How G2's SVP of GTM Strategy evaluates sales comp plans, scales teams & runs M&A

Speaker A: Welcome to the Sales Compensation show where we share the latest sales performance insights through in depth discussion with experts. Season three of our show is your backstage pass to discovering how today's most successful sales and revenue ops teams support go to market strategy and improve sales performance. Plus, we'll explore what we can learn about incentives from different industries more broadly. Subscribe to hear how leaders are unlocking new growth, implementing the latest compensation trends and their priorities for improving go to market performance. I'm your host, cpu CEO of Formai, Nabeel Alzam. My guest today runs an entire go to market engine at G2. The systems, the analytics, the partner strategy, and yes, of course the comp plans. But here's what I find particularly uh, for this discussion, a very topical theme which is the fact that she didn't come up through sales. She started through banking and private equity. And so Shefali, uh, Raghavan, welcome to the show. It's great to have you on, uh, with us today.

Speaker B: Beal. Thank you so much for having me. And I'm so excited to chat comp and everything else with you here today.

Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. And uh, you know, I touched on a little bit. Obviously you didn't start in the traditional path. I mean, I don't think anyone really starts or grows up thinking that they're going to be in the world of sales comp or sales ops. But would love to just hear how, you know, how did you end up landing in this domain?

Speaker B: Yeah, very happy to share that. So I think as you correctly mentioned, I actually started out my career in professional services, started out with consulting private equity. And you know, I think those fields are great because they kind of teach you how strategy is set. But then, you know, I think what I found myself craving is what happens once you make that recommendation, right? Whether it's private equity, whether it's consulting, you're leading with a strategic recommendation on a business. But then how do you kind of tie that to the execution layer and then how do you sort of take those ideas and kind of see them end to end? That then first led me actually over to my one of many operator roles which I've kind of played over the last 15 years, which, whether it's Twitter, whether it's Salesforce, whether it's Airtable or now Most recently I G2, I would say a big part of what I've been focused on is like, how do you sort of build and scale a business? How do you sort of think of the, the strategy of where you want to go, but then connect it to the execution engines that, uh, kind of get you to implementing the outcomes of what you want to drive. And I would say, like, the common thread on all of these is like organizations, economic systems, and building essentially processes that kind of will live beyond you and your time at any given company. Right. My first role actually was at Twitter. I was our very first sales ops hire. They hired two of us at the same time. And it was back when it was still Twitter. Um, and that was like, I think, what, 15? And well, I don't even remember anymore. It was a really long time ago. And then that took me into my journey, uh, at Salesforce, which was my first foray into enterprise as and from there to Airtable, and now at G2. Um, so seeing a little bit of all of it and very grateful to sort of be here and having this conversation.

Speaker A: What's interesting is you've seen both sides of it, right? Like the product LED motion versus a enterprise B2B SaaS. And so how much has the different selling model changed your perspective and kind of what have you gleaned from one organization to the next is kind of like the biggest differences or common themes, common threads.

Speaker B: We're now living in a world where you need a little bit of both. So I don't actually think like a very traditional PLT engine or traditional sales lead engine. The best ones, you kind of are able to sort of take that product virality and attach talented enterprise selling and strategy to it, so you can help sort of really accelerate where you need to go. So I think the themes on both businesses are the same, right? The themes are always about how do you want to accelerate your growth and how do you want to do that as quickly as possible. The levers that you end up using to do that end up being a little bit different. So if you're in a PLG motion, you're really sort of trying to, you know, capitalize on that organic leverage that you're getting through your hand raisers, through your demos. And, you know, you may not actually need to build out a more traditional sales team for a little bit longer because, you know, when I actually first joined Airtable, it was a very, very traditional plt. Oh.

Speaker A: I mean, yeah, that product has like a massive fan base and it's.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. But it's. It's usually when you start moving up market, right? As you start, like trying to break into enterprise selling, as you're trying to really sell into the Fortune 500, it's helpful to bring in your more traditional enterprise selling strategies. Because there's a lot that you can do as a company to help make sure that you're able to capture that market, right? Whether it is setting out your go to market design, you know, which obviously then has like the components underneath it of territory planning and quotas and compensation and all of those things. Um, but it's also about like the right enablement and setting up executive edge and teaching your sellers to be able to go have these conversations with C level employees at uh, you know, these companies that are actually, you know, the buying seats, right. And it's a very different skill set than getting you and me to sign up for something versus getting, you know, salesforce to sign up for something are like very, very different skill sets. And so that's, that's the graduation, right, that you kind of go on and then the maturation of your go to market journey just based on which path you find yourself on. But like I said, I actually think the best companies are able to take some of that organic product led virality and then attach enterprise selling to it kind of early so you can kind of get to where you need to go faster.

