Speaker 1Everyone's interested in AI now, they all want to take a look under the hood, you know, so what does that mean for your organization if you're actually going to go in and do that? But, you know, what does it actually mean for a company to be able to come in and provide an AI transformation to an organization if they actually are AI native versus somebody that's got it bolted on? And those can be two pretty different stories.
Speaker 2Welcome to the Revenue Builders podcast, a weekly show featuring B2B sales leaders and executives, hosted by five-time CRO John McMahon and Force 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.
Speaker 3Our guest today is Brad Scott, VP of Worldwide Sales at Glean. Brad's built sales organization. at three very different stages of growth. Snowflake, during its historic scale-up, Beza, from a much earlier stage, and now Glean, which he's scaling through explosive growth, running an organization of 350-plus people. This conversation goes deep on what actually separates great sales organizations from average ones, starting with people and recruiting. The question Brad asks to find out who someone really is and how he builds trust and self-awareness into his hiring process. We also get into how he keeps his team focused on fundamentals, process, training, execution, while everything around them, the market, the messaging, the product, is changing every 90 days in this AI cycle. Here's our conversation with Brad Scott. So, Brad, you've had a really rare vantage point, Snowflake, during its historic scale-up, Beza, building something from a much earlier stage, and now Glean, which is experiencing explosive growth. So, you've had a wonderful vantage point to answer this first kind of Uber question. What separates the best sales organizations you've been a part of and the average ones? So, Brad, you've had a really rare vantage point, Snowflake, during its historic scale-up, Beza, building something from a much earlier stage, and now Glean, which is experiencing explosive growth. So, you've had a wonderful vantage point to answer this first kind of Uber question. What separates the best sales organizations you've been a part of and the average ones?
Speaker 1So, Brad, you've had a really rare vantage point to answer this first kind of Uber question. What separates the best sales organizations you've been a part of and the average ones? So, Brad, you've had a really rare vantage point to answer this first kind of Uber question. What separates the best sales organizations you've been a part of and the average ones? It's a great question, John. I think, for me, the thing that strikes me early when I walk into a sales organization and tends to be the through line, at least at the great ones I've been a part of, is the people. I think very early you can tell and you're struck by the quality and caliber of the people you're surrounded with, not only in the other AE seats, the sales leaders, the SEs, and that extends to then the product teams and the leadership of those companies. I think that is why recruiting in our business is so important, is if you can go grab great transformative talent, you can create a, you know, assuming you've got a great product, you can create a great sales organization. But if you've got great people, that to me is the biggest separator, differentiator.
Speaker 3Go a little deeper on the people part. What are some of those themes on those great people, some characteristics that you actually have built into your recruiting operating rhythm?
Speaker 1Yeah, I think, one, the best. The best are typically, in my experience, incredibly intellectually curious, right? So they're intellectually curious about their teammates, the way the organization runs, pushing the product team to build better products, and then incredibly curious about their customers, understanding what their business is, how it runs, how your technology could potentially transform that information. And so I think that's a big one. I think the second is just like the standard to which individuals hold themselves and then their broader. And so I think it's people that have come from a background of success, and they bring those unique experiences to the table, and they're able to share them with their teammates. So I think people that hold themselves to a high bar and high account, you know, we'll call that sort of the foundational layer by which you try to seek out somebody who's had that experience in their career and brings that to the table. But I think those are two of the most key innate abilities that people have that then allow them to get to where they want to be.
Speaker 3One of my pet peeves is when I see organizations recruit, it's a muscle, man, like it's a muscle that has to be developed and mastered. And to get to the evidence behind things like intellectual curiosity or whether or not you come from an organization that holds you to a higher standard, not just by looking at that on a CV, how do you coach your leaders to really get to the... Get to the crux of the matter. I probably am borderline. I don't know. I hope not. But, you know, I'm probably borderline on some of the questions I ask people. But I really am trying to figure out what's real and what's not real, especially in the age we're in today. So how do you coach your leaders to do that?
Speaker 1Yeah, I think, you know, one of the best things for me is I like to leave space at the end of every conversation for the person on the other end to ask me questions. And I think that part of the conversation with respect. So like their level of intellectual curiosity and what level of preparation that they've gone to becomes evident very quickly. You can tell, you know, a person gets through one question, maybe two, and then falls off and says they're good here. To me, those people will never pass my screen because I'm looking for somebody that truly wants to understand from my vantage point why this company and why this opportunity is going to be uniquely important. So that's not just like sort of a, you know, something for my ego. That's also how they're going to go. They're going to go out and prosecute that and be curious about our customers, right? They're going to have to go out and do incredible discovery and understand and dig in and be curious about our customers. And so if they can't do that during our sales process and our recruiting process, then how are they going to go do it for our customers? So I think, you know, that is a piece of our process that's incredibly important is just being aware and making the space for people to do that and then carefully understanding the questions that they're asking. I think the second thing is, you know, at the start of the conversation, I like to understand, hey, who are you? Where did you come from? What experience did you have? Who are your siblings? What hardships did you face in your life, right? Because if, you know, especially working at startups and non-incumbent based companies, if you haven't gone through hardship and you haven't faced tough things and you haven't overcome challenges, either in your personal life or your professional career or through athletics, then this job is going to be really hard for you. And so I think having people that have overcome those things. And I've understood those things earlier in their career are super important. And then, you know, with respect to, you know, whether it's deal structure, how they've prosecuted opportunities with their other customers, you know, tell me about a deal you've won. Tell me about a deal you've lost. Why? How? And then you're basically digging in and doing some deeper level discovery and pushing those people to give you all of the detail to get deeper into their thought process.
