YouSaid · the spoken record

AJ Tennant

lines on the record: 76
first: 2024-10-23
most recent: 2024-10-23
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I'm with you. Like, there's that echelon that's kind of like professional sports. It's innate that LeBron James, you know, is where he is. Yeah. You know, and, but there's players that have made it to the NBA that they were, you know, Steve Nash. I don't know that Steve had an innate ability to play in the NBA when you looked at him early, early on in his life. But he just grinded at it. Listen. Thank you. Dude, you're a stall. Well done, my”
2024-10-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Biggest Lessons Scaling Slack from $6M to $1BN in ARR | How to Build a Customer Success Machine and Where Most Go Wrong | The Framework to Hire All Sales Reps: Take-Home Assignments, Hiring Panels and more with AJ Tennant @ Glean · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In, you're like, okay, I got this. So you're probably like me. Do you agree that sales can be taught and it's not innate?”
2024-10-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Biggest Lessons Scaling Slack from $6M to $1BN in ARR | How to Build a Customer Success Machine and Where Most Go Wrong | The Framework to Hire All Sales Reps: Take-Home Assignments, Hiring Panels and more with AJ Tennant @ Glean · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hard, and then also now as we you know we get bigger and bigger which is great in many ways you get a lot of hate yeah and it's not very nice yeah that can hurt i was thinking about it as i was looking at obviously your linkedin followers your twitter followers like my organization now is like 230 people i feel bad when i like look at our gko reviews and someone's like oh i didn't think aj's prezo like was that great like whatever like i get some negative feedback from just a small group of people and i can have only imagine like being sort of a public figure now that it just becomes yeah it's becomes more heightened where did the chip On your shoulder come from to be able to, like, even going back to, I didn't even know you didn't go to college or I started when I was 17.”
2024-10-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Biggest Lessons Scaling Slack from $6M to $1BN in ARR | How to Build a Customer Success Machine and Where Most Go Wrong | The Framework to Hire All Sales Reps: Take-Home Assignments, Hiring Panels and more with AJ Tennant @ Glean · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, well, you're a lead ambassador. So you won't be able to make the move into having your own fund. You won't be able to make the move into having your own big fund at every stage they tell you you can't do it. And at every stage, you have to be like the one solitary person in the crowd As well as my mother who claps. And says, you can do it.”
2024-10-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Biggest Lessons Scaling Slack from $6M to $1BN in ARR | How to Build a Customer Success Machine and Where Most Go Wrong | The Framework to Hire All Sales Reps: Take-Home Assignments, Hiring Panels and more with AJ Tennant @ Glean · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At every stage of my career, people have told me that I will not be able to do the next thing. Oh, well, you're a podcast that well, fine, but you won't be able to make the move into being an investor. Oh, well, you're an investor, but you. And you won't be able to make the move into being a lead investor.”
2024-10-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Biggest Lessons Scaling Slack from $6M to $1BN in ARR | How to Build a Customer Success Machine and Where Most Go Wrong | The Framework to Hire All Sales Reps: Take-Home Assignments, Hiring Panels and more with AJ Tennant @ Glean · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We lost the distribution war at Slack. I think part of why we lost that war was, yes, like monopolistic behavior by Microsoft, but because we didn't lean into other effective fast distribution strategies other than PLG. It's a really fucking good answer. Normally people have shit answers to that question. Honestly, I wondered about scrapping it because people never have any good ones. They just go OpenAI and I'm like fantastic. AJ, I've loved this. Thank you so much for being so willing to freewheel with my open questions. You've been amazing and I so appreciate it, dude. Yeah, amazing. Can I ask you a question? Yeah. What's been the hardest part of your career in this world that you're in now? Yeah, can I flip it and do a little question? Sure. That's the hardest part of that.”
2024-10-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Biggest Lessons Scaling Slack from $6M to $1BN in ARR | How to Build a Customer Success Machine and Where Most Go Wrong | The Framework to Hire All Sales Reps: Take-Home Assignments, Hiring Panels and more with AJ Tennant @ Glean · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But it is true. I'm trying to remember there's quite a famous one. Anyway, I shouldn't say it even if I could remember it. I want to finish on one, though, which is like, when you look at company sales strategies or GDM motions, which one of you been most impressed by recently other than Glean? And why? So what they've done with their partner and channel strategy is just phenomenal. They have a direct sales motion, but what they did is they went to the sort of channel, whether it was the hyperscalers and the cloud service providers, but more importantly like the resellers and the channel players and said, we're going to go all in. And what that does is essentially turned Wiz's sales team of whatever when it was like, I don't know, a year or two ago, 100 AEs into 5,000, 10,000 AEs. Why I view that as like the most effective is it's because sales and GTM is a distribution strategy.”
