Ep. #5, Engineering’s Role in Sales

Marcy Campbell: Finding out who your buyer is and who's not your buyer is important. You can build good sales teams, but if you don't really have a product to sell, I can only sell it a couple of times.

If you're willing to experiment and you're willing to blame the experiment and not blame the people, you create an environment where you can grow and you can move faster than most folks.

You never win a deal on your own because you don't want to lose it on your own.

Yaron Sadka: Hi, I'm Yaron Sadka, senior sales engineer at Runscope. You're listening to Road to Growth. A podcast about startup sales organizations brought to you by Heavybit, a nine-month program for developer-facing startups.

Road to Growth is a bi-weekly series that breaks down SaaS sales organizations one piece at a time, from the first person to kick off sales at a company all the way down to the partnership and cohesion with the marketing and product teams, we'll take you through what it takes to build a powerful, fine-tuned sales organization.

If you're interested in being a guest, have a topic for us to discuss, or a role you'd like us to dive into, send an email to roadtogrowth at heavybit.com. In this episode, I'm joined by Marcy Campbell, Senior VP of Sales at Qubole. We discuss how to place your sales organization in a winning position, grow to multimillion dollars in revenue, and the importance of a strong, well-run engineering team supporting you.

Twenty Years in Early-Stage Sales

Hello everyone. Thanks again for joining us. Today we have Marcy Campbell, SVP of Qubole. Thanks for joining us, Marcy. Appreciate you being here.

Marcy: Thanks for having me.

Yaron: We always like bringing in people that have kind of seen the industry for a long time and their learnings. You're actually the first person who is not a CEO that's on our show. So it'll be great to get a little more sales from you versus our past guests that are, you know, more high level and kind of running their organization.

And so the way we start these things is have you give us two to three minutes of who you are and how you got to where you are today as the SVP of sales.

Marcy: Sure. So I've been in early stage startups for about 20 odd years. The smallest startup I ever worked with had no revenue and no customers. We were able to bring that to an IPO about three years later.

So I've done everything from basically cold calling customers to building out pipelines, to building out sales teams, to doing business development, channel development, support, customer success, and I am a true believer in building things behind yourself. So being able to stretch yourself in all different kinds of areas and raising your hand and then asking the organization to build behind you.

Yaron: And so your experience in sales, what companies have you worked for and how long have you been there?

Marcy: Yeah. So I started my career with IBM. So I'm a little different than most of the folks in the Valley who start out with inside sales. I actually don't have an inside sales background.

When I joined IBM, they put you through an 18-month program where they flew you to Dallas and Atlanta and they made you cold call and do role-playing code for eighteen months.

Yaron: Oh, so you had to learn how to code as a salesperson.

Marcy: Yes. Before you could actually talk to a customer. So I didn't get to talk to a customer for almost two years at IBM. And then when I did, they put me in the area that I was probably the weakest, which was communications.

So selling TCP/IP and communication gear. So I ended up starting very technical in my career. I had seven SEs and my account was 9X. I worked with IBM for about eight years, then I moved to Lotus prior to them being bought by IBM.

I ran the New York office and then IBM bought Lotus and basically I was back at IBM. So then I started to do startups. So at that point I started to work for smaller companies.

I worked at Netscape. I ran industry sales. They actually moved me to California.

I moved to Kana Communications, which right now it's sort of a combination of different companies, but we were the original Kana. I was employee 11. And that was the first real startup that I had done. It was a Benchmark Capital company. We took it to three billion dollar exit.

I was an entrepreneur in residence for a while for a small, well, billion dollar fund. So I sat on boards before I actually presented to boards, which is really not recommended. Because what happened is when I started presenting to boards, I realized I was the person in the room that was asking all the stupid questions.

So I have been involved in probably eleven startups. I've had three exits that have been significant and a bunch of really small exits. I've done a lot of consulting with a lot of small little companies.

Let's see, who would you know? Vontu. I worked with Engine Yard for five years. At Engine Yard I ended up coming in when we were doing about three million in revenue. We drove that to about thirty before I moved over to business development where I ran global alliances.

