Scaling B2B GTM

Background

• Dev is the CEO of MongoDB, he joined in 2014
• Prior to MongoDB he was an investor, held multiple executive position at technology companies, and founded BladeLogic
• He was brought on because the existing management was not capable of meeting an aggressive operating plan

The Journey from $30M to $1.6B of ARR

2007: Mongo’s beginnings

• Mongo was founded in 2007 by Eliot Horowitz, Dwight Merriman, and Kevin Ryan
• The founders wanted to create a flexible and scalable data platform that could process large amounts of unstructured data. They were inspired to do so after learning the limitations of relational databases when trying to scale to serve more than 400,000 ads per second at their previous employer, Doubleclick

2014: $30M ARR and Dev’s arrival 

• In 2012-2013, MongoDB was ahead of all other next generation databases from a product perspective
• Dev was brought on, when the company had $30M in ARR, to rebuild the revenue engine for MongoDB
• There were ~350 employees and 100 sales people - Dev brought in a new CRO and replaced the sales team

Dev on restructuring the GTM team

“The company was about 350 people, I came in, pretty much ripped out 100 people right away, and hired a new CRO”

• Dev identified three problems he needed to address to build a world-class revenue engine

2016: Mongo’s big bet - “Atlas”

• Prior to Atlas, Mongo had a traditional open source business model. Developers would download their product and then Mongo would sell enterprise licenses to businesses. Dev felt this business model was not attractive and worked with the team to launch a cloud product. Mongo launched Atlas, their cloud product, in 2016
• Atlas handles all the complexity of deploying and managing a database on the cloud service provider of the customer's choice (AWS , Azure, and GCP). They launched Atlas because selling an on-prem product was facing headwinds as businesses moved towards the cloud and were locked in with incumbent database providers

Dev on the shift from on-prem to cloud

“The challenge we had was that was a relational convenience, introducing a new database, a new technology for them, is like holy shit, if something goes down [it could go really wrong].”

“Convincing them was just a slog. That’s why we got motivated and decided to launch our cloud business, because then all the challenge and administration burden of provision, configuring and managing MongoDB was on us, and developers basically just use our features” 

• Initially, Dev faced resistance from the team. There were three groups of people:
  • 1) All in on the idea, 
  • 2) Resist the idea and don’t believe in it, and 
  • 3) The wait and see cohort

• He used the people who ‘are all in’ to convince the people in the middle. The naysayers were either quickly convinced or removed from the organization. There is no room for non-believers when making a big shift.

Dev on getting rid of non-believers 

“The third category are naysayers, you have to get rid of them really, really quickly, because they will just turn to become cancers in your organization. People have too much tolerance for it, no matter how talented they are, no matter what they've done in the business, no matter how much credibility they have with. If they're cancer, you have to get rid of them, because they're going to get in your way. That's a big part of assessing people.”

2017: Mongo’s IPO

• They went public at $100M in trailing revenue with a negative 40% Operating Margin
• While early by today’s standards, there is a benefit to going public in your high-growth, high-loss period. If you are able to show consistent momentum in driving growth and operating leverage, you will get credit from Wall Street
• When Mongo went public, Atlas was just 2% of its revenue. This is when Mongo shifted from Direct Selling to Product Led Growth (PLG) + Direct Selling.
• Initially, it was hard to get the sales people motivated because it was a small Average Selling Price (ASP) on the low end of the market. Dev worked to convince his sales team that initial contracts are small, but that large deals would also be possible with cloud over time

2024: Mongo Today

• 5,500 employees in 30 countries, $1.7B ARR with Atlas driving 70% of the business
• 1000 sellers around the world. Success came from marrying the PLG sales and direct selling motion
• PLG is 20% of ARR, Sales is 80% of ARR. The majority of Sales-leads are sourced from the PLG motion
• They’ve also built out three channels to support their GTM: Hyperscalers, ISVs, and System Integrators 

Building a world class B2B revenue engine

Rebuilding Mongo’s GTM Foundations

• The founders of Mongo came from Doubleclick and were consumer oriented. To complement them, they hired a CRO from Success Factors which was a top down sales process. This was a mistake.

