YouSaid · the spoken record

Dan Fougere

lines on the record: 76
first: 2024-11-22
most recent: 2024-11-22
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Harry, this has been such a pleasure, and it's been so fun. And you're like authentic curiosity and interest in what we do is so cool. And I'm just glad to be part of it. Glad to meet you in person. Well, in person-ish.”
2024-11-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: What I Learned Scaling Datadog from $60M to $1BN in ARR | How to do Outbound in 2024 | Why Discounting is Dangerous and Contract Sizes are Misleading with Dan Fougere · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He has been able to take over Datadog. I've hired him as a rep at BMC right after we were acquired at PlayLogic by BMC. And he went through some super hard times and came out as the top rep and got promoted. He was a leader.”
2024-11-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: What I Learned Scaling Datadog from $60M to $1BN in ARR | How to do Outbound in 2024 | Why Discounting is Dangerous and Contract Sizes are Misleading with Dan Fougere · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I want to see wins on the board, week one, month one, ninety days, six months, one year. Think about and list out the wins that you're going to put on the board, game-changing hires, game-changing deals, instrumenting the business, messaging, efficiency, productivity, all those things. Share that with your CEO. Agree on something that's realistic, and go do only those things and make that stuff happen.”
2024-11-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: What I Learned Scaling Datadog from $60M to $1BN in ARR | How to do Outbound in 2024 | Why Discounting is Dangerous and Contract Sizes are Misleading with Dan Fougere · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's almost like when the Microsoft Office suite came out, that's how old I am. I was like, oh my God, my spreadsheet pops right into my email and my word processing and it's all in the same and all of a sudden I could do so many more emails and proposals so much more quickly. As I see it right now, you can do better research on the companies. You can write a more compelling letter, prospecting email, you can put a proposal together faster. These things, it's going to make you more efficient and effective, which I think so far are all good things. I know that people are working on other things to try to have the robots do all the selling. Let's see how that goes. You know, the thing about AI is they thought, I listened to the AI guys, so the people who actually develop this stuff, right? They said, we thought it would automate the menial labor jobs like truck driving or being an analyst or something. And instead, it's making amazing art. So we don't know what it's going to do.”
2024-11-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: What I Learned Scaling Datadog from $60M to $1BN in ARR | How to do Outbound in 2024 | Why Discounting is Dangerous and Contract Sizes are Misleading with Dan Fougere · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Over my experience over the past few years, that very junior people can do very big deals with the right training and the right leadership. And that is very different than what most salespeople are taught is that only the most senior salespeople can do the big deals. And my last company, we had multiple people with slow single digit amount of sales experience a number of years do million dollar plus first deals. And there's something there where when you look at CAC and you look at efficiency, if you have great leadership with a great sales playbook, great framework, great training, you can get more productivity out of more junior people. It's not just some mysterious thing that the person with the five-page resume can do.”
2024-11-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: What I Learned Scaling Datadog from $60M to $1BN in ARR | How to do Outbound in 2024 | Why Discounting is Dangerous and Contract Sizes are Misleading with Dan Fougere · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My spreadsheet to find that optimum point where I could sell the minimum amount of shares so I could hold on to as many as possible but still come up with the amount of cash necessary to exercise all the other shares and that's how money I sold and I was able to do it I had negotiated a two-year term to do it and I closed my last deal to get the cash with like 10 days left”
2024-11-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: What I Learned Scaling Datadog from $60M to $1BN in ARR | How to do Outbound in 2024 | Why Discounting is Dangerous and Contract Sizes are Misleading with Dan Fougere · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You So while I was doing the Data Dog job in the beginning, my night job was making a market for Medallia shares. And so I found out that some deal had been done at like $16 a share through the grapevine. This is the gray area because, you know, there was no official secondary or anything like that. So I was able to find, there's a company called Forge, which was a lifesaver. And through them, I found somebody who wanted to buy my shares. I even had to stop some of the people who were disgruntled former employees from saying bad things about the company because they were driving the price down. And then I found another one just on my own, kept talking to every private equity, hedge fundy kind of person I could talk to. I found somebody. There were sketchy questionable deals that I was doing on my own, but I ended up doing them. And I was able to do the second one through Forge. So at least I had a legit platform to work in. And I was able to get enough to exercise.”