Speaker A: And so how do you find the impact of you know, designing territories quota like and obviously the comp plan when you're thinking about the variances across that enterprise B2B selling motion versus kind of nurturing, nurturing a product led growth motion. How do incentives change? How do, how do rules and kind of the corresponding territory mapping change across those?

Speaker B: You know, usually if you're starting out product led growth, you are already in a scenario where you have that demand. So then what you're really kind of focused on doing is making sure you don't miss any of that demand. So then the way you're building those systems or about making sure that like whether your hand raisers, your demo requests, anything that's coming in, like you're making sure those leads are being captured, they're being serviced, but it is usually a less strategic sale because the customer has already sort of made up their mind. And usually on the PLG side you're starting out heavily, more heavily in SMB and you have a very, very empowered customer that has made up their mind and they've made their decision and now they're coming to you to help sort of get that self serve engine executed. And so for something like that, you obviously want to make sure that you are designing the system in such a way that you have the capacity model that you've built so that you can make sure that demand is appropriately serviced. Whether it is making, you know, making sure that you have your demand generation team, you know, capturing the demand in the right way. Whether it's making sure you have marketing operations, you know, capturing those leads, making sure they're flowing in the salesforce, like that's more of a systems design. You need to make sure that like the demand you're getting is captured and fairly usually you're territories compensation. All of this can remain somewhat simple, right? And you can also attach it from like a slightly different unit economics because you, you don't necessarily need to bring in, you know, enterprise sellers if you're predominantly PLG and you don't have an intention of pivoting in to sales like growth. You know, you're just, you want to, you can actually run a very efficient unit economic model. And that is very different design than you know, if you kind of come in and say, okay, I want to do enterprise selling. Now to do enterprise selling you need proof points that kind of show you that you know, enterprises are already right. So that's where you kind of get into first to go to market of it all, which is like, is your product enterprise ready? Because your product maybe or may not be. Right. So if it's not secure, if it's not encrypted, if you don't have like some of those things that enterprises are going to need in order to implement your product, it's probably too early. So you kind of need to first start.

Speaker A: Yeah, incentives are not going to change that. Right. Are the customers ready, willing to buy and m there to purchase?

Speaker B: Exactly, exactly. So I think once your product is ready for the Fortune 500 or the Big league and you start, you kind of come in and say intentionally, okay, now is when I'm pivoting into enterprise selling and this is a journey I want to run. Then you start asking these questions like, okay, well what is my sales territory going to look like? How many sellers do I need? How do I want to segment my business? Do I want to segment it by geo, do I want to segment it by vertical? Do I actually think that if I focus in on financial services and healthcare and retail, I'm going to be able to speak to these customers a certain kind of way? You kind of get into that part of the conversation, then you kind of get into sales compensation. Right? Because ultimately, you know, I think compensation drives behavior. Compensation is an amplifier or anything your organization is trying to do. So whatever strategy that your organization is setting, your compensation needs to amplify that. Right? So whether it's making sure. That like, you know, if you want to do new business acquisition, you need to make sure that you have specific new business goals and you know, that's, you know, driven within that whether you have existing customers that you need to grow. So usually I think it's a maturation journey that every company goes on like day one. You probably don't need a super complex comp plan with you know, 10 different segments and all these territories. You, there's, you can overcomplicate something. But I do think that the next part in your journey is to kind of come in and say, okay, based on our size and scale, this is when we first need to introduce selling. This is when we first need to introduce enterprise selling. That I think is like essentially the, the journey that like a company needs

Speaker A: to go on, the deployment strategy needs to mimic the product itself. Because I imagine a selling like an enterprise sales motion where you're going after the enterprise directly and trying to sell the whole thing. Versus if you truly are evolving from product led growth to enterprise selling, you likely have enterprises that are already using your product in pockets. And that's probably a very different selling motion than kind of a net new acquisition. And the motion you're building really needs to be incentivized on like understanding how the customer is currently using the product today. They need to be very close to the product solution versus just going out there and kind of solving a sales problem. Right. Convincing a customer that the product is going to best suit their needs from the outside perspective and through kind of a more traditional like net new B2B selling motion.

