← Revenue Builders
Revenue Builders
How Revenue Leaders Scale Beyond Hero Sellers with Jason Forget, CRO Behind Multiple Startup-to-Scale Journeys
01:07:27
Jason Forget, President and CRO of Cockroach Labs, shares lessons from building revenue organizations from the earliest startup stages through large-scale growth, explaining why sales motions must continuously evolve as companies scale. The conversation explores the role of RevOps as a strategic advisor to leadership, the importance of building a strong middle class of sellers, hiring for adaptability and coachability, and creating cultures where problems surface early.
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- [00:00]
Jason Forget
The number one priority of RevOps is to be the trusted advisor to the business, the trusted advisor to sales leadership. If you want to help sales leadership, be great coaches and do the proper inspection and help teams prioritize. Be their trusted advisor. Help them see the business, help them view the metrics and the KPIs and be out ahead. Don't wait, you know, until you're asked why the pipeline is lumpy or why did it jump up by 100% week over week. Like you should inform leadership, like get ahead of it that come Monday or Friday, like hey, this is what I saw in the business. Here are the leading indicators that are blinking red lights or green lights, whatever they are, number one priority, be the trusted advisor. Your job is to enable sales productivity.
- [00:50]
Podcast Host (Narrator)
Welcome to the Revenue Builders Podcast, a weekly show featuring B2B sales leaders and executives. Hosted by five time CRO John McMahon and Force Management co founder John Kaplan, the show takes guests in the barrel behind the scenes with the people who've been there, done that and seen the results. Revenue Builders covers best practices for scaling and growing your business while sharing the pitfalls to avoid. Welcome to Revenue builders with John McMahon and John Kaplan. Today they sit down with Jason Forget, president and CRO of Cockroach Labs. Jason brings a unique perspective from his career building and leading revenue teams. He shares how his early foundation in finance, revops, process metrics and customer facing execution shape the way he thinks about predictable revenue growth, sales leadership and scaling behind a few heroic top performers. They talk scaling enterprise sales motions in open source and PLG environments, why sales motions have to evolve at every stage of growth and how leaders can create a stronger middle class of sellers. Here we go.
- [02:01]
John Kaplan
So Jason, you mastered basically taking open source technologies that developers use for free, like when you're at Redis and CockroachDB and you turn that into developer groundswells and which really resulted in like multimillion dollar enterprise deals. Can you just talk a little bit about the methodology and how you do that?
- [02:26]
Jason Forget
Yeah, no, definitely. It was, you know, it was sometimes a double edged sword in the sense that it sometimes created a false sense of like security especially with our AES because on one hand you're excited, right? There's already usage. It's, it's similar to like when enterprise companies try to use PLG motions. It's very similar. It gives you this kind of false sense of like oh, they love the product and it's true, they love it, they're excited. The problem is that often developers are very important and they solve important problems, but they're tactically fixing or building applications and things they're not ultimately solving for the larger problems that organizations are trying to achieve in terms of scaling solving a business problem, solving a cost problem, solving things that executives think about.
- [03:16]
John Kaplan
Yeah. Revenue, profitability, risk. Exactly.
- [03:19]
Jason Forget
Yeah. We were selling to a very prominent business, retail, with the Gap in San Francisco, and the developers loved Redis and they were solving all these types of problems and everything, but we weren't getting traction. And we said, what are we trying to solve and what does it mean monetarily for the business? And what we found out was it was an amazing statistic, is when you fill your shopping cart and it deletes everything in the shopping cart, 80% of people, if it empties on you, will not go back and refill the shopping cart.
- [03:53]
John McMahon
I don't, I don't go back.
- [03:55]
Jason Forget
Yeah. Who, who would. Right?
- [03:56]
John Kaplan
Like.
- [03:56]
Jason Forget
Or you're just like, you know, I'll come back later. And then you don't. So you could extrapolate an 80% reduction in the shopping cart, not filling times with the average shopping cart. And you come up with a number and you say, hey, who can give me the right conversation? Who can I speak to that says, what's this worth to you? Like, if I can solve this problem for you at scale and be secure and be compliant and meet your regulatory requirements and help you sleep at night, because you're not going to go down on Black Friday because I'm going to be your throat to choke. Like all of these things was where the real magic was. So it was great to get that, that groundswell and that open source adoption, but you had to navigate into that conversation and have that, that business outcome conversation. And that's, that's how you would get even, you know, these big, you know, these big deals. And that's.
- [04:43]
John Kaplan
How do you get from that technical win, let's call it, because a couple developers are using the product to, and let's call one of them as a technical champion, but they're not really a business champion, like you said. So how do you, how do you get from this technical champion to the business champion to get you up high enough where you can talk about the effect that it has on revenue and profitability.
- [05:10]
Jason Forget
Yeah. So we would have to build groundswell within the organization, you know, in terms of not just adoption in a singular area of the business, but in multiple groups and building the noise within the organization to get that attention. And I always would joke with the team, you know, we have our AES and I remind the SEs, I'm like, you know, the SE S is sales, right? It's not sit in the back and wait for the poc. Like what lunch and learns are you doing? What are you doing out there? Like, you, you, you got a dinner budget. Take people out to dinner or lunch, like, and, and build that groundswell. Because then we could, you know, enable our champion, our true champion, to act as a champion and get us that meeting up, up upstream, you know, in, in the organization, really develop a champion. Not a cheerleader, a lot of cheerleaders, a lot of people that loved us, but like, people that will, like, will go do something for us to get us that introduction higher up in the organization.
- [06:11]
John Kaplan
You, you said a couple things there. One, define for people what you mean by a groundswell. And then also talk about, you know, build the noise. Talk about what you mean by build the noise. Yeah, sure.
- [06:22]
Jason Forget
So the groundswell is. It's great when you have one team in a large Fortune 1000 organization using your product, but when you have like five dispersed teams all using it, that. That creates a groundswell in the organization, which matters. I was on a plane once and sit next to CIO of one of the large telcos and just coincidentally had on the screen a slide. It said, you know, redis is part of the architectural. So I started talking to her and, and I said, like, if I. How can I help you? And she's like, my job is to get developers what they want, make sure it meets requirements, but do it in a scalable way. Like, bring them the tools that they want to use, but do it in a way that is secure, compliant, meets regulatory requirements on like. So I'm an enabler, so help me enable them. So when I can raise the groundswell of like, it's going over here, it's here, it's here, it's here, it's here. You have a scale problem, you have a distribution problem that you have to get control of in the organization. The noise. The noise. And we, we did have this in one customer at Cockroach, which was. We had 17 different order cycles, 17 different renewal dates, driving the purchasing team crazy. And there's a conversation to be had to like, let's get this into one contract on one date. There's a, there's economies of scales for you and for us. That's how we can put a better win win deal together. So that noise, you know, is a lot of, you know, a lot of distraction for a lot of organizations that would support all of these projects. So that's the groundswell, that's the noise. And those are important because popular open source can be everywhere. But it's really how you tie them all together to, you know, not just drive the big outcomes, but like, how do you make it more scalable for an organization to leverage that open source product in, in that company?
