20Sales: The Biggest Sales Lessons Scaling Brex to $400M ARR, Why Startups are Doing Outbound Wrong and How to Fix It & Why Demand Gen is the Bottleneck for all Startups and How to Solve it with Sam Blond, Former CRO @ Brex

28:42It's going to be different for every company. But you want to be transparent about here are the things that are important over the first 30 days. Here are the sort of like milestones that we would like you to achieve in your first 30 days. Many of them are going to be objective. Some of them are going to be subjective and just, you know, if you're as a founder watching them, uh, cell is this person, uh, uh, picking this up quickly or not, it's slightly subjective. And then as we mature, there are three things that I look for in terms of measuring the success of a sales hire. This is true for the first hire and this is true for the 10th hire the 100th hire.

29:20The first is performance. Super objective. Sales, you know, it's it's a average revenue is this person generated where do they start breaking on the meterboard. The next two require no skill and are more subjective. The first is effort. Is this person working hard setting the bar for what hard work looks like and then the third one is additive. Is this person reflecting positively on their peers? Are they coming into the office motivated with a smile on their face? Positive about the environment. You know, how do they handle change? Those sorts of things. And if number one doesn't exist, meaning if the performance isn't there, you sort of default to, okay, what is the effort in the attitude like and if either are lacking this is either like a zero time or one time conversation with the person around for once.

30:15Sometimes it takes quite a lot of time to ramp especially in an enterprise sale. The numbers won't be there early on. It's a little bit hard to tell and if you're a founder and CEO that you've got other ships do rather than just monitor Sarah's effort levels which are pretty subjective other than just kind of looking across the room. So my question to you is how do you He measures success by the sales cycles of super long and is effort really that easy to tell? I grew up in a world where people were in the office five days a week and yes it was easy to tell who was working hard and who wasn't.

30:50You know, especially in sales, one there's the like, when are they getting in and when are they leaving. And then there's also the, gosh this person, I hear them on the phone all the time. And you can just sort of like see and hear the activity levels, especially in sales. You know, some folks they are remote and that is a new challenge. I think Harry though, if you make the right hires, there are metrics that you should start seeing improve almost immediately, regardless of how long the sales cycles are. Some of those metrics will be things like the number of opportunities that we are working.

31:28Harry started two weeks ago. Harry, he immediately started pounding the phones. He came up with this like really creative outbound campaign. And we're like, I'm joining calls with Harry with Square. We got a demo with Square today, the CFO, that Harry broke into the account. And now I'm the founder CEO. This is an important call that I'm joining like high five to Harry for breaking into this account. Square's now in the pipeline. This is a real call. And so even if your your cycle times are long there are sort of obvious metrics that should be improving It's sort of easy one is around opportunities and pipeline that you are tracking How long does it taste now if you've got someone shit?

32:12Like I think it's like a week. I think people are way too nice I know in a week if someone's good or not. It's funny The number that was coming to mind for me It almost doesn't matter how long the cycle is with these early ires in particular I think 30 days and here you're probably closer to right with your week, you know, many folks say a quarter, many folks say nine days. That seems way too long for me. If you hired me, I'd show up on day one with like segmented customer lists, the buyers in each. I would be ready on day one to email them, ready to go with my fucking email. I would have already done camver marketing collateral that I'd done in prep for the day ones.

32:53You know on day one that that's good. You only get one chance to make a first impression. It generally doesn't get better, which I think sort of piggybacks off of your Commentary and if you're having performance expectation Conversations really early on I think that is a bit of a red flag Sam was your biggest hiring mistakes ever a maze mistakes. My mother always tells me I was one Haha! When you go there as very eye expectations, because you're crushing it. Well, I think my biggest hiring mistakes were pretending that concerns that I had in the interview at hiring process didn't really exist.

33:39And sales in particular, you know, it is performance -based. But it's also like the team dynamic is so important, like this concept of building a winning culture and having people that are positive influences on their peers. You cannot have folks that sort of sit around and complain about the product or complain about marketing or whatever the like complaint of the day is because it rubs off on their appears and before you know it, you have just like an unhappy sales floor where one person is negatively impacting the broader team. And I have probably rehired or hired people where you know this concern had been flagged where it's like you know they hit quota but there there is some serious baggage that comes along with this person it's like oh they We need to hire 10 people.

