Why Your Sales Rep Needs to Be an Architect, Not Just a Closer with Adam Carr

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Now let's get on with the show. 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, before I get into today's guests, I want to be transparent on this one. Apollo is a sponsor of JB Sales. And if you've been following me for any amount of time, you know, I only work with sponsors whose products I actually use. I use Apollo for my own prospecting. So when I tell you this is a platform I believe in, that is coming from real experience, not because I'm just reading it on the cart. Now today I'm joined by their CRO, Adam Carr.

And he has one of the more interesting career arcs in B2B sales leadership. Every single company he's picked follows the same pattern arc. He works at product-led growth companies that needed to layer on enterprise sales. He was at five stars in loyalty and payments, then classy.org and nonprofit fundraising, then box during their high growth enterprise push. And the biggest chapter before Apollo was Miro, where he served as their SVP of global sales and helped scale their business from a small sales team to 12 global offices, growing high touch revenue from single digits to hundreds of millions in ARR. Miro hit a $17.5 billion valuation during his time there. Now he's at Apollo, which serves over 4 million users and 600,000 businesses, running one of the most widely adopted AI native go-to-market platforms in the world.

We are going to talk about the state of outbound, what AI native actually means versus AI bolted on, what happens when everyone has the same tool, and what the future of GTM looks like when the machines start talking to each other. Hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did. Let's make it happen. Adam Carr, welcome to the Make It Happen Monday podcast, my friend. How are you doing today? Doing well. Thanks for having me. This is going to be an interesting conversation, man. So we've been working together for a while. We worked over at Miro. A lot of things have changed since then. And this is going to be the PLG focus here on what it's doing to sales and sales reps and how that evolution hits.

But before we get into that, as my audience always knows, I love the origin story here, Adam. So talk to me about growing up, family, kid, you know, like where'd you get your influences? Where'd all that stuff come from? And then we'll kind of walk through your college decisions and then all the PLG companies that you've been a part of and then figure out where we're coming from here. So walk us through that roadmap there, my friend. Yeah. Born and raised in Tempe, Arizona. Grew up, my dad was in sales. He still is today. 45 plus years as an individual contributor, 100% commission role. So pretty, pretty fascinating. And I'd say like one of my biggest motivations and doing ride-alongs with him growing up.

Uh, and then my mom was a school teacher and so, uh, that embodied a lot around like my growth mindset and, uh, always learning perspective. And then I grew up playing sports and I think that's that competitive edge. Uh, I was, I was never the biggest person out there. Like when it came to, uh, my size, but I was, I always got, I was always able to get myself the right playing time. And even on varsity sports because I knew the plays and I was quick. And, uh, that was something that was a differentiator for me, uh, as I grew up, uh, playing competitive sports. Well, so I talked to your dad, 45 years, a hundred percent commission rep, like that, his risk profile, talk to me about kind of risk profile on that.

Right. Cause I, and I bring this up because, you know, a lot of reps are, are very terrified of, of full commission. Right. Because it's like, uh, and I know I was like when I was growing up, it was like, Hey, I need at least something just in case it doesn't hit. Right. But then when I got fired from one of my jobs, after we sold our company to Staples and all the fun, well, I got offered another position, whatever. It's a different story. But, um, now all of a sudden I'm a, I'm running my own business and I, and it dawned on me that I was a hundred percent commission rep at this point. And I'm a pretty self-motivated guy, but man, if you need some motivation to get up in the morning, realize that if you don't get up, you ain't getting paid regardless.

So what is your dad like a risk taker or does, what's his view on why he is like, this, this is what gets me out of bed every morning. You might get an invite to the podcast, but you know, you know, honestly, like I think he stumbled into it and, uh, you know, it's, it's, it's, he's a chemical manufacturing type of sales job where he sells his primary customer is automotive shops and he sells. It's like every, every week he's going to these customers and they repurchase the chemicals from him. And so, um, he, he found a real interesting niche where it's like, it's the human element. They want to buy from people and he's built these relationships and they're all small mom and pop type of, or like, you know, local businesses in a way, you know, there's some larger ones like discount tire, which is much more national, but like, yeah, I think for him is no way.

He's not, he's not a high risk, uh, type of person, but I think he's found this, uh, interesting vertical that he was able to, uh, have a ton of success in over the years and built these relationships. And for him, it's like, people love him. Like people light up when they see him and they trust him and they, they, and it comes back to like, even in this new world we all live in, right. Of like people buy from people. I really believe that a human element is so important and it's shifting and it's evolving really quickly, um, in this, in this new world we live in today. Skip ahead a little bit. Cause you know, a lot of people say that, you know, relationships and human element and all this other stuff, but I've always said that yes, and right.

Relationships matter. People like to buy from people, but value matters in the relationship, right? Because you got these people who have in a lot of ways built their careers on being a really nice guy, like being able to, you know, super likable, but you know, and taking out steak dinners and golf and all those things. And, and back in the day, steak dinners and golf, that was valuable in some way, shape or form. Right. But, but now value is, is taking a whole different turn. So what's that balance from your standpoint of, of the relationship likable guy, but making sure that you're constantly adding value and not just relying too much on the relationship. Cause I think people get lazy on the relationships in a lot of ways and they stop paying attention to the value that they're bringing.