So at Engine Yard I ran sales, business development, I ran marketing for a while. I wouldn't recommend that. And I also ran customer success and part of support.

Yaron: Okay, so you've seen the whole gamut then.

Marcy: Yeah, I have a lot of respect for CEOs. It's a tough job. You know, you don't have any friends and basically you have to make a lot of hard decisions on your own with a lot of advice from, you know, below, next to you and your peers, and also above you with the board.

What Growing Companies Share

Yaron: So you've really been in a position to see the enterprise and what it does successfully as well as the successes of a startup and how agile it can be.

So you take Engine Yard or any of these companies really that you've worked for, you know, they're in the few millions, 10 millions, whatever it is, and you grow that 10X or however big you get it. What kind of characteristics do these companies share that you've seen, at least when you were there and you were starting out, that you can kind of pinpoint to and say, you know what, any company that's going to go and grow that much has these certain things to it?

Marcy: Sure. You know, I think the interesting thing for me when I look at a company is, is there real technology there? So I tend to work with engineers. I love engineers. I think they're really bright and they do magic.

And so the ones that I've worked well with believe that sales folks also do magic, but in a different way. By that what I mean is everybody's pulling the sled in the same direction, right? So we're very goal oriented. We can move very, very fast.

We're agile in our thinking. And I look for organizations that have two qualities. They're transparent and they're experimental. And those two pieces I think create a lot of room for growth.

So if you're willing to experiment and you're willing to blame the experiment and not blame the people, I think what happens is you create an environment where you can grow and you can move faster than most folks. You can make decisions faster.

Yaron: And is this, when you're interviewing or, you know, when you're looking at a company, is this something you can pinpoint very quickly or does this take a couple months for you to figure out what kind of draws you to say, you know what, this engineering team or this company has this together and I can work with us?

Marcy: You know, it's interesting, I'll give you an example with Qubole, right? So I met the CEO of Qubole, Ashish Thusoo, on a picnic bench at SoMa in South Park.

I was supposed to meet him at Small and I was late and I wasn't even thinking about joining his company and I kind of was thinking I'd blow him off and I went and I got a salad and I said, let's go sit at this bench and started asking him who he was and he's like, oh yeah, we built the Facebook platform.

He was talking about his partner and he was talking about building a world-class engineering team. And I just got it. And I don't know how to explain that to people, but it was a lot of chemistry. I mean I looked at him and I said, oh, I can build a good sales team around engineering.

It's hard to build in front. You can build good sales teams, but if you don't really have a product to sell, I can only sell it a couple of times before people catch you, right? And you want to sell something that you're proud of.

So, you know, the cool thing about what Ashish and Joy had done is they built, you know, a company about thirty people who had built this amazing product, but they didn't have any market acceptance. There were a lot of folks out there that had piled a bunch of money into big... Qubole does big data as a service. And so basically it piled a bunch of money into big data.

You know, there were other competitors out there that had raised, you know, 800 million dollars and, you know, these guys had raised seven. And so what I needed to do was go in and look at the company and see if I liked the other players in the company, regardless of, you know, whether they were peers or whether they were gonna work for me.

Like, were these good people? Were they committed to the company? Were they committed to winning? And I think that's what I look for, right? People have a point of view.

And the engineers, are they committed to the company and are they committed to winning? And they're committed to building an excellent product. That to me was the most important thing.

You know, my job early on was to come in and test the market. You know, if you have nineteen customers and they're all over the place, you don't know who in the market is gonna buy. And so finding out who your buyer is and who's not your buyer is important.

Yaron: And how much did you know about big data before joining?

Marcy: Nothing. But the thing is, I did know platform as a service. So where it dovetailed for me is I had been selling in the cloud for five years. So Engine Yard was a platform as a service.

It was not a multi-tenant service, but we had relationships with the Amazon and Microsoft and Google already. I understood what the sales cycle was. It was a pay-as-you-go model. It was very similar. So there were a lot of learnings that I didn't have to do by walking into this company.

I knew I wanted to be involved in a big technical company and my learning curve was really small because I knew what EC2 was and S3 was, I knew what Redshift was, I knew what Kinesis was.

