The Pomp Podcast - #1220 Javier Ramírez Lugo | Million Dollar Sales Secrets Revealed

Episode Date: July 7, 2023

Javier Ramírez Lugo is the founder of Cuota. He has had an incredible experience doing sales at Zenefits, Rippling, and WeWork. He is one of the most experienced and insightful people I have ever talked to about sales, and I always learn something every time we speak. This conversation breaks down how you as a founder or a salesperson can get better, how you can drive revenue, processes, hiring, firing, how to manage, and other hacks & tricks. ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 250,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/

What's up everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. So it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode. Javier Ramirez Lugo is the founder of Quota. He has had an incredible experience doing sales at Zenefits, Rippling, and WeWork. He is one of the most experienced and insightful people

I've ever talked to about sales, and I always learn something every time we speak. This conversation breaks down how you as a founder or a salesperson can get better. How can you drive revenue? What are the processes? How do you hire? How do you fire? How do you manage? And what are some of the things that you can do that are little hacks and tricks. Here is my conversation with Javier Ramirez Lugo. This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result, less time spent

on operations more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most learn more at accenture.com spotify anthony pompliano runs pomp investments all views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of pomp investments you should not treat any opinion expressed by pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys, bang, bang. I thought a great place for us to start this conversation is the idea of founders when they start a business. Everyone wants to build a business, but they

don't realize that not only are you the founder, the CEO, probably the engineer, but also you have to be the salesperson. And sales is this thing that everyone kind of feels like is something they don't want to do, but like, how do I get customers? How do I drive revenue? And so let's just start with like, when the founder has to do the sales, what have you seen as the best practices or what are the things that they can do to increase the odds of success as that first salesperson? Great question, Pom. Thanks for having me, first of all. But I think that the best founders that I've worked with throughout my career have a phenomenal way to do sales. They have the most passion. They build the product. They know how to do it. But essentially,

what they do is get in front of the right customers through the proper channels. So what does that mean? In a world of founder-led sales, you're juggling a lot of things, as you say. the CEO has to find a way to get in front of customers where they live. And where they live means, you know, if you're selling into engineering, you're not necessarily going to call an engineer because they don't typically like to talk on the phone. But let's say if you have an HR product, you're going to find a way to build a good email sequence or maybe a LinkedIn presence that is going to help you get in front of them. The second thing is, you know, a lot of founders educate themselves, right? So sales has a stigma, as you say, but it is the forcing

function for growth for any type of business. So the founders that understand that and that are truly seeking to one, get feedback and to help somebody solve a problem usually happen to be the most successful in this domain early in the company. And so when they're going and finding where those people are like, walk me through the process. So let's just say that we built a piece of software, and we're trying to sell to engineers. Sure. How do I go figure out where are the engineers? Do I just like go talk to a bunch of them online and say like, hey, what do you do all day and figure it out that way? Or like, is there a process that's repeatable that people can say, okay, if I built a company or a product, how do I find where my customers are?

Yeah. So there's a couple of avenues. And what most people will do is if you come out of Y Combinator, for example, there's a network. So you try to find the low hanging fruit, who you know what what uh distribution you know channels you can get easiest to but also what a lot of companies will do is find a target list and the process of finding that target list is really part of ideating your go-to-market strategy which means like here's who i think i can solve a problem for that usually is the person or the buyer persona and then the ideal customer profile which means the person or the business that that operates you know within that person today it's much easier than it was 10 years ago to find access to those, let's say, lists of people.

Companies like Apollo, Lucia, Ample Market, Zoom Info, or Sales Loft will give you access to a data set that is aligned with what you've decided is your target buyer. And then from there, what's important is how do you build the right copy? Or how do you get in front of them in a way that is interesting? And that's differentiated because there's so much noise nowadays. Everyone's doing emails, everyone's sending, you know, kind of outreach messages through LinkedIn. So it's really finding, you know, kind of that sweet spot in that honest message coming from a CEO and maybe perhaps going to, to another founder that has that problem. So plenty of founders will say like, okay, it's time for me to do sales. Let me write up this

like six paragraph email that explains exactly what I do, tells you every single detail you need to know. In my experience, like actually maybe just sending like, hey, we did X, it'll save you money. Do you want to talk? Right. Like three sentences actually may have a better response rate. How do you think about copy and like how professional to be, whether the emails should be like really beautiful and have, you know, a bunch of images and things like that, or they should just be plain text. Like we're starting to get into the nitty gritty of actually, you know, reaching out to these people, but like, what have you seen is either best practice or what is the process at which people can figure out and test to get to what works for them?

