Matt Plank
Appearances
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Sales: Rippling's CRO on Why Founders Should Not Create Sales Playbooks | Why Discounting is BS and How to Create Urgency in Deals | The Biggest Lessons on Pricing and How to Win the Pricing Game with Matt Plank
Founders definitely should not create the playbook, but I think founders wait too long to hire a go-to-market. And I think they do that because they feel like they can't hire a good salesperson potentially without a bunch of traction. The big mistake that people make as they transition to the next phase is people don't increase price into a point where they find friction.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Sales: Rippling's CRO on Why Founders Should Not Create Sales Playbooks | Why Discounting is BS and How to Create Urgency in Deals | The Biggest Lessons on Pricing and How to Win the Pricing Game with Matt Plank
I mean, we sell the companies as small as three, four employee founders running payroll for the first time, right? And so on the very low end of that market, you know, we win 50, 60% of all the opportunities. And honestly, the majority of the ones we don't win, they're just like, you know, funding fell through or whatever. Like they don't need to run payroll anymore for some reason.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Sales: Rippling's CRO on Why Founders Should Not Create Sales Playbooks | Why Discounting is BS and How to Create Urgency in Deals | The Biggest Lessons on Pricing and How to Win the Pricing Game with Matt Plank
And on the high end of the market, we're selling to companies that are up to about 5,000 employees. It really has like a wide range of the different segmentations. Now for us, we have segments that are based off of employee size, like any traditional company. But then we also have a bunch of products that like our core new logo reps sell. But then we have too many products.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Sales: Rippling's CRO on Why Founders Should Not Create Sales Playbooks | Why Discounting is BS and How to Create Urgency in Deals | The Biggest Lessons on Pricing and How to Win the Pricing Game with Matt Plank
We've got like 30 different products at Rippling. And so as we started to spin off different product suites, like we launched a finance suite to compete with your brexes and your ramps of the world. We launched a global payroll suite to compete with your deals and remotes and buy global. And so at some point we had to carve off like a separate, what we call product account executive team.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Sales: Rippling's CRO on Why Founders Should Not Create Sales Playbooks | Why Discounting is BS and How to Create Urgency in Deals | The Biggest Lessons on Pricing and How to Win the Pricing Game with Matt Plank
So you have like a core rep that bring, you know, sells the majority of the HR stuff. Then you've got like a different finance suite rep. You've got a global suite rep. And so that's how you end up with like 50 segments when you're kind of, when you end up with a product suite that's, you know, 30 plus products.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Sales: Rippling's CRO on Why Founders Should Not Create Sales Playbooks | Why Discounting is BS and How to Create Urgency in Deals | The Biggest Lessons on Pricing and How to Win the Pricing Game with Matt Plank
Sorry, yeah. So mid-market is probably around, you know, like 20-ish percent. And then I think enterprise is maybe closer to like 15%. And I think the way you think, the way I think about this is it really depends on what you measure, right? And so for us, like if you schedule a demo- And somebody like takes the call and basically says like, yes, I would like a follow up email.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Sales: Rippling's CRO on Why Founders Should Not Create Sales Playbooks | Why Discounting is BS and How to Create Urgency in Deals | The Biggest Lessons on Pricing and How to Win the Pricing Game with Matt Plank
Like, you know, we don't go through like, do you have a budget? And you know, what's your timeline? We do that in a sense in the evaluation, but we're not incredibly strict about like, who do we bring into the pipeline? And so when we, you know, convert a demo, we call it stage two and S2.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Sales: Rippling's CRO on Why Founders Should Not Create Sales Playbooks | Why Discounting is BS and How to Create Urgency in Deals | The Biggest Lessons on Pricing and How to Win the Pricing Game with Matt Plank
We measure win rate like from S2, you know, all the way to a one deal, but that's going to be like a penalizing kind of win rate. If you've converted something to stage three, that means like they've engaged in like scheduling a second call, right? Like they actually have some commitment to like do a proper valuation.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Sales: Rippling's CRO on Why Founders Should Not Create Sales Playbooks | Why Discounting is BS and How to Create Urgency in Deals | The Biggest Lessons on Pricing and How to Win the Pricing Game with Matt Plank
And if you measure win rates from like stage three to win, then like you actually have a much higher win rate. And I think companies do this in very different ways.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Sales: Rippling's CRO on Why Founders Should Not Create Sales Playbooks | Why Discounting is BS and How to Create Urgency in Deals | The Biggest Lessons on Pricing and How to Win the Pricing Game with Matt Plank
So it's a good point. So when we don't do outbound for those type of companies, like that team is 100% an inbound team. We do outbound in our mid market segment, which is essentially 50 to call it 250 employees. And then we do, you know, enterprise air quotes from like 250 to 1000. And then we have a team that works from 1000 to 5000 person companies.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Sales: Rippling's CRO on Why Founders Should Not Create Sales Playbooks | Why Discounting is BS and How to Create Urgency in Deals | The Biggest Lessons on Pricing and How to Win the Pricing Game with Matt Plank
Now, one of the benefits of rippling is when you buy rippling, you're buying a seat for like every single person in the company. So like a lot of products, if you're buying, you know, Confluence or something, right? You get a seat for everybody, but it's like $10 PEPM, right? If you're selling Salesforce, it might be $100 PEPM, but you're only getting five seats in a 50% company, right?
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Sales: Rippling's CRO on Why Founders Should Not Create Sales Playbooks | Why Discounting is BS and How to Create Urgency in Deals | The Biggest Lessons on Pricing and How to Win the Pricing Game with Matt Plank
We are fortunate that everybody at Rippling, you're getting a seat for everybody and our average PEPM is like $60, $70 PEPM across the customer base. So for our mid-market segment, selling the company's 50 to 250 employees, the average deal size is like 45K, And so 45K, you can easily build outbound, right? And then going up from there, it just gets easier.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Sales: Rippling's CRO on Why Founders Should Not Create Sales Playbooks | Why Discounting is BS and How to Create Urgency in Deals | The Biggest Lessons on Pricing and How to Win the Pricing Game with Matt Plank
In our mid-market segment, where we have a $45,000 average deal size, it's probably... 50 days. You'll get deals that come in a month at the right time of year, and then you'll get deals that take three, four, five months on the longest end. But on average, it's probably 50, 60 days in our mid-market segment. There's not a lot of companies closing $45,000 deals in 60 days.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Sales: Rippling's CRO on Why Founders Should Not Create Sales Playbooks | Why Discounting is BS and How to Create Urgency in Deals | The Biggest Lessons on Pricing and How to Win the Pricing Game with Matt Plank
That's a very uncommon kind of funnel.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Sales: Rippling's CRO on Why Founders Should Not Create Sales Playbooks | Why Discounting is BS and How to Create Urgency in Deals | The Biggest Lessons on Pricing and How to Win the Pricing Game with Matt Plank
So in terms of customer success, like at Rippling in the very early days, we had customer success, which I think of as like their, you know, charter is make customers successful, renew them. But like, it's not to, you know, it's generally not to like sell new products. And so, you know, early on at Rippling, again, we had three products when the company first launched and now we have over 30.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Sales: Rippling's CRO on Why Founders Should Not Create Sales Playbooks | Why Discounting is BS and How to Create Urgency in Deals | The Biggest Lessons on Pricing and How to Win the Pricing Game with Matt Plank
And so at Rippling early on, we had customer success. And when somebody signed up for Rippling and then they came back six months later to add a product, like we would bring it back to the original sales rep. And like over time, that was just like clearly a terrible model. And so we converted.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Sales: Rippling's CRO on Why Founders Should Not Create Sales Playbooks | Why Discounting is BS and How to Create Urgency in Deals | The Biggest Lessons on Pricing and How to Win the Pricing Game with Matt Plank
Because our sales reps are very high velocity. They're doing a lot of calls and they're focused on, you know, if a new logo deal is $45,000, like an add-on contract for someone that signed up six months ago might be $5,000 or something.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Sales: Rippling's CRO on Why Founders Should Not Create Sales Playbooks | Why Discounting is BS and How to Create Urgency in Deals | The Biggest Lessons on Pricing and How to Win the Pricing Game with Matt Plank
And so when their calendar is stacked up with deals that are 40, 50, 60K, and then all of a sudden you throw this meeting on their calendar for a $5,000 deal, they're just not going to be able to give it the attention that it needs. And so we split the team and we changed the function. We said, look, we need account management.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Sales: Rippling's CRO on Why Founders Should Not Create Sales Playbooks | Why Discounting is BS and How to Create Urgency in Deals | The Biggest Lessons on Pricing and How to Win the Pricing Game with Matt Plank
We need people who have had sales, carried a quota, want to be held accountable to quota and all that kind of stuff. And so at Ripley, we have new logo sales reps pass a deal over the fence. And then they have account managers who own the commercial relationship renewals. They still own success. Unsuccessful companies will not buy anything new from you, obviously.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Sales: Rippling's CRO on Why Founders Should Not Create Sales Playbooks | Why Discounting is BS and How to Create Urgency in Deals | The Biggest Lessons on Pricing and How to Win the Pricing Game with Matt Plank
And so they do have to make them successful, but they are much more, much closer to like a sales team and a support team for us.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Sales: Rippling's CRO on Why Founders Should Not Create Sales Playbooks | Why Discounting is BS and How to Create Urgency in Deals | The Biggest Lessons on Pricing and How to Win the Pricing Game with Matt Plank
