Why old-school sales work still wins in the AI era | Graham Moreno (Head of GTM, Parallel)

Brett Berson 0:00 [intro music] Maybe a place to start that, that might be particularly interesting to hear your take on is you've been bringing software to market for a while, and you had a huge chapter, um, call it pre-ChatGPT or pre-LLM as we know it, then post sort of ChatGPT in one of the leading companies that's bringing code gen to market. Now you're joining another company that's at the forefront of this technology.

Brett Berson 0:32 What's like your observations in, let's start with kind of New World, Old World of selling these two different forms of software, and do you think it tends to be more different and you're relearning your job or most of it's 90% identical?

Graham Moreno 0:50 One of the funny things about this generation of, of companies and of sales is that it feels like the playbook companies of like the cloud era, the like Mongos, Datadog, Snowflakes, there's like backlash against it, and now there's a lot of very like anti-playbook sentiment. And I think the reality is that I've found that it's very much in the middle, like Windsurf, Cognition-

Brett Berson 1:09 In the sense of in this generation of founders and companies, we gotta reinvent everything and go back to first principles?

Graham Moreno 1:14 Yeah. My sense is that there's just like a lot of like pride in PLG, and in like we want the product to carry the sales motion forward, and there's like less around this like very structured, measurable sales process and more about meeting companies where they are and injecting sales at the latest possible point. And that it feels like in a lot of these companies that have been super successful, there is maybe like a negative ethos around the word sales.

Brett Berson 1:36 You're talking about the end customers AI native.

Graham Moreno 1:38 Correct. So, like the newer companies that have been founded, call it like post-2020, um, where they come in with a pretty strong perspective, often having used a bunch of tools in the market, and like what you're having to do is figure out what they believe relative to what they're trying to achieve and like do some education around that. But there is probably a very different motion there than like an older school, like what made HubSpot famous, for instance. I think in the enterprise it's very similar and it moves faster, but like change management dictates success in the enterprise more than technology. And so companies still want people to come out and deliver services and do trainings and spend time with the team.

Graham Moreno 2:13 And like when we were doing large rollouts at Windsurf, we would send people on roadshows, like two reps in particular, I remember went to India, Europe, all over the US to sit with different offices for different banks. And the feedback we got was, "Since we've been buying AI tools, there's not a single company that has actually sent teams to go and do this. And like part of why we're going with you outside of belief in the tech is that we think that you guys actually understand how to partner with us as an enterprise, because it's not just our tech is amazing, release it into your marketplace internally, and it'll spread like wildfire." There was like a willingness to sit and to do discovery on current workflows, propose new ones, align on what the actual answer was, and then go and like spend time driving it. Because six months in, companies that did structured rollouts were a lot more successful, and we ended up collecting a lot of data on this because it became part of how we sold. Then the companies that said, "Hey, I've got tool A, tool B and tool C, we're gonna throw them into a marketplace and just like let the market decide," that wasn't six months out super effective. There was, in a lot of cases, minimal measurable change. People had done the wrong things because instead of having trainings, they had just messed around with it and figured out their own workflows. And so I think in that way, the like old generation of sales is still very much applicable. People want opinions, they want clarity, and in a lot of cases, there's interest and excitement about something because they have an idea of how it can be effectual in their business. But I think companies lose an opportunity to become more than just a vending machine for software when they're not willing to say, "Hey, we are really strongly opinionated about the best way to do this and why. And look, we're gonna take the time to get to know your business, but then we'll read that back to you, apply our perspective, and if that is the thing that you believe is a viable option, then we'll work with you to make it successful."

Brett Berson 3:59 Why do enterprises want to be sold in this way?

Graham Moreno 4:04 I think companies that have large scale organizations, and certainly the executives at the top of that chain, understand that getting large groups of people to do anything is really hard, and that if you can provide a step-by-step guide, get in the boat with them and work on how to apply that and how to execute it... 'Cause everyone, like, they gets brought into a training is wondering why they got pulled away from work. So you have to have a really strong upfront value prop on, hey, at the end of this two-hour session, here is what you're gonna be able to take with you and how we expect it to impact your work in week one and week four and week 12. Like, this is the carrot at the end of the stick if you spend in two hours not doing your primary job. But if you do that really effectively and you're able to come back and do ongoing training and enablement and you develop relationships, then like the ultimate change management across thousands or tens of thousands of people is more effective. Um, 'cause on top of there being a systemic piece to it, there's a human piece. If someone doesn't trust you or doesn't know you, less likely to listen. If someone is making the effort and there's a team that shows up and is willing to work with you, and over the course of a year you see the same people a few times, you begin to develop relationships. It's why systems integrators far as have multi-decade relationships with these companies and are so effective, like WWT, Ahead, Emphasis doing tens of billions in revenue. A lot of that is because there's executives that have been there for the entire span of the relationship, and there's like a deep amount of trust that if someone says, "I'm gonna deliver this outcome to you," they will.

Brett Berson 5:31 Do you think that's gonna change in any way? If you were a betting man, you would say in the next few years that's how it's gonna be.

Graham Moreno 5:38 I think that at any large scale organization, those foundational principles will continue to exist. Like, Parallel is the first company I've worked at that I would say is truly AI-enabled. And what we do internally with Claude and Notion and Attio and like all of these different tools is amazing. And like Claude code work is in a month, three weeks of being at this company It changed how I work because I can now go into Claude, have all these different systems hooked up to it and say, "Help me build a slide deck, help me build a doc." Like, "Hey, I'm looking to prep for the forecast tomorrow. Can you give me a readout of all of this stuff?" And so I think I have a much better command of the data that I have within the company. But if I were doing a large scale rollout, especially if I had a team of a few hundred or a few thousand, I still think I would default to wanting to be able to work with a vendor on how to make that successful and like, yes, incorporate that into our workflows or teach me how I should change the workflows. Because I even see this in my team of like 10 people right now. How we all use Claude flow work is pretty different, and so if you scale that across thousands of people, I think you probably end up with a lot of redundant work inefficiency, and I absolutely would lean in in that situation to wanting to work with a vendor on how to make sure that we're getting the most out of something versus just being better than we were.

Brett Berson 6:50 If you think about large enterprise and your experience with Windsurf and then Cognition, and you think about excellence in sales, what is different? Are there really important differences with this type of technology and bringing it to the enterprise over the last 18 months?

