YouSaid · the spoken record

Zach Lawryk

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40
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2023-02-20
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2023-02-20
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  1. “There's a company called Vivant that I think does an exceptional job. They create technology for solution consulting organization and solution consulting leaders. I think they've done an exceptional job of engaging and building a customer-centered community around their products and services. And it feels very intentional and as much of frankly as much as I have resisted investing in like technology, they've done a great job of pulling me into that community and getting me exposed to their products and services.”

    2023-02-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: What is Sales Engineering? When and How to Hire Them? How They Should Work With AE's? How to Measure Their Success? How They Change Close Rates and Sales Comp Plans with Zach Lawryk, Head of Solutions Consulting @ Rippling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “I'm going to say more of like a medium. I think video is my favorite sales tool today. Asynchronous video is super effective tactic for developing pipeline and engaging customers earlier in the sales process.”

    2023-02-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: What is Sales Engineering? When and How to Hire Them? How They Should Work With AE's? How to Measure Their Success? How They Change Close Rates and Sales Comp Plans with Zach Lawryk, Head of Solutions Consulting @ Rippling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Travis Bryan. Why? Because I think that he is an SE at heart and was always very empathetic and a delight to work with as an SE.”

    2023-02-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: What is Sales Engineering? When and How to Hire Them? How They Should Work With AE's? How to Measure Their Success? How They Change Close Rates and Sales Comp Plans with Zach Lawryk, Head of Solutions Consulting @ Rippling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “I think the sports analogy still rings true. It is a tactic or strategy you apply at the appropriate time for a desired outcome.”

    2023-02-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: What is Sales Engineering? When and How to Hire Them? How They Should Work With AE's? How to Measure Their Success? How They Change Close Rates and Sales Comp Plans with Zach Lawryk, Head of Solutions Consulting @ Rippling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “If they can't work with their AEs, that's red flag number one. Sometimes you get folks with a deep technical background who don't have a tolerance for salespeople and are running into personal conflict or professional conflict. That's red flag number one. If that's not working, it's never going to work. It doesn't matter how smart the person is. Red flag number two is that especially in early stage companies, the person that you hire has to be an absolute self-starter. And somebody who's both a builder and willing to work on deals. And I remember my first job as the loan SE at Guest Satisfaction was I was building the demo environment. So I was building all the decks. I was working on deals. I was working with business development. You just have to be really upfront in describing that's what the job's about. And people have to be excited about if they are willing to participate in all those activities and they're not going to work out.”

    2023-02-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: What is Sales Engineering? When and How to Hire Them? How They Should Work With AE's? How to Measure Their Success? How They Change Close Rates and Sales Comp Plans with Zach Lawryk, Head of Solutions Consulting @ Rippling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “This is also a very challenging question over time. Because there are a lot of non correlated factors to why Nancy is on a deal, right? And you could look at close rate. That's the easiest way to say for deals where there is an SC, we should have a higher close rate. But at the same time, an SE could be a great way to qualify deals out early stage and save us time so we're working on the right deals at the right time. On the flip of that as well, and this is not going to be a direct answer to your question because it's a tough one. But on the flip side of that, you're typically working on deals that have a higher chance of closing because they're better qualified and warrant a more technical resource. One of the things I heard, this is actually, I heard this on a recent podcast, and I think this is the BP of SE at SolarWinds, and I really like the way he talked about this, is that he measures how the deals where they close rate of deals where they've achieved the solution went and all the things that they did to achieve said solution went is their measures for success of whether or not SEs are effective. And so we want to have more SEs on deals working towards a solution to determine whether or not we were successful as a function.”

    2023-02-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: What is Sales Engineering? When and How to Hire Them? How They Should Work With AE's? How to Measure Their Success? How They Change Close Rates and Sales Comp Plans with Zach Lawryk, Head of Solutions Consulting @ Rippling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “I believe that there is the AE's responsibility to close. So we have the concept of a solution win that we work towards as SEs. Our job is to ensure that the technology aligns to what the customer is trying to accomplish from a business perspective. And depending on the product or service you offer, there are certain check boxes that you just need to check. As evaluation, sometimes that's a security questionnaire that everybody has to fill out or they have to have received the security presentation and we would have to ensure that they have all the right requirements and technical requirements that they are a fit for the solution or product or service that we provide. And then it is the AE's responsibility to close.”