- [08:20]
John Kaplan
How do you know when it's the right time to go with the business champion? Like what, what, what do you need? Do you need any certain metrics or any proof of value that then you say, okay, now it's time to go,
- [08:32]
Jason Forget
yes, you know, with the things that were like the metrics or the pain that we're trying to qualify. The pain can be things that we qualify for around, you know, for example, the database space. The pain is, is you have all of these legacy databases that have, you know, end of life or you need legacy expertise to run them or they have outages, they have down times. Like there's a lot of like things that we try to qualify through all of the discussions we have to kind of identify all of these pain points. Part of a manager's responsibility and the leaders of the organization is to help the teams kind of triangulate all of those points and say, hey, we can build a business case or prepare our champion to have the conversation upstream. Like enabling them to get us that introduction based on, hey, we can make you look good. This is what's in it for you. Here's our findings. You know, we've noticed that you have downtime, you have these legacy systems. I mean, it's always amazing how many companies still use mainframes. I think every credit card processor in the, in the US still runs all of our information on mainframes. So it's like, it's insane. So a lot of that comes with, you know, 65 year old Cobol developers. You still have to figure out how to find which has a cost, right? So it's really, you know, triangulating part of, of the account planning process and doing the account reviews with teams and spotting these pain points and amassing them in a way that can enable our champion if we haven't. We're obviously calling and trying to get access to executives and doing a bunch of other things as well. But at a minimum we're trying to triangulate these so we can inform a champion to go upstream and be prepared to present and have those discussions and get us the introductions if we're not there already. Of course we do a lot of other things to get Access at the exec level as well. But it's an ongoing nurturing process of developing those and making sure you're really good at not just asking the questions but documenting them, informing an account plan, continuing to revisit and test and revalidating and then deploying the team, continually triangulating those to leverage that to go get the more enterprise wide deal.
- [10:58]
John Kaplan
Yeah.
- [10:59]
John McMahon
So Jason, you have an incredible background of being at least in one of the companies being like the first seller and then the full arc of going to like the CRO. So I love your background and then an open source. I would love for you to give the audience some insight into, you know, you've seen it all, you've seen what it takes, what capabilities need to be had to get a technical discussion going. If the company strategy is kind of a land and expand. So there's certain capabilities that a seller has to have and you know, there's a, there's a mix between technical capabilities and business acumen and business outcome connection. You've lived in the world, you've taught in the world, you've designed in the world. Could you give us some. And now, you know, I know we're going to go, you know, to AI, but we'll wait for that till the end because that's a good topic. Yeah. But you know, what are, what's some advice when you're trying to design the most efficient go to market strategy motion when you, when you're coming from an open source environment or land and expand environment or a PLG environment.
- [12:19]
Jason Forget
Yeah. First you have to be a glutton for punishment. That's the first, you know, you got to be prepared because it's hard but rewarding. The one thing in, you know, doing this a couple times is your motion. You have to first be prepared that your motion is, is going to change on an ongoing basis. Right. When I first joined Redis, um, I was employee number one outside of the R D team in Israel and I was at the trade shows, I was opening the office, I was you know, getting the like literally everything, which is very early. But you know, I was an sdr, I was the rep and then you know, started to hire out the team. There's a lot of things you do there that have to evolve and you see this as a kind of failure mode across a lot of companies these days. And quite frankly a lot of sales leaders, a lot of these initial CROs, the heads of sales at these small companies and their model doesn't evolve. And by, by evolving what I'm talking about is like that first deal, that first million, that first 10, that first 20, the first 50, then the hundred and the 200. Like just you have to come to terms with the fact that your motion is going to change through those. You got like acknowledge, like don't get married to anything you're doing. I always tell people it's like that first, you remember that first deal that you sold your soul to get like, you know, 98% discount. But they're public reference, you can use their logo, they'll speak at your conferences. But they got one hell of a deal. Like you do those and you hold your nose. But it has value in terms of getting the next enterprise customer and the next enterprise customer. But then you're going to bring that discipline down as, okay, get 5 million to get to 10 million. You do all of those things. The responsibilities of me as a CRO changes my first line managers change the expectation on SDRs. And then you know what we're qualifying for because in the early days you're bootstrapping and you're so excited. Like you have all this open source adoption and you're just running around trying to find a live one, have the conversation, find the value, land it, go to the next. Then you start to be like, okay, we'll get a little bit more sophisticated. We're going to start doing more count planning and think about big picture and how do we leverage our solution architect team, we call them solution architects because it was not as scary to developers as ses, but all of these things in terms of like pivoting your motion as you go. The good news is like the fundamentals of qualifying a deal doesn't change, it's just what you focus on and how you're scaling for the, the longer term happens and the more that you learn about understanding your business. Like a lot of early stage CROs I see it, they get, they get obliterated by the board because like it's like Shark Tank, you know, you don't know your numbers, you know, you know, it's like the same thing. I'm like, I've talked to so many. It's like it's about the winning of the deals and in those things. But it's also like, how do you see around corners? How do you become more predictable? And it's all based on the fundamentals that you guys talk about all the time. It's like rinse and repeat, basics, med, pick, medic, like just keep banging on those things, how you react to them and scale just it has to adjust over the time, but those fundamentals are just continually going to be the same. But as you grow, a manager has more time to look at an account plan and think bigger and go broader and leverage executives and accounts, et cetera, et cetera, to get those bigger strategic wins.
- [15:53]
John McMahon
How did you stay adaptable, relevant? There's very few people on the planet that have done what you've done. And there's some good stories, like our friend Chris Degnan. And like, there's some good stories of being the, you know, doing the arc.
- [16:07]
Jason Forget
Sure.
- [16:09]
John McMahon
What was the key for you on being that type of individual? Like, there's people that are, you know, trying to make decisions. They're listening here. They're like, hey, do I go to this startup, you know, AI company? Do I. I come. I come from a bigger company. Just. Any advice on what it really takes to be, like, employee number, you know, in the. In the single digits to, you know, to an ipo. Any advice you'd give?
- [16:35]
Jason Forget
Yeah. First one, easier said than done, is leave your ego at the door. Like, amen. I mean, it's like, you can't be married to anything. And I knew, you know, my background talking earlier is not traditional. I wasn't rolling in with all of this baggage of like, oh, I did it here. I did it. Like, you know, I. I was truly wanting to. To learn and evolve. You know the quote, there's no extra credit for reinventing the wheel. Like, I love beg, borrowing and stealing. I've talked to Chris, I've talked to Cedric, who. You've talked. You've been on this podcast before. During COVID I would. We'd ping each other and share notes and talk about. So, you know, at the end of the day, the point is I'm trying to steal the best from the best, and I'm going to make it my own. And I'm not married to anything that I'm doing, and I'm going to evolve. You know, we always joke, you know, sometimes in sales leadership, one of our jobs is to unteach people bad habits. Like, it is a pandemic of, you know, hey, I'm going to wait to close a closed loss. I'm going to wait and close loss. And when I have a win so I don't get attention, like, drives me absolutely berserk. Right. Part of that's lack of discipline, lack of proper inspection. I mean, there's reasons that we've. That happens, but that's bad behaviors that we just. We kind of trained because of the way the industry is. But the ego check the ego be learning, you know, that was the biggest thing for me. And not married to anything that we've been doing in the past. That serves you really well to set the context.
