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

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

“Dave is talking there about more probably corporate motivations. And so, and those are important, but they're also abstracted away from the motivations of the people you're actually selling to. And so the ones that are going to cause those magical moments probably are more about personal motivations, right? Which is, holy shit, I'm not going to get my bonus unless I can show that we are compliant with SOC standards for security by December 15th. And you should know that as a salesperson, you should be familiar enough, and this is another reason to get out of your office and get off Zoom and go to the customer's building and hang out with them and spend time because a 58-minute meeting on Zoom where everybody else is paying attention, people are not sharing some things that maybe they're going to share when you're just hanging out. Having a beer at TGI Fridays after the meeting, all right at Starbucks.”
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
“Shouldn't do so, John Kaplan is a great sales trainer and leader. He says, you don't come in with your hair on fire in the product manual in your hand, but that's what a lot of people do. If you don't know how to sell, then you're going to think, I'm going to show up and show you all the features. Look, we can do this. Look, we can do that. Look, we can do this. And then back in the day, they would call it taking a plateful of spaghetti, throwing it at the wall and see what sticks. And it's just like, I'm going to keep saying things to you that we can do until you say, oh, that's cool. That's a terrible way to sell. And you're just wasting time. And really, in the end, what are we talking about? We're talking about maximizing the valuation of companies.”
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, make sure that you do the discovery ahead of time. Understand their pains. Think about it in terms like put yourself in the shoes of the customer. And it's not about features. And it's not about show up and throw up. And you want to be able to say, hey, Joe told me that he's trying to make decisions but doesn't have the right information and that led to application downtime. So we're going to show you an example of how you can do that in your environment. You told me you have a Unix machine. Here's a Unix machine. So they can start to see themselves. It's like telling a story. It's like if you're reading, I started reading the great Gatsby. But if you are going to identify with the protagonist in the story, then the author has you. And it's the same thing with the demo. I need to see myself in this story. And I can see how my life gets better. I can see how I get better at my job. I can see how I get home to my family earlier. I get promoted.”
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, for example, the demo in the beginning was just walk people through the features. We had to tell a story. I had to like, it was a little extra hard because the SCs at that time did not report to me. But still, I was like, guys, we need to tell a story. We need to show something more compelling. So little things like change the demo, et cetera. And then they could see we're getting better anyway.”
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
“Because then you got enough servers to there's some heft to it, and it happened all the time. But in the beginning, it was a leap of faith because their quota was over a million dollars. And so they were like, Dan, how are we going to make any money here when we're doing all these small deals and just like, hey, have faith that it's going to grow? It's going to grow. Once it actually took off, then we didn't need to convince anybody. But there's that period of time when you're transforming an organization before you have enough victories to prove your idea that you have to keep everybody in the boat. And I say that you need to be in the boat with them. Partly because you're making it happen, partly because they need to see that you're with them. Like we're taking the sail and I'm with you. I'm carrying the flag up front. And also so you can gain the pieces of feedback that you will need to iterate. Like maybe some of the things are not working.”
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 can be. Oh man, such a good question. That's why you're so good at this. And we got a relaxed vibe going. So people wearing hats, sitting on couches. So, when we started the enterprise at Datadog in early 2017, as I mentioned, there were no big deals to be had. We were lucky that we were able to pull off that capital one deal. A little bit of great execution and a little bit of luck. And those deals were not around at other companies because Capital One was such a leader going to the cloud. I had to convince the enterprise people as long as it's a real project solving a real problem, we kind of don't care how small the deal is. Our hypothesis was that this cloud thing was going to take off. And when it takes off, whoever's in the stack is just going to scale with their applications, which is kind of like to me what I saw with Snowflake. This is real-time. So we didn't see this yet. This is 2017. Our idea was just get in there and be part of it. And if it was like a, generally speaking, probably minimum for the enterprise was 10,000 dollars, ARR.”
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
“Want to know did you add a qualified opportunity to the forecast this week? And did you have new business meetings which were basically discovery meetings and demos? Like at Datadog, when I left, it was one of each of those new pipeline opportunity that's got a specific definition and a new business meeting for enterprise and two for SMB. And if I had those, I guarantee you you're going to make your number this year and you're going to make more money than you ever made before and you're probably going to get promoted. Those were the only number of meetings I managed 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
“I think he's got a good point. I think it depends on the stage of the company. But generally speaking, I would agree with him that quality, you don't want to sacrifice quality for quantity. So the other thing I'd say about instrumenting the business, and you sent me something about operational. And so when you think about being a sales leader, you've got kind of two sides, right? One side is the inspirational sales leader who can get everybody fired up, who can convince a customer to win or to do the deal. And then the other side is the metrics-based, data-driven, let's instrument the business the right way. And so part of instrumenting the business too is to distill down to the minimum number of metrics that you need to run the business because I don't want the salespeople spending all day in Salesforce. I want to know just a few things. So the number of meetings that I tracked to go to the number of meetings topic was always number of new business meetings and number of opportunities added to the forecast. So I was not ever really managing the number of meetings per week.”
