Hello, everybody, my name is Alex. I'm a reporter here at TC and I'm very, very excited to host a chat with the zoom car. Oh, Ryan aizuss. Ryan, how you doing?
I'm doing well, how Happy April 4?
Yes, thank you. I can't believe we're doing this on April 1, people will think it's a joke, but it is not. We are here to talk about building an early stage sales team. But to provide a little bit of context for everyone out there. We all know, zoom. Right? I mean, it's essentially ubiquitous now. But you joined zoom, it was late 2019. Is that correct?
Yeah. Just ended the summer, roughly a year and a half ago.
And you're the chief revenue officer, for people out there who are less familiar with what that might mean. which parts of zoom report in to you?
Yeah, that's great question. So I had a basically the sales, the revenue, that direct sales team, the indirect channel sales teams, also customer success, the support org solution engineering, I'm thinking of kind of like the go to market outside of marketing. Okay, fair enough.
So a good chunk of the company that reports into you, that's, that's a material bit of the business.
Almost half actually. Yeah.
And just for people who might not be at the stage when they need to see our Oh, this is more of a in my experience, a late stage company and later position that comes in when scale has been achieved. It definitely for either to help drive significant scale, or to take it to another level of scale typically got it gotta agree. Now, usually, they're not series a series they
don't don't bring in and say, I need a CRM for my series A or seed money for sure.
Yeah, and no point in this chat, are we going to say please hire Ryan, because he's not working enough in his current company. Um, what I want to know, though, was you joined a couple months before COVID zoom, and already gone public takes a while to get to know an org, what was it like going from like six months into the job to all of a sudden, suddenly, you know, the world stops, your whole sales team goes home, and you have to deal with enormous growth during this period of extreme disruption.
Yeah, I mean, crazy, is probably a, you know, true, honest word. You know, I had already come to zoom in zoom had already been successful and had an IPO before I got there. And I've known the founder for many years in the back and working with him and many of the other over the my lifetime, and been very close, and even OEM the product of my previous employer. And, you know, I came in because, you know, despite the success, I saw the brand, what I ironically, thought was a big brand, like when I joined like, this is a big brand. And I had no idea what a big brand really is. And now I do, and knowing the great products and services, and honestly the customer sentiment they had in the market, but also knowing that there's skill value that I could add in different places. And as you're doing your plans, you're rolling through them, and then all of a sudden, you know, chaos does hit. And that was chaos, even for ourselves. Like, I remember bringing people together, looking at our sales team and saying in the local office that I was in here in the Bay Area, and saying, Hey, we're going home, like we're almost watching it COVID, kind of from Asia to be upfront, and just being a global company, and saying, Look, it's probably in an abundance of caution, get your stuff, we're gonna send you all home. And we're just a little early, like maybe a week and a half for as many others. And in that process, like, hey, hopefully, it's just a bunch of caution. It could be we could be, we don't know. But hopefully, we're just being safe. And it's nothing. And literally a year later here, we are still working from our home. So I couldn't even imagine, you know, so many lessons learned. I think, you know, one of them is just really about your expectations of what can be done. At that time, there was just such an influx of like business of need of orders of sift, like, you pretty much taxed every system, every process that you have. But you also found a way they didn't break, they may be bent a little. And just amazing to kind of reset, like your expectations of what can be done. Because so many things we saw that I would have said, well, there's no way if you asked me six months or a year ahead of could that be done? You would have like logically all of us would have said no. And yet somehow you did it and it did get that.
Yeah, but you know, zoom though, like you said big company aren't even public when you showed up there. The reason why I'm incredibly excited that you're here to help us talk to you early stage sales is you have experienced taking sales teams from you know, off the ground up. So at ringcentral you were effectively the first US salesperson you built the whole North American ringcentral sales org right.
Yeah, so um, that was, you know, decade ago, but yes, I joined ringcentral I think at the time there was just some folks in e commerce really some offshore selling and like one us person in sales, I was doing business development, and then came in as the be the leader but to really start from figuring that out to building and left just before roughly a billion dollar run rate, not necessarily revenue, but in Mr. kind of run rate.
Okay, so on that theme, I've broken this up into two pieces. One is kind of kickstarting early stage sales team. And then I have a number of tactical questions. Everyone who's with us today, keep in mind, you can make this whole interview but by throwing your questions in, and they're gonna be piped into me on this other screen over here. So as you go along, we'll be taking them in. Ryan, we have a couple that were already present in five very excited people via email that I've already worked in. But let's kick off with thinking about when founders, you know, famously, the first salesperson at any startup, should begin to step back and make their first one or two sales hires. I'm curious, in your perspective in the SAS world. When is that breaking point when the CEO absolutely needs to get help?