2024-10-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Biggest Lessons Scaling Slack from $6M to $1BN in ARR | How to Build a Customer Success Machine and Where Most Go Wrong | The Framework to Hire All Sales Reps: Take-Home Assignments, Hiring Panels and more with AJ Tennant @ Glean · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because I mean, we can take this up, but there have been quite a few examples, and I would take this out. There's been quite a few examples of CRS have moved to CEO roles. Yeah. Well, give me a shot. That is the best answer.”
2024-10-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Biggest Lessons Scaling Slack from $6M to $1BN in ARR | How to Build a Customer Success Machine and Where Most Go Wrong | The Framework to Hire All Sales Reps: Take-Home Assignments, Hiring Panels and more with AJ Tennant @ Glean · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, no. Effective goals are goals that you can achieve and you can outperform effective stretch goals are ones that you can only get to 80%. What would you most like to change about the world of sales? Kind of what you said. Like, I want the world to see that this is a career path that enables you to become CEO of another company. Career-wise, like at some point, I want to be a CEO of a company. And I think I am uniquely positioned to do that because I am on one pillar of what makes companies great, which is go to market and sales. I want that next grad that regardless of whether you go to college or you're at an Ivy League or at a state school to realize that you can have a massive career by investing in tech sales. Which CRO has turned into a great CEO? Frank Slootman, right? Wasn't he like a CRO to start at some point?”
2024-10-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Biggest Lessons Scaling Slack from $6M to $1BN in ARR | How to Build a Customer Success Machine and Where Most Go Wrong | The Framework to Hire All Sales Reps: Take-Home Assignments, Hiring Panels and more with AJ Tennant @ Glean · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then the next day, I saw him in the lobby. I'm like, hey, John. He's like, AJ, good to see you again. And that was like, as I was walking into a CIO meeting. And Cody Samford at the time was like, how do you know John, like the CEO of our company?”
2024-10-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Biggest Lessons Scaling Slack from $6M to $1BN in ARR | How to Build a Customer Success Machine and Where Most Go Wrong | The Framework to Hire All Sales Reps: Take-Home Assignments, Hiring Panels and more with AJ Tennant @ Glean · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“T Mobile at Slack, one of the T Mobile's key differentiators is the team of teams, how they differentiate both with customer experience in the retail stores and online. And so what I did is went into a retail store, became friends with one of the retail people, recorded him on the technical challenges he was having, how he works, where he thought Slack could play a role. Like I went, I became friends with this guy. I did the same thing with a support agent where I just called in, pretend to be a T-Mobile customer, and like just chatted up with a T-Mobile customer care, like get in the day of the life. And then the cherry on top was I knew the CEO at the time, John Leisure, used to hang out at the W bar in Seattle before an on-site that night before, I just stayed in that W bar, like just hanging out. And John Ledger came in and I went up to him and we spent time chatting.”
2024-10-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Biggest Lessons Scaling Slack from $6M to $1BN in ARR | How to Build a Customer Success Machine and Where Most Go Wrong | The Framework to Hire All Sales Reps: Take-Home Assignments, Hiring Panels and more with AJ Tennant @ Glean · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Get your hands dirty on doing deals. The three things I would say to them do the deals and learn it. And the reason I say that is like my framework for decision making on going to companies and for how I coach my AEs that like set up time with me is focus on the product. That's number one. Learn the product, sell the product, figure it out. Number two, know the people, get to know the people in your organization, figure out like how to build the relationships. And three is like learn the position that you have. And it's the three P's. It's kind of like how I have always kind of simplified both my career making decision framework, focus on good products, good people, and good position.”
2024-10-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Biggest Lessons Scaling Slack from $6M to $1BN in ARR | How to Build a Customer Success Machine and Where Most Go Wrong | The Framework to Hire All Sales Reps: Take-Home Assignments, Hiring Panels and more with AJ Tennant @ Glean · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. If you get a marquee customer and get them successful, it's more important than the logo. It's actually they will do reference calls. They will do intros. So I think it's less about the logo and it's more about that customer becoming successful to then do reference calls.”
