Ep. #7, Hiring and Compensation Strategies

Derek Draper: If you're doing your job as a salesperson effectively, they should be willing to commit to a year of working with you to prove out this value proposition. And along with that comes the ask to get that money up front, because as a startup we don't work for free.

Within two months we went from, I think, ten percent of our contracts being annual paid up front contracts to 85%.

If you know your product sells and you hire a salesperson and that person's not selling, then there's a problem with that salesperson, I would say.

I think there's always more people that could be interested in your product that don't know about it than there are people that actually know about your product and care about it.

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 Derek Draper of Pattern. We discuss hiring strategies, compensation, and deriving more value out of your CRM.

From Fisher and Wildfire to Pattern

Welcome everybody, another episode of Road to Growth. I'm joined here by Derek Draper, who's currently the CEO and one of the co-founders, correct, of Pattern?

Derek: That's right.

Yaron: Welcome, thanks for joining us. So we like to start these off a couple minutes just about yourself and how you kind of got to where you are today.

Derek: Great. Well, first of all, thank you very much for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. I'm excited to talk to you guys. So quick background on myself.

So I started my career at a company called Fisher Investments here in the Bay Area, and I spent four and a half years there doing all kinds of different sales positions, inside sales, outside sales, on both the B2B side and the B2C side. Also did sales management and sales operations.

And for me that was a great opportunity to understand what it means to be successful in selling from different perspectives, especially that Fisher as an organization is very well known for their sales and marketing abilities. And my time there gave me a great blueprint for kind of the next phase of my career, which ended up being the VP of sales at a company called Wildfire.

So I joined as the first salesperson and fourth employee at Wildfire back in July of 2009, and over the next three years built that organization from zero to over fifty million in annual sales and three hundred people across my organization of sales, services and operations.

And that's when we got acquired by Google, which was an exciting experience. I spent about a year managing the integration at Google and then ended up doing about nine months inside of Google X, doing some operational roles, at which point I decided to leave Google and got started with a couple colleagues from Wildfire on this new company, which is called Pattern, roughly a year ago. And we've been heads down working on that ever since.

Yaron: Awesome. So I take it then you are heading sales right now for Pattern, correct?

Derek: That's correct. I am the one and only salesperson at this point in time. So not a whole lot to report in terms of sales from Pattern just yet, but I can reflect back on my experience working at Fisher and Wildfire for sure.

Yaron: Awesome. So a lot of people listening to the podcast are in a similar position where they're either the ones leading sales or they don't classify themselves as a salesperson, but they are now in charge of growing their organization, at least until there is somebody there to take that position.

First, let's take this. Do you classify Pattern as more of B2B or B2C?

Derek: That's an interesting question. We think of ourselves right now as B-to-C-to-B. So we're developing a product meant for end users, but not really planning to have them pay for it. Planning to develop enterprise features on top of that that would get their managers or leadership to pay for it. So it's a little bit of a, it's very cliche to say this these days, but kind of a Slack-like model.

Yaron: Okay, interesting. So taking that model, because a lot of people normally in B2C is a very different type of sale than B2B, and you seem to have experience in both.

When you're looking to grow sales-wise, more so in a B2B environment, what kind of pieces are you drawing from when you're first getting started? Are you mostly just taking inbound? Do you have your outbound leads ready to go and you're just like, I know that this is the demographic I need to reach out to? What's kind of your first target when you're selling to people?

Derek: Well, I can share with you my experience so far at Pattern. The first step for me was really to just mine my network. It starts for me by reaching out to people and, you know, sharing with them the ideas that you're working on, the direction that you're going, and seeing who's interested in sort of riding along with you.

I think there's always more people that could be interested in your product that don't know about it than there are people that actually know about your product and care about it.

So sitting back and waiting for inbound leads to me is not always the best approach. I think, sure, you wanna set up more scaled marketing efforts to have a landing page and, you know, not prevent anybody from reaching out and saying they have some interest, but to me, especially here in Silicon Valley, being really aggressive, politely aggressive and diligent about, you know, reaching out to your network and even people that you've never met before to strike up a conversation is a huge advantage when it comes to creating a sales team or just being, you know, kind of an effective sales culture.

Yaron: Yeah, and were you doing the same thing at Wildfire when you were the first salesperson there?

Derek: When I joined Wildfire they had just done a marketing launch, and so they had a little bit of inbound inquiries coming in, and that sort of kept me going, or got me started, I suppose, right when I walked in the door. But, you know, not too long after that it became clear that there was so much opportunity out there of people that didn't know who we were that we needed to start reaching out.

