Building an AI-Era Sales Machine | with Chris McDonough (VP Sales, Campfire)

0:00Sophie Buonassisi: How did you end up as employee 40 of this company before it went through a huge growth explosion? I was doing over 70 demos a week. So like effectively we went from$800K to$30 million in revenue in about 100 days. Everyone that was in my hiring class as an STR was promoted in 30 days to AE. By the time they got promoted as an AE, I'd already moved to Nashville. I'd opened up an office and I was managing managers. One decision to like sign a lease in the living room to move in two weeks fundamentally changed my entire career. Chris McDonough, Vice President of Sales at Campfire. Give us their secret sauce of how do you pick the right reps.

0:33The difference between top performer and bottom performer is going to be exponential. So I think like you're going to have this core 30 % of salespeople that are worth like triple of everyone else. And then the bottom 20 % are going to be very tough to employ. The great thing about Campfire is we're in SF and we've built a tremendous business through tech and AI. We have some of like the hottest logos. Very soon in the future, if you don't know how to use AI, you're going to be effectively unemployable.

0:53Sophie Buonassisi: There's a lot of talk around AI outbound, AI SDRs. I got to ask you, when you hear that, what's your honest reaction?

1:17Sophie Buonassisi: Chris, welcome to GTM Now. Thank you. I'm excited to be here. Excited to have you here. And now you've joined four companies right before they went on to have some incredible growth trajectories. Currently, you're the VP of sales at Campfire, which is no pun intended, like on fire in a good way, in the good sense. But before that, you also joined Samsara, Vercata through hyperscale periods and Motive. So let's start from the beginning, which was Motive. You were employee 40. How did you end up as employee 40 of this company before it went through a huge growth explosion? Yeah, I think the most interesting thing about Motive, and a little background on me is like, I'm born and raised in Florida.

1:57I'm from a really small town, Daytona Beach. It's only really known for NASCAR and spring break. And so where I come from, no one ever thought of tech. I didn't even know what SaaS was in 2017. I never even heard the word before. And so growing up, my family owned a small printing company. So there was like this idea I would go take that over. I do after college. Very quickly, I realized that was not the path for me. And so living in Florida, trying to figure out what to do, where to go, what to do next. And back in 2017, like Snapchat was like the hot app. Everyone was on it. And so I saw a person that ironically, I barely knew I went to college with.

2:32And I saw that he had moved from Florida to SF and he was posting about his job and he was posting some cool videos. So I shot him a text over Snapchat. I was like, how'd you end up there? It's like, oh, actually, I met with this recruiting firm. They got me a job. They placed me and I moved. And so he sent me the intro, met with a recruiting firm. A couple weeks later, I'm in SF, meet with Motive at the time, keep trucking before they rebranded. And they gave me a job offer. And the most interesting part about it was the pitch was, for those that aren't really aware of Motive and Samsara, is they were born before a federal mandate came into place.

3:06And so the effective thing was like, nobody had a thing. And then everyone was legally mandated by it. And so the pitch was like, come to SF. We have this new product that's legally mandated. And no one has it yet. and so you're going to have to go do it and so once i pitched out a great to me it's hard talk about compelling event in a sales cycle if you legally have to buy something or you're put out of business is a it's a good thing to have and so i was given two options it was like hey we got two hiring classes either starting two weeks or starting six weeks and so i was in sf i got the job offer while i was there and i just made a decision like i'm gonna do two weeks i was very blessed i didn't have like a lease or anything and then that weekend you know at the time.

3:44I was very early in career, did not have a lot of money. And so I ended up renting a living room with a partition that actually came with a thing. I'm not sure if you're aware of what a loft bed is. It's effectively a bunk bed without a bottom bunk for like a fishy purpose. It's the only thing I could afford. And so I found this thing, especially in 2017, the real estate market was really hot.

4:05Sophie Buonassisi: And on two weeks notice too. Exactly. I got it, signed the lease. Everyone told me I was insane. So two weeks later I joined. And the most interesting thing about that and something that's like stayed with me my entire career is we're at the cusp of this explosion with this federal mandate. And so everyone that was in my hiring class as an STR was promoted in 30 days to AE. And so it was effectively like we'd not even got off ramp. We just started learning the tools like, Hey, we have a need. You guys are here. Get after it. And then the people that joined at the six week mark, they didn't get promoted for 18 months.

