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AJ Tennant

👤 Person
459 total appearances

Appearances Over Time

Podcast Appearances

The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Sales: Biggest Lessons Scaling Slack from $6M to $1BN in ARR | How to Build a Customer Success Machine and Where Most Go Wrong | The Framework to Hire All Sales Reps: Take-Home Assignments, Hiring Panels and more with AJ Tennant @ Glean

Yeah. And that's what we're weary of. Our strategy is to capture that AI demand, but then turn it back into clear business value that has success criteria. And you're defining that value for them. For them.

The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Sales: Biggest Lessons Scaling Slack from $6M to $1BN in ARR | How to Build a Customer Success Machine and Where Most Go Wrong | The Framework to Hire All Sales Reps: Take-Home Assignments, Hiring Panels and more with AJ Tennant @ Glean

I mean, even here, I was in London meeting with a large telecommunications company and they were like, I need you to tell us and be prescriptive for us and how we should be defining success criteria because I have my board and CEO asking me to do something.

The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Sales: Biggest Lessons Scaling Slack from $6M to $1BN in ARR | How to Build a Customer Success Machine and Where Most Go Wrong | The Framework to Hire All Sales Reps: Take-Home Assignments, Hiring Panels and more with AJ Tennant @ Glean

I mean, even here, I was in London meeting with a large telecommunications company and they were like, I need you to tell us and be prescriptive for us and how we should be defining success criteria because I have my board and CEO asking me to do something.

The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Sales: Biggest Lessons Scaling Slack from $6M to $1BN in ARR | How to Build a Customer Success Machine and Where Most Go Wrong | The Framework to Hire All Sales Reps: Take-Home Assignments, Hiring Panels and more with AJ Tennant @ Glean

I mean, even here, I was in London meeting with a large telecommunications company and they were like, I need you to tell us and be prescriptive for us and how we should be defining success criteria because I have my board and CEO asking me to do something.

The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Sales: Biggest Lessons Scaling Slack from $6M to $1BN in ARR | How to Build a Customer Success Machine and Where Most Go Wrong | The Framework to Hire All Sales Reps: Take-Home Assignments, Hiring Panels and more with AJ Tennant @ Glean

I hear that argument. I still think staying generalist is important until you get to a certain scale. I think you need to be at 200 million, 250 million to go that granular because just the number of AEs that you need to hire to get to vertical, and it becomes complicated to manage that. So there's a time where you start to edge into it.

The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Sales: Biggest Lessons Scaling Slack from $6M to $1BN in ARR | How to Build a Customer Success Machine and Where Most Go Wrong | The Framework to Hire All Sales Reps: Take-Home Assignments, Hiring Panels and more with AJ Tennant @ Glean

I hear that argument. I still think staying generalist is important until you get to a certain scale. I think you need to be at 200 million, 250 million to go that granular because just the number of AEs that you need to hire to get to vertical, and it becomes complicated to manage that. So there's a time where you start to edge into it.

The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Sales: Biggest Lessons Scaling Slack from $6M to $1BN in ARR | How to Build a Customer Success Machine and Where Most Go Wrong | The Framework to Hire All Sales Reps: Take-Home Assignments, Hiring Panels and more with AJ Tennant @ Glean

I hear that argument. I still think staying generalist is important until you get to a certain scale. I think you need to be at 200 million, 250 million to go that granular because just the number of AEs that you need to hire to get to vertical, and it becomes complicated to manage that. So there's a time where you start to edge into it.

The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Sales: Biggest Lessons Scaling Slack from $6M to $1BN in ARR | How to Build a Customer Success Machine and Where Most Go Wrong | The Framework to Hire All Sales Reps: Take-Home Assignments, Hiring Panels and more with AJ Tennant @ Glean

So right now we're seeing success in like financial services. So we have started more financial services enablement, but we're not at the point where we all of a sudden want to just say, all we're going to do is have one financial services team.

The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Sales: Biggest Lessons Scaling Slack from $6M to $1BN in ARR | How to Build a Customer Success Machine and Where Most Go Wrong | The Framework to Hire All Sales Reps: Take-Home Assignments, Hiring Panels and more with AJ Tennant @ Glean

So right now we're seeing success in like financial services. So we have started more financial services enablement, but we're not at the point where we all of a sudden want to just say, all we're going to do is have one financial services team.

The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Sales: Biggest Lessons Scaling Slack from $6M to $1BN in ARR | How to Build a Customer Success Machine and Where Most Go Wrong | The Framework to Hire All Sales Reps: Take-Home Assignments, Hiring Panels and more with AJ Tennant @ Glean

So right now we're seeing success in like financial services. So we have started more financial services enablement, but we're not at the point where we all of a sudden want to just say, all we're going to do is have one financial services team.