2024-11-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: What I Learned Scaling Datadog from $60M to $1BN in ARR | How to do Outbound in 2024 | Why Discounting is Dangerous and Contract Sizes are Misleading with Dan Fougere · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Another function's fault. It was tough, man. It was tough for everybody. And at that time, Scott, who was a CRO, wanted to punch out. And so I thought, hey, I'm going to move my family of my wife and our babies to the Bay Area. I'm running towards this thing. I have a plan. I believe I know we can do to get us back on track. Initially, I was told I would get the CRO job, and then I was told.”
2024-11-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: What I Learned Scaling Datadog from $60M to $1BN in ARR | How to do Outbound in 2024 | Why Discounting is Dangerous and Contract Sizes are Misleading with Dan Fougere · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Trauma. Now, I'm not saying sales didn't have anything to do with it. We weren't perfect. I would never say that. But we were doing pretty great, and all of a sudden we weren't doing pretty great.”
2024-11-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: What I Learned Scaling Datadog from $60M to $1BN in ARR | How to do Outbound in 2024 | Why Discounting is Dangerous and Contract Sizes are Misleading with Dan Fougere · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, that's like the deep tracks right there. You found out some juicy stuff. Spicy. Yeah, I mean, you know, I gave you some of the background about Medallia. I put my heart and soul into that place. We invented how to sell Medallia. They did not have any kind of repeatable process before we got there. We drove that thing, got it to, we're doubling year over year, got it to like in the 200 million-ish, 250. It had taken them 10 years to get to 25 million, and a few years later we're like at 250. And through some brute force. And so a few things happen. Qualtrics caught up to us because they were out developing us. They were out. Their product was innovating much faster than ours. We were spending money like crazy. The burn rate was unbelievable. And so they brought in CFO to try to control that. They made too many changes to the terms of the deals. And all of a sudden growth like you could feel descelled.”
2024-11-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: What I Learned Scaling Datadog from $60M to $1BN in ARR | How to do Outbound in 2024 | Why Discounting is Dangerous and Contract Sizes are Misleading with Dan Fougere · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Try to do our company. Here's where I ended up that I want them to sell the company that I'm at now. I want us to give them a company to sell to, and I want to give them like three days and come back and you be the rep. It tells me a lot based on, in some ways we found that kind of like the perfect amount of time to spend on it is like three hours because it's enough time to do the job if people who spend less time, their work, their quality of their work output is probably not going to be good enough for our team. People who spend more time maybe take too long to make decisions and get the work done so they're not going to be able to move as fast as we need to. It tells us, can they get out there, do their own research? Are they a compelling presenter? Do they get it? Would we buy from them? Do they want the job enough to go do this really hard thing?”
2024-11-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: What I Learned Scaling Datadog from $60M to $1BN in ARR | How to do Outbound in 2024 | Why Discounting is Dangerous and Contract Sizes are Misleading with Dan Fougere · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A little bait and switch. They told me that I would have headcounts a higher, and then they wanted me to be the rep. And there were a lot of things like that where the things that were said were not true. And if we're in the honeymoon phase and you're already telling me things that are not true, get out because it's only going to get worse.”
2024-11-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: What I Learned Scaling Datadog from $60M to $1BN in ARR | How to do Outbound in 2024 | Why Discounting is Dangerous and Contract Sizes are Misleading with Dan Fougere · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, fitness is one thing. It's not universal, but one guy who is phenomenal, who was at Medallia, he's into video games and music. That's his world. And he is great at those things. And he takes them seriously. And it's a little bit of a different model. Doing something hard and sticking with it. So the other thing is if you were at a startup, anybody who's been at a pre-IPO company that's done well for sure, but you're going to deal with some very hard times, like something, things are not going to go the way you thought. It's going to be harder than you expected. Did you stick? Are you one of these people who leaves every 18 months? Or were you there for the full four plus if you got a four-year vesting cycle? To me, it's like getting your university degree. Did you stick it out and make it?”
2024-11-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: What I Learned Scaling Datadog from $60M to $1BN in ARR | How to do Outbound in 2024 | Why Discounting is Dangerous and Contract Sizes are Misleading with Dan Fougere · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean Probably get that through the process. And as the CRO, I have other people who are the hiring leaders and they can share their stories. It's just like, hey, this is the hardest place I've ever worked, but this is the best place I've ever worked. I feel great about myself. Like, for example, when we would do club trips where significant others come on the club trips, I had so many spouses and significant others come up to me and talk to me about how happy they were, about how their significant other has become a better person, has become more fit, they're a better father, or whatever. All this stuff kind of translates into your life too. Do what you say, say what you do, deliver on the results. Do the hard work. Transparency, accountability, consistency, all that stuff to me ends up making us better people as well.”
