Tony Rodoni on this episode
Tony Rodoni is an Operating Partner at Bessemer Venture Partners with over 15 years at Salesforce, where he served as Executive Vice President and managed multiple layers of sales leadership across SMB, mid-market, and enterprise segments. He brings credibility from scaling revenue operations at one of the fastest-growing B2B SaaS companies in history, then translating those lessons into venture capital advisory for earlier-stage companies navigating similar inflection points.
The core thesis is that hiring the right sales leaders at different revenue stages requires matching external hires to the specific growth chapter a company is entering, not just acquiring the "best" leader from the biggest company. This reframe challenges the conventional wisdom that startup founders should avoid hiring from established players like Salesforce. Instead, Rodoni argues that large-company veterans bring crucial operational rigor, but only when founders understand their blind spots and help them adapt their playbooks to the startup context.
The episode unpacks the journey from individual contributor through multiple management layers, examining what skills matter at each level. At the frontline manager level, the shift from "selfish" (quota-focused) to "selfless" (team-focused) behavior is non-negotiable. As managers progress to second-line leadership, success hinges on building consistent playbooks across teams while developing cross-functional skills that large companies often don't demand until much later. Rodoni uses his own early-stage startup experience and his work at Salesforce to show how the same core principles of pipeline rigor, forecasting discipline, and sales methodology apply across vastly different scales, though their implementation must flex with company maturity and market conditions.
The conversation also addresses the hiring inflection points between $10M and $100M ARR. Rodoni advises founders to start by modeling what a $100M business looks like operationally, then hire leaders who can architect the pathway there. He emphasizes the importance of candidates who write down and codify their playbooks, because repeatability and scalability depend on documented processes, not just individual talent.
What we cover in this episode
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3:38
Account Executive Day One Success What skills and attributes matter most when hiring SMB reps, including curiosity, business acumen, competitiveness, and a balance of selfishness toward quota.
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13:00
Frontline Manager Transition Shift from individual contributor to people leader, emphasizing teaching ability, building followership, and moving from selfish to selfless leadership.
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14:40
Operational Infrastructure and CRM Why CRM discipline, forecasting rigor, and operational playbooks matter, including sales methodology integration into day-to-day workflows.
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19:27
Pipeline Quality Over Activity Metrics The danger of fake activity targets and false pipeline coverage, and how to build trust with reps to maintain honest, qualified pipelines.
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24:48
Second-Line Manager and Playbook Building Manager of managers role, the importance of consistency across teams, and developing cross-functional skills beyond pure sales execution.
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33:58
Large Company Skills in Startup Context Strengths and blind spots of hiring Salesforce or Fortune 500 veterans, including narrow depth but missing breadth on ICP, messaging, and go-to-market.
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50:49
Hiring Sales Leaders at Scale Inflection Points Framework for identifying what sales org structure looks like at $100M, building infrastructure that scales, and the value of documented playbooks.
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53:59
Closing Framework for Startup Leaders Key takeaway on matching leader experience to company stage, avoiding antibodies to external talent, and interviewing for architectural thinking.
The lines worth sharing
Competitive without sharp elbows. Love a dashboard, love a timer, trying to do something faster than last time.
Tony Rodoni · 6:45
As a rep, you need to be selfish in a good way, focused on quota. As a manager, you learn to be selfless in a good way, optimizing for business and team.
Tony Rodoni · 12:30
We win as a team and we never lose alone, because if you lose alone, we don't learn what we need to change.
Tony Rodoni · 42:15
The good architects that are successful leaders think about repeatability and write it down, because that's how we scale companies.
Tony Rodoni · 52:40
Common questions from this episode
Should I hire a Salesforce veteran as my first sales leader?
Yes, but with eyes open. Large-company veterans bring deep process rigor and playbook discipline, but they often lack breadth on ICP definition, messaging, product involvement, and collaborative go-to-market work. Pair them with founders who can help them adapt, not isolate them.
What is the difference between hiring for account executives versus frontline managers?
AEs need curiosity, business acumen, competitiveness, and quota focus. Frontline managers need all of that plus teaching ability, followership, forecasting discipline, and the capacity to shift from selfish to selfless behavior. The best managers aren't always the best reps.
How do I know if my pipeline is healthy or if I'm being fooled?
Look at whether deals are being aggressively qualified and killed when no longer viable, not just dragged. Ensure only two fields matter: close date and amount. Build trust with reps so they own accuracy rather than fear activity quotas, which drive fake deals.
At what revenue stage do I need to start thinking about sales infrastructure?
Start immediately. Model what a $100M business looks like operationally, then hire leaders who can architect the pathway there. Infrastructure decisions made at $10M ripple through $40M. Key areas include CRM discipline, comp structure, quoting automation, and territory design.
What should I look for when hiring a sales leader who has only worked at big companies?
Ask them to show you the playbooks and assets they have written or co-created. Look for architectural thinking and the ability to document repeatability. Understand their blind spots on ICP, messaging, and cross-functional collaboration, and be ready to coach them through startup realities.
How do I avoid hiring external sales leaders who clash with startup culture?
Avoid the "leave me alone, I'm the CEO of my territory" dynamic. Instead, hire for collaborative selling and intellectual honesty about market size and business model. Startup leaders must embrace swarming on deals and be open to feedback from the whole team, not just operate autonomously.
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Tony Rodoni on hiring sales leaders from $10M to $100M ARR: when to hire from big companies, what skills matter at each level, and how to scale playbooks.
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Salesforce sales culture
pipeline management
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Read the full transcript · 60 KB · Tony Rodoni
SPEAKER_00Welcome to RevOps Corner, where we talk about how B2B SaaS companies scale through revenue operations by interviewing amazing guests and sharing what we see in the trenches every day here at Union Square Consulting. Welcome to RevOps Corner. Today, we are going to talk
SPEAKER_01about hiring sales leaders from 10 to 100 million in revenue. I have my special guest today, Tony Radoni, who is an operating partner at Bessemer Venture Partners and was previously
EDDIE REYNOLDSan executive vice president at Salesforce. Tony, thank you so much for joining us today. I'm glad to be here, Eddie. If I could give a brief introduction for you and why I'm excited to talk to you about this today. You worked at Salesforce for over 15 years, really, really long journey and incredible revenue growth. I'm excited to get into that. But you've also been a sales and marketing leader from zero to 10 million, zero to 60 million, 60 million to a billion. And then of course, Salesforce from 200 million up to, I don't know where you left off when you left there, but they're over 20 billion at this point. And what I'm really interested to talk to you about, because you managed multiple layers of sales leaders at Salesforce, is comparing what it took in each role at Salesforce for folks to get into those roles, to excel in those roles, and then be promoted above those roles and compare and contrast that against the world of startups. We oftentimes hear things like don't hire your sales leader from an established company like Salesforce. There's a lot of talk about that. And at the same time, I've personally experienced the playbook at Salesforce since I was there working under you for three years and how powerful that playbook was even starting my own business from zero. And so I'm really excited to dive into this with you today and learn what you did in that time at Salesforce and what you learned about building leaders and leaders of leaders and how that compares to the work that you did prior to Salesforce and the work you're doing at Bessemer as you talked to much earlier stage companies.