Mistake 1: Wrong Approach

• In many cases, selling software to a customer is a centralized decision from the top of the org, this is not true for databases which bubble up to the top from developers. They needed to build a sales organization that was able to capture developer love while also convincing the economic buyer to make a decision

Dev on shifting from a top-down sale to a bottoms-up/tops-down process

“In databases “if you don’t get developers to buy and use your product, nothing matters. You still need to go high to get the economic buyer to ultimately make a buy decision, but they’re not going to buy anything and try and force something down a developer’s throat. So that was part of the problem”

Mistake 2: Wrong Process 

• The team did not know how to negotiate contracts, there was an issue of repeatability, domain expertise was over indexed, and the structure of the sales org was poorly thought through
• 10% of the salespeople were hitting their numbers and 90% weren’t, which points to a lack of systemization in building a pipeline, prosecuting deals, closing deals, and repeating this process in a scalable way

Dev on lack of process

“They over indexed on domain expertise, but didn’t focus a lot on how this person can actually generate a pipeline”

“For example, we were having a meeting with ADP in New Jersey, and meeting the CIO…and I talked to the sales team before the meeting…and I started asking the sales guy on the phone and I said where are you based? He said Atlanta. I said Atlanta, how can you be based in Atlanta when your main account is in New Jersey? That was an example of the dysfunction in the sales organization. There was no rhyme or reason to how territories were created [this extended into everything else]”

Going back to basics. Identifying Mongo’s ICP and the right sales reps

• Dev went down to the basics, rethinking who the ICP was and recruiting the right sales reps

ICP

• Monetization was driven by large enterprises. They had early stage users but Mongo wasn’t monetizing them well
• The challenge they encountered was the developers were Mongo’s users but the ops people were the buyers
• The existing on-prem product was not going to scale because the ops people were an obstacle, so they launched the cloud product which circumvented the ops people as buyers. Cloud removes the administrative management of the database from ops, bringing it in house, allowing Mongo to sell directly to developers

Sales Representative Profile

• Initially, Mongo over indexed on sellers that had database experience. Dev doesn’t think domain expertise is necessary - instead focus on people who can sell. In practice this means, they can generate pipeline, sell high five to six figure deals, and understand how to do that in a repeatable way
• Because they didn’t hire people with database experience, they had to build training programs to explain to them database language and why customers buy the product. The reps also need to be paired with a technical sales engineer who could convey the details of the product

Building a repeatable system for winning new revenue

• There was no system for deal qualification in place. Dev and his CRO instituted a process where every deal that gets added to pipeline needed answers to 3 questions: 1) why do anything?, 2) why Mongo?, and 3) why now?

Question 1: Why do anything?

• The sales team's job is to be pain hunters. Each customer has a value pyramid of ranked priorities, part of the job is aligning the product's use case with the set of priorities. It's important for sales reps to understand where the pain ranks among all the pain the customer has
• One framework for identifying the extent of pain is to consider who in the org you are speaking to
  • If you are dealing with someone low in the organization, the pain is likely minor
  • If you are dealing with someone senior, the pain is likely important to the overall health of the organization

Dev on identifying pain

“If you're dealing with ticky tacky, tactical pain, you're dealing with someone low.”

“If you’re dealing with someone senior, that means you're dealing with something that is very important to that organization”

“The biggest problems for a customers was how can I improve the throughput of my development team because I’m getting pushed on developing apps and enhancing apps, and we would say that your developer productivity would be better with MongoDB”

“We found a smart rep that would read the annual report of a company and find what the priorities of the customer were for the coming year…He would map out what our products were doing to those priorities…We call that the value pyramid, the top level priorities at a company”

Question 2: Why MongoDB?

• Differentiating MongoDB, or any product, against all the alternatives and substitutes a customer may have.

Question 3: Why Now?

