Why Your Sales Rep Needs to Be an Architect, Not Just a Closer with Adam Carr

Hey real quick before we get into the conversation. Look, if you've been listening to this podcast for a while now, you know I don't have sponsors. And it's mainly because I know most people, including myself, skip right through them, and I just don't want to annoy my audience with 10 minutes of sponsor spots every single week. However, it also means I don't get paid to do this. So the way I help fund my ability to provide free content and really interesting conversations like the one you're about to hear is through my sales training and coaching services. So if you've gotten value out of some of these conversations on this podcast and you're looking to level up your sales game, do me a favor and go to jbaros.com and check out the training tab on the top nav bar. I have training for teens or individuals and you can even get an individual training module focused on a specific skill that you're looking to address like objection handling negotiations much more. If you're an individual, you can also use discount code podcast for a 20% off the membership. Look, sales is evolving faster than ever right now, especially with AI. We all need to level up or risk becoming irrelevant. Whether you're an executive looking to train your entire team or you're an individual rep looking to level up, I promise I can help you get to where you want to go in 2026. Send me an email to schedule call or sign up to my membership today and let's make it happen together. Now, let's get on with the show. Hey, everyone. Welcome back to Make It Happened Monday's where we talk about sales, business, entrepreneurship, personal growth, mental health, and everything in between with Guess what? I truly respect and I think make a positive impact on the world around us. Now, before I get into today's guess, I want to be transparent on this one. Apollo is a sponsor of JV sales. And if you've been following me for any amount of time, you know I only work the sponsors who some products I actually use. I use Apollo for my own prospect. And so when I tell you this is a platform I believe in, that is coming from real experience not because I'm just reading it on the cart. Now today I'm joined by their CRO Adam Carr and he has one of the more interesting career arcs in B2B sales leadership. Every single company he's picked follows the same pattern arc. He works at product-like growth companies that needed to layer on enterprise sales. He was at five stars in loyalty and payments, then classy.org and nonprofit fundraising, then boxed during their high growth enterprise push. And the biggest chapter before Apollo was Miro where he served as their SVP of global sales and helped scale their business from a small sales team to 12 global offices, growing high touch revenue from single digits to hundreds of millions in ARR. Now hit a $17.5 billion valuation during this time there. Now he's at Apollo which serves over 4 million users and 600,000 businesses running one of the most widely adopted AI native go-to-market platforms in the world. We are going to talk about the state of outbound what AI native actually means versus AI bolted on, what happens when everyone has the same tool and what the future of GTM looks like when the machines start talking to each other. Hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did. Let's make it happen. Adam Carr welcome to the Make it happen Monday podcast my friend. How you doing today? Very well. Thanks for having me. Yeah, this is going to be an interesting conversation man. So we've been working together for a while. We worked over at Miro. A lot of things have changed since then and this is going to be the PLG focus here on what it's doing to sales and sales reps and how that evolution hits. But before we get into that as my audience, always knows I love the origin story here Adam. So talk to me about growing up, family, kid, you know, like where'd you get your influences, where all that stuff come from and then we'll kind of walk through your college decisions and then all the PLG companies that you've been a part of and then figure out where we're coming from here. So walk us through that road map there my friend. Yeah. Born and raised in Tempe, Arizona. grew up like dad was in sales. He still is today. 45 plus years as an individual contributor, 100% condition role. So pretty, pretty fascinating when I say like one of my biggest motivations and doing right along with him growing up and then my mom was a school teacher. So that embodied a lot around like McGrill's mindset and always learning perspective and then I grew up playing sports. So I think that's that competitive edge. I was never the biggest person out there like when I came to my size but I was I was always able to get myself the right playing time and even on varsity sports because I knew the plays and I was quick and that was something that was a differentiator for me as I grew up playing competitive sports. Well, so I talked to dad 45 years, 100% commission rep. Like that is risk profile. I talked to me about kind of risk profile on that right because I bring this up because you know a lot of reps are very terrified of full commission right because it's like and I know I was like when I was growing up is like hey I need at least something just in case it doesn't hit right but then when I got fired from one of my jobs after we sold our company to Staples and all the fun well I got offered another position whatever it's a different story. Now all of a sudden I'm running my own business and a don don't on me that I was 100% commission rep at this point and I'm a pretty self motivated guy but man if you need some motivation to get up in the morning and realize that if you don't get up you ain't getting paid regardless. So what is your dad like a risk taker or does what's his view on why he is like this is what gets me out of bed every morning. You might get an invite to the podcast. But you know honestly like I think he stumbled into it and he's a chemical manufacturing type of sales job where he sells his primary customer is automotive shops and he sells it's like every week he's going to these customers they repurchase the chemicals on him and so he found a real interesting niche where it's like it's the human element they want to buy from people and he's built these relationships and all small mom and pop type of like you know local businesses in a way there's some larger ones like discount tire which is much more national but like yeah I think for him is no he's not he's not a high risk type of a person but I think he's found this interesting vertical that he was able to have a ton of success in over the years and built these relationships and for him is like people love it. People light up when they see him and they trust him and they they I come back to like even this new world well living right of like people buy from people I really believe that a human element