TONY RODONILet's jump into it. This is a really fun topic, Eddie. Awesome. So I wanted to set the foundation. And so before we get into sales leaders at 10 million and
EDDIE REYNOLDSabove, I wanted to start with like the basic account executive. So, and first, correct me if I'm wrong, because you were at Salesforce before I was there. You were at Salesforce after I left. I did a lot of different things. But as I understood it, you managed, what was it, the entire North America team for all sales of SMB. And did you also cover marketing as well?
TONY RODONII covered the SMB teams for many years across the U.S. and Canada. That was probably the role you knew me during. And I had other roles in sales leadership. I ran all the acquired companies, teams globally. I ran our training business. There was a bunch. But I think for this discussion, both direct reps and overlay or product specialist reps, I think are a really
TONY RODONIvaluable part of the lessons you're trying to get as we think about what somebody's good at at
SPEAKER_11different stages of a company's journey. Awesome. And I think what was so exciting for me is thinking
EDDIE REYNOLDSabout this through the lens of most startups and scale-ups either start and or continue to sell into SMB. And so the organization you ran would have had to have been one of the largest B2B SaaS
TONY RODONIrevenue teams selling into SMB in the world. And so I have to imagine there's some corollaries between that and the companies you're advising today that are much earlier stage.
TONY RODONIOh, for sure. And the truth is, it applies to when you're selling to mid-market and enterprise as well, much of the way. But let's jump into it. I know one of the topics we were brainstorming when I was talking about what we look for when we're hiring good people.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah, let's start there. So within the SMB segment, as your team was hiring account executives, let's just start there and ask, what are the things that you felt were most necessary for those folks
TONY RODONIto come in on day one to be successful in that role? And what do you think are the things that were most necessary to teach them so they could grow and excel in that role?
TONY RODONIOne thing I'd say is, you know, when I'm hiring an enterprise rep, I want somebody who's done it before. And often when I'm hiring SMB reps, they may have done it before, but often they haven't.
TONY RODONIAnd they're using this as a stepping stone to other roles in their career. So I'm assuming in an SMB space that people don't have a lot of rigor at knowing how to do sales or
TONY RODONIhigh-tech sales, and they haven't been trained well. I think if I remember when we hired you, you worked at a startup prior. And boy, you were thrown to the wolves, but you probably didn't get any training. And it made it attractive for you to come to a place that would have a program to teach you all about sales, because guess what? In university, there's no sales degree. And so I'm assuming people don't have a depth of sales process and sales skill and sales enablement history. But what I'm looking
TONY RODONIfor, curiosity, business acumen. I like people that are lifelong learners because I know they're going
TONY RODONIto have to learn through this. And I really like people that are competitive. And the way I want to describe it is competitive without sharp elbows. I love a dashboard. I love a timer. I love to try to do
TONY RODONIsomething more than I did the last time, faster, whatever it is. And most of that's competitive with myself. And I know that people that have those attributes tend to do well in sales. The last thing I'd say is I look for people to be successful as a rep. You need to be selfish, but I mean that in a good way.
TONY RODONIBy selfish, you're focused on your quota or the inputs to quota, like the meetings you've got to have. And the people that learn to balance that selfishness and as a positive energy make great salespeople.
EDDIE REYNOLDSI love that. And it speaks a lot to the culture that you try to build at Salesforce. And I think you hit the nail on the head. For me, I had a number of years experience selling within finance and then only about
TONY RODONIa year working for a very early stage startup as their first account executive. So working for a somewhat technical founder. And as you can imagine, there was really no sales training, no playbook, no enablement. And so when I came to Salesforce, despite that one year of experience, I really didn't know how to sell software. I didn't know how to navigate the challenges that you come into selling software, which I hadn't experienced working in finance. I don't think I ever talked once to a founder CEO about how they wanted to raise capital or raise debt for their business. And they tried to pawn me off on their executive assistants. And all of a sudden that became a very serious challenge when I was
EDDIE REYNOLDSselling technology. And so I found that that playbook that you taught the sales team at Salesforce was really beneficial for me, even as we've closed many deals with small businesses here at Union Square
TONY RODONIConsulting, but also with multi-billion dollar companies. There's a set of steps that you need to follow when you are selling something like software that does seem to work. I would be curious when you hired those reps, what are the things that you felt was most necessary to teach them, especially from an operational perspective, since this is an operations podcast, about the rigor with which they run their business. Yeah. Well, let me think about the trade that I think everybody will make when they're in a big
TONY RODONIcompany and they have these programs. We use Salesforce because you and I work there, but it'd be to say, I'm hoping it would be the same at other large companies. But in my vernacular, it's, hey, as the leader of the sales order, I'm greedy and the company wants us to generate revenue for the company. But what am I going to give you or a rep in exchange for that, I hope are lifelong skills that you're going to use that aren't just related to selling a particular product that my company or industry have? And that's what I want to hold you and every individual contributor accountable to me to help deliver for you. So if I think of that principle now, what do I need to know if I leave a company like that? And you said, what question, what things operational do we want people to know how? Well, I want them to know what roughly a sales process looks like. I care about, do they have good skills in that sales process? Do they know how to do an opening of a meeting? Do they know how to do a time check? And these are pretty basic, right? But you know that when you went to a startup, you didn't get that. Do they know how to do discovery? Can they go to discovery in multiple depths of it? Not just the product challenges or the technical issues, but what are the
TONY RODONIfinancial issues that somebody has? Do they have, have they built most operational skills of knowing how
TONY RODONIto do objection handling or a close plan? You know, some of those sound like sales basics, but I like to operationalize it. The other piece underneath that is going to be some things like time management, some written skills, and use of a CRM product. I work with a lot of startups now, and the most important
TONY RODONIpart about having a CRM system is to start collecting data so you can make decisions over time. But if you have an early sales team that doesn't know how to use a CRM tool, they're not going to be able to make data-informed decisions. And those will really help us because when I'm in operations, we're always looking at some data to make a decision. Do we want to change the way we're
TONY RODONIcarving territories? Do we want to move to a PLG motion? Is our price right? What's our sales cycle look like? And to do all that, we need some data and a CRM tool. It's the perfect place to put it. That makes a lot of sense. And I'll just share from my own
EDDIE REYNOLDSpersonal experience. One thing that really struck me about the way that you did that at Salesforce is the way that everything tied together. So, you know, at the time, I don't know if Salesforce still does this, like Sandler was a really big piece of the sales methodology. And I don't think I went to Sandler training until six or nine months into the role. And by the time I showed up, I felt like I already knew 70 to 80% of it because it was so baked into the day-to-day operations. When you open up
TONY RODONISalesforce and you look at an opportunity, the same questions that you would get in the Sandler training were right there on the opportunity page layout. They were the questions that managers were asking in one-on-ones and team meetings. And I just thought, and I continue to preach this to our customers today, that if you can integrate everything together, that when you go into a sales meeting, you're using Salesforce, you're using your sales methodology, and it all ties together. Then from an enablement perspective and a training perspective, it makes things 10 times easier as opposed to the startup. And I don't mean to knock my boss. He's a wonderful guy. He was doing the best he could with the resources he had, but it was more like, Hey, here's a book on sales. Go read this and try to figure out how to implement it.