And so we started hiring fairly aggressively and that was kind of the beginning of our massive outbound campaign. So the growth of Wildfire was built pretty much, I would say, you know, in large entirety by us taking action and reaching out to people proactively as opposed to waiting for them to, you know, come to us.

Yaron: Okay. And so you had, I guess, you and a couple salespeople who are making cold calls, or how did you choose who you're gonna target in your outbound campaigns?

Derek: I think we could have been, I mean, this was back in 2009. There's a lot more tools and a lot better data, you know, that you can buy today to have better kind of segmentation or understanding of your target market.

We were also a company that was selling social media tools to anybody that effectively wanted to market on social media, and it was a massive market. So we reached out to anybody and everybody.

And in the very beginning, we kind of had an open CRM where people could, quote unquote, register a name. We used to have people that would go to supermarkets and take a notepad and just write down the brand name of every company that they saw, and they'd go back to the CRM, if it wasn't taken, enter it, and then start calling. And that actually went a long way for us for a long time.

And then we had to eventually kind of get a little bit smarter about how we did that to make sure that as we added people, you know, there weren't too many folks sitting on massive lists of companies that weren't being followed up with, et cetera.

And then I would say later on in the company's development, actually my co-founder at Pattern was our head of sales operations at Wildfire, and we got a lot smarter about acquiring lists of companies in our target market and then basically building those into kind of territory plans and then giving our reps, you know, the ability to go after those.

But in the beginning, you know, we created a very opportunistic sales culture and we paid very high commissions, which I'm a big favor of, especially in the beginning. And we just let people, you know, go out there and attack whatever they felt they could. So we weren't really, you know, too concerned about exactly the right target market or whatever in the beginning. We just didn't have much of an idea what would resonate.

Commission-Heavy Pay

Yaron: So I wanna go back to something you said there, which is a CRM, but in regards to commission, we'll just kinda deviate real quick. The standard, I guess, is a fifty-fifty split for your account executives, 50% commission, 50% base. Did you guys stick with that model? Do you kind of play with that? How did you first structure it at Wildfire?

Derek: We were actually quite different than that. Our founders, who are unbelievable entrepreneurs and great people, by the way, they wanted to run the business in a lean fashion. And I knew that going into it. And so we just got creative.

We ended up paying people what today would seem like absolutely ridiculous salaries, kind of, you know, on the low end, and ridiculous commissions on the high end. And so it ended up working out that for people that were performing, it was probably like, you know, twenty-five percent base, seventy-five percent commission, or even in some cases fifteen eighty-five or, you know, twenty-eighty, somewhere in that range.

But we didn't have caps, we didn't have anything like that. I mean, basically it was open for people to close as much business as they could, and we had, you know, our top salespeople were making three hundred, four hundred thousand dollars a year back in, you know, two thousand nine, two thousand ten.

Yaron: So it's a pretty good incentive then, if most of your money's coming from commission, for you to go out and sell.

Derek: I mean, yeah, we basically gave people a sort of below market salary, but then gave them a six month ramp, what we called a ramp bonus, which was effectively trying to keep them at a standard of living for the first six months while they built up a book of business, and then expected their commissions to take over.

And, you know, in larger work, you're right in that I would say the average sort of sales plan is roughly, you know, call it 100-100 or 50-50 or however you want to, you know, mention it, basically one part base, one part commission. But that works in large organizations for many reasons, but in smaller organizations where you've gotta more quickly, you know, determine if people are gonna be successful or not, and you wanna reward your top performers, I find trying to overpay in terms of commission ends up working out better.

Especially, the one thing I would say, though, that you should really think about in an organization is making sure that your commissions are aligned with the success metrics of the company, right?

If it hurts to pay a salesperson a lot of money, if it hurts the business, then you don't have the right comp structure. You know, you should be happy if your salespeople are bringing in three, four, five X their goals, because it means if you've structured it right, the internals of the business are actually looking really great.

Yaron: Yeah. That's definitely a big one that a lot of people struggle with, and at least from my perspective, talking to various people in startups, they're always asking me, how do you comp SEs? How have you been comped in the past?

And for me, it just depends on how you want to incentivize your SE and what you want them to do. I don't think there's a perfect formula for it, unfortunately. So if there's any tips that you have for our listeners in terms of structuring that.

