 Okay, we're here to talk about sales and nobody left yet. Fantastic. Okay, so what I'd love to do in the next 30 minutes is tell you the importance of sales, right? And sales is fundamental to every business, like you need to sell your product. So you make money and with that money, you can grow your company or you can go to a VC and say, look, I can sell products. You should invest in myself. Two years ago, probably you could get away with not selling and still getting funded, but today, unfortunately, that is not the case and I think that's actually really good. So in the next 30 minutes, what I want to share with you is a bit of my personal experience on this sales journey and hopefully that's going to be useful for you as founders. We're going to be talking about three main things. The first one is sales basics, sales fundamentals, things that you should really think about when you're building your sales team, when you're building your sales skills, especially as a founder. The second thing that we're going to talk about is something that I find extremely crucial for early stage companies and that is start building your sales team. That's actually really complicated to do, especially if you're a technical founder and you're a bit alien to sales, like how do you hire your first sales person? So I'm going to try to decompose a bit of that and try to give you some tips and tricks on what to look for when you're looking for those people. And then the third piece that we're going to be talking about is how to sell to bigger customers. Selling to small customers tends to be quite simple. Sending to bigger customers actually is quite complicated. I'm going to try to share with you a bit of the experience that I've had throughout these years and give you some frameworks that you could use on Monday when you go back to work and you can actually go and sell your product. Probably the first thing that you're thinking about is like, why is this guy talking to us about sales? For those of you who just joined, I'm Pablo Rodriguez. As you can tell from my surname, I'm originally from Spain. As you can probably tell from my accent, I've spent half my life in Ireland. So I'm a bit of a hybrid. But I'm also a hybrid in my professional work because I am a computer science graduate. I'm not your typical sales person. And sorry, let me just go back a slide. So I started my career as a computer science grad. I spent 10 years building technology stuff. I did cybersecurity. I did a lot of incident response. I run engineering teams and then I had an illumination moment and I decided that that was not really for me and that I wanted to do something else. So essentially what I did is I started pivoting into sales. So in 2011, I was lucky enough to join Google when Google was starting their cloud business. And for me, that was a really enlightening moment because that's where I started learning what sales was all about. Up until then, as an engineer, I was like, oh, I had this image of the used car salesman. I was like, yeah, this is slimy salespeople trying to sell me dirty stuff. And then I understood three main things when I worked for Google. The first one is that selling to mid-market and selling to enterprise is an actually really complex process. It's not trivial. You need to put a lot of work into it. The second thing that I understood is that you really need to understand your customers really well to be a good seller. One thing that showed me the reality of that was that for some reason that I still failed to understand, somebody at Google thought it was funny to send the Spanish guy to sell in Finland. So here I go to Helsinki in my first customer meeting. I've been working with them over video conference for a really long time and we go to a board meeting and I'm a pre-sales engineer. So I do probably the most amazing demo I've ever done in my life. And there I am, like, look at this process that is very inefficient today. With Google Apps, you can do it really well. And I'm, like, being all the Spanish person that I can and, you know, with my flashier movements. And everybody sitting there, straight face. And the biggest interaction that I got was the CIO nodded once. I was like, okay, they're going to kick us out and we're definitely not selling in this account. And I handed over to the sales rep and the sales rep started talking about pricing and he asked them, what do you think? And there was this really, really, really long silence. And at that point I was absolutely sure that they had one of those buttons underneath the table that they click and then security comes in and kicks you out and then they said, we're buying. I'm like, what? What the hell happened here? And what happened is that I did not understand my customers. That was a very good humility check for me. I did not understand how Finnish customers purchase. I did not understand how Finnish customers behaved. And because I didn't understand it, I could not sell to them. So that taught me a really valuable lesson on how do your customers behave and how do you adapt to them. It was not about me doing this great flashy demo as I used to in the Spanish market, it was about me changing that completely. The third thing that was really important to me when I was working at Google was to help people, sorry, I blanked in there, but this is what happens in sales when you're alive. I'll just move to Dropbox. So when I moved to Dropbox, I left Google, I moved to Dropbox, and it was a completely different business. Dropbox, you probably all know it, it's a B2C business. It's very, very efficient. It's product-led growth. Silicon Valley has been selling us this wonderful dream that product-led growth is the way to go. That's fantastic and until it stops working. And I was the one responsible for making that thing that stops working work. So I work in the B2B division. And the biggest learning from me in all this was really around how do you