• Customers tend to consider sitting on the hands and not taking action - this is the reason most deals are lost
• Sales reps at Mongo need to identify a compelling event or catalyst to convince the customer to onboard a new product

Dev on the importance of ‘why now?’ in the sales process 

“Now, a lot of people think steps one and two are sufficient, but in a lot of cases, in the majority of the cases, you lose a deal, not because they chose someone else's, but because they decided to sit on their hands. So why do anything is finding a compelling event? What? What compelling event can you find that forces them to make a decision now versus kick the can down the road?”

Tracking your revenue engine

• Dev looks at rep attainment as his main metric. Most sales organizations display the 80/20 rule, where 80% of people are struggling and 20% are killing it. If this number is wildly off, he knows something is wrong
• They also look at specific aspects of the funnel. For example, they might notice a pattern where pipeline generation is not where they want it to be. In that case, they focus on pipeline generation and spend time training people on how to do it

PLG or Direct Sales?

• Silicon Valley has gone through waves supporting either PLG or sales-lead approaches
• The reality is the decision about which sales channel is appropriate is unique to each company and depends on the product they are selling and who they are selling it to. Selling into JP Morgan is different than selling into a startup

Dev on the valley’s changing views on PLG vs direct sales

“I remember a time when direct sales was the only way to build a sales organization that everyone kind of switched very quickly to PLG, oh, it's much more capital efficient, you know, it's, it's the technical buyer does, you know, these, you know, expensive sales people get in the way, and you can just drive more business.”

‍Mongo’s revenue engine combines PLG and direct sales

• Mongo leverages both PLG and direct sales because individual developers drive usage and initial monetization through the self-serve option, but these contracts are capped because developers are not the budget holder. In parallel, Mongo built a direct sales motion to reach top-down buyers to expand on developer usage.
• High value leads would come into the PLG motion and the sales team would give those developers extra care
  • The goal of the PLG motion was to take existing business, build a direct relationship, and upsell them
  • Their approach was to make sure developers have the right tools, their questions are answered, they know how to design the schema, the right index, and the right architecture
  • If the developers were successful, it would open up a bunch of doors for future deals
• PLG is 20% of ARR, Sales is 80% of ARR. The majority of Sales-leads are sourced from the PLG motion

Dev on going slow to go fast in PLG

“Go slow to go fast, making sure that first experience was very positive, and launch new business from it”

Winning versus Competition

• At the time, he thought competitors were Couchbase and DataStax. He felt positioned well because 1) their products were worse and 2) they didn’t put the effort into building a sales organization. In hindsight, the real competitors were/are the hyperscalers. Below are tactics they used to win the DocumentDB market:

Stacking the head-to-head comparison in your favor

• Kill sheets – every salesperson was given one of these sheets to assist in the sales process
  • Part of winning the RFP was creating a sheet that analyzed the advantages and disadvantages of competitors’ products relative to Mongo’s. In short, How do you go and kill a competitor? What are their strengths and weaknesses?
  • Sales team members would try to stack comparisons in favor of Mongo’s strengths. If not, they would go back, renegotiate the decision criteria, and try to win the deal. If they didn’t agree to alter the criteria, often times they exited the deal

Dev on kill sheets

“If we felt that our competitor was not as strong as ours, and we thought that the test was being jerry rigged for them. We would pull out. When you pull out of a deal, customers are shocked…We said we're selling you cars. You're looking to buy a truck. This is not a good fit. And the customers are truly shocked. The mistake people make is that they try to engage and hope to win the deal [this is a waste of time]”

‍Product and Sales excellence are necessary to win

• He grew up in an age where the best companies didn’t always win, IBM/HP had a strong hold on customers
• The reality is a great product is necessary, but not sufficient. Early growth from customer love will slow down 
• You need to build a high-functioning sales organization that is aggressive and systematic in their approach

Dev on the importance of sales strategy in a company’s success

“I realized that building a better product was necessary but not sufficient. I also had to build a meat eating barracuda sales force that was hyper aggressive that could break in the door and win those deals…I think a lot of founders think if you build a great product, customers will come and B to B doesn’t work that way”