Speaker 3I like the intimate questions. I think it catches people off guard. But if it's done in an authentic way where you could, you know, I just asked this the other day. I'm like, hey, look, I know the three bosses that you've listed in your last, you know, three jobs and that you talk about. So I know them well. I will call them. But when I call them, what are they going to tell me that you struggle with? Because we all struggle with something. What are they going to tell me that you struggle with? And what am I? What am I going to have to do as your potential leader to help you elevate yourself? And I don't know why people struggle like I get feedback like, oh, that was a great question and you really put me on the spot. Or even people inside my own company will go, oh, John, you just have the ability to get to these. I think it's just natural. It's kind of a trust thing. And if it's authentic. And you get an authentic answer, you really find out who people are. Do you have like some do you have some feeling about that?
Speaker 1Yeah, I think you have to, one, expose a level of, you know, vulnerability to I think it just goes to self-awareness. And is this person thinking about how they're going to make themselves better? And I think if you're thinking about how you're going to make yourself better, you have to be very objective internally with where your shortcomings are. I think also like, look, people who are willing to be vulnerable with one another tend to make good teammates. And you tend to build an organization of good humans that can be around each other. Because, again, you're building something that is really hard. You're going really fast. And I think at the end of the day, a company is just a collection of people. And you've also got to want to work with great people that you're going to want to, you know, hopefully in the best of cases, build lifelong relationships with. And I think if you can get to the core of that, you can better understand early who the core of someone is. And then if you want to bring them along on that journey with you.
Speaker 4I like that a lot.
Speaker 3I like that a lot.
Speaker 4Yeah. There's a balance, though, here, too, you know, on what line of manager you are. If you're a first-line manager, the dynamic in the interview process is completely different than the dynamic if you're the CRO. The first-line manager has to do questioning. There's no doubt about it. But at the same time, they have to not only sell the company, sell the opportunity, but they have to sell themselves. Because at the end of the day, if I'm a rep. I'm coming to work for the manager, and if I don't think that manager's going anywhere, anywhere and I and they haven't sold themselves I'm not joining that company because I already put a ceiling on myself I don't think my manager is going anywhere so and so that dynamic has to change as you become the CRO you can get away with a lot more just hammering the person with questions and then giving them an opportunity to ask you questions and maybe you're selling the opportunity you don't have to really sell yourself so much but you're selling the opportunity but so the dynamic really does change and there's a balance in there in that hour or two hours that
Speaker 1you have with the person 100% that balance especially at the first line tends to flip where you come in you're selling you're getting the person engaged and then once you've kind of earned that trust and maybe that ability then you can flip it back around and dig in a little bit more but you're also you know you're selling this is probably the most competitive talent and hiring environment for a plus talent of all time too and so I think you have to really work that balance but also not flip it entirely where you're not doing any digging in I think that's the danger right now is it is such a competitive environment that people are falling all over themselves that maybe sometimes they miss things and they don't dig in where they need to and man is it a difficult and tricky time to do that what if we wrap what if
Speaker 3on this, where do you find yourself giving your frontline managers, your second line managers, or what have you, where do you find yourself giving the most feedback about the interview
Speaker 1process? What do people struggle with in this? Look, I think right now, for me, it's twofold. One, you're just, you know, we don't have enough pipeline in some cases, right? So you're just not getting enough people through the door to top a funnel problem, right? I think that's a big piece of it, if we think about it as our sales process. And then, you know, I do think it's that last mile of, you know, making sure that we're understanding kind of the true guts of that person. And then the back channel, like it's sometimes the back channel is the only channel. And, you know, you can delude yourself and get all excited about someone. And then you go have conversations and, you know, salespeople are really good at selling themselves. And I think in this environment, especially, you know, John, you mentioned it, hey, I know your last three managers, you know, you've been doing this long enough, the world gets really small, you can get to somebody with less than one degree of separation most of the time. And so we have found that that is the, if not one of the most, the most important part of the process to understand the prior
Speaker 3experience of these folks. Do you listen to any of the transcripts? Do you, when I asked this question, I'm shocked, like anything else, coaching somebody since recruiting is such a big part of the, you know, the leader's role. I'm shocked at the answers I get. And I don't think it's, I think it's just like, it's an easy miss. Like, you, we listen to sales calls. Why wouldn't we listen to recruiting calls? What's your thought on that?
Speaker 1Yeah, look, I think, you know, part of the beauty is we get to drink our own champagne here at Glean. And so we've got a tool that automatically sort of ingests all of that data. All the calls are recorded. All the managers then take and synthesize those notes and put them into the tool we use called Greenhouse. And so all of that information then is presented to the person reviewing sort of the final sign off on that application with then links to go back and do a review. So that's, that's what it is that was talked about how that person presented themselves. You know, we do a panel interview as part of that process. All of those are recorded. So there's a wealth of knowledge and information for you to go even back channel on our own internal processes.
Speaker 3And if you don't have that, and there's no continuity, like you're a walking audition. I always tell people this, like how you show up in the interview process to potential, if you're recruiting an A player, they're going to notice if you're asking the same questions that everybody else asks. If you're asking them a question that they should have had the answer that you should have had the answer to already. And I think it's just such as Johnny said, it's, you know, you're selling yourself, you're selling your company. And by the very nature of how you interact with these people is a walking audition for what it's going to look like when they get there.