It's a good question. For multi-product companies, yes. Because the reality is you can't have both. You can't have like a customer success manager and an account manager. Now at Rippling, we do have account managers that own the commercial relationship and expanding their usage within our product suite.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Sales: Rippling's CRO on Why Founders Should Not Create Sales Playbooks | Why Discounting is BS and How to Create Urgency in Deals | The Biggest Lessons on Pricing and How to Win the Pricing Game with Matt Plank
But then we do have what we call technical account managers whose sole focus is adoption of the product, success, retention, whatever. And then we have a phenomenal support team who can respond urgently, jump on chat, jump on calls, whatever. But I do believe that you have to pick one or the other. And at Rippling, I
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Sales: Rippling's CRO on Why Founders Should Not Create Sales Playbooks | Why Discounting is BS and How to Create Urgency in Deals | The Biggest Lessons on Pricing and How to Win the Pricing Game with Matt Plank
For me, account management and a sales DNA at the core, you can get those people to have empathy for the customer and understand and care about making them successful. But I don't think you can take a CSN and make them like a quota carrying rep.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Sales: Rippling's CRO on Why Founders Should Not Create Sales Playbooks | Why Discounting is BS and How to Create Urgency in Deals | The Biggest Lessons on Pricing and How to Win the Pricing Game with Matt Plank
You also have to do both. So when we first launched account managers, they only had a new revenue quota. So the 100% of their focus in Complant was tied to selling new products. They cared about retention, but they didn't own a retention number. And when you're high velocity, a little bit more down market, there was just a belief that like,
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Sales: Rippling's CRO on Why Founders Should Not Create Sales Playbooks | Why Discounting is BS and How to Create Urgency in Deals | The Biggest Lessons on Pricing and How to Win the Pricing Game with Matt Plank
you know, they would care and do the right things, but like you didn't need to incentivize them. And then we did that for like, you know, nine, 12 months. And we quickly realized, okay, this doesn't make sense. And this year, actually, we changed the compliance. I think like 70% of it is tied to selling new business and 30% roughly is tied to retention, specifically like dollar retention.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Sales: Rippling's CRO on Why Founders Should Not Create Sales Playbooks | Why Discounting is BS and How to Create Urgency in Deals | The Biggest Lessons on Pricing and How to Win the Pricing Game with Matt Plank
And it completely changed everything in our, have just like, completely outlier, like off the charts, low churn metrics. And so they got to own new revenue and churn absolutely has to happen. Can't do it any other way.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Sales: Rippling's CRO on Why Founders Should Not Create Sales Playbooks | Why Discounting is BS and How to Create Urgency in Deals | The Biggest Lessons on Pricing and How to Win the Pricing Game with Matt Plank
So first of all, discounting is a completely like made up thing. Like at the end of the day, the only thing that matters is like net price, right? And so discounting is simply a factor of like, where do you set your list price? Like list price doesn't matter, right? Like net price.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Sales: Rippling's CRO on Why Founders Should Not Create Sales Playbooks | Why Discounting is BS and How to Create Urgency in Deals | The Biggest Lessons on Pricing and How to Win the Pricing Game with Matt Plank
So if you discount 50% off or you discount 25% off, like it's all relative to whatever your list price is, which for most people is like a fake price. Like nobody cares about list price. They care about net price. And so I'm a big believer.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Sales: Rippling's CRO on Why Founders Should Not Create Sales Playbooks | Why Discounting is BS and How to Create Urgency in Deals | The Biggest Lessons on Pricing and How to Win the Pricing Game with Matt Plank
So let's say that your list price, meaning when you show up and you send, I mean, look, starting all the way with like some companies have a price on their website. If you're very SMB and down market and you have a bunch of self-serve signups and trials and all that, you basically need to have a price on your website where someone can see it and sign up, whatever. That's not our business.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Sales: Rippling's CRO on Why Founders Should Not Create Sales Playbooks | Why Discounting is BS and How to Create Urgency in Deals | The Biggest Lessons on Pricing and How to Win the Pricing Game with Matt Plank
For us, we are generally getting somebody on a call, understanding what their pain points are, what products are they interested in, because we have 30 For us, we have a list price, meaning there's a book price for every SKU that we have. Let's say it's $10 PEPM for a random SKU, but the actual price point that we're trying to target might be $8 or $7 or $6. It depends on the size of the company.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Sales: Rippling's CRO on Why Founders Should Not Create Sales Playbooks | Why Discounting is BS and How to Create Urgency in Deals | The Biggest Lessons on Pricing and How to Win the Pricing Game with Matt Plank
Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me. Likewise, I've heard a lot of great things and watched a lot of great episodes on the podcast. So excited to join you.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Sales: Rippling's CRO on Why Founders Should Not Create Sales Playbooks | Why Discounting is BS and How to Create Urgency in Deals | The Biggest Lessons on Pricing and How to Win the Pricing Game with Matt Plank
If you come in and you're
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Sales: Rippling's CRO on Why Founders Should Not Create Sales Playbooks | Why Discounting is BS and How to Create Urgency in Deals | The Biggest Lessons on Pricing and How to Win the Pricing Game with Matt Plank
50 employees and you want to sign up in one week like i've got a little bit more room to make that happen if you're you know if you're 50 employees and you want to evaluate for three months then like it might be a different price but like it might depend on the different you know amount of products that you buy do you worry about different customers talking about different prices hey i got rippling for 20 pep oh you got it for 30 wow they overcharged you
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Sales: Rippling's CRO on Why Founders Should Not Create Sales Playbooks | Why Discounting is BS and How to Create Urgency in Deals | The Biggest Lessons on Pricing and How to Win the Pricing Game with Matt Plank
Yeah. Well, I think a couple of things. So one is we have an extremely consistent and firm discount policy. So it's not like a rep can just make up whatever they want to do. And so we'll tell a customer when they come in, like, hey, here's what pricing looks like on a one-year deal versus a three-year deal, or depending on your timeline, or depending on the amount of products that you buy.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Sales: Rippling's CRO on Why Founders Should Not Create Sales Playbooks | Why Discounting is BS and How to Create Urgency in Deals | The Biggest Lessons on Pricing and How to Win the Pricing Game with Matt Plank
And so for us, you could come in and buy three products in a week, or you could come in and buy 10 products and take six months. And so there's a bunch of different... There's probably five different levels of... How big are you? What are you buying? What's the timeline look like? All these different things. And this happens.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Sales: Rippling's CRO on Why Founders Should Not Create Sales Playbooks | Why Discounting is BS and How to Create Urgency in Deals | The Biggest Lessons on Pricing and How to Win the Pricing Game with Matt Plank
People definitely talk in the market and we've got 20,000 plus customers. And so for sure, people are talking and comparing invoices and whatever. But if somebody were to come back to us, which has happened before and been like, hey, well, this is bullshit. Like that someone's quoted Rippling and I got a different price than you.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Sales: Rippling's CRO on Why Founders Should Not Create Sales Playbooks | Why Discounting is BS and How to Create Urgency in Deals | The Biggest Lessons on Pricing and How to Win the Pricing Game with Matt Plank
And when I walk them through like, hey, look, here's like, you might think these things are the same, but they're a little bit different. As long as you can like walk through the policy and stand behind it, then I think you're good. But you can't have like wild, wild west where people just make up whatever price they want or else that it can get out of control pretty quickly.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Sales: Rippling's CRO on Why Founders Should Not Create Sales Playbooks | Why Discounting is BS and How to Create Urgency in Deals | The Biggest Lessons on Pricing and How to Win the Pricing Game with Matt Plank
Yeah, I think there's like an evolution in a few different phases. I think the first one is when you're a zero to one company, whatever, you're a million bucks, two million bucks, like early, early stage, like nothing matters. The only thing that matters is winning customers. It doesn't matter what they pay. It doesn't matter what their logo is.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Sales: Rippling's CRO on Why Founders Should Not Create Sales Playbooks | Why Discounting is BS and How to Create Urgency in Deals | The Biggest Lessons on Pricing and How to Win the Pricing Game with Matt Plank
Like you need customers to validate that like you can charge something for your product and that they'll buy it. If you look at what we charged at Rippling in the early days versus now, like it's not even on the same chart. And so you need customers. If any founders make a mistake, they're trying to maximize the revenue of one specific deal, which is crazy.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Sales: Rippling's CRO on Why Founders Should Not Create Sales Playbooks | Why Discounting is BS and How to Create Urgency in Deals | The Biggest Lessons on Pricing and How to Win the Pricing Game with Matt Plank
It's like never, ever walk away from any deal, any price that's not free. You sign them up. The big mistake that people make as they transition to the next phase, where they're at maybe 5, 10, they're going to 20 million, is people don't increase price into a point where they find friction. And so you need... Friction around price is good. And so to your question earlier, I get this all the time.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Sales: Rippling's CRO on Why Founders Should Not Create Sales Playbooks | Why Discounting is BS and How to Create Urgency in Deals | The Biggest Lessons on Pricing and How to Win the Pricing Game with Matt Plank
I'll talk to an early stage founder who's often a technical founder, who's a referral from one of our VCs or something. And they're like, hey, we have win rates that are like 60, 70%. We have an incredible go-to-market fit. It's so great. My first thing I always tell them is I'm like, that's not good. You don't want win rates that are 60, 70%. You're either not in enough deals- right?
