20Sales: How to Build Vertical Sales Teams, Why No Customer Success is BS and Everyone Needs it, How to Hire, Train and Retain the First Reps and Lessons Scaling to $2.1BN Revenue and 1,300 People with Larry Schurtz, CRO @ Genesys

10 May 2024 · 56 min

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Podcast Episode Summary: 20Sales with Larry Shurtz, CRO @ Genesys

Episode Overview In this episode of The Twenty Minute VC, host Harry Stebbings interviews Larry Shurtz, the Chief Sales Officer at Genesys. Larry shares insights from his extensive experience in sales leadership, including his time at Salesforce, where he scaled a 1,300-person team to over $2.1 billion in revenue. The conversation covers key strategies in building effective sales teams, prioritization, hiring processes, onboarding, and the importance of customer success.

Key Topics Discussed

  1. From Robotics Student to Sales Leader
  2. Background: Larry initially pursued a career in engineering, specifically in robotics, but transitioned to sales and marketing after discovering his passion for selling rather than creating.
  3. Sales Journey: His career began with Eli Lilly and later included significant roles at Salesforce and Confluent, where he achieved remarkable revenue growth.
  1. Mastering Sales Leadership
  2. Prioritization Mistakes: One of the biggest errors sales leaders make is trying to do too much, leading to burnout and inefficiency.
  3. Larry’s “3 Rs”: Focus on Right People, Right Execution, and Customer Success to drive sales performance.
  4. Art vs. Science in Sales: Larry believes sales is predominantly art (60-70%) with important scientific elements (30-40%), emphasizing the need for emotional intelligence (EQ) in sales roles.
  1. Building the Best Sales Team
  2. Hiring Process:
  3. Understand the specifics of the role before sourcing candidates.
  4. Emphasis on small interview teams (max 5 members) for better relationship assessment.
  5. Speed in the hiring process is crucial to secure top talent.
  6. Common Interview Questions: Larry focuses on candidates' track records, cultural fit, and motivations behind their career choices.
  1. The Onboarding Process
  2. Structured Onboarding:
  3. New hires should engage with big customers early in their tenure to gain insights and empathy.
  4. Implementation of a buddy system for mentorship during initial phases.
  5. Identifying Red Flags: Early warning signs include lack of preparation and inability to effectively communicate company value.
  1. Customer Success as a Core Function
  2. Importance of Customer Success: Larry argues that every team member must understand customer success to drive retention and upselling.
  3. Interplay Between Sales and Customer Success: Clear segmentation of roles (hunter vs. farmer) is essential to avoid conflicts and maximize effectiveness.
  1. Scaling Challenges and Solutions
  2. Common Pitfalls:
  3. Poor prioritization and waiting too long to make crucial decisions can hinder growth.
  4. Emphasis on understanding customer needs and aligning the sales approach accordingly.
  1. Sales Forecasting and Performance
  2. Accurate Forecasting:
  3. Importance of understanding business metrics and maintaining a healthy pipeline.
  4. Lack of accurate forecasting can stem from insufficient diligence regarding customer needs and market opportunities.

Key Takeaways

  • Sales Leadership: Successful sales leadership hinges on prioritization, understanding team dynamics, and fostering a culture of accountability and empathy.
  • Hiring and Onboarding: The hiring process should be clearly defined with an emphasis on cultural fit and quick decision-making to seize talent.
  • Customer Success Integration: Customer success should be a fundamental part of the sales strategy, with all team members playing a role in ensuring customer satisfaction and retention.
  • Art and Science of Sales: Strive for a balance between the art of relationship-building and the scientific approach of data-driven decisions.

Conclusion Larry Shurtz’s insights provide a comprehensive framework for building effective sales teams and understanding the nuances of sales leadership. His emphasis on prioritization, customer success, and the importance of emotional intelligence in sales roles offers listeners valuable strategies to implement in their own organizations.

For the full episode, listeners can search for 20VC on YouTube.

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Transcript

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0:00If you can't forecast accurately, either you don't truly understand your business. You aren't truly doing the amount of diligence with customers and opportunities. You don't have enough opportunities to be able to balance out some of the risk here things with some of the things that look better. And we might not even be asking the right questions and we're likely not talking to the right people. This is 20 sales with me Harry Stubbins. Now 20 sales is a show where we sit down with the best sales leaders in the world to discuss starting and scaling sales teams. Today, we're joined by a sales leader who scaled a team at Salesforce to 1300 people and over 2 .1 billion in revenue.

0:37Following that, he was the CRO Confluent, delivering more than 60 % revenue growth and doubling customer count, and today he's the CRO Genesis. It's time to get the notebooks out. There are so many granular tactics in this one. But before we dive in, have you ever wondered why spending company money is so broken? Employees want to follow the process, but they're confused and frustrated. It takes forever to get anything approved. It's so tedious to get anything paid, and folks in procurement, finance and other stakeholders are just as frustrated too. Duplicate, spend, unauthorized contracts, surprise vendors, late invoices, missing receipts and documentation.

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3:59Visit clay .com slash harry today and get started with clay. You have now arrived at your destination. Larry, listen, I've heard so many good things from the main man Mr. Frank Philman, So thank you so much for joining me today first. Ari, it's great to see you. Thank you. This should be a ton of fun. So thanks for having me on. Not at all, but listen, I want to start with some context. Sales is often something that sales leaders love. I want to dive into when did you first discover your love of sales? Was there a critical inflation point? Yeah, well, so a little bit of background. When I graduated from high school, I went into college.

4:33I want to be an Electroengineer. More specifically, actually, most specifically. I wanted to build robots. I went in, took my first lecture engineering courses, obviously heavy math, some things that I had not really been prepared for and realized that that was probably not the best spot for me. I quickly exited and got into marketing and I did a lot of even back then, a little bit of kind of just soul searching. It's a pretty dramatic miss of what I wanted. And I realized I actually didn't want to like build the robots. I wanted to sell the robots. My love of sales really just came from my first job out of school.

