Recruiting the Right People and Selling Real Differentiation with Brad Scott, VP of Worldwide Sales at Glean

0:00Everyone's interested in AI now. They all want to take a look under the hood. So what does that mean for your organization if you're actually going to go in and do that? But what does it actually mean for a company to be able to come in and provide an AI transformation to an organization if they actually are an AI native versus somebody that's got it bolted on? And those can be two pretty different stories.

0:22Brad Scott: Welcome to the Revenue Builders Podcast, a weekly show featuring B2B sales leaders and executives. Hosted by five-time CRO John McMahon and force management co-founder John Kaplan, the show takes guests in the barrel, behind the scenes with the people who've been there, done that, and seen the results. Revenue Builders covers best practices for scaling and growing your business while sharing the pitfalls to avoid. Our guest today is Brad Scott, VP of Worldwide Sales at Glean. Brad's built sales organizations at three very different stages of growth. Snowflake during its historic scale up, Vesa from a much earlier stage, and now Glean, which he's scaling through explosive growth, running an organization of 350 plus people.

1:17This conversation goes deep on what actually separates great sales organizations from average ones. starting with people and recruiting. The question Brad asks to find out who someone really is and how he builds trust and self-awareness into his hiring process. We also get into how he keeps his team focused on fundamentals, process, training, execution, while everything around them, the market, the messaging, the product is changing every 90 days in this AI cycle. Here's our conversation with Brad Scott. So, Brad, you've had a really rare vantage point, Snowflake during its historic scale-up, VESA, building something from a much earlier stage, and now Glean, which is experiencing explosive growth.

2:14So you've had a wonderful vantage point to answer this first kind of Uber question. What separates the best sales organizations you've been a part of and the average ones? It's a great question, John. I think, you know, for me, the thing that strikes me early when I walk into a sales organization and tends to be the through line, at least at the great ones I've been a part of, is the people. I think very early you can tell and you're struck by the quality and caliber of the people you're surrounded with, not only in the other AE seats, the sales leaders, the SEs, and that extends to then the product teams and the leadership of those companies that I think is why recruiting in our business is so important, is if you can go grab great transformative talent, you can create a, you know, assuming you've got a great product, you can create a great sales organization.

3:07But if you've got great people, that to me is the biggest separator differentiator. Go a little deeper on the people part. What are some of those themes on those great people, some characteristics that you actually have built into your recruiting operating rhythm? Yeah, I think one, the best are typically, in my experience, incredibly intellectually curious, right? So they're intellectually curious about their teammates, the way the organization runs, pushing the product team to build better products, and then incredibly curious about their customers, understanding what their business is, how it runs, how your technology could potentially transform that information.

3:47And so I think that's a big one. I think the second is just like the standard to which individuals hold themselves and then their broader teams, right? And so I think it's people that have come from a background of success and they bring those unique experiences to the table and they're able to share them with their teammates. So I think people that hold themselves to a high bar and high account, you know, we'll call that sort of the foundational layer by which you try to seek out somebody who's had that experience in their career and brings that to the table. But I think those are two of the most key innate abilities that people have that then allow them to get to that next level.

4:27One of my pet peeves is when I see organizations recruit, it's a muscle, man. Like it's a muscle that has to be developed and mastered. And to get to the evidence behind things like intellectual curiosity or whether or not you come from an organization that holds you to a higher standard, not just by looking at that on a CV. How do you coach your leaders to really get to the crux of the matter? I probably am borderline. I don't know. I hope not. But I'm probably borderline on some of the questions I ask people. But I really am trying to figure out what's real and what's not real, especially in the age we're in today.

5:11So how do you coach your leaders to do that? Yeah, I think, you know, one of the best things for me is I like to leave space at the end of every conversation for the person on the other end to ask me questions. And I think that part of the conversation with respect to like their level of intellectual curiosity and what level of preparation that they've gone to becomes evident very quickly. You can tell, you know, a person gets through one question, maybe two, and then falls off and says they're good here. To me, those people will never pass my screen because I'm looking for somebody that truly wants to understand from my vantage point why this company and why this opportunity is going to be uniquely important.

5:51So that's not just like sort of a, you know, something for my ego. That's also how they're going to go out and prosecute that and be curious about our customers. Right. They're going to have to go out and do incredible discovery and understand and dig in and be curious about our customers. And so if they can't do that during our sales process and our recruiting process, then how are they going to go do it for our customers? So I think, you know, that is a piece of our process that's incredibly important is just being aware and making the space for people to do that and then carefully understanding the questions that they're asking.

6:25I think the second thing is, you know, at the start of the conversation, I like to understand, hey, who are you? Where'd you come from? What experience did you have? Who are your siblings? What hardships did you face in your life? Right. Because if, you know, especially working at startups and non-incumbent based companies, if you haven't gone through hardship and you haven't faced tough things and you haven't overcome challenges, either in your personal life or your professional career or through athletics, then this job is going to be really hard for you. And so I think having people that have overcome those things and have understood those things earlier in their career are super important.

6:59And then, you know, with respect to, you know, whether it's deal structure, how they've prosecuted opportunities with their other customers, you know, tell me about a deal you've won. Tell me about a deal you've lost. Why? How? And then you're basically digging in and doing some deeper level discovery and pushing those people to give you all of the detail to get deeper into their thought process. I like the intimate questions. I think it catches people off guard. But if it's done in an authentic way where you could, you know, I just asked this the other day. I'm like, hey, look, I know the three bosses that you've listed in your last, you know, three jobs and that you talk about.

