Kevin Egan: Biggest Lesson on Managing Sales Teams at Slack and Atlassian | E1034

I think when I'm closing a candidate, I'm, I'm interested if I'm giving them a fair comp plan, are they really interested about the long-term journey at this company? 'Cause this comp plan only represents this moment in time for the next year or two. Um, if we're both successful, the company will, um, increase in size. Our jobs will be different. Our jobs will be bigger. So what, how do they view the o- the long-term journey at this company? And are they excited about the company and the journey, or is it about the comp plan? It's really about a total rewards element, which is you're, you're joining a rocket ship. Uh, you're gonna love this job and it's gonna, you know, really benefit your career overall.

Kevin, I have heard so many great things from Maggie, from Kim, from Renu. But I wanna start in the beginning. So it hit me, how did you make your way into the world of sales first? Let's start there.

So I was lucky to join Oracle in the mid-'90s, and I started, um, in the data center in a technical support role, and quickly made my way over to the sales engineering side of the house, uh, supporting database technologies, again, at Oracle in the late '90s in their DMD organization, which was a fast-moving, fantastic place to learn, learn both sales and technology.

You know, I, I thought it'd be really cool, uh, but also a little bit unfair if I started with a quickfire round, 'cause you've had some incredible companies where you've been an essential part of their sales teams and often led them, Salesforce, Dropbox, and Slack. And I thought there's gonna be, like, one or two lessons from each that really shaped how you think. And so I wanted to delve into each in a quickfire round. So if we take Salesforce, what was the biggest takeaway for you? And how did that shape how you think?

Salesforce does not get enough credit for being one of the original product-led growth companies. If you look at Salesforce and what Benioff did in the early days, we were one of the first companies to ever allow companies, or our, uh, potential clients to use a trial of our service at no charge for 30 days. And during that trial, the sales team was obsessed with, what are the business problems that this customer's trying to solve? How do I c- help configure the Salesforce service to help solve those business problems? And it led to incredible conversion rates. So the idea that if we're gonna put the product in our customers' hands, we gotta give them help in terms of how they solve their problems, uh, as a, as a key accelerant. So that was an amazing element of Salesforce, and, and one I just don't think they got enough credit for. Uh, Salesforce remains an incredibly customer-centric company. Uh, so lots to learn there overall.