is so important and it's shifting and it's evolving really quickly in this in this new world we live in today. Just give a head a little bit because you know a lot of people say the you know relationships and human element and all this other stuff but I've always said that yes and right relationships matter people like to buy from people but value matters in the relationship right because you got these people who have in a lot of ways built their careers on being a really nice guy like being able you know super likable but you know and taking out steak dinners and golf and all those things and back in the day steak dinners and golf that was valuable in some way shape or form right but but now value is is taking a whole different turn so what's that balance from your standpoint of of the relationship likable guy but making sure that you're constantly adding value and not just relying too much on the relationship because I think people get lazy on the relationships in a lot of ways and they stop paying attention to the value that they're bringing. My I'll be back in my dad because I've seen this fast saying everybody thought about this way but like he knows his customer and the way that they work as and his product better than anybody and he knows how to position his product differently even though it's a commoditized world especially in the chemical world I'm like why they would pick this one type versus another type and I think that he's good enough to be able to articulate that I think that's where the value comes in in his own world and they trusted because they he can relate to who they are in their day to day and I think that that's the difference maker when you think about value it's not about taking people out for dinners or golf or whatever he doesn't do any of that like my dad was someone that went to work at 6 a.m. in the morning he was picking us up at school every single day and I know and those are things that I think about now in my life and how I want to raise my kids to make sure that I can give you know that time back to them to be present to be engaged and so but a lot of it's because he was smart who's really smart with how he worked and how he worked with his customers. Nice. Yeah, you know everybody says people buy from people they like I'm like no no they buy from people they trust and I think that's the different that's the thing I'm still holding on to with the whole AI stuff is like do I trust AI you know do I get value out of AI sure do I trust it 100% no obviously it lies but the human on the other hand yeah I like talking to humans but there's a trust factor there there's a value factor there as well so paying attention to those two things I think the dynamics of that as we scale through this is going to be really interesting. So I actually went to accounting was that just because you didn't know what the hell you wanted to be when you grew up or you were actually had an affinity for you know accounting. I think it's just how I was wired that like I actually changed my degree because I took the first course of accounting and it just keeps so natural to me just a little bit probably like some sort of weird sickness going on that the numbers just made sense and I was convinced my mom who's the teacher was like hey accounting gives you more breath like then finance because I was finance degree and and so yeah I went on that path and so it was it honestly I look back on it with best decision because like I often a much more operational type of leader I think in numbers and I think it helps me make the right decisions but it's like that mix because I was an entrepreneur in college so like I have that mix between that accounting discipline and an entrepreneurial spirit like and that's what led me out of college is doing my own thing for for multiple years. I was going to say because that's odd right to be in sales, but also be, you know, a finance, that dynamic usually isn't there, right? It's either, "Hey, I'm really good, and I'm the numbers are the numbers," whatever. But that, it's kind of, for me, I grew up. My dad was an electrical engineer, and my mom was an artist. And so I have the kind of the science and the art background. And so from that standpoint, when you say you were an entrepreneur through college, with a golden sky media, did you, like, so did you find, found that in college? Or was it you, you, you, you, you, you, Greek row? You Greek row. Yeah. What, what, what was that? So that was in college? Yeah, so in college, like, I would just be doing some, like, I'll give you an example, like, I owned a vending machine business. Yeah. Or I had more, more vending machines at different storey's and fraternities on campus. Nice. And they're all credit card based. We were stocking them. Like, that was just like a, like, a small little initiative. And then I ran a, like, I had a large event planning as well that we did across, across university. And then that led me to the, you Greek row, which we built a website for, it was set around storage and fraternities. It was a niche, like, I was very involved. And I felt like there was just, like, really tight-knit group of organizations that think about if, like, LinkedIn and Facebook and some sort of, like, chapter management came together in one platform. I still think it would work today. You totally honest. I don't think there's anything out there today. And, and so that part of laying me into running a, that didn't work out. And we failed. And we, you know, a lot of great lessons learned, raised money, didn't work out. And then I went to, um, build a minor league system for up-and-coming musicians. So, uh, we put musicians out on the road. They played again across the country. College campuses, 20 to 25 shows a month. They're sponsored by Oakley, um, muscle milk, vans. And it was, like, a minor league system. We took these up-and-coming artists from these record labels that couldn't get their name out there. And they had an influential market, which is the college demographic, to play and sell merchandise. And that was, that was really cool and really fun because that was much more on the business side of it. And, um, and then I, you know, the economy tank and I was like, what am I doing right now? And so that's when I went back to corporate America. And I was like, okay, if I can go either accounting or I can, you know, try something else and I fell into sales. And that's why I went to the AT&T program in Atlanta, Georgia. There was a six-month program you were wearing a suit and tie every day. It was incredible. And I graduated that program in actually four months because I already, I fairly needed the cut because it was like a three-year cutoff from graduate college. So barely made it. And then that's where I got things started. So it's funny you bring that up because I had the same experience as Xerox, right? It was the Xerox sales academy, right? And I look back at that. And I almost, and I think we need to get back