2024-10-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Biggest Lessons Scaling Slack from $6M to $1BN in ARR | How to Build a Customer Success Machine and Where Most Go Wrong | The Framework to Hire All Sales Reps: Take-Home Assignments, Hiring Panels and more with AJ Tennant @ Glean · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I approach it early days, do it, get the deals done. But once you get past like 10, 15, 20 million of revenue, you really need to have a very tight discount matrix and don't give away just horrible deals because it's going to impact the market discount rate.”
2024-10-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Biggest Lessons Scaling Slack from $6M to $1BN in ARR | How to Build a Customer Success Machine and Where Most Go Wrong | The Framework to Hire All Sales Reps: Take-Home Assignments, Hiring Panels and more with AJ Tennant @ Glean · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like had back then who were just like, let's hire the best reps, they can figure it out. It's gonna hurt you in the long run. We hired a world-class enablement leader who used to be a salesperson, who used to be a sales dev manager, was a chief of staff to the pure storage, like CEO. That has changed the trajectory of what I think good enablement looks like. And it started at Slack with some of the folks there, but I've like fully embraced it with clean.”
2024-10-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Biggest Lessons Scaling Slack from $6M to $1BN in ARR | How to Build a Customer Success Machine and Where Most Go Wrong | The Framework to Hire All Sales Reps: Take-Home Assignments, Hiring Panels and more with AJ Tennant @ Glean · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The mistake is not investing in enablement early enough. So when I was at Facebook, and this is like also my development as a human being, like I used to not believe in like therapy, I used to not believe in medicine in terms of like for mental health, like, you know, it's a long history of like stuff in my family that's like I hardened. But then I realized as I got married, as I had kids, like, wow, like I got to soften that approach a little bit. And related to that, and this is how work life all come together during my time at Facebook, I was like fuck enablement. I don't think enablement's ever going to help anyone. Like I was like, if you're a good rep, you're going to fucking figure it out. You don't need enablement ever like the best reps will figure it out. And that was like the hard AJ back then. And what I realized more in my middle point of Slack and 100% glean is founders and sales leaders that have the mentality that I have.”
2024-10-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Biggest Lessons Scaling Slack from $6M to $1BN in ARR | How to Build a Customer Success Machine and Where Most Go Wrong | The Framework to Hire All Sales Reps: Take-Home Assignments, Hiring Panels and more with AJ Tennant @ Glean · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's totally. I mean, I ended up having to move super fast with this 1AE, ended up having to let them go. And then it became this drama. And it was like a nightmare to deal with. And so I think you just, it's so much more important to take like an extra two weeks, three weeks, four weeks, month to get the right people.”
2024-10-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Biggest Lessons Scaling Slack from $6M to $1BN in ARR | How to Build a Customer Success Machine and Where Most Go Wrong | The Framework to Hire All Sales Reps: Take-Home Assignments, Hiring Panels and more with AJ Tennant @ Glean · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Moving too fast. I at Slack, we got this sort of like when the acquisition happened and even maybe before the acquisition, I got this sort of like, I've got to move super fast to fill in AE. And I didn't take the time to actually do the full Chrono, to like listen to some of the flags I had to do back channeling. Like I think when you move too fast through the process, you make mistakes.”
2024-10-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Biggest Lessons Scaling Slack from $6M to $1BN in ARR | How to Build a Customer Success Machine and Where Most Go Wrong | The Framework to Hire All Sales Reps: Take-Home Assignments, Hiring Panels and more with AJ Tennant @ Glean · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which is something that at this point in the senior AE careers, you need to be going to try to solve that problem or coming to me with how you're thinking about solving it. The second one is the collaborative tension. If you do not have the ability to collaborate effectively in a way that's driving your point of view that does require some tension and you are steamrolling people, people don't want to work with you, you're gone. Like it does, it just doesn't work. And I like to use the word collaborative tension because I don't want to have this soft culture where everyone is just like, oh, we're collaborating. And it's about collaborating in a very prescriptive, direct way that is going to have tension. And if you can't do that effectively, then you need a part of these hypergrowth companies because that's what they need to make progress.”