    2023-02-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: What is Sales Engineering? When and How to Hire Them? How They Should Work With AE's? How to Measure Their Success? How They Change Close Rates and Sales Comp Plans with Zach Lawryk, Head of Solutions Consulting @ Rippling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Yes, early stage. Because SE's job is all about credibility and you can get them comfortable selling a deal of a larger size or talking to a customer of a different stature. But if they don't have any credibility talking to that customer, it's all for nothing. So having somebody that come in with industry credibility and expertise, I can train them more easily on the sales side than I can on the industry stuff.”

    2023-02-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: What is Sales Engineering? When and How to Hire Them? How They Should Work With AE's? How to Measure Their Success? How They Change Close Rates and Sales Comp Plans with Zach Lawryk, Head of Solutions Consulting @ Rippling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Early stage in the market. I think it's hard to make that sacrifice, especially when every hire has to ramp more quickly. When you get bigger, you have the luxury of spending more time developing talent and giving them more time to get familiar with the industry or something.”

    2023-02-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: What is Sales Engineering? When and How to Hire Them? How They Should Work With AE's? How to Measure Their Success? How They Change Close Rates and Sales Comp Plans with Zach Lawryk, Head of Solutions Consulting @ Rippling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “You have the time to do that. That could be a helpful way to accelerate product expertise. I just think logistically that's difficult depending on the size. If you're a smaller company and you're hiring your first SE, I think that's a great way for them to get exposure to the kind of questions that are coming through for sure.”

    2023-02-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: What is Sales Engineering? When and How to Hire Them? How They Should Work With AE's? How to Measure Their Success? How They Change Close Rates and Sales Comp Plans with Zach Lawryk, Head of Solutions Consulting @ Rippling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “I think pretty simple, you obviously will have some sort of product training depending on what stage of growth you're at. When we were at Slack, we've sort of built it from scratch. They had some well-documented product documentation, et cetera. We used something called work ramp to walk a candidate through a six-week process where basically they have some self-service training they go through. They get exposure to a lot of customer calls and they get a lot of exposure to the ideal customer profile as well. And the blend of both, I think, is critical. It can be done at a lot of different ways. I don't think it takes a number of months to get somebody ramps, depending on the technical depth of a product. And it's very easy to just put together a product training and enable in an onboarding customer training, enablement, and onboarding. And you want them coming out, understanding and feeling confident in how to present and demonstrate the product and confident in understanding the ideal customer profile and who the buyer is.”

    2023-02-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: What is Sales Engineering? When and How to Hire Them? How They Should Work With AE's? How to Measure Their Success? How They Change Close Rates and Sales Comp Plans with Zach Lawryk, Head of Solutions Consulting @ Rippling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “I think the biggest lessons learned is I think as you think about building your own sales process at every stage, you should feel like you're receiving data and information on that candidate that's going to help you make a decision one way or the other. And especially as you get to the end of that process, however you design the presentation should be done in a way that is going to help you make an objective decision on the candidate. I say that because where I've seen it fail or fall down is we go through this process that we've designed for probably our own benefit and for the benefit of the candidate feeling like they're going through a professional process with a company. But at the end of the process we're basically justifying our own bias. We're just like, oh yeah, you know, I kind of like that person. They come from Salesforce. Let's hire them. And it didn't matter how they performed or what they did. And that happens all the time, I think. It's really critical for you to be very objective at the end of the process and be able to surface any objections or conflict at the end to make a decision effectively.”