SPEAKER_30Yeah. I mean, like I said, it's hard. There's no degree in sales. Your founder would have hired
TONY RODONIsome engineering people or developers, and they have a computer science degree or some history that will demonstrate they know how to write code. In sales, it's much looser, and that's a harder
TONY RODONIthing to build. And then if I'm a technical founder, I assume you're just going to figure it out.
TONY RODONIAnd whether it's larger companies or other places, we need to build that benchmark to know
TONY RODONIhow to sell. And I want to say, I appreciate you giving me feedback, something that I created.
TONY RODONII didn't create this at Salesforce, right? All of us that were there were stewards of what was created in the early days and trying to scale and improve it. I would say my job wasn't to make Salesforce 10 times bigger. It was to keep it on the rails while it was going to be 10 times bigger and to make it as good an experience as possible for our customers and make sure that they can improve their business. If they did, I knew that the internal stuff would just happen.
EDDIE REYNOLDSSure. Absolutely. And I appreciate the humility there, but when I say you, I mean the entire leadership organization over the many years that it took to build that. But that's a perfect setup for
EDDIE REYNOLDSthe transition I wanted to make here, which is now that we've set the foundation for what you're
TONY RODONIlooking for in a good rep, what does it take for the frontline manager at Salesforce? It was called an RVP or regional vice president. What skills did you see were most necessary for those folks to succeed in growing and managing the team of account executives that we just talked about? Yeah. You know, if somebody is going to be homegrown and move up from an individual contributor to a
TONY RODONImanagement position, I think it's the things I just described earlier that they've demonstrated, curiosity, business acumen, competitive, lifelong learner, selfish, et cetera. What am I looking for? What am I adding on top of that? I need somebody who's a good teacher because their reps are going to be mini me's of some of their best skills. And to do that, they have to teach and be able to pass it on. You know, a mistake many people make when they move up is like, wow, I'm a great closer. So I'm going to close everybody's deals. And that actually is not a bad tactic individually, but as a long-term strategy, it's a mistake because nobody, the others don't learn how to necessarily close deals and it doesn't scale when that person's gone. I also want to make sure that they have some followership, that people will follow them. But maybe the biggest thing I'd say is a difference, you know, success to be a great rep. I said earlier, you have to be selfish in a good way. I think a lot of times when you move up in management, you have to learn how to be selfless. And I mean that in a good way too. And I don't mean that people are going to walk all over you and you do everything that people ask, but you're starting to optimize for the business and the team and learn how that works. And you're basically trying to take some of a sales motion or playbook, use whatever vocabulary you want to use and operationalize that across the team. My hope for every first line sales manager that I've led is, yeah, I'm going to make, we'll make you great at this role at deep and narrow, but over time, we've got to build you the skills that are more cross-functional because in a big growing place, like, you know, use Salesforce or any other, we're not interacting as much with marketing and product and customer success. We are an individual deal standpoint, but not on, is this the right ICP or product marketing materials, right? Et cetera. That's, that's something you don't get until you're either launching a new product in a big company, or you're in a early stage company. That's trying to figure out your ICP, whether you have product market fit, et cetera. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And, you know, from my personal perspective,
EDDIE REYNOLDSwhile I wasn't an RVP at Salesforce, it seemed that what I saw really, really fit with what you were talking about. I think first and foremost, I saw great RVPs coaching their team, trying to help them become better salespeople, maybe helping them deal by deal, maybe helping them close, but really it, the focus being on teaching. Secondarily, obviously hiring is a critical aspect of that job, right? I felt like I saw managers spending a large percentage of their time trying to figure out how to fill spots as people left the team, either being promoted or leaving the company. And then thirdly, the forecasting rigor, at least correct me if I'm wrong, but from my perspective, it seemed like an incredible amount of energy went into having an extremely well-managed pipeline and having the ability to roll up numbers to you that would ultimately result in Salesforce having an accurate forecast.
TONY RODONICorrect. Look, when I'm working with first-time managers, I make one of their top priorities, getting good at forecasting. And I say it with a big smile on my face because we never perfect forecasting. But to be good at forecasting, you have to be, you have to know all your people inside and out. Who's a sandbagger? Who isn't? You need to know the deals to know what state they're at. You need to
TONY RODONIhave enough experience in the business to be able to do that. And you have to manage both competitive changes that are happening in real time and macroeconomic changes. So I think you live in the world of operations. It's my job to really help people get good at forecasting, ever as good as they
TONY RODONIcan be, and accept that we're never going to be perfect at all. This is a lifelong journey.
