You are listening to 20 Sales with me, Harry Stebbings.
Now, today we have an absolute unicorn from the sales world on the show.
We have Ron Gabrisco, CRO at Databricks, which he joined in 2016.
And check this out, under his leadership, Databricks has scaled from zero to over $4 billion in ARR.
He's grown the sales team from zero to over a thousand, globally leading expansion into the enterprise, government and international markets.
I do not know any other CRO or sales leader that has gone from $0 to $4 billion leading the charge.
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Ron, I am so excited for this, dude.
I have heard so many great things.
So thank you so much for joining me today.
Yeah, excited to be here.
Thanks for having me.
I've got to start.
You just mentioned before this how Ben Horowitz brought you into Databricks.
Yeah.
Take me to that story.
How did Ben bring you into Databricks?
Yeah.
So, I met Ben through VC networking and at the time it was like kind of late 2015.
So I was like looking at Mongo or Square or some of those companies and he was like hey, I have this company called Databricks.
It's way earlier stage than anything you're looking at, but it's got the most upside of any company in my whole portfolio.
There's seven PhD super smart Berkeley computer guys and just a bunch of Berkeley hippies and wanted to change the world.
So they gave away their software for free and I need somebody to help them build a business.
So, I met the founders, they were just absolutely amazing, Ali and the whole crew.
What was that like meeting Ali?
Because I think I have a challenge doing the show where I meet Ali today and I'm like amazing leader of multi-billion dollar company.
And then I retrofit that on seed founders.
And I'm like, well, you're not as good as Ali.
And I forget the slope that Ali's been on.
What was Ali like then?
First of all, Ali's like one in a billion.
You know, this is kind of my third founder, technical founder.
He's 100x better than any of them because he can do the technical stuff, but he's also an inspirational leader and he knows the business.
Back then he was like, when I joined the company, they were kind of transitioning to him as the CEO.
He was actually the VP of engineering.
And I was like he was like recruiting me and i'm like that's kind of you know different right, but no, the first thing when he took over as ceo he was like teach me sales.
Like i want to learn sales.
So you know, we would sit down and talk about org charts and medpick and how organizations make decisions, and can you take me to that?
So you sit down with that and to teach him sales yeah, what did you teach him?
No, I mean again like enterprise sales is kind of a system.
Like a lot of people think it's a black box, but it's not.
It's a science, especially complex organizations.
When you're selling to enterprises, decisions are made not by one person usually.
They're made by committees, right?
So you got to kind of know how to navigate organization, who are decision makers, who are influencers, things of that nature.
You know, we talked about like med picks, some of the, how do you build a playbook?
What kind of reps do you hire?
I mean, Ali's 10X smart, right?
Like these, all the founders are like their brains work in a different way.
So he gobbled it up.
Now he's like an expert.
Like he'll, we'll sit down and he knows exactly like he's amazing salesperson now.
So I love this in terms of the engine-like characteristics, the science of it.
But when you joined, it was zero in revenue, no?
Yeah, less than a million.
Okay, less than a million.
Is it an art then?
And how did you think about building the first playbook for Databricks?
First, like, we didn't really have a set playbook or revenue model, right?
Like, we were creating that.
That was one of the things that really was exciting to me.
Coming into Databricks was hey, I get to help build the playbook, build the culture, all those kind of things.
And Honestly, first thing I did was like Hey, let's build out a team of people that I know know how to sell.
And let's just go find out what customers will buy.
So a lot of that first kind of stage of a company called product market fit from a million to 10 million is.
You know we had all these spark users.
They're free, but let's just go talk to them and find out what would you pay for?
I just want to go back.
You said about the playbook there and figuring it out.
Founders are told today, the founder needs to be the one to create the playbook.
And then you bring in the CRO head of sales to run the playbook for you.
Do you disagree with that?
Kind of depends, right?
Like I think founder led sales is really important.
No one can sell the vision and the passion of the company better than the founders.
Like Ali was really good at that.
I'll tell you a story.
Like early days, like I was, I don't know 30, 60 days in, and I was like hey, if we're going to have a big business here, we got to sell the financial services.
And so, I set up like 10 CIO meetings in Wall Street.
You know, I brought Ali, Matei, Arsalan, we're gonna go meet all these folks.
And we went and met JP Morgan Chase, this is back in like early 2016.
And you know, we were meeting with like the risk management.
And first of all we show up.
I get all these meetings like immediately and I'm like what's going on?
And I'm like, well, I have the creators of Spark.
We show up and there'd be like 100 people and they just want to take pictures with Matei.
So, it's hilarious.
But anyway, they're like, we'll give you 10 million bucks to put this.
And at the time, we're less than a million, like our whole first year target's like 10 million to put it on-prem.
And Ali was like, no way, we're not doing anything on-prem.
He couldn't get out of the meeting fast enough, right?
Because his vision and the founder's vision was all around cloud, open source and data and AI, which in retrospect, was amazing insight on where the market was going.
Anyway, so we just passed on it.
And JP Morgan was like, we'll never be in the cloud.
And obviously now they're like one of our biggest customers.
So they're massively in the cloud.
We have Jamie Dimon talking at Data and AI Summit.
But again, like that product market fit.
I think building that playbook If you can find the right salesperson as a startup to help you do that, you should.
But again, I believe in founder-led sales.
You got to go meet with customers.
You got to understand what their needs are, how to develop the product.
That product feedback loop of requirements and what's valuable to customers is incredibly important.
So we're at like 500k to 2 million in revenue, say, and we're going to hire that salesperson.
What type of salesperson do you like to hire in that stage?
And for founders listening, do you recommend they hire?
Is it the senior head of sales who's been there, done it?
Is it the juniors?
Who should we hire?
I mean, if you're just hiring salespeople, find somebody who's smart, intellectually curious, that you trust, you know is going to work their tail off.
In the technical field, you got to have technical salespeople, right?
Again, I always say salespeople teach, they don't sell.
They teach customers how to get value out of their technology, right?
If you try to go for the senior really senior folk, they're going to want to hire a bunch of people.
So, you got to make sure you got a bunch of funding to be able to do that.
Otherwise, get like a great first line manager, somebody you trust, spend a lot of time with them.
Because again, salespeople are good at selling.
So, they're really good at interviewing.
You got to know what you're getting.
Do a lot of back channels, all that kind of stuff.
But get somebody that gets their hands dirty.
Take me back to that.
It's an amazing moment.
You're at 500K, whatever it is, and you join and you start the sales process with Databrace.
What were your biggest lessons from that one to 10 million process with Databrace?
Go talk to as many customers as you possibly can.
Like we went and talked to hundreds of customers.
Second, I hired probably 40 people the first six months, some of the best salespeople from my network.
And I was literally just go set up meetings and find out what people will pay for and get the brand out there.
Are you teaching them the questions to ask, how to engage with customers?
Yeah, we're learning the discovery.
Eventually, when you build the playbook, you want to know okay, as you start to scale, what's the discovery guide look like?
What questions do I want to ask?
How do I position our solution?
How do I position the value of it, the differentiators?
It's all about asking questions.
Like even when i, when i interviewed for databricks, they're like hey, here's our pitch, give us the pitch, right.
And i was like, okay.
So i looked at it and it was like a lot of technical stuff.
And i i was like well, you don't talk a lot about value, i talk more about time to value innovation, all that kind of stuff.
Like okay, pitch us.
And i said okay, what kind of company are you?
And they said okay let's, let's do that.
I was like okay, what are some of your challenges with data?