Yeah, you know, fairly early on, I mean, first off, CEOs need to make products or solve problems, I guess, more than make products that customers are, that's all, you know, customer needs. And so it's important to be very hands on, I would say, for a while to really understand what you're trying to figure out product market fit. And then bringing in some of those sales people as you start seeing something I mean, part of it is also knowing what type of salesperson you need is something that I see in lots of founders are very early stage companies meaning like, you know, who is your core audience? What persona are you going after, and trying to find people that no one understand, you know, selling something that's primarily very transactional to small businesses, and maybe commerce lead, or selling something that's more enterprise like, those are different animals, different segments that you're going after. And, you know, one mistake is hiring, the wrong type of sell, like the wrong type of salesperson that kind of fit those needs is something to kind of watch out for.
Before we get into that, because that's coming up. Next, I want to hit on the product market fit point, because this is what I thought might be the deciding factor. Once you find product market fit, you're going to want to invest in your go to market motion, you're going to build up a sales team. The question then becomes I know this is almost a cliche thing to ask, but how do you determine when you hit product market fit? And so instead of just telling people, once you've reached it go, Is there like a percentage, like if you're most of the way there and pretty confident, even if you haven't entirely iced it, you can begin to hire a sales team? Or would you wait until as the CEO, you were 1,000% sure that you had PMF. And now you're ready to just pour capital into it there.
And it depends, like, you know, scaling a sales team and hiring a few sales people are very different pieces, for sure. So I think to your point, like scaling is probably like there is something there, we know it and at least enough of a hypothesis and you know, evidence backing that up offices and feedback to support it. But I would say even a few sales, you know, folks could be earlier than that, but also being realistic about what you're looking for. Meaning at that point, you might just need a few reps to kind of get out there and make it happen. Or maybe what I call like a director level person, you know, you don't need a VP of sales. And that's where you want to be careful as you like it. Because honestly, things aren't figured out. You need someone to get in there and get dirty grinded out, and there's certain leaders like that. That's not just who they are. They might be amazing at what they do. But I also see that mismatch of where are you in your scale? What type of skill sets needed? And how do you find someone with like the right entrepreneurial spirit, because you know, things aren't figured out. And you know, I used to think of it back in the day, it's almost like you're in a jungle. And you know, it's very thick in the jungle, and you have a machete. And the good news is you have to cut, you get to cut your path, if not blazed. And you get to make the path. The flip side is guess what you have to make the run. So it takes the right personality and mindset to find someone that looks at that jungle of thickness with a machete in their hand. And they're like, you know what I get to carbon where this goes, I'm going to help drive that verse like, Oh, my gosh, I have to cut through all this. How am I going to get over there? Yeah,
yeah. So on that plane, let's just draw scenario up and let you respond to this as opposed to giving you a blank slate. let's presume were a seed stage software startup we were at I don't know. 100k, MRR? 150, whatever it is, we're looking to let the CEO take off one of their hats hire a salesperson. Are you shooting for an early account executive? I usually present a little bit more senior. If you only had one or two headcount, where would you first deploy your capital in that scenario?
Yeah, probably, depending on what you call more senior, but in between, like, early accounting, exactly. Like when I called director, I'd find someone that's been at a good successful company. Don't take my folks from zoom, but honestly a zoom a Salesforce somewhere where you know, there's some process, they've seen the movie. And there's someone who maybe even has like, manager, but they're not the VP. They're like a team manager, they have some leadership, they can see the path, but they're also not so far removed, because guess what they're gonna have to get on the phone. I mean, remember, even at ringcentral, some of those first employees we hired like, we had it like, there's a CRM, but it meant you paid Salesforce, nothing was tailored, you had to like, what's the top track we're going to use? What are you going to say you have to try different things. You have to get a feel and make adjustments. And so you kind of need someone with the right gumption and determination to do that, but also the right intelligence to be like, Oh, I just heard this. I saw this. And then you know one other, it's a little different. You're asking Alex, but I think the key point is it's also not about focusing on the sales at that time. It's focusing on the learnings. And so the weird thing is how later to say, but it's not like oh my gosh, we sold 9% But we're away. But like, the reality of it is, what are you learning about your market? What information are you getting about your product? What feedback Are you getting, that can make it better, and making sure that person knows and understands and people or persons when I say that, sure, they truly know that just as important as getting some wins out there, those aren't going to change the trajectory of your company to be up front, unless it's super enterprise. But that's probably not likely at this stage. You know, what's going to change is your directory is some key learnings about what market you're really in some key learnings about core functionality that would make your product a lot more competitive, those types of things.