Yeah, that's a great question. And I love that you say that because I'm sure you want to be spoken to in the way that you speak to others, right? And as a founder, you probably or CEO of all the businesses that you have, you don't have time to go through like a sophisticated, like lengthy message, and you're going to get lost. So like the longer messages usually don't have the best conversion rates. What messages usually are most successful is when you understand the person on the other end of, you know, kind of the email. So if you're writing to a CEO, like think like a CEO would like to be spoken to. Right. And to your point, simplicity. Hey, which, by the way, is one of the most successful subject lines in the history of like email

prospecting, because it seems like it's personal. It's coming from someone that you may want to have a conversation with. And then you go straight to the point. Like you don't need to say like, hey, we just went through YC. We raised all this money like you lost me at that point. And all of that is sort of the structure that you use for posting online, for doing copy for newsletters it's it's really that hook at the beginning to say like how can i help you or we built this um should we talk and then when you get someone and they respond how much of this is the founders getting on phone calls can it be done over email like what do you see in terms of uh okay i put out all this bait i got a couple bites now right like what like what is the process from

that point yeah so i i think it really depends on the stage of the company and also like the size the deal right so if it's an early stage company the founder benefits from being part of any type of conversation i want to know what the market wants and i want to know what type of feedback everyone is giving me with regards to what i'm trying to solve for so i guess to directly answer a question like a founder would want to be on every single call like in the early days and you know if you have any other like sales staff sure you can have them maybe qualify that opportunity in a light way but you know try to get as much information as possible um and answer them as quickly as possible so you can you know kind of get the ball rolling and get into the

sales process itself and then when they are in that process they're obviously learning right from potential customers um how much of this is just like the founders are passionate about what they're doing and they're good versus they should have scripts and they should practice and they should kind of have what I'll consider a more intentional sales process, even though it's still just the founder doing the sales themselves? I love that question because it's where a lot of founders miss out on the most. And I'll explain why. Typical founders are more on the technical side, right? They're the ones that can code. They have a lot of sophistication from a technical capacity. They don't necessarily have that much exposure or experience on the commercial side.

So they try to over-engineer sales. And when you over-engineer sales, you sort of lose that human component. And in selling, what you want to do is have a human connection, ask the right questions, understand the other guy, and make sure that you have a product that can solve their problems. And that simplicity is sometimes forgotten. And when people try to do scripts too early on, they sort of miss out on a lot. The basic thing that I can think of that most early stage founders will do is, sure, they'll have an agenda, they'll have a structure and a process. But the beauty is in the questions that you can ask them to understand like where they stand, what they need. And based off that, then you tell them about your product with their needs

in mind. So ask questions. Yes. Have them tell you the answers to the test before you take the test is basically the big lesson. A hundred percent. And, and I mean, it's sort of like people joke about this, but it's like a seller has like two ears and one mouth. So you're supposed to listen more than you actually talk. There's, there's a ratio within like, you know, kind of sales enablement. That's the talk to listen ratio. And supposedly it's like, you know, if you listen more than what you talk, you have a better percentage of closing the deal, which is a huge, you know, kind of a breaking of a misconception because people historically think that the best sellers are the ones that don't shut up. And it's the complete opposite. And when you're asking these

questions, how much of them are, uh, I'll call it open-ended questions like, Hey, tell me about your problem. Right. And just kind of sit back and listen versus it is, uh, questions that are very specific. What is your budget for this specific type of product? What is the timeline to make a decision? Is there a combination of open-ended and more direct questions or is there each one's different? Talk to me about the types of questions that people are asking. I mean, it sounds like you know about this, but the earlier in the sales process, the more open-ended you want to be. Because the tactical thing is that you can't interrogate a buyer. They're going to feel interrogated and they're going to say like, you're wasting my time

or show me the product, right? So let's go. So what you want to do is sit down and pick five open-ended questions that can give you as much information as possible. And so for example, help me understand what are your kind of short-term goals in terms of revenue, right?

So if I'm selling a product that impacts, let's say top line revenue, I want to understand like how they're going to get there and what challenges or what's in the way. And I give them a question that can give me as much information as possible so I can use it to my advantage when I am talking about the product later down the road.

