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
Wed, 23 Oct 2024
AJ Tennant is the Vice President of Sales & Success at Glean, Glean has more than 20x'd its revenue and 100x'd its user base in the just two and a half years he's been there. Before Glean, AJ had incredible runs at Slack and Facebook. At Slack, AJ helped grow revenue from $6 million to more than $1 billion. In Today’s Episode with AJ Tennant We Discuss: 1. How to Sell AI Tools in 2024: Are we still in the experimental budget phase for AI? How does selling AI tools differ to selling traditional SaaS? What are enterprises biggest concerns when it comes to adopting AI tools? What buzzwords get enterprises most excited in the sales process? Will we see a massive churn problem when the first renewal cycle for many of these AI products comes? 2. Outbound, Discounting, Closing: Is outbound dead in 2024? What does no one do that everyone should do? How does AJ approach discounting? Biggest lessons and advice? What can sales teams do to create a sense of urgency in a sales cycle? How does AJ do deal reviews and post-mortems? What is the difference between good and bad post-mortems? 3. How to Master Customer Success: What are the biggest mistakes founders make today in managing their CS teams? Should CS be compensated for upsell? How should the comp structure of CS teams change? What can be done to create a good handoff experience for the customer when handing from AE to CS? What are the most common ways CS teams break over time? 4. Hiring the Best Sales Teams: How does AJ structure the hiring process for all new sales hires? What questions does AJ always need to ask when hiring sales reps? What are clear signs of outperformers when hiring new reps? Does AJ give candidates a take-home assignment? What does he want to see from them?
Full Episode
This is 20 Sales with me, Harry Stebbings. Now, 20 Sales is the monthly show where we sit down with the best sales leaders to discuss their tips, tactics, and strategies when it comes to scaling both sales and customer success teams. Today, we have one of the best in the hot seat. AJ Tennant.
AJ Tennant is the Vice President of Sales and Success at Glean, where he's had more than a 20x increase in revenue and a 100x increase in user base in the two and a half years he's been at Glean. Before Glean, he had incredible runs at both Slack and Facebook. At Slack, most notably, AJ helped grow revenue from 6 million to more than a billion in ARR.
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This is so, because we were planning on doing it remote. And then when you said you were in London, I was like, yes, this is it. Thank you so much for doing this. Thank you. I'm stoked to be here. Now, I want to start with sales leadership skills and sales skills. A lot of people suggest that they are born. You're a natural sales person.
Do you believe that sales skills are born or they can be learned?
I fundamentally believe they can be learned. I think a lot of people would say it's innate. You're born with it. It's at your personality, someone that's outgoing. But my philosophy is that humans can learn anything if they're taught and they have the motivation to do it. I've seen in my career someone that's joined both Facebook and Slack that many people were like, oh, they're not outgoing.
They don't have that. gregarious nature, but they were able to navigate just like figuring out how to do sales because they had the work ethic, they had the desire to learn. And ultimately it's about inputs and it's not just about being a personable, like gregarious person.
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