Graham Moreno 7:07 Yeah, I mean, I think one of the things that at Windsurf and Cognition we did really well was... The way I describe it is like great sales is like squeezing an orange. You're applying pressure from both sides. So on the one hand, do you want to go talk to engineers and like have a strong DevRel practice and really get in and like understand on the ground the way that people are working, thinking what they wanna be doing? Absolutely. That's really, really critical. But at the same time, these executives that are managing huge budgets have projects and increasingly have CFOs saying, "Oh, well, like that company over there cut headcount forty percent and increased productivity three X. How are you gonna do that?" If you're not involved in the conversation with them, then you're just hoping there's enough of a flywheel, like at the ground level to pull your product up. I think what we did really effectively was had a strong practice around going out and meeting developers where they were, and that was both being active on Twitter, being active in meetups, having like a strong DevRel practice about trying to bring together a community of people that created the conversation that was ongoing around how to use the tool to the best of its abilities. But then also we had a really strong practice on executive events, making sure that we were plugged into the CIO, CTO and being able to go and basically translate what we were hearing from their people, which in a lot of cases they weren't getting direct, and giving us the opportunity as we were going back and engaging with the developers to say, "Hey, we spent some time with, you know, Mr. and Mrs. Executive. Here's how they're thinking about it." And I actually think that great sales organizations understand that in a lot of cases, they are the vehicle that both developers and executives use to get a clearer insight of what's happening in other parts of the org. Because if there's six layers, if you're selling to a major bank, like the CIO of JPMorgan is nine layers between an engineer, and she's not necessarily hearing from engineers on a regular basis. But if you're a vendor who can say, "Hey, we just went and did a huge training at your Ohio office. Like, here's the feedback, here's what we're hearing," and then like able to integrate that into how they're thinking about AI strategy, that's a huge value add for that business that goes beyond just the tech. I think we were super intentional early from like the very, very early stages about how we chose to do that, because when I got into Windsurf, outside of hiring sellers and deployed engineers, the three things that I told our CEO that I wanted to go do was hire a world-class partner person, a world-class enablement person, and a data person. And my premise was, we're at single digit millions in revenue right now, but by the time we get to 50, 100 in a product like this, it is more important that our enterprise customers are able to get consistent services and ideally from a place that they trust, and that is through partners. Like being able to go and build credibility and build belief in the big partners and systems integrators was something that we started doing probably $40 million in revenue before most companies. But by the time we hit 50, 100, we were in some of these centers of excellence that we wouldn't have been in until we were at 250 otherwise. And that was a huge force multiplier for us because it meant that if a bank said, "Hey, on short notice, we have this event in Singapore, can you come out?" We could probably send one or two people, but we could call the partner that we knew they worked with that we also were close with and say, "Hey, can you, can you flex 30 people to come help us deliver this?" And I think for us, knowing early on that we were going to be more enterprise focused, that was a really high leverage way to spend time. And then from an enablement perspective, I think sellers in some cases get a bad rap because they're not necessarily credible, able to come in and provide information that their customer might not have without them. And so by investing a ton and creating a sales team that was well-drilled, well-educated, was able to speak not just to our product and to our competitors, but to the market as a whole, and to do this in a way that was programmatic, like we measured the outcome of enablement and were able to look at like, "Hey, how did the first four weeks of digital onboarding go? Like, how are people performing in these sessions? How does like at boot camp..." There's different measurements that we have, and we could then look and say, "Hey, like this cohort that hit 75% on average became productive in the field three months before previous cohorts." And so I think just being very intentional and programmatic early on things that at 10 sellers, like doesn't necessarily seem important, but that meant that at 100 we had that completely dialed in in a way that in other orgs that I've been at, we were scrambling because we realized too late that we should have done it a year before.

Brett Berson 11:33 What about what does excellence look like

Brett Berson 11:37 when you're selling to AI native customers?

Graham Moreno 11:39 Yeah.

Brett Berson 11:39 And how different is it?

Graham Moreno 11:41 That's I think the most different thing. Uh, and it's been really fun. I think AI natives, in a lot of cases, a good percentage of their employees started using ChatGPT in like college or high school. And so you have this group of people that are just like born to it in the same way that like our generation might feel about an iPhone. But it means that the education curve is completely different because it's not like, "Hey, here are the rudimentary pieces of like what an agent is and how you get the most out of it." But it's, okay, like, show me what you're doing, show me your workflow. Okay, cool. Like, you are miles ahead of someone that I might be working with who picked this up when they were 45, and now it's about, like, optimizing for the outcome you're looking to create, ideally giving you, like, two or three pieces of information or two or three things about how to use the product or get the most out of a workflow. Having you go back, do it, provide feedback. Like, I think the way that we communicate at Parallel with those companies is, like, a lot in Slack, a lot over, like, text. There's just, like, a lot more constant communication, and it feels more like an ongoing conversation because I think a lot of this generation is just used to async, first of all, and also just, like, having a pretty constant narrative going on. Because even if you're talking to ChatGPT, that can be an ongoing conversation. And so there is this much more, like, continuous exchange of information, and then you get on a call every couple of days to, like, go through the most recent stuff that's happened. But we're coming into those conversations with way more context because rather than, "Hey, here's an email recapping what we talked about." Like-

Brett Berson 13:08 You've had all this interaction

Graham Moreno 13:10 ... go do this, and then we're gonna read it out. Yeah, you're coming into a conversation with, like, three days of just, like, constant communication, which is cool, 'cause I think in a lot of ways it's allowed us to get a lot more embedded in the outcome they're looking to drive, and, like, that's really fun. But I also think that has just been a completely different challenge and set of things to think about from, like, a... Not even sales process. The sales process is similar, but the time interval of the sales process is very different. Where, like, in AI native, a process that might take just naturally six to eight weeks in enterprise is, like, five to eight business days because there's just so much continuous exchange of stuff that otherwise you'd have to extract over a period of time, just, like, naturally gets

Graham Moreno 13:49 compressed.

Brett Berson 13:50 What are the implications for what the sales org looks like selling into that end customer based on sort of that observation? Is there a different seller persona or way of going about the work to be successful for that customer base versus traditional business enterprise, mid-market, whatever?

Graham Moreno 14:10 I think really good sellers tend to over-communicate no matter what, like, depending on what that, what that means. And so, like, in enterprise it might be you're sending, like, project management emails weekly to recap everything that happened and talk about expectations for next week, and ideally you're texting some of the people that are involved. And I think if you took a great enterprise seller that does all of those things naturally, it might take an adjustment to, like, being in Slack all the time or being in text communication as much as we tend to be. But I do think the basic personality traits that make people good at AI native exist in enterprise. They've just never had to communicate that much. So to be fair, I really haven't experimented yet with taking, like, a great enterprise seller and being like, "Hey, I'm gonna pull you off of the big banks and, like, stick you into the, the tier one San Francisco companies." But I suspect that the adjustment could happen. And I actually, like, from a personality profile perspective, no. I think if anything, companies overcomplicate hiring of sellers. Like, you hire smart people that are good at problem-solving. Something I say all the time is, "You can't fake giving a shit." Like, people that care deeply and are very human-oriented will go above and beyond to make customers happy and will be really sincere and authentic about trying to understand, like, not just what the company is trying to achieve, but like, "Hey, I'm talking to these three people every day. Like, what do they care about? Who are they as people?" And I think that that personality profile is exactly what we look for in AI natives and in enterprise. I think the, like, hard skills that come with it are different, 'cause the AI native reps that we're hiring are, for the most part, younger in their careers, often grew up with GPT, and just some of the, like, communication styles that they have are pretty different. But if I look at from a behavioral perspective what makes our AI native reps really good versus our enterprise reps really good, it's almost all of the same things, just usually across different technology stacks.

Brett Berson 15:57 What about in terms of the way that an AI native company makes these decisions, build vs. buy-

Graham Moreno 16:04 Yeah

Brett Berson 16:04 ... how they evaluate competitors, ROI or differentiation or, like, sort of those type of things?

Graham Moreno 16:10 The interesting thing is that where I have sat in AI, I feel like there's less of a build vs. buy conversation. Like, pretty quickly people realized that they weren't gonna build Copilot or Cursor or Windsurf, and so it became a what do we prefer? And in a lot of cases, again, this is where I think there is an opportunity to, like, bring back some of the old school, which is that if you're working with one of the top three vendors in every, in any space in AI right now, on a four to six-week cycle, the tech is probably within 10% of equal. So there's, like, a taste human preference perspective, but I think there is also this, like, trust. Is this person or is this company gonna show up for me and help me if I run into an issue? Where we've had a lot of success in AI native and in enterprise, back to the showing up. Like, are you willing to go on site and do work with the team? Are you willing to fly out and, like, do a training session? Are you asking about hackathons or, like, major milestones where, like, the engineering team gets together and, like, asking to participate in it? The consistent feedback, and this was true at Windsurf, at Cognition, at Parallel, is the way that our orgs operate felt different to them. But when we said, "Hey, why is this really good feedback? Can you tell us why?" The answer almost always was like, "You guys show up a lot. Like, you guys are very present, very willing to jump in and help." And, like, ask for trades. I don't think that, like, fundamentals of, like, hey, if you're gonna go invest a ton of time, it's okay to say, "Hey, we'll send people out, but we wanna make sure that if we do that, we're gonna, like, get the right amount of face time. We're gonna be able to meet with the right people, but we're happy to do that." For the most part, people are very comfortable with that, but I think there's a lot of companies right now that have defaulted to Zoom and defaulted to Slack, and I think that being willing to put in the legwork

Graham Moreno 17:48 and develop relationships... Like, one of my favorite stories is one of my, the best reps I've ever worked with during COVID found out that his, well, champion at one of his company's sons had been taking guitar lessons and couldn't anymore because of COVID, so he ended up teaching this guy's kid guitar over Zoom during COVID.

