YouSaid · the spoken record

Zhenya Loginov

lines on the record: 53
first: 2022-06-22
most recent: 2022-06-22
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

“So I think that the companies that have the most unorthodox approach to building the go-to-market machine and sales from the beginning sometimes get the most impressive results. So for me, the one shining example is Atlassen. A newer example is maybe Coda with their unique monetization model. And I think that companies with exceptionally strong PLG motions such as Canva or Notion have a great potential to develop new go-to-market and sales models for the future”
2022-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: Why Founders Should Not Be The One To Create The Sales Playbook, How To Structure Each Interview in the Hiring Process For Sales Reps, How To Use an "Interview Panel" Effectively and more with Zhenya Loginov, CRO @ Miro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The last two years, I think it's been pretty hard to just be away from people, not on the same floor with salespeople or engineers and kind of everybody else in the company. So I'm really looking forward to being in the office more often and travel to other offices a lot more often.”
2022-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: Why Founders Should Not Be The One To Create The Sales Playbook, How To Structure Each Interview in the Hiring Process For Sales Reps, How To Use an "Interview Panel" Effectively and more with Zhenya Loginov, CRO @ Miro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that there are not enough people who move from other teams into sales and who move from sales to other teams. So I think that if more salespeople jumped into non-salespeople like product and finance jumped into sales, the world would just be better for everybody. There's just going to be more empathy with the sales team from the rest of the organization, more empathy from sales to the rest of org as well. And there's just a lot of magic that can happen in areas like product management or reparations or finance if some sales DNA is infused there.”
2022-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: Why Founders Should Not Be The One To Create The Sales Playbook, How To Structure Each Interview in the Hiring Process For Sales Reps, How To Use an "Interview Panel" Effectively and more with Zhenya Loginov, CRO @ Miro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Biggest one is you're just not investing the time and not being willing to invest the time to learn this art of sales and kind of learn how those people think and how those people work. So just entirely delegating this and not investing the time to learn how sales works. Say your heavy job to succeed in, but you don't have to grow with the company, and the company may grow very, very fast. So you need to have a plan for your learning for the next couple of years, and you need to stick to it. So kind of figure out how to become better at what you do, what do you need to learn, who do you learn from, how do you get access to those people. And treat this plan as a part of your job.”
2022-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: Why Founders Should Not Be The One To Create The Sales Playbook, How To Structure Each Interview in the Hiring Process For Sales Reps, How To Use an "Interview Panel" Effectively and more with Zhenya Loginov, CRO @ Miro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Before you go public. Yeah, I think also the biggest learning for me is that actually in hiring, hiding a person who sits across the ocean from you is kind of five times as important as the person who sits in the same office. It's just because it's hard to notice when things go wrong timely and it's very costly to fix mistakes. So I had to replace a few heads of regions before and it's just a very, very painful process because you are not in the same office to support the transition and it's very hard to find a replacement and so on. So I think I'm hiding especially cautiously for those head of the region roles now than I used to do before.”
2022-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: Why Founders Should Not Be The One To Create The Sales Playbook, How To Structure Each Interview in the Hiring Process For Sales Reps, How To Use an "Interview Panel" Effectively and more with Zhenya Loginov, CRO @ Miro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think the biggest one for me was it takes an entire village to win this thing. You need to open local legal entities and have bank accounts and insurance and figure out local contracts and localize your product to a language and maybe even localize data residency. It takes the entire company to open presence somewhere else, Australia or in Europe or in the US. And you need to be ready for it. And it's just to go to market leader, you cannot succeed in it without the support of your CEO and CFO and the operational organization. So that's big. It's a big learning. The second one is that kind of as big of a journey as it is. It's if you can do it, you should do it rather early and rather fast. I think at Dropbox we launched the first region outside of the US when we were over 100 million in ER. And I think that, frankly, was too late. I think you can start doing this when you are 12, 20, 30 million because it just takes a very long time to build a reputation in the market to build strengths in the market and you want to give yourself plenty of time to build strong and ideally cash flow positive business.”
2022-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: Why Founders Should Not Be The One To Create The Sales Playbook, How To Structure Each Interview in the Hiring Process For Sales Reps, How To Use an "Interview Panel" Effectively and more with Zhenya Loginov, CRO @ Miro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The biggest one actually is about 150, the Dunbar number when you as a person, as a founder, as a leader, start to not know every single person on your team and start to lose the ability to control every single thing that happens that happens at about 150 people. That actually is a real big thing that may take like a couple of years to overcome.”
2022-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: Why Founders Should Not Be The One To Create The Sales Playbook, How To Structure Each Interview in the Hiring Process For Sales Reps, How To Use an "Interview Panel" Effectively and more with Zhenya Loginov, CRO @ Miro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think that the number of deals closed in a golf club is probably much smaller now than 10 and 20 years ago. But I did close a deal on a bike ride at one time.”