2024-10-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Biggest Lessons Scaling Slack from $6M to $1BN in ARR | How to Build a Customer Success Machine and Where Most Go Wrong | The Framework to Hire All Sales Reps: Take-Home Assignments, Hiring Panels and more with AJ Tennant @ Glean · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Number one is a lack of two things creative problem solving and collaborative tension. The creative problem solving, it's not just you can very quickly know when you've got an AE that's all they're doing is coming to you with problems, not coming with solutions and ideas. And that is a telltale sign that someone is not a creative problem solver. The best employees are the ones that when they meet with their boss or a stakeholder, they say, here's the problem, here's what I've thought about for it, and here's one or two ideas I'm thinking about. What's your feedback? Whereas the AEs that fall into that bucket of like that I'm like, damn, it's like they are coming to you and they're saying, oh, like I can't get my SE to do X, Y, and Z. I'm like, cut the bullshit. Like, what do you want them to do? Have you talked to them yet? And you have to do this annoying coaching to them.”
2024-10-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Biggest Lessons Scaling Slack from $6M to $1BN in ARR | How to Build a Customer Success Machine and Where Most Go Wrong | The Framework to Hire All Sales Reps: Take-Home Assignments, Hiring Panels and more with AJ Tennant @ Glean · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It depends on the segment. So, if we're talking about the enterprise segment, you're going to know within probably 90 days. SMB, you're going to know in 30, 45 days”
2024-10-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Biggest Lessons Scaling Slack from $6M to $1BN in ARR | How to Build a Customer Success Machine and Where Most Go Wrong | The Framework to Hire All Sales Reps: Take-Home Assignments, Hiring Panels and more with AJ Tennant @ Glean · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the strategies we have in our panel interview is I always ask my managers choose the account that this person is prepping for their sell to on a new prospect that we are trying to get into. I hate wasted effort. It's money. I like to kill as many birds with one stone as I can.”
2024-10-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Biggest Lessons Scaling Slack from $6M to $1BN in ARR | How to Build a Customer Success Machine and Where Most Go Wrong | The Framework to Hire All Sales Reps: Take-Home Assignments, Hiring Panels and more with AJ Tennant @ Glean · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that the, and this would be more feedback for Arvind, right? My CEO, and what he could have done better, I think that Arvind should have been challenging me to put together a point of view on a couple problems that I like, I think senior leader interviews that CEOs are doing. And this is another reason we do the panel the way we do. I'll explain in a second, is interviews are very precious in terms of the time that your leadership team is spending on them. And so Arvin, he could have spent all this time with me and it not really lead to anything. I think that having him ask me, hey, AJ, here are the three problems that we're dealing with as a company right now. Can you produce something and present to me and my leadership team on how you're going to solve it? It has two benefits. Even if I don't turn out to be the right guy, it's giving him ideas”
2024-10-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Biggest Lessons Scaling Slack from $6M to $1BN in ARR | How to Build a Customer Success Machine and Where Most Go Wrong | The Framework to Hire All Sales Reps: Take-Home Assignments, Hiring Panels and more with AJ Tennant @ Glean · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it actually did skip a B in the moment. But what I'm saying is what we want to see out of AEs is creative, proactive approaches to how you're thinking and that can come in the form of, okay, let's get an example of an artifact that you built. I want to see how you creatively problem solved on a business case. And it can come in the form of, hey, an AE shares an artifact that's not about an account, but it's about like how they were more efficient in the work they did. Or I love, like I said, when reps are saying, oh, I talk to X, Y, and Z customer, I interviewed my friend who's at Databricks, who uses Glean, and he did a demo of it to me. Like that shows the that passion for the product.”
2024-10-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Biggest Lessons Scaling Slack from $6M to $1BN in ARR | How to Build a Customer Success Machine and Where Most Go Wrong | The Framework to Hire All Sales Reps: Take-Home Assignments, Hiring Panels and more with AJ Tennant @ Glean · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's all in the delivery and it's all on the approach. Now, I had relationships with Airbnb and Uber and networked in in a warm intro way. Funny story, like the head of procurement at Uber, who I was like calling, she's like, AJ, we're not a customer of Glean. Sorry. Like watch out for this company. They're lying to you. And I was like, what? And she's like, no, no, no, no. Sorry. Never mind. Their company name used to be SIO. And that's what's in our procurement system. But yeah, you're holding.”
2024-10-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Biggest Lessons Scaling Slack from $6M to $1BN in ARR | How to Build a Customer Success Machine and Where Most Go Wrong | The Framework to Hire All Sales Reps: Take-Home Assignments, Hiring Panels and more with AJ Tennant @ Glean · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, fun fact. So when I was interviewing at Glean and I like when reps do this, I found out who the customers of Glean were and interviewed the buyers about their experience with Glean. I think as much as more important, frankly, is that people are making the right decision on the company they're going to go to.”