EDDIE REYNOLDSIt's definitely a difficult thing. And I always wondered if it was slightly easier at Salesforce
TONY RODONIjust because you have the law of large numbers in your favor, but I can't speak to that. I think, yes, the bigger it gets, of course. Just think of some big hierarchy. The individual rep that
TONY RODONIonly has two deals, if they're in an enterprise team or one, it's binary. They're going to close
TONY RODONIit or not. And the more transactions you have, yes, it can be a little more predictable or math-based, but only if people have consistency and accuracy of what they're using the CRM tool for. For even that to work, you have to have at least two fields need to be correct. The close date and the amount,
TONY RODONIand maybe the stage, let's call it three. And my question to you is, if there was 5,000 transactions in a database, how much would you believe those three data points? There's risk for them not to be
TONY RODONIcorrect if you don't have a reinforcement process in a real-time, all-the-time point of view for it. But that's much different than when you're in a small-stage company. Now, when you're in a startup, the math doesn't work. I was in a small company. We had five, 10 deals a quarter, and we brought in
TONY RODONIsomebody from a big company like a Salesforce. And they wanted to apply math to these 10 deals. It was just, A, there wasn't enough. And B, we knew we were going to close almost all of them. We didn't know exactly when, and we didn't know the amount. But when you're an early-stage company, you are ruthlessly qualifying at the beginning because you have so little resources to make those customers successful, you can't afford to have a lot of misses in the latter half of the sales cycle. You can't in the front, certainly. And I think that's a big miss. People who leave a big company and they go to a small company and want to apply some math to a smaller pipeline, it's either going to happen or it's not going to happen. You're not
TONY RODONIgoing to get a third of these deals to happen or a third of the value.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah, that really resonates with my experience. I think when I sat there as an AE, I would sit there
EDDIE REYNOLDSand say, okay, my quota is a million dollars, which on a monthly basis is something like 88,000. I forget the math. And so then I'm looking at this and I'm saying, okay, I've got a bunch of little 10K deals and that should get me to 50. And then I've got this one 30K deal. And if I close that, I'm going to hit the 88K for my quota. And if I don't, I won't. And then the response to that
TONY RODONIcould be, well, then you should have three 30K deals. Okay, great. Well, if I have three 30K deals
EDDIE REYNOLDSand I close all of them, I'll be at 140% of my quota. And there were months where that happened. But unfortunately, a lot of times I'm just sitting there and I've got one or two 30K deals. And if they both close, it's going to be fantastic. If neither close, I'm going to be way under quota. And there's nothing else I can do about that. And we look at small businesses we
EDDIE REYNOLDSwork with. And I completely agree with your point. It's like, if you don't have a large enough number, it's just going to be very difficult to run the math. That being said, I have personally found there is so much value in the rigor with which you guys managed your pipeline to really filter out deals and understand, should this deal be on a stage two? Should this be in a stage three? Should this deal not be in our pipeline at all? Which then gives you not only a better ability
TONY RODONIto forecast accurately, but also focuses your reps time and attention on the folks that they should be investing time with. Yep. That last point you made, I think is the most important for a team,
TONY RODONIwhich is the real point of categorizing where something is so you know how to prioritize your time. And when we just lump it in that these are all my opportunities, it either will give you a false positive that, Hey, I've got enough. I should just work them. And the question is, what do I need to, you know, what is my next best action on any of these opportunities? It depends where they're at. Even just taking some and saying, these aren't real opportunities. Let's dead them out or put them out of your pipeline causes you to think, Oh, I don't, I need more. I need my next action is to
SPEAKER_17prospect more, for example. Yeah. And I, we're getting a little off track here, but I think it's
EDDIE REYNOLDSreally interesting and valuable. Another thing that we struggle with is you think about goals and
EDDIE REYNOLDSincentives, right? And so you'll see some sales leaders that will push really hard on an activity quota or on a pipeline quota. But inevitably what we see is that if you push too hard on that, then, okay, well, I have to have 20 activities or 50 activities in a day. So I'm going to go crank those out or have to have this amount of pipeline. So I start putting really bad deals into the pipeline and then we've got our three X pipeline coverage. We're good. And then what happens is, is those deals
TONY RODONIcontinue to get drug quarter after quarter after quarter. And so we're constantly fooling ourselves thinking we have enough pipeline. When in reality, what we're doing is wasting time, chasing deals that will never close and forfeiting time that we could use to actually develop deals that will close. Yep. This is such an art, Eddie. And I'd say it really comes down to
TONY RODONIsome version of trust and being authentic with your teams that you're not going to, you know, light them up if they don't hit an activity target. Because if you light them up every time, they're going to learn to just fake the activity. And I've worked in those orgs. I've worked in an org where a boss said I needed three times my quota at any given time. So magically it always added up to three times my quota. And the deals were kind of BS instead of a thoughtful leader that's
TONY RODONIgoing to say, well, we don't have enough. What should we be doing? If you don't have enough,
TONY RODONIwhat are the leading activities you can do to get there? Are you doing enough of them? And how do we work together to have a plan to get there? And as much as we can, we can be comfortable and honest and treat it like that rather than to have a false activity quota. But I do know, I do know activity directionally. I know that the most successful reps probably have the most of whatever we would call
TONY RODONImeaningful activity in their accounts, however you want to define that. And if I can show you as an aspiring rep or a struggling rep, well, here's what the best reps are doing on the team and the quality
TONY RODONIof that's good. I want that to inspire you rather than me cracking some whip on inside some floor of
SPEAKER_04a sweatshop that you got to make 10 more fake voicemails or crappy voicemails.
EDDIE REYNOLDSWell, and that's exactly what I experienced. So I think, and tell me if I've got this wrong,
EDDIE REYNOLDSbut from my perspective, it seemed like management, frontline managers, RVPs, first and foremost, we're saying, let's have a clean, accurate, realistic pipeline. Let's get all the deals out of the pipeline that should not be there. If you keep dragging deals, like let's talk about that. Let's figure out, is there still a real chance here? Let's get rid of that. And if your pipeline is
TONY RODONI0.5 X coverage, it is what it is. That's not good, but let's face the music. Secondarily. Okay. If we're in that situation, let's work on building more real pipeline and you should try to get that 3X coverage, but I'm not going to push you so hard that you start making up fake, fake opportunities.
EDDIE REYNOLDSRight. And then lastly, with the activities, like I always had in my mind, I need to log 20 activities every day. Some days you can do that. Some days you can't, but I never fear that I'm going to get fired because, you know, I, these horror stories you hear about folks that get fired or put on a pip
TONY RODONIor don't get their bonus when they've hit quota, but they didn't log enough activities.