2022-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: Why Founders Should Not Be The One To Create The Sales Playbook, How To Structure Each Interview in the Hiring Process For Sales Reps, How To Use an "Interview Panel" Effectively and more with Zhenya Loginov, CRO @ Miro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think the biggest problem that I've seen with process is when somebody wants myself or maybe the CEO wants your team to follow the process that the team doesn't buy into. And if the team doesn't buy into, your job as a leader is to figure out how to either have the buy-in or how to change the process so that buy-in is there so that the team has the rules of the game, as light rules of the game as possible, and has the resources to play this game, but also has a lot of flexibility and freedom to do it where they can.”
2022-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: Why Founders Should Not Be The One To Create The Sales Playbook, How To Structure Each Interview in the Hiring Process For Sales Reps, How To Use an "Interview Panel" Effectively and more with Zhenya Loginov, CRO @ Miro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's a great question. I'm a big fan of agility and giving as much kind of local power and having as light of a process for the team as possible. I think ideally when we are running a large team, my team is now, what, like 700 people, I want the team not to feel like a huge monolith that needs to move with the speed of this lowest piece of the organization here, but to feel like dozen different villages that have the power to run as fast as they can and have all the opportunity to do it. So for example, when we are setting a new geography like Japan or like France, I want to give as much power and authority to a local leader to be able to run their business as they see fit so that they can be agile on that scale and that they feel like a small and nimble team as opposed to like a cognitive huge machine. The process needs to be as slight as possible but should come from those teams that are actually in front of the customer and if something helps that team like for example there is a very specific sales process and process of discovery your team and your leaders need to be on board with this process before they adopt it.”
2022-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: Why Founders Should Not Be The One To Create The Sales Playbook, How To Structure Each Interview in the Hiring Process For Sales Reps, How To Use an "Interview Panel" Effectively and more with Zhenya Loginov, CRO @ Miro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The biggest one is when salespeople feel that it's like any adversity in the dealer view. When the dealer review for the salesperson is like a review of their personal success, then it becomes a show. They become defensive. They show you only the things that they want you to see. And you don't really see what's really happening in the field. You see what the salesperson wants you to see. I think the best way to run DLAVs is when salespeople know that it's intended to help, it's intended to help close that deal, and it's intended to help create a better motion for the sales organization. the way that you approach asking questions or giving suggestions or how do you split the ownership of the dealer beyond who's doing what I think should be targeted at how do I help this particular salesperson win this particular customer best way possible how do I help the rest of the sales team who is in the room learn something from this to become better”
2022-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: Why Founders Should Not Be The One To Create The Sales Playbook, How To Structure Each Interview in the Hiring Process For Sales Reps, How To Use an "Interview Panel" Effectively and more with Zhenya Loginov, CRO @ Miro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“60 minutes I think is good for one deal if it's in depth and we don't necessarily review a deal that is close to we may review a customer that is mid flight on a given deal or maybe there is a customer where we don't even have a deal but we are creating opportunities there and we would review that so it's about one hour who sets the agenda I think the process and the format should be dictated by your senior most salesperson in the room right your head of sales but then you create the framework but all the meat and assets that goes into it is delivered by your salesperson who is running the deal they should own that meeting”
2022-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: Why Founders Should Not Be The One To Create The Sales Playbook, How To Structure Each Interview in the Hiring Process For Sales Reps, How To Use an "Interview Panel" Effectively and more with Zhenya Loginov, CRO @ Miro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think we had a really good process at segment where we did early views. I think weekly, and we have a couple of deals every week to review on every team. So it's a weekly process”
2022-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: Why Founders Should Not Be The One To Create The Sales Playbook, How To Structure Each Interview in the Hiring Process For Sales Reps, How To Use an "Interview Panel" Effectively and more with Zhenya Loginov, CRO @ Miro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Audience for the daily review is not the person who did the deal, but all the people around. And I think one of the worst ways to do a daily review is when one person is listening and nobody else pays attention and only the person who was there in the room gets any input from your head of sales on how to do the deal better. I think the best deal I use is basically.”