2024-11-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: What I Learned Scaling Datadog from $60M to $1BN in ARR | How to do Outbound in 2024 | Why Discounting is Dangerous and Contract Sizes are Misleading with Dan Fougere · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't, there's something that says messaging that this is not going to be a sit back and enjoy the ride kind of team. I don't think of myself as beating the shit out of people. I would not do that.”
2024-11-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: What I Learned Scaling Datadog from $60M to $1BN in ARR | How to do Outbound in 2024 | Why Discounting is Dangerous and Contract Sizes are Misleading with Dan Fougere · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I personally look for discipline in salespeople because we're asking you to do hard things. Like my teams, I would say are different than most sales teams. And that's why we get different results. Like the Outbound, qualifying, accountability, accurate forecasting.”
2024-11-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: What I Learned Scaling Datadog from $60M to $1BN in ARR | How to do Outbound in 2024 | Why Discounting is Dangerous and Contract Sizes are Misleading with Dan Fougere · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a data point for something like a datadog or a Blade Logic. If you need to get into the guts of a technical sale, then understanding technical concepts and being able to articulate how they work, like how the machinery works, is valuable to help you tell that story. Something like a Medallia, a Salesforce, a workday, who cares? It's a, I can help your HR department work better or your customers can give you feedback, different concepts.”
2024-11-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: What I Learned Scaling Datadog from $60M to $1BN in ARR | How to do Outbound in 2024 | Why Discounting is Dangerous and Contract Sizes are Misleading with Dan Fougere · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, and so back in the day, they were picking baseball players because they had a good jawline because the guy's wife was pretty mind-boggling, but that's how they were scouts were picking baseball players. There used to be some of that in sales. What I would say is they come in all shapes and sizes. Also for each company, there's a little bit different. Like at Medallia, we needed somebody who could show up and have a meeting with a C-suite exec. and didn't need to get into technical details because it was not a technical sale. It was a, hey, we envision a world where companies are loved by their customers and employees. My mom can get behind that. At Datadog, super technical sale. So I would ask people, I wanted to make sure they could handle the subject matter. So one thing I might ask is.”
2024-11-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: What I Learned Scaling Datadog from $60M to $1BN in ARR | How to do Outbound in 2024 | Why Discounting is Dangerous and Contract Sizes are Misleading with Dan Fougere · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Nah, I don't think so. People do it because you're delivering value for them and because you build relationships with them. And I wouldn't want to trade economics for non-economic support”
2024-11-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: What I Learned Scaling Datadog from $60M to $1BN in ARR | How to do Outbound in 2024 | Why Discounting is Dangerous and Contract Sizes are Misleading with Dan Fougere · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You got to have it in your first conversations and first meetings, right? To have some credibility, you got to have it if you have it. If you have it and you don't tell people, then you're leaving something on the table. The more that the skin of the onion gets peeled back, the more substance you're going to have to have.”
2024-11-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: What I Learned Scaling Datadog from $60M to $1BN in ARR | How to do Outbound in 2024 | Why Discounting is Dangerous and Contract Sizes are Misleading with Dan Fougere · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I never have a problem talking about deals with the people on the team. So you can call me, slack me, text me, call me, basically 24-7. I got to sleep. I got to eat. I got to work out. Besides that, I'm yours. We can talk about discounting on deals. Sometimes automating something is not the right thing. Making less friction in discounting, I would rather have the sales team resisting discounting to the customer instead of taking that same energy and effort and trying to jam me as the CRO for discounting. Like we got to protect the value of the product. And if it takes like one more day to come back to them versus me knowing that at scale, we have just protected the unit price because everybody shares people talk and whether it's other sales reps t talking about the discount they got, customers talking about it with other customers. I think you want to hold on to that thing.”
