20VC: Inside Clay's Sales Playbook Scaling to $100M ARR | How to Set Sales Comp Plans | How to Read Sales Talent Linkedin Profiles | What Profiles to Hire & Fire | How to Increase Performance and Speed in Sales Teams with Becca Lindquist

Summary

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The Twenty Minute VC (20VC) | Episode Summary

Episode Title: 20VC: Inside Clay's Sales Playbook Scaling to $100M ARR | How to Set Sales Comp Plans | How to Read Sales Talent LinkedIn Profiles | Profiles to Hire & Fire | Increasing Performance in Sales Teams
Guest: Becca Lindquist, Head of Sales at Clay
Host: Harry Stebbings
Date: May 2, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this tactical, high-energy episode, Harry Stebbings sits down with Becca Lindquist, Head of Sales at Clay, to unveil the granular details behind building and scaling a high-performing sales organization – specifically how Clay scaled to $100M ARR. The conversation dives deep into sales hiring, comp plans, coaching, team structure, and how to thrive in the modern, AI-driven environment. With candid anecdotes and actionable playbooks, Becca delivers real-world strategies for founders and sales leaders looking to understand the DNA of elite sales orgs.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Should Sales Reps Leave for Hot AI Companies? (05:02)

• Staying or Leaving: Becca describes the phenomenon of sales talent feeling stagnant ("rotting") at established companies.
  • “Once you stop learning, like you actually as a person, I think start to settle and then it's just like a process of settling all the way down to the bottom.” – Becca Lindquist (05:04)
• Advice: If learning flattens, consider moving on, especially to companies where you can impact more and learn about new tech, like AI.

2. Reading & Evaluating Sales Talent on LinkedIn (07:09)

• Tenure Signals: Too short is a red flag (“bouncer”), too long can signal risk-aversion or lack of adaptability.
  • Optimal tenure: 4-5 years; red flag above 7-8 years at one company unless in senior roles.
• Storytelling: Look for a coherent story of skill/domain development. Domain expertise is valuable, especially for early-stage hiring.
  • “If you look at his LinkedIn... you can see a very clear ‘I am becoming the early stage data sales expert.’” – Becca Lindquist (11:40)
• Green Flags: Data-centricity, quantifiable outcomes, and aligned company journeys.

3. Hiring and Early-Stage Training (14:16, 19:05)

• Testing Coachability: Give feedback in interviews and watch reactions; defensiveness = red flag.

  • “If I give them feedback and they push back... I'm like, oh, okay, probably not gonna work.” – Becca Lindquist (14:20)

• Title vs. Salary: Pushing for salary = knows worth; focus on value, not premature titles.

  • “I actually don't really care what my title is. I do care how much you pay me. I care about scope...” – Becca Lindquist (16:22)

• Early Rep Onboarding:

  • Founders should record and share their calls—let new reps absorb and critique real founder sales calls.
  • “Send whoever you hire all of the calls that you've done because... they'll hear how you talk about it…” (19:14)

4. Performance Culture & Comp Plans (27:23, 31:08)

• Variable Comp is Non-negotiable: No variable = hiding poor performance; top reps will want clear financial upside for exceeding quota.
  • “If I overperform on that number, I want to make more money... those are the rules of the road.” – Becca Lindquist (28:55)
• Comp Structure at Clay:
  • Quota: 7.5x on target earnings (OTE) – higher than traditional enterprise norms.
  • Accelerators for exceeding quota, weighted towards top performance.
  • “If you're overachieving, it should be heavily weighted towards over performance. If I'm giving you a big quota and you're hitting 110% of that, I want you to be making good money.” (32:58, 33:23)
• Winning Team Ratios:
  • 60% hitting quota, 80% at least 80% attainment is “winning culture” (33:50)

5. Diagnosing & Fixing Underperformance (34:22)

• Hire Two, Not One: To benchmark quality; much easier to spot standout and weak hires with direct comparison.
  • “Hire two at a time because then you'll actually see... it's pretty clear whether one's good and one's bad.” – Becca Lindquist (34:32)
• Post-hire Red Flags: Lack of critical thinking, inactivity, or misunderstanding target accounts in the first 3 weeks.

6. Creating Healthy Sales Competition (36:07)

• Leaderboards & Dashboards:
  • Promote internal competition and recognition with clear, public dashboards.
  • Encourage friendly rivalry and mutual support (Hunger Games, but fun).
  • “We hired non-traditional salespeople. You better believe we're going to build the sales dashboard...” – Becca Lindquist (35:45)
• **Teams should root for collective overachievement, not zero-sum games (37:17)

7. Rev Ops and Internal Training Cadence (45:02)

• Forecasting Discipline:
  • Weekly forecast calls at all levels – managers model the behaviors expected from front-line reps.
  • Biggest leadership miss: Not being “in the deal” with reps.
  • “Not being in the details, not being in the deals with the rep... He's in the deal so he doesn't need to look at his notes.” – Becca Lindquist (46:14)

8. Account Handoffs & Renewal Ownership (48:01)

• “You sell the deal, you're renewing the deal, you're comped on net dollars.” (48:01)
  • Keeps reps hungry, protects deal economics, and secures accounts from competitive encroachment.

9. Discounting & Urgency (49:22)

• Becca is anti-discounting as a close tactic for urgency. Focus on the customer problem and buying timeline.
  • “They were like, is my money not green on April 1st?... Most people know they can get the same discount next quarter.” – Becca Lindquist (49:22)

10. AI, SDRs, and the Future of Outbound (50:27)

• Outbound is Not Dead: SDR function persists; AI multiplies productivity but is not a substitute for human-driven outbound and account development (50:50).
  • “Outbound will never be dead. You can't reach every buyer with marketing alone.” – Becca Lindquist (50:50, 51:50)
• Everyone Owns Pipeline: Entire organization, including leadership and investors, should help source and open doors.
  • “Everybody should be responsible for pipeline generation. Everybody owns pipeline...” – Becca Lindquist (51:54)

11. AI Tools in Sales (54:37)

• Multiplying Rep Output: AI (e.g., Clay, Claude, Granola, WhisperFlow) should help individual reps do more, not just shrink teams.
  • “If I can arm that rep with Clay and a Claude seat... now they can book 40 meetings a month. Yes, please.” – Becca Lindquist (54:42)
• “Blank Page” Problem: For transformative AI tools, onboarding and direction are still a bottleneck.

12. Miscellaneous Quickfire Highlights

• Worst Hiring Mistake: Over-indexing on “playbook companies”; lack of openness to high-slope, non-traditional talent. (61:37)
• Biggest Mind Change: From AI skeptic to power user; using AI as a “thought partner.” (62:47)
• In-Office Preference: Five days a week in office is optimal for coaching and culture; remote is okay if performance is high, but underperformance = no slack. (63:26)
• Right ACV for a Rep: Anything below $20K is hard to justify with a human rep for longer cycles. (66:06)
• Favorite Deal: Complex, high-impact deals with innovative clients are most rewarding, not just the biggest dollar values. (67:11)
• Parenting Advice: “If you have a rigid schedule, then the kid can be off schedule. If you don’t, it’s chaos.” (69:12)

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• On Early-stage Hiring:
  “For early reps, coachability and slope matter more than domain.” (13:14)

• On Sales Titles:
  “If you're joining a sub $50M company as CRO, it feels like an ego play.” (16:22)

• On Sales Culture:
  “The culture that I think is best is when you have 60% of people over 100%, 80% over 80%. You're building a winning culture.” (33:50)

• On Account Ownership:
  “You never want your farmer going against someone else’s hunter.” (47:36)

• On AI Productivity:
  “If I can tool [SDRs] with some sort of AI stack and now they can book 40 meetings a month, I’m going to say yes, please.” (54:42)

• On Champions:
  “If you focus on... the personal win, you probably have a champion, and they're probably going to go to war for you.” (41:49)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• 05:02 – Should you switch to an AI company or stay?
• 07:09 – Reading LinkedIn for sales hiring: red flags and green flags.
• 14:16 – Testing coachability and corrective feedback in the hiring process.
• 19:14 – Training new sales reps with founder calls.
• 27:23 – Why variable comp matters, sales comp at Clay, and plan design.
• 31:08 – Clay’s quota:OTE ratios and over-performance accelerators.
• 34:22 – The benefits of hiring two reps at once.
• 36:07 – Fostering competitive, supportive sales culture.
• 45:02 – Weekly forecasting and the importance of management being in the details.
• 48:01 – Hunters vs. farmers in account renewal and expansion.
• 49:22 – Discounting: why Becca avoids end-of-quarter discounts.
• 50:27 – The future of SDR teams and the limits of AI automation.
• 54:37 – AI as a sales multiplier and the “blank page” problem.
• 61:37 onward – Quickfire: hiring mistakes, AI opinions, in-office culture, favorite wins.

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Final Thoughts

This episode delivers a rare, unscripted look inside high-velocity sales leadership, from strategic hires to comp structuring, AI adoption, and daily management best practices. Becca’s frameworks are candid, data-driven, and unvarnished, making it essential listening for leaders aiming to maximize sales potential in the ever-evolving SaaS and AI landscape.

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For show notes and more: www.20vc.com

Transcript

[Becca Lindquist]

How do you read a LinkedIn profile? Our quota OT ratio is like, I think it's like seven and a half. It should be heavily weighted towards over performance. If I'm giving you a big quota and you're hitting 110% of that, I want you to be making good money. I think is best is when you have 60% of people over 100%, 80% over 80%. You're building a winning culture. Hire two at a time because then you'll actually see you hire one. You're like, is it good? Is it not good? I don't know. If you hire two, it's pretty clear. Outbound will never be dead.