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Sales: Rippling's CRO on Why Founders Should Not Create Sales Playbooks | Why Discounting is BS and How to Create Urgency in Deals | The Biggest Lessons on Pricing and How to Win the Pricing Game with Matt Plank
Candidly, I've been in love with sales since I was selling wrapping paper in fifth grade and elementary school. And I think for me, It's always come from probably some part of competition, you know, wanting to sell stuff and kind of be number one on whatever leaderboard it was.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Sales: Rippling's CRO on Why Founders Should Not Create Sales Playbooks | Why Discounting is BS and How to Create Urgency in Deals | The Biggest Lessons on Pricing and How to Win the Pricing Game with Matt Plank
Like you're just way too narrow or your price is way too low. Like if you win 70% of deals, then like, that's not good. It's a bad there. At least you could go much bigger. Right. And so I think people don't raise price up until they get to a point where you're about to lose deals because like people think you're overpriced and there's like, How do you know when that point is Matt?
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Sales: Rippling's CRO on Why Founders Should Not Create Sales Playbooks | Why Discounting is BS and How to Create Urgency in Deals | The Biggest Lessons on Pricing and How to Win the Pricing Game with Matt Plank
First of all, I think the main thing here is you should continue to inch it up over time until that friction of like, hey, this is more expensive than I thought it would be. This is outside of our budget. This is 100% more than our competitor, 2x the price of a competitor or whatever. Until you get people that are walking away, then you haven't found the right amount of friction.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Sales: Rippling's CRO on Why Founders Should Not Create Sales Playbooks | Why Discounting is BS and How to Create Urgency in Deals | The Biggest Lessons on Pricing and How to Win the Pricing Game with Matt Plank
Right when you get to that point, And again, you got to go up gradually because you never, ever, ever, ever want to go back. You don't want to raise them and then be like, oh, never mind. We're going to lower our prices. That's bad. And we don't do this, by the way, on existing customers.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Sales: Rippling's CRO on Why Founders Should Not Create Sales Playbooks | Why Discounting is BS and How to Create Urgency in Deals | The Biggest Lessons on Pricing and How to Win the Pricing Game with Matt Plank
As we inch price up over time, our existing customers that bought early on, we lock them in pretty much forever. And you have to find that friction. And I think you'll squeak out a lot more revenue by finding if you raise your prices 20% and you keep winning, maybe win rates go down a tiny bit. That's okay over time.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Sales: Rippling's CRO on Why Founders Should Not Create Sales Playbooks | Why Discounting is BS and How to Create Urgency in Deals | The Biggest Lessons on Pricing and How to Win the Pricing Game with Matt Plank
Multi-year is really important. And we have multi-year deals and we incentivize our sales team to sell multi-year deals. So if you sell a one-year deal versus a three-year deal, like we'll give you like a kicker in the comp plan to sell a multi-year deal.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Sales: Rippling's CRO on Why Founders Should Not Create Sales Playbooks | Why Discounting is BS and How to Create Urgency in Deals | The Biggest Lessons on Pricing and How to Win the Pricing Game with Matt Plank
The way I think about it is like, what is your commission rate on a new logo? And that could range anywhere from 10% to 30%, depending on like, are you outbound? Are you inbound? What deal size, whatever. And so you want to make sure that the kicker you're paying on a deal isn't much more than like 10, 15% of the deal, right? So if your commission rate is 20%,
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Sales: Rippling's CRO on Why Founders Should Not Create Sales Playbooks | Why Discounting is BS and How to Create Urgency in Deals | The Biggest Lessons on Pricing and How to Win the Pricing Game with Matt Plank
Then maybe you're giving them an extra like two to 3% kicker for a multi-year deal, but you can't make it that your commission rate is 20% and then you sell a multi-year deal and you get paid 40%, right? Like that math doesn't work.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Sales: Rippling's CRO on Why Founders Should Not Create Sales Playbooks | Why Discounting is BS and How to Create Urgency in Deals | The Biggest Lessons on Pricing and How to Win the Pricing Game with Matt Plank
And believe it or not, they get you primed for that in elementary school when you're selling wrapping paper or discount codes to your local stores or whatever. But then all the way through college, I was selling hot tubs and appliances at Sears and Cutco knives and really anything you could think of. It was a commission job. I was doing it from a pretty young age.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Sales: Rippling's CRO on Why Founders Should Not Create Sales Playbooks | Why Discounting is BS and How to Create Urgency in Deals | The Biggest Lessons on Pricing and How to Win the Pricing Game with Matt Plank
And so it's generally, I'd say maybe 10, 15, 20% of the original contract, like the year one contract, or thinking of the commission rate, I guess the right way to think about it.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Sales: Rippling's CRO on Why Founders Should Not Create Sales Playbooks | Why Discounting is BS and How to Create Urgency in Deals | The Biggest Lessons on Pricing and How to Win the Pricing Game with Matt Plank
The first big mistake that people make around, you know, discounting is they're, they offer a time-based discounts before they even understand if somebody can possibly move that fast, which is like a terrible experience, both for like you, because you have no leverage once you've like thrown it out there. And then for the, for the customer, it just like, it feels awkward. It doesn't make sense.
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20Sales: Rippling's CRO on Why Founders Should Not Create Sales Playbooks | Why Discounting is BS and How to Create Urgency in Deals | The Biggest Lessons on Pricing and How to Win the Pricing Game with Matt Plank
So the first thing you have to do is understand from somebody upfront, like in the first call, what is your ideal timeline? And the way we talk about that, I was like, look, You're obviously evaluating rippling. You've described these pain points up front.
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20Sales: Rippling's CRO on Why Founders Should Not Create Sales Playbooks | Why Discounting is BS and How to Create Urgency in Deals | The Biggest Lessons on Pricing and How to Win the Pricing Game with Matt Plank
Just assuming that you wave a magic wand and rippling literally solves every single one of those pain points that you have, what is your ideal timeline of when you'd like to be up and running in a new system? Just like if you could add everything, every box checked, your perfect scenario, what does that look like? And then when they tell you that, and look, a lot of buyers are honest about that.
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20Sales: Rippling's CRO on Why Founders Should Not Create Sales Playbooks | Why Discounting is BS and How to Create Urgency in Deals | The Biggest Lessons on Pricing and How to Win the Pricing Game with Matt Plank
Some buyers don't. Some buyers know that when they're upfront, they're like, I don't want to tell the salesperson that I want to move quickly. Then I lose some leverage in the negotiation. And so they'll be like, ah, this is next year, Q1 or whatever. But you got to find out from people, what are they looking to do and build some trust up front.
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20Sales: Rippling's CRO on Why Founders Should Not Create Sales Playbooks | Why Discounting is BS and How to Create Urgency in Deals | The Biggest Lessons on Pricing and How to Win the Pricing Game with Matt Plank
And then before you get to pricing, you have to make a little bit of pokes out there like, hey, if we can get some competitive pricing that's based on a timeline, this timeline we talked about, does that seem like something that you'd be interested in and get some buy-in from them? Because people do not sign contracts on the last day of the month.
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20Sales: Rippling's CRO on Why Founders Should Not Create Sales Playbooks | Why Discounting is BS and How to Create Urgency in Deals | The Biggest Lessons on Pricing and How to Win the Pricing Game with Matt Plank
because they're worried that their discount is going to go away. That's absolute bullshit. If you ever bought software and it's the 31st of the month and someone's like, you have this quarter end discount, it's extremely unlikely that if you come back on the third or the fourth, they're going to be like, no, I won't give you that price. Certainly there might be a different price.
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20Sales: Rippling's CRO on Why Founders Should Not Create Sales Playbooks | Why Discounting is BS and How to Create Urgency in Deals | The Biggest Lessons on Pricing and How to Win the Pricing Game with Matt Plank
You might have to go through a whole cycle, whatever. But the reason that the majority of people sign that contract on the 31st, the end of the quarter, whatever, is because you've built a relationship throughout the entire valuation of some like trust. Like they feel they've agreed to do some things and they want to like meet their part.
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20Sales: Rippling's CRO on Why Founders Should Not Create Sales Playbooks | Why Discounting is BS and How to Create Urgency in Deals | The Biggest Lessons on Pricing and How to Win the Pricing Game with Matt Plank
But without that, then time-based discounts don't work for anybody. And they're actually anti, you know, they're like, they really are counterproductive.