Yaron: Yeah, it definitely helps.

Marcy: Yeah. What I didn't know is what's the difference between a terabyte and a petabyte. Right. So I had to learn those things. But that was, you know, that was math.

Yaron: Right, right. That's not the hard stuff to pick up as a salesperson, to really understanding the market and knowing if you can direct the company in the right way and kind of growing it up.

Red Flags

So for you really to take the helm of a company, you want a strong engineering team behind you, you essentially want the wind, right? If you're in a boat, you can put the sails up, you just need to make sure that the wind is behind you.

Are there any kind of red flags that you've seen from companies that make you say, you know what, I really would have enjoyed this, but you just don't have this together?

Marcy: Yeah, I mean I've done a lot of interviewing over the last couple of years, especially when I was an entrepreneur in residence. There were a lot of companies that wanted me to come in and run sales for them. And so I got to see a lot of companies, how they were being built.

If an engineering team thinks they know how to sell already, that's a big red flag. Because I really don't know how to sell your product until I'm in there trying it.

And I know how to sell, but the way I sold at Engine Yard was not the way I sell here at Qubole. And the way I sold at Netscape wasn't the way I sold at Engine Yard.

So I think if you meet an engineering team where it's like, well, we built a great product and of course everybody in the market's gonna accept it, you know, I'm not sure you need me. Right? I mean, okay. Or you should go ahead.

You know, the other things are, you know, when you're interviewing with folks, if you get different opinions about where the market's headed. So if you have people on, especially in the founding staff, who are like, okay, I think we're gonna go after the mid market, and somebody else is saying, well, no, actually we're gonna go after the enterprise, that's a worrisome sign. It's like, okay, where do I start first? And then part of the early stage sales job is a PM job.

Right. So I go talk to customers. I figure out, you know, are you a customer of ours? Are you someone who has a need?

Can I bring that back to engineering? Can I ask them if you could build this little thing, I could sell more of this stuff?

And they say, oh yeah, Marcy, we know what you're talking about. You know, or they tell your team, you know, yeah, this is great. Let's build these features in. So you get a voice at the table.

And I wanted to see that when I'm interviewing, right? Like how interested in feedback is the product team? Because, you know, it's the point on the arrow when you go into market is the sales team, right? Especially an early stage sales team.

Yaron: And so are you more desiring just a conversation or are you actually hoping that they take 50, 80, 90% of your recommendations and actually build them in?

Because, you know, for me it's a discussion, right? I'm a sales engineer. For me it's like, hey, we have a lot of customers asking for this, it would really help. And then I get feedback from the engineers of how long it would take.

Marcy: Exactly.

Yaron: And all these other details that I now factor in.

Marcy: Yeah. It's about prioritization, right? So I'm a believer in A and B priorities. I only work on A's. Right? So when B's become A's, I work on them.

And so I understand the weight a salesperson puts on engineering. I've had enough experience and I've been close enough to enough CTOs and VPs of engineering to know that, for example, going into Japan right now would not be a good idea because it would put a lot of weight on the company from a website perspective, from, you know, just changing our literature, from just managing the language, right? Even though one of our competitors is in Japan and they're in there big, I'm like, well, let me fight somewhere else.

Right? So the first thing that I did when I went into Qubole was look at what were the product benefits. And so I talked to some of our customers and asked them what they thought and had them tell me. You know, I was really lucky because one of our largest customers now was one of our earliest customers.

And when I met him and I said, well, what do you think about the product? He looked at me and said, I found the new love of my life. And I'm like, okay, so what else do you need?

Right. And he told me, gave me a list of features. I brought them back and then it's a trade-off.

Then it's a discussion around, well, how quickly can we get it to market? And what is it going to take to develop and how big is that market? And are there other players out there who will do this?

And those are hard discussions, right? Because you might have to walk away from a market that seems really big, but you can't get there right away. So you might have to go after low hanging fruit to get more money in the door and more customers.

And that's what we did. I mean we've grown Qubole tenfold in customers and 300% in a year. And the reason that we did that was because I also went and called people who didn't buy and asked them, okay, why didn't you buy the product?