Asking for the Money Up Front

Derek: Yeah, so at Wildfire, you know, I don't think it was for any other reason other than we just hadn't spent a lot of time thinking about it. We started with monthly contracts, effectively.

Yaron: So, like a standard SaaS model?

Derek: Well, yeah, I think we asked for a one year commitment whenever we could get it. In the beginning, before we were kind of known, we would have to do all kinds of opt-out clauses or, you know, all this weird stuff that startups sometimes get into because, you know, businesses don't want to necessarily commit.

But in the beginning, you know, once we could finally get to year-long contracts, we asked for the money, we asked people to pay monthly, not really thinking anything of it. And then eventually, I can't remember who it was that told me that, you know, we should really ask for the money up front.

And I thought, okay, well, you know, there's no way that's gonna happen. And I, you know, talked to my sales team and they thought the same thing. They thought, oh, no customer's gonna want to pay up front, etc. But, you know, I thought, hey, why not? Let's go ahead and give it a shot.

So I think we ran a contest one month to give away some prize for the salesperson that got the most upfront deals, and nobody believed that it was even possible. And within like two months of that, so people started selling upfront deals is the moral of the story.

And within two months we went from, I think, ten percent of our contracts being annual paid upfront contracts to like eighty-five percent. Within like two or three months from that point.

It was literally just a positioning thing, and as a mental, it's like the Roger Bannister four-minute mile. As soon as somebody broke it, everybody else went, oh wow, this is possible. You just position them, this is an upfront deal. We get the money up front.

And I can't tell you how valuable that cash was to the growth of the business. We got to over fifty million in revenue on a capital base of less than ten million bucks. So we did it incredibly efficiently, and asking for that money up front was really critical.

So, you know, there's probably a number of people listening to this saying the same thing that I said in the beginning, like, oh, it's not gonna work, people don't wanna do it.

But I assure you, it works. You just have to position it. You have to have conviction.

And then of course not every single deal is going to be up front. You're going to have to be flexible on some deals. But if you're a good seller and you position it correctly, you can make it too, and it'll just extend your runway dramatically.

Yaron: Good. Yeah, that's definitely good information, because when I first started I was selling monthly deals, and then, you know, once you start closing really big annual deals up front, you're just kinda blown away at the size of these contracts, and it's usually more enterprise, so I wouldn't say you're gonna be closing a lot of upfront deals when you're still small, but if you're in a position to have a sales team with enough, you know, at least two to three people, you may start asking for large annual commits and at least getting paid up front, if not quarterly or biannually.

Derek: Yeah, I would say, you know, if you're doing your job as a salesperson and you're conveying the value proposition that your product brings to a given customer effectively, they should be willing to commit to a year of working with you to prove out this value proposition. And along with that comes the ask to get that money up front, because as a startup we don't work for free.

I think what you sometimes see is, you know, when ineffective sales processes have been run and the prospect is interested but maybe not completely sold, they have a lot more leverage, they can force terms that are unfavorable to a startup.

So to me it goes back to the way that you actually manage that deal and the way that you present your value proposition, as opposed to just, as we were guilty of the very early days of Wildfire, of showing up, throwing up, demoing, and then, you know, harassing someone to sign a contract, right?

That's not how you sell. You sell by understanding the needs of a business, bridging the gap between what those needs are and what your solution can do and really working to partner with that customer to provide value to them.

What to Watch in the CRM

Yaron: Definitely. And this takes us back to what I want to talk about earlier, was the CRM. Right, so now you're talking about the management of the sale, which a lot of people don't realize does take a lot of work. And it's not necessarily as easy as throwing everything on the spreadsheet. There's a lot of other metrics that go into it.

At least for me, the first key pieces that I'm looking at is the size of the company, who we're talking to and where they're positioned in the company, and what their pain point is, right? So for me, as a sales engineer, I want to know what your difficulties are so that I can demo to you the proper things that you need.

But you as a salesperson have a very different perspective as to what you want to know. You're more interested in the timeline, the budget, all these other various business pieces so that you can structure the deal or close it in a time frame that would help you and help them.

So from your perspective, you have a CRM in front of you, let's just take Salesforce, for example, as the most widely known one. What are you looking at on a day-to-day basis or a week to week basis in terms of understanding the business, and if it's growing or if it's kinda dipping down?

Derek: Sure. Just to clarify, are you asking as in I am the salesperson, or if I'm the VP of sales looking at a CRM?