    2023-02-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: What is Sales Engineering? When and How to Hire Them? How They Should Work With AE's? How to Measure Their Success? How They Change Close Rates and Sales Comp Plans with Zach Lawryk, Head of Solutions Consulting @ Rippling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Don't think that mutually exclusive. I don't think that actually charisma necessarily corresponds to sales, actually. I think that there are a lot of folks that may not have like a traditionally categorized charisma that have a strong sales aptitude because they think about the benefit to the customer. Like it's all about, again, going back to value. Like, can somebody really take the time to empathize with the folks that we're selling to to understand how the technology is actually going to apply to business outcomes? And you can get a sense for sales aptitude pretty quickly and you want to make sure that they have a blend of both.”

    2023-02-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: What is Sales Engineering? When and How to Hire Them? How They Should Work With AE's? How to Measure Their Success? How They Change Close Rates and Sales Comp Plans with Zach Lawryk, Head of Solutions Consulting @ Rippling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “And I would say thank you for your time. I think what's hard to hide is an SE who is generally like a very high IQ smart person, right? Sometimes they have a low tolerance for working with folks.”

    2023-02-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: What is Sales Engineering? When and How to Hire Them? How They Should Work With AE's? How to Measure Their Success? How They Change Close Rates and Sales Comp Plans with Zach Lawryk, Head of Solutions Consulting @ Rippling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “You got to continue to ask questions. Show me an example. Show me an example of how you dealt with conflict on the team. And that can be really telling. Once you start to break through, everybody's got a set of prepared interview questions or retorts, but you've got to ask that second, third, and fourth question to continue to break through and say, like, so what happened when you had a conflict? Tell me something about your job that you hate. Tell me what you really don't like about the job. Tell me what you really didn't like about the team that you worked with. Those sort of questions can be really revealing.”

    2023-02-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: What is Sales Engineering? When and How to Hire Them? How They Should Work With AE's? How to Measure Their Success? How They Change Close Rates and Sales Comp Plans with Zach Lawryk, Head of Solutions Consulting @ Rippling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Over time, we developed a competency based hiring model. We like to have them really talk through experiences where they have demonstrated value. The way they can articulate how they approach learning about something, taking that information and putting it into sort of presentation form and articulating the value of something, that can be really telling about whether or not they are capable and have the competencies to be really successful in the role. Another component that's critical, especially in this role, is that it doesn't matter how smart or good of a presenter or how technical an SE is if they can't work with their AE counterparts, they're never going to be successful. So we really want to make sure that they have a history of collaborating with people of all different types. And that's really important.”

    2023-02-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: What is Sales Engineering? When and How to Hire Them? How They Should Work With AE's? How to Measure Their Success? How They Change Close Rates and Sales Comp Plans with Zach Lawryk, Head of Solutions Consulting @ Rippling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Yes, especially when you hire the first one or especially at a company that has grown up from very quickly, you've had a lot of capable reps who have done all of what Esses are doing and perhaps more because they had to. They didn't have those resources in the past. And it's something that just takes some time to work out of. You have to help those folks understand the value of having an additional resource and also understand the value of team selling. One thing that I think is important to understand about SEs and team selling in general, but even if both people could do exactly the same thing, there's a lot of value in having just two people on a call because a prospect or customer is going to answer questions differently coming from an SC than they would from an account executive because they have this perception that the account executive just wants to get them to close the deal and the SE truly cares about the business, which is true, but it's just this dynamic that continues to play out.”

    2023-02-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: What is Sales Engineering? When and How to Hire Them? How They Should Work With AE's? How to Measure Their Success? How They Change Close Rates and Sales Comp Plans with Zach Lawryk, Head of Solutions Consulting @ Rippling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “I usually have a panel, so it's myself depending on how many people you have involved. You want to have the hiring manager potentially from someone from the sales side if they have the time and scale, because it's always great when you hire a new SE to have endorsement from sales counterpart to say this person's great. And another SE or SE manager.”