And I heard some disturbing things. I heard, you know, there was a young sales team there at the time. I heard, well, we didn't get enough attention in the sales model, you know, the sales engagement. That's a bad thing. I own that, right?

So we gotta change that. But I also heard things like, I'm not your customer. I'm like, why? And they're like, well, we don't have massive amounts of data.

We don't have a cloud. I'm like, oh yeah, my product only runs on the cloud. It doesn't run on-prem. So I shouldn't be selling to you.

Right. But people weren't doing that. They were sort of scattershotting and going after anybody who looked like they could have big data.

You know, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google are doing a great job selling the cloud. I don't need to do that.

Yaron: Right. Which is nice.

Marcy: Right. But I can go where the cloud is.

COMSA: Qualify Everything

So what we do is we set up some qualification criteria. And we came up, it's called COMSA, right? It's like, and I drill it into my sales guys. It's like, do you know COMSA?

It's cloud. You know, do you have a public cloud? You do use an object store? Right? You know, is it massive amounts?

Is it structured and unstructured, and do you have a need for ad hoc querying?

So if you have three of those five, I can play. Okay. Right? If those first three are no, I walk.

Yaron: So you're qualifying a lead before you

Marcy: We qualify everything. Right? So it's more rifle shooting than it is, you know, spray and pray kind of thing.

But what it did was, the bet I made was that the cloud platform, so I created a battlefield where, you know, if I engage against a competitor, I'm gonna engage on that battlefield, and that battlefield's gonna be framed by those five questions.

And what I was able to do was take those five questions, flip them around, and they became our value proposition. They're my elevator pitch. Right? So now I can say, you know, what does Qubole do? It allows you to do ad hoc queries, right, unstructured and unstructured data against massive amounts at high volumes, in an object store that's distributed, with all the value of the cloud.

Right. So I just flipped it. And so I taught people how to do that for qualification. So by the time something got into a pipeline, I knew I was gonna win it.

Yaron: That's great. I have never heard of that and that's awesome for kind of structuring an elevator pitch for any company that's looking to kind of put their two second, three second pitch together, especially for me because I have to take a technical product and put it into layman's terms for many people.

Marcy: Right.

Yaron: That's my quote unquote skill that I get paid for.

Marcy: Is it awesome?

Yaron: It is a lot of fun. But at the same time, just like you said, it's not always easy, and to have a kind of model to do that, that's pretty good information there.

Marcy: Yeah, I think that's really super important because one of my board members told me at the beginning of last year, when we were doing planning and we were trying to figure out like how much we could sell and we had no data, basically he said next year all you're gonna be doing is hiring and training.

And that really hit me because what you can't do is, you know, you can't come in and hire someone because they built a billion-dollar business if you haven't gotten your first million, right? And so the same thing is I can't go plan for next year before I've actually executed on this year, but I gotta keep it in the side of my head.

So it was like, how do I get people who are not deeply technical to be able to qualify this product where I can get enough breadth in the marketplace? Right? So I have to take people, you know, I could spend a lot of time explaining what big data is a service in Hive and Spark and Pig and Presto and what these engines do, or I could give them very quick instructions on how to talk about our value, how to identify a customer, how to get us in the conversation and drop bombs for your competitors at the same time.

Seed the Objections First

The last thing that I did, which I think is, I did this at Engine Yard. I also did this pretty much I think since my days at Netscape or Lotus.

I listen to what the customers tell me, what questions they ask, because usually they're being asked because they've talked to your competitor.

And Qubole is in an unbelievably competitive space. And I don't think I've lost a deal since the beginning of the year because we know what our competitors are saying about us by the questions they asked. And so I seed that first.

So I tell my customers, hey, you know what, you're gonna hear this. And you're gonna hear that about us, right? And so when somebody comes in and says those words, it basically sounds like a sales pitch.

Yaron: You should go into politics the way you're kind of talking to your clients.

Marcy: You know, I love the customer engagement and I really care about our customers. I really love this company. You asked about like the things I look for.

You know, is there a great culture? Do they care about their people? Right? You know, are people sticking around? Like what's the turnover in engineering especially?