Speaker 1A hundred percent.
Speaker 3You have to assume that people are going to be on their, you know, their best, put on their best presentation, put on their best, what have you. And it's only going to go down from there. So if I'm a candidate and I got somebody that doesn't show up prepared, I'm speaking with somebody that obviously there's no process involved. That's probably a indicator of what will be to come in that company.
Speaker 4That's right. Got a big deal though. Johnny, going back to your original question is to me, most companies don't have an ideal candidate profile. So they don't even know what they're looking for.
Speaker 3Yeah.
Speaker 4So to what Brad said, we're in this market, it's really tight and you may not have enough pipeline. Then everybody looks like a good candidate. And if you're not matching it up, that candidate up to the ideal candidate profile, then you're probably hiring the wrong person. Now, what happens a lot of times is when you, when you make up an ideal candidate profile and you say, this is the type of person we're looking for with these skills, knowledge, characteristics, the reaction, from your sales leaders is you're looking for a unicorn. Yeah. We can't find that guy, McMahon. You're looking for a unicorn and you got to say, no, that's not what this is about. There's an ideal candidate profile. Your job is to find somebody that closely matches the ideal candidate profile and where they don't match the ideal candidate profile. Those items become a risk. The risk to the organization. Now, when you bring that candidate to me and I say, Cap, what are the risks? You got to outline the risks against the ideal candidate profile. So my next question is, how are we going to cover those risks? If we, if we're at a certain stage of a company and we only have certain resources, we may not be able to cover those risks. We may not have a training program. We may not be able to give them training. We may not be able to give them training. We may not be able to give them to a leader that has those, that skillset. So you, before you hire, you need to ask the question, what are the risks in hiring this person? And can we cover the risks? If you can't cover the risks and you know, they're not, they're not a match. You're basically asking yourself for churn to
Speaker 3happen nine or 12 months from now. And when you say we, there's not a mouse in your pocket. You're basically saying to the leader, what are you going to do?
Speaker 4And the organization, like I said, if you're a startup and you're a $20 million company and you don't have anybody in enablement, chances are that that person's going to have to learn all this stuff on their own. And if they can't, and you don't think they're smart enough to do it, and they're not driven enough because they don't have the characteristics,
Speaker 3then you're definitely taking a big risk. I like this topic so much because people understand. I just had an interview a couple of weeks ago with a wonderful human being. Like, so what John, what you're talking about is we're looking for evidence and the success profile by its very nature cannot be a unicorn because the success profile is based upon what success looks like in your organization. So we had to have based it on people that are being successful today. So what I encourage people to do is when you present a candidate to me, or, you know, up hired along the chain, you just go through the evidence of the success profile. It's pretty simple. Like, give me the evidence. Now, what you just said, I really like there's always going to be risk. How do we mitigate that risk? And I just want to, I just want to tell a quick little story. I interviewed a person. I almost want to say their name because I, I would love to try to help them get hired out in the marketplace if they're not hired already, but I This person was off the charts on likability, was off the charts smart, was off the charts on intellectual curiosity, was off the charts on, you know, overcoming adversity. I mean, like to the point where I was leaning in and I had to be honest, and there was a point in the interview that I called it out and I said, look, I, I don't think I'm being fair to both of us because like the biggest risk is you have never, you know, you've never, you've never, you've never called on this environment. And I don't know if we have a mechanism in place to teach you that in a period of time, that's going to be acceptable for you and your career progression. Right. And once I said that, it wasn't, Hey, you're a crap bird. You know, ah, you're not as good as I think, you know, we'll get back to you. But I was so honest and it was so obvious that I was so powerful because I'm still talking to this individual. And again, we're a walking audition for what we do. I've seen so many companies that suck at this process. They're not honest with people. They don't follow up. They just hope they go away. Oh, you did well. We have other candidates versus the people that are authentic and do a good job of giving the feedback. Brad, how do you encourage your people, and Johnny, you too, how do you encourage people to do it right? First of all, to be honest, and then second of all, to make sure that that feedback is given and received.
Speaker 1Yeah, it's a great question, John. I think like, look, the worst thing you can do is leave people to linger out there to their own devices and wonder why. I think the most generous thing that you can do is to give direct, compassionate feedback that says, hey, look, this is potentially not a mutual fit for reasons like, hey, we just don't have maybe the right position, the right segment, the right geography, or hey, you have these gaps. And your experience here, I don't think you're going to be a good fit because the type of company you're going to be calling on, you haven't done it before, and we don't have the support structure to put around you. So maybe I can introduce you to these other people, or hey, let's talk again in a year. Maybe you've kind of covered off on that experience and we'll be a better fit for you. But I think it is part of the mutual pact to be able to give direct, constructive feedback to the folks so that they can better themselves in their career. And look, I'm also just a... I'm also a believer that what goes around comes around. You've got to be a good human being in this stuff, too. And it does help your reputation as a company because maybe that person refers a friend that is just as good, if not better, for the opportunity.