My, I'll give it back to my dad, cause I'd seen this as fast as I never even thought about this way, but like, he knows his customer and the way that they work as, and his product better than anybody. And he knows how to position his product differently, even though it's a commoditized world, especially in the chemical world of like why they would pick this one type versus another type. And I think that he's good enough to be able to articulate that. I think that's where the value comes in, in his own world and they trust him because he can relate to who they are in their day to day. And I think that that's the difference maker. When you think about value, it's not about taking people out for dinners or golf or whatever.

He doesn't do any of that. Like my dad was someone that went to work at 6:00 AM in the morning and was picking us up at school every single day. Yeah. And I, you know, and those are things that I think about now in my, you know, my life and how I want to raise my kids to make sure that I can give, you know, that time back to them too and be present and be engaged. And so, uh, but a lot of it's because he was smart. He was really smart with how he worked and how he worked with his customers. Yeah. Cause you know, everybody says people buy from people they like, I'm like, no, no, they buy from people they trust. And I think that's the definitive, that's the thing I'm still holding on to with the whole AI stuff is like, do I trust AI?

You know, do I get value out of AI? Sure. Do I trust it a hundred percent? No, obviously it lies. Um, but the human on the other hand, yeah, I like talking to humans, but there's a trust factor there. There's a value factor there as well. So paying attention to those two things, I think the dynamics of that, as we scale through, this is going to be really interesting. Um, so, all right. So you went to accounting. Was that just because you didn't know what the hell you wanted to be when you grew up or you were actually had an affinity for, you know, accounting? I mean, I, I, I think it's just how I was wired that like, I, I actually changed my degree because I took the first course of accounting and it just keeps so natural to me.

So it's a little, it's probably like some sort of weird sickness going on that the numbers just made sense. And, uh, and I was convinced my mom, who's the teacher was like, Hey, accounting gives you more breath, like than finance. Cause I was finance degree. And, and so, yeah, I went down that path. And so, uh, it was, it's honestly, I, I look back on it with best decision because like I, I'm much more of an operational type of leader. I think in numbers and I, I think it helps me make the right decisions. Um, but it's like that mix because I was an entrepreneur in college. So like I have that mix between that accounting discipline and an entrepreneurial spirit. Uh, like, and that's what led me out of college was doing my own thing for multiple years.

I was going to say, cause cause that's odd, right? To be in sales, but also be, you know, a finance that, that dynamic usually isn't there, right? It's either, Hey, I'm really good. Um, yeah, the numbers are the numbers, whatever. Um, but that it's kind of, for me, I grew up, my dad was an, uh, an electrical engineer and my mom was an artist. And so I have the kind of the science and the art background. And so from that standpoint, when you say you were an entrepreneur through college with golden sky media, did you like, so did you find the, found that in college or was it, uh, you, you, was it you, you Greek row? You Greek row. Yeah. What's, what's, what was that? So that was in college. Yeah.

So in college, like I would just be doing some, like, I'll give you an example. Like I owned a vending machine business where I had multiple vending machines, uh, at different sororities and fraternities on campus. Nice. And they're all credit card based. We were stocking them. Like that was just like a small little initiative. And then I ran, um, a lot, like I had a large event planning, um, as well that we did across, across the university. And then that led me to, uh, the, you Greek row, which we built a website for, um, it was centered around sorority and fraternities. It was a niche. Like I was very involved and I felt like there was just like really tight knit group of organizations that think about if like LinkedIn and Facebook and some sort of like chapter management came together in one platform.

I still think it would work today. To be totally honest, I don't think there's anything out there today. Um, and, and so that part of laid me into running a, um, that didn't work out and we failed and we, you know, a lot, a lot of great lessons learned, raise money, didn't work out. And then I went to, um, built a minor league system for up and coming musicians. So, uh, we put musicians out on the road. They played against across the country, college campuses, 20 to 25 shows a month. We were sponsored by Oakley, um, um, muscle milk vans and it was like a minor league system. We took these up and coming artists from these record labels that couldn't get their name out there. We put them in front of the influential market, which is the college demographic to play and sell merchandise.

Uh, and that was, that was really cool and really fun because I was much more on the business side of it. And, um, and, and then I, you know, the economy tank and I was like, what am I doing right now? And so that's when I went back to corporate America and I was like, okay. If I can go to either accounting or I can, you know, try something else. And I, I fell into sales and that's where I went to the AT&T program in Atlanta, Georgia, where it was a six month program. You're wearing a suit and tie every day. Uh, it was incredible. Um, and I graduated that program in actually four months because I already, I barely made the cut because it was like a three year cutoff from graduating college. So barely made it.

And then, um, that's where I, that's where I got things started. So it's funny you bring that up because I had the same experience at Xerox, right? It was the, it was the Xerox sales Academy. Right. And, and I look back at that and I almost, and I think we need to get back to that from a developmental standpoint, because when I'm, I don't know the details of the AT&T, but with Xerox, it was, you don't, you weren't just learning about sales. You were learning about the business. You were learning about how, you know, the marketing side, the, you know, the customer support side, the technical side. Then you became an apprentice and that like, you weren't full cycle set. You weren't in your territory until six months into your development.