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20Sales: Rippling's CRO on Why Founders Should Not Create Sales Playbooks | Why Discounting is BS and How to Create Urgency in Deals | The Biggest Lessons on Pricing and How to Win the Pricing Game with Matt Plank
I'll pick like our, let's call it our middle, mid-market team who's kind of like in the middle. The main thing that you're looking for in a deal review is like salespeople by almost like definition are like optimistic. Oftentimes they get happy ears and they hear things that they want to be true.
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20Sales: Rippling's CRO on Why Founders Should Not Create Sales Playbooks | Why Discounting is BS and How to Create Urgency in Deals | The Biggest Lessons on Pricing and How to Win the Pricing Game with Matt Plank
They might be true, but they don't sometimes ask like the second, third layer question to figure out if it is true. And so for me, deal reviews are all about asking your rep Who are we talking to? Who does that person report to? Were they there when they bought this system? A bunch of questions around who are they talking to? How do these decisions get made? What do they think the timeline is?
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20Sales: Rippling's CRO on Why Founders Should Not Create Sales Playbooks | Why Discounting is BS and How to Create Urgency in Deals | The Biggest Lessons on Pricing and How to Win the Pricing Game with Matt Plank
Do you think that people are born salespeople or do you think it's something that can be learned? I think there's a lot of people that are born that could be salespeople, you know, just given the kind of attitude that you have. And I think there are certainly some people who are born who probably don't, you know, would like run in the opposite direction from any sales job.
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20Sales: Rippling's CRO on Why Founders Should Not Create Sales Playbooks | Why Discounting is BS and How to Create Urgency in Deals | The Biggest Lessons on Pricing and How to Win the Pricing Game with Matt Plank
You're trying to basically poke a hole in this. If you're just sitting there and your rep is like, hey, here's the next step and here's who I'm talking to and it's all good. And you're like, okay, great. Sounds good. Let's go to the next one, which is what a lot of pipeline reviews look like. That's zero helpful.
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20Sales: Rippling's CRO on Why Founders Should Not Create Sales Playbooks | Why Discounting is BS and How to Create Urgency in Deals | The Biggest Lessons on Pricing and How to Win the Pricing Game with Matt Plank
You got to create a relationship with your rep where you can poke holes at them and they're trying to like prove to you why this is a solid deal and there's no friction there. They're like, hey, this is what my manager shows up to do. How often do we do deal reviews first? I mean, we have pipeline reviews every week at Ripley.
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20Sales: Rippling's CRO on Why Founders Should Not Create Sales Playbooks | Why Discounting is BS and How to Create Urgency in Deals | The Biggest Lessons on Pricing and How to Win the Pricing Game with Matt Plank
I mean, generally we're doing pipeline reviews with like, you know, managers and rep in like a one-on-one setting. Usually there are times where we do a pipeline review. They might be with like a manager and their team, but you can't sit around a 40 person segment and do deal reviews, right? Like it won't be, it won't be time effective.
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20Sales: Rippling's CRO on Why Founders Should Not Create Sales Playbooks | Why Discounting is BS and How to Create Urgency in Deals | The Biggest Lessons on Pricing and How to Win the Pricing Game with Matt Plank
The first thing I think about is like, what is the historical tendency of like this rep? Because deals do push in sales all the time. As Parker would say, did it push or did it poof? You know, when I show up at the end of the month and I'm like, hey, like, you know, had a rough month, like, but we had some really good deals push.
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20Sales: Rippling's CRO on Why Founders Should Not Create Sales Playbooks | Why Discounting is BS and How to Create Urgency in Deals | The Biggest Lessons on Pricing and How to Win the Pricing Game with Matt Plank
He's like, ah, you know, I don't believe like every time you say that they poof and they don't push, they never come back and blah, blah, blah, which is generally not true, but he's a deep skepticism of that. And so, but you got to look at a rep. Does this rep normally close deals in this timeline and this deal did push?
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20Sales: Rippling's CRO on Why Founders Should Not Create Sales Playbooks | Why Discounting is BS and How to Create Urgency in Deals | The Biggest Lessons on Pricing and How to Win the Pricing Game with Matt Plank
Then that's very different than someone who's a perennial, like my deals always push. And I think the thing you got to help reps understand is a lot of times reps will think that a deal that pushed because of this person left the company or a new person joined or a budget dried up or whatever, they convince themselves that like, hey, this is delayed. This is just delayed.
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20Sales: Rippling's CRO on Why Founders Should Not Create Sales Playbooks | Why Discounting is BS and How to Create Urgency in Deals | The Biggest Lessons on Pricing and How to Win the Pricing Game with Matt Plank
This new person joined and they want to make sure that they get a demo. And it's like, there's no such thing as like delaying a deal for like those types of reasons. Like you're starting over from scratch. You might not know it, but you're starting over from scratch. And so time kills all deals.
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20Sales: Rippling's CRO on Why Founders Should Not Create Sales Playbooks | Why Discounting is BS and How to Create Urgency in Deals | The Biggest Lessons on Pricing and How to Win the Pricing Game with Matt Plank
And so you really want to try to like get them in, not to like hit your quota so that you don't go on a pip or whatever. Like you want to get them in because over time, like if we push as a company 25 deals in a month, like for sure, we're not closing those 25 deals in the next month, right? Like some percentage of them just do poof and evaporate.
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20Sales: Rippling's CRO on Why Founders Should Not Create Sales Playbooks | Why Discounting is BS and How to Create Urgency in Deals | The Biggest Lessons on Pricing and How to Win the Pricing Game with Matt Plank
So, you know, there are good reasons, but like, I'll tell you the worst reason, the legal team didn't get the review done. Nothing is more frustrating than somebody being like the legal, their legal team, right? They didn't get the red lines done on time.
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20Sales: Rippling's CRO on Why Founders Should Not Create Sales Playbooks | Why Discounting is BS and How to Create Urgency in Deals | The Biggest Lessons on Pricing and How to Win the Pricing Game with Matt Plank
Well, I think it depends on so when you went first of all, for me, when a deal pushes, what that fundamentally means is that like you forecasted it to come in, like you said it was going to come in and it didn't come in. And so if you if telling us and rolling a deal up that, hey, this deal is definitely coming in, like they just need to get red line sign.
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20Sales: Rippling's CRO on Why Founders Should Not Create Sales Playbooks | Why Discounting is BS and How to Create Urgency in Deals | The Biggest Lessons on Pricing and How to Win the Pricing Game with Matt Plank
But I think it comes from. you know, wanting to be competitive and being okay when you lose, because in sales, like, yes, of course you win, but you lose the majority of the time, really. And so I think there's a lot of dynamics that I think are, that you have to kind of have the right ingredients.
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20Sales: Rippling's CRO on Why Founders Should Not Create Sales Playbooks | Why Discounting is BS and How to Create Urgency in Deals | The Biggest Lessons on Pricing and How to Win the Pricing Game with Matt Plank
And a lot of times when you pro back in there, it's like, look, when did you send them the red lines? You know, they're like, yeah, they told me yes, you know, two days ago and I got them the red lines the next day. And it's like, well, hold on. Like, there's your problem, right?
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20Sales: Rippling's CRO on Why Founders Should Not Create Sales Playbooks | Why Discounting is BS and How to Create Urgency in Deals | The Biggest Lessons on Pricing and How to Win the Pricing Game with Matt Plank
Like at the end of an evaluation, you should be asking somebody like, hey, what does the contract processing look like within your company? Like who's involved in that process? who signs off on contracts, does your legal team do a review for contracts of this size, whatever. And you want to parallel attract those things so that someone's reviewing the terms of service.
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20Sales: Rippling's CRO on Why Founders Should Not Create Sales Playbooks | Why Discounting is BS and How to Create Urgency in Deals | The Biggest Lessons on Pricing and How to Win the Pricing Game with Matt Plank
A lot of times you'll get the vendor of choice designation before someone gives you the yes, send me the contract, I'm ready to sign. So you have to parallel track those like legal things, budget review. You can't just like get a yes and then start all those processes over.
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20Sales: Rippling's CRO on Why Founders Should Not Create Sales Playbooks | Why Discounting is BS and How to Create Urgency in Deals | The Biggest Lessons on Pricing and How to Win the Pricing Game with Matt Plank
And that's the number one reason why people push a deal, a committed deal because of legal review is like they just didn't run this in like, you know, they didn't run these parallel tracks.
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20Sales: Rippling's CRO on Why Founders Should Not Create Sales Playbooks | Why Discounting is BS and How to Create Urgency in Deals | The Biggest Lessons on Pricing and How to Win the Pricing Game with Matt Plank
question. I think the first thing is I really believe very deeply in a core thing that I had to learn over time. And one of the things going back to the beginning of our conversation, when you're a deeply competitive person and you do expect to win and you really, really hate losing, I can definitely tell you of examples in the past where I reacted poorly to someone that said no or someone that
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20Sales: Rippling's CRO on Why Founders Should Not Create Sales Playbooks | Why Discounting is BS and How to Create Urgency in Deals | The Biggest Lessons on Pricing and How to Win the Pricing Game with Matt Plank
where it was just like, it made no sense to me. And like my initial reaction was just like the wrong reaction. Right. And it's very easy for even the best salespeople because they're generally like the most competitive can get like pissed off and react poorly in a deal. And I had to learn over time that like, you have to literally like kill them with kindness.