    2023-02-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: What is Sales Engineering? When and How to Hire Them? How They Should Work With AE's? How to Measure Their Success? How They Change Close Rates and Sales Comp Plans with Zach Lawryk, Head of Solutions Consulting @ Rippling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “That's an age old question, Harry. Ultimately, where I stand today is you get them to demonstrate your product and understand the value prop better than anybody. Like you understand the target customer. You just have to do so with the understanding that it's not going to be the best demo of your product that you've ever seen, but you have to understand how to measure for competency or evaluate for competency as it relates to that. So what we do and what I've done in the past is you give them a stripped down scenario, something that would be easy for any technologist to grok, but helps them demonstrate whether or not they can connect value to what your product does. And I think it can be structured in a way that's fair to anybody and fair to the right candidate.”

    2023-02-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: What is Sales Engineering? When and How to Hire Them? How They Should Work With AE's? How to Measure Their Success? How They Change Close Rates and Sales Comp Plans with Zach Lawryk, Head of Solutions Consulting @ Rippling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Pretty simple. There's something that we did at Slack, which we haven't yet implemented at Ripling. I'm not sure if we will, which is sort of a chronological interview. And it seems like it's a lot of time to spend, but we would spend an hour and a half going through a person's background, job by job, to understand their motivations, why they joined a company, why they left the company, especially if you're in a lot of interviews. It's really difficult to get to know somebody and really get to know their motivations and the work they've done and whether or not their resume is actually reflective of the impact that they've had over time. That's not just unique to SEs, but that's something we did and I thought was really effective and helped us get to know and hire really great people from basically zero to 200. And then you also want to have an opportunity for the demonstrate the craft because there's very much part art and science in this role. Deep expertise is important, but what's also important and what makes SEs the most successful is if they also are great presenters and can articulate value. So you need to give them an opportunity to do that.”

    2023-02-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: What is Sales Engineering? When and How to Hire Them? How They Should Work With AE's? How to Measure Their Success? How They Change Close Rates and Sales Comp Plans with Zach Lawryk, Head of Solutions Consulting @ Rippling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “On average across a wide variety of products, when you get to about five to seven reps because you're starting your first sales team, you probably need to hire more capable multifaceted AEs for the first five. But then you get to a point where they can't be handling all the demos and handling all the follow-up and handling all the technical details and solutioning. You're going to achieve scale by adding another sort of central resource that'll five to one ratio, moving at scale beyond and handle some of the back office stuff as well. And a great example I joined a company called Get Satisfaction long ago. I was the first SE and I think we had about five or seven reps or so.”

    2023-02-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: What is Sales Engineering? When and How to Hire Them? How They Should Work With AE's? How to Measure Their Success? How They Change Close Rates and Sales Comp Plans with Zach Lawryk, Head of Solutions Consulting @ Rippling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “If you're going to invest in SE resources, you're going to have larger quotas for the AEs for sure because the idea is you have to believe that by adding additional resources to the equation, that they'll be able to execute on a much larger quota at the same rate with additional SE resources. And the SEs are from an SE comp perspective should always have a variable component. You want them to have some skin in the game, but there's less risk involved. Typically, you've got the AE was 50-50, 50 base, 50 variable. And the SE in an ideal world is 70-30. And you want the SE, in my opinion, to have as much skin in the game as possible and be connected to the same number as the sales executive because they need to have a shared destiny and they need to be considered salespeople as well in my opinion.”

    2023-02-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: What is Sales Engineering? When and How to Hire Them? How They Should Work With AE's? How to Measure Their Success? How They Change Close Rates and Sales Comp Plans with Zach Lawryk, Head of Solutions Consulting @ Rippling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Yeah, that's the modern movement. I think Frank Slootman, an idea that he doesn't want to have customer success at any new business. But I think what he's really saying is that he wants the sales team to take more responsibility for the success of a customer. It's not that they don't have CSMs in the traditional sense, but that they have more responsibility to sell good deals so that the customer doesn't churn. When you extend the solutions consultant deeper in the sales process or even post-sales and ensures customer success. And early on, I would say a company of less than 50 people that your SE is going to take on more of that responsibility and that's good. It's healthy.”

    2023-02-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: What is Sales Engineering? When and How to Hire Them? How They Should Work With AE's? How to Measure Their Success? How They Change Close Rates and Sales Comp Plans with Zach Lawryk, Head of Solutions Consulting @ Rippling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Ideal world, yes, there's a perfect handoff. There's also a modern movement for SEs to take on more of that responsibility.”