Speaker B: So 100% and maybe in one of the things you said that really actually resonated with me is if you are actually making this transition from PLG to slt probably and you're within enterprises that you never start with, you know, your VP level, buyer or you know, power. Right. So depending on whatever sales methodology or enablement is so important, being able to do all of these different things. And this is a journey we've been on at G2 with our enablement team. But you know, when you're introducing any methodology, let's say Medpic M as an example and uh, you know, you're kind of training your team on like identifying pain, getting to power, making sure you have a champion. Probably when you're doing that piece DLG to SLG split at the beginning, those champions are probably folks that you know, don't actually have the ability to make large buying purchasing decisions. It's usually some power user that loves your product and like, you know, thinks the world of it. So then how do you take that person? How do you multi thread your way to the organization? And that's when, when you, when you get to that person, right? When you get to that VP or SVP or C level employee that's willing to take that conversation, you need to make sure that your sales team is ready for that conversation. The other thing is like sometimes you get there, but then you need to be ready. Your, your teams need to have the executive edge to be able to go deliver that. And so that would be the other thing that I would say is like it is a journey and usually no one goes from like they weren't selling at all to like the first conversation to C level conversation. It's a journey of like you start down here in the company hierarchy and then you gotta move your way up and you need, you know, really good sellers that can do that multi threading to be able to get there, right, and build those proof points and build that championship so that you can, you can actually do that.

Speaker A: It's interesting because through our discussion it's very clear that it's not just comp, it's everything around it. And I think you're fortunate enough to own that entire end to end go to market motion and the operations behind it. Maybe just stepping back. How is seeing the entire cycle and kind of building the entire machine changed how you've approached incentives specifically in comp.

Speaker B: Yeah, I would say that people always think about comparison, but comp always comes later in the sequence. Meaning compensation is ultimately like an amplification of whatever go to market strategy and design you and your organization have already set forth. And I think a lot of times what happens is people sort of go right to the end and they come in and say, okay, well what is the quota? How much quota do I want to put in the system? What is the attainment against and what is the, you know, sales compensation model I want to build that's going to get us there, but I think being able to connect all the different pieces, right? So you always want to start with okay, what is my go to market strategy? What part of the market are we trying to take where that we think going to? We have a right to win, right? So you kind of start there, like what part of the market, where do we have a right to win? And you know we will win. Then you have to kind of come in and say, okay, well how do we want to go after that market as a cohesive go to market engine? Because the Other place where this breaks is like, you need to make sure how you're incentivizing your sellers. You know, customer success understands that, marketing understands that. How do you bring this whole go to market engine together to make sure that everyone's kind of focused on the same thing. So as an example, if you have your sales teams focused on a certain set of accounts, but your marketing team is like, you know, chasing another segment, then you know, it doesn't really matter. So you kind of need to bring it all together. So that's part two, which is like how do you kind of get go to market, call it strategy, then call it go to market design, like organizational design. How do you get these different components? Then you get into the tactics of like, okay, well is it the same strategy for every segment? And the answer may be no, right? Like the what you want to go do in the enterprise might be different. What you want to do in SMB probably is different. And you know, the cost of sale, the unit economics associated with it, all that is also going to be different. So you kind of come to that once you have that like tops down, I would say you have your company plan and your go to market strategy, bottoms up. You have like the systems that need to work in order for you to be able to deliver against that. And then comes at the end which is basically like, all right, this is what we want to do, this is who we want to do it with and this is how your strategy is going to differ by segment. And now let's figure out like what is the compensation plan can give these sellers or this go to market engine, right? Because you also have your CS team, your Solutions team, your BDRs. This comp isn't just for one, one team. How do you then make sure that we incentivize what we need to see? So as an example, if um, you really care about driving new business acv, because you're saying that, you know, we are, our new logos are going down and we keep talking to same customers. If you don't have a kicker in your plan that has something around new logo acquisition or you don't have like half the plan that's sitting on new business, no one's going to focus on your business. Right.