[Harry Stebbings]

This is 20 Sales with me, Harry Stebbings. 20 Sales is the monthly show where we sit down with the best sales leaders to unpack their tips, tactics and strategies to scaling the best sales orgs. Today we have Becca Lindquist, head of sales at Clay. Clay is one of the fastest growing companies to scale to $100 million in ARR. And honestly, I've interviewed 100 of the best sales leaders. Now I would say Becker and Carles Rayner at ElevenLabs are the two that I have been most impressed by. Was an exceptional deep dive that goes very granular into how to scale a sales org. Get your pen and paper out. You'll be taking a lot of notes in this one. But before we dive into the show today, a quick shout out to a company I've been genuinely blown away by and have been tracking closely. Rocks. I've been watching this team closely and the speed they're operating at and the level of applied AI talent they've assembled. It's honestly remarkable. ROX is pioneering revenue agents for the Global 2000, plugged into your data warehouse and CRM and delivering board level ROI in just 90 days. These sales and revenue agents handle the end to end sales process for large enterprises from research prep to deal risk outreach and opportunity management. So sellers spend more time with customers and less time in tools. This isn't another productivity app. Christ, we've all had enough of those. ROX gives reps a single interface on top of their GTM stack, powered by a knowledge graph across your internal and external data. So if you want to boost AE productivity, increase revenue per rep and consolidate your stack, try [e-mail] while Rox keeps your revenue team aligned, granola keeps your calls captured and actionable. You're in back to back meetings all day, you're trying to stay present, but you're also worried you'll forget the decision, the action item, the important next step. That's where Granola comes in. Granola is an AI powered notepad for meetings. You jot down rough notes like you always do and in the background Granola transcribes and turns them into really clear, useful notes. When the meeting ends. No bots joining your call, no distractions, just a clean notepad that helps you focus. During or after the call. You can chat with your notes, ask Granola to pull out action items, help you negotiate, write a follow up email even, or coach you using recipes which are pre made prompts. It's actually the same technology we use to create our podcast notes. Once you try it on a first meeting, it's really hard to go back. Head to Granola AI 20VC that's Granola AI 20VC and get three months free with the code. 20VC, that's 20VC while Granola turns calls into clarity, Framer turns ideas into pages. A website should help your business grow, not slow it down. If updates to your.com feel harder than they should, Framer is the shortcut you've been looking for. Framer is an enterprise grade no code website builder that works like your team's favorite design tool and it's used by companies like Perplexity, Miro, Mixpanel to move faster. Designers and marketers can fully own the site with real time collaboration, a robust CMS built for SEO, and advanced analytics that include integrated A B testing. So you're not just shipping pages, but you're maximizing what works and when you're ready to ship, changes go live in seconds with one click. Publish without relying on engineering. Plus, Framer is built for scale with premium hosting, enterprise grade security and 99.99% uptime SLAs. Whether you want to launch a new site, test a few landing pages or migrateyourfull.com framer has programs for startups, scale ups and large enterprises to make going from IDE to live site fast. Learn how you can get more out of your.com from a framer specialist or get started building for free [e-mail] 20VC for 30% off 30% off a Framer Pro annual plan. That's framer.com 20VC for 30 percent off framer.com 20VC rules and restrictions may apply. Becca, it is so good to have

[Dick]

you in the studio.

[Harry Stebbings]

It's so nice to do it in person. I went for a walk around Hyde park with Varun and he said so

[Dick]

many wonderful things, so thank you so much for joining me. Thanks for joining me today.

[Becca Lindquist]

Thanks for having me.

[Harry Stebbings]

Now, I think a lot of sales

[Dick]

leaders and salespeople are looking at themselves. They're going, am I in the right place? You're in a SaaS company and you're like, that's not an AI company. And you're seeing a load of friends make a lot of money at AI companies.

[Harry Stebbings]

How should people actually think about the

[Dick]

decision of, should I leave my SaaS company and join a hot AI company

[Harry Stebbings]

or should I actually just stay?

[Becca Lindquist]

So I have a lot of these types of conversations both with peers and with folks that are having this kind of evaluation. And there's two ways to approach it, right? A lot of folks that I talk to are at software companies. They've been there for like four years, five years. The learning curve is kind of flattened out. The phrase that I use to describe how they might feel is like, hey, do you feel like you're kind of like rotting? Like you're, you're not, you're not learning a ton more? The learning curve is flattened for you. You're not in an AI space, which, like, I think is like the next, the next phase of things to learn. Almost every time they're like, yeah, that's exactly how I feel. And I'm like, okay, let's fix that then. Because once you stop learning, like you actually as a person, I think start to settle and then it's just like a process of settling all the way down to the bottom.

[Harry Stebbings]

So what do you do when you

[Dick]

feel as a sales rep or leader that you are rotting?

[Harry Stebbings]

What do you do?

[Becca Lindquist]

You got to go find something else, right?

[Dick]

You can't reinvigorate it.

[Becca Lindquist]

I mean, maybe you can move, maybe you can move into like a different role or like a different sub sector of the company. But usually, like, if you've been there for four or five years, the company is pretty big. There's a lot of structure, there's a lot of process. There's not much more for you to innovate meaningfully. I mean, maybe you could go run the company's VC fund or something, right? But at the end of the day, if you leave a company like that and you move to. This is partially why I joined Clay, right? If you leave a company like that and you go to a next gen AI startup, you're going to learn way more. The surface area of what you can actually go and impact is much, much higher. And I think that's what those types of people are excited about, right? Like, if you've Been at Salesforce for 12, 13, 14 years. Like, you've probably had an incredible run. You probably really enjoy that and you're probably going to stay there. But, like, most people are at companies for like four or five years.

[Dick]

Dick comment. If you've been at Salesforce for 12, 13, 14 years, I automatically think you're not great. I'm like, you got stuck in your ways. You've been there for way too long. Seriously, you were happy just in this kind of melee of mediocrity for 12, 13, 14 years. Is that a bad read?

[Becca Lindquist]

I don't think it's a bad read. I actually. So we're recruiting a lot right now at Clay, and, you know, I see a lot of profiles. I actually ran a training for my team on recruiting last week, the week before, and one of the things that we talked about is like, how do you read a LinkedIn profile?

[Dick]

Oh, wow.

[Becca Lindquist]

Right. And we just pulled up people's linkedins. We pulled up yours. It was actually really weird. We were like, don't hire this guy. No, I'm kidding. Terrible read about Asia.

[Harry Stebbings]

Egotistical, arrogant.

[Dick]

Why would anyone.

[Harry Stebbings]

He's a deeper.

[Becca Lindquist]

So we pull up LinkedIn profile, and I'd be like, what do you like? What do you see that you like? What do you see that you don't like? And it's actually, there's a certain amount of time that if you spend at any company, it's like kind of a red flag, because it's like, can you do something new? Can you operate outside of the bounds of what you've built and what you've done? Right.

[Dick]

What is that amount of time? Because I also hate the bouncer. And the biggest red flag for me is 13 months here, 15 months here.

[Becca Lindquist]

There's a lower bound, too. And, like, I think it's two years. Right.

[Dick]

I was thinking four to five years is like, optimal.

[Becca Lindquist]

Yeah. I mean, that's. I've spent the last decade at two companies.

[Dick]

Yeah.

[Becca Lindquist]

And, like, I've built something. I've learned a ton. And when that learning curve starts to cap off, like, okay, you start to think about what's next and what's new. I think it's probably like seven years, six to seven years after that. If you've been in a company for 8, 9, 10 years, it's like the company is kind of built around you, probably. And you. You've built so much of it to like. I don't know, the best way to describe. It's like maybe like putting on someone else's shoes now. Like, I got to, like, I don't know, redo the laces and the insoles all, you know, screwed up. Like, I think it's really tough for someone who's been at a company that long to, like, adjust and prove me wrong, right? Like, I have a friend who is at Heap, which I was at two companies ago, right? He was there for like eight or nine years. And I'd actually, like, every time that, you know, the LinkedIn anniversary, it's like,

[Dick]

oh, my God, your friend has been

[Becca Lindquist]

there for this many. I just, like one year, I screenshot it, I sent it to him. I was like, yo, blink twice if you need me to save you. Because, like, but he was like, look, I'm learning. And like, yes, there is an end date, there is an expiration date. But, like, when I see something like that, especially at a company like Salesforce, I'm like, okay, you have your thing. You know what you're doing. You probably have great hobbies outside of work.

[Dick]

Don't put that on. That's so denigrative. I love that.

[Becca Lindquist]

That's so funny.

[Dick]

Yeah, yeah. Training, recruiting, take me to that day on the LinkedIn. Specifically, is there anything else like, we watch out for? Don't laugh. One of my big red flags is someone who has like, a picture of them speaking in an event tells me that they have great self importance.

[Harry Stebbings]

You're just a dick.

[Becca Lindquist]

Well, well, well, actually, actually, when I see that, I look at it and I'm like, okay, either you're like, I don't know, you're at sco, or the vast majority of them are them speaking at a wedding and you can tell,

[Dick]

oh, wow, that's bleak. That's really sad.

[Becca Lindquist]

And then, like, you know, look, I don't know. I don't have the perfect LinkedIn. I should probably invest way more in that. You know, everybody at Klay is like a social media star. I'm like, actually very averse to that because I think that, that I'm like, always terrified of saying something really stupid and like, you know, you look at

[Dick]

my LinkedIn, lucky you're on a podcast.

[Becca Lindquist]

Yeah. So, yeah, great, great, great job here. Right? But, like, you know, I look at my LinkedIn, it's like, I'm very critical of everybody else's LinkedIn profiles. I'm the most critical of mine. I need to take a new LinkedIn picture. I like, have, like a lazy eye in my picture and it really bothers me every time I look at it. So when I look at other people's LinkedIn, profiles, I'm like, God, what do they think about mine? But when I look at a LinkedIn profile, what's a red flag? Obviously jumping around? I always like, here are some of the other tips. Like, you discount recommendations. I don't give a shit about how many recommendations I have, but some people do. Yep, I just discount that.