Speaker 3In a tight marketplace like we're all in right now, how many companies do we personally know whose reputations are shite because of the way that they interview and the way they treat people? And when there's great opportunity, Johnny and I have some experience with this with companies that we've been with in the past. When there's great opportunity, it puts people on these pedestals, these interviewers on these pedestals. And it's like, oh, you should consider yourself lucky to have an interview with me or with this company. And that very well might be. But if you're recruiting A players, you should consider yourself lucky. And, you know, luck is luck. It's not the right word, but prepared to have that conversation with an A player. So I'll just put a bow on that. And just a little note out there, like when you listen to some of these calls, I actually wind up going back to managers and like, were you trying to not to give a signal that you weren't interested in this person or are you not excited about this company? Because I was falling asleep when you were talking about the opportunity at the company. So I highly encourage people to dig in.
Speaker 4But Johnny, again, it goes back and Brad did a good job of talking about this. In the context that goes back to the context of having an ideal candidate profile, because if you have to turn somebody away, it means it's just not a match for your company at this stage of the company. You know, the type of talent that you need at 25 million is completely different than the talent you need at 100, 200 million and a billion. And to Brad's point, the person that may not be a good fit for you at 50 million may be a great fit for you at 300 million.
Speaker 1A hundred percent, John. I mean, because.
Speaker 4Because of the resources and everything you have in the company and the way the company operates. So, again, you can cover for them. But right now, hey, you're not a good match because my top people are doing this. You don't have that experience and I can't train you. I don't have the resources at 20 million bucks to do that, to help you with that.
Speaker 1Yeah, we've we've hired people here at Glean, you know, within the last six months that wouldn't have been a good fit three years ago here when we were at 25 million in revenue. It didn't have the resources. So you're absolutely. You're absolutely right. That profile changes and those are great fits and they're going to survive and flourish here, whereas a couple of years ago probably wouldn't have the opportunity that they would today.
Speaker 4I'm shifting. Brad's basically he's deep in, let's say, the AI market, right, Brad? That's right. OK, so talk a little bit about products that are AI native and also explain to the audience what you define as AI native versus a bunch of products that are out there today that are calling themselves. AI products, but essentially it's an old product with a with an AI wrapper around it, right? And so we used to have a saying at one of the companies I was at that a facelift won't cure old age. And that's basically the case of what's going on in a lot of these AI wrapper companies today. Talk a little bit about what you've seen in the market, especially just before you joined Glean.
Speaker 1Yeah, look, I think every company says they're an AI company now, so you're not going to talk to a company that's that. It's not going to say that they don't have AI, right? Because, you know, technically they will have some module or something within that product that that does have an LLM or some piece talking to it. But, you know, bolting or some guy in the back room who flips a helmet down and is like welding stuff onto some giant beast and it's an adjunct product or something that hangs off of it is much different than a product that was built intentionally from the ground up with AI as a core part of it. And so I think, look, it's a really difficult environment for buyers right now because, you know, they're they're seeing and hearing the same story. Everything becomes homogenous. Everyone starts using the same buzzwords. And so I actually empathize a great deal with the enterprise buyers because these people are hearing the same story and you see it on their face. They almost have this thousand yard stare of like, how on earth am I supposed to make a decision on something like this when everyone sounds exactly the same? So then you have to. You have to go to the next level and really get into that deeper education process, right? Helping them understand what is truly a unique differentiator for your product that is AI native versus a legacy product that may have a bolted on and why does it matter for that person? And then they're going to want to get their hands on it. So, you know, that's a huge caloric expenditure for the team. So how do you then understand, you know, everyone's interested in AI now? They all want to take a look under the hood. You know, so what does that mean for your organization if you're actually going to go in and do that? But I think at the front end, John, to answer your question directly, right? There's this whole cohort of companies that have existed for the last 15 or 20 years. You know, you saw it with the SaaSpocalypse, although we're kind of coming back out of that a little bit. It turns out everyone can't vibe code their own sales force and those systems of record are going to be pretty sticky. But, you know, what multiple do people put on that revenue and then, you know, what does it actually mean for a company to be able to come in and provide an AI transformation to an organization? If they actually are an AI native versus somebody that's got a bolted on and those can be two pretty different stories when you get deeper.
Speaker 4Right. So you just hit on this a little bit. So we keep hearing two completely different stories. SaaS is dead and AI is creating the biggest software opportunity in the history of the world. Which one's closer to the truth?
Speaker 1Look, I think the truth, it's never a fun answer or a good clip for a podcast, but like life is a... It makes me interested. That's an interesting answer though, right? It's a gray zone, right? Like, look, I think, you know, you see it with sales force where Mark Benioff is all of a sudden, hey, we're going headless. You can use Claude inside of it because like it's what their customers are asking for. I think the best companies and the best people and the best founders, which, you know, sales force is a beneficiary because they've got somebody like Mark at the helm where you can kind of take those bets and those risks and say, we're going to pivot because we're dead if we don't. And our customers are asking for this. Right. And I think they really want to make sure that they can, you know, go do that. There is going to be sort of this broader area of SaaS companies that aren't true systems of record that sit across there that, you know, really are kind of like the blood and guts of an organization that will probably have a longer and more difficult road in the long term and are going to get disintermediated by these companies. But I think this idea or thesis that all these folks are going to get disrupted is AI's going to be able to come in and just vibe code. The crap out of these things and the reality couldn't be further from the truth because it is incredibly painful to pull the inner workings out of all these products that underpin and underlie the revenue for all these Fortune 500 organizations. I think it's going to take a lot longer. And I think the answer is going to be there's going to be a lot of these, you know, systems of record that survive and a lot of these AI native companies will take over and grow. So the answer is kind of a mix.