So Ryan, from the audience asked, you know, what should a founder do to prepare for hiring their first sales reps, or for sales staff to ensure success? It's, it sounds a lot, like have a learning focused mindset, and use those first, I don't know 100 calls with potential customers, not to just try to rack up early arr or whatever, but instead to figure out what needs are, what's maybe not being met, and then maybe early customer, not complaints, but like, issues during sales calls would tell you kind of where your product is lacking perhaps
100%
right on.
Okay, so it's interesting. So, um, my good friend, Danny Creighton, a TC former venture capitalist, I was mining him for information before are called making sure to get a lot of mines into this script. And he was really curious, as you know, what would you do as, as an early stage CEO, if your early sales hires don't fit? Let's say you do all the work and you hire someone, and they are just not a fit for what you needed. This happens somewhat frequently in the startup world. So how dangerous is that mistake? And how quickly can an early stage CEO really kind of notice that these early people aren't going to be a long term mesh? Yeah, and
you know, we're all good humans, and hopefully people that we sell vision, and they come and join us in our vision and you want to see success, I think it's important to set expectations, like the first couple people you hire, that doesn't mean they're going to be running the company. And so there's a little bit of that it's about the expectation. I mean, sometimes they're just not a fit, maybe we thought our market was over here, it's over there, and there's just not a need. And at some point, it's a business and it's the best thing for you and for them, the you know, in a cordial way to part ways and you know, send them off to something where they're going to be more successful. But I think where there's more likely mismatch is hiring somebody, they're seeing some success, they and they were that maybe they were a team manager, maybe they were like, maybe managing multiple teams, when they think they're going to be the the VP of sales at your IPO. That might not be the case. And I think that's probably the bigger risk than like, Oh, my gosh, we have to let these people go. It's me managing that expectation that they're still a core role, but also saying, understanding that this stage, this is what they're here to do. Here's the goal. But as these stages go, we might need different skill sets. Or they might need to be taught the verse people with different levels of experience, which is part of the reality. I was
just gonna say, I've never heard tops, but I was always been leveled in my experience, but you know, yeah, pick a phrasing.
You're the writer, not me, you better you know, vocabulary, of course.
I mean, in theory, but you know, that doesn't mean it's absolutely true. On the question of leveling, someone who's an early hire, they're gonna feel a lot of ownership in the company, they're gonna have been there when you rollicking out of the same ramen packet, you know, how do you go about tactfully hiring a more senior sales leader in your org, without, you know, either making someone appear smaller than they have inside the org, or really hurting the egos of the team that is currently powering revenue growth? Yeah, I
mean, and that's just people management, right, you have to make them part of the process, right? You have to sell the vision of like, you know, they're not there for the first seed wins, they're not there for the round, they're there to see the long term success of the company. And so just, you know, I have, and I haven't been a founder, so I just, you know, be upfront and say that myself, but like, you know, how do you sell the vision of like, why this is good for them to it's really good for the business, most importantly, and also why it's good for them. And honestly, quite often, someone like that is probably going to learn more, they might not always see that at the first blush. But the reality of it is, you know, as the CEO, you know, he or she, you have so much in front of you, there's so many other things. And quite often, you're probably not able to give that sales leader, you have the coaching, the feedback, the mentorship, you know, some of the things that they may need to be successful, especially as the business start scaling and growing. So having somebody that can do that will probably actually help that person grow and be better in the long run.
And also more successful because if that person gets the coaching they need, they'll grow and said the work anyways, and then they can go to a more senior role their next job, life doesn't end with one gig.
You know, it doesn't and, you know, as simple as it sounds, you know, I always say, you know, what's the number one thing you need to be promoted? And most people will say, like, be good at what I do hit my quota, do this. And it's actually To me, that's not the answer. It's being a growing company. And so whenever there's growth, there's opportunity regardless, like you can be the best in the world. And if there's no growth, there's no place for you to go within that company. And so it growth kind of all it's like the tide all boats rise, and so that creates opportunity. for everyone.
