 Awesome, we're at the top of the hour, so we'll get going. First of all, I wanna say hello and welcome to everyone who's joining. We appreciate you spending this time with us and we hope you find it useful. In this webinar, we'll discuss the ins and outs of managing a remote sales team, as well as cover some tips and tricks for suddenly remote leaders. I'm Darren, I'm the head of remote here at GitLab. I'm joining you today from North Carolina and we'd love to hear where you're joining us from. So be sure to use the chat function, say hello to each other and where you're joining us from. A few housekeeping items before we get started. First, feel free to ask questions throughout the presentation. You can use the Q and A function at the bottom of your screen for that and we will reserve time at the end to go through some of those. But feel free to ask those as you think of them. Don't wait until the end. If you have any technical difficulties, you can use the chat function to get in touch with our moderator to help. And lastly, a reminder that we are recording today's presentation and we will deliver that to all registrants within the next few days. So without further ado, I wanna welcome Michael McBride, GitLab's Chief Revenue Officer. Thanks for joining us, Michael. Thanks for having me, Darren. So let's dive right in. Wanna share with the audience how you manage a remote team and what suddenly remote leaders can learn from your experience. I know it's an old hat for you but for a lot of people, this is a very new dynamic. Yeah, it's interesting because a lot of sales organizations, especially large technology sales organizations, have been hybrid for a long time with some people at headquarters, some people remote. And really one of the biggest changes has been the fact that now customers are 100% remote. And I think what really is the anchor for any organization is hiring great people and that doesn't change. But when you think about remote, if that's a model that you can continue to support after we get through the environment we're in right now, you can hire great people from a much bigger talent pool as you can hire in any location you want. So I would continue to think about hiring broadly and finding great people because the great people then make the rest of it easier where you're trying to set targets and measure results, not time in office. In sales, it's a very measured profession. There's already a lot of metrics in place, but there are targets and results that might be upstream of what is typically revenue and trailing sales metrics that are good to make sure those are the targets we're measuring. We're not looking for how long someone is in the office. There's nobody's in the office. What we really care about is getting the right outcomes. So in order to do that, it's important to communicate. So we don't have that frequent touch point seeing someone in the office as a reminder. So instead, writing everything down really makes it easy for us to not only communicate but be clear with one another about what those results are, what we're expecting and how we're tracking towards those. At GitLab, we use very few tools. We try to just use Zoom. Video is critical for having that, not only clear communication but empathetic engagement. Slack, we use that for sort of the real time communication but for the documentation that really matters to run a project, especially to drive engagement with customers, we use GitLab issue tracking for it's a workflow tool. We also use Google Docs and Salesforce.com. Everything lives in those three tools and it's hard to lose things in translation. One, if we write it down, but big thing that I've learned working at GitLab is to write it down together. And we can talk more about how we do that with customers as well. But when I sit down with one of my team members and we're setting those objectives, we write it down together in a single document at the same time. So when we leave that conversation, we both know that we've heard each other correctly, we've agreed to the right thing because we wrote it down together in the same document. Yeah, I wanna dig into that a little bit. I'm at GitLab as well. I love that we work handbook first. I'm a storyteller, I'm a communicator, former journalist, so writing things down comes very naturally to me. I would prefer to write over verbalize, but for a lot of people in the sales profession, you may find the opposite is true. People have verbalized their entire career through meetings and prospects and all of that. How do you train someone or kind of force the function of switching the brain from verbalizing first to documenting first? And do you see that with any of your new hires that come into the team if they've defaulted to verbalizing in the past? Yeah, it's a shift for everyone, even if you have communicated well and done a lot of documentation in the past, I think in part because doing it together is a change. Even if you've always been a big note taker, you've always written down, typically you've been writing that down for yourself and then eventually maybe summing something up into a deliverable that might be for a larger audience. It's less common and it feels a little bit uncomfortable at first to do it together in real time and share those thoughts in a raw form. And I find it takes about a month to get fully through letting go the old way. It took me a month to, you know, I had my note taking format. I knew how I like to do it together. It means you're gonna kind of have a different format. You're gonna have a slightly different approach, but the result is incredibly efficient and I wouldn't trade that for anything else, especially when operating remotely. So it's worth making sure that you stick to that standard so that everyone knows how to communicate the same way in the same tool, in the same documents. Because we are remote, there is going to be more time lost hunting for things and trying to catch up if it's not always in the same place, in the same format and easy to find. So that does take a little bit of change, but