[Dick]

Any big green flags? Like for me, data centricity is really helpful. So if you talk about your heap experience and you're like, I drove 387% increase in SDR volume, whatever it is,

[Becca Lindquist]

or pipe or yeah, like, you know, people love to put like, oh, I was at President's Club. Or like, here's what I did on quota, right? That's like a, that's a green flag. I, when I look at someone's LinkedIn and I can't tell the story for them. So like, I'll give an example. All companies that like, I think are great, I love. But imagine you're looking at someone's profile and they're like, yep, I did two years at Snowflake and then I did four years at Lattice and then I did three years at Marketo. And you look at that and you're like, this is kind of a mishmash of companies. So like, what's the story? Where's the expertise that you're building?

[Dick]

Can you explain that to me? You want aligned companies where you see align knowledge growing in that sector a little bit.

[Becca Lindquist]

Like, think about, there was a guy that worked for me. I actually think I gave you his contact info. His name's John Dalton.

[Dick]

Yeah.

[Becca Lindquist]

And we worked together, we built dbt, I mean, gosh, for four, four and a half years together. And if you look at his LinkedIn from the outside, you can see a very clear, I am becoming the data, the early stage data sales expert. So like he was very early. He was like the first repp at Cloudera, the first rep at Streamsets, then he came to dbt. So like all in like the open source data transformation space. Now he's at Clickhouse. Right? Which is obviously like in the cloud, in the data warehousing space. So like he's kind of built his career in this particular space. And if you're, let's say I was a recruiter at Clickhouse and I saw everything before that, I'd be like, that is our person. We are going to go do everything we can to hire that person.

[Dick]

So that's so interesting you say that. I really like that. But I have so many sales leaders on the show who say I don't care if you don't have the domain knowledge. We can teach that, but it's much harder to teach the knowledge on contract size. I'd rather someone who's dealt with large enterprise before than someone who's worked in databases before.

[Becca Lindquist]

I don't know about that. Think about everybody that we've hired at Clay. We've hired kind of non traditional sellers. And actually the thing that you can't tell from a LinkedIn profile, but you can from things like back channels. Having a conversation with someone is like, how high slope are they? So I think about someone like, I had a replacement rep at DBT who worked for me, spent six years at Bloomberg. We hired him in as a commercial rep and like almost immediately, like in the interview process, I was like, oh, this kid, this kid gets it. Like, he's super smart, he's driven, he's super coachable. Let's go. Brought him in as a commercial rep. I was like, maybe a year, a year and a half later, we moved him into the enterprise segment, sat down with him. I was like, hey, what do you want to work on together? And he was like, I'm really screwing up in the sales cycle here. Can we work on that? We like did it and it was like, like a quarter later he, he was like doing it in every single deal. And that like just gave me the confidence to say, like, I'm gonna invest in this person. Came to me like a year and a half later and was like, put me into this role. I'm gonna, I can do it. And I was like, okay, let's go do it together. And like, I think he was top three reps worldwide at dbt. So like that's, that's actually what I look for outside of like, you know, like domain knowledge is helpful for certain areas and certain profiles or certain levels. So like John Dalton, who I called out, like, I'd hire John Dalton anywhere, but I'd hire him as like the first rep if I was in the data space. That's the kind of person you need early on with like a little bit of. He has a lot of expertise, but, you know, expertise, the drive to do it, that has done it before. As you get to rep 100, domain expertise becomes a little bit less important. But the high slope is the most

[Dick]

important thing when you've made a bad hire. What did you not see that you should have seen?

[Becca Lindquist]

You know what? We actually, I incorporate this into my hiring flow for leaders. I give them feedback or I have someone else give them feedback. Ideally the recruiter. And you know why? Because if I give them feedback and they push back or they, you know, they're kind of a dick about it, I'm like, oh, okay, probably not gonna work.

[Dick]

So this is feedback in the job interview.

[Becca Lindquist]

Yeah, I'll say, like, I'll give an example. I hired, I hired a guy in San Francisco I'm really excited about. He went on a walk with Varun Brun called me after, gave me a voice note and gave me, gave me like some feedback. So I just called him and I was like, hey, how do you think it went? Like, you know, okay, great, great, great. Hey, this is something that I got. Like, this was part of the feedback that I got. What do you think about that? And you just listen and it tells you everything that you need to know about what it's going to be like to work with that person. If they're like, oh, well, like, he didn't really say it that, oh, interesting. Okay. But if they're like, okay, yeah, that's fair. How do I go? How do I go and overcome that? And they're like, yo, what do I do? That's actually very interesting. Especially in a company like Clay where we're like, I don't know, building something new. There's a lot of like open white space. Right. If someone's really defensive, that's actually the biggest red flag. And I, we need to incorporate it into the, into the rep interview. I, I made a hire one time. Ever since I've kind of just said, okay, I'm going to give you the feedback and let's see how you react. And actually it's even better if the recruiter gives them the feedback. It's sort of like when you take someone to, you take, take your girlfriend or your wife to a restaurant and you see how they treat the hostess and the waiter.

[Dick]

One of the biggest signs I look for is bad amount.

[Becca Lindquist]

Right? Yeah, it's the same thing. So if the recruiter gives them feedback and they treat the recruiter a certain kind of way, I'm out.

[Dick]

You know, the one thing I've learned on hiring as well is when they push on title, they're bad. When they push on salary, they tend to be good and know their worth. It's really all my mishires are when

[Harry Stebbings]

I'm not happy being a ea, I

[Dick]

want to be a chief of staff. Ah, you're an ea.

[Becca Lindquist]

I agree.

[Harry Stebbings]

You're happy with the salary, so you're

[Dick]

not going to that. But it's actually that always a Mistake when I don't care about title but I'm worth more, that's when I make mistakes.

[Becca Lindquist]

That's, that's actually, that's if you think about. So like we talked about Todd, right? Same me and Todd. We agree on that. I was like, I actually don't really care what my title is. I do care how much you pay me. I care about scope, but like fuck, you can call me, go to market like every other AI company. Like I don't really care. I actually think and I tell people this, if, if you're joining a sub fifty million dollar company and you're the CRO, I'm like, that's, that feels my, my, my opinion feels like an ego play and it feels like you are a little bit shortsighted because eventually you're gonna stumble and then what are they gonna do? They're gonna say, oh, we need to hire a CRO. You're out right now, you're not gonna learn anything. Cause you've, you've shot your shot. Right.

[Dick]

I think it's also IND if you've got a really strong, solid founder who's able to hire incredibly well, they're not going to give premature CRO titles.

[Becca Lindquist]

Yeah, that's fair.

[Dick]

It's a real sign of an immature founder.

[Becca Lindquist]

Interesting, I didn't think about that. But that's fair.

[Dick]

You protect titles like that because you know it will lead to them likely being demoted in two years and then leaving and then you've got another shit situation versus, versus.

[Becca Lindquist]

If you come in as like, I don't know, head of sales or like go to market leader, whatever, right? There's always room to go up.

[Dick]

How fast do you know when someone's shit that you hire?

[Becca Lindquist]

If it's nice and actually I listen to one of your podcasts you're doing with someone else and you're talking about this. How do you know a big enterprise rep, big deals person, how do you know like they have a nine month ramp. How the fuck are you going to know in month three if they're good or not? Right? You know, for an ic like within probably three weeks.

[Dick]

What are those signs?

[Becca Lindquist]

The signs are can they think critically about someone else's business? So like, and that would be like the sign of a mishire. You put a, you put a prospect in front of them or you say, hey, here's your target account list. You've got gone through boot camp, the two week boot camp, here's your hundred accounts, how do you stack rank them and they just completely whiff It. Or they're like, I don't know. Right? Like, ooh, that's a big red flag. The second thing is, like, what are their activity metrics? Right? Like, okay, you just exited boot camp first. I want to know how they did in boot camp. Like, were they engaged? Were they failing alone? Were they asking questions? Were they leaning on other people? Once you get out of boot camp, it's like, okay, are you thinking critically about your prospects, their business, how we can help them? Are you fucking hitting send? Are you picking up the phone? Are you hitting send? If you're not, you're not generating pipeline. It means you're not gonna be successful, right? So, like, those are the early flags of, like, this person's not gonna work out.

[Harry Stebbings]

Totally get you.

[Dick]

You said their bootcamp quite a few times.

[Becca Lindquist]

Yeah, Yeah.

[Dick]

I presume we're not talking about Pilates, which is what my mother will think about.

[Becca Lindquist]

Yeah. I take my whole team down to Barry's boot camp every day. Let's go.

[Dick]

Kids are a boy will be pleased.

[Harry Stebbings]

No, like, a lot of founders really struggle with, especially early founders.

[Dick]

Like, how the fuck do I train my reps? I've never run a sales org. What is boot camp, Becca?

[Becca Lindquist]

That's a little bit later stage thing. When I joined Heap and when I joined dbt, we didn't have a bootcamp.

[Dick]

So how should early stage founders train reps?

[Becca Lindquist]

So here's what we did at Heap. Basically, Mateen and Ravi, it's like, they showed. They did the thing. We wrote along, and then that shift started to happen of like, okay, now we run the call, and maybe you're on a few. Now you have gong, so you can actually send the people that you hired all of your gong calls before. Like, that's all the founders that I work with. I tell them like, yo, do you have gong? And if they don't, I'm like, ooh, red flag. You gotta go. Just go get. Just buy it. And then send whoever you hire all of the calls that you've done, because they're gonna. One, they're gonna give you feedback on, like, how to sell. But two, they'll hear how you talk about it. And that's actually the most, like, that's the most important thing me is like, how do I take what's in my brain and put it in your brain?

[Dick]

So if I'm a founder hiring today, early stage company under 10 million in revenue, what should I look for in the people that I'm hiring? Just people that press send and have a lot of Energy. Remember this really early stage, what is that profile?