2024-11-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: What I Learned Scaling Datadog from $60M to $1BN in ARR | How to do Outbound in 2024 | Why Discounting is Dangerous and Contract Sizes are Misleading with Dan Fougere · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Losing deals, or the friction in the process was such that we knew we were at the limit. And so, okay, that's where the discount should be. And we're going to try to get better by selling better value, by coming up with more products. But in the meantime, that's the limit. And we're going to hold it at like CRO, CPO level. And that way, we also have the right data. Because if you're leaving up to like 100 different people who to decide what the discounting should be, that you have no standard to know the data is the same because some people may be approaching in a vastly different way.”
2024-11-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: What I Learned Scaling Datadog from $60M to $1BN in ARR | How to do Outbound in 2024 | Why Discounting is Dangerous and Contract Sizes are Misleading with Dan Fougere · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A number of reasons without the right leadership and even sometimes with the right leadership, salespeople left to their own devices will peg at maximum discount 100% of the time. That is not how we drive maximum valuation. That's not how we protect unit prices for a long-term business. And if you're in a consumption business, if you are going to the lowest discount already when they have the smallest amount of spend, when they have quadrupled 10x to their spend, they're going to expect bigger discounts. Like it's always going to be expected, right? So the more you can have discounting be controlled higher up in the leadership chain, the better. And we were always trying, when I got to Datadog for sure, I was working with product all the time on how little can we discount? You get to a place where if you start losing deals, hopefully we never got to a place where we're losing deals. We could tell that we were close to.”
2024-11-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: What I Learned Scaling Datadog from $60M to $1BN in ARR | How to do Outbound in 2024 | Why Discounting is Dangerous and Contract Sizes are Misleading with Dan Fougere · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like discounting discounting should be these are two separate topics. You know, you could even give some payment ahead of the deals closing, something like that. If they're doing all the right things and it's just like they're building a territory, they're building their pipeline. It's taking longer than you thought. There's a variety of these scenarios, right? But the one scenario I would not necessarily say if you've got, hey, we were growing at 100% a year, now we're growing at 20% a year. That's a whole different thing. And now we've got a bigger set of problems to deal with. This is not an individual person problem. This is a systemic issue that we need some like major surgery. And I've been in both of those scenarios. If you wanted to go down a discounting, you want to go discounting or you want to? Yeah, I'd love to. I would, as a general rule, limit, I want as tight a control around discounting as possible. I don't want the first.”
2024-11-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: What I Learned Scaling Datadog from $60M to $1BN in ARR | How to do Outbound in 2024 | Why Discounting is Dangerous and Contract Sizes are Misleading with Dan Fougere · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They should be in it with the people, especially when times are hard. Like as a leader, when times are hard, you got to bring them up. And when times are good, you got to bring them down. Don't get too high on yourself when things are good and don't feel too bad when things are going tough because that'll affect your performance. And so you should get in it with them and see what is the problem. Do we have a product problem, a market problem? Do we have a regional problem? Or is it a person problem? And if you've gone through all of that and you're just like, I don't know the answer yet, but I do know it's not a person problem. I think there's like probably a whole set of things to do. First of all, being with them and understanding where the pain is. It could be the deals are coming, but they're not coming soon enough. So if you have some financial pressure, there's some things that you can do to be able to alleviate some of that financial pressure temporarily.”
2024-11-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: What I Learned Scaling Datadog from $60M to $1BN in ARR | How to do Outbound in 2024 | Why Discounting is Dangerous and Contract Sizes are Misleading with Dan Fougere · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have seen some people pull out, but most people do not. If somebody is just like a train wreck disaster and you know it, just pull the trigger. If there's somebody that you can see that they have, if they only did these things differently, I generally want to give them a chance to do it. It's a short timeframe. And I want to see, is their leader showing them? Like we might have a bigger problem. If it's a rep, well, maybe what's the leader doing? Does the leader have these skills? Does the leader, is their behavior the behavior I want to be scaled across the team? Can they tell them what to do show them, give them feedback after they do it, and confirm that the person now does it and has improved? So at least we have that process in place to see, I've given you guidance, I've showed you how to do it, I've given you feedback, can you iterate and improve? And if not, then you have your answer.”