34:35Come on, like join. And so, you know, that's one example, but I think it's pretending things that were concerns in the interview process didn't really exist because like either they were coming from this place or be sort of blinded, and then those things oftentimes come to the end of the end and bite me. We've got ourselves team. They're doing okay, but wait, they're not actually doing okay. There's something that's not working. How do most founders diagnose bottlenecks in gross? And how do you advise the right way to diagnose bottlenecks in gross? Now we have the team in place. You know, I did some consulting between Zinefitz and Brex, and I talk with founders as part of my prior role at Founders Bond regularly.

35:23And the conversation almost universally goes something like this. Harry, we're sitting here in Laithmarch. let's just pretend the quarter ended and we missed our revenue target. And when I ask why did we miss our revenue target? Almost universally the answer is something like we had a couple big deals that had those big deals just closed we would have hit our plan. And you know, unfortunately they pushed and we missed. But like, you know, I'm sort of diagnosing our problem with we didn't close company A and company B that were in the pipeline. And the reality is that I would say for four out of five startups, maybe more, when they are effectively diagnosing the problem or the bottleneck to growing faster ads is conversion rates.

36:11And for almost all startups, the bottleneck to growing faster is actually around demand gen opportunity creation. And if you think about just sort of simple version of this, if everything else remains constant, and you are able to 2x the number of opportunities that you are creating, you have effectively just doubled your sales, and doing the same thing on conversion rates is much more difficult to do. Meaning, you know, two X -ing conversion rates is far more difficult than focusing on generating more demand or focusing on opportunity creation. Why, I'm pushing back in a respectful way, using carve out a much more structured sales process, be more involved as a founder in that sales process.

37:05I think actually, if you want high quality, great leads. They're hard to come by, like two X -ing that. I don't know if that's easier than increasing conversion. And I'd rather increase conversion because then we're not gonna, once the lead is not converted, even harder to get them back a second time. So I'd rather increase conversion than just burn more leads. What I find is the environment that exists for most tech startups is what I would describe as lead or environment where you look at the calendars of the salespeople. Harry, you just hired two salespeople. where this phase of the company where it's now you and two other sales people and I pull up the calendars of your two sales people and they are spending an average of one hour a day customer facing.

37:55This is whether it be new demos that they are taking or existing pipeline where they're following up with a customer and they are clinging on to any possible opportunity that exists in the pipeline and their salespeople. So they're sort of waiting for more opportunities to come in because their focus is on closing the deals. And if we don't have anybody in marketing and I'm a founder, I've got all this other stuff going on. If I'm spending one hour a day customer facing as a salesperson, I'm clinging on to the limited number of deals that I do have. That creates an environment where I am and incentivize almost Harry to tell you as the founder, and this deal actually has a good chance of closing, even though it doesn't.

38:42Because I've got to tell you I have some form of pipeline, I can't tell you we're going to close nothing this month. But if I had more opportunities, if my calendar was more full of demos, we would be closing more revenue. And I just believe that demand masks a lot of other potential problems, almost all startups. The bottleneck to growing faster is demand. We are constrained by the number of opportunities that we are creating. We are misdiagnosing this as a conversion rate problem. And our resources and our focus are being mapped to where we are misdiagnosing the bottleneck, which is the middle of the funnel.

39:23We have more sales people than we do. People focused on opportunity creation. Our focus is on the deals that are in the middle of the funnel with all of this resourcing and attention. Should be on generating new demand because that is the bottleneck drawing master. You've sold quite a horizontal products in the past in terms of to a broad customer base of industries, not just, I don't know, the also industry or the whatever industry we want to focus on. I think it's like packaging is one of the biggest problems getting into resonate with customers, but it collies sales playbooks. I find so often people try and be everything to everyone and then it doesn't hit with anyone.

40:00That's one of the biggest problems I find. It's interesting the thing that really differentiated Rex in the early days was the underwriting model where we used the cash balance to issue credit versus a personal guarantee from a founder based off of their personal credit, which is the way that all of the credit card companies did before Brex. We actually weren't the first to do that. Divi, who was a competitor at Brex, they started before Brex and they used the same underwriting model. But Divi sort of approached the market as we were going to be a corporate card for any type of business in Brex launched as the first corporate card for Starbucks.