5:07My graduate with a marketing and finance degree and two companies came on to my campus. One was Eli Lilly from a suitable company and the other was EJ Gallo, the wine company. So these are tough choices as a college graduate. I went Eli Lilly, I was at Eli Lilly for two years. That's where I kind of got hooked. I mean, listen, I love that in terms of an origin story. Sadly, the robot career didn't happen. I'm sorry for that, but I think it's turned out pretty well. There's so many great companies though that you've like bluntly been an instrumental part of. I wanted to start on actually the Decade at Salesforce.

5:41I mean, when I looked at the numbers, leading a 1300 person team to 2 .1 billion in revenue. I mean, these are insane numbers, Larry. What are one or two of your biggest takeaways from a Decade at Salesforce in that trajectory? For me, it was a couple of things. And number one, from a learning perspective, is prioritization. One of the biggest things that sales leaders do wrong today when it comes to prioritization. We're trying to do too much. We really try and do it all. I would look at that from one from the personal leader perspective, the impact that has on the leader and then the impact that has in your team.

6:16So I'll kind of unpack that. On the leader side, if you're personally trying to do too much, this is where you really get into what I know or mindset challenges. These end up in health challenges. You really get spread way too thin when you're trying to do too much. We can can kind of talk about my perspective on how you solve that piece of the puzzle. But I think that's number one. Number two, the impact that actually has on your team is pretty detrimental. It all ends up flowing down. It's a very diminishing trait when you try and do too much because you flow it down and you keep adding things on.

6:47You never take anything off. The list just keeps growing. When the list grows, your teams aren't able to do it either. In the bag, it's fuller and fuller and fuller. For me, it's a little bit like a balloon. eventually when there's so much air in their outbreaks. How do we solve that? If I'm a sales leader today and you're advising me, which is kind of the role play that I'd love to have today, yeah, you have a framework for like only focus on the top accounts, everything else doesn't matter. Only focus on spending time with your top, perhaps they're the ones who are going to close the business.

7:16My framework is I think about it from a leadership perspective. There's nothing more important than people. There's just not. Some people got talent, whatever you want to frame it in, your human capital is the most important thing. And then in the job that I've chosen and that my teams have chosen which is deliver the number there's no plan B There's no like other team that if we don't get it done somebody else is going to it. It doesn't exist So for me it's people it's executing on the number This is ruthless prioritization because I could argue this third one should be first It's customer success and I think if you're nailing those three things You're probably doing a pretty good job I know we've had frameworks before this question and then we hear about kind of the blurring lines And one thing that always strikes me really to stay in sales is like, to what extent is is an art versus a science?

8:03And I spoke to your coach before the show who said that you'll want to very few people who can blend the two. If I push you, is it more an art or a science slurry? And how do you think about that? I have historically thought that it was probably 70 % art and 30 % science. And then I challenged myself on that because then I think, okay, well, if it's art, then And like, can you learn art? Is art more talent and is science more skills? How do you balance those? How do you recruit for those? How do you organizationally model for those? I today am probably in the 60, 40, if you press me, I still think it's a lot of art.

8:44I still think it's a lot of talent. And when I sit talent, I'm talking things that you and I, like, that, that, it's hard wiring. That hard wiring was when we turned 13, man, it's in us. You can pivot, you can adjust, you can learn new things, but all the skills based things that happen after that, I would put into the science bucket right or wrong. What do you think is the art of sales? Is that the EQ of reading customers? Because respectfully to me looking from the outside, it's just more and more science -based. And I put structure, frameworks, analytics, gong recordings, outbound sales tools.

9:19But to me, the only art left in sales is actually the EQ of reading people, relationships, the older school, intangibles. What is the art left in sales? So, yes, I do share that opinion. I would expand if I can. This is more than like reading customers. You cannot train EQ. Really, really good, high -end EQ. I firmly believe that that's in you. And I think that is the art. And I would tell you, is it relates to things like empathy, which is what we're all looking for from customer interaction with our co -workers and bosses? I think it's really hard to train empathy. Trust me, I've tried. Right?

9:57And when it's not something that is core to people, you're asking them to work out of there. What I think is their DNA cycling. And it's really, it's uncomfortable for them. It's not a great spot for them to be working. And so I do think it's a lot of art. I think there is a beauty, a real beauty in people that do it well. and I think it separates the incredible from the great. I totally get that and I agree you cannot train empathy, which is a pain in the frickin' ass, because I would love to. And the other one that I always find striking is like playbooks. Everyone says about sales playbooks.

10:29How do you define a sales playbook? First off, let's just start there. I always start playbooks with outcome first and work backwards. You can get super playbook happy, super playbook heavy. Everybody's got a playbook, playbooks end up conflicting with each other. I always try and work playbooks backwards. What is the outcome that we're looking for? And depending upon the playbook, I typically work it backwards into if that needs to be true, by when does that need to be true? What are the critical things that need to happen for that to be true? And who are the people that we're gonna ask to go do that?

11:01I like to keep it simple. Outcomes first, work backwards. And then measurement and cadence. How will we know if we're on target, how we know if we're on track, if we're not, what pivots do we think we're gonna make? and kind of play the chessboard out a little bit. But man, I'm just a fan of keeping it simple. I'm going back to the analogy of me being the new sales leader or CEO who needs your help. You've scaled sales teams like no one else has done. You mentioned that being an AE and I see yourself helped me understand how do you structure a hiring process for a new sales team addition for an AE today, for an SDR today?

11:36How should I do it? So first, I think you got to understand the role, right? What are you hiring for? What are the specifics of that role that matter the most? A lot of people put this in the job description, but I also think a lot of companies aren't super clear about what they're looking for. And I'll take you through how I think about the process. But I have a high confidence score that when you aren't clear about what you want, that's when you may end up missing and hiring the wrong person as very little to do with whether that person was talented or not. It has to do with, have you done a good job with the matching process?