Speaker 4But isn't we played this out before in history? Right? I mean, so let's take an example. You had Sabre. Remember that airport travel agency? Right. Remember that? And they decided, hey, we'll give system of record and we'll become that and we'll give it away to Travelocity and Expedia. Look how that turned out. So these guys that think they're just going to be system of record, in my mind, they're gone. Good luck. See you later. So, I mean, that's my take on it, but I don't know how you feel about it.
Speaker 3I think those are horizontal and vertical, too.
Speaker 1That's right. And so I think the difference is there will be this top layer of these monolithic companies that have existed for a long time, like a Salesforce, right? If you walk into an organization today and say, rip that out or vibe code it, nobody's going to do it. Very few have, right? It's kind of proven itself out in the near term. But there is going to be this long tail of these other companies that, you know, Sabre still exists today. It's a shell of its former self. it's still alive and kicking. So like, you know, when you say it's an apocalypse, like overwhelmed what timescale and what horizon, right? Are these then zombie companies for 10 to 15 years? I think that'll definitely be the case. And then it gives the room for all these new folks to come in and disintermediate the space.
Speaker 4Well, I think the only reason that Salesforce hasn't been ripped out is because it's in all the departments in a company. So it has tentacles into all these different areas. The companies have typically bought minimum five other packages to attach to Salesforce because Salesforce couldn't do what it needed to do. And then people also wrote their own code in all those departments to get the answers that they want. So ripping it out, you'd have to be, from a sales perspective, you'd have to go around and please five different departments or disciplines in an organization in order to rip that piece of junk out.
Speaker 1That's right. And you kill the paper. If you're impatient while you're doing it, that's not a great outcome either. You keep the blood pumping.
Speaker 4It's like the old SAP implementations, right? That's right. I went to an accountant. He said, do we do an SAP implementation? I put that one on the back burner for two years. Smart. Kicked the can.
Speaker 3Yeah. It begs the question of how does Glean position itself? First of all, tell us a little bit about, give us the high-level value pitch. You guys, we should have done that at the beginning. I'm sorry, but it's such a cool, and you've been at it for, your company's been at it for a few years. How does this conversation dovetail into a Glean?
Speaker 1Yeah. So look, I think what Glean is and what we do is we are the AI system of context for the enterprise, right? So context has, unfortunately for us, become a big buzzword over the course of the last six months. Because as it turns out, you can't really build or do anything meaningful in the enterprise and AI. Without understanding the rich context of an enterprise. So at a high level, you can upload a couple of docs into an LLM and get a very surface level sort of sugar high response that allows you to be somewhat more productive. What companies very quickly found is that without understanding who's Cap, who's Mac, what do they do? What other departments are they working with in the organization? How do those interact together? And how do those workflows actually happen in a much more, deep level? Because without understanding that you can't then actually go automate those workflows. And that's what everyone really wants to do. If you really want to get the depth and reality of ROI, you want to be able to go automate things within a company. Without understanding company context, you can't do any of that. So that's how the company was started by Arvind and the team back in 2019 as sort of a broader enterprise search context company. And then the LLM wave, you know, happened a couple of years later and that sort of turned us into this organization that's allowed us to go in and connect to all of a company's data, provide that rich context, and then build all of these other layers on that become, you know, really imperative for a company to transform themselves. So being able to add, you know, very unique security, because once you connect all of these systems, you've got to be able to secure them and understand who has access to what. And, you know, do we have the salary information for our CFO out there? And do we have exposed credit card numbers, right? And so, you know, the level of complexity gets really, really high. And you've got to be able to have a system like Glean that sits across all of that. And then, you know, the final piece is, you know, we now have all of these LLMs proliferating. So you have all the big labs, you have all the open models, and everyone's freaking out about tokenomics, right? All of a sudden they went from token maxing to, you know, this is great to, oh, my God, this stuff is so expensive because it turns out a token has a dollar value to it. And there isn't a money tree in every company's backyard that they can go out and prune. When they need new intelligence. And so what Glean is able to do is basically think of us as like the index fund of intelligence. So we sit at this layer connected to your context and we provide all these models, right? We provide OpenAI, Anthropic, all the open models, Gemini, and allow a company to essentially provide like intelligence arbitrage so that as the price changes within those different models, we can bring the right intelligence at the right time to your data in the most cost effective way in a neutral position. Because everyone we can. Compete with has a perverse incentive to sell you a token, right? They run their business on selling you tokens, whereas we don't. We don't care. We want to connect to your context and help you drive outcomes.
Speaker 4Earlier, Brad, you were talking about how companies now the buyers are a little confused. Everybody's saying they have AI. Everybody's an AI company and people want to look under the hood. So how do you as a company allow the customer to look under the hood, so to speak, and prove that your architecture is truly AI and truly differentiated?