SPEAKER_17You know, I never experienced that. Look, this is, in some cultures that may work. I'm not,
TONY RODONIyou know, it didn't work where I was and it wasn't necessarily motivating to me, but I'm assuming people did this in their businesses because it worked. And maybe that'll be an interesting person you bring on in the future that can talk about how nuts you or I are to not do that because it works for them. That's fair. And it's also case by case, right? I think it depends a lot on what you're
EDDIE REYNOLDSselling. And I could definitely see an argument for selling a product that is an extremely low price
EDDIE REYNOLDSpoint where it really is all about the activity, but moving on, I would love to talk about that next
TONY RODONIlevel. So we go from RVP to AVP, a manager of managers. And so you've got somebody that maybe went from an account executive to RVP and it is the first time they've ever managed a team. And they were trying to learn, how do I manage a team? How do I transition from being a rep to a manager? And their boss, the AVP is now responsible for helping them do that. I would love if you could share some color on that role and what it took to be successful in that role. Sure. Well, let's, I'm going to oversimplify it, but when you get to that second line management,
TONY RODONIif the first line management was I identify talent and teach reps how to be reps, that same thing applies, but now you're teaching managers how to be sales managers and how to do those things that you learn. And one reason I want to focus on that is people think, oh, I've been in management for a year. I should be moving up to second line management. We were individual contributors for a long time before we perfected it enough that we could have confidence and teach people how to do it. And I think we underestimate, we think it's so easy to just move up into that second line management. Like I know how to recruit managers. I know what the playbook is for managers. And so ultimately bringing, bringing on that talent, hiring them, making them successful. But I'd say the other responsibility they have is to build or improve on the, just like we talk about an AE and a rep having a playbook, there's a manager playbook. And what does that playbook look like? And do you want it consistently run across all your teams? Use forecasting as an example, but I could use what's our hiring process? What's a, how do we run a QBR? What's our account review? And the way I'd say this is good second line leaders have a lot of consistency across those teams. Actually I'd say good companies have consistency across those teams. And it's part of the AVP's job to create and define those standards, to improve them for their segment industry or team, and to implement them consistently over time while letting their creativity and their individual first line managers creativity to participate as well. I'm not looking to create a team of McDonald's franchisees. So you have exactly the same experience every time you talk to somebody. But I don't want it to be random that two different teams that work for you as an, as a second line AVP in this vernacular have completely different
TONY RODONImotions and you're letting them quote, be the CEO of their territory. That's a crime. You know,
TONY RODONIthe board doesn't say, Hey, figure it out. You can do whatever you want. I'm going to give you no governance. And I'm, I'm always skeptical when somebody says, Hey, you get to make all the
TONY RODONIdecisions. You're the CEO of your territory. You need to give ground directional information and ways to help make these people successful. I'm going to add one other thing as they move into this role.
TONY RODONIThere's a few other things that I think are critical that I'll just say a slightly more executive level in a big company. And the amount of analytic skills, go to market skills, sales strategy really start to come out in this role and the ability to work more with non sales teams, business partners, like HR marketing product, you know, in a small company, you have to, you get to do that from day one. You have to, because of the feedback loop is happening so fast. And in a big company, the product marketing team may not be looking for feedback on every one of your customers, like they do in a startup team to work on the messaging. And actually because people develop this late in a bigger company, it's actually one of the potential weaknesses when they, that they
TONY RODONIhave, when they moved to a small company, they're great at everything in the sales trench, but they
TONY RODONIaren't good at multiplexing out to the other, uh, other teams or other departments.
EDDIE REYNOLDSThat makes a lot of sense. And it's really interesting. And I, as we're talking about this, some questioning, like when do I want to cross over and start to compare against a startup or scale up
EDDIE REYNOLDSland. But yeah, I mean, I experienced that when I was the first, first AE at that startup, I was sitting down with the CEO trying to write marketing copy and work with our ad agency to put out ads. I mean, when you're in a small business, you wear a lot of hats. And I think that's also what's fascinating for me is to think like with so many different layers of sales management at Salesforce, at what points in time do you get involved with different aspects of the business? You know, when you think about like the overall go-to-market strategy, you know, did that start at your level? Did that start even higher with Benioff? You know, and I don't know if I want to go down that path because I think it could open up a whole can of worms, but it's just a really interesting thing to think about a company as big as Salesforce and how many different layers there are. And at what point in time, different people are getting exposure and influence in different aspects of the
TONY RODONIbusiness. Yeah. Well, I, I'm, I can't speak for Mark or others. I can just say that as a
TONY RODONIleader, we're trying, we're trying to manage our business goals and our customer experience. And to do that, we have to debug and try to figure out how do we, what works and what doesn't work and what can I do to maximize the productivity or the results that I create. And then that, that creates a chance to say, well, gee, I, maybe I changed the strategy. Maybe I make some changes in a, in a geography or adding a vertical or an industry. And those are discussions you have for six months or so before implementing in a big company and a small company, you might have it for six hours or so before you implement it. And that's just a, that's the nature of the beast. What I would, I don't know if you're familiar with this and I'm, I'm bringing up a really old concept that was published by Jeffrey Moore and a book called Crossing the Chasm over 25 years ago. But he has something called the technology adoption life cycle of when, um, how people buy, whether they're an early adopter or an innovator, whether they're the early majority, whether you're selling the late majority or even the laggards. And what I would say is we think about go to market is it all has to do with what stage we're at in the market that we're selling into and how our product fits into that. And we have different go to market playbooks, depending on which of those stages we're at. Many of the things you've asked me about at Salesforce, we're, you know, for those of us who were really early, we were selling early adopters along and move to the cloud. But by the time it really moved its way to main street and the whole, the early majority, late majority, we, we didn't have to tweak the playbook too much. We just had to meet the demand as the rest of the market came, came to where we were.