Speaker A: So ultimately incentives are powerful. They drive behavior.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Ah, at the end of the day, people do what they're paid to do. So you can say anything you want. And I can usually tell what your company strategy is by looking at your comp plan and if and where I have always Found it to be very interesting is when I look at the comp plan and if it doesn't align with the company strategy from a top down perspective, then you know you have a problem. So as an example, if you say that it's very important for you to have like customer retention because churn is a problem that everyone in the industry is now navigating right now. Right. But then you have nothing in your compensation plan that protects that retention. It isn't like a certain percentage of your reps number that protects retention either. You know, if they don't get to X retention threshold, they're not going to do Y or whatever it might be, or their plan is fully based on expansion. Then you know, and then you're not retaining and you have customers that are churning. Then the question becomes like, what were you thinking? Right. Like you. So I can usually tell your company strategy by looking at your comp plan, but where you will be in trouble is if I look at your comp plan and it doesn't align with what you said you want to go do at the strategic level. Because at the end of the day that's why comp needs to come in the end. You need the sequence and then it needs to come at the end.

Speaker A: And you said something very, very important like at the very beginning when you're defining that strategy, you're assessing the market data, you're kind of going through and saying okay, uh, this is what the data is telling us about the uh, channels that we need to pursue, the TAM that is available to us by region or by channel, et cetera. And then you build the strategy to go after that. The same metrics that you're tracking to do that decision making ideally should cascade all the way down into your quota setting, your territory and your comp structures. And even if you're not using the same metric, I find at the quota level, at the quota or comp level, you should be using those metrics to measure the effectiveness of those incentives. And I think that through line, if you're not doing is such a missed opportunity and so. Couldn't agree more. Start at the top and kind of work your way down. It's.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, that's always been my. And I think that's where it's helpful. My case I'm uh, I do own all of it. But even if you don't own all of it, you need to make sure that the way your, you know, organizational design is set up is that the teams that are setting these plans at the end are like Tied at the hip with the teams that are setting the go to market strategy. And in my ideal world, the best kind of organizational robots. Organizational design is one that basically or DTM ops. Organizational design is one where you have the different components within one. Right. I think it's very powerful to have like your marketing operations, your sales operations, your customer success post sales like all underneath one source of truth with obviously planning, analytics systems, all of that being a through line between. Because you can make sure that you do this connective time. But if for whatever reason that's not the way it's set up, fine. But then you have to make sure that someone is actually going through that extra motion to make sure that it's all going to tie together 100%.

Speaker A: Yeah. Then you need to have that ambassador that's like the one tracking through end to end and frankly incentivized on that

Speaker B: connectivity 100 because sometimes what I've seen is like this. This can get siloed and sometimes live within finance or live within different parts of the organization that are maybe not connected with exactly the incentives that go to market is trying to drive. And that's where you get into trouble. Because you get into trouble if you're trying to keep to a certain unit economic threshold or you get into a trouble when you are trying to say that you're going to set quotas at X because you want to put this much pressure in the system or whatever it might be. But then it isn't conn connected with what the business is trying to do. Like ultimately what you're doing at your sales kickoff and what you're saying on stage needs to like tie back to those comp plans. And so in fact I actually always. It's never exciting, but I actually think I always find a way to incorporate the themes of the comp plans into kickoff because I actually that's the best

Speaker A: way to do it. Yes.

Speaker B: Because then you know what's really important. Right. And it gets. I think organizations get in trouble when you don't have that. When you live in silo and now you know, people are like well why does. Why did you do that? Well, that's what you paid them to do. That's why they did that.

Speaker A: No, the best deployment of comp plans I've seen is when there's kind of like a uh, rah rah or like an energy put behind a new metric that the business is tracking because. And then there's a narrative around the importance of that metric. And then the final part of that storytelling is and now your comp plans are going to pay you on that metric. And now it's like you have the strategy, communicate the field, there's the buy in and the energy around, why this is going to be better for everyone. And then you finally communicate a comp plan that's fully aligned. It's the easiest way to get buy in versus here's a comp plan. This is how you get paid. And it's like there's no connectivity back to what it means for them and their customers. And I think I couldn't agree more.

Speaker B: Totally agree.