Yeah, it's the old joke that if you're offered to seat on a rocket ship, don't ask which seat just get on it. And that's medium. True. To be clear, there are caveats to that. It's it's a bit too broad. But this actually gets us to a question that I wanted to bring, which is how to entice the strongest possible sales talent to your earliest days startup, when you don't have a lot of revenue history. You can't say, hey, look, our net dollar retention is 190%. We're amazing. If you come here, you're gonna look like a genius. Aside from just telling the story of the vision, you know, what's it? What are things you can tell these winners? Early sales people that will get them to join your pirate ship? Yeah,
I mean, you know, first off some of the vision story, like you mentioned, but I think, you know, part of buying into you, as a founder and a leader buying into the team around you, you know, probably your, you know, people passion, and you know, selling the transference of energy. So your passion and your intensity as a founder for the market for the opportunity, why you're doing this, you know, it's not the public liking the problem, you're solving how you're helping people, whatever that might be. Yeah. And then, you know, you also do hear from a lot of founders, like, how do I go find these people like, like, sometimes they come from that background, that's not a problem. And quite often, they probably have a more technical or product based background. And, you know, that's not their domain, but they also have investors, they also have, like, use your network, and there's people out there and going and finding, you know, there's a lot of people that are excited about the opportunity to make a difference. And roles at that stage are truly going to make a difference. You can go work at a company with, you know, 70,000 people, but what's your true impact going to be on their success? Zero, I mean, the type of opportunity that we're talking about here, the impact that you can have, that's pretty sexy, and you know, and if someone doesn't like that, I think that's sexy, they're probably not the right fit for you.
Right? If it's not exciting, you know, if your machete in the jungle analogy doesn't make them want to grab a machete, then definitely send them back to Microsoft, because they'll do fine there. You know, they can sell as your credit. That's fine. Cyrus from the audience asks, Are there any interview questions that you'd recommend asking to help try and find the ideal candidates who would thrive with a machete in the jungle? So he's picking up on what you're putting down? And is curious about how to how to ask the right questions to find that person?
Yeah, no, it's good. Questions. I mean, I think there's different things about, you know, understanding how past leaders would describe them digging in the situate, like in what words is like on the positive, like just hearing how they think about themselves? And what those words are? after them. On the other side, constructive criticism of feedback, what are the areas of improvement, and thinking about how those attributes line up? I think there's digging into asking examples about systems, they drove processes, they've changed improvement, they've made it their last company like, because let's be clear, there's companies with scale where you don't have to, you can come in, do your job, be great work with customers and be very successful. And the there's no playbook that's ever figured out in the world, that competitive evolving thing. But it's somewhat, there's more, it's the cakes baked a little bit more. And so you maybe you take pieces of it out of the oven for it, put all the ingredients and mix it. So understanding like who not just did their job, but also influence things around it. Did they help make their like, those are the leaders I look for even in my org, like, we all have our control field, let's just say you're the team, you're on a team, your rep that your quota, like the people that become the leaders are like you're not just hitting your quota. But were you helping your team? Like, how are you scaling? How are you helping your floor, your segment, whatever that might be that you're part of? And what did you do outside of your job, and not where you did so much outside of your job where you got distracted and didn't hit your core goals. But the people that can hit their core goals and also add value to others. I look at them and all of a sudden, guess what, they're not a rep anymore. And now they're leading that team. And then right now their influence circles, maybe their floor, their segment, and guess what, then one day they're leading that, and then they continue to get promoted, because they find a way to add value. So kind of peeling back in this those situations, to understand not that they drive their primary tasks, how they think about that. And then, you know, I don't there's one question, but it's a bit of an acumen to like, you know, one thing I would look for, you know, a good word is curiosity. Like, you know, selling, you know, natural curiosity, people who are curious people who like business, they want to figure that out. They tend to be really good sellers, but especially for what we're talking about, there's a lot that has to be figured out. And like are they naturally curious to understand your business model, what's happening the customer and find ways to add value to that.