2024-11-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: What I Learned Scaling Datadog from $60M to $1BN in ARR | How to do Outbound in 2024 | Why Discounting is Dangerous and Contract Sizes are Misleading with Dan Fougere · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Human nature is to give them too long. The saying is like hire slow fire fast. It's hard, though. That's why being an advisor or a board member is so valuable. It gives me the ability to give better advice because I don't have the pressure on me to hit headcount targets. Every board meeting, when you're in hyper growth mode, like going from 100 salespeople to 200 salespeople in six months or whatever, that's so hard. Like you got to hire all over the world. You got to try to have quality control. But if I pull back and say there's the same thing, like your instinct, your gut tells you, oh, I think I have the wrong hire here. At the very least, now you need a process to see for sure can this person do it. You probably need just from HR coverage perspective. You want to have like a performance improvement plan.”
2024-11-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: What I Learned Scaling Datadog from $60M to $1BN in ARR | How to do Outbound in 2024 | Why Discounting is Dangerous and Contract Sizes are Misleading with Dan Fougere · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You'll let underperformers stick around. You don't have a vision for greatness like I just described. You don't hold people accountable for performance. The leader is not in the boat with them. The leader yells at the scoreboard at the end of the quarter or end of the week. How come you didn't get more meetings? How come you didn't do this? Like you should have been in it with them. It shouldn't be a surprise at all. And you should know that because you were on the calls. You were in the meetings.”
2024-11-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: What I Learned Scaling Datadog from $60M to $1BN in ARR | How to do Outbound in 2024 | Why Discounting is Dangerous and Contract Sizes are Misleading with Dan Fougere · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I wouldn't have said it if I didn't believe it, but of course I was also anytime you put yourself out there like the first time you told people you were going to run a marathon, you're like, am I really going to run a marathon? But I just told people, so now I have to do it. There's a little bit of like burn the ships. I'm putting a stake in the ground. We are doing this. And I'm telling the whole world. And I'm going to commit everything in my life to making this happen.”
2024-11-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: What I Learned Scaling Datadog from $60M to $1BN in ARR | How to do Outbound in 2024 | Why Discounting is Dangerous and Contract Sizes are Misleading with Dan Fougere · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think you've got to have the vision, and the vision is that we will be great. That this is going to be what I said at, I put a mission statement up that I stole from one of my mentors at Medallia and I iterated a little bit at Datadog that we'll have a legendary sales team that will be known for making great money, making life-changing money, being best in class, and having fun, and that we will learn more, you will learn more and become better at your job during your time working on my team than you would have at any other team during that same amount of time. You will make life-changing money, and you will never have to look for a job again because the halo of our success will be over your head for the rest of your career, and people will seek you out. That was my first day. I said that to everybody on the team. I also said we will do $120 million next year and we will do 240 the year after that, and we will have the most successful IPO in history of New York.”
2024-11-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: What I Learned Scaling Datadog from $60M to $1BN in ARR | How to do Outbound in 2024 | Why Discounting is Dangerous and Contract Sizes are Misleading with Dan Fougere · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of course it is. And I'm going to also build another channel of revenue generation through excellent sales just like I have excellent product. Like when I went to Datadog, people didn't want to go there. Like recruiting was so hard. And part of it was the reputation that it was an engineering company. They didn't respect salespeople. And some of it was true, right? I mean, that's why I wanted to go there because I thought I can fix, I can make a great sales culture, but I can't make a great product in engineering culture. So I'm going to go to a product in engineering culture and I will build a great sales culture because those two things together will be more powerful than two plus two equals five, right? And that was the hypothesis and that's what worked out to be true.”
2024-11-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: What I Learned Scaling Datadog from $60M to $1BN in ARR | How to do Outbound in 2024 | Why Discounting is Dangerous and Contract Sizes are Misleading with Dan Fougere · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe one way to answer it, and I'll answer it in other ways as well is as the founder, if there's that voice in your head or that feeling in your stomach where you're like, hmm, I wish I had a better salesperson right now. I wish I could break into the enterprise. I wish I could go up market. I wish I could do three-year contracts instead of month to month. I wish I could do bigger deals. I wish I could sell multiple products instead of one product, whatever it is, that voice went off in your head. It's probably time and it probably was time before that. Because the other thing I was thinking about, like if you're running a race, like you're a runner. And so if you're running a marathon and you don't hydrate until you are thirsty, it is too late because you are dehydrated. And it's going to take a long time for your cells to be able to get that water. And by that time, it might be too late. I think a general feeling that, yes, the product and the product like growth motion is super important.”