Okay, you know, what are you trying to do in the future for your business?
They're like are you going to pitch us?
And I'm like, I am.
You know, it's all about asking questions and trying to find where, you know, we can add value.
And so then you build that into a system of repeatable plays and teach everyone.
Teach them exactly.
What's the profile we're going after?
At that time, it was like VP of analytics.
You know, we run prospecting day every Wednesday just to get meetings.
We're trying to get meetings and activity and all those kind of things.
Which is kind of a cultural thing, right?
You need to know I'm building pipeline all the time.
And then here's our value and our differentiators and you start to build up that customer base.
Can you take me to prospecting day?
Yeah.
How do you structure it?
Yeah.
What are the lessons on how to do it well for founders listening, literally we take the entire sales team.
This is everyone like, including me like i jump into the pit because we had a lot of, you know, younger sales people too, but every wednesday all we did was prospecting.
Because if you tell a salesperson hey, go prospect four to eight hours a week, Just not going to do it because it's painful, it's like hard.
But you learn so much and if you do it as a team and you make it interesting, we do it in San Francisco.
You know where the company was founded.
I'd get breakfast in the morning.
We talk about okay today, you know you'd already have to show up with okay.
Here are the three to five companies I'm going to research for each salesperson.
I'm going to try to get into these companies.
He'd research their profiles and then okay, here's how we want to pitch.
At the time it was like managed spark.
So, here are the differentiators and we teach them how to pitch it.
We go make phone calls, LinkedIn, emails, all that stuff.
Then you break for lunch, you're like, all right, who got meetings?
And then you'd share, because the collective learning, the faster you can iterate.
That's your secret weapon as a small company is I can iterate super fast and pivot super fast versus a bigger company.
That's how things change.
But Anyway, we'd say okay, and I got this profile on LinkedIn and I got them with this message and you teach that to everybody.
All right, everybody else starts trying.
And so, you start learning, okay, what are people interested in?
How do I get meetings?
All that kind of stuff.
And eventually then, as you continue to scale that every Wednesday-
It's just a muscle you're building.
It's like going to the gym.
And so I would have winter at the end.
You know, we'd either do like a donation to their favorite charity, or someone might get a cowboy hat today or a bottle of whiskey or something.
You know what I mean.
So just make it fun and have the team work together and eventually, like they'll start doing it on their own.
What ACVs are you selling at that point?
18 to 20 grand.
I mean, when I came in, it was tiny.
But the first, you know, say month I was there, we probably did a million bucks because you know, as a more experienced salesperson I could go in and say okay, how are you using the technology?
What's it worth to you?
We found some customers that I was like, oh, that's 250K opportunity.
But at the time, all the deals were 18K.
I was like, no more deals, less than my Uber bill.
Oh, dude, I like you.
But there's a lot of founders who undersell and they don't realize they're underselling.
A thousand percent.
How would you advise them to make sure that they're not underselling, given the knowledge that you have?
We spent a lot of time early days debating how to do pricing.
I actually think it was one of the smartest things we did at Databricks was...
We priced based on consumption.
So, you could start super small, but as you started to consume more, it could get super big.
And then we expanded to multiple products, all that kind of thing.
But if you think about data and AI, data is growing, the number of queries you're going to do grows.
So, having a consumption-based model is super smart.
I see this mistake a lot.
Like people will be like, oh, I'm going to price on users.
There's a cap on users.
You know if the economy goes down then there's maybe less users.
But if you can price based on you know what's your essence of value, then you can scale while we're sleeping right.
Which is a big, important part of, i think, how databricks built its pricing model is it's based on consumption.
If you use it and you get value out of it, great.
If now you don't pay anything, Did you find in the early days that helped you to sell?
Because people were like, oh, great, removes the risk.
Yeah, exactly.
So we'll try it out.
And actually the one trigger that we did early on was traditional enterprise.
You're always selling your services.
We developed a thing we call strategic customer program, where we'd be like hey, if you spend 100 grand, we'll give you free resource.
Because the biggest thing was like there was a gap in talent and expertise.
Like our product was amazing, but you had to know how to use it.
And so we would add a resource.
What's a resource?
A person?
Yeah, a person like a smart technical person to be able to set it up.
Show you the first couple of use cases, all that kind of thing.
And then once they got enabled, they were like, oh, no, I get it.
It's pretty cool, right?
At what level can you do that?
Because I think we're in that stage again with a lot of AI tools where bloody enterprises are like I know it's valuable.
I can see that, but I don't know how to implement it.
And the integration process is actually much harder for traditional enterprises.
At what stage can you do FDs, fully deployed engineers?
It's like the hot word, thanks to Palantir.
At what price point can you do that?
You know again, early days you just need logos.
So it depends on your funding situation.
But 50 or 100 grand, say 100 grand.
Okay, give me 100 grand a year, we'll do this pilot, i'll give you a resource to do it.
But again, you're trying to get those big logos because now once i you know the enterprise market's very much uh fomo, you see your competitors, they're doing this with this company.
Oh, i better get on board, go fast to do that, to compete.
And so getting those big logos is so important early days.
Like you need to buy them and you need to put resources in them to make them successful.
Should you discount to get them?
Should you do anything to get those logos?
How do you advise early stage companies on getting mega logos?
I mean, first of all, like enterprise sales is different than selling to digital natives and those kind of companies.
But honestly, there's more money in enterprises, right?
Because digital natives, they like building stuff.
They're going to squeeze you for lower prices, right?
Enterprises need expertise.
They need help.
You know I don't know about just heavily discounting, but again, if you build a pricing model that scales, that its base unit is based on your value, whatever that is as a tech provider, then you can scale it.
So start with this one team or this one department.
You can scale down the scope of it to get inside like director has up to 100k.
So you know, find a champion that'll spend that amount of money, give the resources and Even if you just do a pilot, get that logo.
You mentioned 18k ACVs and then the same month 250k ACVs.
So were you doing like SMB and Enterprise at the same time?
How do you think about whether you need to be in one camp or the other?
Early days when I got there, they were all in selling to SMB startups, digital natives, Silicon Valley type folks which again like we're like trying to convince someone to spend 25 grand.
And I'm like, it takes you two engineers.
We made a big bet early on to invest in enterprise, and we did that early because i mean one i thought that's where the money was and two long-term, sustainable for a company.
You have to have an enterprise business.
I think there's very few businesses that can just scale based on startups and digital natives.
They go up down all over the place right, so You need to make that investment.
It's going to take a little longer to pay off.
The sales cycles are longer, but you're going to learn a ton too.
You're going to learn about, like when we entered enterprise again.
You could learn all kinds of new requirements about security, how to navigate the organization, even your legal process.
What should all founders know before they go into enterprise?
Because it is a big decision.
A couple of things.
One, it's a conscious investment.
It's a longer term investment.
So you need some kind of sales expertise, their experience, number one.
Number two, they're also going to try to push their custom requirements on you, right?
So you have to be a little bit careful.
Like, the security stuff is really important because again, if you want to be a mainstream tech provider, you got to know about security and governance and all those things.
No enterprise is just going to let them use some tech that doesn't have security.
The risk is too big.
So you're going to get a lot of that.
But you also need to be conscious.
You don't want to build something that's just for one enterprise, right?
You want to make sure whatever you're building is going to be applicable to 200.
And you get some of these big customers, they can wield a pretty big stick in terms of trying to do custom engineering.
Should you ever do custom engineering?
I wouldn't do it if it's just for one customer.
Because again, as a small company, your number one asset at tech company is your engineers.