12:08I always like to start with what is the role required and then I kind of work to Okay, well like where are we going to go source those candidates? There's an incredibly incredible availability of Diverse wildly talented people for any number of roles at any level today It's really pretty beautiful as a as a hiring manager the amount of access that we have now You need a good recruiting team that recruiting team has to be armed with the value proposition of the company So if I was gonna interview, if I was you and you're working for me at Genesis and you're hiring an AE I would want to make sure that you're armed with your Genesis pitch.

12:46What is your pitch about Genesis? Like what's compelling about Genesis Harry? Like why would I come and work there if I was the candidate? You got to be armed with the value proposition. I like to keep interview teams small This is a whole separate thing that I'm sure will rile some people up that may watch this But I'm not a fan of panel interviews I like doing interviews one on one. I strongly advocate that for my leaders because the relationship between the people that you work with for and around Really matters and I think that's difficult to get out of a panel I like to keep it five folks at the most interviewing people and then I think you got to move quickly the beauty of having There's wide availability of diverse talent at all levels today is just that the curse is dragging people through long processes.

13:31Oh, I want you to do one more interview. Like speed is kind of the game. And I think when you can match speed with a defined process, you can get incredibly valuable people. My question there was actually, if you have an amazing candidate on the second interview, which often happens. And you're like, oh, I quite wanna hire them. Do I need to do 10? Well, can I just hire the second? How long have we worked together, you and I? In this process, not long, three months. Okay, no, you're gonna need more people to interview that person. How many do I need? Listen, I think you've got a really hot candidate and we hear this a lot.

14:08We've got offers like I'm a candidate, I've got three offers, you know, I'm kind of coming to you guys. Your early in your process, I'm late in three others, kind of need to make a decision that amount of pressure, we get that a lot. But do you move on that? I don't like hot candidates. To me, it's that hot deals. Bad decisions are made when you compress timelines and don't know people in my mind. I think this is where a lot of hiring mistakes are made because you do not do enough diligence. The challenge is compounded globally because in some markets, you hire the wrong people. That could be a year to an 18 month process to get a new person back in seat and it's gonna cost you a lot of money.

14:47If you're gonna spend more time, my opinion, there's no more important thing than getting the right talent on board. It is a beautiful thing when you do and it is really, really problematic when you don't. So I'd rather invest the time, get a little couple interviews. I don't like the hostage negotiation strategy of, hey, I got a bunch of offers. You know, you need to get me one in the next week, especially if it's that language. That person doesn't match our value statement anyway. Certainly not anyone I won't work in for me, or for you, even though we just met. Completely agree with you. Before we get to that author stage, you're interviewing me for a role in your team.

15:23What are the questions you continue with the go back to if you're adding me to your sales team? And there are certain few which you always like to know and here I'm still I always get into track record And I do it a couple different ways I want it a little by the numbers tell me the story like if I was gonna tell you the sales for a story Which you told very quickly and probably better than I do I would lead with results because we're in a result Strip in business and that's not just sales. It's customer success. It's everything So I want to hear the track record where I then go I typically get into cultures You know, so if you know that I've worked at PTC Hyperion Oracle Salesforce Confluent, now Genesis and I was you and and I was interviewing I'd be like Culture, did you really prefer and why I've had you be shocked the range of answers that I've gotten to the culture question Range of ounces of you had it was really fun.

16:15We had Fridays off for three months There was always food in the office. I've heard very culture -related answers that had to do with amenities of the company. I've heard culture -related answers that if I took that to the other end of the spectrum, you know what that was one of the hardest places that I've had to work. There was the most disciplined structures that I had to work. I didn't like, you know, quite a few of the conversations, but I grew and it was amazing. You'll hear stories about bosses, you'll hear stories about philanthropy. But I really, for me, the reason I'm asking the question, because values matter to me, they matter every place that I've worked.

16:52And I think value alignment is an important thing. I'm kind of getting a little bit of value statement out of the culture piece. And then the last thing that I typically get to is what drives people. Why are you still working? Is that bad if it's money? If I said this, dude, I'm here to make money. I'm a comp machine and I want to make revenue for the company and comp for me. Yeah. Why? I really managed to be able to keep my family a great life. I want to get a bigger house. Obviously, I want to send my kids to great schools and want to have a great life with my wife. What I just got from you is it's actually not about money.

17:25It's money so you can deliver outcomes for your wife and your family and getting a bigger house that probably is for your family. I will always double -click on things. To the point where people get super annoyed is maybe a terrible, it's a terrible habit. But I ask why a lot? Because I think the nuance is in the why for people. I totally agree. So the twerch is five wise. One aspect that a lot of people do is the case studies. They love a case study. Do you do case studies with me? Are we going to have to do that as part of the process? I don't. I have folks on my team that do and like that. This is where I go to like being open to different parts of processes.

18:02There is a lot of value sometimes out of the case study. But for me, the case study gets to what is your mindset and your thought process. It gets to the what and how. I feel like I can get that out of talking to you for 45 minutes. You know what I always do. I say, huh, we're hiring the team around you to Larry. And we need more great people. Who are the two or three people that you'd bring with you on day one? Yes. It's a huge sign. And I would say that imperative grows the higher you go in your role in responsibility. So like, take Frank, right? Frank went from running a team to running a country.

18:37That imperative and your network, your brand is critical. You have to have it. And again, there's so many talented people. If you're competing on that basis, and by the way, it doesn't matter if the people that you're going to bring with you are terrible. The double click on, yeah, I can bring a team of people. It's like, well, tell me about those people. Who are they? What have they done? Like, you got to go unpack that. It doesn't help if you hire an average person that then brings people that aren't the best people for your company and your customers. Doesn't help at all. Totally agree, it's probably the worst thing.