7:40So I know them well. I will call them. but when I call them, what are they going to tell me that you struggle with? Because we all struggle with something. What are they going to tell me that you struggle with? And what am I going to have to do as your potential leader to help you elevate yourself? And I don't know why people struggle. Like I get feedback like, oh, that was a great question. And you really put me on the spot or even people inside my own company will go, oh, John, you just have the ability to get to these. I think it's just natural. It's kind of a trust thing. And if it's authentic and you get an authentic answer, you really find out who people are.

8:29Do you have some feeling about that? Yeah, I think you have to, one, expose a level of vulnerability too. I think it just goes to self-awareness and is this person thinking about how they're going to make themselves better? And I think if you're thinking about how you're going to make yourself better, you have to be very objective internally with where your shortcomings are. I think also like, look, people who are willing to be vulnerable with one another tend to make good teammates and you tend to build an organization of good humans that can be around each other. Because again, you're building something that is really hard.

9:03You're going really fast. And I think at the end of the day, hey, a company is just a collection of people. And you've also got to want to work with great people that you're going to want to, you know, hopefully in the best of cases, build lifelong relationships with. And I think if you can get to the core of that, you can better understand early who the core of someone is. And then if you want to bring them along on that journey with you. I like that a lot. I like that a lot. I think there's a balance though here too, you know, on what line of manager you are. If you're a first line manager, the dynamic in the interview process is completely different than the dynamic view of the CRO.

9:41The first line manager has to do, has to do questioning. There's no doubt about it, but at the same time, they have to not only sell the company, sell the opportunity, but they have to sell themselves. Because at the end of the day, if I'm a rep, I'm coming to work for the manager. And if I don't think that manager is going anywhere and I, and they haven't sold themselves, I'm not joining that company because I already put a ceiling on myself and I don't think my manager is going anywhere. So that dynamic has to change. As you become the CRO, you can get away with a lot more just hammering the person with questions and then giving them an opportunity to ask you questions.

10:24And maybe you're selling the opportunity. You don't have to really sell yourself so much, but you're selling the opportunity. But so the dynamic really does change. And there's a balance in there in that hour or two hours that you have with the person. A hundred percent. That balance, especially at the first line, tends to flip where you come in, you're selling, you're getting the person engaged. And then once you've kind of earned that trust and maybe that ability, then you can flip it back around and dig in a little bit more. but you're also, you know, this is probably the most competitive talent and hiring environment for A plus talent of all time too.

11:01And so I think you have to really work that balance, but also not flip it entirely where you're not doing any digging in. I think that's the danger right now is it is such a competitive environment that people are falling all over themselves that maybe sometimes they miss things and they don't dig in where they need to. And man, is it a difficult and tricky time to do that. What if we wrap, what if to wrap a bow on this, where do you find yourself giving your frontline managers, your second line managers or what have you, where do you find yourself giving the most feedback about the interview process?

11:42What do people struggle with in this? Look, I think right now for me, it's twofold. One, And you're just, you know, we don't have enough pipeline in some cases, right? So you're just not getting enough people through the door to top a funnel problem, right? I think that's a big piece of it if we think about it as our sales process. And then, you know, I do think it's that last mile of, you know, making sure that we're understanding kind of the true guts of that person. And then the back channel, like it's sometimes the back channel is the only channel. And, you know, you can delude yourself and get all excited about someone.

12:22And then you go have a couple of conversations. And, you know, salespeople are really good at selling themselves. And I think in this environment, especially, you know, John, you mentioned it. Hey, I know your last three managers. You know, you've been doing this long enough. The world gets really small. You can get to somebody with less than one degree of separation most of the time. And so we have found that that is the, if not one of the most, the most important part of the process to understand the prior experience of these folks. Do you listen to any of the transcripts? Do you, when I ask this question, I'm shocked, like anything else, coaching somebody, since recruiting is such a big part of the, you know, the leader's role, I'm shocked at the answers I get.

13:08And I don't think it's, I think it's just like a, it's an easy miss. Like you, we listen to sales calls. Why wouldn't we listen to recruiting calls? What's your thought on that? Yeah, look, I think, you know, part of the beauty is we get to drink our own champagne here at Glean. And so we've got a tool that automatically sort of ingests all of that data. All the calls are recorded. All the managers then take and synthesize those notes and put them into the tool we use called Greenhouse. And so all of that information then is presented to the person reviewing sort of the final sign off on that application with then links to go back and do a deeper dive or understand what it is that was talked about, how that person presented themselves.

13:56You know, we do a panel interview as part of that process. All of those are recorded. So there's a wealth of knowledge and information for you to go even back channel on our own internal processes. And if you don't have that, and there's no continuity, like you're a walking audition. I always tell people this, like how you show up in the interview process to potential, if you're recruiting an A player, they're going to notice if you're asking the same questions that everybody else asks. If you're asking them a question that you should have had the answer to already, I think it's just such as Johnny said, you're selling yourself, you're selling your company, and by the very nature of how you interact with these people is a walking audition for what it's going to look like when they get there.

14:43100%. You have to assume that people are going to be on their, you know, their best, put on their best presentation, put on their best, what have you. And it's only going to go down from there. So if I'm a candidate and I got somebody that doesn't show up prepared, I'm speaking with somebody that obviously there's no process involved. That's probably a indicator of what will be to come in that company. That's right. Got to be tough. The deal, though, Johnny, going back to your original question is, to me, most companies don't have an ideal candidate profile. They don't even know what they're looking for.