And you want them innovating on how you build the market and grow the market.
If you build something custom just for one customer and nobody else is going to buy it, you might distract your whole engineering team.
You said you made a very conscious decision to invest in enterprise.
Yeah.
What does that actually mean in reality?
It's a decision that's the whole team, right?
It's Ali, the founders.
Hey, we're going to go after this segment.
Does that mean you leave the SMB segment?
We kept that going.
We hired a first line leader that would just you know in arsalan at the time he was running sales, one of the founders crazy smart technical gregarious, great leader too, like one in a billion.
And you know he was like okay, i'm gonna keep the smb dnbs going, which was kind of generating money as we kind of built out the enterprise segment.
So we personally did both.
It's a handful, but you know i had done that before.
Can you do both?
You can do both.
Because I really worry when you see startups that are just going off to enterprise and you have like, big ACVs but nine to 12 month sales cycles and then they slip.
Yeah.
And suddenly you've got nothing.
Well, I mean, it's hard.
Like I said, it depends on what kind of funding you have, right?
Because eventually your business has to have enterprise.
But the digital natives spend a lot of money, especially in the cloud, data and AI.
And they're also going to be the canary in the coal mine.
Do you think you can do enterprise before 10 million in ARR stay?
We did in our first year, which I think we did 12 or 13 million ARR, we did $2 million deals.
In your first year you did 12, 13 million now.
Yeah.
We did $2 million deals with enterprise.
So again, you have to know what you're doing though.
I think it is smart to do product market fit because those smaller customers will educate you on the requirements of the future market.
Again, the canary in the coal mine.
They're always going to be the ones pressing the technology boundaries early days.
Enterprises are going to adopt that as the next phase.
But again you got to remember enterprises are going to have another set of requirements that the digital natives might not have around security and all those things.
You need to learn about that stuff too.
12 to 13 million in revenue.
Yeah.
Your sales cycles are not that long then if you're doing 12 to 13 in the first year.
I think early days we had some pent up demand of just you know, it was probably three to six months, because they were basically free users and we just had to sell them on why they needed to get more of our premium stuff by paying for it.
You know, again, when I joined, we had hundreds of thousands of Spark free users.
I was like, if I can't sell them something, I suck at sales.
Did you make mistakes in your hiring of your first sales team?
A lot of those early folks were people I knew, like they were known quantities.
Like I wanted smart hungry, good at discovery, good at customer relationships, things of that nature.
But of course, when you're- What are the big fuck ups?
You see young founders or early stage companies making that one to 10 on building a sales team.
Probably the biggest thing is a lot of founders think oh, I hired a salesperson now, I don't need to do sales.
Because a lot of technical founders, they don't really enjoy sales, right?
So like I need a salesperson to like take this off my plate.
I want to focus more on the product and engineering.
But ideally you still need to be involved in sales because again, founder-led sales requires you to hear about your product.
No one's going to be more passionate about selling your product.
You have to still be involved until you can kind of get that, like I said, probably around 5, 10 million bucks where you have kind of a okay, I know what people are buying.
I can build a first playbook.
That's the biggest mistake is just don't delegate it to the salesperson, because they could mess that up.
And that sets you back at least 12 months.
And also don't think sales is like a panacea for product market fit.
Whereas like, oh, well, they didn't sell.
So it's their fault.
And it's like, well, maybe you just don't have PMF yet.
Yeah.
That's not all the sellers fault.
Or maybe listen to your customers, you know, two ears, one mouth.
And even today, good salespeople ask good questions.
Understand what the market wants from your product.
I'm always struck by the dilemma between when you're in those early 1 to 10 phase do you do horizontal?
See what resonates with different customer bases, be it financial services, be it logistics, be it healthcare, you name it the different sectors that we can sell into.
Or do you go?
No, we're going to sell to financial services with a verticalized sales team, very tight product marketing and a really honed sales process for financial services.
Do you go horizontal and broad or verticalized?
I mean, I think you have to start horizontal because you're again learning what's your applicability to the different verticals.
I didn't go vertical at Databricks till we were probably 500 million plus right 500 million.
Yeah, because like again, like you skipped a few steps there, didn't you?
We were at 13.
No, I know.
I'm just saying I think when you verticalize your sales team, there's a whole nother level of resources and complexity that you're going to add right.
Because you're going to add industry experts.
You need to add that vernacular, add that to your training, to your enablement, your customer stories, all that kind of stuff.
Early days, maybe financial services is place to go.
Like what I learned was financial services isn't in the cloud yet.
If we're going to be cloud, we're probably not going to sell financial services early days.
Let's go sell to the folks that are in the cloud already.
Do you agree that you don't want to educate your customers on the problem?
And so, like for me, I don't want to tell LPs that they should be investing in venture, because it's two steps.
Then I need to convince them to invest in venture and and then to invest in me.
You want people who know that the cloud is where they should be and then okay, data bricks not educating them that the cloud is good.
It might be a little bit different now at the scale we're at, but like early days, if they weren't in the cloud, it was like bridge to door.
Let the cloud folks convince them they need to be in the cloud because we need to generate customers and revenue.
You spend a lot of time.
Time's your most precious commodity, right?
Especially as a salesperson.
So don't spend a bunch of time with people that aren't going to buy anything, right?
You need to go find.
So the whole world is our prospect at that point.
Every customer is a potential new customer.
One of our qualifying questions is, are you in the cloud?
If you're not in the cloud, then you're not ready for Databricks.
So let the cloud guys fight that out.
So we're at 13 million in revenue now.
Yeah.
Hold your horses on the 500.
That's a shockingly late decision on verticalization.
I was like, a lot of companies are still horizontal.
There's still be horizontal, right?
Like I think AWS just moved to verticals right across the whole organization.
They're a hundred billion.
So, like I mean again, I think that's another choice you have to make on your strategy when you verticalize.
13 million.
Yeah.
What starts to change when this sales team goes from 1 to 10 to now, in that scaling to 50, 10 to 50 mode.
Yeah, now we have product market fit, right?
We have some references.
We've seen how customers buy, why they buy.
Now we're starting to get into the scale function, right?
Now we can start to build a real playbook, start to train more and more salespeople.
Don't laugh.
When you say build a playbook, do you literally create a doc of questions that they should ask?
FAQs.
Totally.
Discovery guide.
Here are the questions you start with.
Here's the profile of the customer we're looking for.
Here's the actual profile of the people in those customers.
Then here's the questions we need to ask.
Here's how we position it during the first pitch deck.
And then depending on your process, okay, are we going to run POC or pilot for them?
Depending on what you're trying to sell, is it intuitive how to get value out of it?
Demonstrate value and then try to close a customer.
So, you're building out that playbook, you're training everyone on it.
They need to know how to do that so that you can rinse and repeat as fast as possible and gather customers. i mean this with the utmost of respect if it's bluntly that codified can we not just get some monkeys to do this i mean it's like here's the customer here's the profile here's the questions yeah i mean let's just get an ai avatar yeah i know i mean a lot of people say like hey can we replace sales with ai and i think there are parts of sales you can replace with ai like maybe building the playbook some of those things once you get those assets but again early days you're creating that from scratch it has to learn from something Because if you think about like a playbook creator integrated into Gong, it could analyze tone, changes in voice, words, semantics which work and then say- Yeah, what are the best questions to ask?
Certainly should be able to use AI to get way better at that early days.
But the one thing that will always require humans to sell are if humans are buying.
Because the buying process is an emotional process.
You're trying to choose what problems do you want to solve?