So I put out bait, I get bites, I get on the first call, I do a great job, I shut up. After asking my open-ended questions, I get a bunch of information. And then I say, okay, I'm going to send you follow-up information. What the hell am I supposed to send? Again, this is just the founder.

We don't have a sales team yet. So is it, here's a link to a demo. Is it a presentation? Is it a signup form? What is kind of the best practice there? And then as a second part to this, what do I do if they don't respond? The hated follow-up hell that you get kind of thrown into. What is the best practice for a founder?

So a lot of that is a result of not doing a good job on the first call. And let me explain. So when you go on a first call and you have an okay conversation, you show them the product, and you sort of see that the person is not as excited, that's when you go into murky waters. And I'll tell you why. because what typically happens is you'll end the call with something like, hey, thanks for your time. You know, let me send you some follow-up information. I'll check in with you in a couple of weeks.

That is where you get into the deal chasing territory with not a good place to be. Now, what you want to do is if you have a good call, which you're asking the right questions and there is mutual interest, you want to propose the next step before you leave the call, right? And my best practice is usually like have something

on calendar for your next meeting. So you avoid the, they went dark or like they're stuck in my CRM after my first call and I can't get ahold of him because you want to make sure that there's like that mutual benefit, but also you're driving the deal to the next place. But assuming that you did a great job with presenting an opportunity that, you know, is something that will provide value to them. And let's say that you do have that calendar invite set up. This happened to me before and I was like, I don't know what to do. And then they, Hey, I got to reschedule. Okay. And then you basically get another one and then they reschedule again.

It almost feels like they're using the reschedule as a way to keep kicking the can down the road. Sure. What do you suggest in terms of actually being able to be effective and follow up without annoying people? Yeah. So there's a couple of tactics. I'll go back to how well you execute that first call. I think, you know, if you execute that right call, you can find out ways that they actually have some sort of urgency. So going back to my revenue example, if they're trying to get to an X number of revenue by,

let's say the end of the year, the sooner you guys start working together, the sooner I can help you get to that goal, right? So what I try to find out in the first call is, is that, you know, kind of urgency lever. So I can keep it in mind as, as with regards to follow up. So you're saying like, Hey, if you want to get this implemented, let's say by August 31st, in order for us to do that, we need to make sure that we go through X number of steps. And instead of being annoying, what I'll do is I'll remind them of what happened in that

call. like hey listen i think we had a great conversation just want to make sure i'm not being the annoying sales rep but um understanding that you have a goal or deadline um doesn't make sense to you know have a call sooner than instead of two weeks later down the road right um that's one the second one is i'm a big fan of something that's called the call between the call so when you call someone and assuming they answer between the scheduled calls that person is not necessarily prepare to have a conversation with you. So naturally, and humanistically, they will give you the honest answer, right? So you call them and say like, Hey, pop,

you know, I know we have a call, you know, kind of next Thursday, you know, give me a sense of, you know, kind of how you felt about the product, you know, does this really align with what you're looking for? And hopefully, in that scenario, you tell me like, listen, you're good, but you know, you're a little bit out of budget. And then we can, you know, know what to address at that situation. Got it. And so are you calling them on their cell phone or like just trying to catch them off guard essentially pretty much i mean it's um well whatever the tactics are right yeah and so when you're calling though is it just like you know hey steve hey mary uh i got two seconds um you know i just want to hear what you thought about the product or is it something that is much

more uh kind of polished like how do you normally approach those calls it has to be as human and as like straightforward as possible so if i'm calling you to say like hey pomp you know what did you think about you know kind of my product i you know i'm excited about this opportunity you know do you think that we're, you know, on the right track? If, if, if for example, I forgot to ask this question, that that's something that I'll use as an opportunity. I forgot to ask you this question on the call, but I wanted to, you know, catch you one-on-one. Is this something that you think is worthwhile or, you know, you see as, as getting you closer to your goals? And then what about like identifying who the champion is internally, right? So sometimes

in my experience, the champion is the decision maker. Other times they're not the decision maker, but how do you, if you've got a couple of different people, you're talking to the company, how do you kind of identify, okay, that is going to be the champion? And then how do you treat them differently than maybe you may treat other people? Yeah. So great question. I think that it's more obvious than you think in a sense of like being able to ask, right? So who is going to be the person that's going to sign on the dotted line? Who needs to be part of the decision making process? Those types of questions, a lot of like sales reps or even founders in the early days, like forget or fear asking, but it's as simple as understanding, you know, how do you