The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Sales: Biggest Lessons Scaling Slack from $6M to $1BN in ARR | How to Build a Customer Success Machine and Where Most Go Wrong | The Framework to Hire All Sales Reps: Take-Home Assignments, Hiring Panels and more with AJ Tennant @ Glean

I think that you can solve that by educating some of the other generalist AEs because the problem with it is sometimes those telecoms are all over the world and you're not going to have one AE who's based in the Bay Area, be able to service the global telecoms. And so at some point, you do have to scale the learnings from one account to another region.

The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Sales: Biggest Lessons Scaling Slack from $6M to $1BN in ARR | How to Build a Customer Success Machine and Where Most Go Wrong | The Framework to Hire All Sales Reps: Take-Home Assignments, Hiring Panels and more with AJ Tennant @ Glean

I think that you can solve that by educating some of the other generalist AEs because the problem with it is sometimes those telecoms are all over the world and you're not going to have one AE who's based in the Bay Area, be able to service the global telecoms. And so at some point, you do have to scale the learnings from one account to another region.

The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Sales: Biggest Lessons Scaling Slack from $6M to $1BN in ARR | How to Build a Customer Success Machine and Where Most Go Wrong | The Framework to Hire All Sales Reps: Take-Home Assignments, Hiring Panels and more with AJ Tennant @ Glean

I think that you can solve that by educating some of the other generalist AEs because the problem with it is sometimes those telecoms are all over the world and you're not going to have one AE who's based in the Bay Area, be able to service the global telecoms. And so at some point, you do have to scale the learnings from one account to another region.

The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Sales: Biggest Lessons Scaling Slack from $6M to $1BN in ARR | How to Build a Customer Success Machine and Where Most Go Wrong | The Framework to Hire All Sales Reps: Take-Home Assignments, Hiring Panels and more with AJ Tennant @ Glean

Yeah. I mean, the buzzword right now is generative AI. Just saying generative AI, how are you driving AI transformation inside your organization? How are you turning your employees into AI-centric employees? Those are like buzzwords that get people leaning in. A lot of the large accounts that we're in, like we're kind of coming to the table saying we have a differentiated solution.

The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Sales: Biggest Lessons Scaling Slack from $6M to $1BN in ARR | How to Build a Customer Success Machine and Where Most Go Wrong | The Framework to Hire All Sales Reps: Take-Home Assignments, Hiring Panels and more with AJ Tennant @ Glean

Yeah. I mean, the buzzword right now is generative AI. Just saying generative AI, how are you driving AI transformation inside your organization? How are you turning your employees into AI-centric employees? Those are like buzzwords that get people leaning in. A lot of the large accounts that we're in, like we're kind of coming to the table saying we have a differentiated solution.

The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Sales: Biggest Lessons Scaling Slack from $6M to $1BN in ARR | How to Build a Customer Success Machine and Where Most Go Wrong | The Framework to Hire All Sales Reps: Take-Home Assignments, Hiring Panels and more with AJ Tennant @ Glean

Yeah. I mean, the buzzword right now is generative AI. Just saying generative AI, how are you driving AI transformation inside your organization? How are you turning your employees into AI-centric employees? Those are like buzzwords that get people leaning in. A lot of the large accounts that we're in, like we're kind of coming to the table saying we have a differentiated solution.

The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Sales: Biggest Lessons Scaling Slack from $6M to $1BN in ARR | How to Build a Customer Success Machine and Where Most Go Wrong | The Framework to Hire All Sales Reps: Take-Home Assignments, Hiring Panels and more with AJ Tennant @ Glean

We have a unique value prop, but more importantly, like we've got real, real customers that have gone through an AI journey. We can help you learn from those customers. So leaning into not like our speak of the taking what our customers are saying, even the example of the telecom I talked about, like their CEO is talking about an AI enabled workforce.

The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Sales: Biggest Lessons Scaling Slack from $6M to $1BN in ARR | How to Build a Customer Success Machine and Where Most Go Wrong | The Framework to Hire All Sales Reps: Take-Home Assignments, Hiring Panels and more with AJ Tennant @ Glean

We have a unique value prop, but more importantly, like we've got real, real customers that have gone through an AI journey. We can help you learn from those customers. So leaning into not like our speak of the taking what our customers are saying, even the example of the telecom I talked about, like their CEO is talking about an AI enabled workforce.

The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Sales: Biggest Lessons Scaling Slack from $6M to $1BN in ARR | How to Build a Customer Success Machine and Where Most Go Wrong | The Framework to Hire All Sales Reps: Take-Home Assignments, Hiring Panels and more with AJ Tennant @ Glean

We have a unique value prop, but more importantly, like we've got real, real customers that have gone through an AI journey. We can help you learn from those customers. So leaning into not like our speak of the taking what our customers are saying, even the example of the telecom I talked about, like their CEO is talking about an AI enabled workforce.

The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Sales: Biggest Lessons Scaling Slack from $6M to $1BN in ARR | How to Build a Customer Success Machine and Where Most Go Wrong | The Framework to Hire All Sales Reps: Take-Home Assignments, Hiring Panels and more with AJ Tennant @ Glean

We're taking that buzzword and bringing it to others.