Doug Winter: Efficient Sales & Partnerships for a Streamlined Go-to-Market Motion

Hey everyone, thanks for listening. As you know, we're on the HubSpot Podcast Network, and we recently made the switch to go to their CRM platform as well. With this, I get some inside knowledge and some of the products and services that are rolling out, and I'm super excited to share that they're relaunching their sales hub with some really exciting new features. The new sales hub connects the dots with sales engagement, so prospecting, deal management, and analytics and coaching, and it aligns all of that so you can have a single view of your customer, and also with some of these new AI tools that they're integrating, you can actually automate all those annoying admin tasks that take you away from selling.

Trust me, you've got to check this out. We are just scratching the surface with this here at JV Sales, and I've already seen some massive improvements. With Sales Hub, closing deals is no big deal. Try it for yourself at hubspot.com slash sales. Hey everyone, welcome back to Make It Happen Mondays, where we talk about sales, business, entrepreneurship, personal growth, mental health, and everything in between with guests who I truly respect, and I think make a positive impact on the world around us. Now, this is a very special week since I'm going to be attending and speaking at HubSpot's inbound conference in Boston all week. Now, because of this, we decided to do a HubSpot takeover of the podcast with my good friend, Russell Bradley Cook, who's actually the senior app partner manager over at HubSpot, and he's going to be talking to some of the leading CEOs in the tech industry about the future of sales and where sales is going, especially in this world of AI.

We're going to release these episodes daily, so make sure you tune in and let me know what you think. Let's make it happen. Hi, John. Thanks for the intro. I'm Russell Bradley Cook, and I'm thrilled to be a part of this. As John mentioned, he's at Boston at our annual inbound conference, and I'm going to be bringing you not one, but five episodes this week featuring the CEOs of top software companies with integrations on the HubSpot's marketplace. They are Seismic, Sixth Sense, G2, Chili Piper, and Typeform, talking about how AI is being used by their sales and marketing teams and in their product, as well as the future of sales and partnerships. Thank you very much for joining us. You can join John and I on LinkedIn with hashtag JBSales and hashtag Let's Make It HubSpot Monday.

Let's kick it off. Doug, welcome to the Make It Happen podcast with John Barrows. I'm Russell Bradley Cook, HubSpot Senior App Partner Manager. It's my pleasure to welcome you as CEO of Seismic to the podcast. Welcome. Thank you. Excited to be back. Thank you. My colleague, Kelly Sarabin, who's in charge of partner enablement here, will laugh because almost all of my partner problems I think would be solved with better enablement. So delighted to have you here to share and interesting to see Seismic as the bridge between sales and marketing. Yeah, I'm excited to be here and we can definitely talk about that. So as an intro, I would love to hear a little bit about your personal journey, but also kind of high level view on Seismic, fundraising, team size, sales marketing split, how you guys are set up.

Sure, happy to do it. So I'm an engineer by training, ended up in business school a while back, did a couple of startups, caught the bug at a fairly early age, coming out of the dot-com vintage. I'll hate to date myself that much, but it's true, can't deny it. Ended up starting Seismic because we saw an opportunity in the marketplace to create a solution that was going to help marketers and sellers work together more efficiently, more effectively. We had a deep knowledge of content management and sort of the problems associated with content and personalization of content, distribution of content. It was also a time when, you know, really the first true built from the ground up cloud platforms that were built on public clouds were being created.

enables you to go faster, build more product, more attractive economics. And we just saw a real opportunity in the market. We felt, having been a part of a number of startups, the struggle that happens between sales and marketing and how difficult it is to ramp up when you're trying to grow really fast, add new sellers, how do you get them effective as fast as possible? And so that was really where the idea for the company came. We got going on our own. We had big plans that we were going to go, you know, without any outside investment. So we went, we started down that road. We went fairly far and then realized at one point, hey, we've got great customers. We've got, I think, a really great product.

This is a big opportunity, probably bigger than we originally even imagined. And no one knows who we are because we didn't have any real marketing efforts. We had a very small sales team and we're going to get passed by if we don't start investing a little bit more in our own presence. And so we started raising capital. Was kind of very fortunate in the investors that we've been able to add to our team over the years, built a great board. We've raised over 400 million now along the journey. Teams up to about 1,500 people scattered all across the globe. And yeah, excited for how far this market has matured and how far it's come and even more so where it's going. Really interesting. And in terms of your personal story, this is not your first company.