Win a few early logos to drive legitimacy

• A win that differentiated MongoDB was its software use for platforms that were critical to a company’s core business. This lended Mongo legitimacy - they spent more effort to sign some of these early customers to use them as case studies
• Once large enterprises adopted MongoDB in mission critical applications, other customers had faith
• One of MongoDB’s early wins was Morgan Stanley, a financial institution with strict buying criteria

Dev on the discovering their wedge into the market – gaining legitimacy through customers and use case

“One of our biggest challenges in the early days was to get people to think about us seriously and know that they could run a mission critical workload on MongoDB. That required us to improve the product but also required us to convince the customer…we were trying to find some wedge in the door… and one of the first ones was a swap equities trading platform for hedge funds…They took a risk with us and we surrounded that account. We gave it so much TLC because we knew if we could prove that this major trading platform could bet on MongoDB, if would change the perception of MongoDB”

“We went from a cool toy, running a mission, a cool platform, then we had the cloud business, and well, people trust us to run their workloads in the cloud.. We had to go through massive security audits…Once we got those deals we saw the tide changing”

Identify your champion and their strength versus your competitor’s champion

• A champion is someone inside of the prospective customer org who is selling for you after you have left the building. A champion has influence in the customer org and is willing to put their reputation on the line
• The goal is to find the strongest champion who will advocate on your behalf against other internal champions representing competitors. Always ask yourself: Is your champion stronger than your competitor’s champion?

Dev on the importance of a champion in a customer organization

“Is my champion stronger and more powerful than my competitors' champion? And remember, a champion is not just someone selling for you. A champion is someone who has influence, someone who's trusted by the economic buyer, someone who's trying to make a name for them, because they, by definition, have to take on some risk. So you have to develop champions, and hopefully your champions are as strong as you can have to win that deal. And so a big part of understanding that is finding strong champions, or developing strong champions who ultimately become your advocates inside the organization.”

Invest in Partnerships as a supplementary sales channel and a strategic enabler of the business

• Partnerships with hyperscalers are really important as a sales channel 
• In general, SaaS companies staff partnership teams with B players - Mongo took a different approach
• They purposely leveraged their top salespeople on the partnership team because they were more strategic
• This is critical when part of the the company’s sales channel runs through a third party partner - you need to be creative
• Dev still viewed employees on the partnership team as salespeople, the only difference is sales weren’t directly measured through the employee’s leads but by the volume of sales through each partner

Dev on the partnership team

“When you talk to someone who's been in a partner organization, you're typically talking to someone who's been on the JV team, they weren't good enough to be in sales. They got stuck in the partner group. And most partner people are not worth the clothes they're wearing, right? They're pretty bad, right? So we purposely leveraged our top salespeople, and made them partners because we and they had a little bit more of a strategic mindset. So they were sales people masking as partners. They understood that their win was to get the partner to buy in and be a real enabler of our business. The salespeople on the partnership team were measured accordingly. And they were measured in terms of how much, what percentage of deals were coming from this partner versus the other partner. So we held them to high standards. ”

Use Gartner and other similar research firms wisely

• Enterprise research firms like Gartner are pay-to-play and should be handled cautiously
• While engaging Gartner, or similar, can be a source of legitimacy and an independent certification of a company’s product quality, it can also be detrimental should they perceive the product as flawed or as not a market leader 
• Dev found that Gartner expressed bias towards incumbents when evaluating Mongo and did not conduct a fair analysis even when MongoDB provided anecdotes and data to counter Gartner’s perceptions. Dev proactively stopped working with Gartner because he felt providing them with more information would give Gartner the credibility to make claims that were untrue or inaccurate

Dev on Gartner’s bias

“We were working with Gartner. The analyst covering us had a huge relational database bias and I could sense…I just felt that they didn’t seem that interested in helping us out…When a company goes public and you're on the road, investors are calling Gartner and asking what they think. They invariably set up a call for investors to listen to their opinion…These guys were incredibly biased”

Building Partner Channels to complement PLG and Direct Sales

• Mongo also built three channels: Hyperscalers, Independent System Vendors, and System Integrators  