Right. Whereas now, all right, 30 days on boarding, good luck, get out of there. And I think that's really done sales reps a disservice from a, from a developmental standpoint, because there's, you know, almost any GTM role. If you think of sales marketing and CS or, or I'm sorry, uh, a rev ops, right? None of those are real, anything you truly learn in college at this point, right? Marketing, that was my degree, but everything I learned in school, as soon as I got out of the real world was irrelevant. So I almost want to create this, like, you know, GTM generalist role for everybody for a year where you just sit and you learn all those roles within an organization, become like the support structure for like the full-time sales cycle person.

And then you pick your lane. So how are, let's, let's bring this to Apollo or some of the organizations that, that you've, that you've, um, developed here. How do you look at onboarding and empowering the kids with more than just the sales process, you know, with the business acumen that they need to have a real conversation with somebody once they get put into territory? Yeah, I could not agree more. Like that, that six month period was foundational in so many ways. And, you know, Toastmasters, like public speaking, that was in a Toastmaster lunch group, uh, multiple times a week. And you just don't get that time back. And that's where like your focus, you're there, you're surrounded by folks that are very much in the same situation you are.

So you could be vulnerable and you can put yourself outside your comfort zone. I don't, it doesn't exist today in the same way. That's true because those are expensive to fund, right? The largest organizations can fund those, uh, properly. And, and, uh, but I would say like right now, the way that I think about it and like onboarding and how we ramp individuals is like, we, we do spend time giving business context. We help our folks understand like in our world today, I'll equate it. Like how do customers run go to market today? There are customers that are in this legacy world that are still managing, you know, like spreadsheets and very manual ways. Then there's more of the modern type of, of, of, or that are, that are leveraging some of the latest technology.

Then there's more of the, let's call it the agentic world where they're like AI native and they're doing things around the cutting edge. Those are three different types of organizations, three different types of personas, maturity levels. And you have to understand where they're at and meet them where they are. Because if I go talk to somebody right now, that's doing legacy way of doing things, which most companies are today, they're, they're not going to relate to this agentic world. It's going to be over their head. Yep. Like a lot of it is just slowing down and making sure that we're able to help our teams understand who are you speaking to? Where are they at? And I think that goes back to like, how do you build trust?

How do you actually speak the same language? See, my contention is, is that it actually isn't expensive for small businesses to do this. Because if you look at the macro of the fact that less than 50% of SDRs, actually the stats are the average SDR only stays in their company, not their role company for 15 months, 15 to 16 months. So the, the promise of the SDR becoming your AE, right? And even those who do stay less than 50% become AEs. Most of them go into ops or something else or more than 50% going to ops and everything else. And so, and so retention, I think if we folk doubled down on what was and slowed down to your point, I think retention goes up. I think empathy goes up because you get them exposed to customers.

So now all of a sudden the customer experience is better. So all of a sudden retention of clients becomes better. So my thesis is if we did slow down to speed up and actually treated it as an ecosystem of education for the first year of anybody's role in anybody, any company, that the macro would actually save money, save cost as opposed to cost too much because only the big boys can do it. Yeah, I, it's an interesting point to make. I, I, I agree with you on that. And I think that there's also this external factor where like you're an SDR and you're like, how fast do I get out of this? Like, it's like the worst, but best job you'll ever have. And, but it's that mindset too, of like, how quickly can I, can I move?

And I think that like, you know, we, we are spending a lot of time, we're building our SDR org right now. So like, we're building those, the foundations today around what does it take? How do you, how do we make sure these folks are getting developed in the right ways? We're not moving too fast. That's the thing that keeps me up tonight, especially with folks earlier in the careers is that we promote too early and they fail. And I've done that, honestly, like I've made that mistake multiple times because you're like the business needs more ahead. So, Hey, let's promote the folks that are doing the SDR work now, but like they're nowhere near ready. And so it's an interesting question and actually good timing for me to reflect on as well, as we're building out that, that, that program, because we're bringing in folks, folks that have some experience and folks coming straight out of college, which is, was one of my favorite areas for us to hire.

Yeah. And I, and that's actually what gives me a little bit of hope here is that because sales is the least educated profession, at least perfect, you know, from a university standpoint, we're starting to see schools build their sales orgs. And I mean, I'm, I'm part of, you know, I do a lot of these sales, national sales competitions for these colleges at Bentley and all these different places. And man, I'll tell you right now, kids coming out of those schools, like they have, I'd hire half of them who are in school right now, over half the reps that I see because their abilities and they get the education. And so, cause I think start like sales being the default profession anymore. I don't know if that's going to be a thing because, you know, going to school with every degree and be like, ah, that doesn't work.

Let me get into sales. Cause no barrier to entry. I need to know this and I'll figure it out. That, that floor is going to raise so high because the expectations that if you're not coming in with some, some experience or at least perspective on sales, you're not going to be hired at all. Yeah. I, I, I wish there was more of that sales curriculum when I went to school. I, you are seeing it now and like there's, there's a lot of colleges that have built really great programs. Absolutely. You, so, well, you did, you intentionally, didn't it Miro, didn't you intentionally slow down your hiring, even though you were on a rocket ship to, to make sure that that process was, was locked in. Yeah. I mean, a hundred percent.