And if they are very curious about business and don't like sales and love to write, Alex stop, we'll have a TechCrunch comm we're always hiring. I want to go backwards a little bit and talk about sales playbooks prepping for this, I was going through everything I could read online about tips on how to build an early stage stage sales team, and things that came up again and again, was building an early playbook, of course, it'll evolve. But essentially getting those early but a structure in place to help sales reps succeed in a relatively nascent company. And so I'm curious if you have any kind of tips for the model. way of putting together a sales playbook kind of in this COVID SAS era that we're in. Yeah,
I mean, a couple things, you know, first off for doing the playbook, like, if you're gonna try to write that to yourself is probably not the best use of your time. So finding, it might not be the first reps you have, but your next like leader in parentheses leader doesn't mean VP see, like, but your next leader, I'd find someone that work where there probably is a pretty good playbook, like the product, the service they sell the model they're in, you know, is that if you're selling the developers, honestly, you know, are you know, is it, you know, from maybe even a Twilio? Or some of those types of places or developer led communities if you're selling SAS, you know, again, stay away from zoom, but are they from, you know, we're companies that are highly respected like a service and that like, a lot of those companies, you know, they figured out some of those playbooks, and they're perfect, but there's a level of scale and just experience that they've been able to ingest and the programs and what they do. So finding someone that's done some of that they don't have to have written it themselves. But they have to have seen the movie a little bit, bringing them in and having them help make that playbook. Now, one key important point, Alex is one mistake that I see this, especially when I was actually a WebEx before ringcentral for a decade from pre IPO up through acquisition with Cisco. And when I left there, one mistake that I saw from lots of friends that kind of left and kind of separate into on different leadership, is they almost tried to recreate it again. And there was a lot of good things about WebEx way back then. But the key was, you know, what parts of the culture what learnings, what are the pieces that you can take? And so don't you want to be careful not someone that also comes in with a playbook. And it's here's the playbook. This is exactly how we do things. It's having enough of a playbook. But the natural curiosity, and the business acumen, the think, what is this market? What's different in the market I'm in now? And how do I need to adjust to make that happen? And so don't bring the playbook, but maybe which plays are you going to pick from the book, because they fit the market, the customer, the segment, the persona, etc, and that you're going after?
So let's say going back to our little mythical arr coming in, we're talking about 150k in ARR gonna hire a couple of people sitting down with people that say they came from Salesforce, they've sold SAS before, would you ask them to describe for example, like how they would go about selling your product? Or is that too invasive of a question? So how do you go about determining the level of curiosity and ability to pick the right place from their experience to bring to your you know, six 810 person startup?
That's fair, you know, like, what do they do in their free time? Like, like, if they were to read what books would be on their bookshelf? Like, you know, like, are they reading business books? Like, you know, do they talk is are they on TechCrunch? To be upfront? Like, hell? Yeah, that's, I mean, you just send them your subscriber list. I mean, for real, but like the people that are reading TechCrunch, for instance, the people that are like, excited about what's happening in business and technology, like, those are the people that you would want, and it depends now, if I'm selling, you know, something that's, you know, maybe about how like, then it's medic, like finding that alignment where the field that you're in, or education, or whatever that might be, and where's there some passion? Where is some of that in them
at the end of the day,
so we're talking more about personalities, and I kind of expected, we're talking about finding people that have, I would say, passion, slash energy, finding curiosity, which I think is also just like, our former passion to some degree. And this brings up the idea of kind of culture, because if you can, if you can hire a number of people that all shared those things, your coach will be fine. But every culture requires a little bit of tuning and building, frankly, so how involved should an early stage CEO be and building the early culture of their sales? org?
Yeah,
I think, you know, think of the culture of your company versus the sales org would be one comment, like, and I wasn't here, you know, for day one presumed but I've definitely known Eric both times as before he started the company, and then after, and give him a lot of credit for like, he is as a CEO, and even today extremely focused on culture. And, you know, for him, that was, you know, setting a core value of care, you know, for our company, our customers, our community, you know, looking at those things, it's things like Delivering Happiness as a core element, natural transparency, like, you know, speed of trust, like so there's these elements. And, you know, that really wasn't like, what are we doing for sales? What are we doing? Like, those are for the company culture, like, what are those key foundations, and definitely a place where he invested and continues to invest a lot of his time to make sure because at some point, especially at eXtreme Scale, like you can't touch all these things. But what you can do is hire the right people, you can create a culture and then how do you keep that culture alive?
And how confident should a CEO be in terms of handing off the baton for kind of the sales teams part of the larger corporate culture? Should that only really happen when there is enough scale the team to actually hire, maybe a VP of sales or should They stay active even after that point.
Um, we should stay active.
I mean, like, Who's the person you're hiring? What's your? What's their track record? I mean, you know, you know, it depends. Did you know that? Did you work with them? Like, how could people that they do, but you want to be careful, these are the keys to your house like this is to your customers and success of what you're doing. And you want to know who you're handing those keys to. And so you definitely want to give trust, but it doesn't mean you don't just like in anything, you manage you inspect. And then over time, like, you know, in, you know, we think of it here like you, you start with trust, you start with like good intentions, and you expect that so you're not like, Oh, I know, they're gonna do this, you're leaning in looking for the problems. You're starting with all the positives, but just like even with your kids, probably or anything in life, like, you know, you can it's like an account, do you take add to the trust account based on success, track record positive things that you're seeing and experiences? Or are there things that give you caution, and you take away from that trust account and make sure that there's alignment there?