- [18:11]
John McMahon
Just we talked about it off camera, but on camera, like you have a very unique background. So you come from finance, you go into operations, you wind up in sales. Could you just share that briefly and then any insights on how you think that's an advantage and what you would encourage other people?
- [18:27]
Jason Forget
Yeah, sure. I, you know, it's the first to go to college in my family. I knew I liked to make money, I liked money. So the advice was go into finance. Okay.
- [18:37]
John McMahon
Use other people's money.
- [18:39]
Jason Forget
Yeah, let's go into finance. So I went to Northeastern, got a degree in finance and did some work in investment and I was like, ah, it's not for me. So I went to corporate finance, worked at Gillette here in Boston and they paid for my MBA and it's great. And then this.com thing was happening. I'm like, I'm not going to be in the razor business. I mean, how boring. I mean it's even worse than databases, right? So like, so I, you know, I got into tech in FP and A and a lot was happening then. I think in the early 2000s there was this kind of an appreciation that, that as much as selling is an art form for the top 5 and 10% of sellers, it truly is a science for the rest. And I was like, with my process and finance background and you know, My first company, FP&A, I would talk to the investor relations, I was hanging out with sales, I was doing the comp plans, I was presenting pricing to customer. Like, this is my, these are my people. This is my people. My CFO said, you know, you should go run rev ops, like that's your place, you should go over there. And that an integrity. In the early 2000s, I made the change. But that upbringing that I had, you know, around process, KPI metric, informing the business, understanding how to quantify the science element of anything. And at the moment where technology was enabling us to kind of package up the science of selling, you know, it's like, oh my God, salesforce.com what a. It was revolutionary, cutting edge thing that we were implementing at the time, kind of informed my foundation to help me get into, you know, ultimately leading sales because I had everything else. I just needed that customer experience which I just craved and would do any customer meeting. I could run shotgun anywhere, be involved in any conversation I could because I knew that was the piece I was missing. So at imperva, I worked up into that and ultimately was leading revenue. It wasn't called CRO at the time, called field operations, but it was a great experience and filled kind of the final gap of having more of that customer being with customers and selling a technical solution. So that background informed kind of the building of the middle class. Harvard, the Harvard business review, like eight, 15 years ago had this great article. They talked about like sales teams. It's like sales teams, like an economy, strong middle class, great economy. So you got to focus on the middle class. Top sellers in general will crush, like they're gonna make a lot of money. They're gonna be great. They need some coaching, of course, you know, but it's an art form. How do I bring that art form of that top 5 or 10% and turn it into a process for my leaders and for my salespeople? They can leverage that art form and help them be better. It's a system. I mean you, you force management, you guys know this better than anybody. And it's, it's, it's, it's been the foundation of kind of leveraging my background to bring that to, to grow these teams.
- [21:39]
John McMahon
I love that. I've never quite heard it said that way. Is focusing on the middle class. I like that.
- [21:43]
Jason Forget
That's right. It is, right.
- [21:45]
John McMahon
Like thinking of it.
- [21:46]
Jason Forget
Yeah. You're not going to get there just because the top 5% of your teams did 150% of your number. I want as many of them there. But the reality is, is that that middle group is really where the bread and butter is and where it makes my life better. So I don't have to have a heart attack at a quarter end because it's way more predictable. Because that's ultimately what we have to do is provide predictable revenue growth, not just the revenue.
- [22:08]
John McMahon
Hard to be a rev ops person and work for you with your background or.
- [22:11]
Jason Forget
Yeah, it is, it is, it is, it is.
- [22:15]
John McMahon
What does a great rep ops person look like? Johnny and I have been focusing on that the last few months. We. It's really changing rapidly. You know, great rep ops. What's it look like today?
- [22:26]
Jason Forget
Yeah, I, I was, I got a great lesson in this. So first time I worked at a company, I am logic. Actually I worked for Jim Drill, another, another disciple. And he was traveling and was like, hey, you got to cover the board meeting for me. And I said, great. My first time gonna go to the board meeting is like 2003 and talking to the CEOs like, so what do you. What are you gonna talk about? Like, oh, I was gonna talk about comp plans and the systems. And he's like, they don't give a. About any of that. Like, what they care about is the business. They want to care about customers and outcomes and, and all of those things. So I formed my main focus for RevOps. The number one priority of Rev Ops is to be the trusted advisor to the business. The trusted advisor to sales leadership. Yes, the systems are important and compl. Like all super important. I do not minimize any of that. They're all keys to moving an organization together. But if you want to help sales leadership, be great coaches and do the proper inspection and help teams prioritize. Be their trusted advisor. Help them see the business, help them view the metrics and the KPIs and be out ahead. Don't wait, you know, until you're asked why the pipeline is lumpy or why did it jump up by a hundred percent week over week. Like you should inform leadership, like get ahead of it that come Monday or Friday, like, hey, this is what I saw in the business. Here are the leading indicators that are blinking red lights or green lights, whatever they are, number one priority. Be the trusted advisor. Your job is to enable sales productivity.
- [24:03]
John Kaplan
I think the best ones, like to your point, they give them really good insights. Some insights that they can't see themselves because the CRO is running around.
- [24:11]
Jason Forget
Exactly. Like in lots of organizations, they want the sales leaders to also be FPA people. They're meant to be coaching with customers, doing those things. And you also want them to be FP&A analysts. Like it's not the reality of the world or their skill sets. And they're quite frankly not salespeople don't
- [24:31]
John Kaplan
like to do that either.
- [24:32]
Jason Forget
Exactly.
- [24:33]
John Kaplan
They don't like to do expense reports.
- [24:35]
Jason Forget
Yeah, I mean that's where I earned my key.
- [24:38]
John McMahon
Two different sides of the brain. I mean it literally is two different sides of the brain.
- [24:42]
Jason Forget
Exactly. And if you're a Rev Ops and you want to move beyond that or do more, be your CRO or VP of sales, like right hand person and give them the insights into the business they will continue. A lot of the people you know will rely heavily on on their Rev Ops people because it's giving them those. The, the lens that will inform their decisions. And what they do, don't make them go have to figure it out themselves.
- [25:08]
John Kaplan
Like proactive I found though, is that rev Ops people, when you go, if you, if we ask 10 different companies right now. Exactly what do you need your rev Ops people to do and what are they held accountable to? You're going to get close to 10 different answers. It hasn't really been well defined by a lot of, a lot of companies.
- [25:30]
John McMahon
I think one way to make it simple is your analogy that you started with Jimmy Drill when he said, hey, take over for me. I think RevOps people have to think about just like great sellers. How do you take the technical things and the data that's going on and go to market and make it relevant and attach it to business outcomes that a company's trying to achieve. That's what a board cares about. You know, I think great rev Ops people are the ones that can, you know, translate that language of what's going on in revenue and attaching it directly to, you know, company outcomes and making it, you know, clear what needs attention, where do we need help, where do we need investment, where do. And the, the numbers don't lie. Like so it's not just being a numbers person, but it's understanding how to tell a story about the numbers.