transact and let me align to the way that you transact, right? And a lot of times, they might just give you the answer and say like, hey, I'm going to be the one that's kind of making the decision, but we have a panel of people, et cetera, et cetera. How you treat that person is hopefully in a more personal way, right? I want to build the relationship with that person. And if I'm the one being the founder calling, I will make the call to the champion. I won't make the call to the economic buyer or somebody else, right? It's tough sometimes because the champion may be the CEO. CEO is not necessarily going to be available to pick up a call, you know, 3 p.m. on a Tuesday afternoon. So you have to be strategic about it.

What about once you've got as a founder, the decision maker says, yeah, we're good to go. And then it gets sent to finance or it gets sent to compliance or, you know, the general counsel. There's a couple of different organizations internally usually that have to kind of touch whatever the contract is or review something. and now you feel like you've almost been separated from the champion being able to manage the process to like, hey, it's with finance. Hey, it's with compliance. How can you as a founder continue to help move this forward

without being annoying? Yeah, so that is very typical in enterprise sales, right? So when you're selling to a bigger organization, I think that the important thing for you to understand is that that will happen, right? So a lot of people go into these sales processes like expecting it to be signed off, you know, and that is where you lose time and where you lose momentum, right? So if I know that I'm going to have to go through legal, compliance, finance,

sometimes even vendor risk, I want to start addressing those as early as possible in the sales process. So I know that I need to go down that route and that I'm going to do it in a either parallel fashion as we're like agreeing to business terms and then doing the logistical work, Right. So sometimes what reps will do or early stage founders is they'll create a mutual action plan. And in that mutual action plan, there's pretty much sort of a timeline of the things that we assume that need to be covered. And that actually shows a lot of preparation from like the seller side, because, you know, you want to do business with someone that knows what they're doing. right so if someone shows up and tells me like hey pomp here's usually how we sell into enterprise customers and we're able to go through agreeing on the business terms going to committee going to legal going to compliance and here are the different dates that we want to you know kind of agree to what typically happens in something like that process is that you also have a date

that you solve back from right so if it's going to take me a month to be in finance and we need to get the deal done, you know, within three weeks, I'm going to go back to my champion and let them know what the process is like. Cause I want to make sure that they can deliver the urgency because in both of our best interests for it to move forward. And then I use that champion to gain some velocity on the finance side, or maybe he needs to go nudge someone because being the champion also means that he can help me, you know, lobby or work the internals of that heavy or big organization. now that the founder has made a couple of sales and starts to understand the process eventually

they'll say okay i need to hire someone um i've talked to founders and they're like all sales people are full of shit they can't sell at all and then i've talked to other founders that are like build as big of a sales team as you possibly can they're amazing and they all drive revenue yeah uh the truth's probably somewhere in between sure but how do you think about that first or second sales hire where do you find these people and how as a founder can they actually uh interview and kind of underwrite who's good and who may not, you know, be able to deliver on the promises that they say? Yeah. So the founding account executive, as I like to call it, or it's known in the industry, is one of the hardest hires to make early in a company's, you know, journey. And I'll

tell you why. It's because you're going from the founder-led sales motion to starting, you know, kind of that sales-led growth motion, meaning sales is leading the charge, but you're transferring all the information from the person that built the product that knows it best and that actually has the most passion into someone that you want to make sure that has the same skill set or like passion for what they're selling so this is a very non-traditional sales role and i can tell you a lot about it because i was a founding account executive which you can talk about more it's more a seller that wants to build but that can overly communicate and i'll explain why when you're trying to find that velocity that you know scalability and repeatability in the early days

when you're past the baton from the founder to a seller you still need to report back to the engineering team you still need to tell the engineering team hey listen like i know this is our roadmap but what i'm hearing in the market and what people are telling me that they want is x y or z and so you're giving you're putting a lot of responsibility from a company's perspective into someone that's, you know, kind of external. Now that person, because I mentioned he is a builder, must want to have that ability to work outside of like, you know, sales conversations, or like maybe non-revenue generating activities, which may be talking to engineering. That person also must want to build and they must be willing to be in an environment where there's a lot of