2022-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: Why Founders Should Not Be The One To Create The Sales Playbook, How To Structure Each Interview in the Hiring Process For Sales Reps, How To Use an "Interview Panel" Effectively and more with Zhenya Loginov, CRO @ Miro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Direct as possible so radical candor to the extreme so you care about the person but you need to deliver that message very clearly so the moment that you know that there is something to deliver you take the person aside you sit down and you're brutally honest in what you're seeing and what consequences follow if those things are not fixed and i've seen the best reaction when it's super clear when people also need to feel that they care about them that you're in their camp that you need them to succeed in the company you need the company to succeed together with them right but they need to also be clear on what are they doing right or what are they doing wrong and what do they need to fix to be successful this is assessment and monitoring on a kind of person level i'm intrigued when we think about on a deal level do you do post mortems on deals do you do deal reviews and how do you structure them internally i'm fascinated we deal in we deal with both segment and you think the purpose of the deal reviews is primarily for your sales team to learn what to do well and what not to do well i think your”
2022-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: Why Founders Should Not Be The One To Create The Sales Playbook, How To Structure Each Interview in the Hiring Process For Sales Reps, How To Use an "Interview Panel" Effectively and more with Zhenya Loginov, CRO @ Miro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A clear, like, oh, this is awesome. We get so much value, we like the person so much. You need to dig deeper and figure out, can you enable this person to be more successful or do you need to part ways? So I've seen a lot of early rejection and oftentimes it's not the quality of the candidate. Sometimes it's the approach that they take. I had an example of one hire who got significant kind of rejection after the first three months. But then when we sat down and resolved it and when the person talked to the team, they are now very, very loved, much loved by their team. I do want to ask, say they're rejected by the organism or they're not delivering value. How do we communicate that first concern? Do we take them aside and say, hey, we're concerned by X, Y, and Z you're on warning? Just help me understand the right communication pathways after identifying a concern. Yeah, I think my philosophy here is that anybody in the leadership role, they're always just too important, a lot more important than person's feelings or the process that you need to follow. And I try to lean as”
2022-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: Why Founders Should Not Be The One To Create The Sales Playbook, How To Structure Each Interview in the Hiring Process For Sales Reps, How To Use an "Interview Panel" Effectively and more with Zhenya Loginov, CRO @ Miro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Join segment and they ask Tom, am I successful in this company? Like the biggest beginning of the answer was you need to start delivering value on your months number two or number three. You need to ship something. So it's a small company. There's no time to wait and build plans. You need to deliver fast. You have this maybe beginning one month till or you are invested in, but then you need to start paying back very quick week. So I think that's the first one. The second one for me, which I've seen a couple of times, was when your initial team starts to reject the person you just hired. You maybe have five salespeople and you're now hiring. They have sales or maybe you have customer success folks or somebody else. And on months two or months three, somebody from the team comes to you and says, I didn't know about this new guy. And your job as the CEO is actually to make sure that you go and practically ask them, ask all of your team members, how do they feel about the new hire? What is the value that the new hire is delivering already? Is the new hire helping them up level and do better in their job? And if you are not getting”
2022-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: Why Founders Should Not Be The One To Create The Sales Playbook, How To Structure Each Interview in the Hiring Process For Sales Reps, How To Use an "Interview Panel" Effectively and more with Zhenya Loginov, CRO @ Miro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Them more, but you've just interviewed them, you should have tested them to the extent that possible before they joined. I think after they joined the company, it's your mutual job to make them successful. It's their job and it's your job. And if you have any ability to help them, do it. Go introduce them to your board members, to your people who are their peers, sit down with them for like four hours, walk them through the intricacies of the product. I think investing as a hiding manager, as the CEO, as a founder, you need to invest a lot in your hires, especially in the first months to then see the investments pay back in the next several years. This head of sales hire. What are the biggest signs in the first three months that I've fucked up this hire? If you don't see any results delured in the first three months, if you see the person sitting and figuring out quote unquote strategy and drawing charts and not meeting customers and not delivering any value for the earlier sales team in the first three months, that's a big red flag for me. So when we had new exec team or new leadership team members,”
2022-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: Why Founders Should Not Be The One To Create The Sales Playbook, How To Structure Each Interview in the Hiring Process For Sales Reps, How To Use an "Interview Panel" Effectively and more with Zhenya Loginov, CRO @ Miro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As possible. So that's step one. And then, second, I'd like them to have one low hanging fruit in their area. I'd like them to do like one small project and it needs to be small that delivers value to if you had a sales, you either go and sell or you go and solve a particular problem for this small initial sales teams that you may already have or you go and figure some other thing that people see that you're delivering value because as a new person you also need to get a lot of buy-in from the rest of the company that you're actually capable and by delivering this first logging fruit you get the credibility that allows you to then drive change on a larger scale. Okay, so just pausing there, I'm the CEO. Do I say, Janya, you need to go meet the head of product, the head of engineering, da-da-da, and I make it happen. And do I need to give you the low hanging fruit to go get? Or do I drop you in and say, make it happen? Should I expect you to do it or should I give you the guidance? I think that like expecting me to do it, expecting you first stay as hired to do it, it only makes sense if you are trying to”
2022-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: Why Founders Should Not Be The One To Create The Sales Playbook, How To Structure Each Interview in the Hiring Process For Sales Reps, How To Use an "Interview Panel" Effectively and more with Zhenya Loginov, CRO @ Miro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What does that onboarding process look like for So, what I tried to do for AFD leadership hire that I make, I tried to free up their first months as much as possible. I tried to create a situation where they don't need to deliver anything in the first one months. I'm hiring them not for the next six months or 12 months, I'm hiding them for the next five years, plus with the company, and I want them to build the foundation of being able to succeed in the company. And for me, that's understand the product. You get to meet everybody in the company who you will need to work with. And ideally, you start from people who you will need to work with a year from now, not a month from now. So if you're ahead of sales, you don't go and talk to your salespeople first. You go and talk to your head of engineering or key engineering product leaders because eventually as a head of sales, you are going to need to work with them for the company to be successful. And if you miss the opportunity to build this personal connection in the first month, it's going to be very hard to do when you're six months into the role. So the first months I try to give them as much kind of direction to learn broadly about the company into CDM sales calls to just ingest everything that the company has built before they join.”