Speaker 1Yeah, it's a great question, John. So, you know, look, Glean is also one of the few AI companies. It's also a pure sales led growth motion. There is no PLG. There's no money falling out of the sky. Every dollar that comes into Glean is pulled out and earned by our salespeople. We wear that as a badge of honor. But, you know, as we've grown as a company, you have social proof and you've got revenue and you've got investors and you got, you know, we had our big conference last week and we had. You know, GM and DaVita and all these massive companies on stage talking about it. And still every customer says, that's great, but my data is unique. My data is different. I now want to see it with my data. So eventually, if you want to do something at scale, you're typically going to have to enter into some sort of proof of value with the customer. And the way I think about it from my position now is like my Salesforce has a certain number of finite calories on a weekly basis to burn. And where do I want you burning those calories? Well, a proof of value is incredibly costly. From a caloric perspective for a sales organization. So you have to be incredibly careful about how you get into it with a customer. And so for us, you know, a big part of our our differentiator is our process. Right. So we understand, you know, what a customer is actually trying to accomplish. The second stage of our sales process, we call the blueprint process. We actually come into your office, we sit down with you and specifically some of your business units or teams and truly understand what is the process by which you get work done today in your sales organization. Your engineering organization, your legal organization, we map that process out. And then at the end of that, we say, OK, if we were to transform this process, does this have value to you, Mr. Customer? And does that value then extend to the positive outcomes that you want to drive as an organization? Once we go through those checkpoints and we understand that the economic buyer has bought in and that if we do indeed go achieve those outcomes, it's only then do we get to the point that we're willing to then go do a proof of value and actually like plug in the data sources. And so that's what we're trying to do. I think that's what we're trying to do. We're trying to do that. We're trying to do that. We're trying to do that. We're trying to do that. We're trying to do that. We're trying to do that. We're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that.
Speaker 4And we're trying to do that.
Speaker 1And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that.
Speaker 4And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that.
Speaker 1And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. And we're trying to do that. things. It also just radically increases the time duration to when those companies are actually going to be able to implement some of these technologies to transform their business.
Speaker 4And isn't there always like another organization inside the company that says we could do this without Lean and without these other companies, we could do it? A hundred percent. Like, look, no matter any AI company, whether you're a true AI native company or not, when you go into these companies, there's a whole group of people that think that they could
Speaker 1do exactly what you could do. Yeah. And it's exciting, right? This is an exciting time. AI is exciting for people. And for technologists, especially, they're like, man, I want to get my hands on this thing and I want to build it. So I'm going to go tell my boss I can build this thing. It goes back to the question that you have to ask those C-level executives, which is, man, isn't it better for your team to focus on their core competency? Why not build on or build with our technology? We don't have to be the front door. We can be that context layer for you. But if you're a paper manufacturer or you're building automobiles, you're in healthcare, wouldn't it be better to take this foundational technology and build products and solutions that go directly to servicing your end customer versus having these guys down in the depths trying to build some of these foundational technologies? And that's a real personal game for a lot of these folks because they feel like their careers partially depend on it and or they just want to do it really badly.
Speaker 4Right. Let's talk about AI and sales. Five years from now, enterprise software companies, do they employ more or fewer salespeople?
Speaker 1I've gotten into this debate with folks. I actually think it's going to be more. I think it's going to be more people. Everyone said, "Oh, the SDR is dead." This was over the last 12 to 18 months. But the way I look at it, we've got more SDRs at our company and most of my peers' companies. And I think what it's going to look like, and we actually have something that sort of a lab within Glean called the Work AI Institute, where we've got people much smarter than me, professors from Stanford and all these folks thinking about like, what does an organization look like in the future? And I think the sort of common thought pattern is that organizations will be flatter and organizations will have AEs or people in that type of role managing teams of agents under them, doing all kind of the legwork and the drudgery. But it's that whole Jevons paradox thing that everyone talks about now, where the more and the cheaper AI gets, the actual more things happen and the more work gets done. And so I think in the relative near term, you're going to see a broader hiring environment that you're going to need more people. Also, when you have more AI, you can push more slop and more crap out. And so I don't know about you guys, but my inbox is disgusting. The level of slop and emails and inbound that comes in, is pretty terrible. And what's really resonating with people that we're seeing with customers is the IRL stuff, right? The in real life, in person, in your office, handwritten notes, drop offs, all of those sort of like what's old is new again things from a salesperson's perspective, actually differentiate you now in the eyes of the customer. And I think if you're just relying on teams of bots and agents, it's actually not what human beings really want or how they want to buy things right now. So. My prediction is probably more, John.
Speaker 4So do you think that AI ultimately hurts mediocre people and dramatically helps great salespeople or vice versa? I think it levels the point.
Speaker 1When we look back five years from now, how's it going to look? I mean, I think the best of the best and the best that I see on my team, like they go from, it's like they talk about these 10 or 100 X developers, right? Like the best just become that much better. It's like the Iron Man suit and they just explode. And it really is a force multiplier for them. Because they know exactly what they want. They know exactly what they want and they can get it from AI and they go. That's right. So all the BS work or the work that like turns them into 50 other people, they can put that into the AI and they can have those AI systems go out and do things for them on their behalf in the way that they want them done. I think it's an opportunity for folks that may be mediocre in that. AI, what it does is it levels up. It takes away all the drudgery. You don't have to go, you know, do the QBR deck or the, you know, research, all like the manual labor goes away. And so everyone's sort of at this level. And now, you know, do those people want to use AI to train themselves better, to get deeper into process, to really kind of hone those skills? And so I think it's an opportunity for folks that may be middle of the road to really level themselves up. But, you know, when you do have that force multiplier, it's the best people that are going to just get 10 X better.
Speaker 4Okay. So if you were 30 years old, I know you're like 32 or 33 right now, but you're 30 years old and you're an enterprise software salesperson, what would you learn to make sure that you could benefit from AI and it would not replace you?