40:41So we were really explicit it in our branding around what we were, we were a corporate card and who we were for. We were the first corporate card for startups. And because of that, we gained really meaningful market share in this vertical of technology, the segment of startups because of the branding association and the focus that we had. We took the innovator's dilemma approach, which was we went after a small segment of the market, very differentiated product, gained huge market share and expanded from there. And so, at least in that example, it was really effective. So I totally agree, and I remember that so well.

41:23It was a wildfire when it was bluntly so proliferated among the startup class, especially NYC as well. It had this unique channel acquisition as well, which I think is so important. And with more specialization, you get higher conversion rates in channels because you're more targeted messaging wise. So like I think that's really important. You mentioned about kind of generation. Raps expect things to be handed to them. Marketing and not geniuses, not in a disrespectful way, but they're not magic. Who is responsible for lead generation? And how do you think about that? Well, certainly in the early days, and I would argue as companies progress as well.

42:03You know, if you only have two AEs, Those AES have to be responsible for generating some of their out -of -the -me. That often takes form of outbound, but they can come up with clever ways to generate demand outside of the outbound. But salespeople should absolutely be responsible for controlling their own destiny in a way, generating their out -of -demand, that often manifests through outbound. I think this is true on day one. This should be true on day 1000. I'll tell you a quick story about Brex, where I think it really illustrates the importance of this point. When we were a relatively mature startup, so let's call it $50 to $100 million of annualized revenue.

42:44One of the things that we noticed was that the AEs were sourcing far more of their own revenue than their SDR counterparts. Even though they were full cycle, they were also closing this revenue. So you have an STR who is spending 100 % of their time on outbound and an AE who is spending let's call it 50 % of their time on the on outbound and the AE is sourcing more closed revenue. It shouldn't be that way, are you right? But it was. And the reason behind that is because AE's had their opportunities converted at higher rates and the opportunities that they were generating generated more revenue.

43:25And it's because AES had this intuition around what a quality opportunity looked like, which companies would spend more on their card. And so they were sourcing higher quality, higher revenue generating opportunities than their SDR counterparts were. Now, of course, we took this information. We made a bunch of changes. These are took away the ability of the SDRs to decide which accounts to go after. We said, these are the accounts that you should go after. These are the people you should reach out to in these accounts because we know conversion rates by persona. We also changed the model by which SDRs were compensated.

44:04They were originally compensated on opportunity creation. We moved It's revenue. Eventually, SDRs began sourcing more revenue than their AE counterparts. Now, the AE counterparts, they didn't change. They were still sourcing the same amount of revenue. But SDRs caught up. And we get none of these insights. We drive none of these changes if we don't have AE's sourcing their own revenue. Such as one example of why I think it's important, but ultimately, I think that, you know, So it's a missed opportunity to not have a ease like they're thinking about ROI on A E time. Number one is closing revenue.

44:44There's no higher ROI than an 80 spending their time closing deals. Number two, sourcing additional revenue. And so if they aren't spending 100 % of their time, let's call it 45 hours a week closing deals. Whatever that excess time is going towards, it is less ROI positive than sourcing their own deals. So I think they should be doing so. Are we entering a world where SDRs are like, bit old school, isn't it? Bit of cold outbound. That sounds nice. In a world of content, short form video, creating audiences, creating community. They're really people are sold before they even enter sales processes now.

45:24I think there's a gardener thing that says, like, 88 % know that they're going to buy when they enter a sales process. I'm butchering the number, but it's a high number. Like, the old SDR Sam, I like your post about, you know, HR integrations. We're a great provider. Is that not gone and we're moved to a world of content now? It's the right question. I love Albount. I love sales Albount. What you're describing Harry is a form of Albount that I think is not effective. Let's approach it like this. what I see most, say, early sales reps, SDR teams startups. What I see most folks doing is they purchase, you know, CRM, they purchase Zoom info to get contact information.

46:12They purchase outreach to have email sequencing and then they write like a version of the copy that pitches their product a little bit and then they drop the universe into seven email sequence outbound, cold email. And Harry, these are going like, we're a 10 -verson startup. Nobody knows who we are. Harry, you are a 22 -year -old SDR that just started at our 10 -verson startup. Nobody knows who you are. So you're sitting in email to let's use your example that the VP of HR at Brex 22 year old SDR 10 versus startup It's the 12th email that they have received today trying to pitch them on a payroll or whatever product They're pitching them on and it goes right into the trash most startups are doing outbound raw I think the way that startups should be approaching this first is on who you are targeting and then how you target them.