4:41And so in the time that the people in that hiring class, there was an opportunity for them to get promoted. By the time they got promoted as an AE, I'd already moved to Nashville. I'd opened up an office and I was managing managers. So in 18 months, I went from SDR to like interim director running like a large team before those people even had the opportunity to become an AE. And so it's like, it's always sat with me in terms of like what could have been what couldn't have been and how like that one decision to like sign a lease in the living room uh to move in two weeks like fundamentally changed my entire career and i think i would not be in the place i am today if i didn't make that decision

5:19Sophie Buonassisi: i guess you said it stays with you like what advice would you then have and maybe it's not exactly hey move within two weeks and stay in a loft bed but like what does that give you when you are now mentoring younger salespeople. Yeah. And it's not even meant, it's obviously mentoring, but it's like in the hiring process. Like we're a series of new startup, we're hot. We raise a bunch of money, but like, it's still risk. We're a small company, especially for folks that are like larger companies. It's like, hey, I feel very safe. Ricotta or Samsara, like those are very safe companies. They're hardware based.

5:49So they have a moat from AI. Like they're not gonna be disrupted by AI at this stage. But my biggest advice to people is like, assuming all things else are equal. if you're smart, intelligent, hardworking, the biggest way for you to expedite your growth and your career is joining a company that's in hyper. Your career trajectory, assuming all things else are equal, is completely tied to how fast a company's growing, how many products, how many people they're hiring. You can't become a VP if there's no one to be a VP of. And so then like I'm hiring a bunch of people. Like even when I came to Campfire, we're hiring, we're scaling.

6:23We had two phenomenal founding AEs who've done a phenomenal job like building out Campfire. came in, realized we needed it. I promoted them both up to manager in two weeks. And so now they're managers, now they're leading teams. Places like at Samsara, it's two years from SCR to E, non-negotiable. And so like by taking the risk, going early stage, like it won't always work out. But like that exponential growth is what drives your career. That gives you opportunities, new markets, new countries, new segments, leadership. If you're not growing, like they're not going to open up an office in APAC and you won't have an opportunity to go to Australia or go to London.

6:58and stuff like that is always tied to hyper growth in my eyes.

7:00Sophie Buonassisi: I love it. That is great advice, if you will. And you mentioned there was this regulatory mandate. So when you joined Motive, it was right before this insane explosive growth. Like, tell us about what happened. Yeah. And so effectively with Motive, truckers were recording how many hours they drove by hand. They had a little book and they filled it out. So you can imagine. And what happened was how many hours you drove. You had to take a break and you had to stop for 10 to 12 hours. Obviously, people were not doing that because you can race it. They had multiple books. And so drivers could be driving for a day straight.

7:34It's very unsafe. A trucker, a trucking, especially like a thing about an oil tanker. Yeah. It's a 60 ,000 pound missile driving down the street. It's very dangerous if done and safely. And so when I joined, I joined in May. The mandate went to effect in December. And so it was a very interesting time because this was right when, right after the election and when this was an Obama era mandate that his government like put together. It's like, hey, the FMCSA, this is what we're gonna do. And so obviously like when Trump was coming to office, his pitch was like, we're gonna knock down regulation.

8:09We're gonna do all these things. So when we were cold calling into the market, we're cold calling into truck companies in rural parts of America. So obviously like that they really aligned with that. And so the objection was, hey, actually we don't believe in this. Trump's gonna get rid of it. When that was never talked about, there's not an article, There was no inkling that this mandate was going to get overturned, but the entire TAM believed that. And so from May to roughly like August, September, we almost sold nothing. We luckily had raised from Google Ventures that are Series B, we were at$800 ,000 in revenue.

8:46Things weren't moving. We were building pipeline. We're having demos, but it was like, hey, like we actually don't believe this is happening, so we're not going to buy it. so it's like it came into effect on september 17th the famous line was call me september 17th and so then like september hits and then everyone starts to freak out because like oh this this is real and also you gotta remember it's it's hardware yeah and so you have to get it and you have to install it and also but it's hardware is inventory and so for us like there was this huge debate on how much inventory to have because like we're not selling we're on pipe and so what are we going to do?

9:21And so then it just hit the fan. And so we went from selling nothing to doing, I was doing over 70 demos a week. I had to put blocks on my calendar to get coffee, go to the bathroom, get lunch. Cause there was so much inbound that SDR was booking a meeting of every minute of every day. And this went on for like three plus months. There was even a phone line. If you want to work on the weekends where you could take calls and demos and move units because demand was insatiable. They legally had to buy it. And the entire TAM waited to the very last minute. And so like effectively we went from 800K to$30 million in revenue in about a hundred days.

10:01So it was just like exponential.

