The Evolution of Sales in SaaS with Scott Jones

In this episode of the GTM After Hours podcast, host Mark Bliss engages in a deep conversation with Scott Jones, exploring his unique career journey from various roles to becoming a successful partner manager in the Salesforce ecosystem. They discuss the evolution of technology, the importance of early adoption, and how curiosity and continuous learning play a vital role in career growth. The conversation also touches on the impact of AI on sales roles, the significance of community-led growth, and the necessity of empathy in building customer relationships. Scott shares valuable advice for newcomers in the tech industry and emphasizes the importance of maintaining connections with friends and colleagues throughout one's career.

Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome and Introduction
• 10:04 Riding the Cloud Wave: Early Adoption Challenges
• 17:19 The Evolution of Sales: From Transactions to Relationships
• 28:13 The Future of Salesforce: Community and Collaboration
• 34:36 Navigating AI in Sales: Opportunities and Threats
• 40:36 Empathy in Sales: The Key to Long-Term Success
• 1:10:36 Final Thoughts: The Importance of Relationships

Transcript

0:36

Hi and welcome to the GTM After Hours podcast, a safe space for marketers, AEs, CSMs and everyone else that's in that B2B SaaS growth hamster wheel. So grab a comfy blanket, your go-to drink of choice, and then join me for another exciting go-to-market conversation. All right, this is gonna be a fun one, y'all. This is 100 % Detroit podcast here. I'm joined by Sales, Extraordinaire partner enabler and just genuinely awesome dude, Scott Jones. I met Scott, gosh, probably 10 years now. I think that was that was 2014 as a up and coming sales rep on on our SAS team. And he's had a pretty remarkable career. And I'm excited to to dig in, particularly after Dreamforce. Scott, let me kick it over to you for the audience who doesn't know you. Do you want to give kind of a high level of your career so far? Sure. Yeah. And thanks, Mark. That was a great introduction and man, it's great to be here with you. Yeah, you're right. Like 10 years, it's passed pretty fast. But what Mark failed to mention was that I was a sales rep working directly for Mark back in 10 years ago too. So my first role in the cloud ecosystem and kind of actually my first introduction for real into like the Salesforce ecosystem. So you, in a way, friend have been quite the bridge for my career. So it's great to be here. Great to see you. Not at a Pistons game, because that's usually how we see each other. But yeah. We got the beers in our hand anyway. which for anybody who's ever watched a Pistons game, you'll know that that's probably a requirement for going to a game. yeah, no doubt about it. Yeah, yeah. I'm pretty sure they actually give free beers with tickets these days. Yeah, at least at least not since what like 2008. I think that was the last year of decent basketball before everything went very, very downhill very fast. But we have the Lions and Tigers. So. Yay. And in hopefully crossing fingers for the Red Wings this year. And yeah, so things are on the up and up for us in Detroit sports. Doesn't feel so bad to be a Detroit sports fan these days, especially kind of with the the momentum of the Lions, which has been fantastic and the huge win on Monday night. But yeah, so, you know, Mark, think you kind of nailed it. Like, I probably don't have the most traditional background when it comes to, you know, where I'm at currently in my career. But I went to school at Grand Valley, graduated 20 years ago-ish around there, somewhere in that ballpark, right, from Grand Valley, and I had an education degree. And I knew pretty quickly that I wasn't going to actually pursue education. But I went and talked to some of my counselors, and they were like, hey, just graduate, figure life out a little bit, and you can always come back and take some more courses. That'd be easier than... kind of starting over fresh. And I was like, okay, great. So that's exactly what I did. I went and started my first career, or my first job out of college was actually kind of a hybrid because I worked at the place when I was in college, worked at a Chicago style pizza place. I became the general manager of that restaurant right out of college, did that for a little while. And then I took a job at Enterprise Rent-A-Car, right? So anybody that knows that grind, as a serious grind, right? We're talking Michigan weather could be below zero degrees. You're in a suit, a suit and tie with shoes on, washing cars in the middle at 6 a.m. in the morning. it's quite the grind. I did that for a couple of years. Then I transitioned. yeah, like. if you're, if you're just starting out like that, think best buy and then the old, my gosh, what a comp you wear, had these really great training programs. Totally, yeah, and I know people from all of these locations, right? And ironically, I just had lunch today with one of my good friends that I met day one of Enterprise. this has been a pretty nostalgic day for me all around. I knew anybody that's been in that career, either you're gonna continue to rent cars or you're gonna go do something different, right? And so I knew early in my career that I wanted to... to pursue technology and mostly because my roommates in college, they all pursue technology but more from a technical standpoint. They were CS majors. They were great at sitting in rooms and coding and that wasn't for me, but I wanted to take some of the elements I knew right from education and try to spin that into a career in technology. so I kind of crafted a couple different career options. It wasn't immediately technology, even though I was looking at technology. Back in the day, I took a job I took a role with paychecks, selling payroll, did that for a year or so, and then I transitioned into pharmaceuticals for a while, and that was just, this is kind of like happenstance in a sense. Like had a manager that managed me at paychecks that moved back into pharmaceuticals, like