Channel #1: Hyperscalers

• This includes AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. MongoDB works with all three cloud providers today
• This is an important channel, but is complicated due to 1) frenemy type relationship and 2) big nature of orgs

Tactics for working with hyperscalers

1. Partners are good at fulfilling demand but not creating it - Hyperscalers have portfolios of 200+ products to sell and their sales team will never be as effective as your internal team. Your internal team should create demand and you should bring in the right partners to close the deal. 80% of business is generated from Mongo and sent to AWS sales reps
2. Hyperscalers will compete. Focus on aligning incentives instead - In 2019, Amazon launched DocumentDB, which was an imitation product. While markets perceived this as negative, Dev thought it legitimized their market. Instead, he focused on 1) building a superior product and 2) structuring the deal with hyperscalers correctly. They incentivized reps to make money when they sold MongoDB. AWS eventually recognized that Mongo’s product was superior and began to prioritize Mongo versus their internal product when selling because it drove usage
3. Leverage hyperscalers against each other to bolster your bargaining power - Play the hyperscalers against one another to negotiate from a position of strength. As an example, when Azure positioned their internal product ahead of Mongo, Mongo went to AWS and GCP
4. Be flexible. Adjust your relationships as market dynamics change - Market dynamics change frequently. They have had to oscillate between hyperscaler partners as teams have focused more on internal vs. external products.

Value of the partnership(s) with hyperscalers

• GTM occurs through their marketplace which is easier for the customer (e.g., can leverage their paper)
• The benefit of decrementing the customers commitments to AWS (e.g., don’t need to find new budget)
• The salesperson, properly incentivized, will drive new customers towards MongoDB or facilitate customers with the existing intention to work with Mongo

Channel #2: System Integrators (SI)

• SIs are consultants who assist clients in onboarding, running, and building software (e.g., Cognizant)

Tactics for working with SIs

1. Invest in awareness and education for SIs. Mongo made sure that the SI were well versed in understanding Mongo so they would choose Mongo as their underlying data layer provider when they built customer apps
2. An easier entry point to SIs is through smaller companies that are bought by large SIs - Large SIs are difficult to navigate because they are decentralized organizations. Mongo invested in relationships with boutique SIs that were easier to convince to start selling MongoDB. Larger SIs often buy these firms and integrate their preferences into their business. This was a nice work around to influencing the large SIs 

Channel #3: Independent System Vendors (ISV)

• ISVs are companies or individuals that develop, market, and sell specialized software products to external customers, operating independently from the underlying hardware or platform providers
• Example ISVs for MongoDB are Stripe (fully built on Mongo) and Coinbase (partially built on Mongo) - when these platforms sign more customers, usage of Mongo grows.

Tactics for working with ISVs

1. Build strong relationships with ISVs to promote upselling and deeper usage of the platform
2. Mongo wants to see companies succeed that use Atlas because Mongo will earn more on usage 

Hiring Great Leaders

What does a great leader look like?

1. Recruits A players

• The quality of hires is one of the most important factors in determining strong leadership, and cuts across all business segments as a critical skill. Test candidates by going deep into their prior orgs and their process for hiring

Dev on the importance of recruiting

“A big part of hiring great leaders is their ability to recruit great people”

“So a big part of the interview process is to understand what kind of organization this person has built? What does the hiring bar look like? What is their alumni network?”

2. Develops talent

• Leaders will focus on skill building in hiring and executing but often work less on developing people
• Very few leaders are good at developing. This is a critical skill because it maintains quality in the organization
• New hires under a leader can be further developed, making them better leaders for their own teams
  • Development extends to improving hiring practices, which has a scalable impact on org quality
  • If team leaders are able to hire better, the entire organization will benefit over time

Dev on the scalable-value created by developing employees

“Lot of people focus on recruiting and execution, then they're not very good at developing people, right? And developing people is not just like a domain skills around a particular function. Obviously, if you're hiring for a certain leader of a certain function, you're going to assume that person has the requisite skills experience, and that's actually easier to qualify for. But how do they develop their own people? Are they good at, you know, hiring people and making them much better than they were before they got there? And I find that very few leaders are good at developing their own people. And so that's a big criteria for me”