19:09Well, this has gone incredibly well and you want to hire me in this process. What are some of your biggest lessons in terms of getting the offer done right, the comp setting, and how to get the right deal structure for the new sales edition? I think you got to do that early. I'll give you an example. We're in a hiring process right now for a super senior leader in our company. We have a certain constructure that we think is is aggressive. Some people are addicted to a different, a different comp structure. And the intersection of how valuable those people would be for us and what we would need to pay them doesn't make sense for us.

19:42Like that equation doesn't pencil for us. It's really, really challenging when you discover that after two months of interviewing. That's prop. I like to know that we can afford someone and get to a comp structure before like it's time to have a comp discussion. I think you need to do that sooner rather than later. I don't, It's not the first conversation. It's not the last conversation. And this is the unpacking of the interview process for me. You got to understand what matters. And by the way, what matters most around comp? Does your untargeted earnings matter more? Like are you a commission person?

20:14Does equity matter more? How do you think about the two? What are most people care about from your experience? At a leadership role, equity. At a normal role? Like, I see it role. I see role, like, give me my untargeted earnings, like, give me the ability to crush my accelerators. Have sales team expectations changed over the years? I just saw a tweet from Jason Lankin today that said in one of his portfolio companies, the top -performing sales rep just quit because she didn't like her VP sales. Next line, she made $100 ,000 last year. Have people got more demanding in what they want? Yes, but I will say the most important for me, the reason she left is not comp, because she left she didn't like her VP.

20:56Yeah, she meant $800 ,000, dude. And what price though? So this is where I think it has changed. And I will say this from from some of the early companies that I worked for, super coin operated. Give me my untrugged earnings, killer be killed mentality. You know, let's see how long you can make it. And if you don't make it then in six months you're gone. And it doesn't matter if you like your boss or not. That has changed the impetus on leadership these days and the impetus on what I think is like true servant leadership. I think that is driving more loyalty. I think those are for most people.

21:29I think that is a bigger driver than compensation. If that gets too out of whack, you're going to have a problem. You will get sideways if, hey, I love my boss, I love the company, I love our journey, I love our customers. And by the way, you're paying me 30 % of what I could be making somewhere else. Clearly, you're going to have a problem. If we're into small gaps, I believe leaders make a difference. Okay, so I'm, I'm, thank you. I would like to accept your offer, Larry, and excited to join. No one does onboarding well, like universally sucks. What's been your biggest lessons in scaling sales teams on how to do onboarding well?

22:04It's gotten harder, too, right? I mean, it insert COVID in the pandemic. We know everybody shut down what we all considered normal onboarding. It's gotten harder, and I will argue we will never rotate all the way back to the way it was. And I'm talking a little bit about, like, in -person versus digital or remote. My first training as I mentioned to you, Lily, I was exported. I'm an Arizona guy. I was exported to Indianapolis in the winter for six weeks. That was the way you trained. You did roll -based training and there was curriculums and structure and everything else. I think that is shifted certainly from the remote aspect and the in -person aspect that is completely shifted today.

22:44Along that journey, you're getting bite -sized pieces of the prioritized, what you need to know in order to be successful starts with basic things and then you're on your enablement journey that lasts a year. Do we spend any time in support? People a lot of times say supports an amazing place to start. When do we get in front of customers first? Do we listen to prior sales calls? Do we tag along with sales leaders? How do we think about ramping in that first 30 to 60 days? The support one's in. I haven't heard that. That's an interesting thought. I think you can get real perspective there. I'm gonna consider that stall line.

23:21Honestly, it is the most effective thing that I urge all founders for sales teams to. You hear the pains of customers. Do you speak about training empathy? It's probably the closest way to train empathy, just to listen to the customer's support. Yeah, that's a great tip. We like to pair up in teams. We do like the buddy system. We like the mentorship system. You're question our customers like day one. How many chances do you get to be new? You don't give many. Do you know why that you put them in front of a big customer and they're like, I don't really know the sales cycle here. I don't know in the next step on the contract.

23:56I'm not really sure how we close deals. You can't just put them in front of big customers on their own. How beautiful is that? Not beautiful at all if I'm paying $500 ,000 to a company and you put a wrap in front of me, who doesn't know the process. I wouldn't send you a loan as a new AE. I would send you with either your boss or someone else and the problem is the gift. Something has happened with a, you're talking about a good -sized customer, if 500 grand as the metric. You clearly should know a lot when you walk into that customer. So you aren't blind to what's going on. Like, I've been a Genesis for a year.

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24:31I still sometimes will be with customers. I got, I'm still learning. Like, I'm still new. Like, help me understand. I think it is a beautiful learning experience. Now, what's valuable for the customer in that? You got to bring something to the table. You got to do your homework and your background. You got to know your meeting. I'm not parking any of the discipline part of that meeting and the preparation part of that meeting. But if I could be new forever, I would do it. How quickly did you know if a new rap or a new sales size bad? I, you know, for me, that's based on the number of interactions you have with them.

25:02There's some warning signs early. Well, let's use your example. We're going into meet an important customer. I've given you all of the background data on the account. I've given you what they use of our products. I've given you their use cases. And if we're in prep for this meeting, and you haven't been through that, or you don't have a command of that information, Red Flag, right off the bat. If you're in that meeting, and you aren't accurately representing the story of Genesis, and if you don't know about our company, it's kind of Red Flag. And then by the way, just the customer interaction pieces, is you can kind of draw conclusions on how people interact in those situations.

25:43So how soon do I know that they're bad? I would say it's the combination of several red flags. You got a really double click and it goes back to our hiring conversation. And I've made a lot of hiring mistakes. Normally, there is something that ends up showing up that when I was in the interview process, assuming I was perfectly diligent, which I never am. There's always something, it's like, you know, like my gut was a little bit on. Like my god, I hear that a lot with people and my advocacy is trust your god. Normally those things will show up later and without fault, the hiring mistakes that I've made end up showing up in our example right now that were things that I didn't feel 100 % comfortable with and for whatever reason at that time, I gave a pass on right, didn't do enough homework on right, didn't poke on enough.