you should come with me. I was like, yeah, I'd love to sell at payroll and washing cars. Like I'm ready to do this. and, I was always really honest with him too. was like, hey, listen, I really want to be in technology, but I think this is a great, you know, a good segue for me. It's certainly better than where I am currently. I did the pharmaceutical thing for a couple of years. And then when the opportunity arose, I jumped at it that was an opportunity to work in technology. And really my first role in technology was this cloud was brand new, except for things like, you know, applications where like sales, I'm sorry, like Facebook or at that time we were even using. What's the one, you post on people, you you have your friends on the wall? Yeah, that's the one. and it was and it was the Facebook. So Facebook back then. That's fair. Yeah. And so like, so my role with this company was was really just to study what is the cloud? They were hard, like hardware all the way. And also, like coding, right? They did like custom applications. And they're like, you know what, our customers could really benefit from the cloud, we think, but we don't really know what it is. So once you come in and basically study and figure out, is there a go to market strategy for how to, you know, how can we capitalize on this? So I did that for a while and then after that I found myself in a position to come over and I met you out of happenstance actually. It was a career fair and it was happening at, are we allowed to say where it was or do we keep the names out of things? You can say where it is. Yeah, exactly. exists under that name or entity, but it was a place called I dashboards and they were basically like a BI visualization tool, similar to like a Tableau is probably the most relevant today. And basically I just looked online and I was looking for some things and I was like, you know what, I want a new role. I was basically on a contract with this company. I knew it was coming to an end and there was a career, what was called a career fair. And, and I told my now wife, but girlfriend at the time I was like, Hey, listen, this is happening in like 30 minutes. It's like 20 minutes from my house. Like, I'm just going to print off a resume and go up there. And, and I, and I did, and, and, they introduced me to you. And honestly, that was kind of like the history of how I met you. And from that point forward, I've been almost my entire career from there has been in SaaS sales as an individual contributor, AE, account manager. You the titles have changed over the years, but really just managing accounts and selling into net new, also, you know, supporting current customers, trying to expand their footprint. And I found a real love and passion for the Salesforce ecosystem through some of these roles. And I decided that that's really where I wanted to hone in and focus. So I spent a lot of time. And it was more energy, right? Like, it's not like I just sat down and carved out, you know, 20 extra hours a week, but it was really like, where's my extra focus going? It's going to understanding this ecosystem. How does it work? How does the technology work? I felt like there was a lot of momentum behind it. There was a career path that was there. And so I was just very strategic and I was an AE for most of that career. And then three years ago, I, or that path in life and then... Like three years ago, I was presented an opportunity to transition over into the partner or channel side of things and manage some relationships on the Salesforce side for a couple of ISVs. And that's what I've been doing since then. And honestly have had pretty solid success and and had I've really enjoyed my time here and I feel like this is where I'll be until basically they kick me out of this. Yeah, it's interesting. You're talking to talk about this, like the story of your career and there's a lot of like early adopter vibes going through this. And yeah, maybe you could tell the audience like, how is it coming in? And like you're selling cloud when nobody knows what cloud is and, you know, Salesforce ecosystem as it's becoming the juggernaut that it is like, how scary is that? That's a really good question, Mark. And this will probably be a theme throughout our conversation today, but I think perspective is everything. And timing has a lot to do with that perspective. And so my perspective is gonna be very different than some other folks that are probably listening, some of your listeners here. But it was perfect for the wave that I rode, which meant I was young, I didn't have a family, I wasn't married. There's not a lot of money, guys, in startups and new technology and new waves of things in the world, right? And there's a lot of grinding, right? It takes a lot more effort to move that train forward just a step, right? Than it does if there is momentum in a market. The market already understands what the technology is, what the value is and why you should do it. It's just an obvious choice and then becomes just a matter of budget and time, right? That's not where we were when I started with cloud. you know, no one really even knew what it was and everybody was scared to death of it. Like just absolutely scared. They wanted to stay on servers. They wanted applications to stay on servers. just, there wasn't enough certainty around it and probably rightfully so. I mean, but we learned really, really fast as, as an industry on how to create that sense of security and put some of those, I guess, reluctancies to rest. because we had to as a market, like there was a lot of investment in heading this direction. Salesforce was a little bit different because, you know, I used Salesforce at one or two of my jobs early in my career. And I was like, I hate using it. I really hate using it, but I like what you get out of it, right? Okay, so as a rep, as an AE, Yes, it added a lot more work to my plate at that time because again, this is early Salesforce, right? There's no APIs with all of these different applications that you can plug into it. Like you are, it's