Why sales enablement? It was really, you know, I'd love to say that I slipped in the shower and hit my head and had this divine inspiration, but it was really an opportunity that we saw in the marketplace firsthand. You know, we, at other startups, at other companies, you know, where we'd been acquired, we saw the struggle firsthand between sales and marketing and how to ramp those folks up. We saw that a lot of businesses were, or problems that had been solved in the past by on-premise solutions that were expensive, very IT intensive, difficult to generate an ROI, you know, had really developed. So, you know, CRM salesforce, you know, really revolutionized the world when they took CRM, which was an existing category, but they built it in a much easier to use way.

They built it in a, with new technology, the cloud, they sold it in a new model, SaaS, and changed the world. And we thought, well, no one's really doing this in the area of content and especially not in the area of sales, sales content and training. And so that was the opportunity that we saw. It was real, very tangible. And in your previous company, Objectiva, you also, you had a very strong partnership focus. And my sense is that Seismic, that also partnerships is a key part of your success. I was wondering, is that the case? Is that, is that right? How do you think about partnerships? Yes, partnerships are critical for us and for our success. I think early on, you know, we, we partnered with, with some of the giants in Salesforce and Microsoft to help us with our technology stack and to be able to integrate into a customer ecosystem.

That was very important. We, we partnered with service providers, folks who knew the business problems very intimately and who could help deliver our solution into our larger customers. From the very beginning, we partnered, we, we focused on selling to large enterprises and we focused on selling to, you know, big tech companies and we, and we sold a lot to large banks and financial institutions. and as a small startup company, it's really not practical to go in there. You don't have the credibility to go in and sell to those organizations without having a partner there that knows how to navigate, that, that can deliver on the services and the implementation that's needed, the change management that's needed by these large organizations.

So very early on, and in fact, several of our, our first deals were brought to us through partners. But really interesting to, to hear. And, one of the, things that, that from HubSpot's perspective that we, we see the landscape changing dramatically is, is around AI and how quickly it can get into production, how it's being used by sales and marketing teams to effectively extend their capabilities. Seismic is kind of at the, is the bridge between sales and marketing in many ways. I'm curious how you're thinking about AI in terms of your business. Yeah, you know, there's, I've been around long enough to see a lot of hype cycles of things that, you know, had a huge amount of build up and promise and, you know, but never really delivered on that.

And I've also been around long enough to see the difference between something that's really a hype cycle and something that feels like it's got real legs. And, you know, I think maybe we did have a preview hype cycle with AI a few years ago where everyone wanted to talk about it, but the reality was far behind what the promise was. Boy, it sure feels different this time and we're seeing it not just within our own field of enablement, but also obviously outside. And it has affected how we work internally. It's making our developers more efficient. It's making our marketers and our sellers more efficient, more effective. And it's certainly working its way into our product in a very aggressive path.

And we've been working with AI in our product for a number of years. We released our sales Aura AI several years ago. We have, you know, added it over the years incrementally in ways big and small. It does things like helping us, helping our users navigate and search their content to find the most effective and appropriate piece of content more quickly, more effectively. We have products like Seismic Knowledge which really rely on natural language processing to understand what it is people are asking, what they're looking for, monitoring things like Slack channels or Teams channels and giving real relevant answers to questions that people, that sellers have in real time. And we've got a number of pretty exciting things, enhancements that we're going to be announcing at our shift conference which is our user conference that's coming up in October.

So I don't want to give away too much but tune in in a couple of months and there's a lot of pretty, very exciting things that are coming and the potential here is incredible and we're just getting started. Hey, I want to take a quick minute to share with you what I'm working on these days with my new JV Sales membership. It includes live monthly training delivered by me on my two signature courses, filling the funnel and driving a close. It also includes monthly workshops that I'll be running on specific skills and different tech like ChatGPT and how to leverage it in the sales process. And it gives you access to my entire online catalog with every course and every tip I've ever done. You get all of this for $420 a year as an individual or $5,000 for teams.

And as an exclusive offer to my podcast listeners, if you go to www.jbarrows.com and click on the individual or team membership and use code PODCAST, you'll get 20% off. Let's make this happen together. Yeah, absolutely. And in terms of how your own sales and marketing team are using it, I see when I'm talking to founders two somewhat in parallel, but really two distinct discussions. I'm curious how seismic sales and marketing team are using AI, if you have any concrete examples. Yeah, I think it started, it's amazing. One thing I've learned is that sellers are incredibly resourceful and finding tools and ways in which they can be more effective at what they do. So we, in the beginning, really encouraged the use when ChatGPT was released and some of the quick follow-on products that have been released into the market.