I find everyone, once they do that for a few weeks, see the light bulb goes off and they see how efficient that can be. Yeah, a key point there. It's partly about tools using Google Docs for a shared Office 365 doc, but it's also partly about culture and the mentality around it and getting comfortable with sharing things in draft. If you look at the Get Lab Values page, we cover a lot of that where we do blameless problem solving, no ego, we share things that are in draft, but that can feel a bit uncomfortable if you're used to just delivering polished projects. So good advice, it might feel a little awkward, but that doesn't mean you're doing it wrong. In fact, that may mean you're doing it right. So I wanna jump to our next question on optimizing business sale cycles. How does that change when operating remotely and what advice would you give to people that are shifting from doing this in Office in a co-located space to now doing it in a distributed model? Yeah, and I mentioned earlier, there's kind of two sides to that coin in sales. There's in the office in HQ for our company as a vendor, but there's also in the office with a customer and those were two in-person elements that were pretty important to the sale cycle. And yeah, there's plenty of remote sales models, but that doesn't apply to every segment to every company. And I think that one of the biggest changes to the sales organization has been on the customer side. A lot of sales organizations are used to having team members in and out of the office, they're out with customers and they've adapted to that over the years, but the sale cycle where you used to have an in-person cadence with the customer and the customer was used to that, it helped to have an engaged communication with the customer, replacing that is challenging. And I think the most important thing that we've noticed is don't let being remote allow you to slow down that cadence of high quality conversations with the customer. Keep up that cadence so that you maintain that engagement with the customer, but there's some subtle things that are important, especially if that customer was used to having vendors in-person, we always try to use Zoom. Cameras on really helps the communication and engagement in those calls. We do more communication upfront, during the call and after the call. That written communication is probably a little bit more detailed than a lot of companies would do if you were quite often meeting with customers in person because you can kind of make up for what would have been beneficial in that prep by having a really high fidelity conversation in person. And you have some chit-chat before the meeting starts in the hallway, you have a little bit after. Those are moments that you might be able to calibrate on next steps. Those can get lost if you don't do that in writing instead before and after. So that written communication is important. We talked about that shared Google Doc. We do that with customers. Not every customer is in a position to take advantage of that, but many of them are more than happy to try it. And when we take notes together, it changes the dynamic of what feels like a very distant engagement with a customer because now we're collaborating on a single document and that collaboration changes it from a me talking to you or vice versa to a, we're working together and it helps close that gap, that perceived distance that can happen remotely. So it feels a little bit uncomfortable. Try it. I really encourage anyone who's listening to suggest, hey, we've got a notes document for this call. Let's all just take notes together so we're really clear on what we've covered, what action items we've got. And what ends up happening is you leave the call with a shared set of next steps that we built together and we both sort of feel like it's collectively ours and that's really what we want anyway. We want to serve our customers in a way that we're genuinely helping them with what they need and that really helps us to do it when we write it down. Something tells me that documentation is going to be at the heart of this next answer, but I do want to ask about planning. A lot of people are trying to plan for weeks, months and quarters ahead. A lot of that has been upended due to a pandemic. A lot of people are having to reevaluate what those plans were, are they still valid? And then on top of that, if you're not in your usual office environment, you're dealing with that complexity. So what does planning look like on your side that maybe others can learn from? Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, when there's this big of an economic shift, remote or not, one of the most important things is to make no assumptions that everything you knew before is still the same. So what might have been, you know, a quarter or a month or a week full of opportunities that you've been working on for a year and you'd be finishing that last stage, you can't assume that anything is still on that same track for better or worse. And so we assume that all of our customers have rapidly changing priorities and budgets as they navigate the current economy. And that means two things. One, every customer conversation starts with that empathetic check-in to see how they're doing, what new challenges have come up and how we can help. And that does two things. It helps to validate that we're on plan or validate that there's new challenges and that we can go work on those together. We then connect that to a bottoms up plan. So where you might consider doing a full bottoms up forecast quarterly with your QBRs or monthly, we look at that bottoms up very, very frequently now to make sure that we're really using the most recent input and engagement with the customer to guide that plan, what actions are taking, but also the forecast. I wanna dive into hiring a little bit. Next question's on management and strategy. What management strategy, hiring and or training challenge do you wish you knew about before becoming our remote? Maybe another way to word that is, what did you struggle with? Kind of