2024-10-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Biggest Lessons Scaling Slack from $6M to $1BN in ARR | How to Build a Customer Success Machine and Where Most Go Wrong | The Framework to Hire All Sales Reps: Take-Home Assignments, Hiring Panels and more with AJ Tennant @ Glean · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We don't, we're debating this at Slack, anyone that was coming in as an AE had to do a writing exercise and it wasn't a take home like I think you just had to write something. The take home that we sort of do at Glean is more about asking them to follow up with an artifact that they've done. Like we had this one great AE that's coming over from Pinecone who built this incredible advanced prompting methodology for how to like prep for a customer call. It was amazing. He used Enterprise ChatGPT and now he's using Glean to do it and we're implementing it. And like he shared that artifact with us. And it wasn't like IP for the company. That shows like, that's an artifact that has depth.”
2024-10-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Biggest Lessons Scaling Slack from $6M to $1BN in ARR | How to Build a Customer Success Machine and Where Most Go Wrong | The Framework to Hire All Sales Reps: Take-Home Assignments, Hiring Panels and more with AJ Tennant @ Glean · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think that a hiring panel is equivalent to you showing up to a customer meeting and there's three or four people that are in the room that you are presenting to like a panel presentation is for me an opportunity to see how someone is going to have the IQ and EQ to read a room and present. I think that's a miss to bring someone into your company that their core job is to get on exactly a call like that every week, multiple times a day and you don't see them in action. I think it's important.”
2024-10-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Biggest Lessons Scaling Slack from $6M to $1BN in ARR | How to Build a Customer Success Machine and Where Most Go Wrong | The Framework to Hire All Sales Reps: Take-Home Assignments, Hiring Panels and more with AJ Tennant @ Glean · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, absolutely not. The sales reps that are coin operator are the ones you don't want to hire. The sales reps that have that insightful IQ that you talked about want career development. They want challenges. They want to figure out how to get like coached and mentored. That's what good sellers look like.”
2024-10-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Biggest Lessons Scaling Slack from $6M to $1BN in ARR | How to Build a Customer Success Machine and Where Most Go Wrong | The Framework to Hire All Sales Reps: Take-Home Assignments, Hiring Panels and more with AJ Tennant @ Glean · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where you should go is sales. We had this amazing AE. I'll give her a shout out. Rachel Sato, Northwestern grad, went to work at McKinsey. Same thing, had this thought that you wanted to go work in product management at Lyft. We convinced her to be a sales development representative, to do outbound cold calling. And she's like, thank you, AJ. This has changed my life. Like this is the career I wanted.”
2024-10-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Biggest Lessons Scaling Slack from $6M to $1BN in ARR | How to Build a Customer Success Machine and Where Most Go Wrong | The Framework to Hire All Sales Reps: Take-Home Assignments, Hiring Panels and more with AJ Tennant @ Glean · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I agree with you that the smartest minds aren't, but I think the smartest minds will get there with time because when they realize there's two paths to making a big impact inside a technology company, I learned this from David Hahn, who was a VP of product at LinkedIn in technology companies. And this might be controversial because this is putting aside all the other things that make these companies go. There is product and then there is sales. What drives technology companies in most businesses is one of those two functions. If you are the smartest, smartest person that's graduating from Yale, whatever, Harvard, I don't even want to say it's Ivy Leagues, but I actually don't think the smartest people are always from those schools at all. You either are going to find success in a path through product, but if you realize, you know what, I'm not an engineer. I don't like that. I don't want to do product management. If you are smart, that.”
2024-10-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Biggest Lessons Scaling Slack from $6M to $1BN in ARR | How to Build a Customer Success Machine and Where Most Go Wrong | The Framework to Hire All Sales Reps: Take-Home Assignments, Hiring Panels and more with AJ Tennant @ Glean · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They will after they talk to me. Yes. So I wouldn't say sales. I would say that they want to go into, I think the smartest people coming out of the top universities want to go work for the best technology companies.”
2024-10-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Biggest Lessons Scaling Slack from $6M to $1BN in ARR | How to Build a Customer Success Machine and Where Most Go Wrong | The Framework to Hire All Sales Reps: Take-Home Assignments, Hiring Panels and more with AJ Tennant @ Glean · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Disagree with that. I thought you said something else. I thought you said if you're really sharp and insightful, you're going to be an AE. I think that this is very top of mind for me because I was very lucky and shouldn't have gotten into Harvard. I had a chip on my shoulder, worked all four years throughout college. My parents went bankrupt, so I graduated with $100,000 in debt. They got caught up in the 2008 crisis. All my friends went into investment banking, consulting. I think that technology sales has the potential to like capture some of the smartest minds because when you really peel back the layers of what technology and AI sales is, it is taking what's happening in investment banking, consulting, actually putting it to work on driving transformations within companies. Why I love sales is because and why I love enterprise.”