literally like a digital Rolodex and the ability to put that stuff are the art, like the arduous activity of having to put it in made most of the people I worked with want to quit. want, like they were like, I'm, I don't, this is so ridiculous. I just want to use. log my calls? Yeah, I told you that they're they're ready to buy next week. I promise it's going to be next week and it'll be three times what we're thinking. But is that that fun technology evolution too? Because you go like we're not going to log log it to. It automatically logs to. I don't want I don't want anybody listening to my calls to now. Yeah. listening, automatic logging, contextual clues, lots of like, I mean, so much stuff put in audit like it's such a different world, but every single one of those stages was was a shit moment for a bunch of people who either needed to figure out like, am I going to keep resisting this or am I going to do what you did? And like, I am going to learn this and make it a part of my life. because this is where the future's going. Yeah, I also, you know, it's interesting. So I always felt behind. I felt out of place in, in my career for a long time too. So, and you know, this is a safe place. feel like, you know, this is hopefully your audience or people that are listening and, and, and hopefully are, in positions that I maybe have been in my career and can learn and relate to what I was going through intrinsically. Like I was a pizza boy that rented cars. and slaying some paychecks, you know, and now I'm in technology or and I did pharmaceutical, but like I felt really I felt out of place and I felt like I needed to earn my my keep in these roles. And so the technology Salesforce was the technology they use. So I just did that. That's just what I did. Right. So I was a good servant in that moment, you know, to being like, this is what you guys are asking for. I'm going to do that because I don't even deserve to be here in the first place is the way I felt for a good chunk of my like kicking off portion of my career. But yeah, yeah, 100%. And it's just scared, like nervous, like I finally made it to this place, right? Like I'm finally making it into these elements of the career that I've dreamed of or like thought of and tried to bring into my own reality. And it's me that can fumble this ball, right? And if it comes down to the fact that they don't, you I don't log a call or not, like I'm gonna log the call is what's gonna happen. But where I really started to really love Salesforce, And this is actually what drives my, love of it to, to this day. And the love of this ecosystem is the ability to take things out of it. And what does it give back to you? And the early adopters of Salesforce didn't experience that like myself, because it was too hard. There were so many barriers that existed. First of all, people not using it correctly, not using it at all as a big part of it, but like the technology has come so far and also the, the, the marketplace, like the, you know, the marketplace for Salesforce and apps has changed what Salesforce means to people because you now you can take these technologies, plug them in. And now that data that you plugged in that call can now be turned into things like heat maps, like, my most successful calls all happened from this zip code, et cetera, you know, or when I sell this product, the next product I usually sell is something like this, right? And now I start to work smarter. And that's really like all I needed in my career. What I felt like was I need some because I felt behind. I was like, I need an element where I can attack in a sense. Like I need to be really good at something. And that's what Salesforce actually allowed me to do was find a way to become better with the same amount of time every day than my peers because I was actually doing the activity. therefore I was getting good results out and therefore the developers and the folks that own Salesforce at these companies that I worked at were willing to work with me and test with me and listen to my ideas. And I was able to take those and just run with them. I'm sure working for you, you probably understand that that's a part of who I am. Technology in my role is very important because I find a competitive advantage in doing that. And I'm not necessarily competing against my peers these days, right? That's not where I'm at. I'm competing against myself and trying to be better every day against myself. But early in my career, there is no doubt that I was competitive against my peers just because I felt like I needed to earn my place. Well, and it was always apparent. You know, I mean, I remember a day, gosh, probably it was like seven, seven 30 a night. And this was back when we used to actually have to go into the office and like see people crazy. Why did we do that? I don't know. But, we had, we were beta users on the first version of cadence. Yeah cadence, which is sick. cadence product, which is now just sales loft, right? But they had positioned and changed away from their data scraping tool into that email sequencing tool and the connectivity of that into Salesforce. And, we had just gotten it and we were beta users. You know, one of the, the, first reps in the, in the country, getting their hands on it. And you're there like, 730 at night trying to figure that thing out. Make sure you have it all optimized. Yeah. because because I'm a big proponent to have like, I'll put in a ton of work up front to set things up so that I can make the rest of my life easier. And when and there's no better time than the time that you're feeling motivated. Right. And I take advantage of those moments for myself because I'm just as lazy as the next person that exists. Right. But so if I can, I already know this about myself. So I gamify myself a lot in life as well. And so I try to take advantage of those moments where I'm like, I'm excited about this. I'm eager to learn about it because this will pass. This phase will pass. so I'm sure that when you saw me there at 730, that was probably earlier in our adoption. I wanted to probably