26:31You got to be able to unpack it. You got to be able to embrace that mistake and you got to make sure that you're doing everything you can and not do it again. So bad is the sum of a lot of red flags and a lack of improvement with coaching. Do you think that was the first 30 days? Oh, yeah. So first 30 days, and you just said that about the gut, and I'm totally with you. Max Levchin from a firm said on the show, when there's doubt, there's no doubt. Do you agree? And should you just move really fast in those first 30 days, say, Larry, I want to get ahead of this, clearly not working. Sorry. What do you go?

27:01It takes time. It's a complex sale. It's an enterprise sale cycle. that young, you know, give them a bit of time. I was saying nature of the flag. Like, what is the flag? What's the foul? And I think he really got unpacked. This goes back to hiring mistakes, cost a lot of money and a lot of time. I think you need to have pretty can of conversations with people. This goes into the whole post call recap and feedback and coaching. If you are doing that coaching, I think you're gonna be in a different bucket. But let's assume for a minute, you go in, we have a terrible sales call. I'm like, oh my god, Harry, like, that was a mess, which I would never say.

27:38But I would normally start off with, Harry, how do you think that went? If it was terrible and you thought it went great, then I'd throw another flag. Like, it really be curious what you thought was great. So I think you really need to unpack that. So it depends on the nature of the flag. If it's a coaching item and a skills -related item, and it's not improving, like, I feel as an employer you have a responsibility to employees. You really do. It's hard on board. You mention it. It's hard to onboard. And I would break it into mental errors and physical errors. I played sports growing up. So my coach has always said that you can make all the physical errors.

28:09You cannot make mental errors. What's the difference in sales? Not a lot. This goes back to I I think there are things that there are flags that would be real issues if in this goes to interpersonal skills. That is something you should be sniffing out of any of your process. Preparation and diligence. Those are things that are they're kind of non -negotiables for the job that we've chosen to do. So I think you need to be candid with your communication. We have a responsibility as leaders to communicate and coach. If that coaching is not working, then I think you need to move quickly. You're just a laying -in outcome that you have already pretty much decided on.

28:45Here's what also happens. By the time the leader knows it, everyone else on the team knows it. They know it before you do. Do you ever keep someone you don't like? I'm an ambassador to my sins. You know, I'm a metaphor and yesterday, enterprise -south business. and I was talking about one of the sales people. And he said, total dick. But I mean, he brought in two and a half million dollars in revenue last year. So, you know, I can put up with it. Do I ever hire people that I don't like? Where I'm like, oh my God, I just don't like that person. They're offensive, they're abrasive. No, I just don't even hire them.

29:16If they're that way to me, they're gonna be that way with their customers. Well, no, they're not. They can be arrogant and douchey, especially in sales. Like, you can be arrogant, douchey, but you put me in front of a client. I'm gonna charm the shit out of them. I'm gonna close them at the end of the contract. I'm gonna be your number one rap And I'm the best so I deserve the most money and everyone else. Yeah, not as good as me Well, Harry, I would I would tell you there's probably five of you You just aren't self -aware enough to know that by the way, this is not actually me

29:48Everyone is like what a dead Legitimate that would be pretty much what I would say there are so many talented people out there, the separation in the highest echelon, like there are more and more in my opinion, wildly talented people out there. I think it's all about building confidence in the early days with sales, teams with sales. People, do you think that you should go for the logos? Or do you think that you should go for just quantity? Just get as many clients or go for that stellar logo. I think it depends on where you are as a business, right? Early stage, you're zeroes 10 million an hour.

30:29And I think you got to go get category killer brands. Why in the early stage, you went for category killer brands? References. If you can be successful with the category killers, and they didn't become category killers, because they're easy to work with. And if you can do it with the best, and I have a huge caveat after I finished the sentence, if you can do it with the best to heck of a place to start. A caveat is closing the deal is like the easy part. You have to be successful. Like for them to be referenceable, they have to be successful. You know, Coca -Cola is not going to go on record and say, we just closed an amazing deal with Harry.

31:06And we have no idea whether it's going to be successful. It's not going to happen. They're probably going to be a reference once they're successful. So for me, the entire orientation of an organization in the early, early stages. I'm talking like Saba 100. I think needs to be figure out the industries and the verticals you could be successful in, go get brand names, category killers, and rotate hard on customer success. If you can't get customer success, but you're dead in the water anyway. Okay, so I had Chris Dagnan on the show this the R .O .S. No Flake. And he was like, uh, why do we still have CS?

31:40We should have professional services and then there's like support but like CS not a fine. I heard Sluitman say the same thing and you should really go like unpack the titles versus the rules because that matters. And by the way, they're in a pure consumption model business which is very different than a booking. So it's a bookings versus revenue kind of business or hybrid businesses. Snowflake success is a hundred percent built on customers being successful in usage. Now, if you're hiring a bunch of salespeople, and then you're going to ask your salespeople, hey, I just want you to go make sure they're successful.

32:17They're going to be like, hold on, and I'm in Snowflake land. I need to find more use cases. I need to find more applications to move onto Snowflake's platform. That's selling. Who is actually managing the technical architecture, the foundations of that customer being successful? You kind of need to go unpack titles versus roles. And some of the companies that say, we don't need customer success. has, someone is playing that role. You can call them whatever you want. You can put them in finance for all I care. But someone is responsible for the correct architecture, aligned to the right use case, and then someone is responsible for growing and expanding that business.

32:56How do you think about the interplay between CS and sales? I had Dave Kellogg on the show. And he said, you never want your farmer going against someone else's hunter, which I always remember as a statement of the your farmer is your CS rap going against someone else's hunter, which is someone else's trained killer, a who's ready to take your customer. How do you think about the interplay between the sales and CS and not having your farmer versus someone's hunter? For me, that's just segmentation strategy. That's the difference between how am I going up against competition based on the accounts that are in their patch, And do we carve out hunter farmer patches?