2024-10-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Biggest Lessons Scaling Slack from $6M to $1BN in ARR | How to Build a Customer Success Machine and Where Most Go Wrong | The Framework to Hire All Sales Reps: Take-Home Assignments, Hiring Panels and more with AJ Tennant @ Glean · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's shocking to me how many AEs I ask this question to, and they just get stumped at five. I'm like, are you kidding me? I could literally write 50.”
2024-10-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Biggest Lessons Scaling Slack from $6M to $1BN in ARR | How to Build a Customer Success Machine and Where Most Go Wrong | The Framework to Hire All Sales Reps: Take-Home Assignments, Hiring Panels and more with AJ Tennant @ Glean · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The early stages of creatum problem solving, which is like EQ creative problem solving, which is like listening to a prospect and kind of morphing what you're doing based on what they're saying. What I'm looking for in that question is actually like higher level thinking of like, how can you think not only quickly, but strategically and then map it to what is actually going to be your job? Like you are going to get 100 accounts and you are going to need to figure out which ones you spend on.”
2024-10-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Biggest Lessons Scaling Slack from $6M to $1BN in ARR | How to Build a Customer Success Machine and Where Most Go Wrong | The Framework to Hire All Sales Reps: Take-Home Assignments, Hiring Panels and more with AJ Tennant @ Glean · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“From Lexi Rees, who is one of my bosses at Facebook. So, anyway, what I ask is I throw off the interview, the mid-interview and I say, hey, hey, let's pause here for a sec. If I give you like your book of business today, 100 accounts in Excel spreadsheet on column, I'll column A is the name of the accounts. I want you to fire off right now 10 data points that you would use to prioritize that book of business and tell me why and stack rank them one to 10. Some people get to like employee count what industry they're in and then they're like, you know, and I'm like, no, no, no, I want 10. And you push them. Because if you're on customer calls, this is what you got to be able to, what I've described to the team, like the competency that I'm looking for is creative problem solving capabilities. You asked me earlier on this session about like, what is this, what is the skill set that junior AEs struggle with? What I described to you there was almost like the...”
2024-10-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Biggest Lessons Scaling Slack from $6M to $1BN in ARR | How to Build a Customer Success Machine and Where Most Go Wrong | The Framework to Hire All Sales Reps: Take-Home Assignments, Hiring Panels and more with AJ Tennant @ Glean · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, part of going deep into the why and the chronological side, we move from there to a panel interview. And that panel interview is again an hour. They get a prompt. That prompt is tell us your history. Tell us about like, you know, your biggest career challenge. Talk about a large win that you have and then walk through an example deal of selling how you would not sell glean, but how you would prep for like going after this account. You don't give them much guidance after that. And you see a wide range. You see people come in that have no slides and that's fine. I don't care about the slides or whether they look beautiful. I want to understand the deep thought that you've done in preparation. And then in that moment, the thing that I do, and I'm going to say it now, I used to tell candidates, like, please don't tell other candidates, I'm going to do this, but I'm just going to do it because I think it's a good lesson that I'd love to just share with others. And I learned this actually.”
2024-10-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Biggest Lessons Scaling Slack from $6M to $1BN in ARR | How to Build a Customer Success Machine and Where Most Go Wrong | The Framework to Hire All Sales Reps: Take-Home Assignments, Hiring Panels and more with AJ Tennant @ Glean · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You ask people while you're going through that process of who is your boss? Who is the hardest person you worked for? Who is someone like you didn't like working for? And then you in the moment say, how do you spell their name again? You basically quiz them to say, you know, I'm curious if I reached out to that person, what would they give you constructive feedback on? And, you know, sometimes I even fluff it and I'm like, oh, I think I'm connected to this person and I might, you know, my text them and call them. You want to get people off of their whatever their sales skill game and get real and challenge them on that. That's one way. The other is I think what we were talking about before I came in here was actually have people send materials of the work that they've done. So being able to see a deck that they built, an email that they sent.”