be the first person to know how to use it. I probably wanted to learn everything about it. Right. I don't remember this exactly, but I do remember the tool and I do remember being early adopters and I remember loving it so much so that I every company I went to after that up until, you know, recent when my partner role, I was, I was a big proponent of that or that similar type of technology. Now, when you mentioned, by the way, this may be for some of the OGs on the, that are listening, man, that, that first cadence and sales loft version was so, so bad ass. Like you literally could scrape off of LinkedIn. That was like the big selling point. Do you remember that? Like you could use sales navigator, tie that API in, and you could literally scrape full pages of people off of LinkedIn with credits. And man, that is so cool. Like never, and so they shut that down and then SalesLoft had to kind of rebrand themselves because they were like, LinkedIn was like, nah, that's gonna keep happening. And it's never happened since then. But man, us riding that wave, that was really cool. Yeah, it's nice to be a little early to something. Yeah, I mean, as long as you're OK with the uncertainty and also putting an effort that might turn into nothing. But also if you're OK with being the person that puts in that work and now you're ahead of the game, you have a story to tell. It adds to your who you are and what story you tell to the next person down the line, whether that's a job interview or a customer or whatever it is. And I think that you and I share that in common. It's probably a big part of the bond that you and I formed in that role together was, you we both shared that love of new technology and shit, I can't believe where this is going. I can see the vision right over, you know, right over the horizon. And man, can you imagine in three years, five years, 10 years, and if we get good at doing this part today and keeping our eyes on the ball, like we're going to really have a good grasp of, you know, where things are heading tomorrow. Now, technology is... It's kind of naive because technology moves so fast, right? That it's impossible to keep up with it. Like I didn't see, I didn't see chat GPT coming. And I, I do see myself as a futurist and as far as it comes to technology and just in general, like in general life, but that, you know, there are certain technologies that come out literally out of nowhere. And I'm like, man, that is really awesome. And when that happens, I'm super excited about it. I so jazzed about stuff. I mean, it, it's, did, and it didn't come out of nowhere. Like I, I, I, I, led a marketing team at, at a, AI powered startup on like 17, 2017 or something. And, and it was the same thing as like early days of cloud. You're having to explain to people what actually is the AI, like what is the AI versus not. And then you're in deep discussions with. Is it AI or machine learning and all these variants? Like we, filed patents to be able to prove that there was AI. Like there was, there was a whole, a whole weird go-to-market strategy because you know, you're so early in the game. But I, you know, I love your, your entire thesis on like when you're interested, like when something peaks your interest. That's the time when you're like, I'm going to do this deep dive. I'm going to learn what I can because like there's a momentum to that. You're like, holy shit, they could do one. And now you're like three podcasts deep learning about it. You got six YouTube videos queued up on a playlist like you're you're like deep. Yeah, yeah, yeah, like, like, I think that that's something that anybody can emulate, because what happens is you get interested in it. And then, know, you scroll on TikTok or some shit, and then you just lose all of that momentum, the interesting aspect and the energy you have around wanting to learn about it and how it works and how you can leverage it. So yeah, I really, I really love that. This is how I do life. Right. Like big changes in life. Moving to Colorado or whatever. But whatever it is, like, you know, I will I if I'm interested, I'm going to attack it from that angle. At that point, I do have in big decisions. I do take reflection points, though, before I actually actually take action on them. but I'll like put all the stuff together to be able to decide, you know, is this the right thing for me or not? But, you know, today what I do is I, you know, there's always new innovation coming through either ISV partners, SI partners, the Salesforce technology. I mean, they've released data cloud, Slack acquisition is still like, you know, creating a bunch of heat on that side. there's new innovation coming from that. They just released the obviously AI and Einstein and then Agent Force is a new, they just released the set Dream Force. I mean, these things are so comprehensive. So there's an element of this that is interesting because I think I share this in common with a lot of people. Like I don't like being told what to do. It's exciting for me when it's my choice to do it. I hope that resonates a little bit with people because I don't feel like I'm super stubborn by any means, because I think I'm a really good team player. But if I'm talking honestly about what drives me intrinsically and gets that fire, that spark going inside, it's being, it's my idea. I'm taking it. I'm running with it. I want to show myself that I can do this or I can learn this or I had an idea and I really want to capitalize on this idea. I'm creating my own. intellectual property at that point, even though I'm not going to market with it, it's my intellectual property that I've come up with. Now, if it's something that's mandated, like a company training, even if it's really interesting, I'll be the last one to do it. It's so crazy. I just, so like in my role today with all of these things that happen, I do find that new products, new partners, et cetera, are still super exciting for me. So that's where I do capitalize on those things. But if it changes in these, this Salesforce market moves in big waves. Like