33:34You know, this could be a whole other five hour block as for you and I. But that's a segmentation question. Let's say we had A .E.'s reps, individual contributors, that just had customers. Okay, so a varying size is right, but they're just customers. There's no new customers or new logos in their patch. Their job is quote unquote farming. I actually kind of don't think that farming is a thing in the cloud world. It's just not. I mean, you're responsible for finding new use cases across the entire bag that you have to sell. So you're always hunting and farming. You have to have interlock, stacked hands, between CS and sales.

34:14I'll take my team that's organized that way, against anyone else's all day. Chris Dagnans? I don't know Chris, but yeah. That'll be a fun show. One thing I want to discuss, you mentioned that use case is there. I'm such a fan of vertical sales playbooks. You've been a master of vertical sales playbooks. I think it's so important to mean something to a specific set of customers. Your messaging is tighter. Everything is better in a vertical sales world in my mind, really. But so many founders like, it's too expensive. It's too expensive to build that. I'm too early and it's too expensive. How do you answer that question?

34:45If I rewind to when we started doing this at Salesforce, it was really born out of customer requirements. You know, we got feedback that we weren't showing up understanding the customer and it really you said it right There's very few things worse than that. So when we started that business We were just very focused on enablement enablement and organizational alignment and there's depths that you can go when you think about Verticals some companies start with industry. So building out industry teams that can come in and have that conversation, but your AES are still aligned. You know, you may have an A that calls in healthcare in the morning, financial services in the afternoon and is going to dinner, you know, with a three -letter agency at night.

35:29Content's created for them. They can kind of get a couple steps down the road. Do you think that's really as effective as someone who just lives and breathes aviation? Yes. Hospitality. And it's expensive. Does it need to be though? You hire a junior a rapper and you say, Hey, you're in charge of hospitality, which entails large hotel chains around the world. Become a fricking nerd on it and go sell. Why does it have to be expensive in that way? That's a great question. When that AE goes to their SE or SE, the technical person on their team and says, I need to come in and show an airplane demo and I'm sticking with the metaphor.

36:08and that that S .E. is like, well, kind of don't, like we've got a really generic one, like what do you want? Then there's a disconnect at the tonical things. Then you're bringing in an A .E. that is super smart, super knowledgeable, and the S .E. isn't. So clearly a disconnect. And then by the way, for our earlier conversation, you're gonna bring in a customer support person, probably professional services, and you're gonna bring them in early in the sales campaign, the customer's gonna go, so how many aviation implementations have you done? Tell me what you know about the industry, and that person's going to be light.

36:39So my point is to truly verticalize and to truly deliver value for customers, it can't just be the eight. It has to be every single person that touches the account. And then you end up in these sub -verticals. Financial services is a lot of things. The reason I think that it gets expensive, and again, you can like be on this journey where you don't have to eat all this cost upfront and you can try things and feel quickly, if you're truly going to deliver the benefit, that what I think is the benefit of a verticalized sales team, it's every person that touches the customer. Can we do one at a time?

37:12Do we need to do three at a time? Yes, and no. I mean, this is another cost implication. This is another prioritization implication. This is like, how much risk do you want to take on? We started with financial services as Salesforce. And it became so successful, they actually developed a product for financial services. That became more impetus. And now the industry products team at Salesforce is just crushing it because they've actually went out and built products specific to the industry. If I was advising you and you're thinking of building out a vertical, I would pick where you think the biggest bang for your dollars and I'd try.

37:45I wouldn't go to three. To what extent is one customer enough to bet on a vertical? And what I mean by that is I quite often meet founders and they're like, well, we got a chase. We feel that actually the social validity of getting chase means we'll be able to get X, Y and Z bank also. Do you really see it like, oh, you got one so you can get another and another? Do the dominoes for when you have a big name or not? Don't say it depends. I think you pick banks, which are super difficult as it is, but I would not make that step. I would not think that just because you got one that you're going to get the rest because by the way, you could have gotten it by accident.

38:25I didn't mean to be abrasive about it, but there's a lot of you can win a customer, I would be more focused on what is the use case, what is the value statement? How pervasive do we think that value statement could be or that problem statement is for customers? I think you got to look at a lot of variables to, and that all rolls into how we should be thinking about tam or, you know, our total available market, just to say that you got one, I don't know, like you kind of need to make a line. What size customer does it make sense to have a full life cycle like a CSM, the full management of the accounts?

39:00The biggest problem I see in SAS today is I see people doing enterprise teams with 10K ACVs. There's a big operational cost implication to doing that. There's how many accounts is an AE going to be covering? There's what's the ratio of accounts for customer support and customer success? there's you should consider appropriate ratios for solution, consult and solution engineering. So you can work into this process. I think when you get down into the maybe your question of, what size customer do I have? One AE covering it that I have one SE that that's all they do that I have one customer success person that's all they do.

39:37Man, it's got to be a pretty big customer. Is that 100K? Well, it depends on your business. If I thought about Genesis, you'd probably need to be close to a nine digit customer. It's tough to get on our top ten list, which we're blasting grateful for. If I was starting a business and that rotation made sense for customer success and you're going to place your bets there, it's always a tough trade -off. How do you think of scale across teams? Never perfect. How do you think about discounting? I want to get some logos. I'm a new hire. I hate it. So if I'm on your team and I do discounting, how do you feel?

40:11Well, discounting is kind of a part of life. I think there's appropriate discounting based on scale. What's appropriate and what scale? Here's the thing, if you're playing and you got to push yourself in the customer shoes on this too. Let's say you're a small company and you're going into Chase, you're kind of an unproven company. They're taking a flyer on you. They love you, they trust you. You're on the hook for this thing to be successful. You're going to pay a pretty price at Chase to win that business. It's pretty risky. Pay any point in your value proposition to them, but you're an unproven quantity.