take a very simplistic process in B2C where the person that has the money to buy the product, the person that implements the product, and the person that uses the product, it's all in one. That's what a B2C business is. When you move into B2B, that is not the case. The person that buys is the head of the department. The person that uses the product is the end user. And the person that implements it is the head of IT. And I think our biggest failure at Dropbox, and my biggest lesson learned, is that we were not able to understand that those three personas were different in the B2B world, and we could not transpose our product into those. And I say failure under quotes because we took that business from $2 million to $200 million, which is not too bad. But our potential was actually massive. We had a time of $5, $6 billion, and we just couldn't capture all of that. We only took $200, which is still pretty good. And then I actually did the most finished thing that you can do. I quit my job. I bought a Nokia phone, and I went to Spain for three months with a Nokia phone if you need me to call me, and if not, I'm not going to listen to you. And then when I came back, I joined Vanta, which is a startup that has a pure B2B model, right? And what I'm going to try to convey to you is the lessons learned in all these years of experience. So before I continue, how many of you are founders? Raise your hand. Okay, this is much better than the last time that I did interactive stuff and things. Like, keep your hand up. Keep your hand up. If you're founders, keep your hand up. All right? Okay, 50% of the room. How many of you keep your hand up? Don't raise. Don't lower. You just don't raise. How many of you are... So all of you that are really excited about sales and you can't stop thinking about sales all the time, lower your hand. Okay. Nobody lower their hand. Good. This talk is for you. If you have your hand up, you're going to get a lot out of this talk. If you don't, you're going to get a few good things. So if you had your hand up and you don't get something valuable out of this talk, I'm going to give you your money back. That's a joke. And whoever from his losses backstage having a heart attack, it's okay. It was just a joke. All right. So let me talk about the first topic, basics of sales, right? The most important things for you if you had your hands up. If you're a founder, you must be a seller. If not, honestly, I don't think you will succeed. If you have a kid, you're responsible for your kid's education. If you founded a company, you're responsible for selling the product that they have. Nobody can do that better than you. Honestly. It's impossible. All right. Why did I put that picture up? That's Christina Cachopo, founder of Vanta. For the first two years, she was our only seller. She would go to every single meeting, pitch to anybody that would listen to her, keep refining the process, talking to customers, getting the feedback, taking the feedback, bringing it back to product, get product to address, the feedback issues, and being the glue that put the company together. A salesperson is not going to do that for you. You have to do it yourself. The second thing, and if you need to remember one thing, just one thing from this talk, this is what you need to remember. It's not about you. It's about your customers' pain. Nobody cares about your product. Nobody cares about your technology. Your customers care about the problems that they have, and if you can solve them or not. And Holly did a magnificent talk. Two talks ago, Holly spoke about how you speak to customers. Review that. That's actually the way you should do it. Go and figure out the customer pain. Perfect example for this is Vanta. What do Vanta do? Well, Vanta does a software as a service that automates and lets you manage your security program. Do you know how much I sell with that pitch? Zero. Because that's not my customer pain. That's what my company does. However, when a customer comes to me and says, hey, I'm trying to go up market, I'm selling to this enterprise customer, and they're telling me that I need a SOC 2, or otherwise they're not going to sign a million-dollar contract. How the hell do I do this fast? I'm like, yeah, we can automate all that and you can do it in three months. Shut up and take my money. Because that's their pain. It's not about my technology. It's really cool, but they don't care. And as you are a founder that is starting to sell, you need to learn how to articulate your value proposition. Don't vomit a list of features. It's very tempting, especially if you're a technical founder. This is what we do. Here's my feature list. No. Think about how it benefits your customer and start articulating that. How much money are they going to save? What's the return on the investment that you're going to make? How fast are you going to get that back? Another thing that is super important from those sales basics is to be curious. As a salesperson, curiosity is probably the most important feature that you have. The way I do it, sometimes I lack an ignorance. Like, okay, tell me more about that. I have no idea. I've never seen that before. Help me understand it. Again, Holly did a really good job on explaining that in more detail. And the last thing on these basics of sales that I want to share with you is my personal biggest learning coming from an engineering background. I always had this allergy to sales and saw it as something not cool, but sales is just a process. It's like cooking potatoes. You take the potatoes in unedible format. You wash them. You peel them. You boil them. You mash them. You eat them. Not very complicated. If you boil them before you wash them, you eat potatoes with dirt. If you don't peel them, it's actually not very pleasing. And sales is exactly the same. You get leads. You discover and understand the customer problem. Then you say, hey, this is what my product actually does