uncertainty, but nothing is put together. So I'll tell you what an example of like a founding account executive that usually doesn't work is someone that comes from a really large organization and goes into an early stage environment. And I'll explain because in a larger organization, you have marketing, you have sales engineering, that's usually the one that's doing the presentations or the product demos. You have a brand behind you that you may not have in the early days. And when you put that same exact person that's used to just transacting with a team behind them into an early stage environment where they don't have that infrastructure or support behind

them, they usually get overwhelmed and they can't perform. So that's the very long answer to the first part of your question. I think that from an interview process, it has to be the founder identifying someone that is a lot of entrepreneurial, but a lot of selling. And there are many ways to catch, I get this all the time, salespeople interview well. But in reality, they don't if you ask the right questions, right? Because everyone's happy, everyone's peppy, et cetera, and whatnot. But what you got to understand is, number one, why do you want to go early stage? What do you want to go into the most uncertain sales environment possible? Number two is, what's your willingness? And give me examples of how would you build this and send

me the examples. And then three, I usually like to do situational questions, right? So let's say somebody called you to tell you that you suck or something along those lines, or maybe it's a deal that I want them to walk me through because I want to find alignment too. I want to find that someone that has been in a particular sales environment can actually translate over. And if they've sold into actually the same buyer persona that this company is now selling into, that's even better because they can help us accelerate and they know exactly what to do. So one of the things that you're highlighting here

that many people probably just don't think about until they're in it is that first sales hire, they also have to create all the sales material, right? They have to create the deck. They have to create what is the demo gonna look like? What is all of our email sequences, et cetera. And in my experience, there's some people who are amazing at sales.

They hate prospecting, right? And they're like, hey, at my last job, like just like you know leads showed up and i went and i sold and i was amazing at it but like i don't know how to go get the leads yeah uh and there's even people who are really good at prospecting and they're like well i've never been on a sales call before yep right i just went and found all the leads and gave them to somebody else and so it really almost feels like you need someone who can go kind of full funnel and find leads have the materials the system all the follow-up uh sequences etc and then also be able to actually close the deal as well yep how many of those are

out there right like are there a lot of those people out there or is this actually like a pretty hard role to find this episode is brought to you by accenture when your advertising operations fall out of sync everything else follows spotify and accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales using automation analytics and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business the result less time spent on operations more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at Accenture.com slash Spotify. It's hard. It's hard. It's a hard role to find. And you open up a question or a situation where, you know, traditionally in B2B SaaS, as you mentioned, there's the SDR that's

doing the prospecting, you know, kind of full force. And there's an account executive that's just doing the demos, closing, negotiation, et cetera. I think that there is a world where the founding account executive needs to be a full sales cycle rep, but also that the full sales cycle rep is something that is going to come and be more prevalent in this day and age. And let me explain why. There are so many tools out there today that help you create a system to prospect that allow you to get access to information or leads very easily. And with AI and all the different things that we can go into, it's even easier to write good copy

and to make it more personalized to that particular person. So if you create the right systems, which obviously require a level of savviness from like that individual, you're going to create your own momentum to get leads, right? And then second to that, which you see a lot of reps doing on LinkedIn nowadays, is creating your own personal brand,

creating a lot of content that can give you that audience. so when you do prospect there's a perception of like this guy is well known i've seen you before i want to talk to you right so that skill set is hard to find right someone that wants to go through the through the whole process not only wants to but has the tools to actually do prospecting and closing altogether the reason a lot of companies historically will do sdrna is because of focus because when you're prospecting you're not transacting and when you're not not transacting, you're prospecting. So it's really important that first sales hire, the founding account executive has the right system to create top of the funnel if you haven't created

it yet, which again, requires a particular sales muscle. And then the separate sales muscle, which is like, how do I structure the sales process and iterate every day? as the founder you've now hired someone you think they're good um how can you be a good manager and then what are the things that you could do to really fuck it up right like like you've got the salesperson there uh there's got to be some trust sure right but like what are some of the things that are like best practices of managing that first salesperson and then what are the things that just please avoid because you're going to make the situation worse i think you micromanaging for any role is is what you know kills any sales rep no sales rep wants to have

someone on top of their stuff you know kind of on a regular basis so that's number one um i think that you know wanting the sales person to specifically operate under a particular style is a way that you can break a rep and i'll tell you why some reps are phenomenal on the phone Some are not. And some reps are extremely good at email. Some are not. Now, I cannot, it's sort of like, you know, get your job done however you can get it done. Like, I'll respect it.