3. Execution and Forecasting

• A big part of execution is forecasting. Investing too much or too little capital at a given time can have big impact
• Great leaders are exceptional at forecasting and planning for capital allocation. Test for this by asking them to:
  • Qualify their projections as a test of how well they understand their team and function
  • Go deep into their details (e.g., for sales ask them to explain their deals, methodology, and pipeline)

• Forecasting cuts across every function at a company, including finance, sales, engineering
  • In particular for sales, a sales leader is building capacity for the future. In 2024, they are already planning for 2025. If they can’t forecast, they can’t run a fully optimized sales org

Dev on forecasting as a skill

“Thinking about it like an engineering VP, the ability to forecast when they're going to ship the product is important. A CFOs ability to forecast. The P&L is important. So obviously a sales leader's ability to forecast. You know, the bookings for that quarter are super important. So can they forecast, and how close do they get to the forecast? And so that's a good sign of like this, an organization that's well run, because they can forecast the business really, really well and not just at the high level, but even down to individual teams.”

• At Bladelogic, Dev raised $29M in total and had $7M in cash when they filed their S1. Without good forecasting, they would not have been able to grow and scale the business
  • If Bladelogic raised too much capital, they would have taken unnecessary dilution
  • If Bladelogic raised too little capital, they wouldn’t have had enough capital to scale

Dev on the capital efficiency created by accurate forecasting

“In a high growth business, your ability to forecast has a huge correlation into your burn rate, or your revenue forecast is a direct correlation to your expense forecast. At Blade logic, I only raised $29m total, and I took the company public, and I had $7m in the bank when we filed our S1, so a couple bad quarters, and I could eviscerate my cash. I had to be really rigorous in terms of how I forecast the business. Invest too little too late, leave a lot of value on the table. Invest too much too quickly and burn through a lot of cash.”

“A sales leader has to think through things like, how am I going to scale this organization? We do something called cell division. When a leader has 5-6 reps we split that team apart and create a new leader, ideally through promote or we hire someone”

4. Coachability

• Leaders need to have the willingness to continue to learn and try new approaches
• Some leaders that succeed in a past position will apply an ill fitting playbook to their new role

Dev on the importance of leaders’ willingness to learn

“I’ve seen too many leaders come in and say, they had a successful outcome. They have a bit of a prima donna attitude, and I worry that they’re going to cut and paste. That’s exactly what happened with the Success Factor hire. He had a great outcome, acquired by SAP for a big number. But he completely misread the customer buying behavior in MongoDB vs Success Factor.” 

5. Ability to hold people accountable

• Most leaders have trouble giving people constructive feedback
• Leaders needs to be clear on expectations when someone is not performing
• Lead by example - hold people accountable when they miss important deliverables

Dev on his strategy for driving accountability

“So I'm going to say Anu every Friday, I want a report on what's happening this past week with our customers, because you give me visibility on how happy they are. So Friday goes by, I don't get a report from Anu because Anu is also busy doing a bunch of other things. On Monday or Tuesday, I go to Anu and say I was looking for that report. The onus is on me to convey how important the report is to Anu...Now another missed Friday goes by and you can come back and hold Anu accountable”

6. Self awareness

• Leaders are aware of their triggers and how they are perceived in the organization
• This includes accepting feedback to improve oneself - 360 reviews is a great way to collect feedback as a leader

Dev on self awareness

“I find the most effective leaders are the most self aware people. They know how they are coming across. They know how to message a landing. They can read a room. They also know their own biases and triggers that sets them off so they can modulate themselves.”

Admitting a mistake. Removing failed leaders.