Like I, and I learned a lot of this from, um, Genia, who was the CRO at the time of like the importance around hiring. And, uh, yes, like even at, at Miro, we were very intentional about how we hire, uh, at Apollo, I, I, I explicitly said we're going to miss hiring targets and goals because I'd rather hire, you know, I joined and there was like 20 something sales reps and the goal was to get this to over a hundred. Um, and we did that, but we did it in the right time period. And I, and part of that is like, what's the interview guide? What are the questions? What does good look like? What are the must haves? How are we thinking about the, the, the ways we're asking these questions? Because a lot of times it's hypotheticals and like, no, like let's get true proof points of things.

And so, um, our, our, we're not perfect by any means, but like hiring is the most important thing that we can do and bringing in the right talent. I wasn't going to ask this. I'm curious though, um, because the hiring market right now is so fucking brutal. Like if I was, I would be freaking out right now if I was, you know, get looking for a job because I look at it as companies use AI to write a job description rep then uses AI to optimize their resume, to match the perfect job description. The company then uses AI to evaluate that resume to very, and so I guess what the intangibles, right, there's the process of the resume and everything else, but what do you look for? Like who's, what stands out right now?

Even from a, and I think the obvious of like, Hey, here's my resume. Call me back is, is kind of a fool's errand. And if you're hiring for sales and that's what you're doing right now, I'm not going to hire you because you have to get creative for this and you have to, you know, get thoughtful, but which ones are the ones that are standing out for you that make it to through to a human? Yeah. I, uh, it's a, one of my, one of my favorite things is, is looking for actual art of like proof, proof of what you've done. So not hypotheticals. I think I'll go back to this. One of my, one of my favorite things is actually doing a prompt exercise. That's walk me through what you have done. Walk me through how, and this is much like we do a lot of, we always do a prompt exercise, but like to your point, I want that prompt exercise to be AI proof.

And what I mean by that is I don't want you to be able to go to ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and be able to pull it all together just because of that. So like, that's the part that I'm thinking about now is how do I get you, how do I get you to think? How do I understand how you think? How do you operate? You know, how do you learn? How do you ask questions? Like those are the things I'm thinking about and we test that through each of the interviews and yes, success, prior success is an important factor, but honestly, sometimes folks, folks are just a victim of their own environment. Like they were successful because the company was doing really, really well versus what did you do that drove that success?

And that's the level of detail that I'm looking for when I, when we have conversations and then in leadership and above, my favorite is that the panel prompt is like, walk me through it. Show me how you run your cadence, show me how you run a pipeline review, show me how you run a forecast call, show me how you do coaching. And so it forces them to actually, what did you do? So you can't just speak in hypotheticals or theories. Yeah. It's, it's like the next evolution of the situational based question versus the hypothetical question, right? So I always say, you know, kids who are hired, I'm like, never ask me a hypothetical question, right? Cause I'll be the best interview you've ever seen in your life.

Well, John, you know, if you were to get in an argument with your boss, like what, what would you do? Right. Well, I didn't take my time. I'd really think through what the argument, I'd take off. So, you know, blah, blah, blah. And you'd be like, Oh my God, this guy, Hey John, last time you got in an argument with your boss, what, what happened? So I have to give you an example of the last time I got in an argument and that's hard to lie about. Right. So those are the proof points, if you will. But you mentioned something that I'm, that I'm curious, your perspective on like how you think, right? You said like, we want to learn how you think AI is making it real easy not to think right now, man.

And it's making it real easy to make it look like I thought. So how do you, how do you extract how someone thinks when it's so easy? And, and IQ is, you know, kind of a commodity at this point. It's the questions, like imagine we're in an interview and you're, I'm asking you a question and then it might actually spawn a question from you. Hey, that's an interesting question you asked me, but then reverting it back to me and, and almost like a double tap into that question. And so I think that's where I'm like, you're actually thinking, you're actually taking what I'm asking you that you're digesting it. And then you're actually using it and applying it in a different way. And actually that's a good signal for discovery, right?

Are you actively listening? Exactly. So I think that's, that's one thing that I'm looking for. And then honestly, like, so you see, you see, you see it through the dialogue. The other part around it is how quick are you on your feet of like, when I ask a question, you know, how, how thoughtful are you in the structure as well? Like, how do you break down an answer or, and the last piece I would say would be around the questions you ask when I always give time to say, Hey, what questions do you have for me? And that one is really, really telling the boilerplate questions, right? What are your, what are your biggest strategies for the next 12 months? Like it's, those are not high intellectually sound type of questions.

Like I want folks to go much more deeper. Hey, I did a lot of research. Hey, I listened to three or four of your podcasts and I, you're on recently and I noticed X, Y, and Z. I'm really curious the impact that those decisions have been having inside the business right now. Like that just shows that there's, there's more there. And that's like, I mean, I couldn't be more spot on with the, the issue today. I'd say right now that the most insulting thing is you can say to anybody when you get time on their calendar for especially prospect, you know, like a prospect is tell me about your business. What keeps you up at night and tell me about your priorities. Cause I can figure that shit out real quick.

I literally just go into chat to be whatever and say, what would keep somebody like Adam up at night? What are somebody like his priorities? Do some deep research on this. But then to your point, asking clarifying questions about that, being like, Hey, I saw this and I'm kind of curious about that. And that to me is discovery. That's curiosity. And I, and that's the challenge that I, that I keep bumping up against is, you know, how do you teach curiosity? How do I mean, I know that I personally think that genuine curiosity is a, a nature, not nurture thing, but I think you can become curious. How do you facilitate or, or, or support or develop curiosity with your teams? Hey, taking a quick break here to remind you to check out some of my sales training programs at Jay Barrows.com and use discount code podcast for 20% off the individual packages.