But, you know, many times a founder will say, no, no, you have to make, you know, a thousand calls this week. And this rep may not necessarily be good on the phone. Now, you need to know that ahead of time because if you're trying to sell to a buyer that needs to be communicated through on the phone, you just made the wrong hire. that's super important as well. But you need to give them the respect to what their style is in a sense of like, here's how you execute, but also give them the right direction. Sales is very grueling. It's intense. You get a lot of rejection. So I think that as a manager, you also have to support a lot of your team and remind them why they're here, why they're good, because a lot of times they will be defeated because it's a grueling job with a lot of

pressure deadlines goals etc and i think the last thing i'll say is is um you know you mentioned trust i think that's one of the most important things when a rep knows that they're they're not being trusted i mean it's a hard situation to be in but also at the end of the day sales is black and white you're performing or you're not so so i've done it in the past um somebody smarter than told me they're like hire two at a time yeah don't just hire one a don't just hire one sdr hire two at the same time and then in some ways uh there's this like implicit competition yeah so they kind of bring their a game yep but there's also this like explicit uh almost like um kind of social safety net of like emotional support because you're not there by yourself trying to

figure out all this you have somebody to talk to etc is that the best practice is to kind of hire two at a time? You're spot on. You're spot on. I'll tell you why. A salesperson is used to being around a team. When you take them out of that environment and you put them in an environment where he's by himself, it's tough. Not everyone's built to be a lone wolf. So when you hire two, you give them that social, let's say, belonging, but you're also solving for performance. Sometimes when you have two reps, you might see that one is better than the other or one figured it out. The other didn't. And what a lot of companies will do is they'll just hire one and say, well, this guy can't sell. He's a sales guy. We don't have a good product.

That's a tough decision to make just based on the performance of one individual. But when you have two individuals and two performance, let's say metrics that you can compare, it makes life a little bit more understanding to say like, well, if this guy works, that means that we have a solution. We can sell. How do we get more people and create process that then we keep adding more to the process. When do you know when to fire them? Everyone has their own, you know, kind of way to do this, but usually there's like a ramp period, three months, right? So you give them soft goals. You say like, you know, by month one, you have to do what I think is 25% of your goal. Month two, you have to do 50% of your goal. And

month three, you're fully ramped, which means it's at the, what I think you can sell, you know, you're selling that by month three. If that person hasn't, or you see that they don't have kind of the right, let's say performance with those metrics, it's time to go. So I'll give you a real life example. I think of how some of this gets very complex. We have a business. They're five figure contracts. They're with pretty large businesses and we'll get verbal commitments. We're in. Send us the contract. We're very quick. We turn around the contract, usually same day get in their hands a week two weeks three weeks and what happens is there's internal pressure because these teams have to hit quarterly quotas sure the external companies

they don't give a shit about your quota they're going through their process right right and so one of the things that we've tried sometimes with success sometimes not is to just be honest and say hey for internal purposes like getting this done by the end of the uh quarter would be really powerful for us like how do we get that done yep literally sometimes i've seen people respond back and be like so what right like i don't care yeah but other times i have seen them say okay let us see what we can try to get done sure how do you see kind of quarterly quotas and like the internal pressure yep is that a tool to be used externally or is it actually something that could hurt people when they start to kind of you know pull back the curtain and explain something like the internal

uh you know inner workings and and they're just like i don't give a shit yeah um that's a great question and i think it depends how how you use it right so there's a little bit of finesse on how you say it in a sense of like hey um you know i have goals um and our quarter is you know done at the end of this week um i don't want to be pushy but you know help me understand you think is real that we can get this done by friday if not i completely understand but i just want to make sure that you know i forecast this accordingly and they'll understand you know and if you have a good enough of a relationship. Like, I think that, that you can, you can do that. What doesn't work is if you come out of left field and you haven't talked to them in a while and say like, Hey,

you know, the quarter ends today. Do you think we can get this done? Like you're, you're probably actually hurting the deal in that case. Cause it's like, dude, you're it's self, it's about self-interest, but you have that good enough of a relationship where you can be, you know, subtle about it. I think you can get the answer that you're looking for. Got it. That makes sense. Let's talk about kind of your transition, right? You were inside some of the fastest growing companies in the country in terms of startups, absolutely wild places. People have heard a ton of stuff about them. Talk a little bit about those experiences, really kind of from the sales perspective. And like, you know, what were the lessons that you

learned? And then maybe what are some of the things that you're like, okay, you know, if I go to the next business, we're not going to recreate some of these other things. Yeah. So listen, I appreciate you bringing that up. I've been part of, yeah, three unicorns, Zenefits, Rippling, and WeWork. And I have too many lessons from each of them. And starting with Zenefits, Zenefits in 2014 was the fastest growing B2B SaaS company in the world.