And, you know, is it inclusive? Right? Do they celebrate the wins? Do they hammer on the losses? You know, those are things that you want to know.

I used to tell the sales guys, you never win a deal on your own because you don't want to lose it on your own, right?

Yaron: Definitely not.

Marcy: Yeah. So you can't do it without the rest of the team.

Hiring Behind the Process

Yaron: Yeah. So you talk about a team, and a big thing for startups is hiring. It's a really hard thing to do, especially when you don't know the kind of portion of the business that you're looking to hire.

So for a lot of startups, they don't know sales that well. You bring somebody in, hopefully a manager, somebody who can kind of grow that team, or you bring in Marcy, and Marcy knows how to do all this stuff. So for you, what's your hiring strategy to make sure you now have an A-team behind you that can help you grow and make sure you're hitting your million dollar marks?

Marcy: Yeah, I think, you know, you're never gonna be a hundred percent on your hiring. So, you know, I don't do that, but I think the big thing for me is I have to go through the process first to understand what it is.

Right. So what I did, I inherited a couple of people at Qubole. I did the same at Engine Yard and, you know, I went out and talked to the customers and went through a sales cycle. So we closed two or three customers.

I did it myself. I went through and I'd closed a big deal which was already in place, but they needed to do, you know, a three year commitment. And then I had another customer that we couldn't close, we finally got it closed. So I got to see what it was and what that effort was from beginning to end.

And I always tell my sales guys when they join, you're not going to understand the value of our product until you actually go through the sales cycle. Because then you're going to understand, you know, all the piece parts and who needs to be involved.

A couple of things happened by doing that. One is we were selling to the wrong person. So what I realized was because of the five questions I ask, and the first three are really technical, I can't go ask the VP of Analytics those questions because he's gonna say I don't know.

So now I've got an elongated sales cycle. Right. So I might as well go to the VP of engineering first and ask him. And if he's in the cloud, then have him sponsor me into the VP of data analytics.

So what we did was we created a formula that was repeatable. It was a flywheel. And I went through that twice and then I went and looked for salespeople.

And when I interviewed them, you know, what I look for are success. Now in this valley, you know, people have success and they have failures, right? And so it's, what is the reaction to failure?

And, you know, how did they manage to that failure and create a success out of that? What are they looking to do? You know, what are their customer relationships? How do they work with other people?

And I wish there was a formula. What we found was a bit of a formula for Qubole, but I gotta tell you it's different salespeople than we hired at Engine Yard.

In Engine Yard, our customers hated salespeople, right? They were developers. They don't like us at all. And so we created what we called PANDAs, which were polite agents of non-destructive assimilation.

And those guys basically looked like our customers. They were out of school with a computer engineering degree and they helped our customers use our product. And so they took them through the trial process and became more of an advocate for, so they helped people buy, because developers don't want to get sold to.

Right. At Qubole I sell to a different audience. I sell to a VP audience, a senior, and they're okay with that.

They're okay with being sold to. Right. So you don't have that same extremeness.

But you have to manage one. You know, I wouldn't sell the same way I'm doing at Qubole at the next company. I'd hope not. You just have to figure it out, right? You have to be smart enough to, and if I'm wrong, then I'm wrong.

Like we thought we were a mid-market until we closed a lot of big companies. And what we found out is we're really anywhere the cloud is. Right. So as cloud gets adopted, so targeting mid-market didn't make a lot of sense for us.

Yaron: Yeah. That flexibility is real nice.

Marcy: Yeah, you have to be smart and flexible and you have to be able to be wrong.

Like, I was on the phone with one of my guys yesterday in Denver and he was yelling at me. And I said to him, you're yelling at me. And he said, oh, I'm really sorry. And I, we're just passionate about things, right?

But I want people who are gonna yell at me and tell me I'm wrong because that's how we get better as a team. Right. And so that's really important to lay that foundation that, you know, you can be tough and you can be headstrong, but you can't wanna be right.