2024-11-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: What I Learned Scaling Datadog from $60M to $1BN in ARR | How to do Outbound in 2024 | Why Discounting is Dangerous and Contract Sizes are Misleading with Dan Fougere · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's all public information. So generally speaking, a CRO is going to have like 1%. So something like that. And Medallia was not in that category. But it was still life-changing. It still was like normal, crazy money.”
2024-11-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: What I Learned Scaling Datadog from $60M to $1BN in ARR | How to do Outbound in 2024 | Why Discounting is Dangerous and Contract Sizes are Misleading with Dan Fougere · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not even IT, like the people running big companies. And these are big chunky deals. It's not like you're getting like 100 deals this quarter. We're getting like 20. So it's a very stressful time, which is kind of goes back to why would you do it again if you didn't have to, at least that period of time, that growth period, especially for a company like that where you don't have the PLG and you don't have the wind at your back, you know, and you're making the wind.”
2024-11-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: What I Learned Scaling Datadog from $60M to $1BN in ARR | How to do Outbound in 2024 | Why Discounting is Dangerous and Contract Sizes are Misleading with Dan Fougere · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, even at my time at Medallia, so when I went to Medallia, I was at BMC before. All of a sudden, I went back to a startup from the cushy confines of the big company. And I was making less than half as much for an annual salary. As I mentioned, I got three babies. I just had bought a house that was twice as expensive. I thought we were going public in two years, Sequoia backed company, you know, a great board. Four years in. I had been eating into my savings. I ended up paying a bill with a HELOC check. So I paid a bill with basically a loan against my house. I'm like at a breaking point. And this is just where it's like your expectations on. And this also gets into a conversation about letting your employees get liquid and doing secondaries, which was not happening there. So very stressful. And also, like I said, I told you about we had the cold call into COOC.”
2024-11-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: What I Learned Scaling Datadog from $60M to $1BN in ARR | How to do Outbound in 2024 | Why Discounting is Dangerous and Contract Sizes are Misleading with Dan Fougere · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, when it comes in in a way like it did for me, it's all public, most of it's public information. Anything I sold while I was CRO of Datadog is all public information. And so it's almost like a super massive object distorting space-time. And so your idea of like, what's a lot of money?”
2024-11-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: What I Learned Scaling Datadog from $60M to $1BN in ARR | How to do Outbound in 2024 | Why Discounting is Dangerous and Contract Sizes are Misleading with Dan Fougere · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Cards and everything. It took me until I was 50 years old to make that money. Thank God because I was fully formed, I would say. And I could see how making a ton of money can distort reality for people.”
2024-11-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: What I Learned Scaling Datadog from $60M to $1BN in ARR | How to do Outbound in 2024 | Why Discounting is Dangerous and Contract Sizes are Misleading with Dan Fougere · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Great question. So even though I had, I was part of four IPOs, the last two, which were the life-changing ones, you kind of like you have like car changing, kitchen changing, house changing, and then there's life changing. It took me both Medallion, Data Dog happened in 2019. And then you got a six-month lockup. And then I was an executive officer at Data Dog. So that was on an automated selling. Like you can't just say, I want to sell all this stock, you know, because then it gets published. There's a problem. If you create a spreadsheet and the bankers just automatically sell. So I didn't have all of it until like 2021. And so at that point, I was 50 years old. Not only was my dad a cop, but for a lot of my time, both of my parents were unemployed. You know, I had a lot of debt. Every time I use my credit card now, I still expect it to be declined every time because I just had such a long period of time where I defaulted on my credit card.”
2024-11-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: What I Learned Scaling Datadog from $60M to $1BN in ARR | How to do Outbound in 2024 | Why Discounting is Dangerous and Contract Sizes are Misleading with Dan Fougere · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you are Yes. And so here's again the answers are all in the context of growth phase, really, because could I go to another company where the hard work's been done and be the exec and clip some coupons? Sure. But if you're talking about, hey, there's no enterprise sales, there's no messaging. There's no forecast. Like when I went to Datadog, I asked, hey, what's our forecast for the month? And the sales leader said, I don't know. We had to build all that, doing all of that again sounds too difficult, right? If you don't have to do it. And so if you haven't had the big hit and you still have to do it, then you keep doing it.”