it's not these tiny little waves that you and I, in those pockets that you and I use to find together in technology and advantages where we're like, no one else is doing this. It's like, well, 25 % of people are doing this now, right? And so it's like, it's not as exciting, but I still do it because it's super important for me to understand the holistic view of what I can do. And having that holistic view, allows me to also recognize small pockets that do end up existing where I'm like, guess what we're going to do next with Salesforce. We're going to be able to talk to it. I want to be able to speak to Salesforce, right. And, use AI from the, so second that chat GPT became a thing. I literally managed or I, I messaged my boss and I was like, I'm staying on Salesforce fully, but so hear me out. I want to manage all of our AI partnerships. And he was like, Slow down. this is, you know, but that's where my head went. I immediately, was like, cause I already had a vision where I was like, all right, we're to be able to no more typing. I almost no more computer. Like I'll be able to use Slack or Salesforce for my phone. Those interfaces, I'm going to talk to them. They're going to be able to recognize the fields. Chat GPT is going to be able to put those, you know, fields. They're going to be able to, he's going be able to, he, chat GPT will be able to sort through those fields. or put them into fields automatically, then they'll give me insights or recommendations automatically right back to me. And this is where I see that vision. So I pursue those things quickly. So what are people sleeping on right now in the Salesforce ecosystem? Like when you get brought in as an SME and you're like, I can't believe y'all aren't doing this. Like what is this? my goodness, Mark, that's tough. Okay. All that to say is that I think with AI and where we're heading right now with all of the different API capabilities and how much better those APIs have become, and you know what I'm talking about because we API'd back in the day, and it was It was a pretty archaic version of where we are today. Look how many different AI technologies there are, right? Chachibet, we all talk about, but you know this as well as I do, if not better. you, cause you've been in the AI space much longer than I, right? Like you've been aware of it for five years, at least longer than me that this was coming. You know, you can do AI anything. I can make a song. I have, we made a song for Dreamforce as a company, like just within, it took us 20 seconds to put in a couple of things about what we were doing. you know, full song, right? I mean, but there's all different levels of AI and one corporation or one enterprise cannot possibly have that much forward thinking and have that much experience in different use cases to bring it to the table and say, okay, guys, let's call it know, CRO, you're having an issue in revenue, you know, with some of your revenue products. This is what I think is the best solution. Is that really the best solution? I highly doubt it. If you're not involving an SI or somebody that has a bunch of different customers that they're bringing in and putting all of those mind melds together. And then another, I think another piece that everybody's missing right now is we all need all corporations and companies and end users of any technology need to understand that there's a way to connect each other, right? We should be talking more amongst each other as end users and sharing ideas like a recipe book, right? What works it don't rely on your ISV, your app exchange, your app partner, or, even an SI necessarily at that point to be that person. Like there needs to be that like an ecosystem needs to exist. And it's going to be one, two, three technology partners that come together and do this together. Very similar to like reveal or crossbeam did in the partner world. they're going to be basically like recipe books where, Hey, this is, this is how we use this. You can get in touch with me anytime. And I'm forgetting the social app that a lot of people use, Discord, Like Discord, think Discord, but for enterprise version. So the things you talk about can still be secure in a sense or whatnot, but like there's forums, boards, et cetera. And also with the combination of AI and the ability to code and do all these things, like we should be actually sharing that code, right? Like we should be sharing chunks of solutions together. being like, this is how you do it from an admin standpoint, and then there's end users, et cetera. I think just the knowledge sharing as a whole, I think that is a big, I don't think people are missing on it, I don't think it exists yet, but that I think is coming and there will be a gap filled by that. And I'm really excited about that, because that will catapult all technology tremendously for the ability of the people that are actually using it to benefit and learn from each other and to also give feedback directly to developers, et cetera. You're gonna be able to just, go over these boards as a company and be like, our technology, these are the different gaps that people are finding in the technology. This is where it's not working. This is where they're suggesting because it doesn't work, we should be switching over to this technology, right? Et cetera. Like you should be able to just pull that stuff in and chat. And that's where AI will really serve you well as an organization. That is the, let's call it like the app developer in that particular role will be able to just use AI to be like, Hey, comb all of this. all of this unstructured data that exists in these forums, give me recommendations and solutions on how I can stay relevant and what do we need to do next? How do we build our roadmap, et cetera? So that's my thought. would love, and I don't know if this is a back and forth you and I can do, but you are the person I usually turn to for this type of stuff because you always keep me fresh on ideas because we come from two different worlds. Especially now we are moving this way, away from each other, but. your