10:03Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah, that is explosive growth. And I mean, it must've been weird to joining the company at 800K, having been promised, you know, this role or that this regulation would come into effect and then just not seeing any revenue come in the door. Or did you ever feel nervous that maybe it was the wrong decision? I did and I didn't. Because I fundamentally didn't believe in the objection. Yeah. It's like, we knew we were going to sell. The question was how much? We ran out of inventory. No one could have guessed that that would have happened. In terms of like 70 demos, nonstop, everyone was working like 100 hours a week.

10:37I knew something was going to happen. I didn't know that was going to happen.

10:40Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah. Like that was like, no one did. 800K. Yeah. 230 million. Correct. That's in a hardware space. 2017, it was uncommon. Yeah. And so, I mean, you were taking, you mentioned 70 demos per week. Like what did that do for yourself as a seller too? Yeah, I think what was really interesting about that is like when you think about it, it's obviously like inbound is substantially easier than outbound, but like so much of sales, it's just like going to the gym, it's reps. And so at that stage in the three month period, like, I mean, we did maybe like 800, 900 demos and that's more demos than some people do.

11:15Like, cause right now the average sales org, like you're, you're probably doing like 10 demos a month if you're like super busy. Yeah. Maybe 20. And so we were doing four to five X what someone would do in a month and a week. And so I think for all of us, it like expedited all of our growth because like you're just going through the motions, you're giving pitches, you're taking objections, you're closing deals, you're going through red lines. And so then like you exponentially have gone through more sales cycles than most people have gone through in five, even 10 years. And so although there was some level of easiness due to like compelling event, it's still something that builds that muscle that like would have taken much longer otherwise.

11:53Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah. It sounds like your career, I mean, at this early stage too, was just an expedition of everything in terms of timeline, in terms of reps, everything. And that is just the compounding effect of that is incredible. And so then after motive, I mean, you joined at 800K. What was the revenue when you left? Roughly$100 million. Roughly$100 million, including that kind of$30 million 100-day sprint. You went on to join Samsara, Burkata through hyperscale periods of their own right. Do you have any key sales lessons from either or both of those experiences? Yeah, because I think before I left motive, I moved to Nashville, opened up that office.

12:31And then with Samsara, I moved to Atlanta to open up their office. And we joined 100 mil. It was right when the like injury sin, like$200 million check hit. And so then it was like, time to go. And so we scaled that office from like zero to a hundred people. It was funny, kind of similar to that. Like we had a Tableau dashboard that we were held accountable to for recruiting. Cause like the main goal was like, you guys have to hire. Like every leader is like very much baked in their day to day. So we were tracking like how many phone screens you were doing, how many demos, like you were expected to like go recruit.

13:05because we need to hire like 100 people. And all of us that were in that founding leadership team, we did 250 interviews in like our first 90 days. So like what I learned there was like how to hire, how to pick talent. And like, especially with that office in Atlanta, scaling like in a non-core market, the biggest thing I learned was like the importance of like hiring, developing, and retaining top talent and how to do that, how to pick the right people. Because obviously when you hire that quick, you're going to make misses. It's just inevitable. You can't put that many people into a room that quickly without making some mistakes.

13:35So there's a lot of lessons there.

13:37Sophie Buonassisi: And if you could boil it down, maybe give us their secret sauce of how do you pick the right reps? Depends on the company, right? And it depends on the role, what they're doing, how they're doing it. Because reps that would hire at Mercado are very different than the reps that would hire at Campfire. Yeah. So I think my core philosophy right now is I have like a contrarian belief. And what it is, is that a lot of people think that a lot of things are going to be automated by AI. We're going to have labor replacement and I guess the R's and E's. I actually think the opposite. You've seen it with engineers already.

14:07You have the 10X engineer and now it's like the 100X engineer where it's like, they're so much exponentially more productive that you see the salaries that engineers are getting now. It's because like, they're going to go do 20X so you can give five people salaries to one person. We're not quite there yet, but I do think you're going to have like the 10X salesperson. And so I think like with AI and your ability to like self-serve your own knowledge, onboarding, training, when you enter these AI native companies, the difference between top performer and bottom performer is going to be exponential.

14:36So I think like you're going to have this core 30 % of salespeople that are worth like triple of everyone else. And then the bottom 20 % are going to be very tough to employ. And so what I'm looking for now, especially at Campfire, it's like, how intelligent are you? Are you hardworking? How are you going to solve problems? But also like what I'm really curious about is how they are going to seek and develop feedback. Because now when you join a company at Campfire, day one. We're built with AI in mind. And so we have Claude that's MCP'd into absolutely every single thing in the business. And so when you join day one, you could go into Claude and just look for calls, look for demos, get insights.