2024-10-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Biggest Lessons Scaling Slack from $6M to $1BN in ARR | How to Build a Customer Success Machine and Where Most Go Wrong | The Framework to Hire All Sales Reps: Take-Home Assignments, Hiring Panels and more with AJ Tennant @ Glean · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah My process is understand the deep history of the individual over a chronological period of time. I didn't realize that that was a hiring methodology until Bob Fratty taught me that at Slack, which is the who hiring method, what we call a chronological interview. I ask people, what did you do in high school? Why did you go to the college you went to? What was your proudest accomplishment in college? And I do that through every, why did you leave the first job you did? Why did you go to the next job? And I go really try to understand because what you can build is an understanding of like the deep motivations that people have.”
2024-10-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Biggest Lessons Scaling Slack from $6M to $1BN in ARR | How to Build a Customer Success Machine and Where Most Go Wrong | The Framework to Hire All Sales Reps: Take-Home Assignments, Hiring Panels and more with AJ Tennant @ Glean · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Accelerators are essentially ways to if someone goes over 100% of their quota, an accelerator just gives that rep the ability to move faster in terms of accelerated comp. And so what it's doing, and why I say that's the number one thing, whether it's CSMs, BDRs, AEs, is you're rewarding that the top performers. I think it's a good thing to do.”
2024-10-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Biggest Lessons Scaling Slack from $6M to $1BN in ARR | How to Build a Customer Success Machine and Where Most Go Wrong | The Framework to Hire All Sales Reps: Take-Home Assignments, Hiring Panels and more with AJ Tennant @ Glean · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Great question. I think there should be some type of kicker and incentive. It shouldn't be the number one key metric. Right now in the sales dev world, there's a lot of So it incentivizes the right behavior. I think I forget what company pushed that strategy, which is comp BDRs on not net new opportunities, but comp them on closed one. It's too far and too long of a thing to do. But I think there's a model in which you can give a bonus. Actually, we did that at Glean, but we haven't systematically done it. So, for example, the companies that did these multi-million dollar expansions, we actually strategically gave a large spot bonus to the CSM that was on that because we wanted to recognize the right behavior. I think it's a good thing for us to honestly take back because we're in the middle of our planning for next year and we should find a way to structure it in.”
2024-10-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Biggest Lessons Scaling Slack from $6M to $1BN in ARR | How to Build a Customer Success Machine and Where Most Go Wrong | The Framework to Hire All Sales Reps: Take-Home Assignments, Hiring Panels and more with AJ Tennant @ Glean · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yeah, we're already seeing it. We're seeing a lot of accounts move off of those experimental, like quick knee-jerk reaction AI budgets and shifting to our product. I think that you're going to see it, for example, like there's some of these vertical solutions that have layered on AI and sold a big story on, hey, you're already paying X with us. We can accelerate you to go faster. I don't think some of those solutions are actually going to deliver enough value that it's going to be worth the incremental spend that they're going to be asked to do.”
2024-10-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Biggest Lessons Scaling Slack from $6M to $1BN in ARR | How to Build a Customer Success Machine and Where Most Go Wrong | The Framework to Hire All Sales Reps: Take-Home Assignments, Hiring Panels and more with AJ Tennant @ Glean · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“GRR and NRR. Most important for me is GRR. The ripple effects of having an account, especially in the enterprise space, churn the viral negative network effect that happens. Luckily at Glean, we have like a 97, 98% GRR, the only accounts we're churning are SMBs. That's what you want to have. But to answer the question, I view it as GRR. But to me, what's more, in some way more important than GRR, it's the leading indicator metrics, like time to launch. How long did it take the customer to go from signed contract value to the initial launch and measuring that? And then how long did it, not how long, but how many of the paid seats are actually active in the surface? Because if you nail in a systematic way time to launch quickly and you get active users, GRR is just an afterthought. It's going to be a problem, right? If you have people using the service and they're using getting deployed.”
2024-10-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Biggest Lessons Scaling Slack from $6M to $1BN in ARR | How to Build a Customer Success Machine and Where Most Go Wrong | The Framework to Hire All Sales Reps: Take-Home Assignments, Hiring Panels and more with AJ Tennant @ Glean · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that a lot of them don't tie it to clear metrics, they don't tie it to things that will go back into leading indicators for future upsells and NDR and GRR.”