tech, your, your love of technology and, in the way that your brain works with it, I would love to understand, like know where you're, what you think that next thing is or where people are missing the boat right now. Well, I think you're right that it really ties into community led growth. think you're less likely to churn if you're generating ideas on how to utilize the tool or solution better. And it's easier to upsell into new areas, new functionality. You know, if they're seeing a community talking about all the great ways that they're utilizing X new product line. So, yeah, I definitely think it's that, but I think to your earlier point, the change from the integration being more technical to now it's more, do I know the North Star and am I creative enough to know when it moves? And coming up with new ideas based on their use cases, riffing off of old experiences like I think that level of creativity and flexibility tied in with real life experience. I think that's what people are paying for because I don't, nobody needs to know the where to click or the specific code. mean, AI can turn out the code, you know? So like it's an area where the one thing AI can't replace is community. and creativity. And if you can, can do those two things together. I think that's where the secret sauce is because then it's about how do you best leverage the technology? How do you best implement it? What are, what are the rules and the strategies and how do you be successful in that environment? So yeah, I think there's just a little bit of a change. It used to be, I need, you know, even with Salesforce in particular, you needed to know. exactly where to look and even programming to a degree to be able to get it to do the things that you needed it to do. That's not true anymore. Now what you need is a little bit of innovation and an idea from a community that you're in. Yeah. for your, listen, Mark, for your young career listeners, I will tell you right now, there is a, there is a really good space for you today. If you're looking for a career opportunity or where's your place in this, this ecosystem or technology in general, like the technology for AI exists, it is no different than a database. You're querying a database become an expert query. or asker of the technology of the answer, right? Like you need to, like if you can get really, really good at understanding how to ask the technology for the right answers, you will be a very, very, very valuable asset for a while. It's gonna, mean, AI is going to take that over too. That's not, that is without a doubt. And I don't think we've got a giant window here, but there is a window. And also if you learn that today and you have, you can capitalize on it today. Not only are you going to capitalize on your career today and that's a value to you, but just understanding why it's valuable and how you do that today, I think will help you transition into your next role. These roles that are about to exist that we don't even understand yet. Like we, we don't like we, I think truly as we talk about it, let's use a software SaaS company as an example, Mark. I think, and this is a bold statement. I think probably other people have made it, but I almost want to ear muff a lot because I support over a hundred different sales reps in my current role today. And I will say ear muffs to all of those folks. I think that sales reps up to a very, very high level, let's call it like key accounts and hire are going to be replaced by AI. within the next 10 years easy, five years is questionable. And it depends on the scale of your business. think small businesses in certain industries might still value that hands-on approach because they also, it's hard for them to put the structure of technology in place. like the reality is because every technology connects to the other technologies, right, via API, I think the real experts in this space are going to be the people that understand how to create mega solutions, Like multiple technology solutions with one use case or coming from one problem. And those folks are going to be, I wouldn't even say myself, because I'm a partner manager, right? So I manage the technology partnership between Box and Salesforce from a go-to-market standpoint. Not from a technology standpoint, but from a go-to-market standpoint. My role might exist longer than a traditional AE or a CSM perhaps, but I'll be the next phase after that. But get really, really, really good at understanding how APIs and technology work. don't have to create APIs, but just understand what that concept is. anybody that, any of your listeners that want to just have a coffee with me sometime and I can go over that with them. if they're really curious about it they don't know, like understanding how technologies work together and then also go to market together to create solutions and get really good at becoming friends, right? Like help your company be friends with the next company. And that value is going to be very, very important for the next wave of these technology companies. I'm interested to hear your thought on that, but I definitely think that that's where we're heading pretty quick. Well, it's more it's more trusted, right? So just think like an event, right? Like if I'm putting together an event, maybe it's like a dinner or a roadshow kind of thing. If I'm putting that together for just my company, everybody instantaneously knows that it's a sales pitch. And it doesn't matter where you do it, how you do it doesn't matter how you market it. The the inference immediately is that This is a sales pitch. But if I've partnered with these other two non-competitive but collaborative entities, like we're all in the same ecosystem. And now I do the dinner with them. A it cost me less money. I have way more people doing invites and bringing people to the table. But also it does not seem. like a sales pitch, it seems like community. And that's, think where the magic happens. And I will also say to your point about the sales reps getting replaced. I don't necessarily agree with all of the fear mongering around