Brett Berson 18:04 'Cause he knew how to play guitar?

Graham Moreno 18:06 Yeah. So, like, this just, like, came up in the course of them getting to know each other, and it was like, "Oh, you know, my son was It was like, "How, you know, how are you guys managing COVID?" And he was like, "Oh, like, you know, my son was taking guitar lessons, and it's kind of been a bummer 'cause he hasn't really been able to." And my rep was like, "Oh, like, I play guitar. I've, like, taught people. I'm happy to give him lessons." You know, he also didn't tell anyone. Like, no one found out about this for a long time, and then the champion at this account brought it up on a call with me, like, six months later and was like, "Oh, yeah, Isaac has been, like, teaching my son how to play guitar." And I was like, "What?" I think the thing that people miss is, yes, like, sales process is important. Having the right stages, the right gates, the right operational rhythm so that everyone in go-to-market knows where to be at any given time is helpful, not because that's what makes success or failure, but because if you can create that in a way that is aligned with your customers, it creates a lot of clarity for everyone involved in what they should be doing at any given time. But the thing that actually makes special or special is the kind of person that you have then running in this process,

Graham Moreno 19:03 and at no part in our process does it say teach someone guitar.

Brett Berson 19:05 So then if you pull at that, how does it make you think about what do you wanna standardize as you begin to scale a go-to-market organization versus kind of like what do you wanna push to the edges, which is, "Hey, you're a smart, capable, passionate person. Go use your own best judgment to help us build our business"?

Graham Moreno 19:24 And Parag, the-- or the CEO of Parallel, said this to me recently where he said, "Hey, look, I want us to have a super measurable, predictable sales process, but I want what we do to raise the floor. Like, I want the floor to be really high. What I don't want, that I feel like does happen in some of these very process-heavy orgs, is for us to cap the ceiling." So how do you create something that creates, like, a bare minimum as far as people's operational expectations, how they're gonna behave every day that means that we know we're never gonna go below ninety without creating so much structure and so much process that it doesn't give people the opportunity to go do something kind of special and unusual? And a lot of that is, I think simplicity is important. We don't want to have too many sales processes, too many sales stages. It's important to be really clear on what they are and why and to have a really clear set of, like, three to five, never more and probably not less than three, things that happen in each of them. So it's like, hey, as you're moving through the process, do we have these things to move to the next stage? Like, did this meeting occur where someone said, "Yes, I'm gonna do this with you"? Do we know that that person has the power to do it? Great. Move on. But by keeping it very simple, everything else is pick your own adventure. I generally think that if we've created the right expectations in the field, someone else's judgment on why to deviate or how to do something that is, like, nonlinear is gonna be better than mine.

Brett Berson 20:44 Because they're just closer to the customer, closer to the problem.

Graham Moreno 20:46 Closer to the customer and, and, like, I hire people to be better than me. There's not a single person in any of my-- in any of the orgs that I've been a part of building that I didn't think was better than me at the thing that we hired them to do. I think that that's really important 'cause there's two ways this goes. Either leaders want to validate their existence by having input on everything, and by having input on everything, you actually create a culture of people being frozen and unable to act because they feel like if they don't get your sign-off or don't get your input, there will be some penalty, or you create a culture where everyone knows that as long as you've thought it out, I'll ask a couple of questions, but they come in knowing there's an almost one hundred percent chance I'm gonna say yes, which actually makes them accountable for the outcome. If you're in an environment where someone's gonna say no to you, you actually don't feel that accountable 'cause you threw out a suggestion, they rewrite it, and then you just go do that. If you're in an environment where someone is gonna be like, "All right, tell me why," and as long as there's a coherent thought behind that, the default response is, "Yeah, do it. Let's see." And if it works three times, we'll enable the field on it. And if it works once and not again, then, like, we learned. But I think the way to create autonomy in orgs of any scale is to hire. Like, every time someone goes to hire for me, like one of my leaders, I'll say, "Hey, like, do you, do you feel like you are going to be able to say yes to this person the vast majority of the time they ask for something? 'Cause if not, we should talk about that. But if yes, then, like, that's a good signal that we want that person here."

Brett Berson 22:08 Why does it not

Brett Berson 22:09 work as you're scaling to have such a good system and process, such good system and process that you can kinda hire relatively mediocre people and have them thrive and deliver for the business? Like, I'm articulating the opposite of what you're saying.

Graham Moreno 22:22 Yeah.

Brett Berson 22:22 And you obviously have a belief that that's not the optimal way to scale a go-to-market org.

Graham Moreno 22:26 I actually think the optimal way to scale a go-to-market org is probably to have a system that is... 'Cause again, like, the three to five things that, that should exist in each of these stages should be enough to run a consistent, healthy cycle. And so I think at scale, like, if someone walked in tomorrow and said, "Graham, hire a thousand people in the next year," it's not gonna look the same if they said, "Hire fifty." But what you need at that point is to have that process that you've articulated be correct and opinionated enough that someone who does the training leans into enablement, leans into developing the muscle memory to go follow the steps. Maybe they never operate above the floor, but if the floor that you create is high enough and they can follow the steps, maybe that is the person who is a consistent, like, ninety-five to a hundred and ten of quota. But what is important is that the people that are gonna come in and go teach people guitar lessons or go and, like, have a cooking class for a few of their prospects that they found out really love cooking still feel empowered to do that. And I actually don't think that those things are at odds. I think what tends to happen is orgs either are like, "We only want the greatest people," and, like, great people are unstructured, and you end up with these sales orgs that's like a bunch of artists just kind of like throwing paint at the walls. And it's not that those can't be effective, but it's really hard to measure.

Brett Berson 23:38 Talk about why, what the problems are with that.

Graham Moreno 23:40 I think if you have a bunch of people that are all really good at problem-solving, but all do it in silos or do it in different ways, then when you go to create predictability in the business, there's not actually really a baseline to be forecasting off of. Because you have person A over here who is, like, an amazing technical mind, who can walk into a room of engineers and just, like, absolutely enthrall them and get people very bought into their technical brilliance. You have the person over here who is great at executive-level conversations and doesn't understand the tech at all, but can go and, like, connect deeply- To the business problems and then bring the right resources to bear, and they have totally different ways that they go about validating the tech and totally different lengths of time that it takes and different deal sizes. And if there's all of these different objects that don't look the same, when you go to the VP and you're like, "All right, you have 100 of these people, tell me what's gonna happen next," that is a pretty challenging kaleidoscope of behaviors to be looking through. And I think the important thing is if you create that floor and you have this system that is clear, concise, measurable, you can hire people, not to say mediocre, but like who maybe aren't... don't flex in that unusual way, who can come in, lean into the system, follow the process, and be super successful. What you don't want, though, is to create a system that is so rigorous, it's only people that are looking for that level of clarity and certainty who gravitate to it. So it's like, how do you create a process where we can bring people in who might not just naturally be that kind of like artistic nature, but who are diligent, hardworking, smart, care, and will follow the process? And you'll get 95 to 110% of them, and I'll take 900 of those people if the remaining hundred are the people that are out there teaching guitar classes or doing cooking classes or, like, whatever that might be. And so it's like, how do you create a process that allows people of differing skill levels at a baseline to be more successful than they could have been otherwise without working in that system and create enough flexibility in the system that if someone is like, "Hey, I wanna, like, flex and do this thing that's really unusual," you can still say, "Hell yeah, let's go do it."

