 Hi, I'm Peter Burris and welcome to another Cube Conversation from our wonderful studios here in beautiful Palo Alto, California. One of the most challenging things that any business has to navigate, especially a B2B business, is that crucial relationship between sales and marketing and customer engagement, how to make customer engagement as high quality, high value to a customer, but also as productive to the business as possible. And to have that conversation, we've got Amy Guarino who's the COO of Kendi here on theCUBE with us today. Now Amy, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you very much, Peter. So we're going to start with something that recently happened. You recently attended a woman in sales conference. Tell us a little bit about yourself and then we can talk about that conference. Sure. I'm the COO of Kendi, which is an explainable AI company. And that means I have responsibility for everything customer facing. So from sales, marketing, services, support, and anything else to help make sure that we run the business in a good way. I recently came from Marketo. I had eight years there where sales and marketing was really definitely a critical piece. And hopefully we help change a little bit in terms of the way people think about sales and marketing. Well, that's a small job that you have. So, but nonetheless, you had time to go to this women in sales conference. Tell us a little bit about it. Sure, yeah. So it's a group that started out in New York City and then they've been having some events across the country. But this was the first West Coast event. So myself and there were two other women that have sales leadership roles out here. And we participated and there were about 120 mostly women. I think there were three fellows there that joined. So what I couldn't figure out is why more fellows didn't come. It seems like a great place to meet a bunch of pretty interesting women. So it really was a fun event and a lot of the questions focused on women in sales careers and how best to develop a sales career. Well, certainly it was, I'm sure it would have been an opportunity for some men to discover something about how women envision the role that sales plays, the role of engagement. There've been a number of studies over the years of that women actually seem to demonstrate an even stronger affinity for making some of those connections necessary to traverse a very highly complex, high value sales relationship. What were some of the highlights that you took away from the conference? Well, I think some of the things that were pretty interesting was understanding, you know, how do women look at sales differently and really what are some of the unique aspects of how women approach things and a lot of it focused on listening skills and a woman's ability to, and it's not to mean that fellows aren't good listeners. Wait, what? I'm sorry, what? But I think it is something that women do have a natural affinity to be able to listen and to really pull out, you know, when someone is speaking, whether it's a prospect or a customer, what really is important to them? So listening is one, any others that just popped to mind? I think the other was in terms of sales management is really interesting is the ability for women sales managers and leaders to be able to understand what are the strengths and weaknesses of folks on the team, how to be able to coach them, and then how to pull together a team that really takes advantage of all of the different skills on, you know, across the whole sales team. So here's one of the questions that I have about, you know, looking at women in sales as a thing. You have to be on the one hand, be very careful about generalizing, but on the other hand, you really do want to discover what attributes of a person tend to create value for business, create value for customers, et cetera. Was there any conversation about how far we should take some of these generalizations? Like, you know, I once had someone tell me, well, men are very transactional, women are very relationship oriented, which always seemed to me to be a bromide, but how far should we take the notion of women specifically in sales as we think about business management? Well, the piece I think we talked about a lot last night was not so much in terms of the generalizations, but the fact that, you know, in today's world, you want to hire the best of the best. And in order to hire the best of the best, women make up 50% of the population. You want to be a- And 80% of the best. Yeah. Well, I appreciate that, but you want to be able to put yourself in a business culture or a sales culture where that's appreciated. You know, I think especially in tech, there's so many situations where, you know, you walk into a tech sales organization and it's, you know, 80, 90% fellows and it makes it tough for women to want to join that kind of an organization. And if you're as a sales leader, as a sales manager, if you want to hire the best of the best, you want to make sure that you're attracting people, you know, the best. And so therefore you want to make sure your culture really is in a position to be able to attract the best. Yeah, because I think one of the things that a chief revenue officer has to do is has to drive sales productivity, which means, you know, taking advantage of skills and improving sales enablement, but at the same time establishing a culture that encourages each person to shine, that doesn't diminish different types of skills. And I gotta believe that's one of the things you took away. How are you applying some of the lessons that you learned to your job as a COO and responsible for engagement, customer engagement at Kendi? Well, I think it's, the one thing is to really be attentive to it. You know, sometimes your business is growing so fast, you're just like, I'm just going to hire and get things going. And one of the things, we're not quite at that stage where we're adding tons of people yet, but we know we're going to, is making sure that we're thinking about and being very deliberate in terms of the types of folks that we're recruiting. And one of the things that I've seen most effective for, particular for fast growing tech companies is hiring women leadership. I think sometimes, you know, and I don't think it's where the fellows are hiring people because they want to not hire women, but it's more they hire people they know. And so all of a sudden you look up and you realize, oh my goodness, I've got six, you know, first line sales managers and they're all guys. And when a woman goes in to try or to interview for a first line role and they look at that and say, well, all your whole management staff is all men, how is that going to make me feel comfortable? Am I, is this the kind of environment where I'm going to be able to be successful? And so it's really being very deliberate and intent in terms of thinking about how can I make sure that I do have some women in leadership? And I think that can change the dynamic quite a bit in terms of the company culture. And are you discovering that, at least from a Kendi standpoint, I mean, obviously, Kendi at very, very senior levels is you. Yes. So that has, that says something about the, what constitutes being important at Kendi. Do you anticipate that having more women is going to improve your ability to engage customers, improve your ability for customers to make action, take action quicker? What's the expectation? I think that the expectation is that you've got different types of perspectives and different types of a way to look at customer acquisition and customer engagement and customer support. And we can all help each other when you have different opinions and different ways of looking at things. As a team, then, you really get much more productive in terms of being able to do the right things for customers and make sure they're successful. So a culture that encourages, or at least takes advantage, liberates and takes advantage of diversity, talk a little bit about the sales enablement side of that. Sure. Because again, one of the things I mentioned earlier is that as Chief Revenue Officer, part of your job has to be to accelerate increases in productivity of your field organizations as fast as possible. How does what you heard from the conference yesterday, that mission, sales enablement, et cetera, come together, collide? Sure. Yeah, I'm not sure that it's specific to women, but it's anytime you bring on a new rep, you want to be able to take that gap from when you hire them to the time they're productive and productive means being able to go out and actually sell something to a customer. You want to make that as quick as possible and as efficient as possible. So it's really understanding that path and understanding what it's going to take to help make that rep successful and doing that in a systematic approach as opposed to, hey, why don't you go out and go on a few calls with somebody and then see how it goes? Because when you actually take that and make it into a process, you can understand where people are picking things up, where they're not picking things up, what you can do to actually enhance that process and make it go faster and make it easier for new people to come on board and be productive. Cause sales people want to sell, they want to get engaged with customers, they're eager to get going and really make an impact. And so the better you can enhance that process, I think the better and more successful they'll feel. And then from an organizational standpoint, the quicker you can make your number because it's all about how do I have as many quota carrying productive reps in the territory as quickly as possible. Yeah, I think one last thought. I think the other thing is that sales people tend to learn from other sales people. Absolutely. And having a culture that encourages that kind of sharing and that kind of respect and that kind of diversity means that you're gonna get a lot more different perspectives on what works. Exactly. It's all about figuring out what works and what doesn't work and then sharing that information across the group. All right, fantastic. Amy Guarino, COO of Kendi, talking about women in sales and how she as COO anticipates taking some of the lessons learned and applying it to make Kendi a more inclusive, better customer serving business. Perfect, thanks, Peter. Thanks, Amy. And once again, this is Peter Burris. Thanks again for listening to this cube conversation. Until next time.