all of go-to-market with AI replacing jobs. I think the people that are replacing jobs, like they're doing these mass layoffs and then trying to replace like, the seasoned copywriter with AI. I think they're going to end up seeing some real negative downturns over the next couple of years, because it's not that AI can't do what you're asking it to do. It's do you know what to ask? Because the the magic of just growth in general, anything can go to market is it's just all growth. And the magic of growth is doing something that's never been done before. You know, I mean, Steve Jobs changed music for better or for worse changed it in an instant when he talked about a thousand songs in your pocket with the iPod. AI could not come up with that because AI only has the information of what's happened before. It doesn't know what's going to happen next. And so You know, I do think it's a, it's a shift in skills. think colleges are ill equipped for this shift in skills. And there's a lot of X factory things that you're going to be looking for in interviews that, you know, right now, maybe managers are ill equipped to assess. but I think, I think a, if If you are good at building relationships and co-marketing and collaborating across an ecosystem and you don't let your, your pride get in the way of a feature you might build in the roadmap two years from now, that's competitive. Like if you don't let that get in the way, I think you're much better off. And then I also think you're much better off if you lean into the what's next, what could be, you know, that, that creative innovation. because that's the one thing that AI cannot do. Well said. It's interesting because my wife sent me a podcast to listen to while we were heading up towards where you have a cabin actually in the thumb. That was my first time up there. It was beautiful by the way. It was my very first time being up on that peninsula. And I wish I could give credit to the podcast and who had this idea, but just know it's not original. OK, it's not my original idea that I'm coming up with here. But this person was also a futurist, heavy into technology. And she was saying, you know, where do I think kids in college or coming out of high school should focus their energy if someone had to put the magic wand on me to give you that answer? This is my this is her answer. And I think she's spot on is, you know, I just Let's rewind 10 minutes ago and I was telling your audience that they need to be good at querying and understand how to talk to AI. That's not wrong, but I missed the other element of it. And this goes into right, what you were just saying, Mark, like, and I believe it's like a blending idea here, but I think it's right. It's like, we're no longer specialists. Like I think the kids coming out of college today need to have. a broader understanding of things in general, like maybe it's an industry plus a technology or multiple technologies or multiple industries in this, like have more of a consultancy type hat on your head where you're thinking like big picture versus where when we came into this market, the value was definitely like if you were a generalist, you got paid in this bottom tier, right? This bucket, right? And your whole goal. was to stay in the same industry, in the same use cases, as long as you possibly could in technology, because that was where you started making bucks. Because if you were eight years into solving the same problem, if you were 10 years or 15 years into solving that same exact problem, you made the big bucks in our world. That part of it, though, is like, you're going to, I don't think that exists very quickly here. It does still today. There are certain and don't, and that will never go away completely, but as a general rule. I think that the more, the better you are at understanding multiple technologies, not just at the surface, but how they interact or industries and how like these different use cases and you're, you are a kind of like a specialist generalist in a sense. I think that's where your value is going to come in. And when these recruiters start knocking on your door or calling or you're, you're knocking on their door, like, and they're asking you questions, I think that's going to be what they're looking for versus, yeah, I've been in the same industry for 10 years saving the same, solving the same, you know, use case, et cetera. mean, technology is going to outpace that in like just by itself, let alone like the ability to connect these technologies together. Like you gotta have a broader skill set than us in our generation that we came up with. And I think it's it's no longer about having the Rolodex. I think it's about how you've connected with the Rolodex. You know, I think empathy and relationship building is so much more important today than it ever was before. AI can do a lot of a lot of the manual tasks and everything. But I think the magic of like like what you just did at Dreamforce, I mean, the magic is having those face to face meetings, connecting with people, understanding their, their real problems and the motives behind them. And like all of that, that, you know, mean, thankfully, I suppose, AI can't really do that now. They, they, AIs, I don't know if it ever will get to the point where it truly is able to understand human emotion enough to connect in the same way an empathetic seller is able to. Yeah, I mean, maybe when Neuralink exists, right, and we can get real time understanding of how the human brain works in certain and then what our outcome, what we derived as an outcome, maybe with enough of that data set. But yeah, like we're nowhere near that today, though. Like, I mean, flying cars is it's about as close that is right. But like, I mean, we're not saying it's impossible, but it's not it's not like something that, you know, we should be focused on today. Yeah, I mean, the empathy piece is super important. And the one thing that you mentioned, like I had dream for us, you know, we had bunch of one-on-one meetings with our customers, and that's what we valued the most. Like, of