to that from a developmental standpoint because when I don't know the details of the AT&T, but with Xerox, it was, you weren't just learning about sales. You were learning about the business. You were learning about how, you know, the marketing side, the, you know, the customer support side, the technical side, then you became an apprentice and then like, you weren't full cycles. You weren't in your territory until six months into your development, right? Whereas now, all right, 30 days on boarding, get luck, get out of there. And I think that's really done sales reps of disservice from a, from a developmental standpoint because there's, you know, almost any GTM role, if you think of sales marketing and, and CS or, or, I'm sorry, uh, revops, right? None of those are real anything you truly learn in college at this point, right? Marketing, that was my degree, but everything I learned in school as soon as I got out of the real world was irrelevant. So it's, I almost want to create this like, you know, GTM generalist role for everybody for a year where you just sit and you learn all those roles within an organization, become like the support structure for like the full time sales cycle person and then you pick your lane. So how are, let's, let's bring this to Apollo or some of the organizations that you, that you've developed here. How do you look at on boarding and empowering the kids with more than just the sales process, you know, with the business acumen that they need to have a real conversation with somebody once they get put into territory. Yeah, I could not agree more like that. That sixth month period was foundational. So many ways and, you know, toastmasters like public speaking. That was in a toastmaster lunch group, uh, um, time is a week and you just don't get that time back and that's where like you're focused or there, you're surrounded by folks that are very much in the same situation you are saying you could be vulnerable and you can play yourself outside your comfort zone. I don't, it doesn't exist today in the same way. That's the truth because those are expensive to fund, right? The largest organizations can fund those properly. And, uh, but I would say like right now, the way that I think about it and like on boarding and how we ramp into the tools is like we, we do spend time giving business context. We help our folks understand like in our world today and I'll equate it like how do customers run go to market today? There are customers that are in this legacy world that are still managing, you know, like spreadsheets and very manual ways and there's more than modern type of, of, of, or they're, leveraging some of the latest technology. There's more of the, let's call it the agetic world where they're like AI native and they're doing things around the cutting edge. Those are three different types of organizations, three different types of personas, maturity levels and you have to understand where the rack and need and where they are because if I go to talk to somebody right now that's doing legacy way of doing things which most companies are today, they're, they're not going to relate to this agetic world. It's going to be over their head. Yep. A lot of it is just slowing down to making sure that we're able to help our teams understand who are you speaking to? Where are they at? And I think that goes back to like how do you build trust? How do you actually, you speak the same language? See my contention is, is that it actually isn't expensive for small businesses to do this because if you look at the macro of the fact that less than 50% of SDRs, actually the stats are the average SDR only stays in their company, not their role, company for 15 months, 15 to 16 months. So the, the promise of the SDR becoming your AE, right? And even those who do stay less than 50% become AE's, most of them go into ops or something else or more than 50% go into ops and everything else. And so, and so retention, I think if we folk double down on what was and slow down to your point, I think retention goes up, I think empathy goes up because you get them exposed to customers. So now if we're studying the customer experience is better, so if we're studying retention of clients becomes better. So my thesis is if we did slow down to speed up and actually treated it as an ecosystem of education for the first year of anybody's role in anybody, any company that the macro would actually save money, save cost is opposed to cost too much because only the big boys can do it. Yeah, I, it's an interesting point to make it. I agree with you on that. And I think that there's also this external factor where like you're an SDR and you're like how fast I get out of this. Like it's like the worst but best job you'll ever have and it's that mindset too of like, how quickly can I, can I move? And I think that like in a week, we are spending a lot of time, we're building our SDR work right now. So like we're building those foundations today around what does it take? How do you, how do we make sure these folks are getting developed in the right ways? We're not moving too fast. That's the thing that keeps me up tonight, especially with folks earlier in the careers that we promote too early and they fail. Right. And I've done that. Honestly, like I've made that mistake multiple times because you're like the business needs more ahead. So, hey, let's promote the folks that are doing the SDR work now, but like they're nowhere near ready. And so it's an interesting question and actually a good timing for me to reflect on as well as we're building out that, that, that program because we're bringing in folks and folks that have some experience and folks coming straight out of college, which is what was one of my favorite areas for us to hire from. Yeah. And that's actually what gives me a little bit of hope here is that because sales is the least educated profession, at least from a university standpoint, we're starting to see schools grow their sales works. And I mean, I'm part of, you know, I do a lot of these sales, national sales competitions for these colleges, at Bentley and all these different places. And man, I'll tell you right now, kids coming out of those schools, like they have, I'd hire half of them who are in school right now, over half the reps that I see because their abilities and they get the education. And so, because I think start, like sales being the default profession anymore, I don't know if that's going to be a thing because, you know, going to school with every degree and be like, ah, that doesn't work. Let me get into sales because no barrier to entry. I need to know this and I'll figure it out. That, that floor is going to raise so high because the expectations that if you're not coming in with some, some experience or at least perspective on sales, you're not going to be hired at all. Yeah. I wish there was more that sales curriculum when I went to school. You are seeing it a lot. And like, there's a lot of