Yaron: Let's start with the salesperson and then looking at it from a more high level perspective as the VP, because that's where you'll grow hopefully into, you know, once you close a few more deals.

Derek: Sure. Well, it's interesting that you asked the question from the perspective of the salesperson, because we're focusing a lot on that pattern, and what we find in talking to salespeople is that CRMs aren't necessarily designed to operate in the way that salespeople think about running their business. They tend to be more constructed around management concepts like forecasting, etc.

And so when we talk to reps, they don't often talk about spending lots of time in their CRM and that's how they figure out exactly, you know, what deals they're gonna close, et cetera. They typically, what they've got is a laundry list of things that they know they need to do, and that might be their calendar, it might be a sheet of paper on their desk. It might be things in their email, it might be some other to-do system.

But CRM is just oftentimes an afterthought for, you know, something they've gotta update once they take some sort of action, which we think is a big opportunity to, you know, create value for them. And that's something that we're thinking a lot about a pattern.

I would say your average salesperson, I mean, certainly they're going to Salesforce to look up contact information if I need to call someone or email someone, that, you know, it's a good repository for that. But beyond that I think the value of CRM can be hit or miss, also depending on the level of rigor in a given organization. You know, many organizations don't really value putting a lot of information into the system, and then, you know, in terms of the network, if, you know, many nodes aren't so strong, then, you know, salespeople often lose faith in going to the CRM to find the latest information because they know it doesn't exist there.

I'm more familiar, you know, my most recent experience with thinking about it from a VP's perspective. What I typically am looking at, you know, as you sort of pointed out, is basically just looking at the pipeline. There's a couple different metrics that I think are really important, or kind of categories of metrics.

One is just volume. So what's the width of the funnel? You know, do you have enough at every stage to believe you're going to hit your targets?

Velocity is how quickly are things moving down the funnel. So, you know, are your deals that are coming in, how long is it taking for them to get to the bottom of the funnel? Because there's things, specific actions you can take in order to be able to try to speed deals along.

And then the third kind of category of metrics is conversion, right? So are your deals moving through stages as you might expect them to?

And oftentimes that can be challenging because you find your reps just end up operating a whole deal and it's in stage one the whole time until you get a signed contract, and then it turns into a closed-won deal, or maybe the deal wasn't even an opportunity in Salesforce until they get a signed contract, right? Those are always the fun ones where you have zero visibility of them until the deal actually comes in. But in terms of metrics, that's what I would think about at a high level.

And then the other thing that we looked at a lot at Wildfire, that to me is kind of a vestige of what I learned from my days at Fisher, is just looking at activity. It's fairly straightforward and reasonable to track activity. So number of calls made, emails sent, meetings held, demos held, et cetera.

And that, in different types of organizations, can be a good proxy for how many cycles you're going through, and you can apply some forecasting methodology to sort of work that down the funnel and figure out what you might be able to close.

Beyond that, I think it's just important, if you're gonna be a highly effective sales organization, to make sure that you're driving activity. You know, salespeople, like every human on the planet, we can tend to be lazy sometimes. We can tend to take shortcuts.

And unless you're actively encouraging people to do more, push harder, compete against each other, bring in business for them and for the company, you know, sometimes you can look up and realize you just don't have enough conversations going on, and that's gonna make it really hard for you to hit your target.

Keeping Reps Active

Yaron: Yeah. So taking that and building on what you just said, you have your sales reps, right, who you want to keep motivated and will slack off from time to time. I don't know if slacking off's the right word, but for all intents and purposes, we'll sometimes take a day off or two, when you kind of want to keep them motivated.

Are there things that you've done in the past, or they're techniques that you've seen managers use that have worked pretty efficiently in making sure that their sales team stays active and on top of their deals on a day-to-day basis and doesn't kind of, like, let a few of them fall by the wayside?

Derek: Sure. I mean, there's a bunch of different ways to do this. I mean, I'm a very organized and structured thinker, and so I tend to have lots of to-do lists and those sorts of things, and that works for some salespeople. Other salespeople don't like to operate sort of that mechanically, if you will. And you can find some tools out there that will help you sort of stay on top of everything.

A couple big tips that I find are just making everything public. You know, the exposure system is incredibly powerful, right? So having leaderboards of activities, of performance, phone calls, whatever you want to track, making sure that that's public.

And I can't tell you how many times that I've seen sales reps motivated by, you know, being at the top of the board and wanting to stay there, or being at the bottom of the board and wanting to get off the bottom, because that's just not a comfortable place to be, as everybody knows.