Speaker 1Hmm. The best people that I see on my team doing it that are in like that cohort is they have automated their... Like daily and weekly processes. So their prospecting list, their LinkedIn outreach, their, you know, creation of customer value decks, et cetera, like all of that happens. So it leaves them all of this extra time, right? That productivity leaves them extra time so that they can go learn from the best of the best. And I think back to like the first part of our conversation, which is like the people in your organization, if you've come to a great company and you've come to a great sales organization, and John, to your point, if you've chosen a great sales leader, you're going to be a great sales leader. You're going to be a great sales leader. Man, now you have all of this extra time to go learn from those folks, to hone your craft, to study your process, and to take the time that may have been spent creating internal artifacts or sending out emails and maybe get out into the office of your customer to go learn more from them and to, you know, put yourself in a position to go win more deals.
Speaker 3This is going to show up in our first topic on interviewing is that in what you just explained, what you just talked about, the opportunity for promotion, the opportunity for promotion, the opportunity for promotion, the opportunity for productivity is where I see the great sellers are the ones that are trying to identify the workflows that are the most, that create the most friction for them, that create the most challenges from doing more calls or getting more revenue. And they're trying to automate those, or they're trying to, you know, they're, they're, or they're trying to enhance them, like parts of the sales process, like, you know, the discovery process for preparation and understanding a company or what have you. That's got to show up in the interview process. If somebody comes to light in the interview process, and you're not asking them a question about how are they utilizing, not are they utilizing, but how are you utilizing? What are you learning? And what's the return for you? It's probably going to tell you a lot of what you need to know about whether they'd be successful selling it in Glean.
Speaker 1I think also what I see, and I've seen having spent, you know, time with hundreds of customers in this last week is everyone's scared right now on the customer side too. They're scared. They don't know what's happening. They don't know who to believe. And I think if you can spend that much more time in person with your customers, building that trust, they're not going to build that trust with an AI bot on your website. I think the great organizations and the great sellers are going to be there face-to-face building that trust with their customers. That customer looks out over the landscape and they can't get the anthropic rep on a phone because they're too busy taking orders in the back room, but you're there actually helping solve their pain and their problem. That to me is the long-term recipe for success.
Speaker 3The only thing I wanted to put a bow on was, look, the underlying thing that you're talking about here with, you know, in an AI native company selling in this environment is you have to have proof because I don't understand. Well, I guess I can understand, but in our country, our country specifically, there's such a negative backlash right now on data centers and AI. There's so much misinformation. I'm actually seeing it leaking down into companies at CFO levels with like, hey, before I spend any more money on tokens, before I spend any more money on, you know, any other projects that we're going to do, I want a true return on investment, which means that you have to have a rock solid process, Brad. And I'd love to hear some advice because I'm getting a lot more feedback. I'm getting a lot more feedback. I'm getting a lot more phone calls today about proof of concept, proof of value. What are some of the, what are some of the, you know, minimum must-haves that should be in place from a qualification perspective? Can you leave our audience with that? Because this is what I'm hearing. Deals are getting longer. You got to prove it out with our stuff. And that stuff has to be impactful to some business outcome for the company because there's only so many dollars. So do you have words of wisdom? There's a lot of wisdom to leave us with on this bare minimums for proof of value.
Speaker 1Yeah. Well, the wisdom is hard-earned as we all know, right? Intelligence is cheap now with LLMs, but wisdom is kind of hard-earned through experience. And so I think from an ROI perspective, John, the way the industry started out was sort of, hey, it's very simple. One plus one equals two. I'm going to give you more time back, right? You're more productive. We've saved 47 hours a day. You're more productive. We've saved 47 hours a day. You're more productive. We've saved 47 hours a day. You're more productive. We've saved 47 hours a day. You're more productive. We've time? What are you actually giving back to the business? I see that Bo's going to ask for less people to do that. Yeah, look, it's really hard. I sympathize and empathize with people because then to get in there and really dig in with your customer and understand, which is why we talked about that blueprint process. I truly believe you have to be in there with your customer and understanding outside of the technical team, but their actual business units, what do you do? What actually drives value, top line revenue for this company? How can we go automate some of those processes or use AI to make them that much better to drive revenue, reduce risk, et cetera. If you go in and you spend time with your customer to understand what that looks like, how it happens, and then apply your technology to it, to provide a measure of automation, to make that company more successful. One of the most exciting things for me is we've got this, another buzzword, buzzword bingo, FDEs, right? A forward deployed engineering team. So there's things that your technology can do out of the box, but man, if I really want to go specifically drive a change in an organization, maybe we need some of these people to turn a couple of knobs or work with you to actually further customize this technology. And so to give you an example, our team went out and worked with General Motors and now they've got this system that helps them design cars faster. So they can bring all these different data sources and all these disparate teams together to design a vehicle faster. Their ROI on that is almost a billion dollars over three years. If I can get in there and I can spend the time and I can get the buy-in of a customer and I can show you an ROI of close to a billion dollars, that's a huge amount of value that you can then go sell to the customer. And so to me, the companies that are successful are going to be the ones that earn the right and the time with that customer to go in and get their teams embedded with them and to build solutions with their technology that actually transform that business versus just throwing some slop at them and maybe letting people create a PowerPoint. But the bar is so high now with every CFO that you better have something else behind that. And your process has to be able to drive that forward with the customer.