Yeah. And one more on the culture front, you know, sales culture, such as it is, tends to be in the public's eye, especially among salespeople, a little dude ish, maybe a little brewery. And there's been a conversation going on in technology and kind of Silicon Valley more broadly for, you know, at least a decade that I've been covering the space, about building and more diversity about having a more equal playing field for everybody. So I was just hoping you could tell us a couple of tips, maybe for CEOs that want to build a diverse sales team, you know, maybe where to go look, people hiring whatever's on your mind, but I just want to make sure we touch on some tips for you out there who really do want to build a very diverse team.
Yeah, no, I think diversity inclusion, core and, you know, core to building a successful team and regardless of what you're doing, and so you know, part of that is having an awareness like that that's important. You don't want you know, just kind of the same to your, you know, or whatever you might have had, you know, making sure you set the standard. But that's like, again, that's a culture item to me, not at a sales team, but at a company level, like what are we about? are we are we rewarding and celebrating diversity, inclusion, you know, things like that. And then there are things from even, you know, you know, for instance, today, especially, depending if it's in office out of office, like, you know, there's a flexibility like expanding even by using zoom and other virtual products and services, you know, your target market, maybe certain areas or places where you are, aren't as diverse. So how do you expand your footprint in your recruiting all the way to getting much more focused? Like, let's just take for instance, if you want to increase, you know, from black colleges, like, Well, how do you do early hire programs? And what does that look like? and setting up recruiting? Now? Those are things you're probably not doing at a founder level at the startup. But more as you scale? I also think it's, you know, like, what is your leadership team? Like? We're talking about sales, but at the end of the day, I'm assuming, you know, there's other leaders across this executive team of, you know, XYZ company, and what type of diversity Are you hiring? What does that look like to set the tone there? And then those people will help set the tone all the way now?
Going off topic just for a second? Because I'm curious about this, you know, you have visibility into a lot more sales orgs than I do. Is the broader sales executive cohort of technology world doing enough on the diversity and inclusion front? Or is there still, in your view, more progress being made? That's still lacking?
I think there's more room. You know, I think the trend is positive, there's a lot more awareness that sometimes that's the first step. You know, I do think in some things like gender, like it's gotten much, pretty good or much better. And we're seeing, at least in my world, I see some extreme success, I think around certain areas of ethnicity, more work to be done. And, you know, I think this is one of those areas, you're never there. It's a journey. And so how do you make sure you're moving forward? How do you make sure you're improving from wherever it is that you may be, and kind of growing from there. And part of that, you know, what helps and hurts this at some level is, you know, lots of these teams are built from referrals. And so if you start with some diversity, well, then you're going to grow with diversity because of referrals and things like that. Yeah. And if you don't, then you're going to refer and you look up, and you might be surprised about where you are. And so having some consciousness about it, it's probably the first step awareness of where you want to go. And again, you know, you want the best candidates that you can do that in a diverse and inclusive way. Of course, for sure,
yeah. 100%. Now, I'm gonna pivot us a little bit, and we're going to go into some tactical questions, more specific things, because I want to make sure we hit on a couple points. And also, we just got a question that I want to throw to you first, because it is so specific. It's almost kind of funny. So here, here we go, Ryan. And this is from Ryan again, actually, should you wait until your marketing engine is generating inbound in qL marketing qualified leads before hiring your first rep or throw them into the den as the cold caller?
Depends and so, Ryan, sorry for that answer. I think two things that you bring up, so depends on what you need. If you're waiting for leads to start flowing in, you might be waiting a long time, especially when you need to get out there you might have to be outbound calling, grinding it out emailing prospect, new, all kinds of things. So you need to have conversations to be like, again, the first goal is to learn about your product, your service, and how do you make it better? That's it have a need isn't fit a market. And to do that, you have to have customer conversations. And so whatever it takes, but I think it's important to think about the realities of what are you trying to sell? Who's your so let's say you're trying to sell to developers? Well, developers do not want to talk to salespeople as a very general, like, that's not their favorite thing to do. So you also have to think about your model. And, you know, I think we've mentioned sales here a lot. But in my mind, as a founder, I would think sales and marketing, like and, and, and don't think of them as sales and marketing, but like and marketing online, what does that mean? So a simple example would be, you know, maybe, you know, do you Is it better? Who will do better? Is it better to hire a $200,000, maybe plus enterprise sales rep? Or is it better to hire maybe an inside rep at 100, just over $100,000, but then spend $100,000, in marketing to make that person successful? Which one or take that to the extreme or no rep and spend $200,000 in marketing, or maybe do something offshore, or maybe even have a $50,000 person that is more helping facilitate online transactions with 150,000 spent in marketing to help make them successful? And it's, it's not a right or wrong answer. It's think about who's your buyer who you're trying to sell to? How do they typically buy are their channels would be another opportunity? You know, the problem you're solving? How's it been solved in the past? If it's something that you're replacing, like, what does that happen? Sometimes it's you're doing something completely new, but stepping back and really thinking about that persona once again, and then I do step away. But that's sales and marketing. What is that right balance? Because I have seen where it's like, why isn't sales selling and what's going on, or this is marketing? And the reality of it is the two of them together? It's just $1, it's $1, that's gonna hit the expense line to try to drive the revenue line. So how is that dollar best spent? And what's that mix? And there's no right answer. It's the right hand man and surfer, your company, your product, your service, your buyer can at this time, because that might shift to over time.