and this is how it addresses your problem. And then you figure out if you can get to a commercial agreement on it. It's that simple. But it's just a process. If you're a founder and you build a SaaS product, honestly, you can learn a sales process. You've done something way more complicated. So don't be scared about this. Let's move to the second topic. How do you hire a salesperson? Now, if you've done all of that other stuff, you've probably come to a very repeatable process where you're starting to see success. If I keep doing this and I sell to these people, so if you can define your buyer, who is the person that buys? Is it an IT manager? Is this the CFO? You need to figure that out for your product. Once you have that and the ideal company profile, like it's an established bank, it's a smaller startup, once you have that and it's repeatable, go and hire your first salesperson. Because then it scales. In Vantas case, for example, it was when we figured out that our target customers are a scale-up startups that are trying to sell up market. That's it. And we would sell to founders and CEOs, basically all of you, at some point in your life. And when we had that, we hired this guy, Eric R.D. Eric was our second salesperson. And that second salesperson is basically an extension of you as a founder. So what do you need to look for? You need to look for somebody that is curious and likes the hustle. It's a game. You want to play that. But also, you need somebody that is a hunter. Probably much more of a hunter than you are. Somebody can go out there, will not take no for an answer. It's a bit more insistent than you. And can just get the deals through the line. Also, you want somebody that has experience in similar persona or similar vertical. If you're selling to a CIO, do they have experience selling to the CIO? Do they understand it? Or if you're selling to FinTech, do they come from that industry? Do they understand how the FinTech industry operates? And ideally, you also want somebody that has experience in the similar motion. If you're selling to the enterprise, don't hire a startup seller because the motion is completely different. The timing is completely different. The complexity is completely different. You need to adapt to that. Things to avoid. Avoid big logos. Somebody has worked for IBM or SAP. No disrespect to those people, but they actually grow 5% year over year. Your startup, you probably need to grow 300, 400% year over year. It may not be a good match. Unless what you're looking for is their contacts. Avoid people that have lack of urgency. Urgency is probably the most important thing for an early stage startup. Why is that? Because your next sale is probably the one that is going to turn you into a slightly more profitable company or is going to put you under. Maybe it's going to get you to the next round or maybe not. If you have people that are happy to wait, those may not be the right people for you at this stage. And then the last thing is don't look for sales managers. Hire for somebody that you need right now. You need somebody that can go and do the job in the trenches, sell, and then hopefully they can grow up to be a manager. And I think Eric is probably the best example. He now runs our mid-market team, so he kind of grew with the company, but he started as a plane seller like anybody else. All right. Cool. So we've covered basics of sales, how to build your sales team. Let's have a look at how to go up market. So you're going to hear these words again and again and again, right? It's going to be the mid-market and the enterprise. Let me tell you one thing. After 12 years doing this, nobody knows what the mid-market is. Nobody knows what the enterprise is. The only thing people can agree is that enterprise is a Star Trek ship and that's pretty much it. The way that we define mid-market in Vanta is 2 to 100 employees, 10 to a billion dollar in revenue, which you can see is a very wide range, right? And everybody's going to define it differently. But what you're going to find is that there's a few common things that you're going to figure out, right? First one is that customers start to buy, like, enterprises. Like, they have complex buying processes. And especially when it comes to security. I've done this, like, I saw this at Google where we had to explain security to a guy that had an exchange server under his desk and we had to explain our security procedures. When I moved to Dropbox, the same guy or probably a cousin of him had a file server under his desk and I had to explain to him, okay, here's our security procedures. And at Vanta, we do exactly the same, right? So this is something you cannot avoid. It's really important. The second piece is that people don't know what they don't know, right? Selling to a small business is super fast, right? You talk to one person. Probably that person can make the decision. Maybe you need to talk to a second one. You're okay. Enter prices, super complex, but they know how to do it. They have a super structure process. If you're willing to go through it, okay, that's fine. But mid-market is kind of like this messy middle that they're not big, they're not a small, and most likely what's going to happen is nobody even knows who makes the decision, right? It's the classic... No, you made the decision. No, I made the decision. Who does it? And most of the time, you're actually going to have to figure out who the hell is responsible for this, right? And that's a lot of the work that you're going to be doing in the mid-market. So how do we solve all this chaos in this mid-market space? What's the playbook? So a few things that you need to keep in mind. First thing is start building your security and your privacy story from the get-go. You need to have a good talk track around this. Hey, this is how I treat customer data. This is what I do for GDPR. My data is located in the EU. If you have it located in the US, then you