- [26:18]
Jason Forget
100%. We like to call them actionable insights. You know, like these are the things like I don't need a readout, I don't need on a call for you to read to me that it's 30 year over year growth. That's great or it's flat. Right.
- [26:31]
John Kaplan
What do you need a Rev Ops person for? Then just take a finance person and just have them give you the, you know, data dump on the, on the numbers.
- [26:39]
John McMahon
You need a journalist, not a. Not. I've heard this. You need a journalist, not a, a weather person.
- [26:44]
Jason Forget
Exactly.
- [26:46]
John McMahon
You know, the weather is here today. It's doing this, it's doing that. You need a journalist to tell you a story about
- [26:52]
Jason Forget
and you also got to prep them too and say, look, I want bad news. You know, one of the, one of the, one of the things we do is we cadence our. Like we bring the teams together to cadence pipeline, like at the management level with all the attributes, SDRs, partners, expand land, all of that. And I've always prepped these calls with this call is not to read out the numbers. We want to know the problems. And this call is about problems. This call is not about complimenting that. We had a good show last week and we found a million dollar deal. I'm excited about that. That's great.
- [27:24]
John Kaplan
Ready?
- [27:25]
Jason Forget
It's awesome. But that's not why I'm here. This is a problems call, so don't get upset. Don't get offended. We all have problems. If your organization's perfect, then I'm going to be the most worried because it doesn't exist. And what are the things that we're getting stepped upon within the various parts of the funnel, whether it's SDR marketing driven or expand motions, where reps are expanding themselves and what the partner ecosystem is bringing in. So don't try to sell me the positive. You're not, like, it's all about where the. Where the. The challenges or where the investment areas are to double down on. So I see that a lot. Sometimes it's like, yeah, this is like, you know, if you look at it this way, I don't give a about that. I don't care. Like, just tell me where the problems are.
- [28:13]
John McMahon
You said, tell me the story. Don't be a magician.
- [28:16]
Jason Forget
Exactly. You're not trying to sell me. I'm already. I already bought.
- [28:19]
John Kaplan
I'm already bad news. Can't wait. Bad news. Can't wait. Like, I need to know the bad news now, and I might be able to help you turn the situation around. But if you wait and wait and wait, what I've always found is something that's like the size of a. A little mouse when they could tell you about it. All of a sudden, you turn around, a couple weeks later, it's the size of a gorilla. And like, now you got. You got a big problem on your hands, and they could have told you. So I get really mad when, you know, people don't own up to, like, we have a problem here.
- [28:48]
John McMahon
So that's not just revenue ops, Johnny. That's like. That's like, kind of like a foundational attribute for leadership, right? I mean. Yeah, I always. I said to somebody this morning, so
- [28:57]
John Kaplan
they're willing to give you bad news, right? Can't be penalized because they gave you bad news. You got to say, okay, good. Now, what's going on? What'd you do about it? What do you think we should do about it? What's the next step? And let's. Let's go. Let's go fix this thing.
- [29:11]
John McMahon
I looked into a Zoom call this morning, really close, and the only thing was showing was my eyeballs. And I said to the rep, I said, don't lose alone.
- [29:20]
Jason Forget
Boom, boom.
- [29:21]
John McMahon
Lose alone.
- [29:22]
Jason Forget
Exactly.
- [29:23]
John McMahon
We were losing, and I said, don't lose alone. You know, everybody talks about the great. What's the saying? You know, the greatest wins in the company have a thousand mothers and fathers.
- [29:33]
Jason Forget
Yeah.
- [29:34]
John McMahon
Every loss is an orphan.
- [29:35]
Jason Forget
Yes.
- [29:36]
John McMahon
He was involved in that deal.
- [29:38]
Jason Forget
Yeah, it really speaks to the culture you set and that you don't, you know, you don't over rotate in penalizing or punishing mistakes if they're honest and they were trying. You know, it goes back to I was talking about earlier on, like, hey, I'm just going to push my losses out because I'm going to get beaten up on a loss. So I'm just going to wait till I win a deal to do a closed loss. Right. So you got to practice what you preach in your culture and reward that. Because you took the words right out of mouth. I was going to say don't lose alone. And quite frankly, the best reps also don't win alone. You know, the best reps are the ones that, you know, can pull the ex. Other parts of the team in to help them win. It's like, I don't want superheroes. I want. I don't need to be superhero. Like, if you've got to leverage 18 people in the company and it's a, you know, it's an appropriate deal and deal size and qualify and all these things, like, let's go, we're gonna all win it together and. And then don't lose alone.
- [30:37]
John McMahon
Okay, take us to scaling. Because his background is.
- [30:40]
John Kaplan
So I want to talk about scaling in, in a couple ways. The first one I want to talk about is like, you talked about, like, when you're scaling, you're constantly adapting. Right. And so you. Like, what I found is like, the sales process fundamentally stays the same, but there's certain things that you can't. That you're tweaking as you're scaling, you know, because you're going from, like, small deals to midsize deals to big deals. You know, what is it in the sales process that you've seen, like, definitely changes as you scale.
- [31:11]
Jason Forget
Well, I think first off is how you formalize the process and the tools that you use to get leverage across how you qualify deals, how you bring insights across deals. And that's changing really rapidly today with AI and some of the tools that are out there to the effect where you don't have to hunt and peck around anymore to find some of the parts of the deal and the things that are going on. And I think those that lean into that can accelerate very quickly through kind of, you know, early stage, mid stage, late stage of how you think about, you know, scaling a team for consistency. And that's really important because if you, you know, you grow and you've got four sales managers and they're all doing it differently. That's a problem because if every deal's, you know, vetted differently, then I don't actually know the quality of my pipeline and therefore I don't know how predictable I really am. Because what you may think an economic buyer is may be different than what they think an economic buyer is. Or you, you know, you over here, you don't really put pressure on the champion. And what you really is got a cheerleader and you haven't asked the, you haven't standardized the will you can. You question like to really test whether the champion is going to go do things for you. So there's all of these things that as you scale and formalize and run those motions with consistency, you start to get really good intel about your pipeline, about your business, about your predictability, about your win rate, when your loss rate and all of them has a multiplier effect. Because the better you understand all that information, the better you can train your people and enable your people and hire more managers and scale your managers and all of those things. What's exciting with AI, which is what's happening, is that you can now, you know, we've built, we've built a tool called Deal Pulse and MCP Server tied to all our data sources, data sources built upon our sales process and qualification and can in essence inform the quality of a deal, whether it's direct or indirect, across every data source. Which makes it kind of is helping deliver on the dream. The dream of spend most of your time selling and spend more of your time coaching and doing inspection as a manager. And as much as you have a process and you document and you do all of these things, the more you can pull insights from gong or from confluent or any of the tools and you can infer and challenge like, you know, we'll have a deal and we'll say economic buyer is inferred from a gong call, from a conversation you have, but it's not a den. The person's not identified as an economic buyer. That's a good question to have because me as a manager, could I go and I try to listen to calls and be on all the calls, but that's just impossible. But I can get inference around the economic buyer and test that which is tremendously powerful. Really, really powerful. So I'm not spending time making sure the rep asked the question and pulled up the sales process and, and, and vetted it. I can move right to, hey, I can see you don't have an echo. It infers you have an Economic buyer. So this is going to move really quick like this year, which is really exciting and kind of deliver on the promise that we've all been chasing for decades, which is spend more time selling, spend more time with customers, spend less time of this internal, you know, searching for things and, and you can do a lot of things from that, you know, in motion enablement and a bunch of other things.