Our sellers dove in early adopters on ways that they could use it either to help research a company that they may be speaking with and find talking points that they think are going to be relevant. That's one that I've seen a lot of effective use. Obviously, crafting better emails that contain messages that the team feels are going to resonate as they're trying to open doors. The ability to even help prepare for meeting the customer that they may be having with a customer. What are the major chalk tracks? What's an outline? What are the likely outcomes or follow-up action items that I should be aiming for? We went through a phase of letting our sellers organically get creative and figure out things that they thought were going to add value.

Then we formalized that a little bit into best practices and actually making the tools available officially through our own infrastructure and allowing them to be able to have access to those things. Then, of course, finally looking at what they're doing and how they're using it and how that can help make its way into our product in a more systematic way as we hire our roadmap in the months, weeks, months, and quarters ahead. Absolutely. Definitely. Sales are crafty people. It's a very hard job and you've got to figure out any kind of edge that you can get to deliver the maximum amount of value. help customers faster so you can get to the weekend. I was wondering, historically, you've talked a lot about enterprise customers.

If Seismic is continuing to focus on enterprise or if you're also seeing an opportunity to provide sales enablement to mid-size and potentially even SMB companies. We began with a heavy focus on large enterprises and that continues to be far and away the largest source of our revenue. About two years ago, we released a professional version of our product with an eye towards organizations whose needs were a little bit more simple. Either because of scale or because of sales process or geographic reach, whatever it might be, some of them just have small teams and don't have the ability to lean in and do enablement in a more sophisticated way. We released that professional edition. It's been doing extremely well in the marketplace.

It meets the needs of companies that are, by and large, 1,000 employees or less. It's a great fit for what they might need. You can't over-index on that number. There's some smaller companies that are doing very sophisticated things and take full advantage of our premier version. We also have the professional available and even some larger companies have found that it delivers on what they're looking for. As I think everybody knows, the economy is not the best right now. The stress is hitting smaller and medium-sized companies harder than it is, I think, larger enterprises that just have a little bit more moat and are a little bit more robust. I think that we've seen that market impacted disproportionately to larger enterprises, but we remain committed to that customer segment.

I think it's great. A lot of those companies, especially tech companies that are on the smaller side, they're the hub spots of tomorrow. We want to make sure we get in with them early, help them meet their needs, and then we can grow along with them as their needs meet. Our products are there for them. We're working hard with our partners to make sure the hub spot remains the hub spot of tomorrow. But it's great to see the seismic team building an integration with HubSpot, and I think our ecosystem is one of the ways as HubSpot moves from a historic focus on SMB. It's actually one of the things that I've always admired about Brian and Dharmesh is the ability to stick with something, even though everybody else is telling you that is absolutely the wrong thing to do.

And the investors were coming in to say, you should focus on enterprise. I'm sure they had some pretty big offers coming in through the sales team to be like, we should probably sign this deal. But as we get into 2023, HubSpot has a big focus on CRM, really taking advantage of some of the capabilities that we built from the marketing side and putting that into seller's hands. That kind of automation is very powerful. then adding on the AI. I'm curious just how you think about that integration, going to market with smaller customers. How do you see that working with somebody like HubSpot? It doesn't have to be HubSpot, but all their partners. Certainly the partnership is critically important because we all need to be as efficient as possible in our go-to-market motion when you're servicing a smaller customer base.

Things have to be easy. They have to just work. They can be more simple, but they need to be, in a lot of ways, it's more difficult to build a product that's aimed at that market segment because it really has to stand on its own. Customers are quick to try it and they're quick to depart if it doesn't meet their needs or if it's a little bit too confusing or complicated to get the integration working. We're excited that we have partnered together. Our product gets much more valuable when it takes advantage of things that it can learn from CRM integration. We can recommend the content to use in a meeting if we know attributes about the person that you're meeting with. What's their role in the organization?

What level are they? Are they in marketing? Are they in sales? Are they in IT? What industry are they in? What geography are they in? What stage is a sales cycle sitting at right now? What have been objections that might have been raised? All of those things can inform our AI into what content would be most effective and it can help personalize content. We can actually take content and change it based on some of those attributes. If you don't have access to CRM, if you don't have the ability to pull that information from HubSpot, then you're asking sellers to enter it and you're asking sellers to do more work and some of them will, some of them won't. Being able to pull that automatically saves time, makes them more efficient, but I think much more important, it makes it more effective because they're going to speak specifically to the situation that they're in, specifically to the person that they're meeting with or that they're sharing the content with.

Very, very important. One of the things that I really like about Seismic when it's working on with larger teams is that you can see the analytics not only of a particular email but of a particular asset and say this is the number of opens, this is the number of engagements coming, ideally even bringing it down to sign deals to say as a seller you can evaluate, I understand the market created this asset but is it being widely used, is it driving outcomes? It's like you don't want to be the first person to send it to customers but you want to make sure that you're maximizing the touch points that you have. Yeah, that's right. When we talk to customers about their company's enablement journey, we talk about phases of maturity.