[Becca Lindquist]

I keep coming back to, like thinking critically about your customers. So, like, I'll give an example. Maybe you're selling an AI widget. Does this person come in and talk about the widget or do they talk about how, I don't know, JPMC would use it or the company that they're currently at, how they would use it and the impact that it has? What I mean by impact is like, I'll give an example. Whenever we talk about AI tools, I feel like we talk about like the art of possible, like pie in the sky stuff. And I'm like, hey, hey, hey, bring it back here, right? Why don't you give me an AI tool that automatically tells my reps when they have a close date in the past? The basic shit when we're single. Threaded. Let's start there. Let's help people do the basics well before we get to like, oh, it automates the outbound and then it automates the first deck. And then you know what, it automates the rest of the sales process. I'm like, okay, great, great, great, we can get there. Let's start with the basics. So like, do. When they talk about your widget in the context of their company, are they talking about pie in the sky or are they like, this is actually the real problem that it's solving for us and the impact of that real problem is that, I don't know, our forecast is screwed up or we miss our revenue target or like our rep productivity sucks because of it. Can they tie your thing to a real business problem that they are facing and other people are facing and then tie a dollar outcome to it? Those are the types of people that I want and then I test for. Okay, do they have the drive? Obviously I bias towards having college athletes because they've learned how to work hard. All you gotta do is teach them how to work smart. If you teach them how to work smart, it's really tough to teach someone how to work hard.

[Dick]

I think they also have the discipline to do the work when no one is watching.

[Becca Lindquist]

Yeah, that's true.

[Dick]

You're an athlete and I like to think that I, I don't know, you

[Becca Lindquist]

showed up with those pretty cool M frames.

[Dick]

Thank you so much. But like, most of the time is spent in a gym with no one else in 5am in the morning. And you know that black tie dinner where you hopefully look relatively athletic is once every six months where the world might see that you're fit.

[Becca Lindquist]

Yeah, that's right.

[Dick]

That's it.

[Becca Lindquist]

That's right. The poster, the pieces you post on

[Dick]

Instagram of skipping donut time and skipping everything else.

[Harry Stebbings]

I totally get you on the flip side of that.

[Dick]

What you look for. We were going back earlier, we were like, oh, the FOMO of like, oh, should I join an AI company or not? There are so many well funded AI companies today.

[Becca Lindquist]

I know.

[Dick]

And they will have shiny VCs and they will have people who are pronouncing themselves to be replacing work for every large profession.

[Harry Stebbings]

What would you advise those sales reps

[Dick]

who feel like they've plateaued? Rotting. They're rotting nicely. Which one should I choose?

[Becca Lindquist]

Honestly, it's really tough. And obviously I hadn't intended to leave dbt, if I'm honest. I was like, I'm going to finish out the fiscal year and then maybe I'll start to think about what's next. And I met Varun. And you know Varun, we went for multiple walks around. He lives around the corner from me in Brooklyn. I feel like I got a little bit of the cheat code because I do think that Clay is like the most compelling company on the planet right now. And like, when you think about AI companies, a lot of people have. We just hired a Rev Ops guy. He's fantastic. He has this phrase, he's like, everybody has the Claude spookies. And I'm like, that's a really good way to describe it. The, the feeling of like, well, why wouldn't Claude just do this? Is Claude going to overtake this market? Is Claude going to put you out of business? Right. And it's like, there's a lot of companies out there that I look at it and I'm like, I got the cl. I. Yeah, I think that that could be a thing for you. And so like, the real answer is I don't, I don't really know. But I think about, is there something that's not just AI, that's defensible? Clay has this data marketplace. It's really, it's tough to build that. You could go, yeah, you could go do that. You could go buy 180 different data providers and build your own. But that's a lot of work when you think about just buying software to do that for you. And so like I would look for some sort of other defensibility outside of just we're automating this or like we're going to automate this professional way or like a workflow. And that's a really tough thing to find. Like, like, I can't Even think of a company that I would shout out that's doing that. Right.

[Dick]

I totally get that.

[Harry Stebbings]

I would say, like, just look for

[Dick]

a company with unwavering product market fit. It's pretty hard to sell shit no

[Becca Lindquist]

one wants, that is 100% right?

[Dick]

And it's pretty easy to sell shit that everyone wants.

[Becca Lindquist]

Yeah.

[Dick]

Is it?

[Becca Lindquist]

As someone who is currently selling shit that everybody wants. Yeah.

[Dick]

Is it easy?

[Becca Lindquist]

It is easy in the beginning because you could grow as a company a thousand percent just by doing the thing, like having a moderate execution on your sales process. And if you have a really great product, it's going to fly off the shelves. Right. But as you grow, it becomes very challenging to grow 1,000% year over year, 250% year over year. Right. So like, a lot of what I focused on when I was evaluating Clay was like, great that you're landing these, these logos. How many stick around? How many double their spend with you? And like the metrics that I got, I think I can share, they're like, we haven't churned a customer. Our NDR is close to 200%. Those are the types of things if you're talking to an AI company, that's the biggest green flag, right? Because it's not just can you sell the thing, it's can you make the customer successful and successful enough that they want to go do more with you?

[Dick]

The hard thing is today, I don't know if that matters as much as top line revenue growth, as ridiculous as that sounds, but if you're thinking about actually personal wealth accumulation, especially in the short term, if you can go from 1 to 200 in a year, like some of the AI companies with shitter NDR and shitter churn metrics, if you can carry that out for two to three years on a comp basis from stock, you'll have secondary opportunities to sell 10, 20, $30 million worth.

[Becca Lindquist]

Maybe that's when I talk.

[Dick]

And building a really secure business that

[Harry Stebbings]

grows 3, 4x, which by the way,

[Dick]

is amazing, which is great, which is incredible, but it's just like, not that

[Becca Lindquist]

it's amazing, but it's actually, it's amazing for 2011, right? Like, people get caught up on this.

[Dick]

We did Legora and we did Lovable. Like, I mean, 13 months to 100 million in revenue.

[Becca Lindquist]

Yeah, it's impressive. It's impressive. Here's like, here's how I. When people come to me and they're like, like, should I take this offer? How should I think about this? You know, a company, let's call it Acme Co. Right? High flying, fast growing AI startup. They might give you, let's say they give you a million dollars of stock and you're like, holy shit, I'm rich. And by the way, this is growing so fast, it's going to be $20 million soon. There's like a coefficient that I apply to that of liquidity. How liquid is that? Do they actually do tender offers? Because I think everybody's kind of been bit right. By a company that's like, oh, we're growing so fast and we really care about employee liquidity, so we're going to do tender offers and then never does a tender offer. Right. And so now you're sitting on however much stock you have. That is probably life changing for you. So like, I actually just tell people, I'm like, what have they done? Not what they say. What have they done that's shown that they're going to provide liquidity on that. On that equity and just apply a coefficient to that. If they give you a million dollars of equity, but they haven't done anything to allow people to. You know, there's definitely people who've been there longer than you. What are they doing with those folks? Just apply a certain. Maybe you apply 0.3x to that. Right.

[Dick]

I'm a founder and you're an angel investor in my company. Thank you. You're advising me, Becca.

[Harry Stebbings]

I don't know how to do sales comp.

[Dick]

How do I pay salespeople? What would you advise me in terms of genuinely how to think about salary comp? We had a guest on the show that said, before 20x quota, how would you advise me?

[Becca Lindquist]

We just rolled out a variable compensation plan at Clay. Before, everybody was just being paid a salary, whether you're the top performer or the bottom performer. As a salesperson. I saw that and I said, huh? Okay. And there's a lot of companies that have done that in the early days. Like Stripe did that in the early days.

[Dick]

In other words, no bonuses tied, no

[Becca Lindquist]

bonus, no cash compensation tied to any performance in a structured way.

[Dick]

Yeah, yeah. OpenAI did this too.

[Becca Lindquist]

I saw that and I said, and incredible that it's gotten you this far. Let's figure out how you reward and attract and retain the right talent. Because I'll give an example. We just hired a gtme, our version of a rep. You think of it as like a rep and a sales engineer rolled into one. We just hired a GTME out here in London and I cut off a red eye jet from jfk, got Breakfast with her. And the conversation was, how do we go make a million dollars here? How do I w2amillion dollars at Cloud? Walk me through the math. And that's what the best reps want to know. I have a target, I'll run as fast as I can towards it. Tell me how to do it. And then they're like, if you don't have the right math, if you're like, can't walk them through it or you don't have the right percentages, they're like, maybe you don't care about salespeople, but in this scenario you're hiring what your first two salespeople. Here's what worked at Heap and I actually really can.

[Dick]

I'm pushy. Do you agree with me it's fucking stupid not to have a tight performance?

[Becca Lindquist]

I do. Just because I'm an athlete. Right.

[Dick]

I also think it's arrogant to be.

[Harry Stebbings]

Don't mind.

[Dick]

You're paid in the equity too. So like just good luck. Well, going back to your point, if there's no tenders, thanks. But that doesn't pay the mortgage.

[Becca Lindquist]

I think what I think what it does is it just, it allows people to just like hide. And the way that I actually say this to people when they're like, why? Oh, the variable compensation plan, what if. And I'm like, hold on here. You have a number. Today you are being judged against your performance to that number. If you don't hit that number, I'm going to fire you. And if you over perform on that number, I'm not going to pay you more. Do you think this is a good deal for you? Most salespeople are like, yeah, if I over perform, I want to make more money. And like, you know, those are the rules of the road. If I don't hit my number, you're gonna fire me. And so I understand. I think actually maybe the genesis of this is that a lot of these companies are like, they don't know how to do comp plans or they're like, what if, what if, what if? And so they're like, this is actually just easier. And I think that's maybe okay in certain areas. But like I'll tell you the thing that Todd, Todd, who I just hired at Clay, we, we were the first two reps at Heap and we had a compensation plan that was dead simple. It was, we had a base salary and like, I don't know, this was like 2015 San Francisco. I think our base salary was like 60k pretty low. And then every deal that we Closed and we had to pay back our base salary. So like every month it was like, I don't know, five grand. So the first five grand of revenue was a wash. Beyond that, every dollar that we closed, we got 25%. And if it was a two year deal, every dollar in that two year deal, we got 33%. And I have never run harder at a goal in my life than when I knew that I was going to make 25% of every single deal that I closed. It aligned our incentives with the company's incentives very, very directly. And we just like sprinted at it. And then we compete with each other. Be like, who could do the first hundred thousand dollar deal? Oh, I got the biggest deal now. I got the biggest deal. And it was like everybody was celebrating, everybody was making good, you know, good money and that was it. It was simple to administer. Very direct. When we built our comp plan at clay, you know, I feel like it's really easy to make it really complicated and like, oh, 20% of your 20% of your variables, this 30%. And I'm just like, make it fucking simple. Because then it's easy to understand and it's easy to administer. Everybody understands the rules of the road. And we have accelerators.