15:22Yeah. So to what Brad said, we're in this market, it's really tight, and you may not have enough pipeline. Then everybody looks like a good candidate. And if you're not matching it up, that candidate up to the ideal candidate profile, then you're probably hiring the wrong person. Now, what happens a lot of times is when you make up an ideal candidate profile and you say, this is the type of person we're looking for with these skills, knowledge, characteristics, the reaction from your sales leaders is you're looking for a unicorn. We can't find that guy, McMahon. You're looking for a unicorn. And you got to say, no, that's not what this is about.

16:08there's an ideal candidate profile. Your job is to find somebody that closely matches the ideal candidate profile. And where they don't match the ideal candidate profile, those items become a risk to the organization. Now, when you bring that candidate to me and I say, Cap, what are the risks? You got to outline the risks against the ideal candidate profile. So my next question is, how are we going to cover those risks? If we're at a certain stage of a company and we only have certain resources, we may not be able to cover those risks. We may not have a training program. We may not be able to give them to a leader that has that skill set.

16:55But so before you hire, you need to ask the question, what are the risks in hiring this person? And can we cover the risks? If you can't cover the risks and you know they're not a match, you're basically asking yourself for churn to happen nine or 12 months from now. And when you say we, there's not a mouse in your pocket. You're basically saying to the leader, what are you going to do to cover the risk? Well, it's the leader and the organization. Like I said, if you're a startup and you're a$20 million company and you don't have anybody in enablement, chances are that person's going to have to learn all this stuff on their own.

17:36And if they can't, then you don't think they're smart enough to do it and they're not driven enough because they don't have the characteristics. Then you're definitely taking a big risk. I like this topic so much because people understand. I just had an interview a couple of weeks ago with a wonderful human being. So, John, what you're talking about is we're looking for evidence. And the success profile, by its very nature, cannot be a unicorn because the success profile is based upon what success looks like in your organization. So we have to have based it on people that are being successful today.

18:18So what I encourage people to do is when you present a candidate to me or, you know, hired along the chain, you just go through the evidence of the success profile. It's pretty simple. Like, give me the evidence. Now, what you just said, I really like. There's always going to be risk. How do we mitigate that risk? And I just want to tell a quick little story. I interviewed a person. I almost want to say their name because I would love to try to help them. get hired out in the marketplace if they're not hired already, but I won't do that because I didn't ask for permission. But this person was off the charts on likability, was off the charts smart, was off the charts on intellectual curiosity, was off the charts on, you know, overcoming adversity.

19:08I mean, like to the point where I was leaning in and I had to be honest. And there was a point in the interview that I called it out and I said, look, I don't think I'm being fair to both of us because like the biggest risk is you have never called on this environment. And I don't know if we have a mechanism in place to teach you that in a period of time, that's going to be acceptable for you and your career progression. Right. And once I said that, it wasn't, hey, you're a crap Blackbird, you know, you're not as good as I think. You know, we'll get back to you. But I was so honest. And it was so obvious that I liked the individual.

19:50The aftermath was so powerful because I'm still talking to this individual. And again, we're a walking audition for what we do. I've seen so many companies that suck at this process. They're not honest with people. They don't tell people. They don't follow up. They just hope they go away. Oh, you did well. we have other candidates like versus the people that are, you know, authentic and do a good job of giving the feedback. Brad, how do you encourage your people and Johnny, you too, how do you encourage people to, you know, to do it right? First of all, to be honest. And then second of all, to make sure that that feedback is given and received.

20:34Yeah, it's a great question, John. I think like, look, the worst thing you can do is leave people to linger out there to their own devices and wonder why. I think the most generous thing that you can do is to give direct, compassionate feedback that says, hey, look, this is potentially not a mutual fit for reasons like, hey, we just don't have maybe the right position, the right segment, the right geography, or hey, you have these gaps in your experience here. I don't think you're going to be a good fit because the type of company you're going to be calling on, you haven't done it before, and we don't have the support structure to put around you.

21:06So, you know, maybe I can introduce you to these other people or, you know, hey, let's talk again in a year. Maybe you've kind of covered off on that experience and will be a better fit for you. But I think it is part of like the mutual pact to be able to give direct constructive feedback to the folks so that, you know, they can better themselves in their career. And look, I'm also just a believer that, you know, what goes around comes around. You got to be a good human being in this stuff too. And it does help your reputation as a company because maybe that person, you know, refers a friend that is just as good, if not better for the opportunity.

21:42In a tight marketplace, like we're all in right now, how many companies do we personally know whose reputations are shite because of the way that they interview and the way they treat people? and when there's great opportunity, Johnny and I have some experience with this with companies that we've been with in the past. When there's great opportunity, it puts people on these pedestals, these interviewers on these pedestals and it's like, oh, you should consider yourself lucky to have an interview with me or with this company. And that very well might be, but if you're recruiting A players, you should consider yourself lucky and, you know, luck isn't the right word, but prepared to have that conversation with an A player.

22:32So I'll just put a bow on that and just a little note out there. Like when you listen into some of these calls, I actually wind up going back to managers and like, were you trying to not to give a signal that you weren't interested in this person? Or are you not excited about this company? Because I was falling asleep when you were talking about the opportunity at the company. So I highly encourage people to dig in. But Johnny, again, it goes back and Brad did a good job of talking about this in the context that goes back to the context of having an ideal candidate profile, because if you have to turn somebody away, it means it's just not a match for your company at this stage of the company.