Brett Berson 25:45 How does this

Brett Berson 25:46 ladder into what you think true excellence is leading the go-to-market function?

Graham Moreno 25:53 I think excellence at leading the go-to-market function can, you'll see I love this number, probably be broken into three things. I think as a leader it is how are you predictably driving revenue? And that is both, like, net new logos. How are you thinking about expansion programmatically? Like, when founders come and talk to me, I need to be able to tell them, "Hey, from a new logo perspective, like, here's how we're operating. Here's what it looks like in AI native. Here's what it looks like in enterprise. Here are the things that are going really well. Here are sticking points related to how we're selling. Here's product feedback we're hearing." And then from an expansion perspective, are we before close? Like, if, if you're not talking about how to successfully deploy the thing you're selling basically from the moment the eval goes well, then you're completely missing the plot. The plurality of revenue that exists in most organizations happens after the first deal. So how are you going in and saying... And this is another thing. Like, an example right now at Parallel, we have so much... The market is coming towards us so intensely that the team is overwhelmed. There's, like, not enough people to respond to the demand that we have. And so, like, that's a good example of just having to simplify it, where it's like, all right, if the eval went well, have we agreed with our champion and with the economic buyer on the kickoff date, which then applies pretty direct pressure on, like, how quickly we get paper done. Have we agreed on what the first 30-day milestones are, first 90-day? Like, we have to create a lot of clarity for what success looks like so the customer's not wondering, "Did I get something out of the investment?" Like, it's your job to take that on. And so revenue is the first piece. I'm gonna put talent development in the same bucket. But I think one of the biggest, like, tragedies of the generation that's coming into go-to-market right now is that a lot of organizations have become so focused on responding to demand, they've really heavily moved away from development. For anyone looking at getting into sales right now or, or go-to-market, sales to put engineering post-sales, like, finding an organization that still puts enablement and developing of people, like, primary among its responsibilities, I actually think is really critical because... And I don't remember which executive gets credit for saying this, but, like, there's a lot of people that talk about how if you don't love yourself, it's hard to love other people. Well, I think if you're not, like, actively investing in the development and careers of the people that chose to entrust their career development to you, then you're, like, missing the mark as a company, and that probably says something about how you're handling your customers. So Jeremy Powers and Nicole Rettinger built Mongo's enablement program, which was legendary and had every reason to be. Nicole came, built out Windsurf, and brought... Similar to, like, Nicole and Jeremy worked really closely together at Mongo. Nicole came in and was like, "I'm bringing in Dani McCabe, who is every bit as good as me." And so we had, in my opinion, the two best enablement people operating at Windsurf for about a year and a half, and we built an amazing enablement program. But what that meant was because there was so much pride in how we were able to develop people, and whether you're, like, an SDR, AE, leader... This is the other thing. Like, a lot of people get into leadership and everyone's just like, "All right, you're never gonna develop again. Congratulations on being a leader." That isn't how that should work. If anything, it is super critical to be intentional about saying, "All right. Like, who are my cohorts of leaders who are in the first two years of leadership?" 'Cause, like, the lessons in development that they probably need to be hearing are different than someone who's in years three to seven. And I think being very intentional about that both makes you more attractive to top-tier talent and makes you able to take risks on people who are kind of like who we were talking about, where maybe someone doesn't come in knowing the process, but if they're smart and willing to learn and have all these unbelievable other characteristics, you can bring them in and develop them. And so, like, for me, revenue is the big piece. People and enablement is the second piece that I think is unbelievably critical. And then, like, how are you aligning everything in the organization both today and six months out to reduce friction for everyone internally and therefore for customers? Because if you are hiring great people, enabling them and making them better on a continuous basis, delivering revenue to the business that is also delivering measurable value to your customers, and you're being intentional and programmatic about, "Hey, how does what we're doing in sales connect to marketing? Are we com-communicating with our deployed engineering colleagues? Am I communicating with the engineering team? Like, is our, is our legal team being appropriately protected by the sellers? Do we know how to have the conversations around limitation of liability and all of this stuff?" And, like, a huge part, I think, of any, any executive of any business unit should be making sure you're spending appropriate time with your peers. Because if you get that connective tissue built appropriately, it's awesome when, like, legal is being appropriately protected. Finance isn't calling me being like, "How on earth did we approve this term?" And they can all go focus on things that are, like, value added to the business and not trying to create fences around sales, so sales doesn't do idiotic things. And, like, better yet, if you're able to develop rapport where you know there's gonna be times that you ask for help, and if you have done the, like, legwork and put in the, the sweat equity to build trust and to show people that, like, you will show up proactively when something does happen, and it will, where you're like, "Hey, I need an assist here." Like, generally, that is, like, a, a good moment to band together and get closer. Whereas where I've been in orgs where there's that tension, like, people help, but

Graham Moreno 31:00 there's a huge difference between like, "Yeah, I'll help," and like, "Hell yeah, I would love to, like, get in the boat and row."

Brett Berson 31:05 I would say the natural path, which is that functions grate against each other or most likely blame each other. You know, marketing conventionally blames sales for not hitting a number. Sales says we're not getting the appropriate leads or, or coverage from marketing, or sales is blaming end 'cause they're not delivering a product that's saleable. And like, you have this normal sort of cadence where I think the functional leaders often blame each other as opposed to truly coming together. And, you know, it sounds like you have this customer centricity with your counterparts, which is like, "Hey, legal, let me sit in your shoes a little bit." Not, "Let me scream at you because this deal term is blowing up this five million dollar enterprise deal," and, you know, sort of those types of things that can happen in scale upwards.

Graham Moreno 31:53 Yeah. I mean, if you, if you have, like, the particular mental illness where, like, running go-to-market teams is fun for you, then, like, everyone is your customer. Like, the other organizations that are, like, part of your company are very much your customers, your reps, and, like, the people that work for you who, like, trust you with their careers and trust you to be able to give them a path to success are your customers, and obviously the people paying us money as a business for our technology are your customers. Again, you-- when you said this at the beginning, there's different ways. There's not one right way to do it. And man, like, Amazon has been so successful with this, like, we don't want agreement, we want conflict, like, this is part of who we are. And they clearly attract personalities for whom that is, like, motivating and galvanizing in a way that's really good. I don't have the world's most, like, healthy relationship with anger, and so, like, I do my best work and I'm able to make mistakes in a very productive way if I'm in an environment where the people around me, assuming I don't make, like, a ridiculous mistake, trust that I had good intentions and are willing to, like, talk to me about what went wrong, how do we fix it, and I go fix it, and, like, things are good. And I think that assumption of positive intent and that assumption of, like, we're gonna figure this out together is the environment that I react really well to, so I try to create that. If someone is like, "I really want a lot of conflict," like, they probably shouldn't come work for me. But I think something that we did really well at Windsurf, and this was, like, semi-accidental, is rather than creating an organization where there was, like, inherent conflict, and again, Amazon is an example of one that did that intentionally and was super successful. What I tried to do was find people that led different organizations, whether that was like post-sales or deployed engineering or partners who were eighty percent aligned on almost everything we were doing. Like, I want the foundation to be, we agree on most of how to do this, and then that twenty percent is debate, and that's fine as long as there is this, like, general affinity and trust where, like, you know that at a fundamental level, everyone in the room with you who's part of solving this problem or building this machine has your back, wants the same thing, isn't gonna, like, empire build or try to step on your shows or play political games. And I think by having that camaraderie at the top level, not only were we able to solve problems, like one of the things I used to say at Windsurf, and we haven't had to do this yet at Parallel, but I would say I don't ever want a debate or a conflict between my directs to come to me, 'cause if it does, I will intentionally make a decision that's designed to annoy both of you. I will just, like, try to find the exact middle. But generally speaking, my expectation is that, like, we're all adults, we can put our egos aside and that, like, the right answer is pretty apparent. And in two years there were only two things that got escalated to me, and in both cases it was just like silly ego pricking-

Brett Berson 34:28 Interpersonal things.