[Dick]

So can I ask what do you have then?

[Becca Lindquist]

So you have a quota, obviously.

[Dick]

What is the quota?

[Becca Lindquist]

Our quota OT ratio is like, I think it's like seven and a half. Quite good, quite high.

[Dick]

I was always brought up in the enterprise world by 3-4x, was kind of where you were.

[Becca Lindquist]

Well, I think below 4x it's like, yikes, right? I've always taught four to six. Like four, four is kind of shit. Six is like, wow, you're doing great. I think in the AI era, you have 20x, your base salary is your quota. Like that's pretty wild. Punchy, right? It's punchy. Punchy.

[Dick]

Gotta hit the ground running for that one.

[Becca Lindquist]

Yeah, that's right, it's punchy.

[Dick]

But like first 12 minutes now.

[Harry Stebbings]

Sal.

[Dick]

Yeah.

[Becca Lindquist]

In the AI era, I feel like we're seeing somewhere like six to 10, depending on the business, the types of deals, size of deals, who you're selling to. But like we're at 7 and a half x quota to OT ratio today. If it doesn't make sense, we're gonna make it make sense. If it doesn't make sense to have that, we'll change quotas, we'll change pay, that type of stuff. We have accelerators like you would imagine. Normal.

[Dick]

Sorry, this is where I mentioned I'm not too fast. Which is why I'm a venture capitalist. So I need to hit 6 to 8x my salary. And then what happens? And then I get what?

[Becca Lindquist]

And then you get paid more on every dollar that you close. Only then have you worked at a company where they have accelerators before you hit 100% of your number.

[Harry Stebbings]

I mean, 6.8X is quite a lot.

[Dick]

And only then I get it. Jesus.

[Becca Lindquist]

Fuck. So what I'm saying, what I'm hearing is you don't want to come work for me.

[Dick]

No, it just feels like, be the perfect husband.

[Harry Stebbings]

Bring me coffee and tea every day for 365 days a year, and only then you might get lucky on the 366th day.

[Becca Lindquist]

Well, so it depends.

[Harry Stebbings]

I'm exhausted. I've cleaned the house for a year. I've made you dinner every night. And I might get one Shaggy.

[Becca Lindquist]

It's exhausting back there. Look, you have your ot and we pay, like, you know, pretty competitively. I would say above and beyond your quota. And this is actually the. This is the argument that we're actually having right now. Like, I spent probably two hours in the last two days with my rev ops leader, Varun Karim, our finance leader. Right, Our strategic finance team. On what are the accelerators? Because my perspective is if you're overachieving, it should be heavily weighted towards over performance. If I'm giving you a big quota and you're hitting 110% of that, I want you to be making good money. If you're hitting 150% of that, we come back to, what's the percentage of quota attainment to make a million dollars? That's the number that we're fighting over. Because if you have. Let's say you have 100 reps, 60% of them are hitting their number. Great. Just hitting. They're making their ote.

[Dick]

But is that a good amount to hit?

[Becca Lindquist]

The culture that I think is best is when you have 60% of people over 100%, 80% over 80%. You're building a winning culture. People are successful. People are telling their friends they're having so much fun. Very successful. Come work here. You get the best talent. That's a rule of thumb that I like. Our strategic finance guy was like, oh, it was 50 over 100 at my last. Great. Whatever you agree on, some percentage of your team is over 100% and a certain percentage is over 80%. And if those things are true, it builds the right culture, which is actually really important in sales.

[Dick]

How do you know when you are setting the wrong goals versus have a shit team. Because two different people could go, ah, we've got too high expectations. Or it could be you're just hiring shit people.

[Becca Lindquist]

And usually you can tell by the reaction. Actually coming back to heap, they hired both Todd and I roughly the same time. I think Todd was like three, maybe three, four months before me. And they told us like a year later they were like, we hired you two at a time. I tell every founder this. I'm like, hire two at a time because then you'll actually see you hire one. You're like, is it good? Is it not good? I don't know. If you hire two, it's pretty clear whether one's good and one's bad. They told us like a year later they were like, yeah, we hired both of you. And we were like, we're probably gonna have to fire one and keep the better one. But you both were really good. So we kept you both. And I was like, oh, okay. Well, thanks. But like that's how you do it, right? You have, let's say you have 100 reps. There's gonna be five that just bitch about out quota and blah, blah, blah. But if you dig under the covers, they're probably not doing the work to go and be successful. Right? And those are the people that you probably don't want on the team.

[Dick]

I'm an ambassador as well and I was in Vienna the other day to try and lead a series A, which I.

[Becca Lindquist]

Sounds fancy.

[Dick]

Thank you. I lead a very glamorous life. Not just short shorts, but we went into this office and there was this sales leaderboard and it had, you know, whatever, eight reps, kind of series eight early stitch companies, eight reps. And me and my partner in the fun were like, oh yeah, we like this. Like we felt the competition and we felt the like they are looking at their numbers and they are on every

[Becca Lindquist]

new deal, every pipe that's coming to our sales floor. We've hired non traditional salespeople. So you kind of have to like incrementally introduce some of these concepts. But like, you better believe we're going to build the sales dashboard of how much revenue have you closed? How much pipeline have you generated? What's been your activity this week? Who's at the top? Probably the person who's at the top. Bottom sales up, it's going to be at the top on the revenue dashboard, 100%.

[Dick]

Is there anything that we can do to inspire that competitiveness within sales teams to make them incentivized Encouraged to kind of fight between them. Hunger Games of sales.

[Becca Lindquist]

That's why if you create a zero sum game, everybody's kind of just looking out for themselves and they're very scared. Versus that's why I was like 60% over 100%. 80 over 80 creates this culture where people are excited to help each other and they're excited to celebrate everybody else's success. You think back to me and Todd, to be fair to like, for the record, I closed the first six figure deal at Heap and then he was like, awesome, fuck, I want to go do that too. Okay, I'm going to go get a bigger one. Go get a bigger one. Go get a bigger one, right? And we'd be bouncing ideas off of each other the whole time. It's like we wanted to help each other because we knew that we were building this thing together. But we were like, I want to go beat you. And I think even at dbt, right, which is like open source product, open source company, very open source minded. So it's a different approach. You're giving away software for free and then you're also trying to charge for it, which is kind of a weird dance to do. Once you get big enough, you do teams, right? So the last year that I was there, the central team closed the biggest deal in history. And then the EMEA team's like, well, fuck, we need to go get Siemens or Allianz, we need to go get a bigger deal there. And you kind of just pit people against each other in a fun way or a, like, you know, me and Alistair. So Alistair ran a MIA for me at DBT and he would always say, here's the percentage of the company's revenue that comes from amea and you're like fighting over market share. And then I would go to the, I go to the America's team. I'd say, hey, make sure that, make sure that he doesn't get any more points, right? Hey, your goal is actually that he goes from 34% to 33%. Right? And you just kind of like you put a little chip on people's shoulder, but in a fun way and totally get it.

[Dick]

Just kind of demoralize them in a really fun way.

[Becca Lindquist]

It's not demoralizing if the company is growing. If the company is growing 3 to 4x, which you just gave me a.

[Harry Stebbings]

You're becoming inherently less important, but feel good about it. So we have 6 to 8x quota

[Dick]

and then what happens? So like I'm your rep, say, I did join.

[Becca Lindquist]

Did you join Sounds like you have some reservations.

[Dick]

You got a high base, you need to whack it up.

[Harry Stebbings]

But 6 to 8x, what happens then with the acceleration?

[Becca Lindquist]

So like if I pay you 10 cents on the dollar before, it should jump pretty.

[Harry Stebbings]

But for every new deal at Klei

[Dick]

now, do I get 25%?

[Becca Lindquist]

It doesn't jump up that high. You know what? I know I'm very disappointing.

[Dick]

Why did it at Heap and not at Klay?

[Becca Lindquist]

I mean, we did it at Heap because we were the first two reps and they were like, just go fucking close his house.

[Dick]

You can have that higher with scale.

[Becca Lindquist]

I think it depends on the economics of your business. So like if you think about Clay, right, Like we pay for the data that we sell, right? So we pay per credit in the same way that we charge for a credit of data. And actually our economics are very, very good. Our head of finance is really smart about all that type of stuff. But in some businesses you have shit margins. And I've worked for companies that have less than ideal margins and it kind of compresses what you can actually pay. So maybe that's something that you look for in the AI era is good margins. I don't actually know why we can't do that. There's some sort of flat pay that you have a base commission rate and then on top of that you get accelerators. All that Heap did was just jump straight to the accelerators and say you have an artificially low base. Now go work your ass off.

[Dick]

One thing that you said there about not great margins with AI companies and a lot of them don't have great margins because they also give a lot upfront.

[Becca Lindquist]

That's right.

[Dick]

And influences their sales and marketing costs in some ways. How does your job change when people

[Harry Stebbings]

have tried the product already, they've got

[Dick]

usage already and it's not the SDR outbound that it used to be be.