2022-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: Why Founders Should Not Be The One To Create The Sales Playbook, How To Structure Each Interview in the Hiring Process For Sales Reps, How To Use an "Interview Panel" Effectively and more with Zhenya Loginov, CRO @ Miro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To an hour to talk to the person. And nearly everybody who has good experience have about 40 minutes to an hour talk track that they can give you that looks impressive. But I didn't really dig into this candidate's approach to solving problems enough. I didn't do those five hours of interviews. I did like two hours and then when person joined, I realized, well, I should have found those problems that we are now having in the third hour of interview, but I never did. I do want to take this because now we've been through the process. We've got this amazing candidate onboarding.”
2022-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: Why Founders Should Not Be The One To Create The Sales Playbook, How To Structure Each Interview in the Hiring Process For Sales Reps, How To Use an "Interview Panel" Effectively and more with Zhenya Loginov, CRO @ Miro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean quite a few. Frankly, the biggest ones were when I think that I knew that I'm not doing the right step, but I did the step anyway. I had the criteria for myself at the beginning of the process. And either I ignored them or I didn't pay enough attention to him. So an example was for a given role, a hired person who had no experience of working at similar companies at all and they worked. They had third year career in technology but have never worked at a similar company that would have any international presence. It was just extremely hard to change the mindset and we had to part ways. And I knew that it would likely be extremely hard just for some reason I thought that I would be able to because of all the other strengths that the person had that I'd be able to take care of this. The other experience was when I looked at the candidates I trusted the interview panel too much and I trusted the candidates resume too much. So I looked, they had like a wonderful, fantastic resume in my interview panel was very fond of them and I think the problem with this is on your interview panel, everybody has like 40 minutes.”
2022-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: Why Founders Should Not Be The One To Create The Sales Playbook, How To Structure Each Interview in the Hiring Process For Sales Reps, How To Use an "Interview Panel" Effectively and more with Zhenya Loginov, CRO @ Miro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I probably think that I interviewed maybe like thousands of people at this point, and I think early on in my career, I lean heavily on case studies, and now I barely ever use a case study. I think that what I found is that, especially when I'm hiding leaders, I don't want them to solve an artificial puzzle or be a thought partner for BO4, a given topic. I find that their ability to succeed there very much depends on whether they were exposed to something like this before or not. I really want to talk to them about their own experiences. So if all I do is all about give me a situation when you did this and that, and then I dive into it and ask like 10 follow-up questions to understand how they solve the problem, what did they think about, how did they work with other people, like why did they make this decision?”
2022-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: Why Founders Should Not Be The One To Create The Sales Playbook, How To Structure Each Interview in the Hiring Process For Sales Reps, How To Use an "Interview Panel" Effectively and more with Zhenya Loginov, CRO @ Miro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Frankly, I think the fundamentals are the same and I think create enterprise seller and enterprise sales leader at a PLG company should be also a great one in a pure play enterprise company. I think to me the only difference is kind of that those people should have the appreciation for the importance of end user experience and appreciation for teams like product or customer experience. So they don't necessarily need to have PLG experience at a PLG company, but I want to see them sort of respect and value perspective of other people and ability to learn new things. And if they can learn new things, then they can easily learn the PLG motion as well. I don't think that there is a special breed of PLG salespeople. I think that a great salesperson is a great salesperson. They just need to be open-minded about changing their motion, their sales motion to benefit from the PLG.”
2022-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: Why Founders Should Not Be The One To Create The Sales Playbook, How To Structure Each Interview in the Hiring Process For Sales Reps, How To Use an "Interview Panel" Effectively and more with Zhenya Loginov, CRO @ Miro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think over time when you interview together with other people, you're on the same interview panels, you over time learn who is a harder and better interviewer and who almost always says yes. At some point at Dropbox we had this initiative to try to replace our final interviewer for a very long time has been the co-founder Arash has been the co-founder. He interviewed every single person to the company until we were like 500 plus people and at some point it didn't work. And the way that we wanted to find people who could potentially replace Arash, we analyzed who said no more often and who was right in the hiring decisions more often like we took the entire database of our interviews for the company and then we found those few people and what I find in my interviews is that if I did 10 interviews if I had one person on an interview panel or 10 different interviews and every single time they said a yes and then half of the time I agreed with them and half of the time I didn't that's not a very strong signal for me I'm looking for people who will well disagree with me first of all and second who will be hard to pass but reasonably hard to pass not for arbitrary reasons but they have a”
2022-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: Why Founders Should Not Be The One To Create The Sales Playbook, How To Structure Each Interview in the Hiring Process For Sales Reps, How To Use an "Interview Panel" Effectively and more with Zhenya Loginov, CRO @ Miro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I do have individual hiring panel for each role. So, what I'm looking for, I look for maybe three to five people who will talk to the person I'm trying to hire, who will be the most likely to understand well what I'm hiring, what I'm trying to hire, and who will maybe work closely with this person. And if sometimes I don't have those people inside the company, sometimes I may ask my board member to interview, or I will ask my advisor who is head of sales at much larger company to interview my first head of sales hire to understand what to do with them. But I also will have people from within the company interview hire as well. So the panel, I think, is tailor-made and basically I tried to make the panel as hard for the candidate as possible because if they pass that, I want them, they're much more likely to succeed when they join the company.”