2024-11-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: What I Learned Scaling Datadog from $60M to $1BN in ARR | How to do Outbound in 2024 | Why Discounting is Dangerous and Contract Sizes are Misleading with Dan Fougere · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Jason Freaking hard in the early Whatever. To me, there's two different splices off of this question. One is would you go back to a smaller revenue company? And I did. Like I was at Medallia, which was at the time 300 million a year, and I went to Datadog for $60 million a year. Turns out to be a good choice. And I went back in revenue. The other question is, after you do this, would I go and do the CRO job again? And the answer is no, because I don't have to. Because it's super hard. Scott Davis calls it chewing glass. Like, would you chew glass if you didn't have to? And the answer is no. The way I look at it, generally speaking, if you're doing the job right, it's probably the second hardest job in the company after the CEO. It's the most quantifiable as far as performance. OK, ours are not necessarily thrown up in front of the board. And if you miss them, they're thinking about firing you as much as if you miss your sales targets. They're all thinking, do we have the right guy? You're thinking about that every day, every moment.”
2024-11-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: What I Learned Scaling Datadog from $60M to $1BN in ARR | How to do Outbound in 2024 | Why Discounting is Dangerous and Contract Sizes are Misleading with Dan Fougere · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“60 million when I went there. At that point in my career, when I'm like a legit CRO candidate, I had done most of the things that Medallia, I hadn't been the CRO, but I did a lot and I was ready for the job. And a $60 million a year company doubling year over year, that's where I'm going. If you can go to, if you're good enough to go to a company that's $60 million or 100% year over year growth, why would you go to a company that has zero revenue growth? I don't understand it myself. It's an interesting thing to try. I think having a salesperson there.”
2024-11-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: What I Learned Scaling Datadog from $60M to $1BN in ARR | How to do Outbound in 2024 | Why Discounting is Dangerous and Contract Sizes are Misleading with Dan Fougere · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I wonder if you could even say Snowflake was an example because Chris Stagnant now is not Chris Stagnan nine years ago or eight years ago. At the time when he joined, if I recall, he was more of like a first line leader, second line leader, super talented, a lot of headroom. But Dan Fougier 2016 is not going to a pre-revenue company. I went to Datadog. Carlos goes to MongoDB to build that sales organization. And for Carlos.”
2024-11-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: What I Learned Scaling Datadog from $60M to $1BN in ARR | How to do Outbound in 2024 | Why Discounting is Dangerous and Contract Sizes are Misleading with Dan Fougere · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've never seen it. To me, with all these kind of should this be the case, should that be the case? Like, okay, like somebody might have an academic idea, show me how it's actually been done. I would say at Datadog, Amit probably did it. I know he did, right? He did it before I got there. But it wasn't like what I just described. It was more, there's some marketing that they see that talks about implementing the cloud. There's a link. You link to the demo. You get online one-week demo. You put your credit card in. Somebody calls you to do the deal. Now you have Data Dog, right? Something like that. And that's a great way to get started, but you're not going to scale to billions of dollars of revenue, at least in my experience with that. Like, you're going to need more of what I just described. And every place I've ever been, that's been the sales leader doing that.”
2024-11-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: What I Learned Scaling Datadog from $60M to $1BN in ARR | How to do Outbound in 2024 | Why Discounting is Dangerous and Contract Sizes are Misleading with Dan Fougere · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In an ideal world, I can take somebody from the outside, take them to new higher training. And like when we were doing new hire training, my last two companies, when I was running all that, in the new hire training, we would get outbound meetings, your first days, we are cold calling. I have it all documented that these are the personas, these are the challenges they have. This is some of the terminology you need. These are the things you can say. Here's how you handle objections, right? So that's like front end of the playbook. Now, discovery call, right? Format for discovery call. Questions to ask, how to manage it to be.”
2024-11-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: What I Learned Scaling Datadog from $60M to $1BN in ARR | How to do Outbound in 2024 | Why Discounting is Dangerous and Contract Sizes are Misleading with Dan Fougere · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About kind of like implementation and support for commercial CS. It was kind of like a sales kind of capacity. So I think you got to figure that out from your model too. And so you think about how much are we paying if you're early stage, just let's get people to buy this stuff. We're trying to figure out a product market fit. We're trying to figure out how to have what sales process is repeatable, all that stuff. And you're going to iterate and figure out, are we paying too much here? Are we paying too much there? You're probably not paying too much for new logos, new business units, new products, breaking into new segments like enterprise. I think you have opportunities on the back end to see the revenue that's coming in that maybe is going to come in no matter who's sitting at the keyboard. You might have opportunities to really get efficient there.”