[Becca Lindquist]

I think, I think if you. You're talking about like a PLG motion, right? And if you have usage, your. Your job then becomes, what are the next use cases? What are the next teams you're fighting over? Like workloads, right? Rather than going and landing a logo. Because if you think about, think about Salesforce, how many places, how many entrances are there for different AI tools? And then how much market share internally at Salesforce do they have? So like if you go land a logo, let's say Salesforce is on, is on a PLG motion for your company or AI widget. And that, you know, you. I don't know Three people in the marketing team using it, three people in the sales team, whatever. Right? Your job. Then as the rep becomes how do I go take that market share in that company faster than any other AI company or any of our competitors can come in and take some of that? Because once they're in, then you're fighting with them over workloads versus fighting with inertia. So it's almost like, can you go into an account and suck the oxygen out? And that's actually how I think PLG businesses do really, really well. Someone comes in, they're dabbling in the product, and you as a seller, you're like, I'm going to go market that internally at that account to all of the other people and pick up all of the other use cases and secure the borders of that. Not to be too American, but secure the borders on that account from anybody else. It's like Risk.

[Dick]

Trump would be proud.

[Becca Lindquist]

But you think about going and securing your land in that account so that other competitors can't come in. I saw this with Snowflake and databricks, right? Snowflake would own it, everything. And then databricks would get one small foothold somewhere, and suddenly now they're fighting over the same workloads and someone's going to win that.

[Dick]

How do you build internal champions within businesses? What's your biggest lesson?

[Becca Lindquist]

Okay, so if you actually ask anybody on my team, I hope that they don't listen to this because they're going to groan. I will oftentimes just say, okay, do you have a champion? And they're like, I have a. Yeah, this person's my champion. What are the three characteristics of a champion? Champion. All of them know it's. They're selling for you when you're not in the room. They have access and influence over the EB and they have a personal win. If you focus on those three things, if you focus on honestly, just the personal win, like, yo, why are you.

[Dick]

The personal win is they personally gain from your tool benefiting their company.

[Becca Lindquist]

Yeah. So, like, I'll give an example of a champion of clay at a company that we all would know. Her win is she's like, hey, I'm becoming the AI person. I teach this AI course at the university in this large city, and I'm talking about how I'm using clay and I'm building my personal brand. And, like, I kind of want to get into, like, venture and investing and advising companies on AI and like, I'm leveraging what I'm doing with clay to show that I'm that person. And I'm like, that's an. That's an incredible personal win at dbt. Like, you would talk to folks and you'd be like, yo, why. Why you care so much about this? This is just data transformation. They'd be like, but I want to be the data guy. I want to be the guy that owns the entire data stack and does all this cool shit. And then when I leave this company, I can go to another company and be the data guy and come in higher salary, get more equity, whatever. If you focus on that, if you can get to that, you probably have a champion, and they're probably going to go to war for you, and they have to have the other two things.

[Dick]

Becca, I'm one of your reps.

[Harry Stebbings]

I'm sorry, Becca.

[Dick]

It just slipped tonight's quarter. I know I said this quarter.

[Harry Stebbings]

I know I said this quarter.

[Becca Lindquist]

But Mitsubishi, that never happened. That never happens. Never happens.

[Harry Stebbings]

But Mitsubishi, just.

[Dick]

I just slipped tonight's quarter.

[Becca Lindquist]

What do you say to me? Well, I'd start with, why? Why'd it slip?

[Harry Stebbings]

Honestly, they took longer to get back

[Dick]

to me than I thought, and we just didn't get it.

[Becca Lindquist]

Overwhelmed. Here's a big one. Oh, this actually happened to one of my reps. Oh. You know, the. I didn't know how many approvers needed to sign this big expansion. The signer is actually the CEO of this big company is on his island in Hawaii. Fuck. And I'm like, okay, well, like, let's break this down. Is there someone internally that could have told us that? Yes, probably. Right? So then, did we talk to that person? It's like, did you talk to that person? Did you ask the right question? Because those are two different things, Right? You might be talking to the right person, but you just didn't think to ask the question. And they didn't think to tell you because their job is not to buy software. Sometimes it is for your procurement. Right? And then I go to, okay, well, who's your champion? Do you have a champion? And oftentimes what I'll hear is someone mistaking a coach for a champion or a person who's dabbling in the software as a champion. They assume it's the champion versus. I always use this when I say, like, and what have you seen with your two eyes? That tells you that this person's a champion, that they have those three attributes. What have you seen with your two eyes? And people make fun of me, but they remember, right? And now they've gotten better at it. So like, we just opened a London office. I was talking to one of the GTMEs out here and she was like, oh, well, yeah, yeah, he's a bad champion. I'm like, whoa, whoa. Well, hold on here. And you kind of have to be meticulous and, like, kind of an asshole about when people say, like, qualify champion. And like, no, no, no. It's binary, right? Like, if you're a bad champion, is it. You're really your champion, right? You're either a champion or you're not a champion. Like, let's be really clear about it. And if you're, if you say they're a champion, what have you seen with your two eyes? Tells you that they're selling for you when you're not in the room, they have access and influence over the EB and there's a personal win. It's pretty simple. If you don't have a champion, you're probably not going to get a deal done. Or if you get a deal done and you're like, I didn't have a champion. You had a champion. You just didn't know that they were your champion. And you probably didn't do the best job.

[Dick]

When we sit down and we do post mortems and we do collaborative forecasting on what we've done and what we've got ahead of us, how often do we do that?

[Becca Lindquist]

Every week on Thursdays, every one of my frontline managers goes and does a forecast call with their team and they either do it as a team, they do it individually. I actually don't care how it gets done done, but I do care that you're sitting down with your rep and saying, okay, walk me through, what's the pain we're solving? And then it's like, okay, what metric is attached to that pain? And then who gives a shit about that metric? Are we talking to them? Right? Like these types of questions that help us understand, do you have control of the deal? Is the deal in the right stage? Right. Are we, are we making assumptions? Do we need to go back? And actually you get to the end and something happens and you're like, I have a bad champion. Well, actually, actually you're back here and you skipped a couple steps, right? Let's just be real and move it back there now and go do the work to actually build the right deal. So we do that once a week. I do that with my frontline leaders on Fridays. And the way that I do it is I just model the behavior that I want them to be doing in their forecast calls. And I expect that they're in the deals in the same way that, like, I'm running a couple deals with reps and it's a lot of fun.

[Dick]

One of the biggest mistakes sales leaders make in forecast call at the front

[Becca Lindquist]

line, not being in the details, not being in the deals with the rep. I'll give an example. I talked about John Dalton earlier. John Dalton is like one of my favorite people. I would love to work with John Dalton for the rest of my life. He also lives in Santa Barbara, is very chill. He has a very, very nice life. John Dalton, if you asked him, hey, what's going on with company? He knows because he's in the deal with the rep, doing the work, showing the rep. Here's how you do a good deal. Let me teach you how to run these types of deals. He's in the deal so he doesn't need to look at his notes. He's like, yeah, this happened. This is the immediate next step that we're doing to get to the EB or to, you know, we have a call on Friday to talk about all the approval processes and the signing process versus, you know, you might ask Stacy, hey, what's going on with company? And she's like, ah, let me check, let me check my notes. Ah, the last update. And I'm like, I can read the update. In Salesforce, we have a specific, specific, standardized way of writing your next steps. I can go read that too. But what is your perspective on the deal? Are you in the deal? And not every frontline manager can be in every single deal. So you have to choose which ones are the most important. And it's usually a factor of how tenured is the rep, how good is the rep? What are we trying to develop with them? Is it a high profile deal? Is it a great logo that we know we can go and expand? Is it the biggest deal? However you decide, you decide. But that's probably the biggest mistake that I see for frontline leaders.

[Dick]

We get that big logo. And never forget what someone told me on the show once. You never want your farmer going against someone else's hunter. How do you think about the maintenance of that relationship with the rep who's a hunter, versus handing off to pushy, cushy, nice cs. And then one of your competitors, Hunters,

[Becca Lindquist]

is going because they're competing for the same workflow in your account because you didn't secure the account and you've got

[Dick]

cushy CS who's now like, oh, softly, softly. And their hunter's going, I mean, look,

[Becca Lindquist]

you're kind of getting into the question of what's the model of the go to market team. I've been in models where you do a full handoff. I've been in models where you do a handoff, you keep it for 12 months, whatever my favorite model is, you sell the deal, you're renewing the deal, you're comped on net dollars. So what that does is that incentivizes the rep to sell a good deal, right. And protect your unit economics. Someone on John's team sold a deal that was slightly above list price, right? Wow. They had a much easier time than the rep that discounted 40% and is trying to go and claw that back now. So it helps protect the unit economics because you know that you're going to have, you want to go and expand that. But two, you sell a shitty deal, you're going to renew that shitty deal and you're probably going to take some churn of contraction, right? And like, that's actually the model that I love because it incentivizes you, the hunter, to go and secure the border in that account and not let anybody else come take your workflows. You look at a snowflake or a databricks, that's their model and it's because they're competing over workflows in the account. It's the same for us.

[Dick]

You said about the discount then you've got to make it up over time. Discounting is a great way to stop. What I said earlier about, oh, it slipped into next quarter. It encourages urgency. I'll give you a discount if you sign. We don't like discounting at all.

[Becca Lindquist]

I think that's a shitty way to incentivize people. Here's why someone said this. When I was at dbt, this is a long time ago, we were talking to a buyer and they just straight up called us on it. They were like, is my money not green on April 1st? And I was like, fair play. I think everybody knows at this point that if I'm giving you a discount on the last day of the quarter, you're probably going to be able to get that same discount on the first day of the next quarter.

[Dick]

Quarter.

[Becca Lindquist]

And when we buy software, I don't know, the rep was like, hey, I can only do this if you do this by next Friday. And it's like, actually, I don't give a shit about your timeline. I need this software today. So yeah, I'm going to move fast. We bought a forecasting tool. I need this because I have no control over the business. I have no visibility into what's happening. I need this more than you need to sell this deal. So, sure, I'll take your discount, but we're going to try to get this deal done before next Friday. If you find that, that's why I'm like, what's the metric that we're attached to? Who cares about that metric now? Go talk to that person and say, hey, how do I help get this in your hands faster? And if they say I don't really care about it, you probably skipped a step. Let's go back and let's figure it out.