The first phase is really we call it control the chaos. It's just get all the different places that content might live under control, get the training and the coaching all in one place, put everything in the environments that sellers live in, whether it's in their HubSpot CRM or whether it's in their Gmail account or whatever it might be. Get that under control. And then the second phase, and most companies can do that relatively quickly, and then they get to a place where the next phase is can I understand the impact of what is out there? Can I understand if someone does complete some training or coaching exercise or they use a certain piece of content, is that going to move deal cycles forward more quickly?

Is that going to improve win rates or not? Do you find that people who have done the training and use the right content are hitting their numbers and the people who don't aren't? There's just a lot of different lenses that you can look at. Once you get to a point where you have that chaos under control and people are following plays to some degree, it really does become understand the impact of what you're doing and trying to figure out how you can do things that are going to deliver more impact. We talk a tremendous internally about outcomes and making sure that we're aligned with our customer around what they're looking for from an outcome. What's the value that they can realize and expect to realize?

What's the problem that they're trying to solve, the pain that they're trying to address, and then what's the business impact of being able to do that? Then you can work backwards into what are the behavior changes? What are the things that you need them to do in order to realize that impact, that business result, that outcome that you're looking for? It's continuous education, it's continuous learning. It is what sellers need to do to embrace to be successful. Yes, that's right. I think enablement teams, if they really take that mindset, that enablement's not a set it and forget it kind of an application. It's a full contact sport. You're going in there and you're trying to understand what's working, you're trying to make improvements and changes to make it work even better, whether it's people, process, content, whatever it is, you need to understand what's happening in order to improve it and that's a never-ending cycle.

I like the control chaos stage, the understand impact obviously necessary. What does great look like? Great looks like using enablement to drive transformations. If you think about it, every quarter, every year, companies are launching initiatives, sales plays, campaigns, whatever you might call it. It could be your upcoming customer event. It could be a new product that's getting launched into the market. When you start out, you think about what is the enablement plan? How am I going to make this product now sell into the segment that I'm trying to sell it? You probably have a bunch of executives sitting in the corner office somewhere with a whiteboard and they have all kinds of great ideas about how that's going to work.

Here's the play. This is how it's going to work. Then you've got thousands of sellers out in the field actually pushing the keys and speaking on the phone with clients. I think that enablement at its highest form is getting those ideas from the heads and the whiteboards of the boardroom into the hands and the fingers and the things that the sellers are doing every single day. If you do that effectively you're going to win. If you don't you're going to really struggle. To me that's enablement. That's what enablement is all about. Really great enablement is taking a project by project, initiative by initiative, a sales play by sales play approach to developing an enablement plan, all the resources to achieve it.

Then really important is do you have the analytics in place to allow you to monitor that progression and the activities to see in real time whether or not it's being effective. Because we can all wait to the end of the year and say, did we hit the number? We launched the product, let's wait to the end of the year and see if we hit the number. Well, if that's the approach you take, I pretty much guarantee you that the answer is going to be no. But if you can tell, in week one I expect to see these behaviors, in week two I expect to see these behaviors. When people are out giving the pitch about our product, they're doing that. If you can monitor that in real time, you have the opportunity to make adjustments along the way that are going to be very, very impactful to what you're really looking for, which is, of course, to hit the number at the end of the year.

I'm curious to change gears just very slightly. One of the things, before I joined HubSpot, I had never worked in a PLG company. I had only sold enterprise stuff, often to big banks, and things moved very slowly. At HubSpot, you see the product actually helps in terms of onboarding. If you hire somebody who already knew how to use HubSpot, and you're using HubSpot, 30% of your enablement just hit the ground running. Having a tech stack that's easy to use and easy to adopt is really powerful. Salespeople move jobs. There's a lot of people who are going to be leaving their jobs in the next 12 to 18 months. For sales reps who are starting a new job, you see everything from enablement. What is the best practices?

What would you say is an ideal 90-day onboarding plan? Yeah, onboarding is such an important part. It's kind of funny though, although there are certainly people leaving and changing jobs right now. If we had done this conversation a year ago or 18 months ago, it would have been all about that, the fact that you're growing and you're turning over sellers because they're changing jobs so much. That slowed down quite a bit. We're actually hearing the onboarding story a little bit less than than what we were not that long ago. I'm sure that's going to change. I'm sure that's going to change again here before we know it. I think onboarding to me is just another enablement program and plan that you need to roll out, albeit a very important one.