What are the most important problems to solve?
How do I solve them amongst many different options?
And a lot of it gets down to if the technologies are okay.
This one has some pros and cons.
This one has some pros and cons.
Who do I trust the most?
Which organization do I think can get me there the fastest?
If that's a person making the decision, it's not black or white.
When bots are selling to bots, then you don't need salespeople.
But as long as humans are actually solving problems and buying stuff, you need humans to sell it.
Going back to the 10 to 50, for you, what broke in that phase?
When you're in this hyperscale phase, which I kind of see with some of the new AI companies, right?
There's some great scaling AI companies.
You have to start thinking like traditional business might grow 20 year over year when you're doubling, tripling.
My staffing and my leadership plan has to be what I need next year.
So you can't be like, okay, I'm going to incrementally add reps or leaders.
You have to be thinking we're going to do 50 million next year.
We're going to do, you know, we did 100 or 250.
Like what does my org need to look at at 100 million, 250 million?
And I need to do that now.
So I need to go get those leaders.
I need to sell them personally why this is a once in a lifetime opportunity to get even bigger leaders than I need today.
Because once I start building out the team and the leadership, now I can start scaling under them.
You know, my biggest advice is, you know, you need to look at least 12 months out.
Because if you're just trying to iterate, you're not going to grow fast enough.
Is it ever dangerous to hire ahead of time?
And what I mean by that is if you're hiring at 13 million in ARR and then you're bringing in people for like a year ahead of time.
Sometimes an org is not ready to digest talent.
Is that ever the case or is it actually just good to get them in earlier?
No, I think you have to think about that, right?
Like what does it take for us?
It's like we're going to start to also have an impact on the culture of the company.
Like Databricks is very engineering.
Even to this day, it's very engineering technical culture.
When you start adding salespeople, they have kind of a different mindset, you know?
So, you have to think about how that culture fits into that.
Do you think sales wraps the coin off prices?
Not the best ones.
I mean, listen, you go into sales because it has, you know, financial upside.
The people I'm looking for, they don't ask like, how much do I make early on?
You got to make sure they love the mission.
Like, the most important thing is you're building an army.
They got to love the mission.
They got to love the company first. once they love the mission and the company.
Would you mind if I came and I just said I am fucking hungry to make money and I will crush it and make sure I hit quota.
I mean, I'd love, I love the grit and the energy.
You know what I mean?
But I also thinking like, okay, what happens when you don't?
What happens when it gets tough?
Are you going to go to the next company and move around?
No, I blame you for poor leadership.
So, I mean, I look on people's resumes, right?
Like if they have a bunch of one or two year stints, they're not long for Databricks.
I need people like when this gets- What do you like to see in a resume?
Yeah.
Again, I'm looking for grit, first of all, hard work and grit.
Like I want somebody to tell me like, hey, I had some challenges here, but I worked through it.
I worked my tail off and kick some ass, right?
I look for technical backgrounds too, like I'm looking for specific company profiles, because I know if I get a salesperson that already has some data AI technical capabilities, they're going to ramp way faster than somebody who's brand new.
They got to learn the entire technology space, right?
What's more important, that someone has sold an ACV size before, a customer profile before, or they have the domain knowledge of the space.
Early days is the domain knowledge.
That's more important.
Yeah, I think so.
Why is that?
Because again, you're trying to teach customers how to get value out of your technology.
And if you don't add value, like especially in today's world, there's so many technical buyers.
They don't really like salespeople.
Like the last thing they want to do is talk to somebody who's like hey, you know, you want to go golfing or whatever.
Like they actually want somebody that's going to help them solve problems.
Do you not just tie that in with the sales engineer?
I mean, we had a great, we call it field engineering, but and Arsalan runs that team.
It's a great team, right?
But I think the salesperson themselves has to add value.
In early days, it's technical.
Now, as you get bigger like we have 100 million accounts you know you need people that know the organization can get access to the C-level, all that stuff.
But early days, when you're just trying to get logos and early customers, you got to be able to add value.
You got to be able to teach your customers.
$100 million accounts.
Yeah.
God, I hope they get a customer success report.
They have lots of people on them.
I'm sure they do.
Are you kidding me?
That's insane.
$100 million accounts.
Yeah, we just did one for $190 million actually.
No.
Yeah, it's pretty good.
That must feel pretty great.
Yeah, it's pretty great.
Do you put a slap message out?
Especially when we're selling 18 grand.
Yeah.
You know, not too bad.
That can buy some Ubers.
Yeah, not too bad.
Okay, so we're going 13.
We have this process.
Where are we at the end of year two?
50?
50.
Yeah, 30 to 40, something like that.
We did a three to four X the next year.
Yeah, somewhere around that.
So we might've got to 50.
Did the leadership team put pressure on you to hit targets?
I mean, Ali and I kind of built in the founders, you know, the early days of the company, right?
Like he basically built out the product and the engineering and, you know, helped me build out the go-to-market and stuff like that.
And Ali's one of those guys, he wants to set the target as high as possible.
And early days.
I'm trying to make sure.
Well, let's make sure people can make some money too, right?
So there's always that tension.
What are your biggest lessons on setting comp plans effectively?
Because it is important people make money and feel like they're winning.
Thousand percent.
What are your big lessons?
Early days you got to make sure that salespeople are crushing their numbers and making money, because that's going to be your best recruiting engine.
When you're trying to sell a company that has small revenue, you need people to take a leap of faith.
They got to hit the believe button.
So I was like, who's going to be my first million dollar earner?
And I would make sure that that person does that because you know what?
The best reps I would try to hire, they go, has anybody made a million bucks?
And then they're like, can I meet them?
And then they're going to determine is that possible to replicate?
Early days, people have to be blowing out their numbers and making tons of money and it's a great recruiting tool.
Now, as you mean, do you set them deliberately low goals so they hit them and then they become low goals.
But i want to make sure they're achievable goals.
I want them to be stretch but achievable, and i'm gonna make the plans like pretty rich, you know what i mean.
And their plans are like 4x salary, like how do you think about setting a normal enterprise rep?
You know you're going to pay 300, 350k.
So, you know, if they blow it out, you want them to make 3x.
In the early days, we were doing big commit deals.
I mean, like I said, I have one guy make a million bucks in the first year and then scale it.
And, you know, now we probably have 20 guys make a million bucks in the sales team.
But you always have to have those big earners because it's part of the reason they're in sales, is because they want the big payday.
Wow.
20 make a million dollars plus.
Yeah.
Have you ever lost a million dollar plus person?
I mean, eventually people are like, hey, I want to go to the next startup and try to do that.
Because we have great retention.
But as you scale, you have to be a little bit smarter too, on how you spend your commissions.
What changes?
You just get tighter?
You know, we have 1400 reps now.
We have 5,000 people in sales.
So like, you know, there's a certain budget we have to have on commissions.
So we'll schedule a plan.
We know this many people are going to make 200%, 150, you know, you model it out.
It's pretty sophisticated because now you have big numbers.
It's not like you have 20 people.
Do you ever look at it and go like, it's fucking nuts.
Like 5,000 people.
I remember when it was me and Ali selling 18 grand deals.
I know, it's funny.
Yeah, it's fun.
What an amazing world.
Yeah, it's awesome.
Okay, and so we have that.
We have those million dollar people.
Great.
When you look at them, say the 20, are there things where you're like I see that non-conventional or unconventional trait in most of them.
Slash all of them.
Yeah, like i said, i talk a lot about grit and hard work.
You know, my dad was a construction worker.