2022-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: Why Founders Should Not Be The One To Create The Sales Playbook, How To Structure Each Interview in the Hiring Process For Sales Reps, How To Use an "Interview Panel" Effectively and more with Zhenya Loginov, CRO @ Miro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Heidi Manager who really, really sets the hiding bar, and your panel doesn't exactly know what you're hiding for. They may have a good feel, right? You're hiding head of sales and your head of marketing interviews and head of engineering interviews them and they have their own perception of what head of sales should look like, but only you thought about this five times or ten times as much as they did and you understand what challenges exactly this person will need to solve in the next year and the next two years and what do you need them to be able to do to win. So I think by investing this much time, you're basically raising the hiring bar for the candidate you're hiding.”
2022-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: Why Founders Should Not Be The One To Create The Sales Playbook, How To Structure Each Interview in the Hiring Process For Sales Reps, How To Use an "Interview Panel" Effectively and more with Zhenya Loginov, CRO @ Miro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It really depends on the role I've had rolls where I would do three to five, but I also had rolls where I would do maybe 20. But it doesn't mean that I spend four or five hours with every candidate. I usually start those interviews with the topics that I think will be the hardest for the candidate to succeed in. And then if after the first interview the candidate is not succeeding, I will move on to other ones. So the thing for me here is that I don't want them to go to the interview panel until I'm sure that they are actually good and that I am calibrated and I know what I'm hiding for. They passed my bar. What I find with the interview panels is several things. Like one is I will lose everybody's time if I pass edits why I'm like half sure about. And then that's what lead to half a year a year, 18 months long hiding cycles where all of your exec team have interviewed 25 people and are bored to death from this role. I only want them to talk to me three to five people and then say, okay, like all three of them are good and this one is better than the two others. That's one thing, but also I find that it's only the”
2022-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: Why Founders Should Not Be The One To Create The Sales Playbook, How To Structure Each Interview in the Hiring Process For Sales Reps, How To Use an "Interview Panel" Effectively and more with Zhenya Loginov, CRO @ Miro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, at least in this stage. So all the other things I have there as well, but I only will find them when I am talking to them. And then my next step as a hiding manager is that I spend about four or five hours with the candidates in structured one hour interviews before they go to the interview panel. And I'm striving to be maybe 70% sure that they will actually succeed going through the interview panel. And I also want to be about 90% sure that the candidate will accept the offer if we are to extend an offer to them.”
2022-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: Why Founders Should Not Be The One To Create The Sales Playbook, How To Structure Each Interview in the Hiring Process For Sales Reps, How To Use an "Interview Panel" Effectively and more with Zhenya Loginov, CRO @ Miro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That the company is amazing companies but have only sold commercial and not gonna even talk to that person. I'm never gonna say, well, maybe they're great. But my view is I know why I need those must-haves and if one of them is not met, then the candidate is not right and I'm gonna cycle through until I find people who just qualify everywhere.”
2022-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: Why Founders Should Not Be The One To Create The Sales Playbook, How To Structure Each Interview in the Hiring Process For Sales Reps, How To Use an "Interview Panel" Effectively and more with Zhenya Loginov, CRO @ Miro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So here on the Respage, I focus only of the things that I can get and can read from the resume. And I try to have a very short list and I don't have nice to have, so I only have must-haves. So for example, let's say that I'm looking for head of Europe for $50 million right. So I'm looking for a person who I may have a criteria, you know, ran a team of at least 100 people. One, I may have a criteria, was a part of a company that grew from 50 million to 100 million. Not necessarily let this company but was a part of that. I may have a criteria worth the company that had a PLG motion or maybe I don't care about this and I have a criteria worth it a company that had multiple different so not only European purely European company but an international company that had presence in several different places so I would focus on those few things and the fourth thing that I would typically look for for example have strong experience in the enterprise sold million dollar contract to you in the enterprise market and that those four criteria are fairly simple but they mean that if I see somebody who has amazing experience and work”
2022-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: Why Founders Should Not Be The One To Create The Sales Playbook, How To Structure Each Interview in the Hiring Process For Sales Reps, How To Use an "Interview Panel" Effectively and more with Zhenya Loginov, CRO @ Miro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think that the good hiring process is friendly similar in most places. So you have your hiring manager screen, your interview panel, then you have some final interviews, and then you lose the candidate. I will share a few kind of an orthodox design choices that work very well for me. We started with the first one that I tried to make sure always happens, which is if I don't understand the role that I'm hiring for, I don't open the role until I do. And I will go and research the role before I want to fill it. The second step is as a hiding”
2022-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: Why Founders Should Not Be The One To Create The Sales Playbook, How To Structure Each Interview in the Hiring Process For Sales Reps, How To Use an "Interview Panel" Effectively and more with Zhenya Loginov, CRO @ Miro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think if you don't have the background in this, I think that's going to be the most difficult situation. As a founder, you're hiring a lot of people who are going to be professionals in their fields where you're not a professional in their field. You may be a professional one or two, but not 10 other. So it's always going to be the case. And you have to learn it. Like, it's very hard to say, hey, as a founder, I have, I don't want to deal with legal and finance, and I'm going to just find somebody and they're going to take care of this and I'm never going to need to be involved. Well, you are going to have to be involved. You're going to have a bunch of things leading at least up to the IPO that you will need to learn even about that field, not even talking about engineering or sales or marketing. So I think to some extent you need to always be sort of a scholar of different disciplines. The best way that I found that you can learn is really talk to people who have done that before, but you can read a bunch of books that is like maybe 10 different sales books when I was starting to run sales at segment to figure out what people wrote about this. So that, I guess, like knowing what people do is the best recipe. And then you learn from them and you continue learning from them and their peers that you're talking to.”