You've got to have a plan. This is what we're going to do. These are the must knows. These are the coaching sessions that we want people to participate in based on who you are, what role, what part of the organization, what geo, what products you might be focused on or selling. Do you have the product knowledge that's necessary? How can you test that incrementally along the way? By the way, it's not just by answering a bunch of true-false questions, but it's by actually practicing and having AI tell you if you're doing it right or not. Probably not a surprise, but people that use AI to train and practice do better than people who don't because they're practicing. They get real feedback and they're like, ooh, I'm not going to submit that to my boss.

That was terrible. I'm going to do it again. I'm going to do it again. I'm going to do it again. Okay, now it feels like I'm getting a decent score from the AI. Let me go ahead and submit that to my manager and let him or her give me some feedback. Just the fact that you're providing that feedback quickly and in real time causes them to practice more and they do better. So you put that plan together and that program together and then again following closely as they transition from I'm in the onboarding phase to okay, now I'm going to start my first sales cycle. My first sales cycle, I'm going to be working on selling a deal that includes this particular product. If I follow this program for that product, it's going to feel familiar.

I'm going to go through the same kind of process that I did when I onboarded. I'm going to have some things to learn. I'm going to get to practice. I'm going to get real feedback. I'm going to use content and I'm going to personalize that content. I'm going to know in real time, did I do it well? Did I not do it well? My manager is going to get insight into that. And then, again, manager can come in and say, okay, you did a pretty good job here, but let's focus on this aspect. You missed a couple of value points that are really important that might have resonated with this customer. That kind of thing. It'll feel familiar and they'll be able to ramp up much more quickly. probably just as important as them ramping up quickly is you knowing if they're ramped up or not.

Who do you spend time with? This person's doing great. They're a star. I don't need to even mess with them. This person is really, really struggling. They're probably not going to make it. And this person will get a lot of value if I can move them from being a C player to an A minus player. Now, that's where I should put my energy. The faster you can make that decision, the faster as an organization you can ramp people up and have the organization grow. Look, you know we're on the HubSpot Podcast Network and we love spreading the word about other podcasts that we think you should check out. And you should definitely check out the Side Hustle Pro Podcast with Nikaela Matthews Akolm. This podcast showcases diverse entrepreneurs who've scaled from a side hustle to a profitable business.

And I absolutely love Nikaela's real and authentic depiction of what it's like to do a side hustle while working full time and all the emotional rollercoaster that it takes to build a viable business on the side. She tells all of this from her own personal perspective of doing this herself and brings on guests who share their own journey with practical advice that you can take action on immediately. So listen to Side Hustle Pro wherever you get your podcasts. I was talking to Goddard Abel from G2 and one of the things that he was talking about was organizations which understand how quickly they're onboarding people and if you can measure that you know whether you're being successful or not and if you can't measure it you're probably not being successful.

I think he's a very smart gentleman so I think those are really true words I would echo. If you don't know you're probably not being effective. I'm curious in terms of integrations for your business you mentioned that some of the earliest deals came in through partnerships. How do you incentivize your sales team and how do you incentivize your partnership team? Yeah I would say it's something that we're still evolving but we measure and track reference the conversation we just had. We reference and track you know how partner involvement on every deal that we have you know which partner was involved and how they were involved. we incent in some cases you know we run we run spiffs to say hey we'd like you know you to bring a partner in in this sort of opportunity because it needs to be a two-way street as well right partner has to get something out of it just as just as we do.

We very you know actively manage our key partners meaning that we you know we meet with them on a weekly or bi-weekly basis to review pipeline and progress and to look for opportunities and you know and really try to reward you know both sides for for building pipeline and and as well as closing deals. And so does your partnership team sit in the sales team or or as part of the revenue team or do they sit somewhere else? Yes our partner team sits within our sales organization within our our go-to-market organization. They're tightly integrated every time we do QBRs every time we're we're doing key strategic account reviews partner team is there obviously if that customer and partner happen to be one in the same you know even more so but but all of those those meetings all strategy sessions that we do all the plans that we create we have partner targets for partner generated pipeline partner influence pipeline all of those things.