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20Sales: Rippling's CRO on Why Founders Should Not Create Sales Playbooks | Why Discounting is BS and How to Create Urgency in Deals | The Biggest Lessons on Pricing and How to Win the Pricing Game with Matt Plank
Like you, you have to make them when someone tells you, no, it's like, Hey, like, thank you so much for for your time, you know, evaluating Rippling. I know how busy you are. I'm sure doing all these evaluations was like a total time suck for you. Thank you so much for, you know, taking the time. I would greatly appreciate any feedback you could give me. I'm always looking to learn.
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20Sales: Rippling's CRO on Why Founders Should Not Create Sales Playbooks | Why Discounting is BS and How to Create Urgency in Deals | The Biggest Lessons on Pricing and How to Win the Pricing Game with Matt Plank
You know, by the way, like if anything ever changes, like I hope that you're successful with XYZ vendor, but if anything ever changes, like please just know that like I'm here for you, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. If you leave every single interaction with that type of like mindset, I promise you, you'll get stuff that bounces back that you like never like expected to bounce back.
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20Sales: Rippling's CRO on Why Founders Should Not Create Sales Playbooks | Why Discounting is BS and How to Create Urgency in Deals | The Biggest Lessons on Pricing and How to Win the Pricing Game with Matt Plank
But I think from there, you can certainly, you know, teach a lot of the skills that, you know, that make a good salesperson good. Do you think it's okay to be good with losing?
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20Sales: Rippling's CRO on Why Founders Should Not Create Sales Playbooks | Why Discounting is BS and How to Create Urgency in Deals | The Biggest Lessons on Pricing and How to Win the Pricing Game with Matt Plank
They'll come back in two months and they'll be like, hey, this competitor like lied to us. The implementation is terrible. There's a bunch of shit that they don't do that they said they did, but you have to leave it like that.
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20Sales: Rippling's CRO on Why Founders Should Not Create Sales Playbooks | Why Discounting is BS and How to Create Urgency in Deals | The Biggest Lessons on Pricing and How to Win the Pricing Game with Matt Plank
And so I think on one hand, you got to like make sure that you're not sour when you miss and you like morale, it's like you're moping your head around and you're all frustrated and upset. Like that doesn't do you any good. It's a waste of time. And I think as a sales leader, you've got to own the myths.
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20Sales: Rippling's CRO on Why Founders Should Not Create Sales Playbooks | Why Discounting is BS and How to Create Urgency in Deals | The Biggest Lessons on Pricing and How to Win the Pricing Game with Matt Plank
If you point fingers at people and that's the MO that you have as a leader, it sounds very cliche, but you're going to walk up there and be like, the sales org lost. I didn't set the team up successfully. I screwed this up. You got to own it with the CEO. You got to own it with the people down below you.
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20Sales: Rippling's CRO on Why Founders Should Not Create Sales Playbooks | Why Discounting is BS and How to Create Urgency in Deals | The Biggest Lessons on Pricing and How to Win the Pricing Game with Matt Plank
And I think weak or insecure sales leaders will try to deflect blame to some other leader or the team or you train. It's like Parker told me once a long time ago- And I think something that really stuck with me, he's like, you don't get any credit for knowing how to do something yourself.
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20Sales: Rippling's CRO on Why Founders Should Not Create Sales Playbooks | Why Discounting is BS and How to Create Urgency in Deals | The Biggest Lessons on Pricing and How to Win the Pricing Game with Matt Plank
Like zero credit that you know how to do X, Y, and Z. Like your job as a sales leader is to get everybody else to do that. And so like, you can't stand there and have like my team didn't execute and be feeling like, dude, I told them exactly what to do and like they didn't execute. You know what I mean? Like, it's not me. I got to get a new team or something.
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20Sales: Rippling's CRO on Why Founders Should Not Create Sales Playbooks | Why Discounting is BS and How to Create Urgency in Deals | The Biggest Lessons on Pricing and How to Win the Pricing Game with Matt Plank
It's like, your job is to make them execute. It's not to know what to do. You're the head of sales. Obviously you should know what to do. That's table stakes.
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20Sales: Rippling's CRO on Why Founders Should Not Create Sales Playbooks | Why Discounting is BS and How to Create Urgency in Deals | The Biggest Lessons on Pricing and How to Win the Pricing Game with Matt Plank
Up until literally 18 months ago, I'd say up until two years ago, up until two years ago, like the sales org, myself and like everyone that reported to me, literally never once thought about generating an outbound demo or like even like it was 100% like demos pop up on your calendar, like marketing does a bunch of stuff, inbound SDR schedule them and like you just sit on, you know, go show up and you do four or five calls a day and like that's all you do.
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20Sales: Rippling's CRO on Why Founders Should Not Create Sales Playbooks | Why Discounting is BS and How to Create Urgency in Deals | The Biggest Lessons on Pricing and How to Win the Pricing Game with Matt Plank
Over time, we got to this, I mentioned this pinnacle point two years ago where AKA Ashley Kelly, we were like, oh my God, we have to do outbound. We hired her. We grew it from zero to 100, whatever. And we started to weave into the culture like, hey, as a sales rep, you should care about where your pipeline comes from, but they still don't own it. Outbound SDRs own the quota.
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20Sales: Rippling's CRO on Why Founders Should Not Create Sales Playbooks | Why Discounting is BS and How to Create Urgency in Deals | The Biggest Lessons on Pricing and How to Win the Pricing Game with Matt Plank
They schedule the demos. If you're a rep at Rippling, you have zero actual prospecting targets. And so over time, it was like the wholesale.
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20Sales: Rippling's CRO on Why Founders Should Not Create Sales Playbooks | Why Discounting is BS and How to Create Urgency in Deals | The Biggest Lessons on Pricing and How to Win the Pricing Game with Matt Plank
I understand that belief. And I think that Rippling definitely will, of course, get to some scale and saturation of the market where that's kind of true. But I believe that it is critical to avoid that as long as you possibly can. And the reason why is we've done Outbound in 15, 20 different segments.
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20Sales: Rippling's CRO on Why Founders Should Not Create Sales Playbooks | Why Discounting is BS and How to Create Urgency in Deals | The Biggest Lessons on Pricing and How to Win the Pricing Game with Matt Plank
And every single time there's a funnel of number of accounts you work, dials, emails, your call to connect rate, your connect the demo rate. There's this funnel that just, if you put all the things in the top, it just spits out demos. Right. Every single time we look at a new SDR team, somewhere in that funnel is broken. They're not doing enough of this, enough of that.
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Yeah. Well, I think, look, like loving winning and having like a deep hatred when you lose are kind of one in the same, in my opinion. And so as long as, you know, losing stings and motivates you and all of that. But I mean, if you think about in sales, I mean, even the best sales reps I know, depending on whatever segment you're in, you know, their win rates are anywhere from
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20Sales: Rippling's CRO on Why Founders Should Not Create Sales Playbooks | Why Discounting is BS and How to Create Urgency in Deals | The Biggest Lessons on Pricing and How to Win the Pricing Game with Matt Plank
They're like called to connect. Like there's always some part of it and then you hammer it and you go fix it and you train on it. And then it turns green and like all of a sudden they spit out demos. And in my opinion, you can get an SDR org to do that way, way, way more effectively than you'll ever be able to get sales reps to do it.
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20Sales: Rippling's CRO on Why Founders Should Not Create Sales Playbooks | Why Discounting is BS and How to Create Urgency in Deals | The Biggest Lessons on Pricing and How to Win the Pricing Game with Matt Plank
So sales reps, what they want is they're like, give me a book of accounts. that I can like control my own destiny, right? Where I'm not like told I can't prospect, but like, let me do something.
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20Sales: Rippling's CRO on Why Founders Should Not Create Sales Playbooks | Why Discounting is BS and How to Create Urgency in Deals | The Biggest Lessons on Pricing and How to Win the Pricing Game with Matt Plank
But then when you give them accounts, like without a whole bunch of structure and focus, like they're not ever gonna show up and do the like, the way that you manage a rep doing outbound is not the same as the way you manage an SDR doing outbound.
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20Sales: Rippling's CRO on Why Founders Should Not Create Sales Playbooks | Why Discounting is BS and How to Create Urgency in Deals | The Biggest Lessons on Pricing and How to Win the Pricing Game with Matt Plank
For the longest time, up until maybe two years ago, I did the pitch decks with our CMO. We'd be cranking away in the middle of the night, working on the slides. And then we roll out the pitch deck, and I do the trainings, and I do the script. And when you're an early stage company, that makes a lot of sense.