My mom was a math teacher.
They taught me like hard work overcomes talent every single day.
So i'm looking for that's.
The special quality i'm looking for is like is this person gonna put in the extra hours, have the extra grit when times get tough?
Are they just gonna stay in the office longer, make more phone calls?
That kind of thing?
Do you think there's many salespeople like that today?
I am dear friends with Jason Lemkin from Sasta.
I love the man, really.
My father in venture.
He'd probably hate that and say I'm his older brother, but he's considerably older than me.
And he's always like, no, Harry, sales reps don't want to work anymore.
They don't want to work.
They want to dial it in and go home.
Do you find that the sales reps of this generation are not willing to work as hard as they used to?
I mean, that won't work on my team.
Again, that's the kind of culture that I try to build.
And again, I think if you're a good salesperson, you ask me, did we lose any older breaksters?
Eventually, somebody's like, hey, I'm a startup person.
I like to work at startups.
I don't want to work at a 9,000 person company or a 10,000 person company.
So they go to a startup again.
But at the end of the day, I think that's what we have to teach that next generation of sellers.
Because it's going to get even more competitive.
Work your ass off.
Out-hustle everyone.
Does it get harder to hire the hustlers as Databricks becomes an incumbent?
I think Databricks is a once-in-a-lifetime type company.
It will be a trillion-dollar company.
Somebody in that data and AI space will become a trillion-dollar company, and we're the innovation leaders.
I think we can do it right.
And so part of that when you think about getting talent at this level of scale, because we kind of skipped a couple stages now is we have to become a destination company.
People have to be like I want to go to Databricks because I can build my career there, because someday I want to be a CRO or a CEO or whatever.
And they're going to teach me about how to do that in the right space better than anybody.
I mean, think about like Microsoft early days or Google early days.
Like a big part of getting talent is you have to become a destination company.
And I think Databricks is doing a pretty good job of that.
I love that in terms of being a destination company.
How did the type of sales leader that you needed to be change from 10 to 100 million in a row?
Yeah, I mean, 100 million, you know, now you got a lot more process, a lot more enablement.
You know, I don't know everyone.
I can't just reach out and make sure I get involved in the deals.
And so a big part of it is how do you build that leadership team?
Again, we talked a little bit about like, what do you need in the next 12 to 24 months?
So you need to build leaders so that they can effectively develop talent.
My rule is like if you have the best team on the planet and you inspire motivate, mentor them, you get to win.
I mean, we have a great product, which is also a massive advantage for us.
But that's the number one thing you can do is if I put the best team on the field and they're well coached and inspired, I'm going to win.
What have been your biggest lessons on building a successful leadership team with Databricks?
Yeah, so i think a lot of it's like again, the profile and cultural mix.
Right, we talk a lot about first team, first team's the company.
So sales leadership, the higher you go, the more it's got to be about the company.
You're not there to just make sure your people are successful, or you know what i mean.
It's got to be okay.
Here's our company mission.
We're together, we're going to do it, and so i think that camaraderie and how you build that team and how you build the culture is as important as anything else that you do in sales.
People need to feel like they're part of a special mission.
When was the culture at Databricks the worst and what went wrong?
The worst?
I thought we've always had a great culture, honestly.
I can't really say we had bad culture.
When was there a challenging time as you scale bigger and bigger?
One of the keys, i think, is probably how do you keep that early day culture?
It's such a huge advantage when you're like a gritty, innovative startup.
I think we've done a good job actually at databricks.
Keeping that right, like that's a big part of the founders is like we want to be the innovators, the disruptors, the cool nerdy kids you know what i mean.
Like that's what we want to be and so keeping that culture where you have grit and all that, and not becoming a big company you know that's the challenge is your scale.
How do you keep that and not become a big company where people just it's bureaucratic, it's process it's, you know, the management team versus the, the workers?
So, but i think we've done a pretty good job of that.
I think our culture is second to none.
It's a big part of why we're successful In the zero to 500 billion range, which is a huge range.
What did you not do, with the benefit of hindsight, you wish you'd done?
I started to invest in the partner channel much bigger.
Partners are interesting, right?
Like, especially the big partners, big SI partners.
At that point, we had already done, Ali and I did the deal with Microsoft, right?
Which became kind of pretty historical, I think, in legend.
And it's still, you know, Microsoft's our, you know, biggest partner.
It's an amazing partner for us.
But like, you know, you got to start thinking through like channels and partner strategies.
And when you're so small, you're always thinking like, how do I get these partners involved?
But you're too small and like, you know, go away.
But once you start getting scale, you need to start investing early days in partners.
So you didn't do that early enough?
I think we could have done it earlier.
Yeah, absolutely.
I think a lot of founders see channel partnerships as like the panacea.
We're going to have a partnership with Salesforce and it's going to be like, boom.
What are the secrets?
Early days, that's hard to do.
Like I would say, if you're less than 50 or 100 million like, you need to build a strong direct sales channel and then you can build the partner channel.
But at 500 million now, we should be scaling, moving stuff through channels, right?
What does it take to do partner channels really well?
Good question.
Because sometimes like partner leaders, they're like sales leaders that didn't make it sometimes.
So, I try to actually hire... It's like VCs, which is founders that didn't make it.
I like to hire, you know, people that have strong sales acumen, sales leadership a lot of the same qualities that want to build out channels.
Because again, like you know me as a CRO, I'm a sales leader, but I also spend know 30, 40 of my time with partners because i want to build that channel right, and so it's a skill you need to learn when you're trying to build a massively scalable business.
And so, you know, just getting a person that's always been in partnerships sometimes a little bit dicey, i'd rather find somebody that's done some sales and done some partnerships.
They've done it, you know, thoughtfully to build their career.
So i mean i think that's important to do.
Okay, that's a fantastic one.
So that's what you maybe didn't do that you wish you'd done earlier.
What did you do that you wish you hadn't done?
And what are the reflections on that?
I think we did a lot of stuff right.
Like I think when we expanded internationally, I think we did it at kind of the right time.
When did you do that?
We probably started to do that to EMEA, maybe 100 million plus, 100 to 250 million.
And then we were in APJ, probably, you know, about 250 million plus.
You have to do that thoughtfully though.
Any lessons on how to do international expansion?
It's hard.
Yeah, it's hard because, you know, there's a lot of different things.
Like you have to translate your culture, your playbook.
You have to have leadership there that you trust.
One of the big lessons I learned is you want to trans plants some of your talent.
So I literally, like when we open a Mia, took four or five of my you know best young, hungry sellers and said okay, you're gonna go to a Mia for a year, it's gonna be great experience for you.
You need to help them build the muscle over there and build the culture over there.
Right, and me personally too I'm, you know.
I'm doing multiple trips one a quarter over there to get that going.
Same thing with APJ, like transport, some existing talent helps build the culture, all those kind of things.
What do you think are the big mistakes you see people doing when they go international?
Think some do it too early because you know again, it's going to spread your focus, your sales leadership, but it's also going to spread your focus for your product, like you're going to see new requirements come up in asia or new regulatory requirements, depending on where you go.
So i think the biggest mistake is people go early before they've really got that product market fit, because they you know hey, they have a couple customers in emea so let's go support them.
And now Now, again you got to think about, like you know, I have a limited team.
You're constrained by your resources.
Like, where do you want to focus?
So I think that's probably the biggest mistake I see.
I find people go too early into enterprise often.
And the hard thing I find with enterprise is the sales cycles mean it's tougher to determine success with reps because they're just longer before you have closures.