colleges that are built really great programs. Absolutely. Absolutely. So, well, you did, you intentionally, didn't it, Miro? Didn't you intentionally slow down your hiring, even though you were on a rocket ship to make sure that that process was locked in? Yeah. I mean, 100%. And I learned a lot of this from, um, Genio, the Sierra at the time of like the importance for unhiring. And, uh, yes, like even at Miro, we were very intentional about we hire, uh, Apollo. I explicitly said we're going to miss hiring targets and goals because I'd rather hire, not join in, there was like 20 something sales reps and the goal was to get this to over 100. Uh, and we did that, but we did it in the right time period. And I, and I thought that is like, what's the interview guy? What are the questions? What does good look like? Musks, how are we thinking about the ways we're asking these questions? Because a lot of times it's hypotheticals and like, no, like let's get true proof points of things. And so, um, aren't, aren't, we're not perfect by any means, but like hiring is the most important thing that we can do to bring the industry. in the right town. I wasn't gonna ask this, I'm curious though, because the hiring market right now is so fucking brutal. Like if I was, I'd be freaking out right now if I was, you know, looking for a job, because I look at it as companies use AI to write a job description, rep then uses AI to optimize their resume to match the perfect job description, the company then uses AI to evaluate that resume to, and so I guess the intangibles, right? There's the process of the resume and everything else, but what do you look for? Like what stands out right now? Even from, and I think the obvious of like, hey, here's my resume, call me back, is kind of a fool's errand, and if you're hiring for sales, and that's what you're doing right now, I'm not going to hire you, 'cause you have to get creative for this, and you have to, you know, get thoughtful, but which ones of the ones that are standing out for you that make it to through to a human? - Yeah, I, it's a, what am I? What do I, favorite thing is looking for actual part of like proof, proof of what you've done. So not hypotheticals, I think I'll go back to this. One of my favorite things is actually doing a prompt exercise, that's walk me through what you have done, walk me through how, and this is much, like we do a lot of, we always do a prompt exercise, but like to your point, I love that prompt exercise to be AI proof, and what I mean by that is, I don't want you to be able to go to chat, CBT, Gemini, Claude, and be able to pull it all together just because of that. So like that's the part that I'm thinking about now, how do I get you to think? How do I understand how you think? How do you operate, how do you learn, how do you ask questions? Like those are things I'm thinking about, and we test that through each of the interviews. And yes, success, prior successes, an important factor, but honestly, sometimes folks are just a victim of their own environment. Like they were successful because the company was doing really, really well, versus what did you do that drove that success? And that's the level of detail that I'm looking for when we have conversations. And then in leadership and above, my favorite is that the panel prompt is like, walk me through it, show me how you run your cadence, show me how you run a pipeline review, show me how you run a forecast call, show me how you do coaching. And so it forces them to actually, what did you do? So you can't just speak in hypotheticals or theories. - Yeah, it's like the next evolution of the situational based question versus the hypothetical question, right? So I always say, your kids were higher. I'm like, never ask me a hypothetical question, right? 'Cause I'll be the best interview you've ever seen in your life. Well, John, if you were to get in an argument with your boss, like, what would you do? Well, I'd take my time, I'd really think through what the argument, I'd take off. So you know, blah, blah, blah, and you'd be like, oh my God, this, hey, John, last time you got in an argument with your boss, what happened? So I have to give you an example of the last time I got in an argument, and that's hard to lie about, right? So those are the proof points, if you will. But you mentioned something that I'm curious your perspective on, like how you think, right? We said, like, we wanna learn how you think. AI is making it real easy not to think right now, man. And it's making it real easy to make it look like I thought. So how do you extract how someone thinks when it's so easy and IQ is, you know, kind of, a commodity at this point? - It's the questions that the majority interview, and you're, I'm asking you a question, and then it might actually spawn a question for you. Hey, that's an interesting question to ask me. But then reverting it back to me, and almost like a double tap into that question. And so I think that's where I'm like, you're actually thinking, you're actually taking what I'm asking you, you're digesting it, and then you're actually using it and applying it in a different way. And actually that's a good signal for discovery, right? Are you actively listening? - Exactly. - So I think that's one thing that I'm looking for. And then honestly, like, so you see it through the dialogue. The other part around it is, how quick are you on your feet? Like when I ask a question, you know, how are the thoughts for you, the structure as well? Like how do you break down an answer? Or, and the last piece I would say would be around the questions you ask when I always give time is, hey, what questions do you have for me? - Yeah, yeah. - And that one is really really telling the boilerplate questions, right? What are your biggest strategies for the next 12 months? Like, like, those are not high intellectually sound type of questions. I want books to go much more deeper. Hey, I do a lot of research. Okay, listen to three or four year podcasts, and I, that you were on recently, and I noticed X, Y, and Z, I'm really curious, the impact that those decisions have been having inside the business right now. Like, that just shows that there's more there. - And that's like, I mean, I couldn't be more spot on with the issue today. I'd say right now that the most insulting thing is, you can say to anybody when you get time on their calendar for especially prospect, you know, like a prospect is, tell me about your business, what keeps you up at night, and tell me about your priorities. 