15:15Your ability to go find information to improve your own skills is exponential. First, if you joined a company in 2017, where is it at? It's written down. It's in someone's head. You have to go like, someone has to actually sit down and give you that information. And so now I'm looking for people that not just are good sellers or not just hardworking, but like those people are going to become over time, substantially more productive than everyone else. And we're still an early stage startup. We don't have like everything all figured out. And so it's like, how can these people self-learn, self-develop?

15:47And I think that's going to be the difference maker of the next two years for people that are joining these companies.

15:51Sophie Buonassisi: And Chris, it was just this year that you actually left for Cata and joined Campfire. Why the shift? Why did you leave? Yeah, because I think for me, Verkata is an incredible company, incredible product, like really game changer. But Verkata just hit 5 ,000 employees. They're doing over a billion a year in net new revenue. They're past the scale up stage. It's pretty relevant for me now selling Campfire, which is ERP. My joke, and I actually applied to Sam's R2, is typically when a company gets large enough to implement Workday, it's typically time for me to leave it's too large of a company it's time to go back down market and so that's ironically been like usually when that happens is when like i ironically like start to go on the market but the main reason i left and there's nothing against ricotta it was amazing experience being there but like as you see like ai's been exponential in the past two years and it's when you're at a large company it's no fault of their own but like they had 1200 sellers over at ricotta it so it's like you can't just go turn on ai no you can't have 1200 people just going crazy you're gonna spend 50 million dollars in token maxing like on accident yeah and so the downfall of that was we had some ai but like ai at work only matters if it's like truly connected and everything you do ai and silos pretty worthless without data and so as i was meeting with like friends that were going to companies meeting with vcs meeting with founders as like i was starting to think about my next move, like I got hit with this like deep sense of like anxiety.

17:22And the reason for that was like, I quickly realized like how quickly AI was developing and how like all these people were using it in their day to day at these early stage companies. And like, I was really concerned that I personally like was not developing the skills I needed to become employable. It's going to be very soon in the future that if you don't know how to use AI, that's completely interacted, how to build workflows, how to like really run from an AI native standpoint from the ground up, you're going to be left behind. Like if you come in as a sales leader two years from now, and you've been in a company like that didn't have it, you're going to be effectively unemployable.

17:58And so I had the sense I'm like, the market's hot. It's the right time. It's the right place. And also like, I was deeply concerned about the skills I was developing. And that even goes for, for reps that I talked to and I recruit. It's like, Hey, like, do you feel like you're developing the skills that matter? And the answer is often no. And so that's part of the pitch is like when you come to somewhere like Campfire, it's built from the ground up with AI in mind, your ability to kind of like learn and develop, especially those skills, like it's exponential.

18:27Sophie Buonassisi: Chris, you built sales organizations pre-AI and Campfire is very much so AI native. You're building it from near scratch. What's the difference now of building an AI native sales organization compared to how you might've built in the past? Yeah, I think one of the biggest benefits is like, because we're building, not from scratch, but like I would say we're at one, is that like we don't have like the technical debt that a lot of companies have in terms of like our CRM, our stack, our tooling. And so it's when you're selecting all your tooling for the sales reps, you really think through like, how do these things talk to each other?

19:06What's the quality of the MCP? When we're testing a tool in the MCP, doesn't work well and you can't actually pull like meaningful data out most of these tools are going to become headless to some capacity yeah so it's like you're really thinking through like what are the workflows how does everything interact with each other how does it integrate how do you build workflows across all these tools and how do you make those things work and so like i for instance like how one thing i have is like instead of clary at previous organizations and And I had Gong and all that's for deal insights. And so like I've built this automation that effectively listens to every call, enriches the deal with Clay, runs it through the CRM and then grades it against every close one and loss deal we've ever had.

19:50And so then I have a daily top deal dashboard that's fully integrated, that listens, knows every reason why we win, lose tied into our battle cards. Also like it uses Clay Enrichment to tell me when someone leaves the company, when there's a new hire, if like there's a new VP coming in that could like impact the deal. So it's just like all those little things, like how do those tools interact? Do they interact well? And how do they make the team more efficient? So you can spend more time on revenue generating activities. I think one of the biggest time savers is top deal reviews. It's like the rep has to get a deck.

20:23They fill out the deck. It's do they have MedPick? Do they have all these things? Or is it me or the manager and we're listening to the call and like, are we doing this thing well? Now I just have it. And so there's no slide. I have all the information. Every call has been listened to. And I have full med pick listed out. Is there a next step? Is there a compelling event? And so now it's like you can stay on top of deals and coach people through deals substantially faster. And also like reps would spend two hours building a top deal QBR. It's not a good use of time. And so it's small things like that that just save so much time for people.