Speaker A: So you've had, you know, you've had this privilege of again working across multiple different organizations, but even within, you know, G2 today, and I think across the organizations we've worked in the past, acquisition strategy is a big part of the inorganic growth side of the business. And then the goal is to take that inorganic growth and then bring it in and kind of pull it into the organic growth engine that you have within the organization and kind of embed that. And so I'm curious, it's obviously far easier said than done. I feel like that is at the most complex, uh, from an organizational perspective to kind of integrate different go to market motions, different product offerings and, and sales teams. And I mean we just love a high level like how, how do you approach that and how, you know, what are the biggest pitfalls and items to avoid doing when you go about that.

Speaker B: Yeah. So uh, you know, like, like you mentioned, I've actually had the privilege, you know, my background many times, both from starting out in private equity. So being on the other, you know, the other side of the transaction to obviously being on the operator side and being on like the, you know, either the integration or acquisition part of the equation. I've had the opportunity to see a lot of M and A right, both in my time at Salesforce. Most recently here at G2, we had a fairly large acquisition um, as we ac, uh, Gartner Digital Markets. My story on like where you go wrong and where you go right. Like at the end of the day when you're thinking about any kind of go to market integration, the design principles that we're talking about don't really change here. Right. So you, you went and bought this company because you believed that the power of your platforms together, one plus one equals three, not one plus one equals two. And that is why you decided to go make the bet. Right? You did that as, as you did that, you also baked in certain incentives in your, you know, board plan or strategy plan. As you were kind of getting, you know, your board and your and everyone else to sign up for that vision. Right. So usually all of these are baked on synergy plans of what you think you can go achieve based on bringing these things together. Where I think this goes wrong is, you know, if you kind of come in and say, okay, day one teams, you're going to go co sell together and you're out in the field go like, if you do that before, you have a shared language. And when I say shared language, I mean the shared language of like people process technology, you're not going to be successful. So as an example, in, you know, this integration that we're currently living through right at the moment, it's very important. You know, in our case, we were operating off one CRM and the acquisition company was operating over different CRM. M. You need to be able to be in the same CRM because first you need to be able to come in and even have your sales teams look at accounts together in system. You need to actually kind of come to a place where everyone sees the words the same way. Like for what's a target account for your company and your propensity may not be target and propensity for the other company. Right. So, but that doesn't mean anyone is right or wrong. Um, it's just you need to sort of build that shared common language that everybody gets aligned on before you kind of get to the final step of okay, now go and go sell or whatever it might be. And the best way to do that is you kind of break it out, right? So I always kind of think of this, any problem in like, you know, systems. I'm a big believer in building operating systems that kind of outlive you and outlive whatever problem you're trying to build. So, you know, if you kind of think of it as a system of like people, right? So who are the right people that need to be part of this conversation from day one? So RevOps is always going to be part of that or GTM Ops. But it's your finance team, it's your IT team, it's your sales team. But you know, you'd be surprised. The sales team comes in more towards the end. You got to first get a bunch of other teams aligned at the beginning, right? Your, you know, HR team. You need to get the right people together to figure out, okay, well, this is the roadmap. These are the company level milestones we're going to build. This is when we're going to hit these certain Checkpoints, like, if you're. If I'm operating on a different tech stack than you are, but I'm saying, okay, we need to go sell together now, then that's going to make it very hard for you to do one day, one. Right. So usually, like your strategy is like, you want to preserve the greatness that made those companies individually great. So you have some like, ramp off period where you basically keep both of those companies, like independent, you operate independently and you sort of are trying to have these teams that I just mentioned, which are your core operational teams, come together and build that shared language roadmap. Once you've built the shared language roadmap, people are operating on the same systems. You have had a way of like, you know, getting an understanding of what are your shared customers, where, what are your big bets, where can you go accelerate? Then you bring like, you know, your go to market engine truly within the conversation, right. If you try to do it at the beginning before you do some of this work, which isn't exciting sometimes, but is the most important work you're going to do almost upright, you're not going to have a. Because at the end of the day, you want to go to your customer with a compelling narrative on why they should invest with you, why this is better for them. Because otherwise ultimately everything goes back to the customer. Everything we do has to be customer centric. So then you kind of have to come in and say, okay, why do I care about my. Like, why? How is this a better experience for the customer? So if you. I. So my design principles are always build the operating system, build a shared language in any M and A. Right before you. Before you sort of come to like, even this conversation of how am I going to incentivize sellers? Which I think is a very important question. But like I said, it kind of comes at the end of. You'll see a theme here.