Graham Moreno 34:29 Just like eg-- like people's egos got pricked, but like we s- like sat down and I was like, "Guys, if you, like, put your egos back in your backpacks and, like, take a breath, is the answer to this question actually hard?" And in both cases, we sat there for a second and they were like, "No, I got it." And I don't actually think in either case we h- anyone said out loud what the [chuckles] answer was 'cause it was very obvious. And I think that that is super important. So like by creating that ethos, though, at the top, it then meant to the point of, like, companies mimicking founders' values. It meant that the teams saw that the leaders got along well, and so for the most part it was, like, just natural, like people bumping into each other. But I think by having that, like, ethos of an assumption of we are all in this together, we're gonna build together, and that doesn't mean you don't call things out. If someone falls below standard, call it out, but ideally do it one-on-one. Like if you choose to do it in a room, to me that's performative. Like that's not actually being a good peer, being a good partner, being a good leader. Like that's, that's a conversation where you pull someone aside and you're like, "Hey, I'm not at all trying to blow you up or come down your street, but like I'm observing either you doing this or like what I'm feeling is your team is dropping the ball here and we've seen it a couple of times, and here are the specific examples and here's why I feel this way." And I think it is a lot easier to move fast when you're not looking over your shoulder.

Brett Berson 35:42 What do you think the downsides or trade-offs that you're making to behave in this way and, and create an organization that behaves in this way?

Graham Moreno 35:51 You know, like the two other examples I have is I was in org-- I was in an organization that was really high performing, but combative. It's like a bunch of people from New York and Boston. And I think the negative side was that you could get into meetings that were like just twenty minutes of people yelling at each other that had nothing to do with solving the problem, and it just became like egos. But in a lot of cases, some of the most like pugnacious, difficult people that I've worked with were often, A, right, and B, thought in different ways, and so would get frustrated and vocal because they had this like different way of thinking about things that was really valuable And it is probably good to, like, inject in a conversation. And I don't like, you know, again, I, I... That you're saying you can lose that if there's too much agreement. And so I think you, like, ideally, you try to find that person who is still able to be the stick in the mud or whatever, uh, but for the most part can do so in a congenial way. I am someone that will try to call stuff out, but I generally try to do it in, like, a playful-seeming way. But I think that's a risk, like, if you default too much, 'cause there's also, like, agreeable, fake agreeable, and there's, like, agreeable, aligned agreeable. Fake agreeable is you're agreeing for the sake of agreeing even if you don't agree. Just, like, saying yes for the sake of avoiding conflict, and, like, that's not ideal. But for me, the way that you have the most productive flavor of conflict is if you have built a foundation of trust so that conflict isn't threatening. Like, ideally, if you have people that foundationally like and trust and care about each other, that actually creates a platform for productive conflict. I think one of the things that some pieces of America is missing right now is that a lot of cultures that have really strong identities have, like, natural cultural touchstones. So, like, whether it's, like, a bar mitzvah or a quinceañera, there's, like, shared experiences that people have that, like, bond a group over a shared identity or a shared thing, and I think that's actually where enablement's really powerful. Where if... And, like, I'll s- I'll give a Mongo example. But, like, at-- If you have boot camp, everyone goes through three to four weeks of, like, onboarding, online training, and then you get to boot camp, and you take it seriously. It was like you dial in, like, you take a test coming in. There's winners. Like, it's competitive. It's fun. It's meant to make you better. But this is, like, an-

Brett Berson 37:50 What's in a test like that?

Graham Moreno 37:52 What we would do... The Mongo one was more intense. At Windsurf, it was, like, not quite this intense, but it was literally just like, "Hey, over the last four weeks, you've worked through these training modules, and now we're gonna give you, like, a... in some cases, multiple

Graham Moreno 38:03 choice, in some cases, fill in the blanks," but it's, like, 20 questions. It was meant to take, like, 30 minutes, but just to make sure that you've absorbed it, that you didn't-- weren't, like, watching TV and doing laundry and just had it on in the background. And it's just like we want to make sure that as a foundation for doing-- for investing a week in boot camp, that you have absorbed the information that we were hoping you would to make this valuable. And so, like, really the intent is just did you do the pre-work? But it was a way to make sure that the week would be valuable. And then you go through, and, like, there's competitions, and that ranged from, like, trivia games, just, like, stuff that is meant to create, to force recall at the end of a long day, or, like, uh, mock discovery calls, and you do 'em in front of the room, and people would rate it. And, like, it was just a way to, like, both, like, build a reputation and make friends and, like, build this community. But across... You do once a month across 12 cohorts of people. Like, everyone, years later at Mongo, would be like, "Oh, well, what boot camp class were you in?" And it was like, "Oh, I was with, like, Matt McClernan, who's now the CEO of Augment, or Graham Seamands, who's now the CRO at XII." And, like, it became this thing that oriented everyone, 'cause it would be like, "Oh, like, did you guys do this training?" And they were like, "Oh, no, we had scrapped that by the time I was there," but, like, they'd introduced this one. And it becomes this common cultural touchstone that also becomes a really big source of pride for people about, like, who they came up with and, like, how hard it was, and it just becomes this rallying point, and it also sets the tone early that, like, being excellent and being elite is, A, an expectation, but also, B, can be really fun. It should be something that isn't, like-

Brett Berson 39:30 Drudgery.

Graham Moreno 39:31 Yeah. Like, I think right now in AI especially, there is this, like, glorification of misery where people are like, "We work 11 hours a day, 500 days a week," and you're like, "Uh, okay." And I didn't read the part of the book that said that you can't have fun. And, like, at every... Whether it is music or art or sports teams, like, most of the greatest examples of all of those were people that appeared to be having a pretty good time doing it, and I think that that is, like, an important thing. And if you talk about, like, instantiating an idea in a culture, enablement is the best way to do that early. And then, like, the way that you make that an ongoing part of pride is great.

Brett Berson 40:03 Do you think enablement's changing a lot with sort of the type of knowledge a seller can have at their fingertips? Or do you think you run the risk of if you don't actually learn it, there's a certain feel and taste and judgment that gets instantiated in a person when you're actually going through training, that if you're just relying on an LLM to give you the correct answer-

Graham Moreno 40:28 Yeah

Brett Berson 40:28 ... that you are just broadly less effective?