40:44I think the higher just general industry practice, not being a victim here, but just the way things have been in enterprise technology, there's a linear correlation between volume for the size of the investment and the discount and that varies by whatever you're selling or if you're in the experience orchestration business or if you're in the supply chain business or ERP, companies are pretty adapted buying these days. Like this company's have gotten really good at buying stuff. So they're doing their compares gardener advises on pricing. There's plenty of places you can go do benchmarking The difference for me when someone asks for a discount if it's my team that's asking me for a discount I want to see the value proposition.

41:25I want to see the business case if we don't have a business case If we are having articulated when they're gonna get their money back What those outcomes look like if we haven't done a good job on value and we're just looking for a discount That's the stuff right, and I'm not a fan of that. There's not means we haven't done our jobs Larry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm on your team. And I know I said that the deal will come in this quarter, but it just slipped to next quarter. I'm sorry, slipped to next quarter. How do you respond to me as the sales leader? No problem. Are you? Are you the sales leader or AE?

41:59Who are you? I'm an AE, you're the sales leader. Help me understand, Harry, like what happened? This was a committed deal, Harry, like what happened? I know, honestly, they just, they just didn't have it as a priority this quarter. And so they just said, hey, you know, we're going to punt it tonight. It's cooler. When did it get deprioritized? I went, they went to, they went cold on me and they just go about to me yesterday. Okay. Who are you working with over there? Who's your highest level contact at the account? I didn't fucking know because it's a hypothetical situation. You know, we've got to break.

42:33Could be anyone in the company. I am a huge fan of people doing what they say they're going to do. I put an incredible premium on it. Do you think you're good at sales forecasting? Yes. Why? That how how are you so good at sales forecast and that teach me? Ultimately, you have to balance risk with commitment. Pipeline is everything. So the more the more appats you have, the more likely you're going to get a hit, it's the same thing in sales. And forecasting accurately is in the job that we do a critical part of your brand. If you can't forecast accurately. For me, it's one of a couple of things.

43:07Either you don't truly understand your business. You aren't truly doing the amount of diligence with customers and opportunities. You don't have enough opportunities to be able to balance out some of the riskier things with some of the things that look better. And we might not even be asking the right questions, and we're likely not talking to the right people. Let me say all of that, and it's really hard to do well. I've missed months, I've missed quarters, I've missed quarters back to back. It's a hard thing to do, but there is a real premium in the world that I've chosen to play in on forecasting accurately.

43:42In particular, I kind of own the number myself and my peer in the CSI don't the number for the company. How we think about investment and strategic priorities kind of depends on us doing what we say we're to do. My rollup is based upon my directs doing what they say they're going to do. That's dependent upon theirs, right? So doing what they say they're going to do, which is dependent upon their directs and dependent on all the A's. And managing that with agility and accuracy is very difficult. And I think it's incredibly important. Everyone says today is so hard in sales, so hard in sales, all budgets of centralized back to CFOs.

44:15People aren't spending like they used to, you know, Larry, they're not. They're like, yeah, that's truly like an bullshit. The latter, there isn't a company out there today that doesn't have Tam data that maybe there are, but like in the companies that are really playing the game today that are winning, they know the Tam data, they have, there's so much information about accounts, there's so much information on PTB, like propensity to buy. That information is kind of the table stakes. When AE start, they're kind of like given all of this information, like here's your territory, here's the opportunity inside of your territory.

44:49Now, you could be in an industry that gets hurt macroeconomically. A perfect example. The travel and transportation industry during COVID, tough spot. That's a tough putt. You need to have a little humility with the narrative and a heavy dose of empathy that, listen, some of these are hard. If you've given a patches of customers that are upset and you're working through a bunch of issues, I think you need to have some empathy with that situation and understand that. But I would really push back on a leader in an AE that barring force measure some macroeconomic pandemic or a financial crisis if you're selling to the banks.

45:31I would really push back at any time today of someone saying, you know, people just aren't spending the way they used to. So I'm not able to sell anything. That's a mindset thing too, by the way. Have you ever had bad culture in one of your sales teams and why did that happen? What did you do wrong? The biggest lesson that I would say that I learned early in my career was I didn't even use the word then. The word to me long time ago was like a soft word was empathy. I completely lacked empathy. It would be the narrative of an A .E. in the financial crisis who only called on B .A. and Chase came to you and said, hey, like it's really tough sledding and these opportunities are going to push for a quarter.

46:08And if you just said, I don't care. Go figure it out. Like there was a point in my career where that was that was okay. There was a point in my in my learning as a leader where that was how I was wanted. And it was uneducated. It was very difficult to maintain loyalty. And I think you learned you learned some very expensive lessons that normally show up through attrition. When quality people start leaving, excuse back to our first conversation, when quality people started leaving is comp and issue. Yeah, I mean comp is likely always an issue. I don't think comp is always the issue and I'm prioritizing the issues and it comes down to your leader and I early in my career was not a great not that I'm great now I'm on the journey just like the rest of us that are in this in this role I was pretty poor.

46:54Well that one or two moments where you really thought you improved as a leader like the flow fell from beneath you and you improved in that way. Yeah, so this goes back to our our deal conversation and probably and it's very hard for me to do. Like I would say that I've tried to work my DNA to respond to things a little more masterfully than than I used to but generally when things would come to me as a problem I would respond with finger pointing somebody's doing something wrong very little accountability for myself in that equation and it was really how I responded to things. I learned a lot.

47:30I talked about kind of my career journey. Godfrey Sullivan was the CEO at Iperian. And I learned a ton from Godfrey, the empathy score with Godfrey and customers I learned a lot from. I'll never forget I was a meeting. I'll leave the account name out of the picture. But it was a, we were not doing well with this account. Super senior level, C -suite meeting. The way he handled that situation. Remarkable. What did he do to have? Just listen. Listen. I know you've used in that word a lot. He listened, he was prepared. He showed incredible empathy. He knew the details of what was going on. And he had a plan.