2022-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: Why Founders Should Not Be The One To Create The Sales Playbook, How To Structure Each Interview in the Hiring Process For Sales Reps, How To Use an "Interview Panel" Effectively and more with Zhenya Loginov, CRO @ Miro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it makes a total sense. I think what founders should learn from this is not necessarily only just what the salespeople look like, right? But more, you can use the same approach for and should use the same approach for any role if you are hiring your first, I don't know, CISO or CMO or your head of engineering or anybody else. Go and figure out what the job is before you start talking to people about joining you for that role.”
2022-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: Why Founders Should Not Be The One To Create The Sales Playbook, How To Structure Each Interview in the Hiring Process For Sales Reps, How To Use an "Interview Panel" Effectively and more with Zhenya Loginov, CRO @ Miro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Characteristics of those people. My feeling is that there is no simple formula answer to this, and that your job as a hiring manager is to make those non-obvious things obvious to you by trying to deeply understand the role that you are feeling before you are starting to interview the first people for the role. So if you're hiding your first head of sales and you have no idea how to hire a head of sales and what they should be doing, go and talk to 10 heads of sales who you may possibly maybe not be able to hire much larger companies, right, for not looking for anything and just talk to them for an hour or two and understand like what are they doing.”
2022-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: Why Founders Should Not Be The One To Create The Sales Playbook, How To Structure Each Interview in the Hiring Process For Sales Reps, How To Use an "Interview Panel" Effectively and more with Zhenya Loginov, CRO @ Miro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hiding is definitely my favorite part of the job, and mostly I'm gonna talk about genuine leadership hiding and maybe the first sales leader hiding, but also you can apply the same for anywhere from your head of engineering to head of marketing to anywhere else. I think first and foremost, I'm looking for people who have not done the job before. So usually instead of hiding people who have the experience who have done exactly the same role before, which sometimes is appropriate, but for most roles, especially in high-growth companies, I'm actually striving to look for somebody who knows 70% of the job, but is really, really passionate about getting the other 30%. And the only motivation I care about them having is to grow personally and professionally by succeeding in this next step in their career. So I give them the opportunity to take this next step and I see the most amazing results when they have the passion and the skills to run it. I think the big trick here is to know exactly like what are the key no negotiable experiences that fall into this 70%, what can you not miss? And frankly, there is just about non-obvious”
2022-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: Why Founders Should Not Be The One To Create The Sales Playbook, How To Structure Each Interview in the Hiring Process For Sales Reps, How To Use an "Interview Panel" Effectively and more with Zhenya Loginov, CRO @ Miro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think we do actually. So I think the way that we build collaboration between the two teams, I think the entire sort of high touch side of the company realizes that the PLG side is not about small customers, it's not about self-serve alone. It's about PLG motion for all of our customers. So within the PLG team, we actually have enterprise growth team, which is a product team that sits within our self-serve organization, self-serve product organization, and that helps mature customers to the enterprise level and helps expand customers in the enterprise. So generally when I joined the thing that I saw as maybe mission or thing that I wanted to do most is kind of build the next iteration of the best in B, the combination of PLG and enterprise and how the more they are connected everywhere, the better I think they overall motion is.”
2022-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: Why Founders Should Not Be The One To Create The Sales Playbook, How To Structure Each Interview in the Hiring Process For Sales Reps, How To Use an "Interview Panel" Effectively and more with Zhenya Loginov, CRO @ Miro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think that there is resourcing conflict. I think the biggest conflicts that can happen are alignment conflict. What are your goals and what are the goals of the people around you? So, for example, you ask me, right, like, how did I take into account all the mistakes and the ways to do things right when I joined Miro? And I think most of those things I took into account even before joining Miro. And you asked about the resource conflict. So one of the big things that I wanted to make sure happens before I joined Miro was that we don't have an internal conflict. So now I'm responsible for all revenue, all self-serve and high touch, but the self-serve team doesn't report to me, which I also think is the right thing. I think that the self-serve team is fundamentally a product team first and foremost, and it needs to be a product engineering team and sit within the product organization to be actually able to build the experiences for the customers that enable PLG. But because I have this responsibility for all revenue, I actually don't care whether the revenue is self-served, whether self-serve customer or high-tech customer. So I don't have any incentive to build things.”