'Cause I can figure that shit out real quick. I literally just go into chat to be whatever, and say, what would keep somebody like Adam up at night? What are somebody like his priorities? Do some deep research on this, but then to your point, asking clarifying questions about that. Being like, hey, I saw this, and I'm kind of curious about that. And that, to me, is discovery. That's curiosity. And that's the challenge that I keep bumping up against is, you know, how do you teach curiosity? How do I mean, I know that I personally think that genuine curiosity is a nature, not nurture thing, but I think you can become curious. How do you facilitate or support or develop curiosity with your teams? - Hey, taking a quick break here to remind you to check out some of my sales training programs at jbarros.com and use discount code podcast for 20% off the individual packages. If you're not interested in training, or you don't think you need it, then you can still support me by leaving a five-star review on your favorite podcast platform, or G2, if you've already gone through my training before. You can also sign up for my newsletter on jbarros.com, where every single week I put out a newsletter that breaks down what I'm learning out there, some of the new tips and tools and tech and resources that I'm coming across, and some stories from the streets of train wrecks that I go through and stuff not to do. So if you could do one of those things, either sign up for the membership, give me a five-star review, or follow me on the newsletter, it would mean the world to me. Thanks for your support, now let's get back to the show. - You know what's good about that? I think it's all about the why. - Okay. - Like, and so, the asking why, like, why is it that way? - Okay. - And I think that's the only way you get people to think. And so, for me, this is asking why's a lot. And, but I think that like, to your point, you can't, there is a part of just who you are, if like, and to also that growth mindset too, are you someone that wants to learn? So I think the learners, or the ones that are seeking out information, like I'm constantly trying to look at, like, reading articles, listening to podcasts, like I'm waking up in the morning, when I'm on the way to the gym listening, listening to different podcasts, because I just want to hear from other people, how are they thinking? How are they doing things? And just get to my mind going like, "Wow, why are we not doing it that way?" Or how would we, if we leverage that insight, how would that work in our own world? So that's how I think, and I think that we, there's probably more ways to help pull that out of folks, but I think that unheirately, the people are, I think, born with it in a lot of ways, and it's a big of their environments too, that they're part of. - Yeah, and that's kind of the problem is, it's kind of the 80, 20 rate per-rateals rule. It's like, I don't think most people are here. It's like, I heard some stat the other day that like, this can't be true, but you know, whatever the internet. It's like less than, you know, 30% of people out there don't have an intermodal log, like when they don't talk, or when they don't think they're literally just sitting there in their minds blank, I'm like, that can't be true. I'm like, 'cause what I'm not talking, my brain's like a million miles an hour, thinking of a billion different things, I'm like, I cannot imagine a large part of our population is literally just sitting there like green screen, you know what I mean? Like, I'm like, come on. So, but. - I get my best thinking done at a Barry's boot camp. Like, every day, like I come out, I would like all my great ideas, and people are like, you're crazy. How do you not just zone out? It's like, I don't know, I get my best thinking done when I'm part of it now. - Mine's actually my hot tub. I literally sit my hot tub at the end of the day just to relax a little bit, and that is where the vast majority of my, like good ideas come from, 'cause I'm just reflecting, I'm staring into the woods, and I'm just kind of in a different zone than working all the time, 'cause I can't get, you know, real good decisions out of this. So, let's talk about the PLG stuff, right? 'Cause you've lived your life in PLG, and it's always been crazy to me. You know, it's funny. You always see PLG founders specifically. At some point, or especially early in the business, they all stand up and proudly profess, we don't need sales reps. - Right. - Our product sells itself, right? I go Slack, Dropbox, Tableau, all of them, right? And guess who, guess what? I've trained Slack, Tableau, Dropbox, I've trained all of them. So, how do you walk me through the difference of kind of original PLG that was like, okay, it's like almost like a freemium model, let's go. And how it's evolved with AI. And then I wanna talk about the sales reps value in that chain, but I just, I'm curious right now, has PLG changed with the advent of AI, or is it just a continued evolution of the same philosophy? - Yeah, I love this topic, and I, I think about it in a few ways. One, there's the PLG, which is the, let's call product led growth, which is self-service signups. And you have a different plan types. Then you have product led sales, which is like PLS, which is like great, now I'm the product, how do I actually bring sales into aid that motion? And that could be like, okay, there's some use. to do already, how do I now go topstown? And then there's sales lead growth, which is like, in theory, there is no product, and you're just going more topstown selling, right? And so I think those worlds are colliding, and that's what I feel good to be excited. The title you, it's an evolution. Even at Apollo, I joined Apollo was, over a hundred million ARR coming from a PLG perspective. And they were starting to layer in product lead sales, and same with Miro, very similar type of environment. I'd say that the key here is the decisions, and be able to go all the way, able to create value, and be able to articulate why to go all in on a product, scale all the way. You have to be able to have that business level of discussion. And so you're leveraging that inertia, you have to go scale it. I think that AI is allowing all the signals, probably product lead growth is you're getting all this noiseiness from all these different end users, and their type of usage, and the product signals that are happening, and even third party signaling that you see, too. Like, how do you know that there's these ICs, or individuals, or teams using this? But then what are the executives looking for? What are their priorities? And so with AI, you now can take all the context, all the different signals that are happening, and you can actually create better relevance of who to reach out to with what message at one time. And I think that's going to bridge this world, especially in our way of how I actually accelerate the sales lead growth within the PLG environment. And it's hard though, because of all the data that you see in this world living, it's like, I think in a lot of cases, it actually creates complicated, it complicates things. Because as a rep, like, if I didn't have this PLG motion, it's really simple what I have to go do. When I have this PLG, I get caught up talking to all these people who are already using my product that aren't actually helping me move the sail forward. What