- [34:52]
John Kaplan
Let's go back to scaling Nobody and with recruiting and talk to me a little bit about the people you're recruiting. When it was you and you have to hire a couple salespeople at Redis and then you start to scale and talk to me about type of people you, you are recruiting, then I'm sure the profile changed.
- [35:10]
Jason Forget
It did change. You know, in the earlier days you leaned to. You always want the grit, you always want the, the people that are willing to do the work. Because in the early days it's a different type of grind. But it's a grind. It's, I think it's exponentially more disappointment in the earlier days.
- [35:27]
John Kaplan
Let's talk to traits that they, they have in the early days versus you know, once you start to get 50 people, 100 people.
- [35:36]
Jason Forget
Well, the, the traits is they're, they're more transactional, they'll end up doing more deals. There's less of these big deal cycles because you're just trying to knock down those early wins. We always tended to look for people that, you know, if someone came from a home that had a family business, really like those people, people did sports in college or military, just like people that just, you know, grinded it out and just had to continue to react and be tactical and, and find those things. As we grew over the resourceful.
- [36:10]
John Kaplan
Right. They can, very resourceful round. Like I remember I was on the board of this company and I thought this one guy that wanted to be a CRO, put him in the CRO job and called me and said, you know, they don't have like expense reports here. Like, yeah, make an expense report.
- [36:30]
Jason Forget
Yeah.
- [36:30]
John Kaplan
I mean later. And he said, you know, they don't even have a laptop. I said, okay, so get online and buy a laptop. Like I realized like within a week he was just absolutely the wrong person. Even though he did really well in a mid sized company, he was just awful when it came to a startup.
- [36:50]
Jason Forget
Yeah, no, you have to be, you have to scratch. Yeah, you gotta, you gotta put all those things together. You're not gonna get a silver platter of all these things.
- [36:59]
John McMahon
You know, I had something here on this yeah, the big part for me is identifying what's required in the role like you guys are talking about. But then having this is why I feel we just miss it too many times. We're not honest about whether or not somebody has the energy to do that. And it has nothing to do with age. It has nothing to do with intellect. It is like, will that give you energy? So a lot of times I'll say to somebody, hey, I like this person, and, oh, can they do this? I look at the job profile, they can do this, they can do that, they can do this. I say, yeah, okay, I got it. And they're giving you evidence. Is that what they want to do? And I feel like people miss that. They get the check in the box saying, yeah, they've done it. They were at this company, they did this, they did this, they did this. And I just feel like how that's evolved for me now. And I didn't ask that too much back in the day when I ask it all the time now, I'm like, does that give them energy? Will it make them feel like less than 1% of the population in the world who wakes up in the morning and says, I'm doing exactly what I'm supposed to be doing, do you ask
- [38:04]
John Kaplan
them why they want to do it?
- [38:06]
Jason Forget
Well, I, I, I do something similar and I did it more with reps, and I do it more with, when I hire leaders now and I ask them a question and, and, and I ask it relative to whatever the cycle of the company is, if it's a rep in an early stage or if it's a manager now. But the context is the same. The question is, first I'll say, I don't want an answer to this question. I'm going to ask you a question. You need to reflect on it and you really, you got to think about it. But the question is, you're going to tell me all the things, why you want this job and why you're excited and what it entails and what it's going to do. And you're a salesperson, you're going to tell me exactly what I want to hear, because you know yourself that's the best product you know how to sell is yourself. But think through 90 days from now. Are we going to have a conversation because we're disappointed because you can't deliver on the expectations of the role? Because it'll come. We're not just having this discussion on what the requirements are in the role in this time, but the conversation will come in 90 days. So let's anticipate whether we're going to have a good conversation or a bad conversation because, you know, we weren't honest with ourselves in terms of what the expectation of the job. I used to do that a lot more. You know, in the early days. I would, I would absolutely speak to every rep. It gets harder as we get bigger. But I certainly have this conversation with every leader that we hire because I make sure I speak to every sales leader we hire. Is that that question? Don't, like, I would always say, don't tell me you like updating salesforce.com. you're lying. If that's. But you're gonna do it, right? Like, because in 90 days I'm not coming with my broom to clean up your business. Because. Because we can predict that that's going to be a problem. So don't answer the question, but, like, assess if this is really for you. And that was always a good filter. Like with reps in the early days, like, it's like, hey, it's going to be chaos. Yeah, you're going to be an sdr. Yeah. You're going to go to the show. You're going to stand at reinvent for 12 hours and lose your voice in that damn dry conference center. Like, yeah, that's what we're going to do. Don't tell me in 90 days that it's not for you. Like, because that's the job. I'm doing it. You're going to have to do it. That's it. So I sometimes, like, and I've had people bow out, they're like, yeah, you know what, that was a good question. And thought about it and you're right, I'm better off at a 10,000, 10,000 person company. And I like to have all these people helping me with these accounts because that's the other end of the spec. Like, that's the other end of the spectrum. People just can't survive. And then it works both ways. Some people thrive in chaos and they're great at it. You know, it's. That's. They get energy out of like scrambling and running around and doing those things. And that's fine. Like, you know, there's different types of people for different types of stages. But letting them, like, answer the question for themselves, like, it tends to work because otherwise they're going to tell me what I want. They want the job, they're trying to sell.
- [40:56]
John Kaplan
A lot of times they don't know. Like, so I'll ask them. Okay, so you're Talking to me on this world startup and I'll say okay, so what other companies are you looking at? Well I'm looking at Salesforce, I'm looking at ServiceNow and I'm looking at IBM. I go talking to me. Yeah, it doesn't make any sense. You don't know what you want yet. Yeah, you're talking to those companies and me. You have no idea what you, what you want.
- [41:18]
Jason Forget
Yeah, the answer is I want the options. Well, right, yes. But that's not the reason. Like it's a reason but you're, you're,
- [41:25]
John Kaplan
you're setting yourself up a disappointment in the early days. Talk about some of the leadership in for the leaders that you're going to hire. What are some of the traits you're looking for in the leaders in, in the early days?
- [41:36]
Jason Forget
Yeah, I think excellent, excellent. You know folks that can deal with ever changing environment as we talked about earlier. Like you may be pitching a certain product market, fit or use like whatever it is and you have to be adapt and a spot like if that's not resonating and kind of be the conduit back into the business in the early days because feet on the street you're hearing it, you're testing it. Like you gotta have a good sense of all of that so that you can take that back and share what's not working because it's early and you don't get it all figured out especially in the first couple million bucks. Like yeah, you get some customers.