so does one one of my heretical ideas which would get me kicked out of most board meetings is that I actually think that partnership source leads is a terrible metric because it ultimately does it discounts a lot of the value that partnerships add in terms of retention in terms of value for customer in terms of easy adoption and making sure that that people are on that that successful runway rather than just on their way to churn but just silent churn and talk a little bit more about how you how you incentivize your your partnership team. Yeah I guess what I would say is I think it's a terrible standalone metric you know partner source leads and I also think you know realistically companies are in business to sell their own products not yours right and we're not in business to sell someone else's product that's just not the way it works so you know you know partner source leads I definitely understand what you're saying in terms of it being a standalone a standalone metric it's probably not not the best or it needs the others around it we do track things like for example the retention rate within customers who have installed the integration between us and one of our partners you know and almost without exception we see that retention rate significantly above what we would see across just the you know the core customer base or the customer who hasn't taken the time to do any of those integrations and the more the integrations you can have the better the ecosystem partners work together and add value and make seller's lives better or the administrator's lives better the more that effect is going to amplify so yeah that's a key one that we keep an eye on 100% we see we see a big retention uplift from HubSpot side which is why our ecosystem exists and we think that it adds a lot of value for customers to have all that data plugging together do you also see it on deal size do you also on like the deal cycle speed deal velocity yes we do when I would say on the deal size for sure when we're in there together with a partner it's typically because it's part of a larger initiative you know and again especially what we find selling to you know larger enterprises you know they move slowly but they move with purpose and so if they're going to go through a major project to reinvent how they sell chances are it includes CRM you know changes to their CRM infrastructure it includes changes to some of their other periphery tools and accessories and they're really trying to look holistically at a sales process and that includes more than one product you know they also very often have a system integrator who's in there who's going to kind of steer the entire project and those projects typically have bigger budgets they're you know they're more concerned about the results than they are about the fact that you know this tool costs this or that you know vis-a-vis its list price not to say that things don't get still feel the financial pressure but you're more likely to see a commitment towards the right answer when they're looking at the picture holistically and that usually involves a lot of integration work yep yep yeah well it's I have I don't know if I should say this public on the podcast I love our HubSpot agency partners who are selling HubSpot and also integrating and implementing it in some cases I think that integrators are incentivized to have products which are poorly integrated that have more product integrations because for that it's just more work and so they would rather do it a hundred times because that product is poorly integrated rather than have a really good product integration and so I'm working hard to align with the agency partners and to help them be successful but also to help them be successful to say hey this stuff should be fixed once at the core rather than to have busy work which ultimately is not going to add a huge amount of value to the customer right yeah similar to what I said earlier you know different technology providers are focused on selling their product we're going to sell our product you're going to sell your product that's the most important thing for us the system integrators and the large scale partners you know they do they make money off services there's no doubt about that but I think the good ones the ones that have been most successful understand that if they don't deliver value if the customer ultimately isn't happy with the solution then they're not going to get invited back to the next project right so they have the best interest of their customer in mind you know 100% and the best interest of the customer is going to be repeatable scalable supported integrations that happen between the partners right the one-off integrations that are done if they're significant you know those things are going to be expensive to maintain they're going to break when APIs break all that sort of stuff and no you know no really solid system integrators going to want that or expect that that's the way things are going to work so there's plenty of other work to do you know integrating workflows and building maintaining a vision for where the change management needs to go that I think that system integrators have plenty to do but I think you're right you're right about what we said I haven't figured it out they don't necessarily want to hear what I've got to say or what I'm selling that's right well I won't tell anyone what I've focused is really on like the first three months and say because I do think as it's coming from the enterprise side of the world like things where things are slow and clunky and like it is what it is like those sell is everything else that people are used to consumer technology being so good and so slick that when they come to the enterprise side they're like what is going on here like this makes no sense at all and so if we can focus on that time to value I think that that's where a lot of enterprise companies can really focus and hopefully we can pull some of those systems integrators into that time to value framework yeah makes sense how do you enable your partners how do we enable our partners well we have a formal partner program that we've invested quite a bit in I think it's you know 10 plus people we try to develop programs specific to the type of partner you know large strategics smaller ISVs integration partners across different geographies we try to you know we have limited resources so we do our best to prioritize within those customers and are within that list and pick the ones that the partners and really double down on the ones that we feel like are going to have the most impact for us increasingly we've been developing a more and more robust ecosystem so we have an exchange now which includes a lot of APIs and SDK that partners can use to build their own integration into seismic you know when you're a small company getting started you're the one that has to build all the integration so we would do that as we've gotten larger we've been able to build and support a more robust infrastructure that makes it easy for our partners either services companies or ISVs to build the integration themselves and then we're constantly looking to improve that and add new