2022-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: Why Founders Should Not Be The One To Create The Sales Playbook, How To Structure Each Interview in the Hiring Process For Sales Reps, How To Use an "Interview Panel" Effectively and more with Zhenya Loginov, CRO @ Miro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So let's say that one bad way to organize this is to have two people. One is responsible for self serve revenue, another one is responsible for high-tech revenue. And they're only responsible for their own portion of revenue. And in a couple of months after that, the high-tech person will go and figure out well. I can launch an SMB motion here and sell to small companies through a salesperson. And a self-serve person will come to the CEO and say, well, those guys are cannibalizing my self-serve revenue and actually they are deploying people resources where we should not deploy people resources where the customer eventually will grow. Maybe it will take them additional couple of months, but we'll grow to the same level that you would grow with a salesperson with no cost spent. And this creates a room for conflict and people are starting to spend time on things that are not productive for the whole company, but that would optimize for either self-serve or high attach.”
2022-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: Why Founders Should Not Be The One To Create The Sales Playbook, How To Structure Each Interview in the Hiring Process For Sales Reps, How To Use an "Interview Panel" Effectively and more with Zhenya Loginov, CRO @ Miro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm a big fan of OGA from Asana, right? But I would argue actually that companies like Asana, Dropbox were a little too late into getting the enterprise motion on top of PLG. I think that's one of the reasons that OG joined Asana, was that Asana realized that they need to build the sales-enabled motion and grow much faster, which then they did. So that to me is one maybe mistake. It's the question of sequencing, grants the question of when do you transition from a pure PLG to a combination of PLG enterprise. So if you are too late, you may just miss the market. On the other hand, the other thing that we talked about is that doing enterprise too early and having hiring a lot of salespeople without figuring out the fundamentals of your PLG motion just makes you into pure sales-led company. And there sure are markets where purely sales-led company is the right way to go, but many, many, many markets allow for combination of PLG and Enterprise. And if you are too early into enterprise, you will miss the PLG building the PLG engine that would actually help you in the long run. And then the third big kind of area of problems that I've”
2022-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: Why Founders Should Not Be The One To Create The Sales Playbook, How To Structure Each Interview in the Hiring Process For Sales Reps, How To Use an "Interview Panel" Effectively and more with Zhenya Loginov, CRO @ Miro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think I agree that the head of sales is the best brawl to hire for instead of just reps. I think that if you can at all afford it and then I think go and hire your first head of sales, I think the stage is important, right? So if you don't know where your initial product market fit is, you should hire any salespeople, either reps or head of sales. They are not going to figure it out for you, like the founder is a lot more likely to figure out the initial product market yet. But after you closed either several deals or maybe you are up to maybe 1 million in revenue, it is time to hire your first head of sales. I think that the junior rep will consume bandwidth from the founder and the founder will need to spend time on those first few reps to enable them to support them to show them what to do. In the head of sales, we'll instead create bandwidth that the founder can use to go solve other problems to go like build a product, to go hire finance person to go do something else. So I'm a big believer in scaling yourself through hiring people who can do things independently of you.”
2022-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: Why Founders Should Not Be The One To Create The Sales Playbook, How To Structure Each Interview in the Hiring Process For Sales Reps, How To Use an "Interview Panel" Effectively and more with Zhenya Loginov, CRO @ Miro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Less effective and less efficient than if founder brings in the person and lets them create something that they would feel ownership over and would feel empowered to go and execute.”
2022-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: Why Founders Should Not Be The One To Create The Sales Playbook, How To Structure Each Interview in the Hiring Process For Sales Reps, How To Use an "Interview Panel" Effectively and more with Zhenya Loginov, CRO @ Miro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now, you listen to some of your interviews with Sales Leaders before on the question of whether the founders should create their own first sales playbook. And I feel like we have a consensus here, and I think that no, the founder shouldn't. And it's better that they're not. So of course the founder is the most often the first seller and most often, and they need to link the sales playbook to the vision of the product and the company they want to be able, right? It's very helpful for them to be deeply involved in creating this first sales playbook, but it's also very, very helpful if a sales professional is actually running the process. So coming back to my point about sales being like a very deep area of expertise, I think that some first-time founders just don't realize it and don't realize how much they may not know about sales and about what's important for the sales rep and how to create a playbook that would resonate with them. And they would feel like it's their own. Anything one more important thing that I want to emphasize is I'm a big believer in enablement and empowerment. And I think if the founder of higher salespeople who he gives the playbook to that the founder developed, it's going to be”
2022-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: Why Founders Should Not Be The One To Create The Sales Playbook, How To Structure Each Interview in the Hiring Process For Sales Reps, How To Use an "Interview Panel" Effectively and more with Zhenya Loginov, CRO @ Miro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“like Microsoft and Google and so on. So from a regional product to the long-term product vision and the time frame for this is maybe five years or more.”
