Dan Fougere, CRO @Datadog: Why Discounting is Dangerous and Contract Sizes are Misleading | E1229

We will have a legendary sales team, making life-changing money, being best in class, and having fun. You will learn more and become better at your job working on my team than you would have at any other team during that same amount of time. And you will never have to look for a job again because the halo of our success will be over your head for the rest of your career and people will seek you out. I said that to everybody in- on the team. That was my first day.

Ready to go? (upbeat music) Dan, I am so excited for this, dude. I've wanted to make this one happen for a while. I'm in awe of the Datadog journey and your role in it, so thank you so much for joining me today.

Man, I'm so happy to be here. Uh, longtime listener, first time caller. I have enjoyed your podcast for years and I'm fired up for today.

That is very, very kind of you, but I just spoke to Carlos at Harness beforehand, and he said that I had to start with the mechanical engineering part. He said, "Why did you make the move from engineering to sales?"

Well, I ended up doing mechanical engineering, t- just engineering in general because I didn't have a lot of money growing up. I read a magazine in 1987 called US News & World Report. The five or seven top earning degrees all were engineering, and I was like, "I don't know any engineers." I was living... I grew up in New York City and my dad was a cop. We were living in the country at the time, very rural place. And so, uh, I seemed pretty good at math and science and I got into it. I love technology. I always admired Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, and those guys were kinda heroes from my childhood, and I got a, uh, a design job in Detroit using CAD/CAM software. And so I got pretty good at it, I went on to go work for the company and it was, turned out to be this company Parametric Technology Corporation, or PTC. And I went there for the technology, not realizing that they kind of possibly are the greatest sales team that's ever been put together. So this qualification methodology, MEDDIC, that everybody uses, it was invented there while I was there. Company was doing about 200 million a year, so they still had the DNA of a startup. And so I talked with them about just how they built an amazing qualification machine, uh, pipeline generation machine, sales process machine, and I just happened into that as an engineer.

How do you build a really, really good qualification machine?

You gotta expect that bullshit is there. You have to realize that human nature is such that you want to have the rose-colored glasses on, you wanna believe the deal is good, and you need to know that the opposite is probably true, and you've gotta look for the dirt and you've gotta build that into every time you're looking at a deal, you should be thinking about it. And now MEDDIC is a nice way to have a structure, a framework for this, versus some meandering conversation that may or may not get to the answer, right? So your metrics, your economic buy, your decision process, decision criteria, identify pain, champion, competition. That's the way I look at MEDDIC. And so in that way, I can have a conversation in possibly even 15 minutes, but m- max 30 minutes, and I'm gonna be able to qualify this deal, we're gonna be able to co- look for the- for the weaknesses and strengths, yes.