are the signals you look for in the PLG mode? Because I remember like box when I was working with them, it was, if somebody downloaded box and uploaded a file within 48 hours or something like that, whatever the number was, their conversion was through the roof, right? But if it was like the 48 hour mark, if they hadn't uploaded a folder, a file, or something like that, they pretty much conversion ratio drops. So that was the thing where they got them in, like, hey, have you done this, have you done this? But then it was like the trigger of when does the sales rep get involved? So let's just use Apollo. What are the kind of the ones that are through all the noise, the ones that are like, oh shit, like that happened, like make the phone call, or this one needs to be elevated to this. Is there something that you look for specifically out of that noise? So part of it is like you want to, part of the PLG motion is value should be realized before you monetize it. And we have a great acquisition model. We have a great leader that's writing that business. How do I get folks into the free? How does free convert the paid? And then ultimately, what the sales team is, how do I get them to drive towards the organizational plan? Which think about that as like, or why? How do I think about now, this should be an worldwide initiative? And for us, we look at product qualifying accounts, and then we also think about product qualifying leads and leads are more contexts. So we have signals and scoring that host, we're still not fine tuning it, to be honest, like it's not perfect here. But the answer is also one thing, every company is different in how we think about the scoring of it all. But ultimately, when it's the signal, the signal within these product qualifying accounts, and these signals from these product qualifying leads to convert the right rates. And for us, we see a lot of signal around the usage, not just being a data-only provider, but data and sequencing as a data signal. But from a lot of cases for us, the platform itself, because of product leads, teams are signing up for it. So for us, we need to go get the director plus personas to actually understand that, hey, your teams are going rope. It's the classic, like your teams are going rope situation. But less than being a security play, which is kind of like the drop-offs and box type of motion, which I've very used to in the past, it's more of how do I actually unlock more value of scaling this across your organization? So even the basic usage for us is a strong signal for us. I know that there's something there, and we need to go have a much more strategic discussion around how do we scale this? How do you unlock the value across your organization? So how do you then look at the freemium approach to this versus the actual value approach to this? Because I think there has been this shift where you say, I need to see value up front. And a lot of times, the free version of whatever it was was so dog shit that I was just like, all right, whatever. So I guess unlocking everything so people can get all the value out of the gate versus gating this and saying, you have to get to this level. What has that evolved? And how do you look at that? That's a constant-- being part of a product led growth company, there's always the battle of plan differentiation. And the sales team is always going to say, there's not enough. We need more differentiation. Because typically, it's much more tailored around IT, or governance and compliance versus-- and it's much more of the back end users versus the front end users. So for us, you want to create that flywheel. And I think we're in a highly experimentation type of culture where we're constantly testing what are the right gates. Because we give away a lot for free a lot. And that's intentional. Because we want to. So I would argue that our freemium product that we have is the flywheel. Is there reason why we have 3 million plus users that are using this product? And it's growing at accelerating rates is because it's easy to get in. It's easy to get value. And we have that paid acquisition model really dialed in. So we know right now where there's enough features of functionality to feature data next step into the buying version. You said you test a lot. How does that trickle down to the organization? So what's the alignment there from a agility standpoint? Because a lot of times, there's the dev team that will test a lot, obviously, right? Marketing test messaging a lot. But then sales reps, my experience is when you get sales like without some structure to it. And you keep kind of throwing, well, what about this? What about this? Sales reps aren't really good at, oh shit. What are we doing this week? OK, this is different. I need my lane here. So how do you think about testing and being agile? And then how does that disseminate down to the floor for those reps so that they're not just book of the month club every single week and you're just testing stuff? And they're the ones who are being held accountable for the results of a test that doesn't go bad. So how does that work from your standpoint, from a CRO perspective? How do you implement it throughout the organization? The human testing is really tough, right? Because you're dealing with the management of people, emotions, and we're not in that-- we do a lot of product testing and experimentation on that side of things right now. Once we mature, we're in this maturing process which we're laying a lot of the foundations right now. So we're not in that experimentation phase of the, oh, it's called on the sales side of things. Yet, we'll get there. When we-- at mirror, we were there. And we would carve out teams. So we would carve out entire teams to isolate them entirely. We would make sure compensation was taken care of. So that wasn't influencing the wrong type of behaviors. And then we'd have proper Amy tests. We said, cool, this team, like with this called pricing. So we did a ton of pricing tests. We would pull out the team and say, cool, you're only going to go sell this variant of pricing for a quarter. And so we made sure compensation was fully adjusted for us so that they would actually go sell with the rent intent. And after we saw the best results, we were able to see, did this work or does not work? So for me, it's carving it out. You've got to make sure that the incentives are aligned. They have the right level of focus. Because if not, to your point, it's just the new flavor of the week. And you never really know is it actually working? Yeah, it's kind of like-- when I see companies go from the inbound SDR model to the outbound, right? And I always ask them, are you going to segment the team for an outbound motion versus-- and they're like, no, no, no. We're going to have inbound do also some outbound. I'm like, that is the absolute worst decision you could possibly make. Because an inbound rep will chase the shittiest email lead they'll ever see in their