- [42:18]
John Kaplan
But I just want to emphasize what I say there is like in the early days the sales people are part salespeople, part product manager.
- [42:29]
Jason Forget
Yep.
- [42:29]
John Kaplan
100 I'm ready to be ready. Part product manager for a raw startup. It's probably not the right job for you because the product's not going to do everything it's, it says it's going to do or is intended to do or eventually will do. So you have to sell around that at the same time getting really honest feedback from the customer and giving that
- [42:52]
Jason Forget
to development 100% and I think that's a very early stage skill. I think guys that have been at the other side of scaling, you've, you, you have processes and ways to, you got product marketing, product management teams and a lot of other insights that you can glean those things and you're trying to innovate forward based on customer feedback so that becomes less of a need then. But that, that's one of those things is that ability to be, that is gold. It's, it's in the interest of the business.
- [43:21]
John McMahon
You know, I just had a conversation with a guy the other day, and he was telling me what he hated about his job. And it was that the product doesn't work yet. And I went back to my notes when I was talking to him, and I said, hey, are you sure? It's like, yeah, I've been, I've done startup. I'm a startup person. And this is where three months later, I said, I didn't ask you if you've done that. You obviously have done that and you did it well, Is that what you want to do now? And the reason why he didn't want to stay in this company was he, the freaking product doesn't work. And, but, but the, the company and the customers don't think the product doesn't work. That person's frustrated because they picked a company that didn't have right comp. Plans that were, you know, going to acknowledge that fact that we're going to have to get feedback from customers. So, like, you got to participate in your own rescue.
- [44:19]
Jason Forget
Yeah.
- [44:19]
John McMahon
You know, you can't tell yourself, I've done it before, I can do it again. There's a lot of things in my life I've done before. Damn, I don't want to do that again. But I would tell people, I've done it, but, man, I don't want to do it again.
- [44:34]
Jason Forget
Exactly.
- [44:36]
John McMahon
You gotta be honest.
- [44:37]
Jason Forget
Exactly. You gotta be honest with yourself. And, you know, that's the ego thing. It's. It's all of those things and evolve your expertise and what you can leverage and be successful. And there's so much opportunity and everything's evolving so quickly that, that you just got to be. Don't jump at the first thing. Have the patience, do your due diligence, because ultimately, like, everything, it's going to fail. You can't debate the statistical chance of, like, you're miserable.
- [45:05]
John McMahon
Like, what, what I love about your question, Jason, when you got us on this topic, I think it's great leadership and it's great connection and people are looking for real conversations with real people when they're being recruited. And you're going to take me to a place in the conversation that I probably wouldn't have got to on my own. And you're going to ask me to reflect on not just what a home run looks like, what does failure look like? And I want you to sit in that moment of pain and let's just talk about, like, what your comfort level is there. So that for me, when I heard you Say that I don't think enough people do that because they try to sell the job. Oh, you know, you're going to kill it here. You're going to blah, blah, blah. Now, the other thing that I think people miss out on is I cannot believe how many people do not check references. Because when I say, hey, did you check the references of this? I tell my hired managers, but did you check the reference like John? References are going to be great. And I'm like, okay, I got a problem. Because that's. I'm expecting for the references to be great. But why are we not using an opportunity for that reference to ask them for three more names if we're hiring people like that? Like, who else is like this person? We love this person. We love Jason. Can you give me two more people like Jason? So it's a recruiting tool. The best question I've ever asked a reference is along the lines, what you said, Jason. It's going to get hard here and it's going to get difficult. And it like, we love Jason and we want to hire him and prepare me to be the very best I can be to help Jason out of difficult situations. Where does Jason get into difficult situations? So, first of all, you're asking a reference who wants to be very, very positive for the person who, you know, you're telling them you're going to hire the person they want to give you the right information. I've gotten some of the best information. Real, raw information. Well, every now and then, John gets a little edgy. Well, what do you mean by that? Well, John gets frustrated by the little things, and sometimes we got to remind him that he's got to focus on what he can control and what. And not what he can't control, just for reference purposes.
- [47:12]
John Kaplan
He's talking about himself right now.
- [47:13]
John McMahon
Of course.
- [47:14]
John Kaplan
Of course.
- [47:14]
John McMahon
You know, so, so, okay, so now I know what I'm getting into. Now, Johnson, let's say, not me, but let's say this person's an A player. But I want to know where they're going to struggle when it gets hard. What does it look like for them? And I cannot believe how many people do not do that. They don't have to reference that crazy.
- [47:33]
John Kaplan
How many people don't do back that. Don't back channel and get references.
- [47:37]
John McMahon
Yeah, but even asking somebody who cares enough to be a reference, so they already care about the individual, they're going to tell you from the heart what to look out for because they want them to be successful.
- [47:48]
Jason Forget
Yeah, it's a great Question. Because obviously, who gives bad references, hey, talk to these people. They're going to say bad things about me. So you have to, you know, it's like inverting a question to, from a yes to a no question. You just kind of invert it. So why would you not move forward with me? Would you not move forward with me? No. Yes. No. Yes. You know, so it's like, it's the same thing, which is great. But yeah, it is amazing. And how many actually don't want to do references. And like John said about back channel, like, those are just as valuable like always. Like every once in a while I get a hey, we're going to hire this person. And it's like no one's connected them to him on LinkedIn. I'm like, doesn't that tell you something? Like, who doesn't know anybody? Like, come on. Like, I mean, like, where have you been?
- [48:34]
John Kaplan
In a cave?
- [48:35]
Jason Forget
Is this a real LinkedIn profile? Like, you know, it's all of, it's all of those things. But that's a great, that's a great question. And hope everybody, when you're scaling too,
- [48:44]
John McMahon
because, you know, you never can make mistakes, right? But when you're scaling and you're in a position of, you know, unfit, high or whatever, you can't make it up. Like you're going to burn cash at those stages. You got to be right.
- [48:59]
Jason Forget
Yeah, you gotta, you gotta be right. You gotta take your time. Richard Branson has this great quote which is, it's better to have a hole on your team than an I use it all the time. It's like, it's like genius, right? And the second rule is fire fast. Like, you know, if you clearly made a mistake, you know, address it quickly and move because, you know, we, we're carrying quotas. Quota coverage, you know, is, is someone who's producing something better than biting the bullet and getting reinvested in someone better. It's, it's always that question that, that leaders take. So it's, it's, it's important to, you know, you will make a mistake. It's very painful. But the next level for managers is, okay, so what are you going to do about it? Like, are you going to address it? You're going to bury it? Like, I admire when people say, look, I made a mistake, whatever it is, I got to figure this out. Great, let's take corrective action. Let's move forward. What do we learn from it? You know, ask that reference that question next time.
- [49:57]
John McMahon
I had a very spirited conversation With a group of people today that were getting my advice on how to fire faster. And I was like, well, first of all, I think there's another problem here. If all of you people are asking me about how to fire people on your team, it means that, you know, we have a responsibility that we recruited these people 100%. I remember, Johnny, you know, back in the day, I can't remember what you said, but you, you said you got to go look in the mirror. I can't remember.