How do you think about measuring rep effectiveness?
And what are your biggest lessons in what it takes to do it well?
How do you know if I'm good?
For enterprise or for any rep?
Does it differ?
I think it does slightly just based on the sales cycle, but-
I think upfront, I'm looking at pipeline and activity.
The number one thing I'm going to look at is this person getting the right meetings?
Are they building the right pipeline?
I got to make sure I'm inspecting that too.
So you know early stage sales leader you're going to want to go.
Hey, I'm in your territory this month for this week.
Set up as many meetings as you have.
And if you got one or two meetings...
Probably don't have a great salesperson, right?
So, and then you're going to see them in front of a customer.
Do they ask good questions?
Does the customer want to buy from them?
Is there a right amount of meetings?
I know it's really granular, but like we mentioned Dagnon before.
Dagnon was always like to me.
When you get to my age, you know the memory goes, but he said it's like six or eight.
I can't remember what it is, but you can't do more than six or eight because you need to be researched.
You need to be informed.
Six or eight is the max.
Yeah.
Do you agree with that?
You know, we sit at the bar at like five a week is kind of the minimum.
So, you know, five to 10, he's probably right.
And that's six to eight.
That's not a bad metric.
But again, you do want to make sure you prepare.
It's just like any other sport.
Okay.
So you have five weeks.
Let's just roll with this.
You have five a week, 20 a month.
Yeah.
Do you have like an expected close rate?
I'm building opportunities, right?
So at least 25% of those should turn into some kind of opportunity.
And now I'm going to work that opportunity.
And you know they're going to close at different rates depending on that organization.
How can I get budget things of that nature?
Do you worry about setting goals that can be played?
And what I mean by that is you're like, Harry, I want 20 meetings.
I'm like, okay, 20 meetings.
And my qualification process goes down.
Yeah.
How do you think about effective goal setting which can't be played?
Eventually, I'm going to see pipeline and closures.
But you're right, there's a delay.
There's a 6, 12, maybe 18-month delay on that.
But that's why the first-line manager and the sales leader is so important, because I'm going to go assess those meetings myself.
Again, if you think about it, you need pitchers and batters, right?
Or catchers and batters.
I don't know what you know.
I guess for cricket here you need yeah, bowlers and batsmen yeah, bowlers and batters.
So we didn't play rounders in this country.
I know, i know, but i'm a baseball player.
So, if you think about it, the reps like when i was first there, i was like, just get me as many meetings as you can just put in there.
Be like oh, we're going to deal with j and j.
They're like who do you want to meet with?
I was like anyone with a j and j email address because i'll be able to assess, like is that person got juice?
You know, is there an opportunity?
How do i navigate the organization?
So again, go take as many meetings as a leader.
You, you will join that call and let them run it.
Yep.
Okay.
So you're not running that call.
Correct.
And you sit in and you just listen.
Yeah.
As long as it's going well.
Okay.
And if it's not going well, I'm going to step in and try to help.
And where does it not go?
Well, it depends on the rep, their preparation.
Are they asking questions?
You know when you think about what's a successful sales meeting.
We haven't even talked about that like the basics of selling.
It's like, have I generated some rapport?
Do they trust me?
Have I generated interest?
Have I identified challenges?
And have I driven to an objective?
What was the objective of my meeting?
Was it to get an X meeting?
Was it to get a POC?
Was it to get an introduction to somebody?
So, you need to have a game plan on all that.
So you've had to have researched the company, the opportunity, the people you're talking to their LinkedIn profiles.
So, a good meeting is somebody who really is prepared.
Again, it's like any sport, you practice 10x more at least than you play.
So, if you have a one-hour meeting, you should be preparing for it 10 hours.
So funny, there's a Usain Bolt interview which is amazing.
Yeah.
And he says, I trained 10 years for nine seconds.
Yeah, there you go.
Exactly.
Fuck me, that's a bad ratio.
That's a really bad ratio.
Yeah, I mean, think about the Olympics, right?
Like these people train their whole lives and it's over in a split second, right?
Honestly, unbelievable.
Going back to that, what it takes to do a good meeting, I'm so glad you broke it down that way.
I know it's kind of facile of me to ask, but what do you find works in building rapport?
I mean, get to know somebody, right?
Like be intellectually curious about their background.
But I find a playbook.
When I feel like someone's running a playbook on me, it doesn't build rapport.
And so for me, my job as an interviewer is to build rapport too.
Yeah.
But to make someone feel safe.
Yeah.
And like, you know what?
He's not here to get me.
And he's open to.
And so I'll talk about my mother having MS or anything like that.
Because you're like, oh, I feel like I'm getting to know this guy.
Yeah.
Be a little bit vulnerable.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
Any lessons for you on like how you build rapport, rather than like oh, whereabouts are you in the world?
Oh, it's rainy in London.
I'm definitely not a weather talker.
Normally, I usually talk about, you know, where did you grow up?
What are you interested in?
What are your family?
I mean, you got to start small.
You can't be like, oh, do you have any cancers we can talk about?
That's a savage talk.
No, but again, it's like, you know, how do you try to get to know somebody, right?
Get to know about them.
I think a lot of people are influenced by where they grew up, their families.
Like I like to ask about that, because I think a lot of people are like you know, family is a super important thing.
So I want to get to know about that.
Do you find people lie about being a buyer?
Because you want to know if they have budget and if they're the buyer.
Do you find that people over inflate their own status within companies?
I mean, listen, I'd never ask somebody, do you have budget?
I'm experienced enough to know what's going to happen.
I'm going to get that information eventually, but like, listen, everybody wants to be important.
So like, let them be important.
The reason they have in that position is because they have some decision authority.
You know, I've done literally billions of dollars of software deals and thousands of deals, right?
I kind of know how organizations work and I'm there to teach how to get value and I'll ask questions like oh, do you have to do a value case for this?
How does that work?
How does that process work?
Who has to approve that?
Who has buying authority?
Once you've established rapport you can get a lot more deeper on that kind of information on how to navigate the organization.
You can't really have that discussion until you've added value.
How does AI change the sales process, do you think?
Do you use any AI tools today?
Oh, we do.
Yeah, we use Perplexity.
We use Glean.
We actually built some of our own AI, like a sales AI assistant.
Our sales AI assistant.
If we're like hey, how do I get funding for an on-prem migration from Microsoft?
You can just ask and it'll tell you the process on that.
We use Perplexity.
We'll do a lot of our upfront account research.
Tell me, you know, how this customer uses data and AI.
How would they get the most value out of Databricks?
You can get a lot of information on that.
And then our sales assistant will actually take that data or take that conversational stuff along with like, our account data.
Right.
Like it'll say, oh, they've been growing here.
They've been spending on this product.
They're working on this initiative.
Oh, I also see in the press they're interested in cybersecurity, stuff like that.
Right.
So you can use AI to really accelerate all that research and get smarter because again, the smarter you are on that customer, the more interesting questions you're going to be able to ask to try to find an area you can add value.
So content preparation in terms of outbound, will we see outbound not die but be replaced by AI in terms of email, outbound literally being done by AI?
I don't know if completely replace it, but certainly I think outbound stuff.
The AI is actually better at it than humans, in my opinion, because it'll also learn what works faster.
Right?
Like that whole iteration process I did early on with, hey, everybody's going to do prospecting day.
If I start setting up a bot to try to ping people to get meetings, it's going to learn what works and what doesn't work faster than I can get a team of humans together.
Now, that being said, like you want to learn that, but it needs to be informed, right?