Graham Moreno 40:31 Depends on the kind of sales you're doing. I think if you're out there selling, like, a basic application, it's probably fine. I also think those are the sales jobs that are gonna get AI'd. I think if you're doing, like, real enterprise sales, though, it's really hard. There's not, like, an LLM that can tell me about organizational change management, and, like, a lot of my favorite customers, but also my scar tissue, comes from, like, financial services and then insurance companies. A lot of what you're navigating in those organizations is political, and there's not an LLM that can tell you that. Now, like, do I see, not even do I think, do I see sellers that have information at their fingertips, like, abdicate the responsibility to understand that? Yes. And where that kills them is in person, because on a Zoom call, you can have the little AI bot that's, like, slinging you information, but those are the people that you have to, like, send into a rocket and shoot into the field, because they won't go willingly. I also think this goes back to just base hiring, where if you're not hiring someone who is naturally curious and, like, wants to be good 'cause they want to be good, not because you're making them, then you run that risk. But I also think that that goes back to, like, who you let

Graham Moreno 41:35 in the door matters a lot, because if you're not creating, if you're not cooking with the right ingredients, no amount of knife work is gonna change that. On the one hand, though, I think what I'm seeing with AI and, like, again, parallel most AI advanced organization I've worked with, and Dani McCabe showed up two weeks ago and, like, already is, like, all the way in on being able to figure out how AI can not just enable our sellers in live conversations, but also from, like, a practicing and enablement perspective-

Brett Berson 42:02 Yeah, yeah

Graham Moreno 42:03 ... you can do a lot more. So I think the cool thing about AI in enablement is it actually allows you to go significantly deeper on your own, so by the time you get in a room with other people, you can be much better.

Brett Berson 42:14 In terms of, like, simulation-

Graham Moreno 42:15 Yeah

Brett Berson 42:15 ... and all that kind of stuff.

Graham Moreno 42:16 Simulation, like, the ability rather than, like, single shot calls To mimic complex situations, and even if it's not in, like, a simulated conversation, but you're, like, having a conversation with a bot that is, like, forcing you to string concepts together to connect ideas, and where just, like, the synapses that are firing are more complex and different and, like, if you're trying to, like, build myelin and, like, create the underlying nerve matter that allows you to build skills, like, complex movements is how you do

Graham Moreno 42:45 that, and, like, transitions are a really important part of that. And so I think that that is a really cool part of AI enablement. But yeah, totally, if you're gonna let people hide behind a computer and just read snippets of, like, other conversations that sound smart, yes, then, like, I would recommend you not let those people go on site. What are the other things in this bucket of enablement in your mind if you're operating at a world-class level? When we were selling MongoDB, we effectively had to know the database industry, and that was kind of it. Like, I had to be able to talk about different relational databases, I had to be able to talk about different NoSQL databases that were out there, but I didn't really have to be able to talk about, like, big data systems or, like, anything to do with Kafka or anything to do with Kubernetes. It was, like, pretty confined to that industry. And I think now, if you really wanna be elite, because not only are you selling against direct competitors, you're selling against implied competitors. Like, you have to have a pretty good grasp on not just your competitors, but, like, the entire infrastructure layer, the app layer. There's a little bit of everything and, like, now-- 'cause not only are people saying, "Okay, like, why can't I do this with Claude?" Or, "Why can't I do this with GPT?" But, like, every company on Earth that was an app company, like, tried to crash into developer tools to avoid getting obliterated. And so now, like, randomly people will be like, "What about this company?" And I'm like, "Do they even have something in this space?" Like, Google it, and I'm like, "Oh, they do." I think you have to be able to clarify and simplify for customers why things matter. 'Cause people will come in and be like, "All right, we're doing this with Claude and this with GPT, and, like, we have Cognition for this, Cursor for this. We have like fifteen other dev tools. Notion has started doing a bunch of stuff that is, like, not necessarily what was in their initial remit. How do I tie this together?" And, like, I think the hardest thing for sellers, A, you have to be able to speak about it intelligently, because if you can't, you don't even earn the opportunity to simplify. So, like, you do actually have to be able to play ball across all of these different products and be able to have a coherent narrative and a coherent opinion. But I actually think one of the things that the best sellers and the best organizations do is help to clarify things. What about in, in sort of the top bucket of driving predictable revenue? What are kinda the input drivers to excellence there? Like, take people out of it, 'cause I think that's, like, the big one. But from a process perspective, it's, okay, you're gonna go do pipeline generation. We call that stage zero targeting, so it's like, hey, these are the companies that we're trying to engage. And a company can only be in targeting if it has been actioned on, reached out to in the trailing five business days. Reason that we're so strict about that is we wanna see from the time that we engage... And there's two buckets. There's leads, there's, like, people that came inbound, and there's people that we're proactively reaching out to. We wanna see how much time does it take in each of those buckets to get to a first meeting. And then from a first meeting, we have a set of qualification criteria. First meeting goes into use case evaluation. So, if the meeting goes well, we're like, "Yep, there's something here. We're gonna have a larger conversation. We're gonna move into use case evaluation." If it's not the right fit right now, might push that towards self-serve, might push it towards a drip campaign, might disqualify for the time being. There's a number of reasons you could do that. Then use case evaluation could be two conversations, it could be twenty. Just depends on the organization, depends on who you're talking to and where you have to get. Then you have a POV initiation conversation that is, "Hey, this is all the stuff that we've talked about, everything we've covered.

Graham Moreno 45:57 Do you agree that we're gonna go take this hill together?" "Yes." Great. Move into scope. That is clearly measurable criteria that we're gonna go test against. We all agree that if we do these tests and achieve these results that we're gonna purchase, go have a conversation with the executive. And at each of those stages, we're looking at conversion rates, so you're instrumenting the entire process. So it's like, all right, we know that in cold outreach takes us three weeks to get a first meeting. We know that forty percent of first meetings convert into use case evaluation. For us, qualified pipeline, QP, is starting at scope. So once you get to scope, we expect the close rate to be sixty percent or greater. So we know fifty percent of use case evaluation conversations move into scope. We know that sixty percent of deals in scope close, and, like, you're instrumenting each stage of this pipeline. So what should happen over a quarter or two is you are able to create a heat map from a warm lead or an outbound prospect through close. This is the amount of time it takes. This is our conversion rate. And then suddenly you have a map of all the things that you can go coach to that shows you all the levers you can pull. And so you develop a baseline for the company. You look at AI native, you look at enterprise, and then you look at individual reps, and you can effectively show someone, "This is the company baseline. This is the baseline for your segment, and then this is where you are relative to that." And that should make coaching conversations, like, pretty non-confrontational. By having this heat map, you're able to basically take the entire revenue cycle and demystify it so that at any given time, A, there's, like, maximal accountability on me. Like, I can never say I have no idea why something is happening, 'cause at any given time, I have a heat map that I know I have to go look at. And the same is true of post-sale, 'cause, like, honestly, especially it feels like right now in AI, companies aren't doing three years. They're not doing huge upfront commits. They're, like, dipping their toe in the water and then, like, just gradually consuming more. And so a lot of the work is done in post-sale. Do you think that post-sales should always roll up to the revenue leader? I think in general, it is really important to have, surprise, clarity on, like, what the overall direction of the org is. And so, like, where I've seen there be struggles and, like, I, I worked at a company that, like, had unbelievably good people, but we split the go-to-market org into, like, three separate pillars,

Graham Moreno 48:19 and in theory, all of those people were equal. And the way that I used to describe it to people is, it is like you took three people, spun them around for like two minutes, and then tied their legs together and said, "Walk straight." Not intentional. There's not, like, any malice to it, but everyone was just, like, kinda leaning this way or leaning this way, and there was just, like, all this tension And so generally speaking, I think you wanna confine the greatest amount of direction-setting clarity to the smallest number of people possible. Generally speaking, not a fan of authoritarianism. I think in businesses it's actually really important, right? You need one person who is responsible for owning the strategy of go-to-market, and, like, for me, that is, like, basically anything revenue-generating or customer-related ideally is under a single person. Now, that person's obviously accountable to the founders and to the board and to all these other things. But, like, there should not be two people that the go-to-market organization looks at for direction, because that's the only way that you can have the appropriate level of clarity and the appropriate level of ownership. And I think post-sales is an unbelievably critical function, but so is deployed engineering, so is sales. And, like, you want post-sales to be a really clear mirror of the product and of the sales process back to sales and then also to engineering, and so it's super important, like we talked about with the cross-functional stuff earlier, to do the right type of enablement to make it so that people can communicate cross-functionally effectively. But ultimately, if there's an organization that is responsible for the success of customers that have invested in us and for earning the right to expand beyond that, I don't see who else they could report to. And I know there's a lot of other opinions on this, but, like, this specifically is something that I think all the other opinions are wrong.