23:11You know, the type of talent that you need at 25 million is completely different than the talent you need at 100, 200 million and a billion. and to Brad's point, the person that may not be a good fit for you at$50 million may be a great fit for you at$300 million. 100 % John. Again, because of the resources and everything you have in the company and the way the company operates. So again, you can cover for them, but right now, hey, you're not a good match because my top people are doing this. You don't have that experience and I can't train you. I don't have the resources at$20 million to do that, to help you with that.

23:47Yeah, we've hired people here at Glean within the last six months that wouldn't have been a good fit three years ago here when we were at$25 million in revenue. It didn't have the resources. So you're absolutely right. That profile changes, and those are great fits, and they're going to survive and flourish here, whereas a couple years ago probably wouldn't have had the opportunity that they would today. I'm shifting. Brad's basically deep in, let's say, the AI market, right, Brad? That's right. So talk a little bit about products that are AI native and also explain to the audience what you define as AI native versus a bunch of products that are out there today that are calling themselves AI products.

24:29But essentially, it's an old product with an AI wrapper around it. And so we used to have a saying at one of the companies I was at that a facelift won't cure old age. And that's basically the case of what's going on in a lot of these AI wrapper companies today. Talk a little bit about what you've seen in the market, especially just before you joined Glean. Yeah, look, I think every company says they're an AI company now. So you're not going to talk to a company that's not going to say that they don't have AI, right? Because, you know, technically they will have some module or something within that product that does have an LLM or some piece talking to it.

25:10But, you know, bolting or some guy in the back room who flips a helmet down and is like welding stuff onto some giant beast and it's an adjunct product or something that hangs off of it is much different than a product that was built intentionally from the ground up with AI as a core part of it. And so I think, look, it's a really difficult environment for buyers right now because, you know, they're seeing and hearing the same story. Everything becomes homogenous. Everyone starts using the same buzzwords. And so I actually empathize a great deal with the enterprise buyers because these people are hearing the same story.

25:47And you see it on their face. They almost have this thousand yard stare of like, how on earth am I supposed to make a decision on something like this when everyone sounds exactly the same? So then you have to go to the next level and really get into that deeper education process, right? Helping them understand what is truly a unique differentiator for your product that is AI native versus a legacy product that may have AI bolted on. And why does it matter for that person? And then they're going to want to get their hands on it. So, you know, that's a huge caloric expenditure for the team. So how do you then understand, you know, everyone's interested in AI now.

26:23They all want to take a look under the hood, you know, so what does that mean for your organization if you're actually going to go in and do that. But I think at the front end, John, to answer your question directly, right, there's this whole cohort of companies that have existed for the last 15 or 20 years. You know, you saw it with the SaaSpocalypse, although we're kind of coming back out of that a little bit. It turns out everyone can't vibe code their own sales force, and those systems of record are going to be pretty sticky. But, you know, what multiple do people put on that revenue? And then, you know, what does it actually mean for a company to be able to come in and provide an AI transformation to an organization if they actually are an AI native versus somebody that's got it bolted on.

27:02And those can be two pretty different stories when you get deeper. Right, so you just hit on this a little bit. So we keep hearing two completely different stories. SaaS is dead and AI is creating the biggest software opportunity in the history of the world. Which one's closer to the truth? Look, I think the truth, it's never a fun answer or a good clip for a podcast, but like, like life is a, it's an interesting answer though, right? It's a gray zone, right? Like, look, I think, you know, you see it with Salesforce where Mark Benioff is all of a sudden, Hey, we're going headless. You can use Claude inside of set of it because like, it's what their customers are asking for.

27:41I think the best companies and the best people and the best founders, which, you know, Salesforce is a beneficiary because they got somebody like Mark at the helm where you can kind of take those bets and those risks and say, we're going to pivot because we're dead if we don't. And our customers are asking for this. Right. And so they really want to make sure that they can go do that. There is going to be sort of this broader area of SaaS companies that aren't true systems of record that sit across there that really are kind of like the blood and guts of an organization that will probably have a longer and more difficult road in the long term and are going to get disintermediated by these companies.

28:19But I think this idea or thesis that all these folks are going to get disrupted is AI is going to be able to come in and just vibe code the crap out of these things. And the reality couldn't be further from the truth because it is incredibly painful to pull the inner workings out of all these products that underpin and underlie the revenue for all these Fortune 500 organizations. I think it's going to take a lot longer. And I think the answer is going to be there's going to be a lot of these systems of record that survive. And a lot of these AI native companies will take over and grow. So the answer is kind of a mix.

28:52But isn't, we played this out before in history, right? I mean, so let's take an example again, Sabre. Remember that? Airport travel agency. That's right. Remember that? And they decided, hey, we'll give system of record and we'll become that and we'll give it away to Travelocity and Expedia. Look how that turned out. So these guys that think they're just going to be system of record, in my mind, they're gone. Good luck. See you later. So, I mean, that's my take on it, but I don't know how you feel about it. I think those are horizontal and vertical, too. That's right. And so I think like the difference is there will be this this top layer of these, you know, monolithic companies that have existed for a long time, like a Salesforce.

29:39force, right? Like if you walk into an organization today and say, rip that out or vibe code it, nobody's going to do it. Very few have, right? It's kind of proven itself out in the near term, but there is going to be this long tail of these other companies that, you know, it's a, you know, Stabr still exists today. It's a shell of its former self, but it's still alive and kicking. So like, you know, when you say it's an apocalypse, like over what timescale and what horizon, right? Is it, are these then zombie companies for 10 to 15 years? I think that'll definitely be the case. And then it gives the room for all these new folks to come in and disintermediate the space.