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And then all of a sudden, you get five segments, 10 segments, 20 segments, and you're no longer the expert about all of them. And so I definitely held on to that like way too long, kind of being the like the number one person in the org who like knew the script and the pitch and the competitors.
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20Sales: Rippling's CRO on Why Founders Should Not Create Sales Playbooks | Why Discounting is BS and How to Create Urgency in Deals | The Biggest Lessons on Pricing and How to Win the Pricing Game with Matt Plank
And two years ago, I hired like my first kind of like layer of just like really kind of successful VPs underneath me. And then over time, now it's like I literally don't even think about those things like as completely owned by the VP of SMB or the VP of in-market or whatever.
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20Sales: Rippling's CRO on Why Founders Should Not Create Sales Playbooks | Why Discounting is BS and How to Create Urgency in Deals | The Biggest Lessons on Pricing and How to Win the Pricing Game with Matt Plank
And I should have done that a lot sooner because what happened was we would be doing deals or we'd have a deck that sucked and I'd go look at it and I'd be like, this deck is terrible. This feels so stale. How does the SMB org stand up and give this deck every day? It's so bad. This is 18 months old. And there was just a general thinking of like, well, you made the deck.
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20Sales: Rippling's CRO on Why Founders Should Not Create Sales Playbooks | Why Discounting is BS and How to Create Urgency in Deals | The Biggest Lessons on Pricing and How to Win the Pricing Game with Matt Plank
Like you authored this thing. And I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, no. Like you guys are better than me at all of this stuff. Like you're doing it all day long. Like everybody should feel empowered to be like, this thing that you're telling us to do is dumb and it doesn't make sense. It doesn't work. And I don't think I like inflicted that like early enough in enough places.
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And today, you know, my team is a lot more useful than I am in terms of actually winning business and bringing customers on board. Yeah.
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It's a tough question to ask because we have direct segments, channel segments, product segments. There's literally 50 segments. But at the end of next year, my SMB, mid-market, and enterprise teams will all be roughly the same size, probably SMBs maybe 60 reps, mid-markets maybe 90 reps, and enterprises maybe 40-ish reps or something. But that's
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150 reps and there's probably 300 reps across the board that are at different types of places. So it's kind of a mixed bag.
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The fastest growing segment for sure is like our upmarket segment. Like our, you know, we were moving that market very quickly and, you know, used to not compete with the workdays of the world. And now that's when a lot of deals with them. And so that piece of the business is, and you, if you're going to grow 60, 70, 80, 90% year over year at hundreds of millions of dollars.
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15, 20%, maybe 30, 40% of the absolute highest end. And so regardless, like every month, every quarter, you're losing the majority of the opportunities that you're in. So you got to be able to know how to lose an opportunity and come back and bounce back and focus on the wins and all that. So yeah, you got to be okay with accepting a lot of rejection if you're in sales.
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You have to be able to have some things that are growing 200, 300%. That's the only way you'll maintain a growth rate. And so I'd say our upmarket teams are growing a lot faster. What's not growing fast enough today? I'm thinking about Parker would probably say everything. But I think probably international, to be honest.
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In international, we have teams now, go-to-market teams in Dublin selling into Europe. We've got a team in Sydney selling into Australian market. There's a bunch of international teams in place where we feel like we have incredible product market fit. We're trying to crack the code of you can't just land in these places and run all the same playbooks and do all the same stuff.
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And so I think our growth internationally is like, there could be explosive growth and there will be soon, but we're still kind of tweaking the ingredients a little bit. Why do you think that hasn't gone to plan? When you enter a new market, everything is way more expensive. When you're an early stage company, efficiency doesn't really matter. You don't even have a business, right?
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It's not about how efficient are you. It's like, you're just trying to win in any way possible and you're losing money and all that good stuff. As you get to be larger and you're our size, all of a sudden efficiency is the number one constraint.
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There are things that we could go do to win more business in places that we don't do because we couldn't do it efficiently and we're not trying to light money on fire. And so in the US market, there's all these other things. There's organic, there's brand, there's all this free accrued benefit over time.
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And so you can afford to go pay money and do different things to acquire leads in more expensive ways. When you go internationally... all you can do on day one, right? You can go put money in the LinkedIn machine or the Facebook machine or the review sites or whatever, and you can get demos, but you don't have all of the easier, more free stuff to blend the portfolio into something that works.
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And so your growth is just like, it's a little bit stunted if you want to grow efficiently. Like we don't get to grow in these markets the same way that early stage companies do who don't really care that much about being efficient. Like we do care about being efficient. And so there are kind of these, you know, guardrails that we have to operate within.
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And so that has made growth a little bit slower than it would have been.
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I think one, all of the non-US markets, like starting with Canada and for sure in Europe and, you know, in APAC. Like their HR software landscape is at least a decade behind where the US is. Like in the US, you have 10 plus like major public company payroll providers, right? Like there's just an enormous, you've got all these IT companies, like all the ramps and brexes of the world.
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Like it's a deeply competitive market. And when you go internationally, pretty much in every country, whether it's, you know, the UK or France or Germany or Australia, whatever, there's literally like two people at max. that are in that space. And one of them is like a completely old, archaic, like awful system.
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And one of them is like a brand new startup that's like modern and easy to use, but has like enormous issues kind of like supporting all the different various use cases, large companies, whatever. So there's just those markets are like extremely ripe for disruption. And I think we have a really strong product market fit.
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And then there's a bunch of other things where like, you know, we do really well with multinational companies.
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Efficiency. Well, so a couple of things. One is it is working in the sense that the win rates are really good. The ACVs are really good, all that kind of stuff. What is scaling slower than you would like is pipeline generation and top And that's because no matter how much money we have, we could be sitting on a billion dollars of cash.
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Like we are not going to go invest in top of funnel that is inefficient just to grow faster. Like that's just like our guardrails.
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That's certainly a way to do it. I would say that we are pretty disciplined in the kind of finance function at Rippling to not get the cheap thrill and go sink a bunch of money into these markets. Because the reality, it's not just that it's inefficient, it's that we don't know exactly what works. It's not the same playbook. The growth playbook is not the same.
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And so, yeah, you could think that you could convince yourself that you could spend inefficiently. And of course it'll work because it works in the US, but like you also might just light a ton of money on fire and like your whole strategy just might not work at all for a long time, whatever.
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You know, the number one reason why you lose a deal, in most cases, at least at Rippling, is indecision. People that basically end up staying with whatever solution they have today. At least in our case, You know, we are ripping and replacing something pretty much every time, you know, we bring on a new customer.
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And so I think really the answer for us as like outbound has been the thing that we've been able to scale the most because all of the growth demand gen stuff is expensive when you can't offset it with referrals and word of mouth, whatever. And so the outbound thing is working really well for us.
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But like, you got to hire 20, 30, 40, 50 outbound SDRs, you got to ramp them, you got to train them, like it just takes longer to ramp the engine when you can't just go spend a million dollars, you know, on kind of, you know, paid advertising and get a bunch of demos that show up.
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Founders definitely should not create the playbook. And I would say that Parker is exceptional go-to-market CEO. In fact, I think one of his strengths is that he really is the main product roadmap guy. His product vision is really strong. On the go-to-market side, like that guy can sniff out, you know, bullshit from anywhere.
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Like he knows just like all the places to poke, all the weak spots, all the bruises. And so Parker is like involved in go-to-market. Is this really working or are you like, you know, making it... appear as though it is when it's not. Having said that, he would never want to like, you need to do it this way, pitch people this way.
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And I think the reality is Parker is the best at articulating why somebody should care about our product, why they should want our product, why did we build it this way? What are all the benefits of building it this way? There's no one that does that better than Parker, but he doesn't think like our buyer. You know what I mean? He doesn't...
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He doesn't know how to transform his brilliant thought into a consistent, repeatable sales playbook. He doesn't know how to do that. That's not his thing. And so he's involved in the direction. You know what I mean? He gives a lot of feedback. He's kind of like, this is what I think. But if I push back on him, there's friction and it's good. Friction is good and that kind of stuff.
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But eventually he'll get to a point where he's like, Okay. Okay. Okay. That makes sense. He'll start from a place of extreme pessimistic view. Like, I think that's wrong. I think that's wrong. Here's why, here's why. And then if you like defend the position and you convince him of why you think your way is the right way, eventually he'll just be like, okay, that makes sense.
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You like convinced me that that's better and you should do it that way.
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when you're a founder from day one, first of all, I think you should hire salespeople way sooner than conventional wisdom. And there's a lot of salespeople that will tell you that that's not true. Like, hey, you're a founder. You got to make sure that you can sign customers up and you have product market fit.
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And so the overwhelming majority, I mean, if you look at the pie chart of closed loss reasons, you know, almost half of them are basically like unresponsive, right? Or maybe a third of them are unresponsive. Like literally you do a few calls and it's going well and they just completely ghost you.