I don't think you can completely replace humans there.
Also in a world of infinite outbound, does value of it not go down?
If you know that you're being outreached by an AI, does the value of that not go down?
I don't know.
I haven't thought about it.
Still early days, but you're probably right.
I mean, even now, like, I mean, how many emails and LinkedIn posts do you get?
It's literally thousands, right?
Like, so which ones kind of go to the front of your box where you even take a meeting, right?
A lot of it's going to have to do with your brand and your message, and you know what's happening in the market and how much you know about their company right.
Like Again, that's what I think AI can do is if I really know what's going on inside that person, inside that company.
You're right.
You might need a human to actually put a human touch to it, but it's probably going to give you the content to get them potentially interested better, right.
Will you have more or less sales wrapped in five years time?
Again, as long as humans are buying software, I think you need humans to sell software.
So we definitely use AI to become more efficient, but we're going to hire quite a few folks because we're going to go big.
So did I answer that correctly?
Yeah, you did.
Brilliant.
When you look at the different stages of the company, what was the hardest?
You can break it up into like, I don't know, 10, 100, 100, a billion, billion and beyond.
Which was the hardest?
They all have different challenges.
The zero to 10 for me was probably the most fun.
It was tough, but I was like, I can sell $10 million of something to literally anyone.
You know what I mean?
Like all I have to do is figure out what they want to buy.
That 10 to 100 million is a pretty tough scale because now you got a little bit of product market fit.
But now you really have to get into like that enterprise motion start getting referenceable customers, get them to speak about you.
I really enjoyed that phase for sure.
Then the 100 to a billion.
Now you're getting partners involved, distribution channels, you're scaling the sales organization.
So, now it's, you know, you're getting into the scaling function.
You know, we just did 3 billion last year.
You know, I think we'll be 10 billion in a few years.
So, you know, now you're in hyperscale and, you know, a different set of challenges.
So, each one I've enjoyed because they're different.
I think the 10 to 100 is one of the hardest things.
Now, the hyperscalers in AI, they're like blowing through 100. million, right?
Like some of these companies, they're crushing it.
Which one are you most impressed by?
I think cursor is super impressive.
I think they're growing crazy fast.
Like I use AI for engineering and coding.
They're doing really well.
So I mean, we'll see you know if they can sustain it.
I hope they can, but it's, you know, super impressive what they're doing, for sure.
You have been in a fight against Snowflake.
What are your biggest lessons on selling against competition?
Everyone has competition.
It's one of the biggest things I've learned today.
Investing is that before you used to have two or three competitors.
Databrace and Snowflake say.
Now there's 15 competitors for everything.
What are your biggest lessons for founders on how to sell in competitive markets?
So first of all, you need competition.
Otherwise, you don't have a market, right?
Especially early days.
If nobody else is selling into your market, like, you know, what's the point?
I don't think there's 15 companies that'll survive in it.
You know, the traditional thing is there's three companies.
There's three clouds.
There'll be three AI players.
You know, I think there'll only be one data and AI player Databricks, but there'll probably be three.
Every other market, three.
Mine, one.
One.
We'll win.
We'll crush everyone.
No, but I think, listen, and the biggest player gets 80% of the market, right?
And the other ones, you know, get the rest.
It depends.
In consumer, that's the case.
In enterprise, it tends to be the opposite.
It tends to be much more distributed.
I haven't seen that.
I mean, look at Salesforce.
Look at ServiceNow.
I mean, you look at cloud and you're like AWS.
Cloud's a little bit more even distributed, although GCP you'd still say it's kind of a distant third right.
But AWS and Azure are kind of neck and neck.
That's a big battle.
Getting back to the competition snowflake question for us like it's kind of good to have somebody that's trying to make you better.
And I'm ultra competitive, right?
Like I'm an athlete.
So like the reason I do sales is because I love competition, right?
How far behind are they?
Five plus years, in my opinion.
You know, we bet on the future early days.
We bet on AI.
We bet on the lake house.
We bet on open source.
They're just dipping their toe into that.
And if you look at it too, right, we're three times their growth rate.
We've done 250 snowflake to Databricks migrations, eight of their top 10.
Like, you know, we're doing pretty well in that market.
So I think we're the future.
And the founders made some really smart investments and technology bets in RD to make sure we're well ahead of them.
And so we'll continue to invest.
It's great being private too, right?
We get to over-invest in R&D, over-invest in sales.
Do you think you've benefited from being private in a way that they haven't had the luxury of being private?
Yeah, massive.
It's massive, right?
We think it's early in the market.
I say it's top of the second inning.
And so if we can continue to pour money into innovation and RD and sales and distribution, we're going to grab more market share and again get further out of them.
Where have you not spent, or have not spent as much that you would like to spend more of in the future?
Actually, our brand's gotten really good now as we started to spend more on brand.
I think we should have done more of that early, marketing and brand.
I want to press even more on partners.
You know we'll fund 200 million in projects to partners this year, but I would spend even more on partners and distribution training.
We just started Databricks India Academy.
You know, we'll train over a million people.
India Academy?
Yeah.
Databricks India Academy.
Fuck me, that's niche.
Yeah, it's cool.
Wow.
Well, there's so many companies that, you know, have big IT and outsourcing in India.
And so, we built a whole academy there to train all the, you know, Indian partners, Wipros and the Emphasis and train a million people there.
So, What are your biggest lessons in what it takes to do President's Club well?
If I'm an early stage founder, should I do President's Club and what do I need to do to make it good?
I mean early day founders.
What I've seen is they'll do the whole company in offsite, but it's not a President's Club, right.
What stage should you do President's Club?
When you have enough of a sales team where, because you don't, President's Club is like 10 15, maybe 20 of your people are going offsite.
But if that's only two people, it's not a president's club, right?
So you got to have at least I don't know 50 or 100 people at least in sales before you join a president's club.
Because it's also like if you're an engineering company, because we bring MVPs too, engineer side of it's going to be like Well sales going on like a holiday for top performers.
But if you think about the sales mentality, you're competitive.
You want to be one of the best.
You want to be one of the top 10, 15%.
So, it's usually kind of a slightly later stage thing.
I would say you got to be 100 million plus to do it.
You have to be smart about how you invest in it.
And the whole idea is create a special experience for the salesperson and their spouse.
Get that spouse where they're like wow, Databricks is an amazing company and you got to make sure you go next year.
I always say the power of pillow talk is so valuable.
Yeah, totally.
And my sales team cares more about who goes to club or as much as who goes to club as like.
Okay, what's the new commission plan?
How does that work?
All that kind of stuff.
It's that important.
Like people will be like trying to lobby for the people that are on the fence and You create that culture where you know everybody wants to get there and it becomes a really fun thing.
So, and just make it amazing.
Four days, David Briggs' sales go to shit.
Well, it's over a weekend.
Oh, it's over a weekend.
Oh, it's fine.
Oh, fine.
It's been a power of pillow talk.
I think it's so valuable because when they come home and moan, I'm just not.
But remember, we did have a great time and Ron was so lovely to us.
Well, listen, we're, I ask for a lot, right?
They're traveling all the time.
Does remote sales teams work?
You said that about kind of you know, the pipeline building, the prospecting day, that being there in person.
Yeah.
We have the saying.
It comes from one of my leaders, Michael Hartman sell from your feet, not from your seat.
If you have the opportunity to go meet a customer in person, go do it.
If you have the opportunity to go do lunch or dinner, go do it.
Because again, we talk about that rapport, talk about that relationship with the customer.