20:59Sophie Buonassisi: Oh, yeah, absolutely. And the things that people don't enjoy doing too. Exactly. No one wants to build a deck. No. People don't want to do that. No, that's fantastic. I love it. And we've been talking about Campfire, but I think most people are familiar because it is so hot right now. But for anyone who may be unfamiliar, give us the one to two liner. Campfire is an AI native ERP. We're tackling one of the most legacy markets on the planet, effectively going up against the NetSuites of the world. I think the thing for Campfire that I think makes this a very interesting opportunity is ERP is one of the last software modes in my eyes.

21:33because ERP is a existential system of record for finance and accounting. Every company on the planet has money. They count the money. They have to do accounting. They have to close books. So the TAM is arguably one of the largest there are because it's effectively every company. But from there, like the thing that really matters is like your ERP cannot be wrong. It is the financial backbone of your operations as well as like, that's how you get audited when you go public. like obviously for larger companies, like there was a, I'm not going to say by name, but there was CFL like four months ago that got fired because ERP put out bad data and the board size were up by 5%.

22:12You can't go to the street with bad data. It's not allowed. And so like, no one's going to vibe code it. You can't, it's too complex. And I think the finance and accounting teams are like traditionally like more risk averse. And so like, I think there's a true moat there in terms of software. And then like, I think on top of that, like when you have the agentic layer and for folks that work with a CRM, if you have an MCP or you're building AI on top of Salesforce, like the data is bad. It's not good data. It's a lot of times with humans, even if you have call recording, like it's CRMs are very reliable data sources.

22:46And so the AI like is pretty worthless because the data is so bad. ERP is the opposite. The data is right. It's correct. It's audited. I'm such a larger company. So like your ability to build AI workflows and actually like break into labor replacement long-term will be very possible because the data is inherently correct. And so it'll be a little bit longer to get that going because like you have to build trust that the data is going to be correct as you kind of start building those things. But there is very inherently, AI is only because of the data. And the data in your ERP is like, should be correct.

23:22And so I think that's what makes this opportunity so interesting.

23:25Sophie Buonassisi: Super interesting. That's a good pitch too for Grandpa. You want to join? Yeah. I know. Now I'm excited. I was always excited. It's been phenomenal to see your journey at Campfire. That's incredible. And I mean, prior to Campfire, you spent so much of your career selling to what we often term as the real economy, if you will, which is more of the logistics side, healthcare, trucking. We talked about government. How does this relate now to Campfire and your strategy? Yeah. And I think to my other point is like every single industry in the country, around the planet, like needs an ERP. They do accounting and finance.

24:01And so it's really about how do you break into those markets? Because the great thing about Campfire is we're in SF and we've built a tremendous business through tech and AI. We have some of like the hottest logos. And with that, then it's like, okay, the world tech is roughly 35 to 40 ,000 companies that matter, right? So if you want to become a large, valuable public company, you need to go beyond that. And so it's like a lot of the strategy is like, how do you break in the middle of the country? How do you sell to that real economy? I mean, how do you start tackling those businesses? And because like, it also makes you be a recession-proof business.

24:34So that was the beauty of like Samsara and Bricada during like COVID was like, they had such a diversified customer base. A couple of them got killed during COVID shutdowns. Then some of them, trucking as an example for Samsara, went through the roof. Everyone worked from home. You had to get more deliveries, more online, more goods. People were getting stuff delivered to the house. So the trucking industry exploded during that time. And so it's like, how do you build a diversified TAM and diversified revenue stream that also helps you fight against economic headwinds in the future?

25:06Sophie Buonassisi: Trucking industry has been good to you in your career. I can't complain. Yeah. And so is that part of the plan then at Campfire to really diversify your TAM and go beyond? Yeah. At Campfire, you've got some of the hottest AI logos, like you said. When, or perhaps you already are, do you diversify to the real economy and expand that TAM? yeah i i think like at any given moment every company started expanding tim right like no one's like man i really just don't want more tam uh we used to have a joke of ricotta that every time they said uh tam in all hands um you'd have to take a shot we never actually did but the joke is like you'd be passed out in the first six minutes so tam is like such a big topic everywhere um but yeah no it's something we're focused on now it's like how do we expand how do we go into different states different markets different verticals we just recently opened up an office in the uk we We have an office now in London.

25:54We now have five heads there. So it's something that we're actively looking into and working on.

25:58Sophie Buonassisi: Brilliant. And because you've sold into it in the past and you're actively working on it now, you have this unique viewpoint into the real economy. What do people who don't have the experience selling into the real economy, but want to expand there, what do they get wrong? Yeah, it's funny because it was even something like, I think, Sam Sara got wrong in the very early days. When you're in SF and you sell to tech, it's all like, who's the VC? Which hot company do you have? Like, oh, do you have that new hot logo? Did like the hot VC like give you funding? Those people don't care. They don't know who Excel or Andreessen are.