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Like, don't hire this poor VP of sales to come in here who will never be successful because like your product, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? Like, I don't believe in any of that. Like, I believe that I mean, I started at Parker's house when there were four engineers literally in the basement of his house. There were no customers, there was no CRM, there was no anything.
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Granted, me and Parker had a relationship. And so would I have done that with a stranger? Probably not. But I knew that Parker was going to build the right thing. And I knew that he needed me to help him figure out, one, do the sales so that I could take that off his plate. But there was a trust there of like, as we're building stuff and you have constrained resources in engineering,
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What is the most important thing to build first? How do you sequence the things we need to build? And a good go-to-market leader that you trust will help you figure that out. They're part of that journey. And so I think you should hire a sales leader very early on. You probably should have some customers that have paid you some money, but I think founder is way too long to hire a go-to-market.
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And I think they do that because they feel like they can't hire a good salesperson potentially without a bunch of traction.
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you want to hire for slope, right? Like you want to hire for how steep you think somebody is like going to be able to kind of grow and scale. Like the number one thing that I look for, I think if you're looking for an early stage, you know, sales leader, there's a bunch of things that we could get into.
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But I think one of the things that stands out is you want somebody who has been like rapidly promoted at the same company two or more times. Like that ingredient is
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And what I mean by that is like, if you're an account executive for like a year, and then you're a sales manager for like nine months, and you're like a director of sales for like a year, when you look at high growth companies that are just like growing super fast, right?
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Whatever all of the historical SaaS companies you might want to go look at, where should I hire someone who worked at a high growth company? And you find somebody who was promoted multiple times. There are lots of people that get promoted once. And it's a mistake, right? Like they're not good at being a manager. They don't want to be a manager or whatever.
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But when you find someone that's been promoted two times at the same company, it's like an immediate signal that that person is good, right? Like you don't get promoted twice at high growth companies if you're not good. And when they've done in a rapid succession, right? If it's like three years in this role, three years in that role, three years in this role, it's like, okay, that's good too.
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Some other big chunk of them are people who get back to you and are like, hey, we decided to hold off for now. you know, whatever, something in the company changed, priorities, budget, someone left. And so there's a lot like if I think win rates are different if you think about a decision to deal, right?
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But there's nothing better than like one year, one year, one year. It's like, that means you promoted them. They took on a bunch of new stuff. It was growing. Everything was broken. They didn't know how to do it. And boom, they solved it. And like now they're under the next role.
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And so I think you find people like that, that they may top out at like their experience has only been a director of sales of the 20 person team or something. And it's like, you don't need more than that when you're building a company from scratch.
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I think that's exactly right. I mean, in fact, I'll give you the perfect example. When Parker started Rippling, who's the first person he wanted to hire? It was Sam Blonde, right? He's like, I want Sam, come work here with me. And Sam was like, no, man, I can't do it again. And I started, Sam hired me at Zenefits and I started there as the 25th and Plaza account executive.
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And so I had kind of grown up in the underneath kind of like Sam at the org. And so When Parker was like, okay, Sam's not the guy who's going to come start in the basement again for a second time four years later, he immediately went to the tree. What's Plank doing? What's Jameson doing? Who built Gong for many years and now works at Rippling.
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I mean, look, like the first thing is, generally speaking, if you are successful on the whole journey, then there's only like one reason that you don't make it. Like if you're successful, it works. And Rippling has been fortunate to be successful. And like, yes, in some part, do I feel like I run sales and I own some of that? Yeah.
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But like we've been successful for a million other reasons that are not me, right? The product that we built, the marketing team we have, all these other things, right? But I think when you are winning... like the reason that you top out and in some companies, right?
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Like a deal where they decided to go with you or a competitor, then I think you'd look at win rates that are much higher in those cases.
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Like they're winning, they're doing pretty well by all metrics, but then they're like, but we gotta go hire like a CRO because this person is like, you know, we're doing great, but we just, they're not gonna make it. 100% of the time is because you can't hire people Yeah, absolutely. that are all homegrown and organic. You're a 10, 20 million, whatever.
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You haven't hired anybody from outside the company really. You know them so well and you convince yourself that there are not gaps and they're all going to scale. And it's just like, they're not all going to scale.
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And so you got to be able to go to that person that you brought over from your previous company that's done really well and know when they're hitting a breaking point where they can't scale. And you've got to be able to layer them in a way where hopefully they stay at the company
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I think when someone is not scaling, there are two things. I think one is they end up becoming like they're leading from the back and not the front.
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And what I mean by that is they believe that their job now is to like tell people like what to do because they've done it, but like they don't believe their job anymore is to like do it for them, show them how to do it, be involved in like, you know, leading the way and being like, everybody follow me. And they just kind of hit a point where they,
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like they kind of think that being a director or a VP or whatever means that like all of a sudden you don't have to do that stuff anymore. And usually when that happens, they start to lose the locker room. And like, even if it's a winning team, like their team starts to not really like them, you know, it starts to fall apart and kind of flounder from there.
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And you can't come back from someone who like lose it, like an organic promotion who was amazing all the way through, but then they like lose the locker room because they think that that's not my job anymore. I think that's it. That's it.
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For sure. I think someone not deciding in many cases mean that you didn't prove enough value in the solution you're selling or whatever it may be. But there are also just a lot of good reasons why someone's not ready for whatever reason or really dynamics change in the company.
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It was around the time where kind of, you know, speaking to this, it was, it was at a point in time where there were people that reported into me, you know, who had maybe lost the locker room a little bit, or at least when anybody is questioning, like, is my manager or my director or whatever, are they scaling with me? Right?
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Like when anybody starts to question that, they immediately look to the CRO and they're like, what's the CRO going to do about it? Is this person going to let that fly because they know the person, they've been here for a while, whatever. And a lot of companies, that's what happens.
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And so I think for me, you first see with your own eyes, there's a problem here and I'm giving the feedback, but it's not changing. But then you start to feel that other people see that. And if you don't take action very quickly when those things start to fester, then that's how you can lose the locker room. People need to know that you're willing to to like, just like every rep, right?
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Is like, if I don't hit my quota, then like, I'm gone. Everybody knows that, right? If your manager, your team's in your quota, it's like, everybody feels that performance culture, but there can be a moment where you get so high up in an org chart that people start to feel like, you know, when things are failing, like nobody blames the person that runs that thing, right? They blame everybody else.
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And like, that's a really bad place to be. Dude, I could talk to you all day.
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I think maybe I would say probably like in the HTM space, maybe like Palocity is, you know, of the legacy competitors. Like they generally seem to be people we see in most of the deals. You know, they do a good job, I think, of selling around their product gaps. Potentially there's other players in, you know, our product suites.
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I guess maybe when I think about competitor I respect the most, I think of it mostly from a go-to-market team perspective. And so I think when we lose to a legacy payroll provider, I'm kind of like, damn, we got outsold. I know our product is better than Paylocity or ADP or whatever.
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And so when we're in a competitive deal and it's neck and neck, and I'm just like, man, they must be doing something good on the go-to-market front to make up for all of the horrible blemishes that exist under the surface of that product when you actually use it. Yeah. It's true. Respectfully, that's all on you.
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When you get beaten by an ADP, it's like... Yeah, it's like you should really look in the mirror and you should really take that one on the chin for sure. Tell me, what sales tactic has not changed over the last five years? I think more so now than ever, working your ass off and hustling has always been able to get you ahead, but there was a culture...
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A lot of time, the person that you're evaluating with might leave the company or they might hire someone new who now owns that decision. And so there's plenty of good reasons. And I actually think the way that you deal with that is really, really critical. And the best reps... over their time and their tenure, they grow and they build a pool of those types of people.
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pre COVID where that was like table stakes and what everybody did. And you were in the office all the time and you showed up at eight and you left at six. And it was just like, everybody did that. It was obvious. And I think over time now, the true, like, I just like, and it's not like I work on the weekends and I work all night.
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It's like, when I'm like in the walls of like the arena, I am like million miles an hour grinding, just like working my ass off as fast as possible to just like do more output. I think that is like less common than it used to be. or is more of an advantage than maybe it once was.
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You know, candidly, I really miss the days of being the vibe that's in a company when you're all in there on the same days and whatever. I think having said that, I mean, we are. If you're in an office, for us, anywhere in the country, you have to be in the office three days a week. But we do have people that we've hired remote across the world, really.
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And we have access to better talent and all that. So I think the remote people are part of the company culture. But yeah, I mean, if I could wave my magic wand and keep the people I have and force them to come to an office, I would do it in a heartbeat. I believe that we've lost something over the years of not having the same company culture of an office.
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You really should work for a CEO whose ambition and expectations make you deeply, deeply uncomfortable. The best coaches in the world, right? They're not your best friend. They coach you and they're like, if you look at the whatever, all the different people, the Nick Sabans, the Bill Belichicks of the world, right? Like,
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You have to want to work for someone that demands greatness every day, often is completely unreasonable, feels like is unfair and all this stuff. You're going to get more out of yourself by working for someone like that than you would ever possibly get by thinking you can push yourself that hard. And so for me, it's like, don't work for a company because you think it's it's chill or it's easier.