Speaker 3On the FDE piece, where actually maybe you can share with us some of the people at Glean we'd love to talk to because this is not just a buzzword anymore. Like you said, this is kind of like a must. I'm wondering, where do you find the pressure of FDEs before the sale, which typically elongates, or before the contract, which typically elongates, or post-sale, where we believe the hypothesis, we've proved out the hypothesis, now I want to learn how to make cars cheaper, faster at GM?
Speaker 1Yeah. I mean, typically, there's almost two types of FDEs. People use FDEs sort of like this broad catch-all term. Many companies will use FDEs to sort of prop up a deficiency in their technology, frankly. So my tech doesn't really work. I need an FDE to actually go plug it in and just get the core base functionality. So I'm not going to do that. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. Our FDEs are really more on the tail end, which is our SEs and AI outcomes managers can kind of help get it implemented and get our customer to a certain SETI state. And then the FDEs come in after that and truly go that last mile to build those things. And so, yeah, we've got an incredible team that once the product is in place with the customer, we'll come in and have those conversations and dig in and truly understand the outcomes and the processes to see, one, is it worth spending time together to do? Because if you're not doing it, you're not going to be able to do it. Because these are also very precious, hard to hire for resources that we as a company, if you think about sort of the breadth of our organization, have to decide where we want to place those bets. And the way we look at that is like, well, is it an industry we haven't been in before? And is that industry? And if the outcome that we go design with that customer, then repeatable. So we can kind of stamp that out and then make that a repeatable process that we can take to market with our teams and our organization. More to come on that topic. Sure. We've got some great folks. But, you know, John, you did ask one question in your email, which I thought was great. And maybe to end with some vulnerability and get some advice from you guys is looking back, like, what are some things that you could do differently? And or, you know, what are some of the challenges that I face right now? It's just like the rate of change is so high. It is so much higher than it's been before. And I've been at fast moving companies like Snowflake, where maybe you had one product change a year, right? And you could, you know, kind of like... Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And you could have an anaconda eating a deer. You could have had time to digest that change through a sales organization. Now you're changing every 90 days, it seems, right? And the messaging in the market changes and your product changes and disseminating that change and how your product help affects positive business outcomes for customers based on those changes. You know, especially when we've got, you know, 350 people in my org alone, it's really hard because you don't want to choke people out with information. And so it's like, how do you as a sales leader come in and really drive that organizational change that you can take these messages and drive it out to the companies that we can stay abreast of everything? I think that's really tough because you don't want to drown people with new information or take them off task.
Speaker 3I think it's such a great question you're asking. And we are at an incredible time in sales now and in sales productivity, sales execution, where the greatest companies on the planet, first and foremost, are aligned. So you're not alone. Sales is not on an island. For you guys to be able to do your job, to go to market, to be able to do their job, there has to be a shared vision at product and marketing and sales and, you know, pre-sales, post-sales. There has to be this shared alignment. And now, because we have access to technology, that doesn't have to be in like a once a year meeting that says, this is our new framework value. This is our framework, you know, 30 days from now, 90 days from now. What we're seeing is that the core principles of value creation are still critical. They're Egypt old. You know, the answers to the four essential questions. What problems do we solve? How specifically do you solve them? How do you solve them differently or better than anybody else? And where have you done it before? The response to those questions, both from an internal company perspective and aligned vision perspective and from the marketplace is changing faster than I've ever seen it in the last 20 years. So the companies that are going to do really, really well are the ones that have the ability to capture that, those changes and that information as fast as possible and get it into the workflow, get it into the hands of the sellers with this least friction, as possible. And I'm not talking about through a tech stack of 17 different sales tools. So that for me is a big area of opportunity. Johnny and I are kind of tinkering in this area and we're kind of excited about some things coming down the pike. But for me, that's the holy grail. In a sense, I would say dynamic information in the sales rep's hand at the moment of truth. When they're in front of a customer is big. Huge. That's awesome.
Speaker 4But as a background to that, Brad, I think it's also really important to stay focused on the fundamentals, the fundamentals of process, recruiting process, onboarding process, training process, selling process, implementation process. If you don't have a real focus on the fundamentals, then what happens when all these new things come out and things keep changing? There's always this new shiny object and the whole or some organizations all chase that thing and find out, you know, it's kind of a dead end. There was never pumped up to be what it really, you know, what they intended it to be. And it's the organizations, especially, you know, you as a CRO to stay focused on the fundamentals and there will be incremental changes to those processes when you see that the competition is changing. And you know, hey, I got to, I got to incrementally change my sales process and let everybody know right now, or I got to incrementally change my, my training, you know, what I train them on. But if you're not, if you don't have those processes nailed, that's where people get really lost.
Speaker 1Totally. Yeah, no, it's great. I think my team gets bored with my boring, trust the process and then like atomic habits, right? Hard work compounds, just get up, have your cup of coffee, do these things every day. Within that process. And it turns out over the course of the year, things tend to work out, but, you know, it's also easy to get lost in the sauce right now in this AI cycle. And so it's sort of the, the push pull in that balance is always interesting.
Speaker 4Yeah. Well, great job, Brad Scott. Really appreciate you joining us. Thank you, Mr. Kaplan. And thanks to everyone for listening to another episode of the Revenue Builders Podcast.
Speaker 2Enjoy 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.
PodcastTranscript AI