Speaker A: What is even possible? Yeah, yeah.

Speaker B: What is impossible? The first piece is like, keep your greatness. Right? There's a reason you decided to do this first. Keep that greatness, keep these companies operating independently for some period of time until you're able to build out the shared language dictionary that's going to tie these two things together. Figure out those big bets that are going to make you one plus one equals three, and you'll know what they are. And you would have known, you would have had some assumption of what they are before you went through this because that's how you got everyone excited. That's how you got the board excited. That's how you got the investors excited. Then from there you, once you have that and you get to that threshold, that's when you get into the conversation of, um, all right, well, how do we build back to the synergy plan that we think we are going to achieve? Right? And now it becomes important. Okay, what is our go to market strategy? Is the strategy that, you know, we were going after, call it ex customers. Our, you know, acquisition company is going after Y customers. Do we want to go after X? Do we want to go after Y or do we want to go after X +Y? And then are they all equally important? All this becomes very important because then at the end you can set up the structures that are going to incentivize both sets of sellers, right? And the best incentive structures are ones that you can tell everyone that you want them to co sell from day one and you want everyone to be able to go. But if you design the compensation plan in such a way that they're incentivized if they close the deal, but there's nothing in it for the other party that needs to come along for the conversation, then again, you know, like they're just going to sell their stuff and

Speaker A: now you're even worse because. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker B: Then you're going to see it in front of the customer. At the end of the day, like I, like I said, I can always sell your company strategy if I look at your complaint and if your comp plan and your company strategy are not aligned, then that's where you're going to get into trouble. That's usually you go through this flow and then make sure that you come in and say, okay, I really care about, you're not going to cannibalize each other. We're actually going to make more by doing this. Then maybe you have to then have a conversation, right, with your finance team, with your cfo. You got to just make sure that everyone's aligned, that there's going to be some period where we're going to have to double comp. There's going to be some period where everybody's going to get paid on the deal. But we have to because we need to build a shared language because otherwise you're going to give up the short term unit economics. But then you're going to build out a sales team where they're, they're not actually bringing each other along the journey. And so those, those are some of the things that I, you know, I'm living through right now. But yeah, uh, that, you know, I have A lot of experience in it.

Speaker A: Go slow at first to go faster m like much faster later. And that part you know is critical because you see it all the time. Acquisitions happen, the integrations happen too fast and then you either can't uncover those opportunities because the data is not structured or set up or you have those opportunities but the systems aren't in place to actually enable sellers to action on it efficiently. And I've seen this multiple times where it's. There's a clear understanding of what that low hanging fruit to make one plus one equals three. But either we can't measure metrics properly and so you end up with a problem with the comp plan where there is no concept of teaming and then you end up with a problem where like the actual customer doesn't get that experience or the sellers are just better off doing what they used to do and because it was at least the clarity to getting to their money. And I think going slow upfront to kind of define that journey is critical because these systems are complex. Migrating CRMs and merging CRM M data that is not easy. But if you do the planning upfront correctly it also I imagine gives you a roadmap of hey, these integrations are actually more important than these integrations and ah, we should prioritize this and maybe it's not going to be the full blown integration but we're willing to wait for the full blown in 2 years or 18 months because having this upfront starts the join process of, of our salesforce and it's very easy to get pushed I imagine to accelerate that. So I guess how do you as kind of this owner of this go to market engine and operations actually explain the technical difficulty of overrushing this to the executive stakeholders that maybe are not as close to the technical nuance details because I imagine that's probably uh, not an easy venture to go on, right?