47:13So who you are targeting, think about the universe in terms of concentric circles. You wanna start with the sort of like closest concentric circle to your business. So here we're still this 10 -verson startup, okay? You, Harry, in Europe, you're the founder, you have a personal network that is a bunch of other founders. So we're gonna start going after companies that are in your personal network. We've also raised a seed round from a number of different investors. We're going to leverage the networks of our investors. We've got 10 employees. Our engineer, they were at three companies before they joined our company.

47:56They've got a bunch of connections that they can reach out to at other early stage startups. Let's rev leverage their personal networks. Okay, now we're starting to acquire some customers. Some of these customers are really happy. How can we leverage these customers to generate additional customers? Hey, Harry, your BP of HR at this company, do you know anybody else who could leverage our product to realize some of the same value that you are realizing? Because the HR community is sort of tight -knit. So I just think the way that we are doing outbounder who we are targeting is wrong. Think about the world in terms of concentric circles and closeness to the business.

48:40At BRECS we started with personal networks. We moved to investor networks. We moved to YC companies. We moved to former YC companies. We then put billboards up all over San Francisco. And we targeted companies that were headquartered in downtown San Francisco that would walk past our billboards. these concentric circles just keep getting further and further out. Until you get to the point where you have such a brand that you can email the VP of HR, you are no longer a nobody company. You are rippling. And VP's of HR at 250 person tech companies, they know rippling. And the probability of getting response to that email is just significantly higher, but you don't get there on day one.

49:23It's a process. So that's on who you are targeting. Now, the way that you target them, I think you really want to have contrarian, you know, really demand -gen efforts, but specifically contrarian outbound efforts. I've talked about a champagne campaign that I did at Brex, where we sent founders a bottle of champagne early on and you know, congratulated them on a recent fundraise. That's differentiated. It received a ton of responses. You just want to come up with something that is different from what everybody else is doing that stands out and oftentimes can come in the form of some physical delivery, a handwritten note.

50:05You just want to be different. You know what worries me a lot of the time that I see now? A lot of companies I'm in. They'll have this, like quite intense SDR, AE sales function. They'll have C -S functions. and the ACV is a 10K and it's like, ah, and they're like, ah, but it'll scale, it'll scale some, it rarely scales. And so we're layering on this, I enterprise cost -base for this very SMB PLG revenue base, which has really been born out of the PLG motion. And I'm just seeing a generation of companies have shit economics because of this. Do you see it too? And am I just getting jaded and old, Sam?

50:41I think the approach to acquiring customers and how much you can spend on that, it needs to be influenced by your ACVs. And to your point, Harry, and your LTVs, like if you are pranks, the LTV is much longer than I would imagine a people management solution, maybe not, but other solutions, which should just generally short. Well, I think there's, you know, within different businesses, you have different segments of customers. And you can approach acquiring one customer very differently than a significantly larger customer that generates more revenue. But what you can't do is scale that down. And so I used this example of we sent bottles of champagne, it was 40 bucks a bottle.

51:29You know, it's expensive, like after delivery, maybe we're upwards of 60 bucks, you can't spend that on customers that generate $100 a month in revenue for your business. And so if you think about the world that ignore company in terms of multiple businesses based off of the segments, you just target customers differently depending on how much revenue they're going to be able to generate. It's certainly not one size fits all. One thing I worry about without bound this on is you mentioned like, oh, people get 10 emails a day and I think they're about to get 100 emails a day. And I think they're about to get 100 text messages a day and 50 WhatsApp's I see so many WhatsApp sales tools now as well.

52:10AI is going to massively increase the amount of outbound send. Will we see the commoditization of outbound with the rise of AI? What I'm seeing is the tools today are making the category of outbound or the function of SDR or AE, more effective. They're streamlining a lot of manual process. The same way that something like, you know, outreach did a number of years ago. Erie, when I joined, Echo Sign is an SDR. Marquetto existed, but I was manually sending all of these emails one at a time. I like copy it, paste it, and then I'd like put in somebody's name and then I'd hit send. But it was a very manual process long comes outreach and I'm able to send like a hundred of the time that allowed me to You know be far more efficient as an sdr but it didn't give rid of the function of sdr It's like maybe there were sdr's and a world where outreach exists than there were before and you know I think we're continuing down this path of automated You know now we can personalize emails the AI is gonna write me an email that knows things about Harry that I wouldn't even be able to find out if I stood to a bunch of time researching it.