• Some leaders scale for a while and then suddenly don’t. When you see signals, move on from these people
• It's emotionally difficult to remove an early hire in a startup because that person did a lot early on in the company
• As an example, Dev parted ways with his early CRO a quarter after going public because he was not scaling
  • He took over the CRO role temporarily
• A signal for a failing leader is when they are losing their team - you can’t fool the people on your team

Dev on sensing bad leadership

“You can usually fool the people above you. You can sometimes fool the people next to you. You can never fool the people below you”

• Mistakes happen. Fire quickly. When you acknowledge there is a bad hire or someone is failing to meet their obligations, it is better to fire them sooner rather than later. It also sets a high standard in the org for quality of work and commitment

Dev waiting to long to fire someone

“Most people do not do this. Most people are terrible at this, you see. So I'll ask, how many of you have fired someone too quickly? [nobody responded]”

“The worst thing you can do is hiring someone and then let them stay even when you know that you’ve made a mistake…When people see you take action and address problems, that’s really motivating for other people”

Staying close to the organization. How to surface bad news?

• When bad news reaches you assume that you are the last to know and it's far worse than you think
• Bad news tends to go down the organization quickly. When you let someone go, other people begin to raise complaints about that person
• Bad news is filtered as it goes up the organization, as people are incentivized to deescalate negative news with their supervisor

Dev on bad news

“So whenever I see something bad, I automatically assume two things, it's far worse than what people are telling me and I'm the last to know”

Mechanisms to uncover bad news as the CEO

• Dev talks to individual leaders in different functional area
  • He performs skip-levels and sits  in product meetings and sales QBRs every week
• He relies on external data (i.e., is one team outperforming another in the same org>)
• He will call the most junior person after a meeting and ask for their unvarnished opinion. Everyone tries to impress him, but nobody tries to impress the junior person on the team.
• He sets up one-on-one meetings with people in different parts of the world to get a sense of what's going on. He will keep track of their conversation through a google doc, which captures their conversations over time

CEO coaches

• Dev supports the idea of having someone to mentor CEOs. The CEO job is lonely and even co-founders don’t quite walk in the CEO’s shoes
• When making big decisions like pivoting the business it's important to have someone to talk to. Everyone who you talk to is advocating for something or has a bias. People below you may freak out when you share thoughts with them on important subjects. You want someone neutral
• Dev’s mentor was Steve Walske (ex-CEO of PTC Software). He found Steve by asking his investors who the best CEO in their portfolio was. They introduced Dev to Steve and they built a relationship over time that turned into mentorship.
• Key for the mentorship relationship is it has to be high trust. For that to be true, they need to have credibility, relevance to the work, and have a perspective you value. They need to be reliable and have a willingness to be intimate

Dev on mentorship

“the test is, can you be vulnerable with that person and feel like you're getting value from that”

Building a high functioning team

The hiring process

• There are two reasons why people fail, a lack of skill or will: Dev evaluates hires on a 2x2 matrix of skill and will

• Spend time diagnosing their skills (e.g., what they’re good at and bad at?) and understand areas where they are not successful. This helps understand development areas and how to transition from low skill to high skill
  • Example - A salesperson could be great at pipeline generation, but fail in a room with a senior leader
• Most people focus on skill but will is equally important. Evaluate a person's character, values, and belief system
  • What makes this person tick? What is their innate motivation? What is it that drives them? What do they believe? What value system do they have? Do they believe in hard work and how do they deal with adversity? 
• Collegiate athletes who study difficult majors are great candidates to hire into a sales organization
  • Their background demonstrates intelligence, time management skills, the capacity for teamwork, and discipline

Dev on evaluating skill and will

“There’s a funny story. We have a pretty aggressive recruiting process. A candidate walked in. He was kind of a portly and he's telling us about all the deals he closed, and we were listening to him. One of my sales leaders goes, this is bullshit. You didn’t see anything. You just were lucky…He takes out his wallet and opens a picture of his family. It’s a beautiful women and lovely kids. If I can’t sell, how do you think I got that”

“I’ve asked questions like, tell me, what's the hardest thing you’ve ever been through? And I purposely leave it open ended. And the stories you hear from people come from a broken family, a family with very little resources”

Dev on hiring student athletes

“From a sales point of view, I love hiring ex athletes who went to reasonably good schools and had tough majors. You show me an athlete who had a tough major in college, I don't even need to interview them. They know time management. They obviously are smart. They know how to work in a team, the results oriented, the you know, the discipline”