Speaker B: 100% and I think that that's, you're always going to have push and pull there. At the end of the day there's going to always be an appetite to go fast as soon as possible and get to you know, realizing some of those synergies because whatever you just did, you know, any company just did, there's, there's a huge impact on your balance sheet for you know, the decision you just made. So there's always going to be an incentive to how do we get to that one plus one equals three really really fast so that we can sort of, you know, navigate the immediate financial impact that you're kind of seeing from it. And I think my story is that you just, you know, it's helpful when you're able to build roadmaps and plans that are thoughtful in nature and you're able to bring people along to that journey. Right? So as an example, I think it'd be really fair if, you know, we had an executive stakeholder like the CEO kind of come back and say, okay, well, but if this is going to take like two years, like we need to get there faster, right? So I think the way to bridge that gap is you almost have to do like what I like to think of as like a tops down and a bottoms. And you'll see that's like a throughput theme and sort of how I think about problems in general. But the tops down is you need to realize this energy as quickly as possible. You're trying to capitalize on the one plus one equals three as quickly as possible and you're trying to obviously accelerate your growth as quickly as possible. That's the top down. You do that. The bottoms up is making sure you're building out the operating system that actually gets you where you need to go. And you know, all the things we just discussed, I think the way you negotiate that difference is you kind of have to come in and almost draw a roadmap. That's what we did. You draw a roadmap of like what needs to happen each quarter. Now you actually have OKRs that are tied to that and you actually see, are you actually making the attraction that you said you were going to make? Get everyone aligned with that initial plan that this is going to take six months or 12 months or whatever it's going to take you and your company based on your size, scale, you know, of the acquisition, your company, what like the journey you went on. And then you make sure that you're tracking success to those OKRs and those milestones. If you are, and you genuinely are, uh, bought in on what it was going to take bake, then you know, that is I think a much better way than kind of over committing and saying you're going to do this by X. But then you know, you're still like, you know, uncovering and building out an account taxonomy or a product taxonomy to like join up your CRMs. Like you, you bake all that in. You say this is what I think is realistic. And then you figure out, are there some areas and this kind of gets into the, like, how do you kind of parallel processes? Are uh, there some areas where we can move fast before the full infrastructure is built. So if you have like a set of, call it 10, 15, 20 strategic customers, where you kind of come in and say, you know what, like I need to build out this whole engine. I need to, you know, build these checkpoints. Like this is work I have to do. Like, this is not throwaway work. This is something I have to, to build a company. But you know what? We know there's like these top 10 to 15 strategic enterprises where we'll just go fast with these guys and we will figure it out. And so whether that's like, like paying the rep, double comp, whether it's offering some kind of incentive, whether it's, you know, it's, it's being able to figure out who those customers are for you and figuring out like how you can get to that strategic partnership realization even faster. But maybe with those customers to start,

Speaker A: you know, you're basically taking an approach of like the non scalable approach in a small segment that has a high impact.

Speaker B: Exactly.

Speaker A: It's still lessons learned, right? Hey, what are the things that we're encountering?

Speaker B: Lessons learned. Exactly. And you go one at a time, right? So you don't approach all of them at the same time. You pick one that you know is one that you have a really powerful partnership with. You go to them, you sort of. And you learn from that and actually helps you go build this entire engine that you're building too. Because you'll learn, you'll get customer feedback and ultimately you, anything you do, you want to build the systems, but you want to make sure at the end of the day that you're keeping the customer first. And the best way to keep the customer first is to talk to the customer and get their feedback, you know, understand what they're telling us and what they're excited about. And you know what, what, what is it that they loved about your product? What is it that they loved about the other product? Now that you're together, what business problem can we help them solve? How can we help them go faster? As a byproduct of this decision our companies have made, if you get that, you get that customer early read, you actually will design all these systems better too. You just can't do that with everybody because you still need to build all the systems, but you pick like your top five to 10 and figure out if you can do some strategic partnerships and then you take it and scale it across the board. Yeah.

Speaker A: And those top five, 10 customers. Customers, there's a lot of oversight from within the business. Right. So there's A lot of people looking at it from different lenses that I imagine then gives you that safety net to ensure you're not going to do the wrong thing. But also a lot of eyes to kind of find uh, opportunities or areas of a concern that you can take back as lessons to the broader deployment. So I agree. I mean this is kind of like the Lean Startup methodology of, you know, you gotta iterate, quick fix, whatever. But obviously you can't do that at the full scale of thousands of customers across two masses of go to market operations. But it's a very tactical application of find the small area where you can be lean and agile and then. And iterate.

Speaker B: Yeah, 100%. Like uh, I think one of my favorite books, I like Lean Startup. I also really like Atomic Habits Right. By James Clear. Because at the end of the day like everything comes down to your systems.

Speaker A: Yes.

Speaker B: The systems you build will either build you to what you want to go do or they will break you. And if you don't have systems then that's a different problem statement altogether.

Speaker A: Yeah, I recommend that uh, as a great read as well. And I think, think if you just read it and you don't right away start implementing some of those tactics, I think it's a missed opportunity. But you're right, like implementing those systems that structure, that process is critical in everything you do.