design patterns and integration patterns that support more and more those customers you know we also on the go to market side have tried to programatize as much as possible about how we're working with our with our partners so you know the motions that we that I talked about earlier that you know the pipeline reviews and customer mapping and all those kinds of exercise we've tried to programatize as much as we can so that it becomes repeatable and scalable as we add more partners over time and of course we use a lot of our own enablement technology to make it more efficient I was teeing you up I was teeing you up for this one I almost missed I almost missed that softball so thanks for giving me a chance HubSpot uses Seismic for our partner enablement and one of the things to be quite frank is we had a little bit of a chicken and egg problem it's like the sales people are not going there if there's not a lot of sales assets there and we're going to ask partners knowing that the sales people are not going there because there's nothing there and so that's something that we've been focusing on and investing in heavily and we've seen very good update from our sales team and kind of delight moments where they're just like this is amazing this is exactly what I needed thank you for this and as you said putting it in the context and place where they are used to finding their other assets has been very helpful for us excellent glad to hear that I'm curious seismic sales team where you guys are today like obviously you are a very strong business historically I would say more sales oriented like where is your sales team how you structure today and how would you see that changing in the next 18 months yeah so our organization has continuously evolved over the last decade plus as we scale as we expand across the globe as we have completed a couple of acquisitions over the years as we built new products and increasingly gone to upsell cross sell motions as a larger and larger percentage of our growth and our bookings in a given quarter all of those things have driven evolutionary change of our sales and go to market organizations probably one of the more recent ones that we've done is increased our focus on our larger accounts we've established what we call a GSA program where we're really providing a single team that is focused on meeting the needs of our very largest customers on the kind of multi-million dollar customers that have large organizations and this is both for us to make sure we're serving their needs as best as we possibly can so we've integrated the customer success motion with the sales motion and kind of more of an account team that's focused on each of those organizations we've also as we've expanded geographically other changes that we've made is establishing an international team instead of having specific country leaders we have an international team that is focused on making sure that the international part of our business which is still relatively young for us has the resources that it needs to operate as autonomously and effectively as possible within different regions different time zones etc so those are a couple of the changes that we've made I can tell you that it's never ending every year there's a tweak to the organizational structure and plan even how what we were just talking about bringing partners more and more into the deal that's something that's evolved over the last couple of years it's I was talking to Alina from Chili Piper and one of the things that she said is that in the past lot a lot a lot of organizations have treated their sales people as coin operated and that they just do the basic standard stuff and that now with AI really what they're having to deal with is the complexity of the buying process of the discovery that AI is not going to give the answer to and so as you said it's always room for improvement and for fine tuning you mentioned internationalization in there one of the things that HubSpot has done very successfully is expand internationally and we now have more revenue coming outside of the US outside of North America than from North America and I'm curious what has been your experience with internationalization yeah that's amazing and that's where we aspire to go over time you know we're much earlier in that journey I would say my experience with international expansion is if you're going to do it do it right that trying to do it on the cheap or cut corners will not work and ultimately be a loss of the investment that you made or a very minimal return on the investment that you've made so for us when that means going into a geography means you bring marketing in region with focus you bring customer success you bring sales engineers sales engineering the extent that it's possible you bring support infrastructure such as support and potentially support engineering professional services you may bring some of the GNA functions local people team or talent team local finance and legal support certainly in going into Europe things like understanding the implications of privacy law and something that's constantly evolving and changing doing all those things is not cheap we've also leaned into cross pollinating the culture so actually bringing people from our successful teams in North America to seed or be a part of getting a new geo off the ground with expat has been critically important again not the cheapest thing to do in the world but if you do that right and you have realistic expectations it's a startup within a startup going in and finding new customers is a flashback to when we were first trying to find our very first customers you find your first customer in the Germanic regions it's not that different from finding your first customer in North America and that's hard it's really difficult you have the advantage of a larger company around you you have the advantage of reference customers and things the right way you know you're really asking people to start their own company so yeah getting past that is hard for the I'm sure there's a lot of sellers out there listening who are thinking about hey I want to go live somewhere else I want to try a new adventure live in a country I haven't lived in before when you're hiring for those transplants or when you're deciding which people to relocate because they're already working for size make what are you looking for in those people that you think sets them up for success well my team would tell you that I always say the right person is going to hurt meaning that the right person that you want to go and take on this assignment you're really going to miss them from what they were doing before you want to start you want people that you really believe in that are exceptional in their talent and are willing to scrap and hustle and roll up their sleeves a little bit that are willing to lead others and show the way instead of waiting for someone else to do things you know you can be awfully lonely when everyone else in your company is asleep and your customer asks you a question you got to figure out how to answer that so the right person is going to hurt and I think it's a tremendous opportunity the folks that have done that