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Like the CEO gets it and like, they're not, you know, a huge, like go to market. They're not going to bust your ass all the time to go to market. It's like work for someone who you kind of walk out of there and they're like, man, that guy was intense. Like, I don't know. Or a woman was intense. Like, I don't know. You know what I mean? That might be uncomfortable, right?
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Like you should feel that when you're going to go work for a CEO.
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I mean, honestly, I think for us, it's more of like a macro strategy of like breaking up our sales org, right? Like at one point we had reps who sold all of the products at Rippling.
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And when we finally got to a point where we launched our, you know, spend management suite and I had a rep who had like their 12th product that was competing against like a rep at Ramp or Brex where like all they sold was that very specific thing. And just asking my rep to like be able to compete with that rep when they had 12 other products they needed to sell, right?
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As long as you have really good engagements with both the people that you win and also the people that you lose, they start to come back around. Like once you've been in a role for even a year, 18 months, like you just get this circle back loop of all these people that you've spoken with in the past 18 months. And a lot of times when they come in the second time, they're immediately ready.
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It just became clear that the cup is too full here. We can't put more knowledge in the sales rep cup. And we need to basically carve off this kind of product account executive model and then build this culture of partnership in those deals so that when you are a new logo and you want to buy HCM stuff and spend stuff, there's two people working together.
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And we kind of have splintered that off now in a bunch of different places. And had we not done that, we never would have been able to compete in these kind of like hyper competitive, like vertical spaces, like finance and global payroll.
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And, you know, we've done a really good job in those spaces by being able to do that strategy, which is operationally very complex, but like my RevOps team kind of makes it, you know, takes it on and makes it happen.
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Awesome, man. I appreciate the time, Harry. Thanks for having me. And hopefully we'll do it again sometime.
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The deal cycle moves way faster. It's a lot easier. And so sometimes I think people, they get a no from somebody And they just like abandon. Sometimes in the worst cases, like they won't even respond. You know, hey, thank you so much for your time. Thank you for evaluating all that good stuff. But I'm like over the top, like killing with kindness when they say no.
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And that really just builds you this like big circle back on a loopback pipeline that will help you, you know, in years down the road.
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I think it's way easier when you're replacing something, in my opinion. When you're trying to create a category or create budget for a thing that doesn't exist, there's just a whole bunch of different things that you have to go through. I have always, for the most part, sold a product where you're
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I mean, I think early on, I guess, in the early days back with San Blon when we were at EchoSign, you were selling an e-signature solution that was like net new. And it was hard because you go down an evaluation and someone at the very end would be like, no, we're just going to keep doing this on paper. You'd be like, how is that even a consideration? It's so crazy.
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I think today at Rippling, we're replacing another system every time. And I find that to be a lot easier to know that like there's a deal to be had here. They're going to pick somebody and you really just need to beat the competition, you know, to win the deal. I think that's much easier.
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I think people that say outbound is dead are either one of two things. They're either engagement baiting, looking for a reaction on LinkedIn or whatever. They know that there's a whole army of people out there where that's their profession and they're trying to kind of create whatever, some conversation around it. Or they're generally not good or haven't grown something of large scale.
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I mean, to even claim that Outbound is dead, it's just absurd. It's like, how else would you build a business? If you think you can rely on marketing form fills or marketing programmatic email or whatever, it just means that you've never scaled something. In fact, I'll tell you that in the early days of Rippling... One of the great mistakes is that I didn't push outbound harder.
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Like the marketing team at Rippling was absolutely one of a kind. They generated thousands of inbound demos every month. And we got to a kind of crisis point throughout our journey where we looked at the plan for next year and we looked at what the growth means. growth rate needed to be in marketing was kind of like, hey, we can't grow form fills by that percentage. There's no way.
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And we had to very, very quickly build an outbound org from scratch overnight. It was super stressful. And I wish we would have done it much earlier, but there's no way to grow and scale a big company without doing outbound. So it's harder and it's different. But to say that it's dead, I think is insane. I mean, we book 50% of our outbound demos, we book over the phone.
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So we schedule like a thousand outbound demos a month in our SDR work and literally half of them are booked over the phone. And so anyone who says it's dead, I think, just doesn't know how to do it effectively.
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There's really two things that are important. I think the first is you have to have like a very deep partnership with marketing where you don't care about like credit. So for example, when marketing shows up and they generate 100% of the pipeline and it's all inbound demand gen, you know, form fills, hand raisers, and they're flowing to your inbound team.
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When you start to spin up outbound, you're trying to create a new incremental pipeline, right? If you obviously hire 100 SDRs and you end up with the same demos you had when you had inbound, that's obviously a bad equation, right? Way more costs and no more pipeline.
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And so marketing, you have to have such a partnership with them where a lot of the stuff that marketing does, it drives outbound success, right? And so when you schedule outbound demos, you've got to also give marketing credit where credit is due. And I think a lot of companies... They break that.
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And a lot of times they'll have marketing and, you know, different orgs and sales, which is true of Rippling as well. Marketing does not roll into me, but we just have this like incredible cross-functional partnership.
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And so what marketing is goal and how bound is they are telling us essentially like, who should we reach out to and when, and they're doing that by capturing all this like intense over the internet, right? Who's on our website, who's on our review sites, right? who just recently changed the job on LinkedIn. And so they're curating intent across all of our accounts that we would want to go after.
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And they're teeing it up for us. Hey, this person you should reach out to right now. And then they, of course, help with the messaging. Here's the most effective sequences. They help us with the cold call scripts. And so the SDR work has an opinion on all of those things. And we're responsible for like ruthless, like execution of like a very daily driven, you know, KPI business.
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But marketing is absolutely critical and like making it work. And if you don't have a really strong partnership.
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First, it comes from like the culture of the org and generally from like the CEO, right? Like if I show up to a meeting with Parker and I'm like, hey, we're going to massively whiff revenue this month, but like it's all marketing's fault. They didn't generate the demos they said they were. I giggle at the idea of that. That would absolutely never fly. That conversation wouldn't be able to happen.
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And so you can't blame marketing when you miss the plan because it's like, so what? We have a plan. What are you going to do about it? And you can't take all the credit for yourself when you build an outbound org and all of a sudden the pipeline splits and you've got 50-50 or whatever. You have to acknowledge and give marketing credit. And while they're not incentivized from a comp perspective...
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It's like deeply built into the culture that like our marketing team has a pipeline plan that they sign up for. They don't have like a, you know, how many webinars did you do and how many content downloads did you get? Like those things are important, but like their goals are how much pipeline do you generate? Like that's all we talk about in our forecast meetings.
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Like that's what they're geared around. And so I think culturally you have to have it be that way from the top down.
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There's two different ways that I think you think about a plan. And for us, historically, we start with usually something that Parker is like, hey, if we want to continue to be in the top 1% of SaaS companies out there, this is the number that we need to go get next year. This is the growth rate that we need. This is what we need to hit to continue to be an outline. in the market.
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And you look at that number and you're generally like, wow, that's, you know, that's definitely not an easy number to go hit. Otherwise, like, of course, why would it be an outlier? But then you go through like a ruthless detailed planning process. For us at Rippling, we have 50 different sub-segments, right?
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So you have, you know, SMB and mid-market and enterprise and channel sales and product sales and all the different products. And so if you think about there's like 50 capacity plans in a spreadsheet and it's like, how many demos are we going to generate? How many reps are we going to hire? What are their quota? And you go through that in great detail through all of the different teams.
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And you basically ladder up and you kind of ignore the number. You're not focused on the number that someone asked you to get to. You start from a place of, if I just make reasonable assumptions about growth and all these different things, what does that get me to? And then generally, there's the plan that you believe is attainable. And then there's the plan that you want to get to.
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And there's a gap there. And then you go through this exercise of how are we going to plug that gap? What are the 10 or 15 different levers that we could pull this year to be able to close that gap.
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I mean, it really depends on like the stage, right? So when you're early on, you actually start from a place of like, who are we getting demos from, right? Like we're getting demos today, you know, like what do they look like? And, you know, in your kind of, in many ways, like that is your segmentation, you kind of build around that. I mean, we had one sales team when we started, right?
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And we branched off from there as you start to go up market a little bit, a bunch of things happen and you branch off. And so... I always tell people, by the time you get to be maybe, I don't know, 200 million or something, your job as the CRO completely changes to essentially head of sales operations.
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You have a great sales operations team, but at some point it transitions completely from can you close the deals and are you the best salesperson or whatever? to like operational planning. And so you take the demos that exist, what did we do last year in all these different segments? And you kind of figure out like, where do I think we can do a little bit better?
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And you just kind of start to slot in all of the humans against those different segments. So Parker doesn't care. He's not like, hey, we need this much revenue from all these different segments. He's like, we need this revenue, like you go figure out how to do it.
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And then we build like a tops down plan from there based off of how many demos are we going to get in what segment and how many people do we want to staff against us and so on and so forth.