26:34They don't know what like a round of funding means. They don't know what like a cursor or like a postdoc is. They don't even know who Campfire is yet because we haven't called them. And so what it comes down to is like, you actually need to pitch actually on the value of the product. It's very in-person. you need to travel you need to get there like i ring joe because i've been to more cities in pennsylvania that you've never heard of when i was at simsar just going into scranton pennsylvania the airport has an office store themed after the airport that's how like niche it is um but um but yeah it's very in person it's very personal and it's funny they don't care about the hot logo but the one thing that gets really interesting when you start like breaching those verticals is like you'll like be in texas and like you'll be selling like an oil and gas company and you have like an old gas logo maybe in Canada and they're like I want to talk to a customer in Texas that does oil and gas with you it's like well you'd actually be the first one we only have something we've some in Canada same business it's like no they need to be from Texas I need to hear so like the reference is actually like hyper specific hyper geographic hyper local yeah and so then it gets a little bit like difficult like how do you build because those people in those type of businesses it's very tight-knit it's very very it's like similar to tech but like more rural and So it's like, who do you have?

27:50Who are your references? Who looks like us? It's on the product because they're inherently skeptical of tech companies out of SF because it's so different. Like SF is like its own own world at times. And it's very different than the rest of the country.

28:05Sophie Buonassisi: Right. That completely makes sense. Good advice. Lots of traveling for sure. And switching gears a little bit, Chris, but thinking about more high level news, what's online, there's a lot of talk around AI outbound, AISDRs. I got to ask you, when you hear that, what's your honest reaction as a salesman? Yeah. It's a very interesting topic and it's one that actually gets put on my plate pretty often. And my LinkedIn is also filled with people trying to sell that. That is going to make people substantially more efficient. But I think AI outbound in its current state, if you're running a complex B2B cycle, it's just not going to work.

28:45I think depending how you use them, they effectively kind of become spam tools. So it's like you could, you just quadrupling output. Like if you look at the metrics, like the conversion is like very, very low. It's great for inbound. So if you're selling like down market transactional B2C or like low end B2B, like, Hey, credit card or the phone, 50 bucks a month. I think that works super well, but I think like the companies that are going to stand out over the next couple of years are going to be the ones that actually like truly develop a strong SDR work. And that's something I learned in my time at Samsara, my time at Verkata, because like one thing you'll look at, if you're looking for Sam Sara, you look at that, if you were to go pull up like a chart, there's people that were SDRs five years ago.

29:28They're still there during customer success, their renewals, their enterprise, their, they're this, they're that. And the same thing with Verkata, they did that exceedingly well. I think those are two things that like really stood out about those companies. And so my opinion of that, especially like for what we're building campfire is like, how do you build a really strong SDR org that not just builds meaningful, efficient pipeline for your sales team, but that becomes your bench. Ideally, like I hope five years from now, I hire an SDR that I then promote to a director. Like that's my ideal state.

30:01Cause like, if you really think about like how do you build a great company it's how do you hire develop and retain top talent i mean it's much much easier typically internal promotes also like they ramp faster they have higher court attainment they're less risky and so that's my hardcore belief that's also contrarian to ai tools for outbound because if you're doing that and then you have a bench you're not developing people you're not promoting people and that's the org also it's like it's so important it's also a place where people learn if they want to become an ae yeah and that's fine if you don't.

30:32If you're a good, smart, intelligent person, we'd like to retain you and let's figure out another place to put you. And so then it becomes just like the feeder organization for the company at large. And it helps you grow and scale much faster.

30:43Sophie Buonassisi: It sounds like your largest top of funnel bench that even feeds the entire, or perhaps even beyond the sales sometimes. Oh, it's existential to recruiting long-term. It's very time consuming and expensive to hire externally all day long. I've spent a lot of time doing it. I started new offices. And so once you get that bench it just makes everyone's lives easier and then it just builds a really strong culture yeah because then like when i'm interviewing people the main question i get is like what's my path what's my path to promotion like how am i going to grow my career and obviously we're very new and so we haven't promoted a lot of people yet because we just hasn't been enough time And Verkata, like five years in, I think nine of the 12 directors were at ease at one point.

31:28And so that pitch becomes very meaningful. If you, you got to put your money on your mouth. Do you promote people internally? Show 15 people you've promoted. It's on their LinkedIn. Yeah. So it's hard to hide from that. And so I think that's what really matters for recruiting tools as well, to show that you're promoting that talent. And it makes people feel like this is a place where I can grow my career.