need to have a conversation with your customers about how you're using Chapter 5 of GDPR, which nobody reads, but you need to explain to them anyway. If you're selling to the US, you probably will need a SOC too, so you need to start getting those things in order. And the other thing that is important if customers are starting to buy like enterprises is to build what is called a mutual close plan. And this is somewhere where you put in black and white, this is what you're committing to do. This is what your process is going to be to close a deal. Okay, for this deal to close, it needs to be approved by finance, which needs to be signed by the CFO, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. You put in black and white, you start giving people deadlines, and then you have something to hold on to. The second challenge that you have that you want to address is that they don't know what they don't know. So what you need to do is ask a lot of discovery questions. Sometimes you need to go extremely deep like, hey, what's the problem? Why are you not solving it today? How do you envision this problem to be solved? What is the pain that this problem is causing you? And one thing that for me is probably like one of the things where my biggest achievements from trying to solve this problem is to give people a roadmap. Sometimes as a smaller startup or a small company, we feel a bit shy about imposing our methodology to others. You would go in and it's like, oh, I'm trying to sell to Amazon. They probably know what they're doing. Well, the reality most of the stuff is probably put together with duct tape and a couple of sticks. You just don't see it. You just see the big logo, and that's how you feel. So one of the things that we were struggling with a lot at Dropbox was taking customers from the discovery phase into closing because the way that we were demonstrating our value to them was not very clear. Dropbox was a very horizontal problem solver, right? So you could basically solve any collaboration issue with Dropbox, but you can't solve all of them. So that process was extremely tedious. What we did is we built a roadmap for customer evaluations. We called it the three-track plan. And guess what? It had three tracks. So we divided that process in first security review. Every single customer needed to do a security review, and that's what we built in the plan. First track, security review. Second track, it was a technical review. It was a software as a service. It works exactly the same for everybody, but the technical teams wanted to deploy it, implement it, and test every single feature. Perfect. Go ahead and do that. And the third one was really the important one. First and second were just check boxes. We just were making people feel good about it. Once they say, cool, the security of this product is good with me, we were fine. Once they said, this product can technically be implemented in my organization, we were fine with that. The key was the business track, which essentially was the pain track. We were trying to identify what was the pain in the customer's shoes, how were they suffering that pain, and how could we solve that with our product in a live scenario. And that was the one that was the key. That's how we built our business case. And we were very aggressive with that. We would go to the customer and say, if you want to buy from us, you be in a small, medium, or large customer, you're going to buy this way. There's two weeks of an evaluation process. These are the three tracks. We want commitment from your side. So you're going to put people on all those tracks. We will put people on all those tracks. And in two weeks, we'll know if this is the right product for you or not. And guess what most people said? That sounds reasonable. Because it is actually reasonable. If you're not willing to commit people to evaluating the product, you're not the right customer for me because you don't care. Looking at the used car and kicking the tires, and you're like, yeah, they look like good tires. I have no idea what I'm doing. So that was super important for us. And that actually helped us close a lot of business. But most importantly, it helped us avoid going into a lot of trials and a lot of tests that were not going to get us anywhere because the customer was not willing to commit. And you need to also think about as a startup the cost of opportunity. If you're spending time there, it means that you're not spending it with a customer that actually cares about your product and that is going to buy your product. So that was the second challenge. And the important thing about the third challenge is the multiple stakeholders and being multithreaded. So these three tracks would run in parallel. In the beginning, we would do them sequentially. First, we do the technical evaluation. When the IT team said, yeah, this is fine, then we would do the business evaluation. And then somebody from security will drag us for six months in the sales process. So we decided to be multithreaded and do things in parallel to make sure that we were much more efficient on the way we were doing things. And when you're doing that, you always need to be qualifying your buyers. Always make sure that you're checking if your buyers are the right people, if they're willing to commit to you or they're not. And if you feel that you're not the right field for that company, pull out and go and spend time with a customer that actually deserves your time. And sometimes you can be blinded by the lights and the dollar signs and you would feel, oh, my God, this could be probably the biggest deal we've ever done in a company. But in the reality, you're just following a pipe dream and trying to close a deal that will actually never go anywhere. All right, so those are the three things that I wanted to talk to you about, like kind of basics of sales, how to build your sales team. And that's all from my side. Thank you.