Yaron: So I think the big one that I've heard at least is you can be cocky, but you can't be arrogant, and that'll kinda hopefully drive you forward in sales because you do have to have confidence when you walk into a room and kind of control the sale. But if you're arrogant, you're gonna end up losing those deals because you think too highly of yourself.

Marcy: Yeah, arrogance and stupidity is a bad combination.

Self-Serve and Enterprise

Yaron: So we're kind of getting towards the tail end. I really want to ask one last piece because a lot of people listening in are hopefully trying to hit bigger marks.

How do you manage two different verticals like you did at Engine Yard, where you do have the self-service model and then you also have the enterprise where you need to have salespeople kind of focusing and honing in on the enterprise clients, but self-serve can kind of run on its own, but you can't forget about it or it'll just kind of fizzle out your enterprise clients?

Marcy: I think, you know, at some point in the life cycle of a sales organization, you get your board who talks to you about cost of sales, right? So you're like, okay, what's the best way for me to go after a market?

At Engine Yard, when I got there, we were selling managed services, you know, it was data center stuff. And so we had a lot of data center managed service sales guys. That morphed into more inside sales because we found out that we could sell cloud services over the phone.

But it was still a very technical sale. So we had to get these PANDAs involved very early on in the process.

We then started to work through systems integrators who actually had access to these larger customers, a lot of the Ruby devs, a lot of the Ruby community leaders also were building big products for large companies and they would bring us in. So that was just a different way we went to market. We'd built sort of a partner organization that managed them.

Managing both of those organizations can get difficult because you have to pay them differently and you have different compensation plans and different go-to-markets. You know, early on you should pay people for everything. And then you have to bifurcate at some point because the company can't afford it.

You know, what we found at Qubole is that people really don't buy big data on the web, right, with a credit card. But we do have customers who buy it with a credit card. It's just they spend a lot of money every month with us, right?

And at some point I'm expecting them to call me up and say, hey, why am I paying list price? I want to renegotiate our deal. And that's happened. So you need people who can do that, who can negotiate.

Like, I need a stronger negotiation team now than I ever did at Engine Yard, because it was really about onboarding at Engine Yard. It was a different process. So if you're looking at the overall sales cycle, just generate interest, needs analysis, you know, feature advantage benefit, and negotiate and close, I need to negotiate and close more because we're rifle shooting at Qubole.

I need that talent more. But that said, I'm starting to see small customers come in and I want to manage them through an inside channel. So I'm starting to build that out, but I'm doing it as a secondary thing. I think it's an art, not a science.

Yaron: It's definitely more of an art, at least from my couple years in sales, is there's no two customers are alike and no two deals are alike, and if you can win more than you lose, then you're probably doing pretty well.

Marcy: Yeah, I think that, you know, there's a million ways a deal falls apart and there's only one way it gets done, right?

So I think I look for people who like sales and the sales process, but people have different skills. I find a lot of people in Silicon Valley have great inside sales skills and are just really starting to learn the enterprise world. I find a lot of BD people can do enterprise sales because they're used to big, big deals.

But I don't think there's any magic to it. We're gonna scale this year at Qubole. And so the problems that I'm dealing with are different than the problems I dealt with last year.

What I told one of my SEs who came in and was talking about problems for the future, I'm like, those are problems for the future. I'm not there yet. You know, when we get there, we'll address them.

I don't want to paint myself in a corner on those problems. So I've got to be aware of them. Right. But I can't focus on them now.

Yaron: Understandable. Yeah, no, it's great, and I think we've had a great discussion here. I've learned a lot at least myself from twenty or thirty minutes here. And I hope that our listeners do as well. So thank you again, Marcy, for coming by.

Marcy: No, thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. You guys make me feel very comfortable.

Yaron: And good luck with growing out the new team for you.

Marcy: No good salespeople sending my way.

Yaron: That's all we have time for today. Questions? Feedback? Contact me at roadtogrowth at heavybit.com. Thanks again to Heavybit for sponsoring our program.

To learn more about Heavybit's nine-month program for developer-facing startups, visit heavybit.com. And while you're there, make sure to check out their library. It's packed with great educational talks from developer company founders and industry leaders. Thanks again for joining us. Have a great week.