    2023-02-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: What is Sales Engineering? When and How to Hire Them? How They Should Work With AE's? How to Measure Their Success? How They Change Close Rates and Sales Comp Plans with Zach Lawryk, Head of Solutions Consulting @ Rippling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “It depends on the volume. I mean, I just talked to a CEO yesterday. We were talking about the ideal A to SE ratio. And his average ACB was about like 35K. It's all about how many opportunities you think your AEs can manage and how many opportunities you need your SEs to help manage. And then you think about the win rate and if it converts and it's worth the investment that you're making that additional resource.”

    2023-02-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: What is Sales Engineering? When and How to Hire Them? How They Should Work With AE's? How to Measure Their Success? How They Change Close Rates and Sales Comp Plans with Zach Lawryk, Head of Solutions Consulting @ Rippling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “There's two things. One, if it's a highly technical product that requires deep expertise, oftentimes you can't have the same person be the account executive who also is going to go to that level of depth with a customer. There are some solutions where very early on you just have to have a technical expert on every call because it's that detailed and that technical product or solution. On the other hand, if you're competing in a market where you're competing sales teams have a solutions engineer or consultant as part of the sales teams composition, that's when you have to think earlier about adding a solutions consultant to your team as well because part of what we do is provide that deep expertise solution expertise presentation differentiation through process and approach. But also it's a competitive differentiator in how you approach a sales cycle and how you appear to a customer. And if you show up and you know there's only an AU who's trying to handle this end to end and you're competing for a large ACV or dollar amount, it's really difficult to compete without the right resources in place.”

    2023-02-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: What is Sales Engineering? When and How to Hire Them? How They Should Work With AE's? How to Measure Their Success? How They Change Close Rates and Sales Comp Plans with Zach Lawryk, Head of Solutions Consulting @ Rippling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Yeah, I think it is a healthy forcing function. We're all scared about the current macroeconomic climate, particularly in sales. Now we're forced to really think about how we're going to sell this if a CFO is scrutinizing every detail. Having the CFO involved is always tough, but it forces you to think about true ROI, dollarized ROI, which is not always easy, especially for early stage founders. That should be an exercise that they go through. If you had a CFO come into this conversation and had to justify the spend on this amongst all the other software that they're purchasing or investing in, how would you do it? So that same exercise where you would identify primary buyer, you could do the same thing for every potential buyer or influencer as a part of the process. And if that's the case, it's something that's required necessary.”

    2023-02-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: What is Sales Engineering? When and How to Hire Them? How They Should Work With AE's? How to Measure Their Success? How They Change Close Rates and Sales Comp Plans with Zach Lawryk, Head of Solutions Consulting @ Rippling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “So he said something, and I was listening to this yesterday in the car. He kind of alluded to the concept of these business value canvases. It's a really empathetic exercise that anybody can walk through where they identify who their customer is as an individual and a business person, the pains that customer has, the gains your product potentially could provide. And you essentially connect your potential customer with your product and solution and essentially just try to map what your solution does to the outcomes that your customer is trying to achieve. That's a vast oversimplification there, but it is a really powerful exercise to walk through. And you imagine the power if you actually have that sort of visual in your head as you're developing your product and talking to customers and talking to investors makes things a lot easier.”

    2023-02-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: What is Sales Engineering? When and How to Hire Them? How They Should Work With AE's? How to Measure Their Success? How They Change Close Rates and Sales Comp Plans with Zach Lawryk, Head of Solutions Consulting @ Rippling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “It always boggles my mind. And I was thinking about this morning as well. I think it's because the process of starting a company, developing a product is a very personal journey. You're really wrapped up in yourself and you sometimes don't take the time to empathize with the actual customers that you're selling the solution to. So when I try to mentor folks or earlier stage companies that have no sales expertise or background, think about who you're actually going to sell this product to. Map out their pains and gains. Is it Marty Kagan? Is that the guy that you just had on the podcast?”