So actually, this brings up an audience question that came in last night via email that I want to make sure we got to if this is the right moment for it, it was how do you prioritize a customer segment to sell to at the earliest age? It's very open to anyone? How do you start filtering down? So when you're thinking about getting the right mix of marketing and sales spending in the ratio? Correct, you have to know really whom you're trying to reach? It's not usually just like, developers, that's a little bit simplistic. So for companies, how should you begin to think about which persona or which customer segment might be the most lucrative and therefore the best to go after first?
Yeah, I mean, you're probably gonna have to test a bit there, you're probably gonna have to live and at some point, you should have some hypothesis, right? Like, who has a problem, or opportunity, depending on what you want to call it, that can be solved, that will bring ROI, like which customer is going to be helped more what industry what vertical, and you know, there could be like a high ROI vertical, but maybe there's barriers to entry to that vertical. And it could be in certifications you need to have or security certificates or health kit like might be things you don't have, like maybe healthcare is one of your four opportunities, but so is legal. But for healthcare, you'd have to do a lot of regulatory stuff. So you know, I think there's a balance of you know, that might not be the first place for you, maybe you do start with the legal vertical just using that as well. Because the barrier to entry might be lower, cut your teeth, make sure that's right, while you're working on the certifications and investments to do the other side. So I don't know if there's an answer, per se, is some a lot of these questions, right. It's a playbook. But it's really spending time thinking about your customer thinking about the problem you're trying to solve, thinking about the competitive universe you're in. And also don't be afraid to copy, you know, steal, whatever, you know, go illegally, but like, You're not the first person unless there's a few maybe of Elan Musk is in the audience right now. But typically, you're not the first person to have done something close to this. I know, we all think our ideas, the one thing, no one's ever tried anything like this, but there's things that are probably similar. And I would study the heck out of how are the companies in that field that are focused on this buyer, that market that vertical? That problem we're solving or anywhere in sillery to that? How do they go to market? What do they do? How do they then copy borrow, like, find somebody from one of those companies to come work for you? Like those are the things that I would be doing to help because you know, great, you can innovate once you understand it better, but maybe the first thing isn't the innovate it's just do the fundamentals and kind of really figure that out.
That's a great artists borrow great salespeople steal, I think is the summary of that. I have a question here. Ryan. I don't know if I understand. So I'm gonna throw this at you and you may pass on it if it's not useful, but here it is. from anonymous actually, do you have any preference on hiring externally versus internally, and I'm curious if they're thinking here about like, leadership hires inside your sales org versus bringing in people externally to, to help mature things,
you need to do both. First off, you know, people want a burger directory, they have to see a path of progress. You want to reward internal success or otherwise wasted, not everyone wants to be a manager or a leader. Let's be clear about that, too. For those that do, you have to show that path. And so if you do just external, I don't see how you're going to have a winning culture. At the same time, you have to be honest with yourself, there's certain times, you know, that's your goal, would it be the external? Can you be diverse? What can you look through that, but other times, there's certain situations where you need a specific skill set, you need a level of experience that it just not there, and you need to do that. And honestly, even at zoom, I had to do a careful balance about like, we've been growing tremendously. And so there's good news is, is a lot of promotions, there's a lot of opportunity for leadership. But it's been a healthy balance of promoting from within wherever we could, and where's appropriate. But there's definitely certain areas where, you know, there's a level of leadership or experience that was needed that just wasn't there. And honestly, as a leader, I didn't have the time to wait not that people could have gotten there. But I didn't, I needed people that knew how to do it had been there done that could take it, the ball could run without supervision and just go. And so you have to make that decision. But you also have to be upfront to look at your team and say, This is why we're doing it. And then if you just did that, you're not going to end up having you know, people that stay with you, you're not gonna be able to retain your employees. And so again, how do you have a healthy balance? The key I find is when you hire that person from the outside, and they come in, they have to be good, and they have to be impressive. And that sounds okay, great. How do you find someone good? How do you find you're right? But the key is you got to really invest in it because you can't bring someone in and they can't just look at them and again, past normal jealousies and things like that. Munson, you know, past success of ramping, they can't just look at them and be like, I can do that. And that doesn't mean that those what you want is them to come back to you and be like, You know what? I yes, I would have liked to been doing that. Yes, I'm personally was a little bit jealous. But when you hire him or her, You did the right thing. And I see that and they're adding great value. In fact, I'm learning from them. And this is how I'm growing.