Speaker B: Most people and most companies are actually generally pretty good at setting goals and setting okrs. Your ability to actually hit them will come down to what systems have you built that are going to make those outcomes repeatable. Right. And if you don't have repeatable outcomes and you don't have a repeatable system, and oftentimes companies will rely on the ELT or senior leadership team to solve problems, but ideally they're not solving the same problem over and over again, they're

Speaker A: building the systems to autonomously solve them going forward. Exactly. I think you, this is where. And by the way, I think the shift to the agentic world that we're going through right now is we're running into this exact same. You know, I think every enterprise is going to run into the exact same problem, which is we've built the infrastructure to date for humans to make decisions and have autonomy and ultimately have accountability. And there's this kind of gap which is the systems are not built to have a structured decision making framework that is applied by a non human. And until we implement that and set that up, you actually have a inability to deploy kind of an agentic AI layer across the entire business. And so what's interesting is before I think it was a not nice to have, but it was a competitive advantage to have a very systems thinking, process oriented approach to running your organization because it helped you make decisions faster, not be bottlenecked on the elt, but actually like enable every part of the business to move quicker and make decisions. And I think we are shifting to that, to a world where if you do not have that, you literally will not be able to compete. It's no longer just a incremental positive, it's actually a detriment. And so if you're not building those systems in on a day to day basis, you're kind of missing out on a massive opportunity. Another question I always ask our guests is, you know, if you had to take someone out in the industry for lunch, who would it be and why?

Speaker B: I would probably take out, uh, Yamini Rangman. Right. So she is obviously president, CEO and board member at HubSpot. You know, I think her specifically because, you know, I think throughout this entire conversation what's probably come through is that I'm really interested in leaders that can move from deep functional expertise to running the whole equation. And like her journey is that right? She started out in like go to market strategy and ops. She then kind of went in and became CRO and then CEO. Like she's kind of done the whole journey of like, you know, seeing all of it together. And you know, I would want to take her specifically because I'd want to understand like how was the way that she viewed the business change as her scope expanded. So like as she expanded out her scope and she started running go to market, you know, you can optimize your own growth, you can optimize your own commercial execution. But when you're running a company, you're also balancing that against how your products, your customers, your profitability, talent, investment. You're thinking about a lot of different things. The other thing, uh, that you know, I would ask her about is I think she has a really interesting take on AI. I think the AI piece makes the conversation really interesting right now. And she's also helping shape that conversation, right? Not just from like a product perspective, but like even if you were to go back to comp, like you know, consumption and breeze agents and how to sort of think about like comp plans of the future. So I just think it'd be a really interesting conversation or understand her career journey, you know, steps she made at different points, what kind of. And how her perspective changed as she sort of expanded her scope. Right. And kind of took different things on it. Probably if she'd be willing to go to lunch with me, I'd be very excited to go to lunch with her.

Speaker A: So, yeah, 100%. I agree. That's a great one. I think it is crazy when you look back at like, HubSpot's history as a company too. Salesforce was already the established dominant player. You had dynamics. And for a company to be like, oh, we're just going to go into the CRM market because, you know, why not? We're going to build a better product. And it's incredible, like how far that company has come and kind of the, the unique approach they've taken. So to hear her perspective both on that journey and then now in that position where she's seeing kind of the entire thing and ownership over it. I agree. Would be very, uh, very interesting and kind of enlightening. Uh, lunch? Absolutely.

Speaker B: But thank you so much for your time, Navil. I really appreciate it today.

Speaker A: Absolutely. Shubali, it's great to have you on the show. Thank you. It was a great discussion.

Speaker B: Thank you.

Speaker A: The Sales Compensation show is brought to you by Forma AI, the sales performance management platform that fully integrates sales planning with rapid scalable incentive compensation management. Our data platform brings together how you can plan and manage the entire lifecycle of territories, quotas and incentives. With global customers like Autodesk, Stryker and Hootsuite, we enable go to market teams to plan and deploy even the most complex SPM strategies at speed, taking you from idea to execution instantly. To learn more about form AI, visit our website site at Forma. Uh, AI. Hit the subscribe button and find more episodes of the show on Apple podcasts, Spotify and YouTube. Thanks for tuning in.