrastructure costs. That is not enough for us. What our sales team is doing is taking that momentum that we're seeing from the ground up and going to the biggest companies in the world and CIOs and CTOs and saying, hey, there's this momentum that is, there's this demand that's happening at your company. And that demand is there for a reason. It's there because people want to build differently. It's there because people at your company don't want to, you know, directly have to manage infrastructure. It's there because you can build products with Vercel that you couldn't dream of doing in any other way. And so like, let's have a conversation. about that. So it's basically taking that demand that we're seeing from the ground up and then talking to the people who are running companies and saying, how can we, you know, help transform?
Speaker 2It's a great segue into one of our questions on like this, you know, rapid fire piece of this is in a world that is moving, like the CFO wants cost predictability and enterprise eventually wants to commit in the, so that, okay, we have some like recurring revenue here, but in a world that's moving to monthly and usage and developers don't want to be I don't want to be tied down for two years because I might be swapping in and out. Tell us about like the unique challenges that maybe come with that. And how are you directing your sales team in order to still sell enterprise deals, but not be, not cost too much friction that hurts the PLG motion, really just this user first, like tell us about like the unique challenges there.
Speaker 1I think it's the same challenges that any sort of like consumption-based business has. And so I don't, I don't think Vercel is any different than any other consumption-based business, whether it's like a hyperscaler or, you know, Snowflake or, you know, Databricks or others. So it is, it is balancing usage with commitments, with affordability and predictable discounting. So that's really what it comes down to and having conversations with people about how we can like accomplish conversations with customers about how we can accomplish all of those things.
Speaker 2Do you feel like you're getting more friction though, around versus three years ago, or at least the team that you're in right now? Versus three years ago, or at least the team has felt this, like more and more people wanting to like not sign long-term commitments versus they were maybe, because the usage era, in my opinion, you want to go back to your AWS, that's probably where a lot of it started was this cloud computing. The big three was like, hey, use as you, but eventually they would move to enterprise contract. I've almost seen the AI era, we've gone even more so of like, so usage-based, so month to month. Have you seen more of a trend towards like not wanting to sign annual or long-term contracts? Or long-term commitments? I haven't, I haven't.
Speaker 1And I think it's largely because like infrastructure choices are like big, big choices for people to make. People really want to make those choices and stick with them. You don't want to like change your infrastructure strategy every six months. We don't see it as much, you know, I'm sure at SaaS companies, like I'm sure they're seeing it more.
Speaker 2Yeah. This is exactly why we're seeing more and more people who have traditionally been app sellers want to go into infrastructure because of this. It's stickier, it's a more. It's a very important partner that you're willing to long-term and sign with and not like just switch on and off, because that would be like exhausting, right? It's just like, hey, I'm going to zap that out.
Speaker 1There's too much like change management or organizational change. But like, I think what you're describing, I think there's a real bifurcation in the market between like SaaS, which I'm sure is feeling that, and infrastructure, which people are making sort of like longer-term decisions on. Yeah, completely agree.
Speaker 2A couple other questions before we wrap up. You know, a lot of people say, hey, I admire AppD, Mongo. It always gets me, I love asking this question of what are the mafias or the sales teams that you admire from the SaaS and AI era that come to mind and you can't name companies that you've worked at or you can't name Mongo?
Speaker 1So, yeah. AppD has spread into lots of different companies, and I think it's done so for, you know, good reasons for everything that we've talked about in this podcast. I think one of the ones that is. Because I saw it, because I competed against them, was really impressive was Datadog's sales team. And what they did that AppD didn't do is there was a lot of PLG pull from Datadog. So basically what was happening is as people would migrate to cloud, to workloads to the cloud, they would need a observability solution that like worked well with it. And Datadog provided that and it was sold on the AWS marketplace. And what they really did was like they built an enterprise sales team around that and started, you know, really expanding into the enterprise, but they never lost the efficiency of like a sales led and a PLG motion. Like they scaled those things together and it made a very, very efficient enterprise go to market. AppD wasn't terribly efficient. Like it was really expensive. It was really expensive because we didn't have that PLG motion to feed off of and Datadog figured that out. And, you know, I think that company and that go-to-market organization is hugely and continues to be hugely impressive.
Speaker 2Yeah. Shout out to Dan Fougere, who's like a big architect. And then Sean Waters, or if I'm pronouncing his name now, is the new CRO there.
Speaker 1A hundred percent. And shout out to the product team. Right. Oh, totally. Yeah, of course.
Speaker 2To continue to sort of like, you know, do those things. Gotta give love to your former product book now that you're a sales guy. Last question I have is like any AI tools internally in your personal life that you're using that you feel like has given you leverage and you can't answer Granola or WhisperFlow? Anything that comes to mind?
Speaker 1So we run our entire business on tools that Vercel has created. Right. Got it. And these are the tool that we've created is something called Athena. That's our product name. In there is territory products. In there is forecasting. In there is PG. In there is consumption signals. Like, it's all there. And, you know, I built it with the go-to-market engineering team since I joined Vercel. And, like, literally every single salesperson is using that every day for their jobs. That's, like, something, like, I'm incredibly proud of and, like, super psyched. And I think that just shows. Super psyched about. And I think that just shows how you can build products that are, like, really custom-tailored to, like, what you're trying to do as a business. And, you know, I'm a, you know, I'm not a, like, a developer. And it's just been, like, incredibly, like, liberating to build that stuff.
Speaker 2So you had said, like, forecasting was an interesting one. Almost like asset creation, it sounds like, of, like, business use cases. Okay. Based on what they told us. We can have some sort of artifacts that we can add. It sounds like that's things that the signaling base. I guess if there's any that you'd be, like, this one's providing us the most amount. Like, what's one use case that you would be very bummed if it just stopped working?
Speaker 1Yeah, yeah. I think the biggest thing is just, like, is pipeline generation and giving reps the details that they need to do, like, effective targeted base pipeline generation. Like signals and stuff. And signals. That has created, like, an incredibly efficient sales team and an incredibly efficient BDR team.
Speaker 2Got it. Cool. Nick, this was great, man. Yeah. Thanks so much for coming on. Thank you. If somebody wanted to get your attention or of our sales team attention, what's, like, the most creative way that you have seen to do that?
Speaker 1Yeah. This happens all the time, by the way. People need to build things. Yeah. And show us what they built. Yeah. It happens. The receipts, back to your point. It happens over and over again. Literally, people are, like. I've been trying to get into Vercel. It's not who you know. Build something and show it to us.
Speaker 2Yeah. Sweet. This is great, Nick. It's awesome to highlight your background, the Vercel background. And hopefully our Mets can have a similar soon-to-be, you know, fate that our Knicks will have. Yeah. Thanks for coming on, man.
Speaker 1Yeah. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.
Speaker 2Thanks for hanging with us. If you like this one, follow the show on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube. And we'll see you next week. Cheers.
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