The other thing that I would tell you is, and I think this is an area that we did well at Wildfire, we overinvested in sales operations resources. As I mentioned before, CRM can be, you know, not the greatest experience for a sales rep.

And so what we did is we invested pretty heavily in a sort of an internal consulting and engineering team called SalesOps that was very actively involved in sitting with reps to understand their pain points and figure out what technology or process or compensation or anything we could build to make their lives easier.

And I think as a leader, when you're asking your people to do things that they don't necessarily want to do or that aren't kind of part of the course of their normal everyday workflow, like logging information into Salesforce, it really helps for them to know that you're on their side and you're trying to give them something back, trying to make them more efficient as opposed to just asking them you know, to do this thing that is really not fun.

And in many organizations where you don't see that commitment, the sort of rigor of updating Salesforce, you know, unless it's checked daily with management, you know, it can kind of wane, and then that can dramatically impact the visibility you have on that given business or on the pipeline, because now you're just working with a smaller and smaller set of data and trying to understand you know, where you're gonna end up going.

The Founder as First Salesperson

Yaron: Right. So now we've talked about as if you already have a salesperson there for you, but for a lot of people, they still need to bring a salesperson into their company, or somebody who could at least take that burden off their shoulders and kind of move that along.

For you, you know, you understand sales. When you're growing your company, you know what to look for in a salesperson. A lot of times things don't work for whatever reason. Are there certain qualities or certain things that you look for in sales people that you want to bring on board to your organization?

Derek: That's a great question. In theory I should know what to look for, but times change, you know. There's a couple thoughts on that.

First of all, I think if you're running a small business or, you know, an early stage startup, I should say, I think it's critical as a founder or CEO to be your first salesperson and, call it, this is an arbitrary number, but bring your first ten customers on board.

Even if this isn't your forte, you haven't done sales before, sales is not rocket science. You need to be a good communicator as a leader and you need to be a good communicator as a salesperson.

And if your product is halfway decent, or if it's gonna make it, then I think you'll be able to sell at least ten customers, and I think that's important because, one, it gives you a baseline for understanding what's possible selling your product. And it also gives you first and front row access to hearing the objections that you're encountering on a daily basis. They're going to be incredibly valuable to drive your product roadmap or change your strategy.

If you were to go out and say, okay, I'm not a salesperson, you know, I think we have this product that we can sell, I'm gonna go hire somebody, unless you absolutely know you're hiring a rock star, you're gonna bring that person on board and you're pretty certainly very immediately gonna have some questions about, is this the right person?

And if you don't have a good baseline for understanding, you know, if you sold full time, what are you going to produce? And then you hired this person. If they're a professional salesperson, they should be better than you presumably, and that'll help you kind of understand and measure their performance, especially in relation to what you could do on your own.

You know, the other way I could think about this too is that, I mean, as a CEO your job is pretty stressful. There's a lot going on. But bringing in business is one of the most critical, if not the most critical, you know, and B2B businesses for sure, to be successful.

Even if, you know, you think about, okay, how can you scale your time? If you're doing all the sales now, that's obviously not scalable. You could go out and outsource to someone, you could go hire a salesperson to come in and hand that responsibility directly to them. Or you could just say, all right, well, what if I could spend less time prospecting or, you know, doing some of the demos or something else? Maybe you hire, you know, an SDR, or you hire a junior account executive that basically tees up the opportunities and still brings you along for kind of the closing sessions.

So you don't have to just necessarily think about it like all of a sudden you're gonna hire a salesperson and walk away from sales. I think you should, as a CEO, as long as you can, continue to stay involved, and there's ways that you can expand your capabilities by hiring kind of people that are really specialized, whether it be setting up conversations or kind of teeing up deals and demoing and then bringing you in at the right stage.

But getting back to the meat of your question, you know, the one thing that I look for a lot in hiring salespeople is self-awareness.

And I don't, you know, I've never heard anybody else say this, but I don't think it's completely unique. But for me, why it's really important is that selling is a skill that requires a lot of tweaking and adjusting and being open to feedback and all that sort of thing.

And people that are aware of, you know, where their strengths are, where their weaknesses are, where they need to work to get better, end up kind of getting to the right spot more quickly.

I mean, I've been in a ton of interviews where you can have a very slick talking salesperson that you think is gonna be great when you put in front of a customer's, but you hire them and for whatever reason he or she just is a cultural disaster, or they don't have the motivation, or they come with a playbook that doesn't work for your business.