30:14Well, I think the only reason that Salesforce hasn't been ripped out is because it's in all the departments in a company. So it has tentacles into all these different areas. The companies have typically bought minimum five other packages to attach to Salesforce because Salesforce couldn't do what it needed to do. And then people also wrote their own code in all those departments to get the answers that they want. So ripping it out, you'd have to be, from a sales perspective, you'd have to go around and please five different departments or disciplines in an organization in order to rip that piece of junk out.

30:53That's right. And you kill the patient while you're doing it. That's not a great outcome either. You keep the blood pumping. it. It's like the old SAP implementations, right? That's right. I went to an accountant, he said, do we do an SAP implementation? I put that one on the back burner for two years. Smart. Kick the can. Yeah. It begs the question of how does Glean position itself? First of all, tell us a little bit about, give us the high level value pitch of you guys. We should have done that at the beginning, I'm sorry, but it's such a cool, and you've been at it for, you know, company's been at it for a few years.

31:33How does this conversation dovetail into a glean? Yeah. So look, I think, you know, what glean is and what we do is we are the AI system of context for the enterprise, right? So context is, you know, fortunately for us become a big buzzword over the course of the last six months, because as it turns out, you can't really build or do anything meaningful in the enterprise and AI without understanding the rich context of an enterprise. So at a high level, you can, you know, upload a couple of docs into an LLM and get a very surface level sort of sugar high response that allows you to be, you know, somewhat more productive.

32:09What companies very quickly found is that without understanding, you know, who's CAP, who's MAC, what do they do? What other departments are they working with in the organization? How do those interact together? And how do those workflows actually happen at a much more deep level? Because without understanding that, you can't then actually go automate those workflows. And that's what everyone really wants to do. If you really want to get the depth and reality of ROI, you want to be able to go automate things within a company. Without understanding company context, you can't do any of that. So that's how the company was started by Arvind and the team back in 2019 as sort of a broader enterprise search context company.

32:50And then the LLM wave, you know, happened a couple of years later. And that sort of, you know, turned us into this organization that's allowed us to go in and connect to all of a company's data, provide that rich context, and then build all of these other layers on that become, you know, really imperative for a company to transform themselves. So being able to add, you know, very unique security, because once you connect all of these systems, you got to be able to secure them and understand who has access to what. And, you know, do we have the salary information for our CFO out there? And do we have exposed credit card numbers?

33:23Right. And so, you know, the level of complexity gets really, really high. You got to be able to have a system like Glean that sits across all of that. And then, you know, the final piece is, you know, we now have all of these LLMs proliferating. So you have all the big labs, you have all the open models, and everyone's freaking out about tokenomics, right? All of a sudden, they went from token maxing to, you know, this is great to, oh, my God, this stuff is so expensive because it turns out a token has a dollar value to it. And there isn't a money tree in every company's backyard that they can go out and prune when they need new intelligence.

33:56And so what Glean is able to do is basically think of us as like the index fund of intelligence. So we sit at this layer connected to your context and we provide all these models, right? We provide open AI, Anthropic, all the open models, Gemini, and allow a company to essentially provide intelligence arbitrage so that as the price changes within those different models, we can bring the right intelligence at the right time to your data in the most cost-effective way in a neutral position because everyone we compete with has a perverse incentive to sell you a token. They run their business on selling you tokens, whereas we don't.

34:32We don't care. We want to connect to your context and help you drive outcomes. Earlier, Brad, you were talking about how companies now, the buyers are a little confused. Everybody's saying they have AI. Everybody's an AI company. And people want to look under the hood. So how do you, as a company, allow the customer to look under the hood, so to speak, and prove that your architecture is truly AI and truly differentiated? Yeah, it's a great question, John. And so, you know, look, Glean is also one of the few AI companies that's also a pure sales-led growth motion. There is no PLG. There's no money falling out of the sky.

35:11Every dollar that comes into Glean is pulled out and earned by our salespeople. And we wear that as a badge of honor. But, you know, as we've grown as a company, you have social proof and you've got revenue and you've got investors. And you got, you know, we had our big conference last week and we had, you know, GM and Davida and all these massive companies on stage talking about it. And still, every customer says, that's great, but my data is unique. My data is different. I now want to see it with my data. So eventually, if you want to do something at scale, you're typically going to have to enter into some sort of proof of value with the customer.

35:42And the way I think about it from my position now is like, my sales force has a certain number of finite calories on a weekly basis to burn. And where do I want you burning those calories? Well, a proof of value is incredibly costly from a caloric perspective for a sales organization. So you have to be incredibly careful about how you get into it with a customer. And so for us, a big part of our differentiator is our process, right? So we understand what a customer is actually trying to accomplish. The second stage of our sales process, we call the blueprint process. We actually come into your office.

36:15We sit down with you and specifically some of your business units or teams and truly understand what is the process by which you get work done today in your sales organization, your engineering organization, your legal organization. We map that process out. And then at the end of that, we say, okay, if we were to transform this process, does this have value to you, Mr. Customer? And does that value then extend to the positive outcomes that you want to drive as an organization? Once we go through those checkpoints and we understand that the economic buyer has bought in and that if we do indeed go achieve those outcomes, it's only then do we get to the point that we're willing to then go do a proof of value and actually plug in the data sources and systems for that customer.