[Dick]

You said you buy software. I am friends with Jason Lemkin from Sasta, who's like, I just got rid of a lot of my team, including a lot of my sales team. And we have AI SDRs, we have artisan, we have qualified, we have Monaco now, Like, fuck, I don't need them. I'm doing more, I'm doing better with less. How does the world change with AI SDRs? Are SDRs dead? Is Outbound dead?

[Becca Lindquist]

Absolutely not. No way. So it's funny, people ask this question, when I first started Klay, they were like, oh, SDRs, what's your perspective? And I was like, I'm building an SDR team. I'm building a Klay doctor team. Because Outbound will never be dead. You can't reach every single company and every single buyer with whatever marketing you're doing. Or if you do, it's less efficient, right? It might be efficient when you're trying to generate $40 million of pipeline because you have a, I don't know, 10 or $15 million revenue target. But like, when you get into having to build a quarter billion dollars of pipeline, like, it's actually probably a little bit more efficient to just put some hungry, scrappy 24 year old on the field, pay them, you know, a certain amount of money and say, go run at these accounts. Right? That's the first thing. The second thing is like, hey, you don't have an SDR team, who the hell are you going to promote into your closing roles? It's completely de risked if you have an SDR that you're promoting. Those are the best people.

[Dick]

So Outbound is not dead.

[Becca Lindquist]

No, Outbound is not dead.

[Dick]

Should AES be responsible for pipeline generation?

[Becca Lindquist]

Everybody should be responsible for pipeline generation. Everybody owns pipeline. I'm out here. We have, we call it Clay on Tuesdays. You might know it as its former name, PG Tuesday.

[Dick]

Yeah.

[Becca Lindquist]

Every Tuesday I ask my team, hey, who Can I reach out to for you? You know, we have a whole channel called multi threading requests. Who can varun. Who can Kareem, who can our chief of staff, Julia. Who can she have our VCs reach out to for you rep? Because everybody should own pipeline generation to help make the rep successful. That's it. It's so funny that like, just the same message coming from a different mouth totally changes everything. Yeah, it gets a completely different response. And so, like, I encourage people to think about it. One of the GTMEs that I was talking to out here in London, you know, Tuesday rolls around, we kick off Clay day. I'm like, hey, what's working well, she's like, you know what, I'm just doing the basics. I take an account and I think about what are all of the ways that I can go and make contact with them. So is it a vc? Is it me? Is it you? Is it our partners?

[Dick]

Right, you get a sequoia partner to LinkedIn, message a CE, 100%. There's an increased chance of their response.

[Becca Lindquist]

Yes, 100%. 100%.

[Dick]

One of our portfolio companies, the CRO, comes in every month and gives me like the top 10 targets and I just go with them to the CEOs on LinkedIn. I have a blue check mark and lots of followers on LinkedIn.

[Becca Lindquist]

They're very important.

[Dick]

Very important. Chatting shit on LinkedIn. Nine out of ten respond. Yeah, they're like one out of ten. Totally different. I completely agree to yes, 100%.

[Harry Stebbings]

You said about really interesting.

[Dick]

Everyone at Clay is a social media star. Do you encourage your reps to be public online? We had the head of growth at Lovable on and she's like, the best form of marketing is employee led marketing.

[Becca Lindquist]

I tell people I need to be better at this. I need to follow my own advice. We do really cool shit at clay. So I'll give an example. You can, if you work at Clay and you want to try out a new AI tool tool, you can just go into a channel and say, can I have a ramp card to try this tool out? And they'll give you a ramp card, like, no questions asked, like, I want to try this AI widget. Can I do it? And they're like, yeah, get after it. Versus like a lot of other companies are like, oh, that needs to go through approvals. It needs to go through our AI council and they need to evaluate it and we'll get back to you never. How's that? Right? And so things like that, I'm like, whoa, hey, you should actually post about that, because one, that's something that no other company is doing. And anybody who's out there and sees that and is currently rotting at their company, they're like, holy shit, I want to do that. We do a lot of. We talked a lot about the cultural things that we do that are fun. I think that it should have some sort of learning or training. Hey, I'm getting better at my job. I think that's a great way. That's kind of modern marketing.

[Dick]

You said AI doesn't change SDRs. It doesn't change outbound. What does it change?

[Becca Lindquist]

I didn't say it doesn't change it. I just said it doesn't replace it. I think about this, if I can, and this is my thesis with the clay doctor team is like. Like, let's say 20, 2018. An SDR can book in a given month. Say they're booking 15 meetings, right? If I can arm that rep with clay and a Claude seat, maybe a lovable seat, I don't know, I can tool them with some sort of AI stack. And now they can book 40 meetings a month. I'm going to say yes, please. Thank you. Okay, now I want to grow my team of SDRs for from 8 to fucking infinity, right? Because I see a ton more productivity. Anybody that's like, oh, well, we're just gonna cut our SDR team in half. I'm like, hmm, okay. That's an interesting move, right? That's a scared play that you're making because you're saying, I can get the same productivity for half versus saying I can get this productivity. And now I'm gonna go multiply that into infinity and take all the space, all the oxygen out of these accounts.

[Dick]

Well, one assumes that you need the SDR for part of the work, and the other assumes that you can replace it entirely and just hand off to an ae. If you think you can replace it entirely and just hand off to an fd, you can get an Infinity with one tool.

[Becca Lindquist]

Well, I think. How many businesses do you think out there can actually replace the entire SDR process and just hand it off to

[Dick]

an AI right now? None.

[Becca Lindquist]

Right?

[Dick]

Yeah.

[Becca Lindquist]

So it's like, okay, you're going to have some number of SDRs.

[Dick]

What's been the best AI tool that you've brought into the company from a sales perspective?

[Becca Lindquist]

I don't know that I have particularly found the AI tool and brought it in. But here's two tools that we use pretty aggressively. Everybody uses level, Everybody uses. Claude, I was talking last Night with a bunch of my team about on the plane back to New York, I'm probably just going to look at the Claude saved projects and just steal a bunch of ideas. The two tools that I'm obsessed with right now. Granola. Everybody's obsessed with granola. Great. They just raised a big round. Happy for them. The other tool is Whisperflow. Are you familiar with them?

[Dick]

It's very personal. So Granola. I was the first VC they met, and I turned them down. I sent my partner a note saying someone should set up a just giving page for them because no one would give them money.

[Becca Lindquist]

Well, they gotta think, what?

[Dick]

Like, Chris is a friend of mine, and he basically came to me and he was like, AI and notes. It's gonna be a thing. I don't have any clue how, what, where, when, but, like, that's the thing. I'm like, I've been in Rome research. I've been in all the others dude notes.

[Becca Lindquist]

You know what, though? It's very object. I did a reference call last night on my phone, and I used Granola to take the notes, and I just sent it to Varun and my talent partner. And it's very cut and dry. There's no emotion in the granola notes. And Varun was like, is this a positive? Was this a positive reference? And I was like, yes, it was glowing. And I looked back at the granola notes and it was like, just objective. Like, yes, Stacy helped me in this deal. And I was like, okay, got it. I'll figure out a different process. So they got some things to work on.

[Harry Stebbings]

And then Whisper Flow.

[Dick]

To be fair, I never had the chance to invest in them, but I loved them. I use them the whole fricking time. I never type anymore. Like, never type. The only thing that really annoys me on the phone is the toggle.

[Becca Lindquist]

Yeah, that is kind of annoying, especially if you don't have it open. So, hey, whisper float, if you could fix that for me, that would be really great.

[Dick]

So annoying. I love that I'm with you.

[Becca Lindquist]

I don't know if you have this problem. If I open up a new email tab and I just have a blank email, I'm like, oh, my God, what am I gonna say? If I can just press a button and say, that's how I send out a weekly update. And if I can just press a button, I say, yo, squad, this is what's going on this week. Here's the numbers, here's the pipeline. Like, da, da, da, da. And it does the whole thing for me. And I just hyperlink and you can

[Dick]

add it a little bit if you're like. I didn't want to say, like. Yeah, yeah, I have that, too. I find it better for hard emails, ironically, where, like, you know, it's difficult to know what to type. It's easier to know what to say.

[Becca Lindquist]

Yeah, yeah. So I don't know if you know Bill Bench over at Battery.

[Dick]

I remember interviewing him when he was at Pat.

[Becca Lindquist]

Oh, yeah. I have a ton of respect for him. And if you've been an operator that long, God, you've got some thick skin. But he said the other day, he was like, no one's going to type anymore. If you're typing, you're behind. You should be talking to your technology. And I was like, that's a weird way to think about it. It's a very futuristic Jetsons way to think about it. But it's actually true. I don't really type that much anymore.

[Dick]

I completely agree. But you haven't used the AI SCR tools to boost productivity. You're not pushing them.

[Becca Lindquist]

I mean, we use clay, right? We use Clay to supercharge our SDR team. Because if I can build a system that then tells the SDR where to focus and then I can go train that sdr, let's go be a dick.

[Dick]

It's not that intuitive. It's, like, not that easy.

[Becca Lindquist]

Well, it's not that easy.

[Harry Stebbings]

Well, I. I've tried.

[Dick]

Varun and Bruno keep on trying to get me to do stuff.

[Becca Lindquist]

Okay.

[Dick]

And I'm.

[Harry Stebbings]

It's a bit fucking complex.

[Dick]

I don't know where to start.

[Becca Lindquist]

Well, so actually, it's a bit of

[Dick]

a blank page problem.

[Becca Lindquist]

That's right. It's the same problem. It's the same problem as Whisper Flow and email. Right. It's a spreadsheet. You open it up, it's a blank spreadsheet. So where do you start?

[Dick]

Well, in Whisper Flow's, like, just talk. I can't just, like, verbal diarrhea Clay.