life before they make one outbound call. So you have to segment out team, get the handraizers of the people that want to be in there, treat them as a SWAT team, compensate them accordingly, and test. And so you can prove it, and then bring it to the rest of the team to show like, this is why we're doing this. And without that, well, you're just throwing everybody at everything. It ends up being a disaster. I think it's a fun-gallance test. So they had another part of going back to like, even I mentioned before, like, how do you start funding these more like development programs? It's the same thing with this. It's like, you have to fund a team. In a new world, maybe three folks that are fully just experimentation. They're the ones hacking new things, new pitches, new ways to position different products, maybe new pricing, or new bundles. And we're not there yet as an organization, but that's the goal that I want to get to here soon. All right, let's finish up on the one that I'm probably most concerned about. Is not guys like you and me. I don't know. I'm just turned 50. You're younger than me. But we both been around the block a little bit. We got some experience. We got some business acumen. We got some context. So all this AI shit, man, is fantastic. Because it's like, oh, I know exactly what and why I should be automating certain things. I have the context to have a conversation with you. So I can look at all this information I get put. So you and I can have this conversation without even really trying. I don't have a script. I don't have a-- you have questions. So that's us. Great. The buyer now has more access to information than they've ever had before in their life. They come-- like people always say, oh, by the time somebody comes to us, they're 60% to 70% fine. That was always for inbound. Now it's even for outbound. Because if you catch my attention or something, I'm like, okay, I gotta call coming up with a second. I'll just wrap on this thing. Five minutes before that meeting, I can jump into chat to you BT and be like, tell me everything I need to know about this, right? And so if I get a 22 year old kid who's gonna start asking you can ban questions and not give me any insights into the platform and those type of things and not have a business value conversation with me, I have zero interest in that or tolerance for that conversation. It used to be tolerated because it was what it was. This is the only way I could go through the process to buy something. Now it is not. So how are you outside of the hiring profile? How are you giving these kids a chance? Like what skills, what fundamentals, what are fundamentals anymore? To have a high value conversation with somebody who's already really educated and has a tool now that can answer pretty much every question that I could probably give them. So what's that value of the sales rep in this equation? - Yeah, I'll break it down in our world right now. And I'd say there's three things that we're doing. The first one is like, what is your proficiency in good and market workflows? So internally here is like, you need to be more of an architect, like a system teacher. But I need to be successful now in this day and age. You have to be an expert in the domain. And what does that mean? It means in our domain, you're an expert in data, data enrichment, data orchestration, album, inbound, how the funnel works all the way to a stage two. If you don't understand that, you're not gonna create value because your buyers are more educated than ever before. The second thing is how do you map the systems of our product to those solutions? How do you map other products in the category to those workflows? And then the third piece of this is the value creation. So how do you ask questions? How do you articulate the value tied to those first two categories? That's the differentiation. And that's what's gonna allow you to create trust as well as for your customer to see, wow, I actually wanna go partner because they're not just trying to sell me something. They're actually, they wanna partner with how I go to market. How I can make my go to market more efficient. And we're seeing that shift happen here. We're spending a lot of time in those areas. We have a long ways to go. But a lot of that is going back your point around hiring. But also we hire folks that need to be much more of this like architect of revenue or a good market engineers that buzzword that's out in the market today. But it's actually true. That is what's needed in this new world to be able to have the right conversations. 'Cause if not, you can do everything via chat, you know, or chat, or call it today. - Yeah, and that's why I think, you know, Salesforce, it was funny when I was training them all those years back. I was like, you guys don't understand what you're, as a sales rep, for Salesforce. You don't understand what your competitive advantage is. And they're like, what are you talking about? I'm like, did any of you have Salesforce before you worked here as a CRM? Most of them didn't. I'm like, is your job better? Working as a sales rep using Salesforce, than it was before you had that platform. Yeah, tell that story. Like there's your competitive advantage. So like I look at Apollo's the same thing. It's like, if you're selling to me as an executive or whatever it is, well, you're my rep. You know what I mean? You represent the rep that I need to do this thing. - We should show you how we do our day-to-day in the product. And the best conversations I have are the ones, even when I get on the phone with other executives, show me how you do it today on your side. And so, eating our own dog food and being experts, that's mission-critical for us. Because, and we should show that to our customers. That's the best way for us to sell it. She's walking through how you use it today. - Exactly. Last point, 'cause this was the unlock for me with Apollo. I mean, look, I was early days at Salesforce loft. I knew Kyle really, really well. I worked without reach. I'll these cadence tools. And I've always appreciated them if they were used the right way. But the reason I never personally used them very much at all was because they would just such a pain in the ass to get set up the way I wanted them to get set up. You guys came knocking, right? It was like, all right, cool. Let's work together, like divide what you guys are doing here. And I'm like, okay, I gotta figure this out. I gotta figure out Apollo, right? And it was, I run it because it was timing is everything. I had just made the switch from Chatchy BT to Claude. And then I jumped into Claude co-work. And I was like, holy shit, what is this? And on my list of to-dos was, all right, I gotta figure out Apollo as this separate thing. I gotta set some time. But then you guys came out with your MCP connector. And I was like, huh, I connected it. I didn't go into Apollo. I literally just turned my microphone on and said, now that Claude knows everything