31:47Sophie Buonassisi: That almost feels like a good metric for leadership to engaging it. Like, are there any sales metrics that you're obsessing over? Like, what are the key things that you're tracking in general? Yeah. I mean, obviously all the normal, you know, KPIs, pipe gen, how many meetings we're booking dials, but like the long-term metric that I really care about and outside of obviously revenue and pipeline, like those are the top two, but like what drives into that and not to go back to Simsara, but like, if you look at Simsara during their like a hundred mil to a billion run through IPO, you didn't see a single top rep leave the organization willingly.

32:24The average P-Club rep was five, six, seven years at Samsara. And so they did a phenomenal job of retaining, developing, and paying their talent and having really good comp plans, really good structures where people could make a lot of money. And so those people didn't leave. And so like, especially in sales, like over time, your top performers, the longer they're in seat, they become like exceptionally more productive over time. Like a really good sales org, the top 30, 40 % is covering probably 70 to 80 % of the number. And so one thing I'm really focused on long-term is like, how do you not just hire, develop and retain top talent, but are we retaining our top talents?

33:03Like what, how much regrettable churn? That was a metric we tracked like very fiercely over Kata is like, is this churn regrettable? Because like those people, You have to hire someone new. They have to ramp. They have to train. They lose the knowledge. They become less productive. And so like, I think that had a lot to do with Sam's R's exponential growth is because they just retained the top 23 % of the org for like six, seven. And there's still folks that are still there eight, nine years. And that's very rare at that time. Like just the paychecks were really high and really strong culture.

33:35Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah. Yeah. Regrettable turn. I love it. And I mean, you're hiring a ton yourself at Campfire right now. Now, tell us, what are you hiring for and why should somebody join or consider joining? I'm hiring across stack. So we're not an office company. So I have an office in New York, SF and London. So really scaling up the org. We're going to roughly two to three X the GTM org by the end of the year. So we're hiring SCRs, AEs, SEs, and then leaders for all those departments. So we're hiring aggressively across the stack, really trying to catch the demand. of this market. And I've said this a little bit across the interview, but the reason you joined Campfire, for all the reasons I said, it's like, if you join a company that is in hyper growth, that's how you fundamentally change your life and change your career.

34:22Like people live in SF to join life-changing companies to chase life-changing equity. And so it's like, this is definitely a place where we have that focus. We have a focus on obviously development, hiring, promoting internally, but also we have phenomenal product. We have a great team, very large, diversified market that is ripe for disruption. So joining Campfire is your, like I said, it's a tough decision for folks because like you now are going into an interview process. Will Claude kill this company? That's the thing. It's in the back of everyone's mind. Is Claude going to come and build this thing and it's going to crash for a company?

35:03Until I said, know, like ERP is a moat. It's one of the last moats in software. So I think like it's a great opportunity. I think we're very safe from disruption and the market's large.

35:13Sophie Buonassisi: I love it. I mean, that is super compelling for anyone looking to join a really hot kind of growing company. So that's fantastic. All right, Chris. And to finish us off, we've got a couple of just quick rapid fire, finish the sentence questions for you here. So you ready? Let's hear it. All Right. The part about leadership that nobody tells you is. I think the thing that people don't realize about being in this type of role with leadership is every single day as you like lead and operate like a sales org, you have to make decisions. And those decisions like typically have like two outcomes. It's like, is it going to benefit the business?

35:52And then how does that impact the people? And so the hardest part about this job is like, how do you consistently balance what's doing best for the company while also what's best for the people? And how do you tow that line? Because like, sometimes we're gonna have to make decisions that are best for the business. We're here to make money at the end of the day. And like, we have a number we have to get to. But then you also take care of people and like, how are the decisions you make? How does that impact them? How does that like impact their income, impact their day-to-day? And so I think like one of the hardest things about leadership is the constant day-to-day reprioritization of like what you're doing, how you're doing and decisions you make.

36:28And then how do those decisions have downstream impacts to the entire org while also like benefiting and helping the company grow?

36:35Sophie Buonassisi: The most underrated piece of go-to-market advice is? Yeah, I think the most underrated thing, and this is something like I think about often, is I think like companies spend a lot of time, you know, Mark Zuckerberg actually had this like big quote about this, about like how to think about your competitors and how to think about like what you're doing day to day. and the companies that win obviously need to be know which pairs are doing how they're doing it but like you just need to focus on execution it's it's the day-to-day it's like how are you executing and how we execute everyone else because at the end of the day like you're one of the main modes of a company is like how do you go to market how do you execute day-to-day like what's your overall strategy and it's less about like what's a competitor doing and it's more so like what are we doing?