Brett Berson 49:54 And is your sense it also just stops all the normal issues you have when sort of a traditional sales org is throwing a, a signed op over to a success team, and, like, accountability and ownership and, like, are they jamming somebody into the funnel that is not gonna retain for whatever, you know, and all of those, like, subtle things that end up popping up?

Graham Moreno 50:15 Yes. So, like, first of all, yes, I think having that go to a singular place, like, creates the opportunity for clarity. I also think that this just goes back to, like, the people you hire. Um, and, like, stuff happens. There's gonna be a deal that blows up. Like, that, that's inevitable. I don't know that I've ever been somewhere that that didn't happen. But I think if you hire the right kind of person who is high ownership, and, like, I want reps to feel, like, a sense of, like, ownership and accountability to their customers, 'cause ideally you've made these people your friends. If you have connected with what they care about, who they are, you, like, have done the legwork to, like, build trust and to connect with them, there... Like, it shouldn't be an option to that seller to hand off the account and be like, "Yeah, good luck with your life." Look, I have sellers who I have pulled accounts from just because they were too busy, where it's like, "Hey, you're covering three of the Fortune 10. Like, I need you to just go, like, live there, so I'm gonna pull these other accounts back from you," but who still, like, actively communicate with the people that they develop relationships with and, like, are telling the existing account team. But I think in, like, a healthy org, if you've hired the right kind of person, like, it shouldn't just end there. Another... And this is hard. This is not, like, an easy thing. Getting the swim lanes right for sales and for post-sales is super important.

Brett Berson 51:20 The last couple things I wanted to get your take on, given the way that you describe the type of sellers that you want in your org, smart, curious, customer first, customer obsessed-

Graham Moreno 51:31 Kind, coachable, IQ, EQ, drive

Brett Berson 51:33 ... why do you think that sales commissions make sense?

Graham Moreno 51:37 I think you're looking for people that are really competitive, and I think you're looking for people... Not in all cases. Like, there-- I know some f-amazing sellers who, like, who grew up very privileged, and I-- but ironically, everyone has a s- a different flavor of the same chip. So it's like either you grew up with not a lot or, like, in, like, varying versions of situations that, like, created a lot of adversity.

Brett Berson 51:58 Yeah. Or you don't wanna, you wanna prove that you're not a silver spoon kid or some other version.

Graham Moreno 52:01 Correct. Or,

Graham Moreno 52:02 or, or you're, like, the, the runt of the litter in a very, like, talented family, and, like, I probably skew more that way. Like, my parents grew up super blue collar, but, like, I didn't necessarily, but I am from a family that is, like, really frighteningly accomplished, and I was the athlete. I was, like, the one that was very obsessed with soccer while everyone else was at UChicago. And so for me, it's this, like, incredible drive to not be-

Brett Berson 52:27 I'm smart enough and-

Graham Moreno 52:28 Yeah, like-

Brett Berson 52:28 Good enough

Graham Moreno 52:29 ... to, to not be the loser of the family.

Brett Berson 52:30 Yeah.

Graham Moreno 52:30 Totally. I think that that personality profile, like, if you're looking for... 'Cause the other thing, sales impact is so measurable on the business, you can justify a different sort of pay because you're able to say, "Hey, like, our margin is this. Total cost of servicing the business, like engineering, infra all in is this." And then, like, the rest of this we have that we can build a comp plan around. And, like, the reality is that if I can go write a comp plan that at the top tier... In AI right now, the top tier is, like, 30X your OTE. Like, I remember in the days where it was like, oh yeah, if

Graham Moreno 53:04 you're doing, like, 5X OTE, that's, like, spectacular, and now quota's, like, 10X OTE. First accelerator tier is 20, second is 30, and at that point, that person has paid themselves back, paid themselves and, like, everyone else back so many times over that I'm happy to give them that, that upside, because the reality is that, like, I've done this now. I've seen it. When you give people healthy accelerators, not only does it attract a different kind of rep, but, like, as much as everyone is driven, kind, compassionate, all this stuff, every poker game anyone has ever played at gets a little bit more intense when there's money on the table. And I do think that even though you're hiring these people that embody all of these traits that I think exist with or without that carrot, the competitive fire that comes up when you can, like, go make a life-changing commission check or you're trying to compete to be number one, and it's not just to be number one, is really fun. And, like, I have that. Like, I, I like to think that I would go do the right thing for customers no matter what. I'm gonna go do the right thing for employees no matter what. Like, I, I know in general, leadership is for you if you get more excited when other people make money than when you do. The best day of my career was when Cognition acquired Windsurf, and I, like, saw what the 200 people who for, like, 96 hours I had been having a panic attack that I failed were making. Like, that was the coolest moment of my entire life. It was unbelievable. If you don't have that perspective, then, like, leadership probably isn't for you. As much as I get fired up when, like, we're paying out commission checks, it's also really fun to, like, try to run up the score. And I think that, like, the natural tendency to hire people that come from competitive backgrounds, and it's not just sports. I think, like, the sports thing gets beaten to death, and there are great sellers. But I also know great sellers that were, like, very good at music and had to, like, compete chess or all sorts of things. I mean, sh- music, chess, acting. Theater is not, I've learned, not, like- An easy thing to necessarily get the roles that you wanna go get. Just like I think anyone that did something that was based on passion and obsession, and that was inherently repetitive for long periods of time, so you could string it all together in a game or in a play, like, that's a good profile for sales.

Brett Berson 55:00 Last couple things. In, in the way in which companies are scaling right now and the environment is changing, when you think about leading the go-to-market org, how far out do you think you should be thinking and working on the business?

Graham Moreno 55:13 So I'm gonna give you the, my current state today, and then, like, I think how that evolves over the next few quarters. Right now, like, just getting in, it's observing, watching, and trying to, like, figure out what we're doing today, how we're doing it. You boil the frog, right? You don't wanna just come in and be like, "Here is all the process we will ever have at the same time," because people's heads would explode. So it's like, all right, we're gonna introduce a couple of, like, light concepts. Hey, we're gonna send, we call them W emails, like weekly emails to our customers that are just like project management recaps, but it just helps us all stay aligned. We're gonna set a set of expectations for, like, how we interact with customers and how we interact with each other. We're going to start to make certain things a requirement depending on where we are in the cycle, like little things. And then you introduce sales process and sales stages, and then, like, once the team is patterned into doing that and, like, operating a forecasting rhythm. Like, for a lot of people at these early-stage companies have never really had to forecast before. So, like, explaining how to do it, like, how to create ranges, and just saying, "Hey, like, this is gonna be messy for the first four to six weeks, but, like, the goal is to hit in a quarter. Now, we have it dialed in." Um, and setting expectations. Like, six weeks out, I need to be within five percent of the forecast and, like, never down. But once you have that patterned, and that's probably six months in, where you have sales process, sales stages, you have the right level of inspection. Like, the reps know what to expect. The leaders know what they are expected to be digging into. You have the funnel instrumentation that I talked about, where everyone can see where they are relative to expectations, where the company is. Like, all of this stuff, 'cause it's really only once you have absolute clarity about how people are expected to operate today that you can or should spend a lot of time on the future. So, like, let's say it takes six months to build that level of, like, clarity, consistency, and the right amount of capacity. 'Cause the other thing is, like, early-stage companies, everyone is on fire. So, like, no matter how much you put great ideas in place, it's hard.