I think having self-awareness, being open to learning new things and changing and understanding, you know, what their personal kind of developmental roadmap looks like is critical, because at least for me, working with that person is much easier than working with someone that's set in their ways or thinks that they have all the answers.

Who to Hire First

Yaron: And so you bring up a good point, and another follow-up question to the hiring portion. Who do you hire first? Do you hire a VP or somebody who can kind of manage a sales team? Or do you just hire a salesperson who could at least get the kinks out, show you the strengths and weaknesses that you need to hire for, and then kinda go from there?

Derek: Like any question, I mean, it's sort of, the answer depends on where you are, what kind of business you are, but I would say for the, you know, if I think about myself at Pattern or, you know, a similar company that's at its early stage, I think you could go out and hire a VP. I mean, that's effectively what I was hired in at Wildfire as a first salesperson.

But I think that model is kind of risky, in that you could hire somebody, and if you think about it, if you're gonna hire a VP, you're hiring, you know, a chief who's gonna come in and wanna basically, you know, build a team around him or her. And that's gonna cost money and that's gonna cost time.

And if you happen to pick the wrong person, you probably won't know it for six to nine months at the earliest. And even when you do figure that out, now you've most likely got a lot of collateral damage of people that that person thought were really good who may or may not be really good, that are also part of that whole mix.

So what I tend to advise startups to do is, you know, it depends on, as a CEO, how much time you have to devote to selling. If you really don't have a lot of time to devote to selling, I would look for like a manager slash director level candidate, somebody that has good management experience, but has also been a good salesperson, is not opposed to rolling up their sleeves and jumping in and selling deals, because that's what's most critical in the beginning, but they can also put the very initial processes, selling processes and methodology in place, hire some folks and, you know, get a team going.

If you've got a little bit more time to devote to selling, I would say start with, you know, an AE or two and an SDR and build that team. Manage that team yourself and, you know, start creating some pipeline and seeing if you can kind of develop a repeatable process. And again, you could be that sort of ace in the hole that is gonna come in on bigger deals or more important deals and, you know, using the founder magic basically, or the CEO magic, kind of get a deal done.

Yaron: And so last question on that then, when you're hiring, would you rather hire a few and then let the cream of the crop kinda isolate themselves out, or is it better to just kinda hire a couple and be like, all right, well, you guys are here, do your best and we'll see what happens?

Derek: That's a good question. I mean, it's always nice to have data points. Creating competition, healthy internal competition is always really, really good. It depends on your funding situation.

I mean, if you could hire three AEs and one SDR, like, to me that's a great start. You know, that's about the combination that I typically use, like one SDR to about three account executives. Even if you could start with two, I think that still gives you an A-B for your account executives to figure out, like, all right, who's really motivated, who's gonna bring in business.

If you hire one salesperson, and this goes back to my earlier comment, I mean, if you know your product sells and you hire a salesperson and that person's not selling, then there's a problem with that salesperson, I would say.

If you don't know your product really sells and you hire one salesperson, you're not gonna be sure. You're gonna wonder, you might think it's the product, you know, the product's fine, but then you think that salesperson's bad and you might fire them and hire someone else, and then not really realize that you actually have a product problem, not a sales problem.

So I think the more people, the more data points you can have, the better.

Yaron: Awesome. Well, Derek, thank you very much for being with us. There's a lot of great information for our listeners to take home, everything from a hiring strategy to commission and how to compensate your salespeople, but also making sure that your salespeople are giving you enough information and feedback so you know what's working and what isn't. So thank you again, Derek. Really appreciate you being here.

Derek: Yeah, my pleasure. Thank you very much for having me, Yaron.

For anybody listening to the podcast, I'm happy to answer questions directly if you guys are interested in reaching out to me. I love talking about this sort of stuff and I'm happy to help.

My email is Derek, D-E-R-E-K, at getpattern.com. Once again, Derek, D-E-R-E-K, at getpattern.com. And I will make a quick plug for Pattern. So we're still sort of in stealth mode, but we're spending a lot of time thinking about how to build technology for salespeople to make them more productive, and we are looking for organizations that are interested in partnering with us at this point to, you know, act as, in many ways, their outsourced operations team.

We get a lot of value in terms of learning about the challenges that they're facing. And so I would love to have you guys go to our website, sign up, or reach out to me directly if you're interested in checking out the product or learning more about what we do.

Yaron: Thank you very much for coming on board, Derek. 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.