EDDIE REYNOLDSThat makes a lot of sense. And it gets into a whole nother topic. And I am familiar with your book. Ironically, I keep talking about my old boss at that startup, but I'm pretty sure he gave me that
TONY RODONIbook in my first week on the job. Yep. It's been a while though, but this, that book is a little bit
TONY RODONIwhy forecast math can work when you're selling to the majority market, but forecast math doesn't work when you're selling innovators and early adopters. And instead you have, you basically have to do everything you can and your team and your company's power to win every deal, because even the ones you're losing are a huge learning experience, huge learning experience. In the early days at Salesforce, pre IPO, Mark had this great line that I loved. And he said, Hey, we win as a team and we never lose alone. And why do we win as a team? Well, we win as a team because when we're winning, we all need to see what worked. So we know what to repeat and use elsewhere, whether that's, I don't mean just for sales, like in R and D, what, what functionality is helping us win, but we couldn't lose alone. If you lose alone, we don't learn anything on what we need to change. These are my words, maybe not Mark's, but I always interpreted it as it's a fireable offense to lose alone because you, you miss an opportunity for the rest of the company to learn how to respond to it. And that's what you're building in the innovator and early adopter pre chasm stage, but you don't need to invest as much later on as you're in a territory capture mode and the market's
TONY RODONIcoming to you. Well, and that was one of my favorite aspects of the culture. You touched on
TONY RODONIthis earlier. I think the term, at least my team and I use was coopetition in that everybody wanted
EDDIE REYNOLDSto be at the top of the leaderboard, but we're also pretty focused on helping each other. And I always felt like if I'm about to lose a deal, I can take that to anybody. I could take that to my manager. I could take that to a colleague. I could take that to a manager on a completely different team. And it would be an all hands on deck type of thing of what could we possibly do to try to save this deal? Or it could be, I think I'm going to close this, but what other resources could I pull in? What else could we do to try to increase our chances of winning it? And that was probably my
TONY RODONIfavorite aspect of the culture. Completely. And think about how that helps you debug on what you
TONY RODONIlearn. First of all, you learn to apply it. Whatever you learn in that, you're going to apply
TONY RODONIto the future transactions you work on. But let's apply it back to a smaller company. Something really valuable about a loss is it helps you really get focused on your ICP. Was that loss in your ideal customer profile or not? Or are you making some assumptions about your ideal customer profile that are incorrect? So this is a constant feedback loop where in a small company, every loss needs to be greatly examined with honesty and clarity. But in a bigger company, you're going to lose some along the way and it's okay. Yeah, I can personally relate to that quite a bit right now. So I want to
TONY RODONItransition over to startup and scale up land. But before I do, we haven't yet touched on the SVP and EVP roles. And as we're talking about it, I'm wondering if it's even relevant because I want to compare and
EDDIE REYNOLDScontrast this to companies with a hundred million in revenue or less. And so my question would be, and forgive me if this is just a little bit vague, what would you like to share with me about the SVP
TONY RODONIand EVP roles in terms of what those roles entailed, what it took to be successful? And is any of this relevant for a company at a hundred million dollars in revenue or less? Yeah. Look, I mean, this is
TONY RODONIalphabet soup that you're trying to share of internal lingo at Salesforce. So fair point. They're better leaders that demonstrate more scale that have been through probably some hyper scale have led multi-dimensionally with maybe into different geographies or new markets and a little more global experience. And they've got stronger business analytic and partnering skills with the rest of the business. But you can have all those and still be in, yeah, 90, 95% of sales management jobs in tech are first line and second line, 98. And then there's some third line positions. And there are, when I look at the talent in a place that I worked at, is there a difference between those people? For
TONY RODONIsure. But is that relevant in a under a hundred million? Maybe while you're recruiting that person, but think about at every stage, what we're trying to recruit for when we bring external people in is we want somebody who's been through the stage that we're going to go through next. So in this, let's just use your a hundred to 10 to a hundred million range. If I'm a startup founder and I've scrapped my way to five to 10 million, I want somebody who can see a little bit of my future who's been through a 10 to 50 or 30 to a hundred. Somebody who's been there with at least a sample
TONY RODONIsize of one. So they can say, guess what? This is what happens. We're going to have to hire a lot of people or open offices or, you know, run more of a, uh, uh, PLG motion, whatever those things look
TONY RODONIlike. And this is one of the things I think somebody like Mark did magically at Salesforce was he was always looking at the leadership team and saying, how do I get people from the outside that had been through the next stages of growth, um, and successfully onboard them and make it the responsibility of
TONY RODONIeverybody to bring them in. A lot of organizations treat external talent that gets brought in like a virus entering the body and every antibody is trying to get rid of it and not make it work. And my advice to small companies is you're not going to be successful if you don't figure out how to bring people on from the outside and make them successful. You know, the guy who was trying to do pipeline math in my startup was successful, but we had to deprogram him of his $200 million company pipeline math, and instead program him on, we need to win 80% of the deals we have in our
SPEAKER_36pipeline right now. That makes a lot of sense. And so, you know, if I think about like a, a first line
EDDIE REYNOLDSmanager and thank you for correcting me here, like throwing around all the different, uh, acronyms
EDDIE REYNOLDSisn't super helpful to our audience. It's funny because I'm usually more adamant about that. A frontline manager, like the one that I reported to, we each had a quota of a million dollars. So seven people on average, it's about how many people a manager is managing seven, eight people. So you're
TONY RODONItalking seven to $8 million in new revenue on top of whatever revenue our existing customers had previously. So that's easily a 10 to $20 million business, right? So when you think about if you're
EDDIE REYNOLDSgoing to hire your sales leader, and I asked this because there is so much talk about should I, or should I not hire my first sales leader, first sales rep from a company like Salesforce, what are some of the strengths and weaknesses that person brings to the table? From my perspective, they bring this rigor of
TONY RODONIhow to manage a tight pipeline and process, but they've also had a lot of things done for them at Salesforce that they're now going to have to figure out how to do in a startup. I'd love if you could share some more color on that. Yeah, totally. What I would say is that type of manager, because I'm not
TONY RODONIgoing to say it's just Salesforce. And if it would be true of course, you know, Oracle or take your pick of favorite companies, they go exceptionally narrow in breadth and their depth is very deep. They will, they know how to run a sales team and all the things we've talked about in this call forecast,
TONY RODONItop rigor, sales skills, etc. Where their weak spots tend to be basically on the edges, but they don't have to do as much. The ICP has already been identified. The repeat, the playbook has been defined. Product
TONY RODONImarketing has written the materials. Product that you don't need to get product involved very much, if at all, unless you're, you know, getting somebody in a new market or working on new products. So those are the areas I think they tend to need help to be successful, or they need to have a prior experience to having gone
TONY RODONIthrough that. Look, you're a good example. And earlier in this call, you said, you realized when you were at a startup, you had to write a lot of the materials. And, you know, I see people come from places that were bigger. And they're like, Hey, great, who's going to do enablement for my team? Who's going to, we have an RFP coming up, who's going to respond to the RFP. And the answer to all those are you, buddy, you, ma'am. Like this is what we do in startups. And we work, we, you know, we work with others in the company to do it, but this is on us. And it's what I'd say is it's why we go to a small
TONY RODONIcompany. When somebody wants to leave the narrow, but deep environment of a large company, they want to experience in touch more of what's left and right of their spot in that supply chain. And it's, they need to build that experience. And if I was, and I think those people fail either because they don't have the skill, they haven't had experience doing it before. And importantly, they don't have a startup leadership team that knows that those are areas that they might not be good at and don't know how to help them be successful with it. You know, it's such an interesting perspective. And I both
EDDIE REYNOLDSidentify with that and also struggle with that concept. And I'll, I'll continue to go back to my first day at a startup experience. I did everything you can imagine. I built our demo orgs and this is a company that built a product on top of Salesforce. So I became a Salesforce sales engineer. Like when I interviewed at Salesforce, they asked me to interview as an SE because I had
TONY RODONIbeen doing all this stuff. Not only was I doing demos, I was literally building and configuring Salesforce because I had to upload all of this data. I was building my own sales and marketing assets.