Brett Berson 57:06 With everything going on, yeah.

Graham Moreno 57:08 Yeah. If someone's running 30 deals, like, they're not gonna follow the sales process to a T. They can't. So I think it's like getting that to a healthy state. And then once you do, like, you as a leader, again, have to, but also should be in a place where you trust your enablement leader, your sales leaders, your deployed engineering leaders, like, all these different people to, like, operate the business most of the time. And, like, at that point, your focus should probably shift to still a lot of recruiting. Eighty percent of the job of most very senior, like, go-to-market leaders is, is still recruiting, and that will never change. But then the rest of it is, okay, how do we evolve? What does this look like? What does the org look like? I think you do have to build capacity models 12 months out. I know some people don't like that, but, like, I think if you don't have a bottoms-up model for how you're going to build success, especially

Graham Moreno 57:53 looking at, like, time to hire, current ramp time.

Brett Berson 57:56 Basically where you're working backwards from what you want the business to look like.

Graham Moreno 57:59 Correct.

Brett Berson 57:59 Yeah.

Graham Moreno 58:00 And that can be from a revenue perspective, where we can say, "Hey, we actually think in the next six months, given some of the stuff we have coming on the product side, we're gonna flex, and we're gonna hire way more on enterprise. We have XYZ things coming, so we're gonna scale enterprise in preparation for this big release hitting in 90 days." But I think you have to start looking at that because, like, back to the idea of, like, alignment cross-functionally, it's like, all right, well, what, what's coming on the product side? What are the expectations of the business? What are we seeing now that we can, like, extrapolate out and make a reasonable bet on? Or maybe it's, hey, like, we are at a scale of revenue where we have enough inputs to know that we have very specific plays in insurance and healthcare and in banking, so maybe we start to experiment with verticalizing. You don't do that mid-year. It's a great way to piss a bunch of people off and cause a bunch of chaos. But, like, you start planning for that change 90 to 180 days out. So like, all right, at the turn of the year, we're gonna verticalize. And, like, if we're doing that, what are all the breaking changes? What content do we have to create? Like, what collateral do we have to spin up, like, field marketing teams that are specific to these different things? And, like, so you're going and putting all of that scaffolding in place while at the same time running at the back half of the year. And, like, I do think once you've built the foundation and started to scale the team, if you're not spending 70 to 80% of your time three to six months out, then I would be curious [chuckles] to know what you are spending your time on. 'Cause certainly at Windsurf, like, a huge amount of my time was spent on, like, looking at the capacity model relative to product stuff, relative to, like, what does legal have to go do if we do this? What does... How does customer success change? How does the deployed engineering team change? And, like, beginning to put all of that stuff in place so that when you go to make the change, it's there. Like, the worst thing that could happen is you go to make this big structural change, team gets a bunch of whiplash, and it gets there and, like, it's basically the Fyre Fest version of an org change. Um...

Brett Berson 59:50 So, so then how does this ladder into, call it, you're six or nine months in, business is starting to scale, you're maybe in the tens of millions in revenue. What does, like, a normal week look like if you're really maximally productive in the seat? Like, how are you spending time, or what does spending time well look like?

Graham Moreno 1:00:05 What I found effective, and, like, this is a sample size of one company, so I will probably have a different answer to this over the next few years. But it just became, like, what are the things that if I spend time on are the most ful-force multiplicative? So, like, at Windsurf, which is where I have that context, it was the partner organization. So, like, we made the decision to run 100% of our revenue through partners. And so I spent a ton of time with my partner leader and his, his directs in front of the systems integrators, in front of the VARs, like, building those relationships because being able to get nonlinear revenue throughput as well as, like, services and all of this different stuff, like, building the relationship, building the belief, figuring out what, like, a Indian systems integrator, how are they going to incorporate our offering and, like, the services attached to that into their existing AI playbook? Like, if you're working with, like, a Head or WWT or some of the bigger US options, like, what does that look like? How are we enabling their sellers? So it's like going back to enablement. If you just, like, develop these relationships with people, show up at an all-hands, and you're like, "Yeah, Yo, sell AI, it's great," like, it's not gonna happen. So you have to invest a ton of time and resources in enablement, in training, in building relationships, and being super intentional about going out and getting three to five wins that you can then go take internally to my team and internally to theirs, and going and publicizing that. And like, for me, if I could spend a ton of time with our partners and they leaned in with us, so, like, that from a revenue perspective was more nonlinear than almost anything I could do with an individual seller here. Likewise, uh, enablement. We were hiring, you know, 10... Well, like 10 people a week, so you're looking at, like, 40, 50-person classes of boot camp. And so it's like, okay, well, that had better be dialed in. Like, if we're looking at what is the ramp data from the last six months, and now, like, and now with 50 people going through a boot camp class, pulling ramp forward by a week is meaningful. How do we, like, pull apart what we've done before, like, figure out where to tune the knobs, knowing that it's gonna take us six months to see if it worked, and go and, like, do that again? And so for me, it became what is the most force multiplicative places I can spend my time? And I'll try to spend probably 50% of my time total in those two or three. As we've heard, big alignment guy. Uh, I spend a lot of time in one-on-ones. I probably spend two to three full days a week, even at, like, max output-

Brett Berson 1:02:14 Wow

Graham Moreno 1:02:14 ... on one-on-ones. And, like, some of that is scheduled, and a lot of it too, and, like, my wife is a saint for putting up with this, but, like, my team knows that I'm available pretty much all the time. The worst thing is I put blocks on my calendar for gym, and the smart people have figured out that I'm available then. And so I would just get-

Brett Berson 1:02:28 And while working out?

Graham Moreno 1:02:29 Well, yeah, they're like, "Oh, Graham's at the gym. He's not on a scheduled call." So I'd get, like, 30 calls while I was at the gym, and I'd come home, and my wife would be like, "How was your workout?" And I'd be like, "I didn't do it. I paced around outside for two hours and then gave up and came home." But I think that's important. Like, again, I think if you're gonna spend your time on something that's force multiplicative, where, like, the impact of the field is really great, that's a good use of time. Same thing with being cross-functional. Like, I would spend a lot of time with peers or with, like, different groups that were meant to support the overall revenue infrastructure, 'cause I knew if that broke, especially as we got bigger, the, like, immediate impact of that across 100 sellers is really high. You don't ever wanna be... And not that this is preventable at a certain scale, but, like, you don't... For as long as possible, you don't wanna be a leader who's just, like, out there in the clouds.

Brett Berson 1:03:10 Yeah. You wanna stay close to the work.

Graham Moreno 1:03:11 Yeah. Like, you wanna be someone that, like, will just pick up and, like, call a rep that either is, like, doing really good work on a deal or that you know is, like, fighting the good fight on a renewal that's tough. And like, how are you being intentional about, like, I should probably go call this person and, like, check in with them, see how they're doing, or, like, call this person running this big cycle for us and see if they want me to fly out. Putting in the legwork, I think, to create the right culture has hugely multiplicative benefits if, like, you do it correctly and you've hired the people around you who are doing the same, 'cause you kind of have, like, concentric circles of people that think that way. Like, you end up having something that is, like, supportive and fun and dynamic and challenging and hopefully, like, really lucrative, great, but even more importantly, like, gives someone a network and a set of skills that they can take with them for the rest of their career. Never gonna be a doctor, never gonna be a lawyer, but for me, if I can, like, be a part of building revenue organizations that can, like, materially change people's lives, like, that's cool.

Brett Berson 1:04:05 That's a good place to end. Thank you so much. This was great.

Graham Moreno 1:04:08 Yeah.

Brett Berson 1:04:09 I really enjoyed it.

Graham Moreno 1:04:10 Same.

Brett Berson 1:04:10 Thank you for spending the time.