2022-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: Why Founders Should Not Be The One To Create The Sales Playbook, How To Structure Each Interview in the Hiring Process For Sales Reps, How To Use an "Interview Panel" Effectively and more with Zhenya Loginov, CRO @ Miro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I feel like I think about sales playbook on 3D Federals, the customer level team level and market level. So customer level for me is all about the problem and the solution. So the question is like what problem are you solving? Who are you solving it for and how are you solving this problem with your product? And the timeframe for this is somewhere between one single meeting and one deal cycle. The team level for me is about organizing the team to solve as many of those customer level problems as possible in a period of time effectively. So it's about hiding profiles. It's about how do you ramp and train salespeople. It's about the leaders that you hire into the team, what is the coverage model and who does what on the sales team and customer success team and the time frame here is maybe six to 12 months. And then the last level is the market level, which I think is all about your plan to be in the larger market in the long run. So it can be about moving from S&B to enterprise, which we talked about. It can be sort of moving from mid-level decision makers as buyers to CAO as a buyer or C-level decision makers as a buyer, moving from selling into one country to a global”
2022-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: Why Founders Should Not Be The One To Create The Sales Playbook, How To Structure Each Interview in the Hiring Process For Sales Reps, How To Use an "Interview Panel" Effectively and more with Zhenya Loginov, CRO @ Miro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“how fantastic and how deep the world of sales is, how much it has to master and to learn, and that it's sort of a separate field of knowledge, even like several different fields of knowledge. So before segment, I think I expected salespeople because I saw that they can do kind ofly effortlessly what I couldn't see myself doing. But then after segment, I respected them even more, knowing how much they have to learn and how much they need to do in Excel in to be able to do things they do so easily.”
2022-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: Why Founders Should Not Be The One To Create The Sales Playbook, How To Structure Each Interview in the Hiring Process For Sales Reps, How To Use an "Interview Panel" Effectively and more with Zhenya Loginov, CRO @ Miro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like segment for me, segment was really the first place where I ran the sales teams, right? So I started about six years ago and I started as the head of customer success team at segment. And then about a month in Peter, the CEO, asked me to run sales and I told him, hey, there's so many people who know how to do this way better than I do. You can go and hire them and do you really want to do it. He said, well, yeah, you seem to understand how the go-to market thing may work and go and try to run the sales team. And if you fail, we will hire somebody. And so I've been at Segmit ever since like every six months increment is like, okay, let's trust another six months to Genyen. Let's trust another six months to see how he can run sales team. So I think the biggest learning from segment for me was this kind of pass of an outsider into the sales team and learning about the sales world and like I'm kind of a mathematics nerd and a curations geek. And I think that I saw initially sales is maybe nothing other than building relationships and maybe knowing your product well. Over three years of segment, I came to realize”
2022-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: Why Founders Should Not Be The One To Create The Sales Playbook, How To Structure Each Interview in the Hiring Process For Sales Reps, How To Use an "Interview Panel" Effectively and more with Zhenya Loginov, CRO @ Miro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What they learned, I guess, from Dropbox is that going into the enterprise is a commitment for the entire company that starts with the CEO and that needs to take the entire, not just the go-to-market teams and sales teams, but the entire like marketing and engineering and product and the entire culture of the companies to change a bit and the whole company needs to believe that enterprise is good fundamentally, that it's not an evil and that salespeople are not evil, but that it's great for your customers, it's great for bringing your product into the market.”
2022-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: Why Founders Should Not Be The One To Create The Sales Playbook, How To Structure Each Interview in the Hiring Process For Sales Reps, How To Use an "Interview Panel" Effectively and more with Zhenya Loginov, CRO @ Miro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, we've seen it right in every company. So it's a double edged sword, I suppose. On one hand, some of those early adopters will become your marquee customers who you will show to all of your other prospects for the next two to three years. And every company, you know, Dropbox and segmented Miro, we had those first few adopters that adopted the product very, very early and became large users. It really helped us go into the enterprise and figure out how to build the product there and figure out what are the requirements for the enterprise customers. On the other hand, if you know that you're going to need to build a lot for this particular customer that is outside of your normal product roadmap and that would detract your engineering product resources from building a core product, I wouldn't do it. It's very hard to say no to a lot of money and logo that you like, but I think if you know that it's going to detract your resources, don't do it.”
2022-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: Why Founders Should Not Be The One To Create The Sales Playbook, How To Structure Each Interview in the Hiring Process For Sales Reps, How To Use an "Interview Panel" Effectively and more with Zhenya Loginov, CRO @ Miro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think in the long run, I think the best business model that you can have is PLG plus Enterprise. But in the early days, I agree with you that if your resources are scarce, you need to focus on one. And if you have any opportunity to build a PLG business in your market, I would advise first figure out PLG. I think that's a lot bigger add to your valuation, a lot bigger add to your future success if you figure out PLG. Go to market, you will also, you will always have the time for it if your PLG motion is figured out, but the PLG, if you miss it and if you build the sales teams too early, it's very hard to build later.”
2022-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: Why Founders Should Not Be The One To Create The Sales Playbook, How To Structure Each Interview in the Hiring Process For Sales Reps, How To Use an "Interview Panel" Effectively and more with Zhenya Loginov, CRO @ Miro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source