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Thanks for your support. Now let's get back to the show. You know, it's good. I think it's all about the why. Like, and so asking why, like, why is it that way? And I think that's the only way you get people to think. And so for me, it's just asking whys a lot. And, but I think that like to your point, you can't, you, you, there is a part of just who you are of like, and it's also that growth mindset too. Are you someone that wants to learn? So I think the learners are the ones that are seeking out information. Like I'm constantly trying to look at like reading articles, listening to podcasts. Like I'm, I'm waking up in the morning when I'm on the way to the gym, listening, listening to different podcasts, because I just want to hear from other people.

How are they thinking? How are they doing things? And just gets my mind going like, wow, why are we not doing it that way? Or how would we, if we leverage that insight, how would that work in our own world? So that's how I think. And I think that, you know, there's probably more ways to help pull that out of folks. But I think that inherently the people are, I think, born with it in a lot of ways. And it's a victim of their environments too, that they're, that are, they're a part of. Yeah. And that's, that's kind of the, the problem is, is it's kind of the 80, 20 Ray Pareto's rule. It's like, I don't think most people are curious. I heard some stat the other day that like, this can't be true, but you know, whatever the internet, it's like less than, you know, 30% of people out there don't have an inner monologue.

Like that, like when they don't talk or when they don't think they're literally just sitting there and their minds blank. I'm like, that can't be true. I'm like, cause, cause when I'm not talking, my brain's like a million miles an hour thinking of a billion different things. I'm like, I cannot imagine a large part of our population is literally just sitting there like green screen. You know what I mean? Like, uh, I'm like, come on. Um, so, but I get my best thinking done at a Barry's bootcamp, like every day. Like I am the one, I come out of there with like all my, my greatest ideas and people are like, you're crazy. How do you not just zone out? It's like, I don't know. I get my best thinking done when I'm working out.

Mine's actually my hot tub. I literally sit in my hot tub at the end of the day, just to relax a little bit. And that is where the vast majority of my like good ideas come from. Cause I'm just reflecting, I'm staring into the woods and I'm just kind of in a different zone than working all the time cause I can't get, you know, real good decisions out of this. So let's talk about, um, the PLG stuff, right? Cause you've lived your life in PLG. Um, and it's always been crazy to me. You know, I, it's funny. You always see PLG founders specifically at some point or especially early in the business, they all stand up and proudly profess. We don't need sales reps, right? Our product sells itself, right?

I go Slack, Dropbox, Tableau, you know, all of them. Right. And guess who, guess what? I've trained Slack, Tableau, Dropbox, but I've trained all of them. So how do you walk me through the difference of kind of original PLG that was like, okay, it's like almost like a freemium model. Let's go. And how it's evolved with AI. And, and then I want to talk about the sales reps, um, value in that chain. But I just, I'm curious right now, has PLG changed with the advent of AI or is it just a continued evolution of the same philosophy? Yeah. Um, I love this topic and I, I, uh, you know, I, I think about it in a few ways. There's one, there's the PLG, which is the, the, what's called product led growth, which is like self-serve signups.

And you have the different plan types. Then you have product led sales, uh, which is like PLS, which is like, great. Now I have the product. How do I actually bring sales into aid that motion? And that can be like, okay, there's some usage already. How do I now go tops down? And then there's sales led growth, which is like, in theory, that is more of, there is no product and you're just going more tops down selling. Right. And so I think those worlds are colliding and like, that's what, that's what gets me excited. It's how do you, it is an evolution for like for even at Apollo, like I joined Apollo was over a hundred million in ARR coming from a PLG perspective. And they were starting to layer in PLG, you know, product led sales and same with Miro, very similar type of environment.

I'd say that like the, the, the, the key here is that the decisions and be able to go wall to wall and be able to create value and be able to articulate why to go all in on a product and scale wall to wall. You have to be able to have that business level discussion. And so you're leveraging that, that inertia, you have to go scale it. I think that AI is, is, is allowing all the signals probably product led growth is you're getting all this noisiness from all these different end users and their type of usage and the product signals that are happening. And even third party signaling that you see too. Like, how do you know that like there's these ICs or individuals or teams using this, but then what are the executives looking for?

What are their priorities? And so with AI, you now can take all the context, all the different signals that are happening, and you can actually create better relevance of who to reach out to with what message at one time. And I think that's going to bridge this, this world, especially in our, in our way of how do I actually accelerate the sales led growth within these, within the PLG environment. And, um, it's, it's hard though, because of, of, of all the data that you see in this world we live in is like, I think in a lot of cases, it actually, it, it, it, it creates conflict, it complicates things because as a rep, like if I didn't have this PLG motion, it's really simple. What I have to go do when I have this PLG, I get caught up talking to all these people that are already using my product that, that aren't actually helping me move, move the sale forward.

What are the signals you look for in the PLG mode? Cause I remember like box when I was working with them, it was, if somebody downloaded box and, and uploaded a file within 24 or 48 hours or something like that, whatever the number was there, the, their conversion was through the roof. Right. But if it was like the 48 hour mark, if they hadn't uploaded a folder, a file or something like that, it pretty much conversion ratios dropped. So that was the thing where they got them in like, Hey, have you, have you done this? Have you done this? But then it was like the trigger of when does the sales rep get involved? So let's, let's just use Apollo. What are the kind of the ones that are through all the noise, the ones that you're like, Oh shit, like that happened, like make the phone call or this one needs to be elevated to this.