36:57So why does all that exist today? Because we got burned early, right? Like when you're an early company, you're just begging for people to talk to you. You just want to put revenue in. And you're like, you're doing it for six months and you've been beaten down. You're like, oh my God, this person wants to talk to me and they want to plug their data in. And you go running in like a puppy dog. And then it's four months later, you've sunk all of your time, all of your engineer's time, worse off, maybe some of your products team time, and you come away with nothing. And that is been on the forecast for a big deal for two quarters, two quarters, maybe four quarters.

37:30In some cases, you're like, I'm sick of talking about this dog. Right. So I think like, look, those are hard lessons learned over time for a lot of companies. But I think you have to have that type of process in place. And so that's why we've implemented these processes and checkpoints to make sure that we're actually spending the right time in the right places. Okay. So now from a Brad Scott perspective, not a green perspective, you go into a lot of companies, your people see a lot of things happening just from an AI initiative that are going on in all these companies, you know, where, where is AI failing?

38:07It's a great question, John. And look, I'm a simple animal. So I just try to go pattern match. So I start with like, where have we been successful? Where we've been successful with customers like Dell and GM and many others is it's a C-level initiative. Very few transformative AI programs happen within companies now if the CEO isn't involved, driving the teams down to go make things happen. And so when I walk in and I see and understand like the shape of a deal, I can very quickly say, hey, if we have this C-level support and initiative and they're going to go get all the other roadblocks out of the way, we can go do some really interesting things.

38:45I mentioned we had our big conference last week, Glean Go, out in San Francisco. And I was fortunate enough to interview one of our great partners, Bain, on stage. And they have great relationships with C-level executives. And what David talked about was, what are the biggest AI red flags that you see? And what we see from a red flag perspective is when an AI initiative at a company goes from a CEO or board level initiative where you're trying to transform the company and their business outcomes and their processes to a technical evaluation. So what happens in those companies? The CEO says, we want to go do this.

39:23The CEO implements an AI czar. That AI czar typically is a CIO who is a technical person with a technical team. He then hands that off, he or she hands that off to their team. And it becomes this much different game of telephone where it went from, you know, changing the way the business runs and operates to, I want to look under the hood of this thing, understand how it runs, right? And it becomes a much more technical evaluation. If you're at that level or below and it becomes a technical evaluation, man, is that going to be a coin flip for you and your business, right? Because then you could go to preferences and incumbency and all these other things.

40:00It also just radically increases the time duration to when those companies are actually going to be able to implement some of these technologies to transform their business. And isn't there always like another organization inside the company that says we could do this without Lean and without these other companies? We could do it? A hundred percent. Like, look. So no matter any AI company, whether you're a true AI native company or not, when you go into these companies, there's a whole group of people that think that they could do exactly what you could do. Yeah. And it's exciting, right? This is an exciting time.

40:33AI is exciting for people. And for technologists, especially, they're like, man, I want to get my hands on this thing and I want to build it. So I'm going to go tell my boss I can build this thing. It goes back to the question that you have to ask those C-level executives, which is, man, isn't it better for your team to focus on their core competency? Why not build on or build with our technology? We don't have to be the front door. We can be that context layer for you. But if you're a paper manufacturer, you're building automobiles, you're in healthcare, wouldn't it be better to take this foundational technology and build products and solutions that go directly to servicing your end customer versus having these guys, you know, down in the depths trying to build some of these foundational technologies.

41:15And, you know, that's a real personal game for a lot of these folks because they feel like their careers partially depend on it and or they just want to do it really badly. Right. Let's talk about AI and sales. Five years from now, enterprise software companies, do they? employ more or fewer salespeople? I've gotten into this debate with folks. I actually think it's going to be more. I think it's going to be more people. Everyone said, oh, the SDR is dead. This was over the last 12 to 18 months. The way I look at it, we've got more SDRs at our company and most of my peers' companies. I think what it's going to look like, and we actually have something that sort of a lab within Glean called the Work AI Institute, where we've got You know, people much smarter than me, professors from Stanford and all these folks thinking about, like, what does an organization look like in the future?

42:06And I think the sort of common thought pattern is the organizations will be flatter and organizations will have AEs or people in that type of role managing teams of agents under them, doing all kind of the legwork and the drudgery. But, you know, it's that whole Jevons paradox thing that everyone talks about now where, you know, the more and the cheaper AI gets, the actual more things happen and the more work gets done. And so I think in the relative near term, you're going to see a broader, you know, hiring environment that you're going to need more people. Also, like when you have more AI, you can push more slop and more crap out.

42:46And so I don't know about you guys, but my inbox is disgusting. Like the level of slop and emails and inbound that comes in is pretty terrible. And what's really resonating with people that we're seeing with customers is the IRL stuff, right? The in real life, in person, in your office, handwritten notes, drop-offs, all of those sort of like what's old is new again things from a salesperson's perspective actually differentiate you now in the eyes of the customer. And I think if you're just relying on teams of bots and agents, it's actually not what human beings really want or how they want to buy things right now.

43:23So my prediction is probably more, John. So do you think that AI ultimately hurts mediocre people and dramatically helps great salespeople or vice versa? I think it levels the point. When we look back five years from now, how's it going to look? I mean, I think the best of the best and the best that I see on my team, like they go from, you know, it's like they talk about these 10 or 100x developers, right? Like the best just become that much better. It's like the Iron Man suit and they just explode and it really is a force multiplier for them. Because they know exactly what they want. They know exactly what they want and they can get it from AI and they go.

44:07That's right. So all the BS work or the work that like turns them into 50 other people, they can put that into the AI and they can have those AI systems go out and do things for them on their behalf in the way that they want them done. I think it's an opportunity for folks that may be mediocre in that, you know, AI, what it does is it levels up. It takes away all the drudgery. You don't have to go, you know, do the QBR deck or the research, all like the manual labor goes away. And so everyone's sort of at this level. And now do those people want to use AI to train themselves better, to get deeper into process, to really kind of hone those skills?