    2023-02-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: What is Sales Engineering? When and How to Hire Them? How They Should Work With AE's? How to Measure Their Success? How They Change Close Rates and Sales Comp Plans with Zach Lawryk, Head of Solutions Consulting @ Rippling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “Yeah, and that's where especially now we have to think about scale. We think about what we do on a weekly basis, how we're engaging with customers, and how we might productize some of those engagements in a way that can be scaled earlier in the process. So it's not us physically getting on a call with a customer earlier. It's us creating content and messaging and solution material that can be leveraged earlier in a sales process, but we don't have to get involved directly when we do it at scale.”

    2023-02-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: What is Sales Engineering? When and How to Hire Them? How They Should Work With AE's? How to Measure Their Success? How They Change Close Rates and Sales Comp Plans with Zach Lawryk, Head of Solutions Consulting @ Rippling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “A really good point, and that's where I see, especially in my world where the solutions engineering function was predominantly a really guarded function or resource where you couldn't even talk to somebody on my team 10 years ago unless you've gone through an hour discovery call and you've been well qualified. We're starting to encroach earlier in the process and that's okay. We want our team to develop content that will be consumed earlier in the process. So we're creating things like short form videos and demo vignettes and slides that are easier to consume in new formats in a way that helps the customer educate themselves earlier in that process. So by the time they get to us, we're very well aligned on what they're trying to do, what they're trying to accomplish. It makes our jobs easier, more precise, and more valuable, and it makes the buying experience much more enjoyable as well and effective.”

    2023-02-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: What is Sales Engineering? When and How to Hire Them? How They Should Work With AE's? How to Measure Their Success? How They Change Close Rates and Sales Comp Plans with Zach Lawryk, Head of Solutions Consulting @ Rippling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “I don't think Outbound is dead. I think Outbound has just fundamentally changed in terms of the methods that you need to use to engage prospects. And you have to take like a multi-channel approach to that. And it's as simple as creating different forms of content to capture people's attention and the way that they consume information today. TikTok style approach to selling. You and I, we're going to get off this podcast or whenever you take a break, you're probably going to look at your phone and consume about 16 different pieces of content and articles and probably read half of those articles. We don't have time to consume long-form content in the way that we did. But we're selling as if people have time to read these elaborate emails. We've got to capture their attention where they are and the way their brain processes information.”

    2023-02-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: What is Sales Engineering? When and How to Hire Them? How They Should Work With AE's? How to Measure Their Success? How They Change Close Rates and Sales Comp Plans with Zach Lawryk, Head of Solutions Consulting @ Rippling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “I think PLG is a really fancy word these days, and there are a lot of people that kind of use that term loosely. But at the end of the day, it's a great way to get exposure to a product in a self-service fashion. People still want to talk to people, but they want to talk to people on their terms. So Forrester has this concept of sensemaking. It's a term they use as it applies to modern complex selling. And I really like it because what it's really about is your job is not to sell something to somebody. Your job is to help your buyer make sense of a really”

    2023-02-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: What is Sales Engineering? When and How to Hire Them? How They Should Work With AE's? How to Measure Their Success? How They Change Close Rates and Sales Comp Plans with Zach Lawryk, Head of Solutions Consulting @ Rippling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “It's not an easy experience, and it's not very fun. You can imagine when somebody is trying to withhold information from you, it makes that experience far worse. So I think what has changed and what is broken about most sales organizations today is they're still trying to sell, like they're in control of that process. When the truth is they're not. The buyer isn't controlled of the process. And it's more about buyer enablement than it's about selling anymore.”