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 call it pipeline generation PG. And so asking somebody else to do PG for you is like asking them to go to the gym for you. I don't think it creates the right culture to think that this is something that can be outsourced. PG is everybody's job. And so whether you're a sales leader, AE, SDR, we're all”
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
“The same conversation has been happening my entire career. And so my answer is yes. You just need to get better and find a way to become the signal amongst the noise.”
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
“Our other customer just implemented Redis. Here's the video here's his link on GitHub. Would love to see if this is interesting to you to see if we can help you guys have the similar success. That's step one, something like that. Next, two days later, hope you enjoyed that link about Redis. Also saw you're trying to implement Kafka or Kubernetes. We've implemented Kubernetes ourselves. Here's a link with some of the dashboards that our own people are using. Okay. Do I have your attention? Like I'm not some knucklehead just trying to like make some money. I'm trying to help you. And I've done research and I've learned about you. This is some of the techniques that we use.”
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, a mistake I've seen in working with a few companies over the past couple years, they're trying to qualify in the beginning and you need to light them up with excitement. You need to get them on the hook by getting them as excited about what you have as you are. And so there's going to be some balance in the beginning of you think you're barking up the right tree at the very least because, hey, it's capital one. They buy a lot of stuff. And so when you reach out to the person, we're talking outbound, right? And so to be able to, and also I saw your video on YouTube, I saw what you wrote on Twitter. Like to me, you need to differentiate yourself by the way you show up and the way you show up is going to be I've done research. I am coming in with value. I'm not coming in saying we're a cloud monitoring product. We're based in New York City. We have 500 employees. Don't do it. Don't even waste your time. But saw on Twitter you're implementing Redis.”
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
“Just went down with the other products, and he's got Datadog working. They're going to release tomorrow with Datadog for their QA. So it's like, okay, boom, we got it. We go to DC the next morning and meet with those guys. We write it all up, take screenshots, and now we are presenting it. So now to get back to your question, how do we earn our way up? That's how you earn your way up. Like when you're intimate with the business, you're figuring out what are their problems, and we're making sure the product's working. And when it does, we are singing it from the mountaintops. And so we're working our way up. So we kept working our way up to the next person and next person until we got a meeting, which I think may have been, Olivier, I can tell you if it's true or not, but I think it was the first time he met certainly with an enterprise customer. And all of a sudden, that was our first enterprise deal. And it was for $1.4 million. And we had never had a deal like that before. And that was about six months in.”
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
“Couple sales engineers working hard. And I was like, Hey guys, what are you working on? Oh, we're working on Capital One. I was like, oh wow, how much did they, their customer? Yeah, how much do they have? $600. I was like, what's that? Two servers or something. And then I was like, well, why are you guys working on a $600 deal? And they're like, well, they have, they've just bought 20,000 servers from AWS or something like that, $8,000, $13,000. I was like, okay, I'd like to work with you on that. So we start working on it. They're actually on the verge of rolling out their first production application. They need to run, get all the metrics set up. And they tried it with this other product called SignalFX. They tried it with app dynamics. They had Linux update happen. And this is just us being like talking about being hands-on. I'm not sitting at my desk. I'm not managing from afar. I'm there with the guys. We're slacking like on a Sunday night. The engineer says, hey guys, his dash.”
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 that was small deals, credit card deals, month to month, minimal human interaction, mostly almost entirely software startups who were born in the cloud. So one of the things I talk about is don't F up what's already there and go build what isn't, right? And so I needed to build the enterprise. I needed to build channel, international, et cetera. And so the enterprise, there were really in early 2017, this might be surprising to some people, is there really weren't any production applications in the cloud for the enterprise. Capital One, their CIO just made a big statement that he's going all cloud. And this is when people thought you couldn't do it because of security and everything. We saw that one person bought $600 worth of Datadoc, like $600 ARR. Here's another reason to work in the office, by the way. I was in the cafeteria getting some food that I was about to eat at my desk and keep working just like we all did. And I saw.”