53:25So, you know, the AI is going to write me copy as well. I think what, at least today, AI does not accomplish that humans still do is this aspect of being creative. You know, the AI isn't going to tell you, here is your contrarian or unconventional, outbound sales campaign that is different from what everybody else is doing. and that's generally gonna come from a human. And you know, there is a process that I go through to determine these things if it's helpful. Yeah, I'd love to hear it. Okay, for each different channel, I love to do just a whiteboard session. You know, outbound is one example.

54:08So let's take the outbound example but this applies to so much more. And then I'll give specific examples of outputs that this process has produced. So with outbound, we wanna be different. At a 10 % startup, Harry or the founder, you're going to be in this meeting. The two sales reps are going to be in this meeting. And then maybe we have somebody in growth. That person is going to be in this meeting. So you've got four people in this meeting. We are going to do, it's at eight o 'clock on Monday evening meeting. It's the end of the day. We're going to do a whiteboard session. This meeting can go until midnight.

54:40There's no end in sight because it's the last meeting of the day. Okay, everybody come in with your top three ideas on what you suggest we do that is different from what everybody else is doing in Outbound. Okay, we go around the room. Sam, what are your top three ideas? Okay, Harry, what are your top three ideas? We go to each person, everybody comes with three like a Trarian or different ideas on how to do Outbound. We discuss them all, we select the ones that we think are the best, and we go out and we try them. And you do this with outbound. You do this with events. I remember the first time we sponsored Saster at Rex.

55:20We have late by whiteboard session. We get everybody that we think is, you know, contributing to this meeting in a room. Everybody come up with three ideas. What are the things you want to do differently? We don't just show up to Saster with a $100 ,000 booth and some pins to give away to people. We show up, we have task rabbits outside of the event in Brex T -shirts ending up Brex fist burritos to every single person that walked in the video. So the first experience that they have at Sastery is they get a Brex burrito on where they walk in. Four bucks a person. Not expensive. They walk in. You know, our booths, we have a magician that is using like, you know, Brex cards to do tricks.

56:02We're giving away a $25 dollar gift cards. He's incorporating the Rex pitch into his magic tricks. Everybody's around our booth for these $25 gift cards. We had all the billboards that were around the Saster conference. We bought them at Dave Vomal, so on the walk, from the hotel to the conference, you're seeing Rex billboards. When you check into your hotel, your key is a Rex credit card. When the hotel gives you your key, it's a regular, you use your key like four times a day to go in and out of your room and you're using a Rex Crack bag. How do you do that? You do a partnership with the full seasons?

56:37Like you pay for the sponsorship. And we, you know, we actually brought this idea to Saster. Saster was like, that's free money for us. We didn't even have this sponsorship before. Yes, we have these room blocks. We can tell the hotel like, use these key cards. We ordered the key cards. That's small. I like that. The key cards is really good. And none of this stuff, and again, you do this with every channel. The match, I'll give you one more example because I think you know here you seem to like the Outputs and some of this stuff but the way you get there is late night whiteboard session Response drinks Astro everybody come with your top three ideas of things that we can do to stand out at the conference We're doing outbound everybody come with your top three ideas of things that we can do differently than everybody else for Outbound I'll give you one more hate advertising actually there's two outputs that everybody just pays LinkedIn and Google at Twitter and they pay them a bunch of money to like surface some ads.

57:30Okay, Rex, we went offline. So everybody's doing online advertising. We put billboards all over C. Francisco. We did offline, very contrarian, yet a concentrated target market geographically. My favorite one though, that was super effective. What Rippling has done, they have a campaign right now where instead of paying LinkedIn money to surface ads on LinkedIn, when new employees onboard to their customers, They onboard through RIPLIN. And at the end of their onboarding, but you know, it's W4i9, Payroll, all that stuff. Benefits. At the end of the onboarding process, they do an NBS survey. How would you rate your experience with RIPLIN?

58:09The folks at say nine or 10, they send them an email. And it says, if you post on LinkedIn about your onboarding experience with RIPLIN, we will give you $25 or $50 visa gift card, just hashtag RIPLIN, hashtag sponsored, something like that. And so you have thousands of posts on LinkedIn that are sort of organic where a new hire at a company is saying just joined company X onboarded through rippling awesome onboarding experience, you know, hashtag rippling, hashtag sponsor. In all of these posts, they get tons of engagement because you see when somebody joins a new new company. Everybody likes it.