    2023-02-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: What is Sales Engineering? When and How to Hire Them? How They Should Work With AE's? How to Measure Their Success? How They Change Close Rates and Sales Comp Plans with Zach Lawryk, Head of Solutions Consulting @ Rippling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “Broadly speaking, most technology sales organizations are selling the same way they were 20 years ago. We've got to do some deep discovery with you. We're controlling access to resources, controlling the sales process. It's a very seller-centric approach, which I think is totally broken. The way things have shifted, and this began before COVID, but was accelerated with COVID and the fact that we're all staring at 16 different screens on a daily basis, is that attention spans have dwindled. And I don't know, have you ever purchased software before”

    2023-02-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: What is Sales Engineering? When and How to Hire Them? How They Should Work With AE's? How to Measure Their Success? How They Change Close Rates and Sales Comp Plans with Zach Lawryk, Head of Solutions Consulting @ Rippling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “Think about the advice that I give to folks earlier in their career. Go to someplace where you're surrounded by people that are smarter than you, but also people whom you think you can collaborate effectively because the people that you work with are really what make every single day tolerable. It's all about the people. It doesn't matter how fast the company is growing, how great the technology is, how big the total addressable market. If you don't feel like you're learning from the people that you're surrounded with, then you're in the wrong spot.”

    2023-02-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: What is Sales Engineering? When and How to Hire Them? How They Should Work With AE's? How to Measure Their Success? How They Change Close Rates and Sales Comp Plans with Zach Lawryk, Head of Solutions Consulting @ Rippling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “I would say I also, while I've worked at some really successful companies, there are some companies that didn't live up to expectations. And I learned just as much from those experiences as I did from Slack, Salesforce, and Box. And I would say the common denominators have always followed great people. That is a good proxy for understanding whether or not the company is going to be successful and is on the right trajectory. It's the quality of people you're surrounded with. And that's a comment that I've followed throughout my career.”

    2023-02-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: What is Sales Engineering? When and How to Hire Them? How They Should Work With AE's? How to Measure Their Success? How They Change Close Rates and Sales Comp Plans with Zach Lawryk, Head of Solutions Consulting @ Rippling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “So the sales engineer or solutions consultant or pre-sales consultant, there are a lot of different words these days. I think solution consultant is the proper term. We are a product expert, an expert in the solutions that tie to business value to help support the sales rep in the execution of their quota.”

    2023-02-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: What is Sales Engineering? When and How to Hire Them? How They Should Work With AE's? How to Measure Their Success? How They Change Close Rates and Sales Comp Plans with Zach Lawryk, Head of Solutions Consulting @ Rippling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “Salesforce instance and manage it on one side of the room there were the technical support people like myself on the other side of the room were sales engineers the sales engineer side of the room was having a lot more fun than I was and I looked across the room and I said I wonder what that job is about it looks like they're having a lot more fun than we are we're taking this so seriously lo and behold it's true it was a much more fun and rewarding career and I never looked back that was like around 2006 I interviewed for my first SE job I didn't get it the first time I demoed they said you're going to need to do that again that was pretty bad the second time around they said that was okay come on the board i've never been more excited about getting a job”

    2023-02-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: What is Sales Engineering? When and How to Hire Them? How They Should Work With AE's? How to Measure Their Success? How They Change Close Rates and Sales Comp Plans with Zach Lawryk, Head of Solutions Consulting @ Rippling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “So, long story short, I started university with the idea that I was going to complete a computer science degree. It was 1999 right before the bubble burst. That was the best way or the best path to making great money. Halfway through it, I realized I didn't want to spend all my time in the lab because that was most of the initial coursework for the computer science degree. I pivoted and said I'm going to be a lawyer. So I did political science instead, but never got away from technology. I always loved the intersection of business and technology. And frankly, I stumbled into technology sales. I started a company in college. I had no idea what I was doing, but was sort of on the business and technology side. I worked for a company that got me to San Francisco. I luckily got a job at Salesforce. I knew nothing about the company, knew nothing about the job, was just happy to get paid a little bit more than what I was paid previously. Long story short, I'm in a training room. I started my job at Salesforce. I was like a premier support person basically. So I had a set of accounts. I was the Salesforce expert help them set up.”

    2023-02-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: What is Sales Engineering? When and How to Hire Them? How They Should Work With AE's? How to Measure Their Success? How They Change Close Rates and Sales Comp Plans with Zach Lawryk, Head of Solutions Consulting @ Rippling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source