37:24What can we do to win? And how do we execute on our vision? And really focusing hard on that. I think often people get lost in like what a competitor is doing or how they're doing it or like this feature or this function. And it's like, you just got to focus on the day to day and like, how are you executing?

37:40Sophie Buonassisi: I love it. And I think that's part of the beautiful part of joining a hyper growth early stage company is you are just thrust into execution mode. Like there's no room to not execute. And so you learn to be a fast executor and then you can adapt that to any pace, but like, you're really not given a choice in a hyper growth environment. Like you were taking 70 demos a week. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, look, I think what happens most is like people get paralysis on decisions and data and like, how do we do that? And I think like Jeff Bezos had a quote about like, is a door a one-way door or two-way door?

38:15And like, Like you should be trying to make decisions once you have 70 to 80 % of the data because you're never going to have 100%. And so it's like when we're thinking about execution, we're thinking about decisions we're making. It's like how quickly can you walk something back? And if it's a two-way door and like I can walk it back pretty quick, it's like let's move. Versus like it's a one-way door and it would take a long time to unwind. Like let's be very, very thoughtful. So it's like something I'm constantly juggling with me and my team. It's like how are we making the decisions we need too quickly?

38:43then how do we slow down and think more in depth about like the bigger, harder to walk back decisions?

38:49Sophie Buonassisi: Brilliant. And just overall, it can be go to market. It can be not, but Chris, what is the best piece of advice you've ever been given and who gave it to you? You know, there's been a lot of great advice that I've received over the years. I think it comes down to like, you can only control two things. You need to focus on the control goals, kind of similar to what I was saying on execution. It's like, how do you show up every day? How do you work excruciatingly hard? And like, how do you have a really just good attitude? Because like working in sales and sales leadership, you're effectively signing up to eat glass every day.

39:29You're waking up in the morning, you're calling people. They don't want to talk to you or they do. You win deals, you lose deals. It's a very hard job. And so you're waking up, you're signing up to do something excruciatingly hard and signing up effectively be rejected multiple times a day. And so it's like, you can't control that. And the best sellers that I've ever had are folks that are just laser focused on like, how do I work hard? How do I control what I can control? And what do I have a good attitude about? Because like, that's what drives culture. And if you start having people like on the floor or in the organization, or even like leaders that don't have a good attitude or like they're being negative, like that becomes a drain on the organization.

40:10So that's something that I've held with me.

40:12Sophie Buonassisi: I love it. Fantastic advice. And for anyone who wants to get in touch or just keep up with your journey in Campfire, where can they find you? Yeah, you can find me on LinkedIn. There we go. On LinkedIn. And then for anyone interested in Campfire jobs, career page? Yeah, career page or DM me directly. I either respond to every DM I get or I get their information I send over to the recruiter. I've hired multiple people already that have DM me on LinkedIn. So if you're looking to be in sales in New York, SF, London, especially if you have a strong finance background, like I love the chat, we're tripling the org.

40:45So we need a lot of great people.

40:47Sophie Buonassisi: And Chris, I got to ask you, what makes for a good DM when somebody's looking for a role? Yeah. I mean, it's not just a good DM you. It's funny. If you're a salesperson, you very likely have access to tools like Zoom info and clay. And so I've actually had people pull my cell phone information and call and text me. I think that's phenomenal. I'm putting that person in process. If you're like looking for an SDR role and you cold call me and text me, try to get a job at my company. Like I very likely want to hire you. So like DMs are good and not everyone has access to like call data and stuff like that.

41:20But like if you're in seed at a company, you like very likely can do that. And so some of the best folks have done that and i think that's the best way to stand out as long as you're like doing the right way but if i have someone who texts me like hey chris i'm looking for an sdr role super hungry grabbed your number from zoom info i'm like this guy can prospect yeah so like demonstrating instantly bringing him into the funnel or her i love it i love it and i think

41:44Sophie Buonassisi: even if somebody maybe doesn't have access to that and they're just sending a dm there's so many different ways to stand out like a video for example i mean you just write text exactly Make a video of yourself. Yeah. And it's also like, you got to follow up a little bit. Yeah. You know, because like, it's funny as someone who tells my team to outbound, you know, whenever we have news or anything, we all get like probably 45 LinkedIn DMs a day of people trying to sell us stuff. So then it's like, sometimes I just miss it. And so it's like, also like, it's the follow up, which also ties in sales.

42:11Like you got to follow up.

42:13Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah. Demonstrate the role before you're in seat. Absolutely. I love it. Well, Chris, thank you so much. This has been phenomenal. Really appreciate you coming on to GM now. Thanks for having me.