Is there something that you look for specifically out of that noise? So, you know, part of it is like, you want to, part of like the PLG motion is value should be realized before you monetize it. And you know, we have a great acquisition model, um, with a great leader that's running that business that is like, you know, like how do I get folks into the free, how does free convert the paid? And then ultimately what like the sales team is, how do I get them to drive towards the organizational plan? Which think about that as like, or why, how do I think about now that this should be an org wide initiative. And for us, we look at like product qualified accounts, and then we also think about product qualified leads and leads are more contacts.

So when we have signals and scoring that helps us, we're, we're still fine tuning it to be honest. Like it's not perfect here. I think that's also one thing is like every company is different in how we think about the scoring of it all. But ultimately we want the signal, the signal within these product qualified accounts and these signals from these product qualified leads to convert at the right rates. And for us, we see a lot of signal around like the usage of, you know, not just being a data only provider, but data and sequencing as an example. But from a lot of cases for us, the platform itself, because of product leads, teams are signing up for it. So for us, we need to go get the director plus personas to actually understand that, hey, your teams are going rogue.

It's the classic, like your teams are going rogue situation, but less than being a security play, which is kind of like the Dropbox and Box type of, you know, motion. Which I'm very, you know, used to in the past. It's more of how do I actually unlock more value of scaling this across your organization? So even the basic usage for us is a strong enough signal for us to know that there's something there and we need to go have a much more strategic discussion around how do we scale this? How do you unlock the value across the organization? So how do you then look at the, like the freemium approach to this versus the actual value approach to this? Because I think there has been this shift where you say like, I need to see value up front.

And a lot of times the free version of whatever it was, was so dog shit that I was just like, all right, whatever. So I guess like unlocking everything so people can get all the value out of the gate versus, you know, gating this and saying, you have to get to this level. What's, has that evolved? And how do you, how do you look at that? That's a constant, you know, being part of a product led growth company, there's always the battle of, or like plan differentiation. And the sales team is always going to say, there's not enough. We need more differentiation because typically it's much more tailored around, um, IT or, or, or governance and compliance versus, and it's much more of the backend users versus the front end users.

And so for us, like, you know, you want to create that flywheel. And I think we're in a highly experimentation type of culture where we're constantly testing what, what are the right gates because we give away a lot for free, a lot. And that's intentional because we want to. So I would argue that our freemium product that we have is the flywheel, is a reason why we have, you know, 3 million plus users that are using this product and it's growing at, you know, accelerating rates is because it's easy to get in. It's easy to get value. And we have that, that, that paid acquisition model really dialed in. So we know right now where there's enough, uh, features and functionality to, to, you know, to feature gate the next step into, into the, the buying motion.

You said you test a lot. Um, how does that trickle down to the organization? So what's the alignment there from a agility standpoint? Because a lot of times there's the dev, you know, dev team will test a lot, obviously, right. Marketing test messaging a lot, but then sales reps, like my experience is like when you get sales rep, like without some structure to it and you keep kind of throwing, well, what about this? What about this? Like sales reps aren't really good at, oh shit. Like, what are we doing this week? Okay, this is different. Like I need my lane here. So how do you think about testing and being agile? And then how does that disseminate down to the floor for those reps so that they're not just book of the month club every single week and you're just testing stuff and, and it, and they're the ones who are being held accountable for the results of a test that doesn't go bad.

So how does that work from your standpoint, from like a CRO perspective, how do you implement that throughout the organization? The human testing is really tough, right? Cause you're dealing with the management of people, emotions, and we're not in that. Like we do a lot of product testing and experimentation on that side of things right now. I, we, once we mature, we're in this like maturing process, which we're laying a lot of the foundations right now. So we're not in that, that experimentation phase of the, oh, it's got on the sales side of things yet. We'll get there. When we, at Miro, we were there and we would carve out teams. So we would carve out entire teams to isolate them entirely.

We would make sure compensation was taken care of. So that wasn't influencing the wrong type of behaviors and then we'd have proper AB tests. We said, cool, this team, like let's just call it pricing. So we did a ton of pricing tests. We would pull out the team. We'd say, cool, you're only going to go sell this variant of pricing for a quarter. And so we made sure compensation was fully adjusted for so that they would actually go sell with the right intent. And that's where we saw the best results is we were able to see, did this work or did this not work? So for me, it's carving it out. You got to make sure that the incentives are aligned. They have the right level of focus, because if not to your point, it's just the new flavor of the week and you never really know, is it actually working?

Yeah. It's kind of like, it's when I see companies go from like the S the inbound SDR model to the outbound, right. And I always ask them, I'm like, are you, are you going to segment the team for like an outbound motion versus, and they're like, no, no, no. We're going to have inbound do also some outbound. I'm like, that is the absolute worst decision you could possibly make. Cause an inbound rep will chase the shittiest Gmail lead they'll ever see in their life before they make one outbound call. So you have to segment out team, get the hand raisers of the people that want to be in there, treat them as a SWAT team, compensate them accordingly and, and test. And so you can prove it and then bring it to the rest of the team to show like, this is why we're good.