preconceived notions that you had before going remote that you think would be useful for people to know up front now. Yeah, I'll give you two answers because the first one's gonna sound a bit like a broken record. The first one is about shared documents and it's not about documentation, we've covered that. It's about the shared part of that. This is something that I will take to any company I ever work at ever again, whether it's fully remote or not, and I hope it'll be remote, but even if I was in a full brick and mortar company, the shared document mindset that when we come to a meeting, when we work on a project, we're all working in a single document. It fundamentally has changed how effective we can be with a large group of people working together on a project. So whether you're remote or on different floors in a building or in maybe different offices that are in different cities, that collaboration, one step about using a single document really changes the effectiveness of meetings and communications. So I'll definitely take that. Another thing that I wish I'd known before, is how it's very possible and I think often easy to lose a connection with the people on your team, the people throughout your company, if you end up only having every 30 minutes on your schedule, a work meeting, because it turns out with remote, you can be very focused and very efficient with the time, which is great, but then you didn't go to the snack room and have a chat with someone. You didn't go grab a cup of coffee and talk about something unrelated to work. And so I think a really actionable element, this is kind of jumping ahead to your question five here, is schedule informal meetings. It can be like on the calendar, but it's intentionally informal. So that's the weird thing, it feels weird at first, but once you start doing it, it feels totally normal, but it could be a one-on-one to just grab coffee with someone and talk about non-work things and make sure that that's sort of the point and they know that and you know that. It might be a team happy hour on video. It feels weird the first time, but after that, everyone relaxes and feel like they can just catch up and talk about the crazy times we have going on right now. Otherwise, that sort of remote interaction can end up being all work because it's hard to replace those serendipitous interactions in an office unless you just create them. And it turns out they're easier to create than I thought. I thought that would feel really awkward. I feel like I'd be almost imposing telling someone, hey, let's schedule some time to have a 20-minute chat over coffee. I feel like I'm not using their time well. It turns out it's just as appreciated on the other side. Yeah, and just a quick aside to prove that we are practicing what we preach. Both you and I are actually 3,000 miles away, but we're actually conversing over a shared document. Like we're actually both looking at the shared document. We have our moderators in there. This is very much how we work. And you're right, because I know that we're looking at the same thing. There's a comfort level that comes with that. This is our single source of truth. This is the document that we're gonna work on together. And to your point about being intentional about conversing with each other, you know, I dawned on me the other day that even in co-located spaces, someone intentionally built a lobby with a coffee machine in it. And it's quite possible that those coffee machine lobby conversations happen because someone was intentional about building the atmosphere where they could take place. And so the same is true in a remote setting. You just have to do it a little bit differently. So instead of physically building a lobby with a coffee machine, you actually have to use a calendar invite and offer for someone to join you on that. But the intentionality behind it, I think is crucial across sales and other functions in the organization, especially when you're remote. You can't rely on fate for certain things to happen. So you did answer this to some degree, but if there's any additional actionable advice that you would wanna give to remote managers right now, here's the chance. Yeah, I mean, I think that's by far and away the most important one to me is find a way to schedule that informal time. The second thing I would say is be careful about your own schedule. It's easy when you're fully remote, your office is always with you to have your day get longer and longer and more and more full. It's important to fill some blocks of time for yourself, whether that's to pursue your hobby, exercise, whatever it is that keeps you, you. It's easy, especially when there's demands where the team's going through change, customers are going through change. There's a lot of people who would like time and would benefit from that time. And you gotta make time to move around. You don't have a commute anymore, maybe use to walk from the train to the office, find a way to replace that walk. Otherwise a week goes by, how many steps did it take? Did I move at all? So I've been bad about this one, but I have tried to occasionally sort of schedule in almost a fake commute where at the end of my day, before I just walk out of this office right into the kitchen, I go for a quick walk around the block, go around the neighborhood. It can be short, but it's a way for me to sort of change gears from the workday to being present with my family. And it's easy to forget that, hey, there actually were some benefits to having hopefully a short commute. And one of those was to have a separation between the two. Yeah, I've recommended to people that are used to having a commute and now they're acclimating to remote life, especially if they've found that the lines between work and life are now completely blurred. Put a calendar invite for your morning and your evening where your commute used to be and replace it intentionally with something, whether that's exercise, whether that's additional rest, whether that's reading, calling your parents, whatever that may be. It helps you kind of