We did zero to $72 million in about two and a half years. And it was really like building a plane mid-flight as some of the leadership would describe it. And you just learn how to operate fast, effectively. Right. There's, there's, you have to put in work around, you know, the performance, just like a performer. I think sales are, you know, kind of performers in a certain extent. But at Zenefits, I was in an environment where I had anywhere between 10 to 12 net new customer demos a day for, for years. And you learn about a lot about selling. You learn a lot about,

you know, kind of trusting yourself, but, you know, you start paying attention to the company and to the business. My background is in finance, so I kind of had a different perspective from a financial perspective. And in 2014, there was a growth at all costs mentality that may or may not have been sustainable, as you and I know. And it was sad because Zenefits was a very boom bust situation. The company, after growing aggressively, becoming a unicorn in such a short period of time, ended up having a lot of problems with sales growth, and we ended up having to lay off a lot of the team, and that was hurtful. The lesson there is operate effectively, but keep going. And then, of course, everything that I know

from B2B SaaS, I learned there, and having a big exposure to building stuff and talking to the engineering team. Now, the second unicorn that I went to was Rippling. I was the first sales hire at the company, exactly what we were just discussing, working for Parker Conrad, who's a great friend. And I was sitting in his basement with 12 engineers and we had one SDR. And you learn how to have a lot of conviction, but you learn how to put yourself in a situation where you have to wear every single hat that you can think of and pull every trick out of your hat that you've used throughout your career. There's nothing structured. So you have to be okay with uncertainty and know that it's going to be okay. But also be very organized about the things that

you do because you have to think about revenue generating time, but you also have to think about building at the same time. And then the third company I went to was WeWork, which I thought was a very safe bet at the time. Incredible story, experience maybe for another time. But WeWork was also a high growth environment. And I kind of realized and looking back that I've had a lot of success by saying yes to opportunities that a lot of people have said no to. And WeWork brought me to Miami, actually. Miami in 2018 was a distressed market in the eyes of WeWork because not a lot of big companies wanted to set up their headquarters here. And I signed up for it. And the lesson there is I was willing to kind of get my hands dirty, stand up a team, recruit the right

team to sell from Miami. And then eventually I ended up growing my responsibilities to run sales for the Southeast of the United States. And that was a very different environment from my experience from selling B2B SaaS deals that ranged anywhere from 50 to 250K to going to WeWork where the average contract value was anywhere between two and $5 million. So very different stages, very different, you know, kind of experiences and products, but common lessons, you know, in terms of sales and like the right things to do, which, you know, I carry with me for all my career. How did you decide to leave kind of doing sales for other people to go start your own business? This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations

fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result, Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at Accenture.com slash Spotify. I always knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur, but I also noticed something that was very unique, which was I have a very unique exposure and experience that a lot of people want access to and that I can make a business out of. Coming from like my business background,

I always think about hedges and not putting all your eggs in one basket and the recertification. And I sort of build that structure with my company now that's called Quota in a way where I can work with different companies. I can give them the value that I bring to the table, given my experience, but I'm not putting all my eggs in that one basket. And maybe it's a protection for my own self, given my past experiences at Zenefits and WeWork, which didn't necessarily end how I wanted them to end. Right. And I knew that, you know, as a founding account executive, you're such an entrepreneur because you're doing so many things. And if I would have applied all those to starting my own business, I would have been successful. And so far, it's been an incredible experience. And then talk to me about you kind of have to do sales for yourself to then go help people with sales.