We're doing this. And without that, while you're just throwing everybody at everything, it ends up being a disaster. I think it's another part of going back to like, even we mentioned before, like, how do you start funding these more like development programs? It's the same thing with this. It's like, you have to fund a team to be open a new world. Maybe three, three folks that are fully just experimentation. They are the ones hacking new things, new pitches, new ways to position different products, maybe new pricing or new bundles. And, uh, we're not there yet as an organization, but that's, that's the goal that I want to get to here soon. All right, let's finish up on the one that I'm probably most concerned about, um, is, is not guys like you and me.

Um, I don't, I don't, you're about my, I'm, I just turned 50 or younger than me, but, um, you know, we've both been around the block a little bit. We got some experience, we got some business acumen, we got some context. So all this AI shit, man, is fantastic. Cause it's like, oh, I know exactly what and why I should be automating certain things. I have the context to have a conversation with you so I can look at all this information I get put so you and I can have this conversation without even really trying. I don't have a script. I don't have, you know, questions. Um, the, so that's, that's us. Great. Uh, the buyer now has more access to information than they've ever had before in their life.

They come like people always say, oh, by the time somebody comes to us, they're 60 to 70%. Fine. That was always for inbounds. Now it's even for outbound. Cause if I, if you catch my attention or something and I'm like, okay, I got a call coming up with a sales rep on this thing. Five minutes before that meeting, I can jump into chat GBT and be like, tell me everything I need to know about this. Right. And so if I get a 22 year old kid who's going to start asking me bank questions and not give me any insights into the platform and those types of things and not have a business value conversation with me, I have zero interest in that or tolerance for that conversation. It used to be tolerated because it was what it was.

This was the only way I could go through the process to buy something. Now it is not. So how are you outside of the hiring profile, how are you giving these kids a chance? Like what skills, what, what fundamentals, what are fundamentals anymore to have a high value conversation with somebody who's already really educated and has a tool now that can answer pretty much every question that I could probably give them. So what's that value of the sales rep in this equation? Yeah. I'll break it down in our world right now. And I'd say there's, there's three things that we're doing. The first one is like, what is your, what is your proficiency in go to market workflows? So internally here is like, you need to be more of an architect, like a system.

But I need to be successful now in this day and age, you have to be an expert in the domain. And what does that mean? It means in our domain, you're an expert in data, data enrichment, data orchestration, outbound, inbound, how the funnel works all the way to a stage two. If you don't understand that, you're not going to create value because your buyers are more educated than ever before. The second thing is how do you map the systems of our product to those solutions? How do you map the, our other products in the category to those, those workflows? And then the third piece of this is the value creation. So how do you ask questions? How do you articulate the value tied to those first two categories?

That's the differentiation. And that's, what's going to allow you to create trust as well as for your customer to see, wow, I actually want to go partner because they're not just trying to sell me something. They're, they're actually, they want to partner with how, how I go to market, how I can make my go to market more efficient. And we're seeing that shift happen here. We're spending a lot of time in those areas. We have a long ways to go, but a lot of that is going back to your point around hiring, but also we, we hire folks that need to be much more of this like architect of revenue or a, you know, a go to market engineer is that, that buzzword that's out in the market today, but it's actually true.

That is what's needed in this new world to be able to have the right conversations. Cause if not, you should just, you can do everything via, you know, ChachiBT or Claw today. Yeah. That's why I think, you know, Salesforce, it was funny when I was training them all those years back. I was like, you guys don't understand what you're saying as a sales rep for Salesforce, you don't understand what your competitive advantage is. And they're like, what are you talking about? I'm like, did any of you have Salesforce before you worked here as a CRM? Most of them didn't. I'm like, is your job better working as a sales rep using Salesforce than it was before you had that platform? Yeah. Tell that fucking story.

Like there's your competitive advantage. So like, I look at Apollo as the same thing. It's like, like if you're selling to me as an executive or whatever it is, well, you're my rep. You know what I mean? Like you're, you represent the rep that I need to do this thing with. We should show you how we do our day-to-day in the product. And the best conversations I have are the ones, even when I get on the phone with other executives, show me how you do it today on your side. And, and, and, and so being, eating our own dog food and, and being experts, that's, that's mission critical for us because our, and we should show that to our customers. That's the best way for us to sell is just walking through how you use it today.

Last point, cause I, cause this was the unlock for me with Apollo, right? I mean, look, I, you know, I was early days at sales loft. I knew Kyle really, really well, you know, I've worked with outreach, all these, you know, these cadence tools and I've always, you know, appreciated them if they were used the right way. But the reason I'd never personally use them very much at all was because they, they were just such a pain in the ass to get set up the way I wanted them to get set up. Right. You guys came knocking, right? It was like, all right, cool. Let's work together. Like the vibe, what you guys are doing here. And I'm like, okay, I got to figure this out. I got to figure out Apollo. Right.

And it was, it was ironic because it was timing is everything. I had just made the switch from, from chat GBT to Claude. And then I jumped into Claude co-work and I was like, holy shit, what is this? And on my list of to-dos was, all right, I got to figure out Apollo as this separate thing. I got to set some times. But then you guys came out with your MCP connector and I was like, huh, I connected it. I didn't even go into Apollo. I literally just turned my microphone on and said, now that Claude knows everything about me, all my messaging, all my positioning, all my ICP stuff. Could you please go into Apollo and set it up? So I get five tier one accounts personalized in my inbox every single day that I can approve.