They want that relationship where they trust you, where they know they can count on you to solve problems for them.
Because a lot of times they're making a decision that may affect their career.
It could catapult them way into the future or not.
And so they're going to make a decision like the more time you can spend with them, spend with them in person establish a rapport crazy important.
So the expensive state dinner not done, because a lot of people like oh, that's so last year.
It depends on the company.
If you're going to sell to an enterprise company and you can get executives out for two hours to do a steak dinner, do it.
It's worth it because now you'll have a relationship with those people that you wouldn't have had on 30 minutes over the phone, right?
Do you know what i miss?
I miss golf days.
I don't get to golf with many customers.
Four hours on a course.
Yeah, that's rare.
That's rare anymore.
Can you imagine if you had four of your biggest enterprise customers hanging out with each other, hanging out with you shooting the shit?
No phone.
Yeah, we try to do events like that.
Recently, we did spring training events.
We had like 30 customers there.
Actually, I got to throw out the first pitch for the Texas Rangers and then- It only cost you five million bucks.
Yeah.
It wasn't that expensive.
But you know, then we went golfing and dinner and you know you get to spend that kind of time.
Now you have a different relationship with those customers.
You got to make sure they're the right customers.
So.
Who performed at your last president's club?
We said we weren't going to talk about that.
Yeah, no, I don't know if that's public or not.
So.
We don't have to.
Maybe it is.
I don't know.
I mean, last year we had Flo Rida, it was awesome.
Yeah, it was fun.
He was amazing.
I heard that Ali did a break dance to it.
He did not.
Oh, he did not?
That was fake news?
No, he did not.
He did not.
He did not.
That would be too good though.
Although he is fun.
Dude, I love that listen, i've so enjoyed this.
Can i do a quick fire with you?
Sure, let's do it.
Okay, there's so many places i could take this.
Let's start with what's the biggest misconception people have about cro's, the sales leader.
Most people think like oh, you're in sales, like the only people in sales they've had a interaction with is like a used car salesman.
They're like oh, you have to be slick.
I don't think being a sales leader, you have to be slick.
Again, I think you have to be knowledgeable and trustworthy.
You can be a mentor, right?
You don't have to be tough.
I'm a driver, but, you know, mentor people, inspire them.
You have such a great voice as well.
Oh, thanks.
Yeah.
You're like kind of like a husky, a Matthew McConaughey.
I appreciate that.
I think I look just like him.
You know what?
In 10 years, I'm chasing my hero.
I'm like, just talk to me, Ron.
This could be a meditation app.
That's awesome.
Dude, where are you weakest as a sales leader today?
Where do you think you need to spend time?
I mean, I'm all in on Databricks.
Like I spent a lot of time on Databricks.
My kids are out of the house, so travel all the time.
Is that hard on marriage?
I have great marriage.
My wife's like, I mean, I wouldn't be able to do what I do without her.
She takes care of everything while I'm, you know, here in London or Korea or Singapore or wherever.
What's your biggest?
Warren Buffett said the most important decision you make in life is the partner you choose to spend your life with.
Yeah, 100%.
What's your biggest advice to me on partner selection?
Um, i told you at the beginning you were like how am i?
This is hilarious.
There you go.
That's funny.
Um no, for sure.
I mean, depending on what your life goals are, they have to be in line with your partner's goals right, like kids, and you know what kind of work you're going to do, all that kind of stuff.
Like to me, when i look back at just life in general, like having kids is the best thing i ever did, get married best thing i ever did.
If you do those things right, then it allows you to put your mind and everything into other things.
I put it into Databricks.
Like I had to make lots of sacrifices but my family was always there to make sure I was on the right track.
So, I think balance is probably the biggest thing for me.
You know you didn't really ask, but you know work-wise, like certainly I'm sure there's a ton of stuff I can do better in terms of more patience and all that kind of stuff, because I'm a hard driver.
Yeah, that's my biggest thing is you got to have a little bit of balance too, you know.
I never have much patience.
That's why I called it the 20 minute VC.
Are you kidding me?
I am for this question.
You're, you know, adopted son and I'm 23 and I'm entering a sales org first job.
What's your biggest advice to me? as a 23-year-old entering sales for the first time bright-eyed?
Two things.
One, go into an industry that's growing and you're passionate about.
Obviously, I think data and AI is where it's at today.
But if you're going into tech, I'd say go into data and AI.
So go into a market that's growing and got to be passionate about it too.
If you're like, oh, that's boring, don't go into that.
Number two is go where you're going to learn the most.
A lot of people try to go oh, I'm going to get this amount of money instead of that amount of money.
No, go to where you like the people and they're going to help mentor you and you're going to learn the most, because that's the whole thing about your first job, or whatever is.
How do I learn and how do I grow as an adult, as a worker, as all those kind of things, right?
Like that's what it's all about.
Penultimate one, you can go back to any day in the Databricks journey.
What day do you go back and relive?
Relive.
Oh, wow.
That's a great question.
Thank you.
I'm a podcaster.
Yeah, there you go.
I've had some time on this.
Yeah, they didn't even give me a heads up on this stuff.
That's like me saying to you, like, oh, that's a great sales process.
You're like, no, it's kind of my job.
One day, you know what?
I think when Ali and I got the first Microsoft deal signed was a pretty amazing day.
So, that was pretty game changing.
Looking back.
Do you remember where you were?
I remember when he told me we were like on the 13th floor.
There was this like little conference room.
We would like... like a couch in there, it was like video games in there or whatever, so.
In Databricks?
Yeah, in the office.
And they called you up and they're like, congratulations, you have a partnership?
Well, no, no.
I mean, we've been working on it for months and months and months.
But when it finally got signed, we were like, you know, me and Ali were like, oh, great job.
Good work.
High five.
Did you do a little victory dance?
No, it was like back to work.
You didn't put on any Taylor Swift?
No, we're back to work.
No.
Yeah, so.
Shake it out.
Yeah, no.
I'm more of a rap guy anyway.
Listen, when you hit a trillion, Taylor can perform at President's Club.
Yeah, there you go.
She's expensive though.
She's pretty expensive, but a trillion is quite a lot of money.
Totally.
That's a goal for you.
Totally.
I thought that was a pretty good day though.
Oh, that's a pretty great day.
Yeah, it's a cool day.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
10 years time.
Final one.
Where is Databricks then?
In your mind, i think we're a trillion dollar company.
Then in 10 years yeah, it's an iconic company.
I mean, how many trillion dollar software tech companies are?
There's only seven or eight.
I think it's funny if you think back like people at databricks today, it's like you know microsoft people what were they like back in 1985?
Or google people back in 2000.
You know, when you think you are in that journey, that's where we are.
We're early days like, you know, we've obviously doing well, but it's early days.
So we got a lot of work to do, but we're excited about it.
Like I said, I think market's amazing.
We've made a lot of good bets.
I think we continue to invest and innovate.
We can get there.
So I think it'll be one of those iconic companies.
Listen, Matthew McConaughey, it's been wonderful having you.
Thanks for having me.
Appreciate it.
Honestly, shows like this are why I love doing what I do so much.
So seriously, thank you so much for being so open and this has been amazing.
Yeah, thanks for having me.
I loved it.
Dude, you are amazing.
Very cool.
I mean, are you kidding me?
He has been the head of sales CRO from zero to five billion in revenue.
What a hero.
That was such a fantastic show to do.
If you want to see more, you can find it on Spotify.
I'd so appreciate it if you liked the episode and left a review.
It'd make a huge difference.
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