Right. It's like this like very interesting kind of meta type thing. But where have you found the best channels to get customers? Like, how have you applied some of your lessons that you know from these other businesses to your own business now? That's a great question. And we touched on it lightly earlier, but there are three channels, let's say, that work for me really well from a top of the funnel perspective, which I wish like every rep would know or would utilize a lot more. Number one is referrals, right? So, you know, I work with companies that, you know, do a good job. they refer me to other customers, and I ask for the referral. And that, you know, kind of comes,

I come highly recommended. So I have like a pretty close, good close rate on those referrals. Number two is your network, right? So there's, there's a, people call it the go to network. And the go to network is pretty much like, you know, where throughout your experience in your life, you know, have you made, you know, relationships that you can, you know, knock on their door and say, like, hey, here's what I'm doing, like, how do we work together? and then the third one is content so i like to talk a lot about content i've been talking a lot about content lately because what i realize is that sales is taking a page out of you know marketing's book and it's almost becoming where like a lot of b2b sales motions are becoming b2c

sales motions and i'll explain because you know typically you would see people marketing their product online or doing all this content online uh just to sell like a particular like you know let's say e-commerce product. But now you're starting to see a lot of B2B folks doing the same, creating content on LinkedIn, sharing a lot of value, sharing their experiences, doing it even through Twitter, doing it even through Instagram. And I started to invest a lot in that time. And obviously through being well-organized with creating content on one side and then running the operation on the other side, I found a lot of success. And interestingly enough i never had to do outbound for my business and so when you're going to like let's say the

network as an example how much of this is uh hey here's everything i do yeah versus let me just have a conversation with this person listen sure right and then kind of uh see where you can almost um you know help sure and that helping is really where the business gets inserted like is it this like intentional like that's a company i want to work with them here's exactly what i'm going to do for them like let me go talk to them yeah or is it much more like that seems like a business that uh is gonna going to continue to grow let me go talk to them learn about all their problems and then i'll come to them with a proposal for like how i could be helpful that um it's it's more of like i try to be very prescriptive when i ask for something so i know i know my expertise

and so for example if i see a b2b sas company that's series a that's doing good um and then i think that they could be doing better um i'll try to you know kind of study up the company and find a mutual connection and then say like, hey, I think this company could benefit from my work. The other thing that I'll mention that I forgot to mention, which is really important, a big referral partner for me is VCs. So I work very closely with VCs for a handful of reasons. First of all, I mean, you get a lot of exposure, one to many, in terms of getting access to our portfolio. But not every VC has an internal sales expert. A lot of VCs have very sophisticated uh, operators, builders, people that have been more on the technical side of the business,

but don't necessarily have like that commercial element. So I come and sort of sit on their bench and act as a, you know, kind of sales expert for those companies, um, which end up, you know, kind of working really well. Cause when a VC is funding a company and they tell you like, Hey, go talk to Javier. It's almost like the person that's giving you money is telling you to do something. You're probably going to go do it. Right. Yeah. That makes a, that makes a lot of sense what would you say is uh the biggest mistake that founders make when it comes to sales whether it's them doing the sales hiring managing the teams like what's like the one thing you're like if i could just take have everyone take something away from this conversation please

don't do x yeah well i mean there's one that's super obvious which is like don't build products that people don't want right because listen pump at the end of the day there's a lot of people that build products that you know they force the distribution and like if the market doesn't want it, you're not going to have any type of product market fit or repeatability. So I think that the way to solve for that is front load your sales. And what I mean by that is start talking to people as many as you can. Imagine that you're doing the sales process. Get feedback and understand what people are struggling with or what they're doing. And I've experimented with an AI product ourselves that we're looking to you know add to our services or sell individually and what we've

done is talk to hundreds of people and i don't know that a lot of founders will do that on a regular basis to say like hey let me talk to 100 companies run it like a sales process get feedback and then build something that the market wants because then when you start talking about it and building content and you know kind of doing the prospecting once the product is built you're actually responding to like a true need versus like a need that is perceived from just your own perspective so talk to more people ahead of time is is pretty much what i would recommend where can we send people to find you on the internet or find out more about quota um so i'm very active on linkedin um so javier ramirez lugo is where you can find me and on twitter hobby b2b is uh

my handle so you can find me there i'm i'm uh very pretty clear what you do pretty clear what i do so uh yeah you can check out anything that i'm doing and the companies that i'm working with there awesome thank you so much for doing this uh i always learn something about sales every single time we talk and anyone who's looking to learn more uh i highly suggest i reach out to you so i appreciate it thank you for the time pop super exciting