- [50:26]
John Kaplan
You know, it's either that you can't recruit. If you're going to get rid of somebody, you got to take accountability. So you can't recruit or you can't coach and lead.
- [50:36]
John McMahon
Yes.
- [50:36]
John Kaplan
Now what I want you to do is go down to the bathroom, look in the mirror.
- [50:40]
John McMahon
Yes.
- [50:40]
John Kaplan
Yourself. And come on back and tell me which one you can't do because we have to fix it. So he was a bird, so we just let him go. No, you hired him.
- [50:51]
John McMahon
That's what happens in those cultures when everybody's talking about higher, fast. Like, you get a badge of courage to. Excuse me. To fire fast. And I'm like, those companies never make it that have cultures like that because they're not learning anything on the turn. What did we learn? Yeah, it's normally in the success profile. It's something that we missed in the energy. Like we are complicit in this.
- [51:13]
Jason Forget
Yeah, it's actually our fault. Not the person's fault. It's our fault. We. We let it happen. We missed something. We didn't hold ourselves accountable. Yeah, it's on us. 100.
- [51:25]
John Kaplan
What it always comes back to, you know, you have skills, you have knowledge, and you have characteristics. And what I found, this always comes back to a characteristic it doesn't typically come back to, especially if you have good training. Leaders could be good coaches. You're typically going to hire people that are at least smart enough to gain the knowledge of what your product does. And, you know, good coach can help them develop some new skills. But where they usually check out is that they don't have the traits that you need at that point in time of the company along the scale growth. Because there's different traits that make it at different stages of your company's growth. And I found that usually it's because they're. They're missing or lacking a trait. It could be. If you wanted to ask me, what do you think is the number one? I'd say it's probably coachability and adaptability because the product's changing the Company's changing, the customers are getting smarter, competition's coming after you. Messaging has to change, the way you sell has to change. And if you don't want to change because you're not coachable, or maybe you are coachable, but you can't look in the mirror and say, you know, I really need to adapt, I need to develop a new skill or gain some new knowledge, but you refuse to do that. It's over.
- [52:44]
Jason Forget
Yep.
- [52:45]
John McMahon
You know what? I, I'm really bullish on this principle right now because the more I look into and even my own history, like we all go through cycles, you know, have we always been, you know, energetic? Have we always been like everybody's gonna have a bad day, everybody's gonna have some crap that happens to them. Somebody's gonna pass away or, you know, something's gonna happen, you know, your family or whatever. Just bad things can happen. What I find is when we talk about these traits or characteristics most of the time, because we hire for this most of the time, something happened in the exchanges inside your culture, something happened. It's not an excuse, but I always try to figure out especially people that have like, I call them level fours. They have high skill and they have high will. And all of a sudden I'm showing up in a QBR and, and they're telling me this person's a crap bird. Well, I know a high skill, low will person can only come from one place on the planet. It only works that way in the model. It comes from a high skill, high will person. So what the hell happened? And I have found amazingly that when I, when I'm in tune with this, I find that there's stuff. Life happens. Sometimes life happens. Somebody needs a break, somebody has some crap happen, somebody or you know, stuff that's out of my league, you know, they're, they're struggling with drinking, they got problems at home or whatever. But very rarely is this, does this characteristic. Now the job could change, which causes another character trait to, you know, to highlight. But that's why I always encourage people to first ask, ask questions to this individual. Why and what, what happened and why? Because I've heard some unbelievably great stories.
- [54:37]
Jason Forget
This goes to the profile of, you know, we're talking about like obviously reps and things, but it's like the profile of your managers capability. Right? Like it's just important as you qualify what their roles are and how, you know, they're getting out there with their teams and asking those questions and, and you know, validating what's going on in their life and, and being open to asking those questions. A lot of people, like, I'm not going to ask that. It's none of my business. Or, you know, I encourage teams like, hey, if you, even if you don't have meetings to go to, but you haven't been out in that territory with that team, go out and spend the day with them, get a conference room or we work, sit in a room, make calls together and, you know, just do some motions together, whatever it is, and, and be there as part of, you know, assessing what's going on and building that relationship. You're right. Life is tough and it's, it's, you have to manage for everything that people have going on and changing it. But you also want to have the relationship where people open up and tell you this is what's going on. Because some people won't tell you their pride. And like you said, everybody's got challenges and things going on. But if you have that relationship and people are open, you can navigate around that and set expectations accordingly and give them the coaching and support. So that's key. It's important how we're hiring managers as well. It's as important because they're going to play that role.
- [55:58]
John McMahon
I want to give a little plug to our buddy, coach Brian White, who wrote a book called the Locker Room is Not for Sale. And the book is, yeah, he is a, an incredible football coach, but it's not about football. It's about being intimate with the, you know, people don't leave programs or leave companies. They leave people. And I, I think he's just got a really good take on earning the right to get really, really close to your people in an authentic way, which is an incredible skill for a leader to have.
- [56:34]
Jason Forget
Yep, yep.
- [56:36]
John McMahon
A must have.
- [56:37]
Jason Forget
Very important.
- [56:38]
John Kaplan
Go back to a little bit of scaling again maybe before we wrap this thing up. So what happened? What you see in a lot of startups is and, and even they, they start to gain some traction, some size too, where, you know, you get, you get 10 reps and two of them are carrying the weight of everything. They're doing the big deals and, you know, maybe two more barely making quota and the rest aren't making quota. And then you get to like 30 reps and four or five are carrying 80% of the deals and, you know, five more are making their number, but the other guys aren't making their number. And then they get even bigger. And then you can tell, man, these guys just are having a difficulty either recruiting the wrong People, they're giving them to the wrong leaders. They're not onboarding these people correctly. Why can't they get the rest of these people to make the number? What do you think's going on there? You see it a lot because on the surface, people go, wow, this company's unbelievable. When you peel back the onion and like, oh, there's nothing really going on there.
- [57:39]
Jason Forget
Well, I think it starts to be at first we kind of talked about it earlier, is that they're not peeling back the onion and they're not actually assessing what is going on first. It's being honest with yourself and what's going on in the business. And you'll see this. It's like, yeah, we crushed our number and it's great. And then lift up the hood and like you said, it's two out of six people. So that's. The first is being honest. Being honest. The, the second is, is, is digging into what the people like. You spend a lot of time celebrating and looking into the people that, the two people that hit it. But what, what is your process and your cadence for continuing to inspect what's going on in the other four or six people? And what are you learning from that? Because there's a lot of things you can get insights from. It could be, you know, those two people, they've been here for five years and they're just good at it, or they have, they, they happen to also have the two best SEs in the business. Or our business is very tech centric and they happen to be in the Bay Area and that's our core customers. And we put a bunch of people in New York because that's what you do. It could be the particular use cases that these people focus on. They just don't convert. The loss rate is low, the win rate is low. Rather, you got to be looking under the hood and all of these things and, and, and, and diagnosing kind of what the root causes of those things. This goes back to our Rev Ops conversation. It goes back to kind of being honest, leaving ego at the door. But, you know, you should not be getting on a call that's, you know, the George Bush, Mission accomplished, Carecraft carrier at the beginning of a Desert Storm, like right before the mess really began, like, hey, we're, you know, we did it. That's not what it should be. It should be like deep inspection of the other folks that aren't and really understanding why and then build your program behind it. If you see that these guys just can't convert from stage to stage, and we're getting caught up here. Great. Is it an enablement thing? Is it a product issue or use case for the verticals? There were. I mean, it could be a whole bunch of things. We could go on and on. But you got to be honest, you got to look under the hood, peel the onion back and truly assess those things that you're looking at. Right. And address them. Or you might be just over hiring because you're chasing a growth number and you're playing a numbers game and you don't care how much you burn. I've seen that too. Right. So, you know, brought up a whole
- [59:59]
John Kaplan
bunch of things that I've seen before too. Amazing. Got a feel back to you.