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, brilliant question because that's where the action happens. That's where, so to me, magical moments happen in sales, right? And so a magical moment is I call you and you're like, I hate salespeople. I don't want to talk to you. And all of a sudden, you're like, hmm, this is interesting. I'm glad this guy called. I'm learning. I'm thinking. Okay, that's a magical moment from a cold call in a meeting when somebody has their arms crossed and like looking at their phone and then they're like, wait a second, this is maybe I should get my boss in this meeting. That's a magical moment. And another magical moment is, holy shit, we need this right now. And so, for example, we were working on a deal at Capital One. They were the first, this is early 2017. So early 2017, I started Datadog. We've got a very good business that the boys created before I got 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
“They could implement it. It told them things that nothing else could tell them. Then we built a ground swell from there. We got to leave your ego at the door and realize we're not talking to CIOs and CTOs. To answer your question, we didn't talk to them for a while. And so now at Medallia, what we realized is we had to invent how to sell Medallia. That was before Datadog. People might not know about it. It was a $5 billion exit, which is pretty good back in the day when those were big exits before Datadog and Snowflake and companies like 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
“Ahmed and I went on a series of dinners with Shah Dul Shah in early 2017. And we were, and it was all CIOs and CTOs. And we were so excited and we went to Fancy Restaurants and nobody cared about cloud monitoring. Nobody, everybody had just done big deals with AppDynamics and Splunk and Dynatrace and New Relic. And they said, we already have the cloud handled. We just did a deal with AWS. So they didn't want to talk to us at all. I couldn't get them interested. Amen couldn't get them interested. Shardul couldn't get them interested. That's a lot of firepower. It was almost like the nature of the market cycle was such that we had to focus on the people who were actually tasked with implementing the cloud successfully. And so we were selling to the people who were implementing. And the fact that Datadog actually”
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, you're going to earn your way up, right? And so there's two different ways. And so the fact that I was at Medallia and Datadog back to back are two extremes. So at Datadog, we started with hands-on keyboards, the practitioner, the person who's actually implementing the cloud. It was crazy, man, because everything that we were told, everything that I was ever taught and I taught come in high, get to power early. The reality is, so at Datadog, Amit, you've had Ahmit Agarwalan, right?”
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
“Person who's the technical user, that's probably they're thinking that's their champion. That person's boss who really should be the target champion. That's who they think is the economic buyer because it's just too hard to realize that the person who's going to sign is actually multiple levels above where you've even engaged.”
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
“Know with a three Y's in medic, or why should they do anything? Why should it be Data Dog or whatever? And why should it be now? And so asking those questions, and that's the thing about sales, is it's not quantum physics, but we talked about discipline before. We talked about repeatability, and that's a big part of this is just always doing the right thing, even when there's so many excuses to not do it. And the same thing with asking the questions, same thing with medic. What metrics do we have that build some kind of business case, even if it's a back of the napkin kind of thing? Like, why should they do it from a metrics perspective? Do we have any metrics from previous customers that we can use to tell a story there? Economic buyer. Do we know who the economic buyer is? What I know from experience is it's probably one or two levels above whatever you think it is, whoever you think it is. So when the salesperson is engaged in the deal, they're going to think that the”
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 expect that bullshit is there. You have to realize that human nature is such that you want to have the rose-colored glasses on. You want to believe the deal is good. And you need to know that the opposite is probably true. And you've got to look for the dirt. And you've got to build that into every time you're looking at a deal. You should be thinking about it. And now medic is a nice way to have a structure, a framework for this versus some meandering conversation that may or may not get to the answer, right? So your metrics, your economic buyer, your decision process, decision criteria, identify pain, champion competition. That's the way I look at medic. And so in that way, I can have a conversation in possibly even 15 minutes, but Max 30 minutes. And I'm going to be able to qualify this deal. We're going to be able to look for the weaknesses and strengths.”
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 everybody uses that was invented there while I was there. The company was doing about 200 million a year, so they still had the DNA of a startup. And so I talked with them about just how they built an amazing qualification machine, pipeline generation machine, sales process machine. And I just happened into that as an engineer.”
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, I ended up doing mechanical engineering, just engineering in general, because I didn't have a lot of money growing up. I read a magazine in 1987 called U.S. News& World Report. The five or seven top earning degrees all were engineering. And I was like, I don't know any engineers. I grew up in New York City. And my dad was a cop. We were living in the country at the time, very rural place. I seemed pretty good at math and science and I got into it. I love technology. I always admired Steve Jobs and Bill Gates and those guys were kind of heroes from my childhood. And I got a design job in Detroit using CADCAM software. And so I got pretty good at it. I went to go work for the company. It was turned out to be this company parametric technology corporation or PTC. I went there for the technology, not realizing that they kind of possibly are the greatest sales team that's ever been put together. So this qualification methodology meant.”
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
“Man, I'm so happy to be here, longtime listener, first time caller. I have enjoyed your podcast for years and I'm fired up for today.”
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
“We will have a legendary sales team making life changing money, being best in class, and having fun. 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. 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.”
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