[Becca Lindquist]

You can now. Well, you can't verbal. You can type diarrhea. Maybe you can use Whisper Flow into Sculptor, which is like our kind of like, you know, Clippy from the Microsoft Word. Right. Sculptor is like our little Clippy. You can say, I'm trying to find the 100 best Indian restaurants in London and find out who their owners are, what is their Yelp reviews, and what are people actually saying in those Yelp reviews is the best dish. And then craft me an outbound email saying, hey, owner, I'd love to sit with you on Thursday and talk about whatever while we eat this dish. You can put that into sculptor and it will build the table for you. So you're actually not starting because that was like when, you know, when I was, I guess, interviewing or talking to Varun about joining clay. There are a bunch of things that I was of kind, like, hey, and what about this? Because, like, my wife uses clay. Or like, you know, we bought clay at dbt. Like, what about this? This is a gap. And I'd be like, yo, this blank. It is a blank page problem. How do you start that? And he was like, we're actually building dick comment.

[Dick]

Is that not claudified?

[Becca Lindquist]

You could probably use Claude to say, hey, give me the top 50 oil companies in Austin. Yeah, right?

[Dick]

Find the CEOs of all of them. Get me their email for each of them. Actually, open air will fuck you on that one straight away. They're like, no, we don't provide emails.

[Becca Lindquist]

Well, I think.

[Dick]

Well, that was fucking.

[Becca Lindquist]

But think about it. One rep could do that. How do you do that? When you have 100 reps, what do you do? How do you scale that out? How do you add in something new and iterate on it? A lot of people, we talked about my favorite phrase, the Claude spookies, right? Like, oh, why doesn't Claude just do that? It's like, hey, have you ever tried to get 100 people to do something different, to change something, to iterate in the same way that you iterate? Good luck. Because we're still humans, right? We're not bots yet.

[Dick]

I totally get. Listen, I can talk to you all day. I want to move to a quick fire round, so I say a short statement. You give me your immediate thoughts. That sound okay?

[Becca Lindquist]

Yeah, we'll do our best.

[Dick]

Okay, so what's the worst hiring mistake sales leaders make?

[Becca Lindquist]

Focusing on the last company that they were at and if it was a Playbook company or not? Like, I'll give an example. It's actually interesting. You see, I don't know if you. If you saw Brian McCarthy just joined cursor from Rubrik. And actually, you know, I was texting with a friend last night. A lot of people are now moving from Rubrik to Cursor. Rubrikrik. Very Playbook company. Cursor AI First Company company. And I have a ton of respect for those guys and all the Playbook folks. And I think what they've done and what they've taught the craft of sales is really, really valuable. It's going to be very interesting to see how they Modify their playbook to be AI first. Because I think there's a lot of parts that are still very relevant, but I think there's some parts that are going to be thrown out. I give an example, like understanding entire business case before you do anything in the product or you show any value. Like you can't really sell that way in the AI space. So like, I'm very interested to see how that works. But like I've worked for leaders in the past that they have a certain hiring profile and they do not want to deviate from that. Even for high slope individuals. I think that that's, that's a mistake because then you just get the same, you get 100 of the same kind of person versus people who are going to actually push the envelope.

[Dick]

What have you changed your mind on in the last 12 months?

[Becca Lindquist]

12 months ago I actively resisted using AI. I was like, I think it's going to make people dumber. I think that you see some folks that just ask Claude the answer rather than reasoning about it themselves. And I was like, oh, I don't love that. Obviously now I work at an AI company, so maybe I'm a hypocrite. But basically I went from saying, fuck that I'm not going to use this thing. I've got a brain and I'm going to use it to okay, how can I offload some of the things or how can I teach Claude to think like me so that I have two of me and I can converse with myself and be my own thought partner.

[Dick]

Do sales teams have to be in

[Becca Lindquist]

person, in person with customers or in person in an office? In an office, I'm a five day weeker. I show up to the office five days a week. I'm here in London for these four days. Tomorrow I'm gonna go to the office on Friday. I think that you get so much more when you're working in person with your team. Like I get FOMO when I'm not in the office.

[Dick]

Are you not pissed when you go in and other people aren't in? Like Friday is the new holiday weekend now, especially in Europe. Friday's at work Friday, fuck off. Yeah, it's not work from home Friday.

[Harry Stebbings]

I would never let work from home.

[Dick]

Friday or Monday is basically an instrumental weekend.

[Becca Lindquist]

It's a three day weekend. Look, I don't track attendance and like if you're a product, if you're productive, you work from wherever, you get a little bit of flexibility. But if you're underperforming and you're not in the office. We're gonna have a conversation.

[Harry Stebbings]

What would you most like to change

[Dick]

about the world of sales?

[Becca Lindquist]

I think everybody would say this. I think people feel like they don't want to be sellers. So, like. Like, maybe you're a product leader and you're like, I don't really want to go into sales because it feels a certain way. I think that if people understood that, like, hey, we're not just making 150 cold calls a day and indiscriminately trying to sling our product, like, no, I actually thought critically about your business, and here's how I can help you. I wish people would view sales more like that, but I understand there's a lot of us out here.

[Dick]

When is the right time to verticalize sales teams? You said about critically thinking about a business business.

[Becca Lindquist]

That's a good question.

[Dick]

Thank you. Ten years of research.

[Becca Lindquist]

Yeah. You finally got a good one. I'll tell you how we're thinking about it. At Clay, we're going to spin out a small new verticals team. And the reason that we're doing it is because we don't have a complete understanding of the data coverage or the data sources. Do we have them? Do we have the right coverage? We don't have a motion of where we land. What's the story that we tell? So I think when you're trying to enter a new vertical in a concerted way, that's when it makes sense. I also think when there's some sort of expertise that you need, so everybody has a finance vertical or they hire someone in Detroit to sell to the big auto companies, if there's some sort of differentiated expertise, I think that makes sense. Here's where it doesn't make sense, is where, yeah, I've got my guy at JPMC and he just buys whatever. That's dead. The relationship type of sale of like, well, I know all these people. I have this Rolodex that's gone. Because I think today, the buying cycle, the buying committee is not just one person. You have to have the product that can go and satisfy the needs of multiple people and multiple kind of divisions in a business.

[Dick]

What ACV is justified for a sales rep? So you see lots of PLG tools where they're super cheap and you're like, well, they could expand, but they could not. What's the.

[Becca Lindquist]

I mean, I'm not a math major, right? So, like, there's a math equation in there that I don't know the intricacies of. I'll tell you the ACE CVS that I'm less excited about as a sales leader. Anything below 20K, I'm like, why do you have a rep? And if it's not like a very short sales cycle, like I'll talk to some founders. Like our average deal size is 25k and our deal length is 6 months. And I'm like, what are we doing here, guys? Right. If you're spending that, you're either spending way too much time with these folks or you could add at least another zero and justify it. Right. You know you talk to like HubSpot and they're at the size where like, yeah, they've got reps that are working like $9,000 deals. Right. They're at a different scale and they

[Dick]

can do it light touch with a lot at the same time.

[Becca Lindquist]

Yeah, right. And they're like our average, you know, we do a three call close and it's $9,000 mrr and like we're just focused on logo acquisition because we know that we can go double those. Okay, cool. That makes sense. From a business perspective.

[Dick]

What's your favorite win story of a deal?

[Becca Lindquist]

That's a good question.

[Dick]

Thank you.

[Becca Lindquist]

What time? What time frame?

[Dick]

Any.

[Becca Lindquist]

I worked on a deal with a rep at my last company.

[Dick]

Company.

[Becca Lindquist]

It's a large bank in Australia. It's one of the big four banks. And one, we had an E.B. she was the chief Digital officer, Chief Data officer and she just fucking got it, man. Like she was maybe a little bit earlier in career for like a C level role. She was super innovative. She would come to us and she'd be like, yo, I'm checking out these other tools. What do you guys think? How do they play? Like, does this story make sense? So like it was almost like working with a friend that was like really smart that was putting together their data set. The use case was the coolest though, which is they were using our product to basically create new derivatives that they were going to sell to my classification poor rich people. People who had between $10 million and $50 million of net worth and they were going to launch 10 of these products and they were expecting each of those products to generate $100 million for them. And I was like, wow, you've thought about, we kind of uncovered all that and helped them build the business case. But like it was something that was like a very intricate use case that had a huge financial impact and it was just, it was a fun team. I actually, my favorite deals are not the biggest deals is the deals where like I'm working on One right now with one of the gtmes on my team. And, like, I show up to the calls and, you know, we have our plan. We know what we're trying to do. We're like, hey, we need, you know, we need to drive these steps. But, like, the people on the other end of the phone are. Are two women who, like, have their shit together very clearly. And they're like, we need to make a big change in this company. And here's how we're thinking about doing it. You guys have done this with other people. Are we thinking about this the right way? And I'm like, you're thinking about it exactly the right way. Cristy, you're doing great.

[Dick]

What's the biggest deal you've ever closed?

[Becca Lindquist]

Me Personally, it was $1.1 million for three years. So it was like 3.3 TC with a large financial services company.

[Dick]

That's a good day.

[Becca Lindquist]

It's a good day.

[Dick]

What's your biggest advice to a new parent?

[Becca Lindquist]

The best advice to a new parent, actually, my wife and I talk about this all the time. If you have a rigid schedule, then the kid can be off schedule. If you don't have a rigid schedule, you're like, the baby eats when the baby eats, the baby sleeps when the baby sleeps. No way to get off schedule. No way to, like, feel down about yourself, feel down about the kid. You just go with the flow. Makes your life a little easier.

[Dick]

Marc Andreessen would call that retard maxing. Let life do its thing. And you're like, you know what? It did its thing.

[Becca Lindquist]

Yeah, there's a little bit of that in there.

[Dick]

I love that. That's amazing. Listen, it's been so fun to do this. Thank you so much for being so amazing and I've loved having you on.

[Becca Lindquist]

Thank you for having me. Really enjoyed it.

[Harry Stebbings]

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