44:43And so I think it's an opportunity for folks that may be middle of the road to really level themselves up. But, you know, when you do have that force multiplier, it's the best people that are going to just get 10x better. Okay, so if you were 30 years old, I know you're like 32 or 33 right now, but if you're 30 years old and you're an enterprise software salesperson, what would you learn to make sure that you could benefit from AI and it would not replace you? Hmm. The best people that I see on my team doing it that are in like that cohort is they have automated their like daily and weekly processes.

45:26So their prospecting list, their LinkedIn outreach, their, you know, creation of customer value decks, etc. Like all of that happens. So it leaves them all this extra time, right? That productivity leaves them extra time so they can go learn from the best of the best. And I think back to like the first part of our conversation, which is like the people in your organization. If you've come to a great company and you've come to a great sales organization, and John, to your point, if you've chosen a great sales leader, man, now you have all this extra time to go learn from those folks, to hone your craft, to study your process, and to take the time that may have been spent creating internal artifacts or sending out emails and maybe get out into the office of your customer to go learn more from them and to, you know, put yourself in a position to go win more deals.

46:12This is going to show up in our first topic on interviewing is that in what you just explained, what you just talked about, the opportunity for productivity is where I see the great sellers are the ones that are trying to identify the workflows that create the most friction for them, that create the most challenges from doing more calls or getting more revenue. and they're trying to automate those or they're trying to enhance them like parts of the sales process, like the discovery process for preparation and understanding a company or what have you. That's got to show up in the interview process.

46:54If somebody comes to light in the interview process and you're not asking them a question about how are they utilizing, not are they utilizing, but how are you utilizing? What are you learning? and what's the return for you is probably going to tell you a lot of what you need to know about whether they'd be successful selling it in Glean. I think also what I see and I've seen having spent time with hundreds of customers in this last week is everyone's scared right now on the customer side too. They're scared. They don't know what's happening. They don't know who to believe. And I think if you can spend that much more time in person with your customers building that trust, They're not going to build that trust with an AI bot on your website.

47:38I think the great organizations and the great sellers are going to be there face to face building that trust with their customers. That customer looks out over the landscape and they can't get the anthropic rep on a phone because they're too busy taking orders in the back room. But you're there actually helping solve their pain and their problem. That to me is the long term recipe for success. The only thing I wanted to put a bow on was, look, the underlying thing that you're talking about here with, you know, in an AI native company selling in this environment is you have to have proof because I don't understand.

48:12And, well, I guess I can understand. But in our country, our country specifically, there's such a negative backlash right now on data centers and AI. There's so much misinformation. I'm actually seeing it leaking down into companies at CFO levels with like, hey, before I spend any more money on tokens, before I spend any more money on, you know, any other projects that we're going to do, I want a true return on investment, which means that you have to have a rock solid process. Brad, and I'd love to hear some advice because I'm getting a lot more phone calls today about proof of concept, proof of value.

48:57What are some of the minimum must-haves that should be in place from a qualification perspective? Can you leave our audience with that? Because this is what I'm here and deals are getting longer. You got to prove it out with our stuff. And that stuff has to be impactful to some business outcome for the company because there's only so many dollars. So do you have words of wisdom to leave us with on this bare minimums for proof of value? Yeah. Well, the wisdom is hard-earned as we all know, right? Intelligence is cheap now with LLMs, but wisdom is kind of hard-earned through experience. And so I think from an ROI perspective, John, the way the industry started out was sort of, hey, it's very simple.

49:43One plus one equals two. I'm going to give you more time back. Right. I've given you're more productive. We've saved 47 hours a week. And that was sort of like the bar that everyone had to clear to go sell AI in 2024 and early 2025. And that's fine. It's like, well, what the hell are you doing with that time? What are you actually giving back to the business? I see if Bo's going to ask for less people to do that. Yeah. Look, it's really hard. Like I sympathize and empathize with people because then to get in there and really dig in with your customer and understand, you know, which is why we talked about that blueprint process.

50:13I truly believe you have to be in there with your customer and understanding outside of the technical team, but their actual business units, what do you do? What actually drives value, top line revenue for this company? How can we go automate some of those processes or use AI to make them that much better to drive revenue, reduce risk, et cetera. If you go in and you spend time with your customer to understand what that looks like, how it happens, and then apply your technology to it to provide a measure of automation to make that company more successful. Like, you know, one of the most exciting things for me is we've got this, another buzzword, buzzword bingo, FDEs, right?

50:49A forward deployed engineering team. So there's things that your technology can do out of the box, but man, if I really want to go specifically drive a change in an organization, maybe we need some of these people to turn a couple of knobs or work with you to actually further customize this technology. And so to give you an example, our team went out and worked with General Motors, and now they've got this system that helps them design cars faster. So they can bring all these different data sources and all these disparate teams together to design a vehicle faster. Their ROI on that is almost a billion dollars over three years.

51:22If I can get in there and I can spend the time and I can get the buy-in of a customer and I can show you an ROI of close to a billion dollars, that's a huge amount of value that you can then go sell to the customer. And so to me, the companies that are successful are going to be the ones that earn the right and the time with that customer to go in and get their teams embedded with them and to build solutions with their technology that actually transform that business versus just throwing some slop at them and maybe letting people create a PowerPoint. But the bar is so high now with every CFO that you better have something else behind that.