about me, all my messaging, all my positioning, all my ICP stuff, could you please go into Apollo and set it up? So I get five tier one accounts personalized in my inbox every single day that I can approve. So it doesn't go out automatically 'cause I still wanna do the last mile stuff, whatever it is. And holy shit, it worked. So where are you on this headless set, like platform, if you will, because I think that is the future where we're going. Like if you think of Salesforce as, okay, system of record, right? Salesforce wanted everybody living in Salesforce. Then Salesforce and outreach came out and said, no, no, no, we're the later on top. You don't have to go, it's a system of record, but you wanna live in Salesforce because we have the full cycle. Now we're looking at Claude, OpenAI, everything else, and just being like, I'm just gonna look into this, and I'm gonna tell all these things where to go. So as a SaaS company, which everybody's talking SaaS is dead and all this other stuff, I don't necessarily know. And I think your mode is obviously your data in a lot of ways. But how do you look at this as the evolution of SaaS? And are we moving towards a headless where it's pick your big AI platform, and that's where we're gonna live, or are we still gonna live in different systems as we go? - I think it'll be headless for sure. I totally agree with that. We have to see our, you know, you pick the interface. Is your interface chat GBT? Is it Claude? Is it Slack? Like where is the interface that you want to live? And where we see that our value is is around the intelligence layer. So the way that they think about that is intelligence all the way to pipeline as an example. So the data that we own, the prior data, the first part of data, second, third party, that is what is uniquely differentiated in this market. And when you start bringing in the context between them, that's the intelligence. And the intelligence also gets smarter when you think about the infrastructure than everything was built upon. Right, so you think about the infrastructure that was built upon as like the sequencing. Like think about the email warmup, deliverability. Like there's a lot of foundational architecture or all type of infrastructure set up that allows us to work seamlessly. So now we're okay being the intelligence layer powering Claude co-work as an example for GoToMarket. So you think about like the advanced skills that are needed to be able to be really impactful using those different interfaces. So we are fully investing in that and making that happen. So we want you to be able to do the work where it makes the most sense. And we believe it's multifaceted in this new world. And we're seeing a ton of traction with that using the AI within Apollo, being able to power through other interfaces. - Yeah, like I said, it was like a, oh thank God. As soon as that connector came, I was like, now I can get it to do exactly what I want. And I just have to tell it, I don't have to figure out whether to click this and do that and set up this and just did it. And it was definitely okay, I see where this is all going. So last topic, last question, what's next? Like where do you see this going for Apollo? And what's the next kind of evolution, if you will, as you evolve here? - I go back to the conversation we had a little bit earlier, we talked about there's three different categories that companies around, the legacy world, where they're trying to modernize, and you have the modernized world, they're trying to go more agente. And I don't believe there's a winner yet. And this go to market arena when it comes to the technology that's owning the space. I think there's a players out there, but no one's really owning the AI go-to market motion. And I believe that we're uniquely positioned when you think about it to own that pipeline. Everything up to a stage two, we will be best in class it. And why is that? It's because the data, the data powering, and the Nespex action via the intelligence. And that contextual element is huge. And so I'm super bullish on the opportunity ahead. And AI is just simplifying our world right now. And I think that's why I said go-to market is so complex. There's so many things that you have to do right to be able to make the system work. And where you're going to democratize it. And all we're doing is making it easier for every company out there to do world-class go-to market. And so I'm super bullish. We're just getting started in so many ways. And we're powering some of the best companies in the world and they're going to work in motions. And so yeah, it's exciting times ahead. - Love it, man. - Awesome. Anything we missed that you want to highlight before we take off? - No, it's great. I appreciate these conversations. I definitely like my, you know, just thinking out loud here, the comment around this whole like sales development world. Like it's something that I actually, you know, really believe it. And it's something that I actually think we can iterate on now. I need to think through our conversation today. So no, this is great. Thank you so much. And we've got to get you to do some enablement and training on our side here soon. - Anytime, my friend. Anytime. Where can people fight out more about you? But what you're working on over Apollo and all that, what do you want to send people here? - Just LinkedIn. - Yeah. - I mean, I'm actually being more intentional about publishing content on LinkedIn to be able to help, you know, the category I understand how to think in this particular modern world, not just AI, because I think there's a lot of buzz of that, but it's also like leadership. How do you build teams? How do you think about the sailing motion? And what's this next world of sellers? In even customer success, we didn't talk about that at all, really, but we fund them [BLANK_AUDIO] shifted our motion. We don't have CSMs anymore. We are all go-to-market engineers on the back end that are highly mechanized via proactive interventions. So like we know when a customer is off-track, it creates a signal and then we have a human that's actually proactively reaching out at the right time and the right place of the right message. And so we're rethinking what are the right footprints for building world-class go-to-market? >> Awesome. Well, thanks for coming on. We should do this again in a few months here just to kind of see how things have changed because it seems like things have changed every day, every week at this point. >> Yeah, Mike West, thanks for having me. Appreciate it. >> Absolutely. And everybody, I hope you enjoyed the conversation as much as I did. And like I always say, as I owned all these podcasts, go out there and make somebody smile today. Because no matter how bad your day is going or how bad you think it went, if you make somebody smile, you know you had a good day and the world needs a lot more of that right now. So thank you all very much and I will see you on the other side.