58:51It's like, you know, I join this new company, it's an announcement, everybody likes it, congratulations on joining the new company. And they're paying 50 bucks each time somebody does one of these with hundreds of likes. And some instances because they join a new company, how much more effective is that $50? Then paying LinkedIn $50 to service an ad that says rippling all in one HR and IT. We both know brand building. That I'm moving is one of the most high engagement valuable posts you will ever do. That I'm moving new fund, big round, is other ones that get it. Everything in between is nice, but it's activity.

59:29Those are your needle movers. And so you're getting it for 50 bucks. So I totally agree with you there. I've got to ask, what was the most successful paid campaign you did and what was the, oh my God, we just fucked up on that one. Okay, so the most successful campaign in Mollinabi Brex Pacific, The most successful weekend campaign we did Brex was the billboards. I think it's the type of thing where our mind share it within our target buyer. With from zero, we had Brex launched in 2018. When I joined Brex, we didn't have a website. I went to the website and it said, coming soon. We had no PR. We didn't announce any of our funding rounds.

1:00:12We were in stealth. So it was almost impossible for our target market to know who Brex was. So you know, market, mind share of Brex was like near zero. And when we launched, we did a bunch of things, including announcing the fundraising that we had done historically. Of course, we launched a marketing site, but the very day that we launched in GA the product. We put billboards up all over San Francisco. I think the campaign cost something like $300 ,000 over three months. We were everywhere. That just made everything easier for us. You know, we talked about outbounding. I can't tell you the number of responses to our outbound emails that were I see your billboards everywhere.

1:01:00And they probably don't respond to the email in the first place if they don't see our billboards everywhere. So one customer acquisition became so much easier because of the brand awareness from that campaign But where he was bigger than that like in fundraising became easier because of that Can we we sort of became famous because of this billboard campaign or we were all over San Francisco And so for you know $300 ,000. It was really effective So we have that as the best. What was the oh my god? I can't believe we did that Okay, Rex is a corporate card, a credit card. And if you think about, you know, American Express was our biggest competitor when we first launched.

1:01:46We were mostly taking market share from American Express, folks that used their business or corporate card. And American Express is really famous for airport lounges. You know, they've got these like centurion lounges at a bunch of airports. And around the same time, Capital One was launching these like Capital One cafes and we decided at a very early stage. We were less than 100 employees. We decided that we were going to open a restaurant in Lounge. And so we opened in South Park in San Francisco. We opened a Brex Lounge on top of a South Park cafe, which was a restaurant. And Harry, running a restaurant is hard.

1:02:33It's also expensive. It is distracting. And in hindsight, that was a big mistake. We should have focused on building a credit card company using our dollars to acquire things like customers and not remodeling a 100 -year -old restaurant that was in dire need of a remodel. How much did it cost? There's two costs. There's the hard costs. Hundreds of thousands, if not low millions of dollars, you know, and all was said and done. In terms of remodeling the restaurant, the rent, the, just everything that goes into it. But Perry, it's the opportunity cost that was so much higher. It is hard to run a restaurant.

1:03:21It takes resources from whoever we put in charge of running the restaurant. They have to hire people they have to manage those people that was the biggest mistake that we made it Yeah, I was a shit idea I was a world -carsher If you were in if you were in some of the exact meetings where we discussed it You might have been like this is gonna be great No, no because there's no it's like it's just in South Park. That is just in South Park There's no like I might slown just around the world with a network effect and a brand effect. This feels like if I was the founder, I'd do it just to have a good place to have lunch.

1:03:58You know, uh... Here's maybe the glass is half full way of thinking about this. Is something like not 100 % of your really creative or crazy ideas are going to land. And I think it's better to have tried, not tried at all, something like that. You know, so maybe even like celebrate the failures in a way. If you think about the contrarian winnings, I totally agree with you and I'd way rather fucking try and have some out there stuff that fails than does nothing you should want cap losses, hopefully in the not millions. I want to move into a quick fire sound, so I'm going to peppy you with questions 60 seconds per one, does that sound okay?