So it doesn't go out automatically because I still want to do the last mile stuff, whatever it is. And holy shit, it worked. So where are you on this headless set, like platform, if you will, because I think that is the future where we're going. Like if you think of Salesforce as, okay, system of record, right? Salesforce wanted everybody living in Salesforce. Then Sales Loft and Outreach came out and said, no, no, no. We're the layer on top. You don't have to go. It's a system of record, but you want to live in Sales Loft because we have the full cycle. Now we're looking at Claude, OpenAI, everything else, and just being like, I'm just going to look into this and I'm going to tell all these things where to go.

So as a SaaS company, which, you know, everybody's talking SaaS is dead and all this other stuff. I don't necessarily know. And I think your moat is obviously your data in a lot of ways. But how do you look at this as the evolution of SaaS? And are we moving towards a headless where it's pick your big AI platform and that's where we're going to live? Or are we still going to live in different systems as we go? I think it'll be headless for sure. I totally agree with that. We see our, you know, you pick the interface. Is your interface ChatGBT? Is it Claude? Is it Slack? Like where is the interface that you want to live? And where we see that our value is, is around the intelligence layer. So the way that they think about that is like intelligence all in a pipeline as an example.

So the data that we own, the proprietary data, the first party data, second, third party, that is what is uniquely differentiated in this market. And when you start bringing in the context between them, that's the intelligence. And the intelligence also gets smarter when you think about the infrastructure that everything was built upon, right? So you think about the infrastructure that was built upon is like the sequencing. Like think about the email warmup, deliverability. Like there's a lot of foundational architectural type of infrastructure set up that allows us to work seamlessly. So now we're okay being the intelligence layer powering Claude co-worker as an example for go-to-market. So you think about like the advanced skills that are needed to be able to be really impactful using those different interfaces.

So we are fully investing in that and making that happen. So we want you to be able to do the work where it makes the most sense. And we believe it's multifaceted in this new world. And we're seeing a ton of traction with that using the AI within Apollo, being able to power through other interfaces. Yeah. Yeah. Like I said, I was like, oh, thank God. You know, as soon as it happened, like as soon as that connector came, I was like, now I can get it to do exactly what I want. And I just have to tell it. I don't have to figure out where to click this and do that and set up this. It just did it. And it was definitely okay. I see where this is all going. So last topic, last question. What's next?

Like where do you see this going for Apollo? And, you know, what's the next kind of evolution, if you will, as you evolve here? I go back to the conversation we had a little bit earlier. We talk about there's three different categories that companies are around. The legacy world, where they're trying just to modernize. And, you know, the modernized world, they're trying to go more agentic. And I don't believe there's a winner yet in this go-to-market arena when it comes to the technology that's owning the space. I think there's players out there, but no one's really owning the AI go-to-market motion. And I believe that we're uniquely positioned, when you think about it, to own that pipeline.

Everything up to a stage two, we will be best in class. And why is that? It's because the data, the data powering the Nespex action via the intelligence. And that contextual element is huge. And so I'm super bullish on the opportunity ahead. And AI is just simplifying our world right now. And I think that's honestly, go-to-market is so complex. There's so many things that you have to do right to be able to make the system work. And we're here to democratize it. And all we're doing is making it easier for every company out there to do world-class go-to-market. And so I'm super bullish. We're just getting started in so many ways. And we're powering some of the best companies in the world in their go-to-market motions.

And so, yeah, it's exciting times ahead. Love it, man. Awesome. Well, anything we missed that you want to highlight before we take off? No, it's great. I appreciate these conversations. I definitely like my video. Just thinking out loud here, the comment around this whole sales development world is something that I actually really believe in. And it's something I actually think we can iterate on now. I'm even thinking through our conversation today. So, no, this is great. Thank you so much. And we've got to get you to do some enablement and training on our side here soon. Anytime, my friend. Anytime. Where can people find out more about you, about what you're working on over Apollo and all that?

What do you want to send people here? Just LinkedIn. You can find me on LinkedIn. You know, I'm actually being much more intentional about publishing content on LinkedIn to be able to help, you know, the category understand how to think. And especially in this modern world of not just AI because I think there's a lot of buzz of that, but it's also like leadership. How do you build teams? How do you think about the sailing motion? And what's this next world of sellers? And even customer success. We didn't talk about that at all, really. But we fundamentally shifted our motion. We don't have CSMs anymore. We are all go-to-market engineers on the back end that are highly mechanized via proactive interventions.

So, like, we know when a customer is off track, it creates a signal. And then we have a human that's actually proactively reaching out at the right time in the right place with the right message. And so we're rethinking what are the right blueprints for building world-class go-to-market. Love that. Awesome, man. Well, thanks for coming on. We should do this again in a few months here just to kind of see how things have changed because, man, it just seems like things are changing every day, every week at this point. So, yeah, likewise. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it. Absolutely. And, everybody, I hope you enjoyed the conversation as much as I did. And like I always say around all these podcasts, go out there and make somebody smile today because no matter how bad your day is going or how bad you think it went, if you make somebody smile, you know you had a good day.

And the world needs a lot more of that right now. So, thank you all very much. And I will see you on the other side.