- [60:03]
John McMahon
And honest about it, you got leaders. One big one that I see often as a company scales and then they start to struggle with productivity. First of all, that's the number one metric that you got to be looking at as you scale rep productivity. But it's the opiate of the deals and you get leaders like it's. It's the opiate of the deals. They, you know, some great deal people or great deal people as reps, they might have been able to coach and develop one or two reps. They get a team of five and they got two people that are doing really good. Probably what's happening is they are chasing the deals with the top people and they are not coaching and developing the other people. As tires you get, I think are the ones that are like high skill a little bit, you know, excuse me, low skill, a little bit higher. Will. You got to teach them the skill part. But you know, to be a great leader today, I think you have to be accountable. Somebody's got to hold you accountable for coaching and developing your people.
- [61:03]
John Kaplan
But you see it all the time. Right. So let's say Kaplan's going to go out and he's got a big multimillion dollar deal, but he's done ten multimillion dollar deals in his. In his career and he's going to meet with the ebay. Most managers are going with Kaplan to that EB meeting even though Kaplan doesn't need their help because they want to say, I helped slay the bear and pull it back to the campground. Yeah. You know, but there's five, four or five other reps. They got their first meeting with a technical buyer or potential champion. And the manager doesn't go on those calls. And those people need his help desperately. That's. They do what you call say, Johnny, they're chasing the Forecast. They're only working on deals that are in the forecast and they're ignoring other people that need a lot of help and they're going with people that actually don't need their help.
- [61:56]
John McMahon
That's a lumpy pipeline and lumpy forecast. Over time, for sure.
- [62:00]
John Kaplan
All the time. You see it all.
- [62:02]
Jason Forget
Well, it's, it's common. We've seen it. And it's funny. First VP of sales I worked for way back, he was that guy flight in Australia to get the eight million dollar pos. Like, like, dude, like, you're burning four out, four days to go get. It's happening. Like, why are you going all the way there? We've got other deals to do. Like, you could tell through our conversation. All comes back to the leave your ego at the door, be in the details, understand your business, manage your middle class. They're basics, but I think it kind of, it rings through, you know, all of these things. All of things. And it's basics, but easier said than done, right? Like, if it was easy, as I tell my guys it was easy, they'd pay us less. So, you know,
- [62:52]
John McMahon
Donnie, I don't feel like we gave Jason a chance to talk about Cockroach, what they're doing there, you know, are you hiring? What's happening? Can you give us a little juice?
- [63:01]
Jason Forget
Yeah, no, we're excited. So, Cockroach, first question I always have to ask is, I didn't want to ask, but please, I hit it right? I was like, cockroach. I mean, half the customer meetings I have, they're like, you're going to change that name? Like, are you going to forget the names?
- [63:14]
John Kaplan
Like, no, I'm like, oh, you're not forgetting it.
- [63:16]
Jason Forget
Yeah, it's like it's the first company my parents ever remembered where I worked. Like, they thought I worked at Reddit, not Redis. Like, it's like, you know, but now I work at the Cockroach company, which, which is a. The first part, the powerful meaning of the powerful. How powerful the name is, because it is. But the other secondary and more important reason is that why the cockroaches, outside of, you know, being disgusting insects, they're also very well known for the only thing that will survive a nuclear holocaust.
- [63:49]
John McMahon
Yeah.
- [63:51]
Jason Forget
And that's in essence what, you know, CockroachDB is, is a very highly resilient scalable database, SQL database. And it's really important. It's kind of, it's meeting the moment and why it's so exciting is the moment with AI and it meets the Moment because of its distributed nature and you know environments are very complex. You have hybrid environments. You know, you're working across data centers on prem data centers and cloud. You have multi cloud, you have mainframes and you have, so you have all this data all over the place which you obviously want your LLMs and your AI to have access to. So you're going to need the ability to work across all those databases, across all of those configuration setups. So it needs to be very highly scalable and resilient. The other which is meeting the moment is with AI and agents, the databases and a lot of the older databases aren't going to be able to put up with the, the parabolic growth pounding that these databases are going to get. We talked about developers and architects and people building applications but that's going to go up. Pick your number. 100 x, thousand x a million x of people pounding on this distributed database architecture. So you know, that's why we're framing our agentic database cloud that will allow companies to you know, service all of that landscape hybrid multi cloud portability regulation. It's crazy. We have a customer Hard Rock Digital. Every state or every tribe where they have to settle a bet has to be settled in the state and then reconciled, you know, at the corporate level.
- [65:33]
John McMahon
Quickly, quickly.
- [65:35]
Jason Forget
Like, like no one's gonna wait a sec a millisecond for their money.
- [65:39]
John McMahon
Right.
- [65:40]
Jason Forget
So you have an obligation. So, so that is just the tip of the iceberg in, in where the market is going and that's why we're excited. You know, cockroach is, is meeting the moment built before AI but it's one of those things skating to the puck. It was just, it's, it's a, it's a well aligned opportunity for us. We're growing really well. We're hiring. Check out our website. Always looking for good people. It's fun, it's hard work, it's a lot of accountability but you know, work hard, play hard. You know, kind of old school saying but that that's what we do.
- [66:13]
John Kaplan
Excellent.
- [66:14]
John McMahon
What a great, well wounded rounded leader that they would work for. Jason, well done.
- [66:19]
Jason Forget
Yeah, well I appreciate that. Thank you. This has been awesome. Really enjoyed talking to you guys and it's always, it's good to hear, it's good to make sure you're not crazy when you have these conversations and reinforce what you know. You tell yourself that you think is good and seems to be good but it's. You always got to keep going and validating yourself. And this, this was certainly super helpful for me.
- [66:40]
John McMahon
You should hang on after we go off the air because Johnny stays five minutes to tell me how I screw up the interview all the time. You killed it, Jason. Thank you, dude.
- [66:51]
Jason Forget
All right. Thank you guys.
- [66:52]
John Kaplan
Appreciate Jason Forge. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks to everyone for listening to another episod of the Revenue Builders podcast.
- [67:02]
Podcast Host (Narrator)
Thanks for listening to today's episode. If you enjoy the content, please subscribe, rate and review the show to help us reach more people. This show is brought to you by Force Management, where we help companies improve sales performance, executing the growth strategy at the point of sale. Check out forcemanagement.com for more information.