2024-10-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Biggest Lessons Scaling Slack from $6M to $1BN in ARR | How to Build a Customer Success Machine and Where Most Go Wrong | The Framework to Hire All Sales Reps: Take-Home Assignments, Hiring Panels and more with AJ Tennant @ Glean · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You've got to be looking at it a combo of the company size and the contract size. I think one thing that I learned at Slack is like all Slack did was look at what the ARR was for the specific account and then tied it and they would only put a senior CSM on the million dollar contracts. I think that can be a little bit of a miss because if you are closing, let's say you close a couple hundred K deal with ExxonMobil and you're putting like a junior CSM on it who doesn't know how to navigate, you're not going to be likely to drive an upsell. And so what I look at is a combination of employee count and are they over a certain dollar amount?”
2024-10-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Biggest Lessons Scaling Slack from $6M to $1BN in ARR | How to Build a Customer Success Machine and Where Most Go Wrong | The Framework to Hire All Sales Reps: Take-Home Assignments, Hiring Panels and more with AJ Tennant @ Glean · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Back to value. That's the sweet spot you want to be. Now, you can't do that if you're talking about a velocity motion for like a commercial or SMB segment, and that's not going to be our strategy there.”
2024-10-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Biggest Lessons Scaling Slack from $6M to $1BN in ARR | How to Build a Customer Success Machine and Where Most Go Wrong | The Framework to Hire All Sales Reps: Take-Home Assignments, Hiring Panels and more with AJ Tennant @ Glean · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not CS. Yeah. And I would say it's a shared responsibility, but what i metrics CS organizations on is NRR, NDR, and what we call active users. We want people to get active with our service. And so we're actually tying the compensation of our CSMs not to an upsell, but it's frankly more about are you getting users active? And that tied with AEs having an overlay of, oh, I'm tied to being able to upsell incremental makes that sort of like handoff, not a handoff. It becomes a partnership. You're like, the story I keep talking about internally is we had this healthcare company do a $60,000 land deal with us. And over the course of nine months, the AE, the SE, and the CSM turned that account into a $500,000 plus contract. They focused on deployment. They focused on success. They've tied”
2024-10-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Biggest Lessons Scaling Slack from $6M to $1BN in ARR | How to Build a Customer Success Machine and Where Most Go Wrong | The Framework to Hire All Sales Reps: Take-Home Assignments, Hiring Panels and more with AJ Tennant @ Glean · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think it's a handoff. Our strategy is that in the enterprise, you as an AE are involved in the deployment. The reason you're involved is because you have an incentive to make them successful because you're the future upsell is dependent on your ability to drive deployment.”
2024-10-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Biggest Lessons Scaling Slack from $6M to $1BN in ARR | How to Build a Customer Success Machine and Where Most Go Wrong | The Framework to Hire All Sales Reps: Take-Home Assignments, Hiring Panels and more with AJ Tennant @ Glean · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That it's going to be easy to implement is what they get wrong. That's simply, I mean, we talked about it already. I think that lots of even our AEs that we have, like we are educating them, even though our product is relatively compared to the market, easy to implement, we're telling them set the right expectations, make sure that you have a deployment success plan. I took a page out of Dave Schneider's book from ServiceNow, and we're implementing a system where we're not paying AEs on their deals unless they have an approved deployment success plan filled out. I care very much about the customer success side. I own that function at Glean, so I own the pre-sales, post-sales. That's for me a very important part to it, but I think going back to your question, it's a lot of companies are getting the big deals done and then assuming, okay, we can figure out the deployments later. And that's what they get wrong.”
2024-10-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Biggest Lessons Scaling Slack from $6M to $1BN in ARR | How to Build a Customer Success Machine and Where Most Go Wrong | The Framework to Hire All Sales Reps: Take-Home Assignments, Hiring Panels and more with AJ Tennant @ Glean · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, this is where I would say the space is like falling down. Everyone is being sold a bag of goods and a dream of this sort of AI enabled workforce or automation, top line, bottom line. And then when it comes to implementation, it's taking six, nine, twelve months, or it comes attached with a $5 million services budget next to it, which is, it's like, well, hold on. I'm paying $5 million to implement this thing for the, with one of the big companies. And like, I'm paying the fees for the service. What we're seeing is adoption and usage is not where it needs to be. And we're seeing that even with, you look at like Microsoft co-pilot, I mean, many customers are saying it's falling flat, just not delivering the value that was advertised. So what the challenge is, is not like some of the other technologies, a product issue. It's more of a change management security challenge.”
2024-10-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Biggest Lessons Scaling Slack from $6M to $1BN in ARR | How to Build a Customer Success Machine and Where Most Go Wrong | The Framework to Hire All Sales Reps: Take-Home Assignments, Hiring Panels and more with AJ Tennant @ Glean · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source