2024-11-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: What I Learned Scaling Datadog from $60M to $1BN in ARR | How to do Outbound in 2024 | Why Discounting is Dangerous and Contract Sizes are Misleading with Dan Fougere · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it depends on what they're doing. And because the other thing is for the enterprise, so we had CS for enterprise, when you have a cloud-based startup, they have cloud ninjas. Now, more people are cloud ninjas today than seven years ago when we went into some of the enterprise companies, the cloud skills were not as predominant. And so they needed more help. And you're working your way through bureaucracy. You're working your way through people that have older sets of skills. And so what we needed there was not somebody to clip the coupons every year. It's for the renewal. Like, hey, you're using more. Should you should commit to more. It was how do you actually implement this stuff? Even though we designed the product so that you wouldn't need implementation services, once we broke past the early adopters of the cloud and we started to work with the legacy folks, then we needed more help. So for enterprise CS, it was more.”
2024-11-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: What I Learned Scaling Datadog from $60M to $1BN in ARR | How to do Outbound in 2024 | Why Discounting is Dangerous and Contract Sizes are Misleading with Dan Fougere · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Once things started to get competitive, then you want to have somebody who's got more of a sales capabilities. The answer is I think you got to have to design it based for your company based on what you're trying to accomplish. Listen, that model that I described, Data Dog is worth what, $36, $40 billion. You can't question anything that's done. It was a phenomenal success, but could that work in every company? I'm not so sure, right? Would I personally replicate all of it, some of it for sure, because some of it was fantastic.”
2024-11-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: What I Learned Scaling Datadog from $60M to $1BN in ARR | How to do Outbound in 2024 | Why Discounting is Dangerous and Contract Sizes are Misleading with Dan Fougere · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's like we were talking about going to the gym, but most people don't do it because it's hard, even though it's so good for you. And so the same thing with Outbound and Pipeline Generation and breaking into new accounts. And so we gave them when they broke into a new account, whether it was inbound or outbound, doesn't matter. They had four months to sell more products, to take advantage of some of the growth that they might have because of the consumption model. And then after that point, it was passed over to customer success. And now in a one product world, that was great. And we originally had one product. And so now some of those really small accounts had weird names, Airbnb or Zendesk, that nobody ever heard of until everybody heard of them. And so the CAC was incredible. The growth was non-commissioned because CS did not have commission, right? That's pretty incredible. Now, if you look at in a multi-product world where you then have to go back and sell multiple products or”
2024-11-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: What I Learned Scaling Datadog from $60M to $1BN in ARR | How to do Outbound in 2024 | Why Discounting is Dangerous and Contract Sizes are Misleading with Dan Fougere · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, such a controversial topic. Listen, CS, is it technical support? Is it a less well-trained, less well-paid sales team? What are you actually really trying to do here? And I think based on the product, there might be different explanations. At Datadog, there was something brilliant there where I don't know if you've talked about this with anybody. So we focused our commercial team, which really focused on startups. So we would get them focused only on new logos. And I'd say this is true about enterprise. And I say this is true about Medallia. And this is one of the things I feel very proud of is that my teams, once we got going, we will get a meeting with somebody who could influence a deal in 30 to 45 days in any company, a real meeting. And part of that is you have to be focused and you can't be distracted by because human nature is such that you're going to seek pleasure and avoid pain. And you're going to avoid the hard work.”
2024-11-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: What I Learned Scaling Datadog from $60M to $1BN in ARR | How to do Outbound in 2024 | Why Discounting is Dangerous and Contract Sizes are Misleading with Dan Fougere · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or whatever it is, that's why I say old school is the new school and it's the good school because the things that worked for the fuller brush salesman or IBM or Wang, it'll always work because humans don't change. And so the technology has changed. You have some PLG, you got Zoom, great. Use it, but don't use it at the expense of the connecting with people and becoming more intimately familiar with the personal drivers of the people you're selling to.”
2024-11-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: What I Learned Scaling Datadog from $60M to $1BN in ARR | How to do Outbound in 2024 | Why Discounting is Dangerous and Contract Sizes are Misleading with Dan Fougere · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source