1:04:37I love it. Okay, discounting. Do we ever do it? Do we not do it? What's the advice? Yes, with qualifications. You know, early stage startup, if I can describe the environment that I prefer to be in, it's something like we are perceived as the premium product, both because of the quality of our product, but also the price point with which we sell the better product. And I have the ability to discount that product to accelerate deal cycles. So much of sales is psychology. And if you're a buyer, the feeling of getting a good deal drives behavior. You know, there's a saying here, he time kills all deals, especially in the early days.

1:05:23If providing a discount does things like accelerates, deal cycles, prevents people from looking at competitors and allows you to move on to another opportunity. I do like leveraging it in certain instances. I think where people make mistakes and and sales people in particular make mistakes is like just defaulting to discounting. This is something that happens very late in a deal and it happens with a very clear trade -off which is driving urgency to close. Well, sales tactic has died a death. What's the normal? There are two, we talked about one, this spring and prang of emails, especially at an early stage, I think is something of the past.

1:06:09The second thing that comes to mind is people are going to start meeting their customers in person again. You know, free 2020, a lot of customer interactions happened in person. In the 2020 hit people went remote and I think, you know, we have not returned to an environment where we're meeting our customers in person, we're meeting our prospects in person. And I think that today, if you're doing that, it's a real competitive advantage. But I think forward looking, this idea that we never are going to meet our customers at person that we're just going to return to the norm here. We measured conversion rates at REX when we met a customer at person, we had 3X the likelihood of closing that deal that if we didn't, it's like the days of working from home, doing zooms only to meet with customers, not meeting customers and developing personal relationships Just those days, I think you're going to be a thing of the past.

1:07:04It's not already. Do you buy remote sales teams? If you are a mature business and you've gone remote, that's tough to put that back in the bottle. Jeannie's out. If you think if you are starting a business today, I am very biased towards building in person, both the entire company, but also the sales organization. I totally agree with you. I fund in -person companies. As finished with, what would you most like to change about the world of sales moving forward? My experience with many salespeople today, and you know we've talked a little bit about this remote environment that I think has had influence, but I think today's salespeople have gotten a little bit lazy.

1:07:49And I think they and we, because I consider myself, you know, part of this community. Couple things have happened. One, we have become overly dependent on marketing, SDR, anybody to source our own leads. We are consumers of demand and if we're not well fed, then you can't expect us to close revenue. So that's I think one like trend that I believe meets to change. In the second one, it is around effort, and especially with remote companies. And I think that this is true with sales, and it's likely true beyond sales, where, you know, Harry, when I joined Brex in 2018, and we did this podcast, startups were really fucking hard.

1:08:42And my first day at Brex, I had a meeting that was at 8 a .m. And I had a meeting that was our exact, our weekly exact team meeting. And it started at 8 a .m. and didn't end in Jumidnight. And I walked home from the office after midnight. And I was in meetings from 8 a .m. until midnight. Same thing was true at Zenefits. And look, I was an executive employee there, but all of the people at the company were working that hard. And it required it. And I think today, many salespeople in a remote environment are waiting for leads to be placed on their calendar and working something like a 30 hour work week.

1:09:23And it just doesn't really work, especially for early stage startups. Like if you want to separate and be successful, it just requires a lot of hard work and in no entitlement around getting leads placed to warm spoon fair that leads on our calendar. But that's the greatest opportunity of all to me for young people, because I sound so old so young, but like, yeah, I've been doing this 10 years and a lot of people coming out of university asked me what do you advise. I always say it's so easy to be different because everyone else is so mediocre. If I actually just do those little things to you Sam, I write that thank you email to you post the first day, highlighting the couple of things that I thought were interesting from that first day that maybe we could do better.

1:10:11You're like, that is good. Good start, perceptive. Little things that don't take much, really don't take much, but it's so easy to be great because everyone's quite mediocre, I think. I think it's really insightful and smart and there are so many of these things that just apply beyond what we're describing here, but like the little things can go a little away. Sam, I've loved this. Thank you so much for putting up with of my sometimes impassioned rants and opinions. You've been fantastic, and I hope we don't have to wait another six years to do this again. Harry, I appreciate the invite so much.

1:10:43I've had a blast as I always do and let's hang out in person. I'll be in London early June and I expect to see you and spend some time together then. Wouldn't an incredible show that was with Sam. I wanna say she sized in for joining me today. And if you wanna watch the full episode in video, you can check it out on YouTube by searching for 20VC. We always love to see you there. ad, 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.

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