EDDIE REYNOLDSI was defining my own territory. It was literally just like, who do you want to call anybody in the world? I mean, I think we had narratives to North America, but that's about it. And all of that was fun for me. But at the same time, I didn't close a lot of business. I was doing so many different things that if I could go back and do it all over again, I wish that a lot of those things had been taken off my plate. I wish that someone else had said, Hey, look, this is our company. You're entering it. You don't know us or our customers. These are the best accounts you should be calling on. Like that's not for you to figure out on your own. Like we're going to use our own data and our own experience to tell you that and get, get you sick. I mean, that probably took my first six months, right? Here's the messaging that works for us. Here are some sales assets. And then I was also configuring Salesforce for my own internal uses. And, and to me, while that obviously lent itself to me, not only starting my own business, but doing something around revenue operations, I wouldn't want that for another salesperson. And that's the delicate balance, right? Yes. I believe that salespeople and startups should wear a lot of hats and leaders, but I also want them to focus on what they're best at and struggle with the concept that they have to take on too much.
TONY RODONIMy response would be, Betty, get over it. And I mean that with love and affection. Like in a small company, go back to Jeffrey Moore's technology adoption life cycle. We don't have, we don't know if we have product market fit. We haven't perfected the messaging. These are the things that we want to build. And look, if I was a sales manager and you were working for me, I would say, I want to minimize how much of this you're doing, but we need to, we, the good sales leaders and people like you in this role, what they've got to be better at writing stuff down. We want to write down what is our ideal customer profile and be thoughtful about it. And I want your feedback building it. Once, you know, by the time you joined Salesforce, we already figured that out. We didn't need you. We could just go point you in that direction. A startup is trying to move from often for founder led sales into a real repeatable sales motion. And that is the blood and guts and gory part of work that has to happen to make that happen. And people that are good about it, enjoy it, enjoy the intellectual portion of it. They enjoy winning the first deals. And often the people that figure that out, they hate being in the scaling part of the org because now they're no longer close to identifying and solving a new problem. And they miss the interaction with R and D and product marketing and those other teams. And those are often the salespeople that I move into or what are, I shouldn't say I move in. They want to be moved into what's the new product, what's the new geography, what's the new industry. I want to go to a place that's really uncomfortable again because I enjoy figuring it out.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I think I also, well, now that I think about it, maybe I'm being a little bit whiny about all the things I had to do, you know, 12 years ago in that job. I think what you said and the way you described it is what I'm thinking that on the one hand in an
EDDIE REYNOLDSearly stage startup, you need to hire people that are scrappy and are willing to do whatever it takes to win. And at the same time as a manager, how can you make that easier on them? How can you take what's working and figure out how to codify that and make that repeatable? Yeah. You're getting me.
TONY RODONII'm thinking back to startups I was in and we had one and we had an enterprise product. We were
TONY RODONIselling to big telcos and internet service providers and I was the VP of marketing in that company and I would be writing, changing the website and customer success stories in advance of a meeting with a prospect so that we were that tight with the team to make sure we had enough stories that would show up. So I'm not saying, Hey, all you aspiring reps to work in startups, you got to do all this and marketing is not going to do it for you. But we were hand in hand doing it. And I was, I was like, okay, which ones can you review this copy? What message works? And then the, that person would sit
TONY RODONInext to me on conference calls and I would sit in his cube and write comments on the whiteboard while he was doing a call with a customer that he didn't, he wanted to look like it was just him that was on the call. And two of us would be in there writing some notes for what he should be saying. That's the, that's not the extra work. That's the excitement and collaboration. You have an early
TONY RODONIstage company that often when you get into a big scaling company, you don't realize you miss it until you don't have it. I love that. And that just goes into, we're not here to talk about
EDDIE REYNOLDSmarketing, but while we touch on it, marketers being able to see through the full funnel and understanding like the intricacies that happen after the lead is created. And we certainly try to foster that with our, our new marketing manager that just started with us a few months ago. And she's so involved in everything. She's on sales calls. She's talking with, you know, potential partners. She's building out assets. Like it's just all hands on deck. So I absolutely can identify with that. Yeah. And this is where I think some people that will go from a big company to a
TONY RODONIsmall company will struggle. They're used to, Hey, you got your number, you've got this team,
TONY RODONIyou're one of 10 AVPs or second line managers in the business. Now you want to go to a startup and guess what? People are swarming on you for everything. You know, in these startups, I remember we would be getting ready for a meeting with one of these telcos and it would literally be the management team and the sales person. And we are all like with the CEO, we'd be reviewing the slide and the decks and the demo. And why? Well, because we went as a team and we can't lose alone. So people that are used to a lot of autonomy and think, Hey, I'm, you now just hired me as a VP of sales. Leave me alone. I'm going to go do this. That's a mistake they make because they, they haven't built the muscle to know what this collaborative selling in a startup is like. And I don't mean don't hire
TONY RODONIpeople from, you know, a big company to help run part of sales, but know where their strengths and
TONY RODONIweaknesses are going to be and augment them with the other things that you're going to be able to do. Early in my career, I grew and I went to a company that was from 20 million to about a billion in revenue. And I was interviewing a couple of startups and they said, ah, we don't want to hire you.
TONY RODONIYou're a big company guy. And then I went to a couple of startups that went great. And I remember interviewing with a big company and they said, we don't want to hire you. You're a startup guy. And you just remember for your listeners, like people remember you, what you've done recently,
TONY RODONIbut over time, you've got to build out either the breadth of these experiences, or you have to decide you're going to major in your career in one area. You're going to be a startup guy or gal. You're going to be a 10 to a hundred guy or gal, or you're going to be a hyperscale guy or gal. I'm too much of a lifelong learner for that one and too curious for that to be me. But that's absolutely fine for people that figure out that they're built for it. And that's the major they want to be in.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYou know, it's so interesting. And I'm, and as I was thinking about this, I was thinking about the experience I had interviewing after I left Salesforce and I'm trying to figure out the right way to say
EDDIE REYNOLDSthis without it sounding like I'm bragging. Cause I'm really not, it's not about me. But when I left Salesforce, I had it in my head that I wanted to go become an enterprise AE at a startup. Right. And so I go and I interviewed for six jobs and inevitably got the question, wait, you were in SMB at Salesforce. Like, how do you think you're going to make the jump to enterprise? And so I said, well, let me just walk you through the playbook that we had. Like, let me show you step-by-step, like how we sold at Salesforce and what like selling a deal at Salesforce looked like, what was required, who we were talking to. And then you tell me if this fits like what you think you need to close enterprise deals. So I've just walked them through that step process. And then, like I said, this isn't bragging about me. This is literally just the playbook that I learned. And I got six out of six job offers because I think they saw like, oh wow. Yeah. These are the steps that we do indeed need to follow in order to close an enterprise deal. And while I continue to sell more SMB and maybe you might call it mid-market to this day, we have closed some deals with multi-billion dollar companies. And in my limited experience, I haven't found it to be night and day different from the playbook that we had to run in SMB. Like at least the complex deals where you're engaging multiple
TONY RODONIstakeholders and you're having to be really thoughtful about each and every meeting.