48:07You can tell when someone's genuinely listening or when someone is sitting there with a prepared answer, hoping that you ask the right question. That was a great example for me as a leader. I was blessed to have the same boss for a period of time when I came into Oracle all the way into Salesforce who had a remarkable ability to hear things that weren't going the way the teams anticipated and you'd leave that meeting and like we got this, no problem, really comes with listening and empathy. Those are probably my two biggest career journeys, I think, personally and professionally. I could talk to you all day.

48:40I am cognizant that you do also have a job. Listen, I want to do a quick fight. So I say a short statement, you give me your immediate thoughts. Does that sound okay? Yeah, careful what you asked for, but yes. What would you most like to change about the world of sales? I think of value creation, the ability for to universally for teams to be able to convey value to customers. I think that pretty dramatically changes things. I think that changes the optics of selling completely. It's not a sales game then. Tell me, is outbound dead in 2024? No, no, no, no, not at all. Outbound done well. What an instrument, what an incredible instrument.

49:16So no. Do you not worry that with AI, the outbound supply will be infinite in the way that everyone will be able to create so many personalized emails, messages. There's going to be automation gains from AI, so efficiency gains that were largely by the way things people didn't want to do anyway. They hated doing anyway. And then there's going to be augmentation benefits from AI. So helping people do their jobs better. The way I see this going, that's going to be like 3070. I think 70 % of the benefit of AI is going to be for people to do their jobs better. So no, I don't think Alban is better.

49:49I think or anything Alban is gone. I think AI will help enable the right outbound teams to do it better. What's the else strategy? Do you think is dead? That was prominent and now it's like, nah, we don't do that anymore. You know, fab selling is pretty dead. FAB. Do you remember this one? Feature, Vantage Benefit. This is a big deal. This is actually how I learned. This is next that he lay, Lully, that was the training. So you were trained feature advantage benefit. That was how we learned. So I think that one is dad and gone. It goes back to, you know, there's so many value selling frameworks now.

50:23I grew up it in my tech job at PTC, which was medic at the time or med pick. So there's an unlimited choice of them. But I think I'm pretty sure fab selling nobody is writing a book on fab selling these days. What are the most common ways that fast scaling sales teams break? Prioritization for me is the most common. Then I would think generally speaking it's waiting even though you're fast scaling What are the things that you're waiting for something to be different on before you go and try that could create a different outcome? I think waiting is it is just a really dangerous way to go. I'm a founder considering a vertical sales playbook approach What's your number one piece of advice for me focus?

51:04pick your spot on where you're going to go to the vertical on the playbook work outcomes backward. Final one, what recent company sales strategy have you been most impressed by? None. I'm not a sales strat ironically given the job that I have. I'm not a sales strategy like entrepreneur or wizard. So I probably don't see as many or enough in the cloud world you have to be in a land and expand and retain sales strategy. And that's not just sales, it's customer life cycle. If you're not in that business, I think you're gonna lose. Listen Larry, I can clearly speak to you all day. I can't thank you enough for doing this and this has been so much fun.

51:48Man, it's been a blast. It's great to meet you. Thank you for everything you're doing. I just love shows like this. For me, I started these vertical shows because I wanted really actionable takeaways for founders to learn from and implement in their businesses today. Larry was incredible there and if you want to watch the full episode you can see it on YouTube by searching for 20VC That's 2 -0 VC, but before we leave you today Have you ever wondered why spending company money is so broken? Employees want to follow the process, but they're confused and frustrated It takes forever to get anything approved It's so tedious to get anything paid and folks in procurement finance and other stakeholders are just as frustrated too Doplicate spend, unauthorized contracts, surprise vendors, late invoices, missing receipts and documentation.

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From the publisher

Larry Shurtz is the Chief Sales Officer at Genesys where he oversees the company’s global go-to-market strategies, including commercial activities, field sales and partner ecosystem operations. Larry has nearly three decades of experience in the software industry, from leading Confluent to delivering more than 60% revenue growth and doubling customer count as Chief Revenue Officer, to scaling a 1,300-person team at Salesforce to $2.1 billion in revenue.

In Today’s Episode with Larry Shurtz We Discuss:

  1. From Robotics Student to $2.1BN Sales Leader at Salesforce

  • How did Larry lead 1300 people to $2.1 billion revenue at Salesforce? What were his takeaways?

  • What did Larry learn about building vertical sales playbooks at Salesforce?

  • Which framework did Larry learn at Salesforce that he still uses at Genesys?

  1. Mastering Sales Leadership

  • What are the biggest mistakes sales leaders make on prioritization today?

  • What are Larry’s “3 Rs” to master prioritization?

  • What does Larry think are the most common reasons fast-scaling teams break in sales?

  • Has Larry ever caused bad culture in a sales team? What did he learn from the experience?

  • Does Larry think sales is more art or science? How does Larry blend the two?

  1. Building the Best Sales Team

  • How does Larry structure the hiring process for a new sales hire?

  • How big should your recruitment team be? 

  • What are Larry’s most commonly asked questions when interviewing?

  • What were Larry’s biggest hiring mistakes? What did he learn from them?

  • How does Larry structure the comp? How does he get it right? What do most new hires care about today?

  1. The Onboarding: The Dos & Don’ts

  • How does Larry structure the onboarding process?

  • Why does Larry onboard new hires with big customers? What is the buddy system?

  • How does Larry tell if a new hire is bad? What are the biggest red flags to look out for?

  • What does Larry mean when he says “You can make all the physical errors, you cannot make mental errors?”

  • Does Larry agree with Max Levchin @ Affirm that “When there’s doubt, there’s no doubt?”

More from The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch

All 521 episodes
20Sales: How to Build Vertical Sales Teams, Why No Customer Success is BS and Everyone Needs it, How to Hire, Train and Retain the First Reps and Lessons Scaling to $2.1BN Revenue and 1,300 People with Larry Schurtz, CRO @ GenesysThe Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch · 56 min
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