for us are people that we have you know really do consider to be stars and have had an incredible impact and it's a leadership opportunity that I think most of them would say really has benefited them and will continue to benefit them as they go forward in their careers so encourage everyone to put their hand up yeah no it's it's it's interesting I think a lot of times when when I see BDRs and AEs that are early in their career and they're kind of always like what is the next step what is the next step and they want to skip the goal is basically how do I get out of hard part of this job and how do I get the really cushy well paid part of this job and I think that it's those skills early on of grinding and being scrappy that ultimately set you up for success in your career yeah that part never seems to go away and so speaking of hiring you're now at a size like you're hiring VPs for AEs who are looking to go want to step up into that VP role or looking at that maybe not next year but in a few years can you talk about hiring your first VP of sales what that was like and maybe some lessons or if it worked out yeah well I can't actually talk about hiring our first VP of sales because our first sales leader was one of the founders and a key part of and Ed Callen based out of Boston where you are so you know and he was on the journey with us for a better part of a decade and a huge part of our success overall I can tell you that I found that hiring senior sales leaders is one of the hardest hire that you have and the reason I think is simple that if you have been even moderately successful in your career as a seller then certainly you know how to sell yourself and so as you're interviewing that person they almost get inside and understand how they operate and what they're good at and whether or not that's going to translate into your business I personally leaned heavily on a bunch of folks in my network to help me with that people that had a lot more experience than I do leading large sales organizations that had seen good and bad and could sniff through the difference that was something that I cared that I leaned on heavily as I went through the process of hiring senior sales leaders I think also learning to ask questions that help you understand whether the leader that you're talking to is a builder or an operator and both of those things are great both of those things are important but at different stages in the company's development you're really looking for someone who can build stepping into a process infrastructure that's very successful and operating that business requires a certain set of skills being able to put that process together where none exists is another set of skills and I think really understanding that my tip to entrepreneurs out there that are building their own sales teams really ask questions and probe on how much they like the building part versus how much they need that kind of infrastructure around them in order to be successful and is there advice for AEs who are at this stage so they see like this is where I want to go they might think that the job is easier than it ends up being but at least that's where they want to go what would be your advice for what they should be working on today selling a deal and managing a team of sellers are two different skills they start out and are also really good sellers and closers they have to be and our co-founder Ed is a great example never met a better closer being able to close well is super important and being able to actually do the job of selling learning how to manage a team is another skill and if you go in thinking that well I was their best seller and so therefore I'm going to do great you're very likely going to fail so pay attention to what your manager does what your president or CRO does learn from him or her the skills required to actually manage to do deal inspection at scale to really understand whether or not your pipeline has a chance or deals have an opportunity to be successful what the pipeline is going to be how they're thinking about forecasting how to motivate large teams where to spend your time what we were speaking about earlier you know where do I invest my time and when do I cut bait and move on those are different sets of skills completely different sets of skills than closing and winning deals you got a much better chance of making that jump if you're closing and winning a lot of deals that's how you're going to get people's attention but in order to win the job and to be successful in the job you're going to have to learn a new set of skills and I think even admitting that that's things that you know you're going to need I'll take a chance all day long on someone who comes in and says look I know I need to learn here and I've got a mentor who's going to help me there and I'd love it if you would help me get better in this area and give me feedback and coaching along the way a person who knows that their own is vulnerable about their opportunities to improve I think last question if you had a magic wand what would you change about HubSpot what would I change about HubSpot if I had a magic wand I would have gone back and bought a bunch of stock in HubSpot like 15 years ago but not that much magic not that much magic no I think look HubSpot is on a list of companies that I have incredible amount of respect for that are paving away I went to MIT business school so I was also extremely well aware of the success that company has had our first big office second big office was in Boston right across the river from where you are in Cambridge so it's a company that I followed very closely and idolized we onboarded with HubSpot many years ago I remember very clearly the onboarding process and how structured it was and how efficient it was and thinking that this is something that we would model and copy from so I'd say tip of the hat to the entire HubSpot team and we look forward to continuing working as close partners great well I really appreciate it Yamiti's doing a fantastic job and we're kicking off with InBow this week so I really appreciate your time Doug thank you very much for joining the Make It Happen Monday podcast John Barrows couldn't be with you but I'm sure he would have enjoyed the discussion No No problem I appreciate it it was great to meet you Take care doc I hope you enjoyed that conversation as much as I did with your support and our incredible guests we're one of the top sales podcasts out there right now and I can't thank you enough now to keep the momentum going it would mean the world to me if you could go and leave a five star review on your favorite podcast platform and share some of your favorite episodes with your network also check out my new website at www.johnm as in michael barrows.com where you'll find even more ways to engage there's a ton of free content and you can also get trained from me directly as an individual or for your team look I'm out there selling every day just like you are and I'm doing my best to stay on top of all the latest trends and technology so if you're looking to level up and you give a shit about this profession of sales let's connect and let's make this happen together