TONY RODONIYeah. This could be the topic of a different podcast because the deeper you get into complex enterprise sales, what I'd say, Eddie, first of all, I'd hire you into that job. No problem. But I would also speak to the couple of areas where you're going to have some blind spots if you haven't sold the enterprise. And typically it's things like, you don't, you don't have experience maybe with procurement because many, you haven't had to deal with a big, long legal process that happens. A huge budget matters more because they don't just make budget like a small company buys. So there are very specific things. I actually think the biggest one that the biggest one for me, I can't speak for others, was when I was doing enterprise sales, I had to learn that you're going to be at, the deals take 18 months. You have an annual quota. You're either going to be at zero or a hero by the end of the year. And you have to start doing this stuff in the beginning of the year to give you a chance for success. And you don't get feedback quarterly or monthly, like you do in more transactional sales jobs to build at bats and skills. You're kind of getting everything ready.
TONY RODONIYou're more like an Olympic rower. I don't know what sport to pick that nobody sees on TV, except once every four years they show up and here you go is for all the more. And learning how to sell all the behavior and things to do along the way without having multiple transactions to build that experience on is the hardest part of enterprise sales.
EDDIE REYNOLDSVery, very fair points. So we're running up towards the end of the hour and I'd like to take this back.
EDDIE REYNOLDSSo when you're working with startups and scale-ups and advising them at Bessemer, as they go from, and this is going to be a very broad and vague question, so forgive me,
TONY RODONIbut as they grow from 10 million to a hundred million dollars, what advice do you have for them about hiring sales leadership? Are there any major inflection points that are broadly applicable to this wide set of companies where, okay, at 30 million, for example, you really need to be thinking about this. At 60 million, you really need to be thinking about this. Are there some big sort of takeaways that you could leave our audience with, just some general rules of thumb of things that you want to think about as you're hiring these sales leaders?
TONY RODONIGot it. So I love this and I think, and I really like how you talk about the stage because it's really about how much confidence and conviction you have in your TAM and your likelihood to get to, let's just for sake of argument, say from 10 to a hundred. And the first thing is, are you, how honest, intellectually honest are you on how big is this TAM? Can we get there? Is this a big enough market? And then let's assume we are, but I've been in places where we haven't had that conversation and don't, can't really think about how we get there. Now let's assume we are. I want to start to think through, well, let's, let's play a mind game. Let's imagine we're a hundred
TONY RODONImillion. What does the org look need to look like? You know, what, what are all the things we need to feel, have, is it, uh, let's use strategy and operations for a minute. Uh, how do we collect,
TONY RODONIhow do we bill? How do we automate quotes to customers? Can they buy online? How does all that, you know, how does this stuff happen and what infrastructure do we need? Uh, what, what are our sales, what would our sales teams look like? Is it self-service? Is it PLG? Is it an enterprise motion? You almost want to build a little bit of the, what does a hundred million dollar business look like? And now I'm looking for people that have a point of view on what that experience looks like
TONY RODONIand how we get from where we are here to there. Uh, and it doesn't need to be perfect. I don't,
TONY RODONII don't see a big difference in 10 to 30 to 50 or whatnot, but what I want to know is they're able, they're like an architect that can say, you know, we're going to build, you have this one acre lot.
TONY RODONISo, or in some farmland, uh, you want to build a house, but you're going to add an in-law unit for, your mother-in-law and father-in-law someday, or kids are going to live over here in some other,
TONY RODONIhow can you architect what it's going to look like? And then what steps can you do to get there? And to me, I like this infrastructure example, because whatever infrastructure we put in at 10 probably lasts till 40, whatever we put in 40, we're like, we fix stuff that's breaks last till we double or triple again. And the infrastructure decisions you make like a CRM tool, what am I using for my ABM and marketing? How does comp work? The, those administrative operational stuff are things that I look for when hiring people. And then the other thing I look for is how well they're able to write it down. Like I'd say when somebody says, Hey, I've been in this zone, let's use 20 to 40. Cool. Hey, open up your computer. Show me the materials you have on that you saved or written or help write or help co-create. Because I think the big difference from the early under $10 million stage is we're just figuring it out and letting it happen, but we're not trying to repeat it in a way we can repeat it individually, you and I and a couple others, but we haven't thought about how do we repeat it with five times the number of people? Or how does it get repeated if we're not here? And the, the, the good architects that are successful leaders are really thinking about this repeatability and writing it down. And I want to reinforce that because this is a weakness that many people have when they're first in sales. Yeah. People that end up in sales are often great interpersonal communicators. They can talk, they do these calls, zoom calls all day. They probably aren't the best writers. And I find the people that are good in sales management and good in these stages that you and I have been talking about. They can say, Oh yeah, Hey, let me pop this thing up. Let me show you a kind of a little, I just wrote down my sales motion. The vocabulary doesn't matter to me, Eddie. It's that they've, they've thought about and written it down because that's how we scale companies is we're, we're
TONY RODONIrunning a repeat loop on how this thing works, but the loop has to get written.
EDDIE REYNOLDSI love that. I mean, obviously as operations professionals, we're always just trying to figure out what is the process that is actually working and how do we replicate that and repeat it and scale it?
TONY RODONIAnd I have long believed that the best leaders, especially as you get into more mature companies, the focus is less on, okay, what do we need to do today to close the next deal and more on how do we build this, this engine? Yeah. I mean, I look at the person who is maybe the godfather of a lot of
TONY RODONIthat systems we had at Salesforce that ran sales. He was a mechanical engineer undergrad, grad. And he came from a tiny startup that he had to build everything from the zero to 10 million that grew on public, et cetera. But I'd been through enough of that before to put some
TONY RODONIprocess around it. Look, and the guy was an amazing salesperson. I'm not like, this wasn't just a process person, but I would say as you're getting in that 10 to a hundred, you you're, now you got your
TONY RODONIteeter-totter or whatever, however you're balancing these skills is you want to see some of both, especially in the leader. Or I've seen orgs kind of share some of that leadership that, you know, there's a, many times there'll be a great sales leader that might be weak at some of this operational stuff. Maybe they're awesome customer facing, but they bring their director of strategy and operations with them everywhere that kind of fill in that gap. And they are the tag team of all tag teams. So those partnerships work really well when somebody is overdeveloped on
TONY RODONIone side and needs a yin to their yang. Awesome. Well, Tony, this has been really fun
EDDIE REYNOLDSand I really appreciate you joining us today. Thanks for having me, Andy.