ramp into the day, ramp out of the day. If you don't put it there, it's far too easy for work to just consume both ends of it because the reality is there's always something to do. It's never gonna just neatly tie itself up at the end of the day. When you don't have a building to walk out of, it becomes the burden of responsibility shifts to the individual to basically just say it's time and now it's me time. And that's crucial for people to recognize and for leaders to reinforce because you can't necessarily expect all of your directs to understand that. So I wanna shift over to a few audience questions. These are some fun ones or can be. So what keeps you up at night, McBee? So I'll try to answer that in two ways. I think given the context of the conversation here, as it relates to remote, probably one of the bigger concerns is onboarding. How quickly I can help people to not only, as they join the company, understand the culture, understand the way we run the business remotely, but to sort of quickly ramp to mastery and be really efficient and effective in their role. And this is one that especially at a company like Gila, where we're growing really quickly, there's a lot of new managers, a lot of new team members and we've done a really good job of keeping our culture strong and engaged and following our values. But being intentional about that onboarding is really important. And I do worry about that growth. Hey, as we went from in the low hundreds when I joined to 500 to 1,000 to 1,200 people, I was worried about hitting breakpoints where that would be hard to maintain. We've been able to do it but we had to be intentional about it. And that never goes away. So I wanna make sure that as people do join the company, we went to a lot of trouble to find a great person to join that we help put them in a vision to be really successful. It's a great answer there. What skills do you look for in excellent remote hires and leaders? Or it can just be one, maybe something that's surprising or unsuspecting. Yeah, I think this one is, it's easy to say I'm looking for it. It's harder to measure it and do a really good job identifying it. But it's some of the same things you look for in someone in the office too. And it's gonna be obvious but one of them is good communication. And that's not just verbal communication. It's written communication. How do they communicate in between interviews? And that's an indicator of how they're going to operate when we're not standing right next to each other and have the opportunity to say, Hey, did you mean this or this? I didn't understand that clarity and communication and willingness to speak up. So one thing I look for in interviews is not only do they ask questions but what kind of questions are they asking? There's the questions that maybe they prepared for in advance that were important to them. Those are good indicators but also the questions that come up in the course of the conversation. It might be a clarifying question. Someone who's willing to say, Hey, I didn't quite follow what you just said there. Can you clarify that? Or can you double click on that for me? That means I know they're gonna have the confidence to say, Hey, I'm not quite sure I heard that right but I don't wanna leave this until I do know. That's really important when there might be a more challenging communication environment. Last one here and then we'll wrap. What should suddenly remote leaders keep doing or start doing? Once it's safe to return to the office. And they may return to a different environment where some people continue to use the office as their default work location and now a subset of the company may opt not to go into that environment. So I'll share three things and I'll do it as quick as I can here. The first one is it's very possible that you're gonna go back into the office into a hybrid environment. Hybrid meaning you've got a large group of people in an office but you do have team members not in that office. That's one of the most difficult remote environments there is. So I think if you're the one in HQ you're the one in the office always go the extra mile to ensure that the remote party has a full seat at the table. They have the ability to contribute, communicate, engage and that means cameras on. It means having good audio quality having good microphones making sure that if there's a big room there's enough audio coverage that everyone can be heard. And it goes to the second point just document keep writing stuff down. Even though you're in the office it works it's really efficient but it will also help support that input from your team members that may not be in headquarters. And then finally I'd say find ways to hire and support remote work anyway. There are tons of really talented diverse people that don't live in your area. And probably one of my favorite things about working at GitLab is that when we are looking for a new role we're gonna fill a new role. We can look anywhere on earth for that role. That's a really big and open and exciting talent pool. So when you're hiring keep in mind like hey is it possible for us to do more of this remote? I think it's a real competitive advantage. I love telling the world about this. I also love not having to compete with everyone for that talent pool but I encourage you to go compete with us for that talent pool because there's a lot of great people out there that will really help you grow. Love it Mubrad. Thanks so much for doing this today. Thanks for sharing your insights. And for those watching be sure to follow GitLab on Twitter and LinkedIn and reach out to either of us if you wanna continue the conversation. You'll find all of our documentation at allremote.info that'll get you straight into the remote section of our handbook. And just feel free to Google everything else. Sales at GitLab will put you into that handbook as well. There's over 5,000 pages there so make sure you bring a tall cup of coffee. It's a fun place to be. Take care all. Thanks so much for joining us. Be excellent to one another. Aloha and Mahalo. Thanks much.