51:55And your process has to be able to drive that forward with the customer. So on the FDE piece, we're actually, maybe you can share with us some of the people at Glean, we'd love to talk to because this is not just a buzzword anymore. Like you said, this is kind of like a must. I'm wondering, where do you find the pressure of FDEs before the sale, which typically elongates, or before the contract, which typically elongates, or post-sale, where we believe the hypothesis, we proved out the hypothesis, now I want to learn how to make cars cheaper, faster at GM? I mean, typically, there's almost two types of FTE.

52:41People use FTE as sort of like this broad catch-all term. Many companies will use FTEs to sort of prop up a deficiency in their technology, frankly. So my tech doesn't really work. I need an FTE to actually go plug it in and just get the core base functionality out. Our FTEs are really more on the tail end, which is our SEs and AI outcomes managers can kind of help get it implemented and get our customer to a certain setty state. And then the FDEs come in after that and truly go that last mile to build those things. And so, yeah, we've got an incredible team that, you know, once the product is in place with the customer, we'll come in and have those conversations and dig in and truly understand the outcomes and the processes to see, one, is it worth spending time together to do?

53:24Because these are also very precious, hard to hire for resources that we as a company, if you think about sort of the breadth of our organization, have to decide where we want to place those bets. And the way we look at that is like, well, is it an industry we haven't been in before? And is that industry, and if that outcome that we go design with that customer, then repeatable. So we can kind of stamp that out and then make that a repeatable process that we can take to market with our teams and our organization. More to come on that topic, I'm sure. We've got some great folks. But, you know, John, you did ask one question in your email, which I thought was great.

53:59and maybe I'll to end with some vulnerability and get some advice from you guys is looking back, like what are some things that you could do differently? And or, you know, what are some of the challenges that I face right now? It's just like the rate of change is so high. It is so much higher than it's been before. And I've been at fast moving companies like Snowflake, where maybe you had one product change a year, right? And you could, you know, kind of like an anaconda eating a deer, you could have had time to digest that change through a sales organization. Now you're changing every 90 days, it seems, right?

54:33And the messaging and the market changes and your product changes and disseminating that change and how your product help affects positive business outcomes for customers based on those changes, you know, especially when we've got, you know, 350 people in my org alone, it's really hard because you don't want to choke people out with information. And so it's like, how do you as a sales leader come in and really drive that organizational change that you can take these messages and drive it out to the companies that we can stay abreast of everything. I think that's really tough because you don't want to drown people with new information or take them off task.

55:08I think it's such a great question you're asking. And we are at an incredible time in sales now and in sales productivity, sales execution, where the greatest companies on the planet, first and foremost, are aligned. So you're not alone. Sales is not on an island. For you guys to be able to do your job, to go to market, to be able to do their job, there has to be a shared vision of product and marketing and sales and pre-sales, post-sales. There has to be this shared alignment. And now, because we have access to technology, that doesn't have to be in like a once a year meeting that says, this is our new framework of value.

55:54This is our framework, you know, 30 days from now, 90 days from now. What we're seeing is that the core principles of value creation are still critical. They're Egypt old. You know, the answers to the four essential questions. What problems do we solve? How specifically do you solve them? How do you solve them differently or better than anybody else? And where have you done it before? The response to those questions, both from an internal company perspective, an aligned vision perspective, and from the marketplace, is changing faster than I've ever seen it in the last 20 years. So the companies that are going to do really, really well are the ones that have the ability to capture those changes and that information as fast as possible and get it into the workflow, get it into the hands of the sellers with as least friction as possible.

56:55And I'm not talking about through a tech stack of 17 different sales tools. so that for me is a big area of opportunity uh johnny and i are kind of tinkering in this area and we're kind of excited about some things coming down the pike but for me that's the that's the holy grail in a sense i would say dynamic information at the in the sales reps hand at the moment of truth when they're in front of a customer is big huge that's awesome But as a background to that, Brad, I think it's also really important to stay focused on the fundamentals, you know, the fundamentals of process, recruiting process, onboarding process, training process, selling process, implementation process.

57:48if you don't have a real focus on the fundamentals then what happens when all these new things come out and things keep changing there's always this new shiny object and the whole or some organizations all chase that thing and find out you know it's kind of a dead end or it was never pumped up to be what it really you know what they intended it to be and it's the organizations especially you know, use a CRO to stay focused on the fundamentals. And there will be incremental changes to those processes when you see that the competition has changed or the products have changed and you know, hey, I got to incrementally change my sales process and let everybody know right now, or I got to incrementally change my training, you know, what I train them on.

58:36But if you're not, if you don't have those processes nailed, that's where people get really lost. Totally. Yeah, no, that's great. I think my team gets bored with my boring trust the process. And then like atomic habits, right? Hard work compounds. Just get up, have your cup of coffee, do these things every day within that process. And it turns out over the course of the year, things tend to work out. But, you know, it's also easy to get lost in the sauce right now in this AI cycle. And so it's sort of the push-pull in that balance is always interesting. Yeah. Well, great job, Brad. Scott, really appreciate you.

59:11joining us. Thank you, Mr. Kaplan, and thanks to everyone for listening to another episode of the Revenue Builders Podcast.

59:21Brad Scott: Thanks for listening to today's episode. If you enjoy the content, please subscribe, rate, and review the show to help us reach more people. This show is brought to you by Force Management, where we help companies improve sales performance, executing the growth strategy at the point of sale. Check out forcemanagement.com for more information. Down it, down it.