Right? I'm gonna just throw in a couple really quick ones here. We had an earlier question about sales tech startups. And I had a question in here about tooling, which we're not going to get to is restored on time. How should early stage founders think about their investment in their sales tooling budget? And how big of a priority should be increasing that as they scale their early sales, headcount? Yeah.
I mean, there's a gazillion technologies behind us. And there's a lot of folks that will come play software, like ourselves included, but by zoom, but all the other stuff, you know, we, you wait, you need some tools and resources. So you have to be realistic for where you're at, you know, there's, you know, prospecting causes and CRM, there's, you know, they can't get out there. At the same time, I don't know if that's a career focus just enough to make your people successful. And that those lead early leaders should be able to help guide you there. At the end of the day, I do think there's a different point in time that like you have some scale, and that becomes a different tooling. Can where can tools really help? How do you make sure you have, and it's not always the quality tools, it's how they're used, how well they're integrated, and honestly, how to tools help you better serve your customer, again, customer, customer, customer, about the customer? So, you know, do these tools make you more efficient in front of the customer? Do these tools help you? Do they help you solve the customer problem? Because to me, it's not the product you sell? Isn't the customer experience? It's everything that you do? The people that you hire, it's even if you send them a bill, it's how the bill is a correct What's it look like? How do the tools that use internally help you be more efficient when the customer has a problem? And they come to you with something? Because of the quality of your tools? Can you turn that around faster? Can you solve it is their self service. And so these are maybe more as you scale. But you know, I think of customer experience, it's the whole thing. You know, one simple analogy would be like, many of us, you know, we have credit cards, or maybe banks and banking, we call the the biggest companies in the world, you know, fortune 100 companies. But think about how often you've ever talked to somebody at these companies. It's the agent when you have a problem and you you call that's your experience with a company. If you step back from it, or maybe even an airline very similar. You might say hi to the captain, but like you like that in the person at the desk, who's sitting there taking your ticket. That's your experience. And so think about what does that experience and how does that look like for my whole customer? Regardless of how high how low whatever you want to call it were in the organization that is
Yeah, I would say I don't talk to the captain when I'm on planes cuz I'm flying united economy plus, not private sadly, I'm really, really briefly and then I'm going to wrap up with a question about books because we've had a couple of those on one that I want to ask for myself. What is this concern when they're hiring their first early sales hires is offering equity as part of the sales comp package and attractive way to get talent. And that, you know, because zoom can afford to pay more cash comp than most startups right. Let's just be clear. So is equity a great way to attract the town that you might not otherwise be able to afford?
Yes, I think at the end of the day,
and then right now, we're so short on time, really quickly. People want to know favorite sales books, favorite sales, blogs, any sort of sales, tips, tricks and places you go to, to learn stuff? Or maybe you've learned in the past? Yeah,
I mean, greatest sales personal world, it's so simple, but it's more of an inspirational book, those kinds of things. You know, Tony, see, you know, great book, I mean, just about service and customers, you know, why simple wins. Eric has read the speed of trust. There's a lot in there thinking about building your organization, that speed of trust is a really good book. Plenty of others that are out there, but I don't know if there's, again, there's not this one master guide. It's the same thing. Just being curious. There's information and also, you know, it isn't all books are great blogs, you know, TechCrunch of course, but like, you know, think about your network, think about the you know, hope angel investors, the VC like how do you leverage that think about where you were in your past your friends, your neighbors that have been successful? And in this industry, business, whatever you're trying to solve for the problem? And how do you kind of learn and listen and get from them to
Ryan? I'm sorry, we have to stop I still have like 20 questions that need a couple more I couldn't get to you but thank you for your time. I hope for everyone this was useful and go forth and make awesome sales teams. Thank you, Ryan.