course, we've got a booth. We've got a big booth. People can come by. We give them swag. We give them demos. We shake hands, kiss babies, introduce them to the surface level of what we're doing, and that's all really exciting stuff, and it's exciting for our customers and for prospects, et cetera. So I'm not saying that's not important, but where the real magic happened was in those one-on-one meetings with our customers. And the magic of it is the empathy piece, listening to them and truly caring about how the problems that they're having, either just in general or even some of them were with our technology, right? Like the gap, like the shortcomings of our technology of where it is today and the ideas that they have and where they're just like, if I could just do this, right. And it's driving me insane that it doesn't do that. And you're like. Yeah, I hear you like, you know, that is an element that I agree with you, AI is not going to be able to create. the seller is changing. It used to be, like all the movies, Like, Glenn Gary, Glenn Ross, Like, coffee's for closers. Well, guess who's closing deals today? People that truly listen and give a shit about the people that they're talking to. And there's no more of this machismo that is allowed to exist in this ecosystem. Like, SaaS has changed that. it's long term. It's a lifetime value of that customer. And so in order to have a lifetime value, you need to have a customer for a lifetime. you're building it. You need a person, you need to hire people that have real human elements to them, not business elements to the core. Like there's got to be a good balance of those two things. And I think, especially for me coming up in sales, like it didn't feel like that. Like the kudos always went to the person that could put their emotions aside and just get a deal done. Right. Like that, that changed years ago, though. Like, and I'm not talking like, like that was. relatively recent within like the last seven to eight years, perhaps like in a real big way. I mean, what what series A or B company can handle their top two customers churning in a year like and as a thing, if you're not if you're not building relationship and that's across the entire go to market landscape like that's not just the CS team. That's not just the salesperson who closed it and it's not just marketing like all of those pieces need to work together to create that environment that we've been talking about. You need to have. a community, you need to have empathetic conversations, you need to be able to have a back and forth real dialogue about the issues in your product. Yeah. And why do you think that we went from, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you. Go ahead. I was going to say like, this is, if there's no truer like thing to look at back as a litmus test that is real, like when I started in, in, in technology and in sales in general, like there was no such thing as a customer success manager, right? There, there was no such thing as an account executive necessarily, like an account, if there was the account executive was really an account manager, right? And an account manager managed current customers and Net News, right? And they had a territory and your job was to sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, And no matter what, like even if you went to your manager and was like, I just had the best current customer call and they have these issues, it's like, okay, so what are you selling to them? It's like, well, didn't you just hear what I said? They bought the technology or the solution a year ago and they've only got. 10 % adoption and that 10 % is shitty. Like they are not happy, right? Like we didn't do what we said we were going to do. And you were looked at at that point, like, and again, this is not super long ago, but this is, you know, prior to this, the shift that we had was like, well, he's too soft or she's too soft. She cares too much. Like it's not about that. It's about the bottom line. Guess what? It's still about the bottom line. But companies have realized that to get that number, like You can't turn customers the way that we were before. And you don't get testimonials from customers that you're not taking care of. Customers are looked at as partners these days. We use that language. That language really does exist for us. It may not exist for the customer because it takes a while for enough repetition of proving that that's the way that it feels for both sides, for them to change that and feel that authentically. But that's where we're heading, really. We value customers these days more than we used to because it costs us a lot of money to onboard them, costs us a lot of money to pay our people to sell to them and to onboard them. And then it also takes a lot of money, like from your side of the world, you know this really well, to just even attract somebody or get your awareness of your brand out. Like it's so expensive. like take care of your current customers, get testimonials, make it work. And that's where the CSM is so important. like a parent where that shift happened. And that was every company now in technology has an AE or account director and they have a support arm directly correlated or next to them that their job is to make sure that that customer is successful and their technology has exploded in the CSM world about how do we measure success? How do we make sure that our customer's temperature is good? Mm-hmm. up to renewal, not just 30, 60, 90 days before that renewal point, right? And then now you're like sending them an email that says like, hey, we're going to renew you. know, auto renewal is coming up. You know, you just sneak an email in, which is like unheard of. shouldn't that those practices have completely changed in a great way. And again, that takes us from being like car salesmen into real solution sellers that you can go home at the end of the day and feel really, really good about how you've solved something. And by the way, you get to see it in the real world. You know, we help. Big customers like Nike or my kid, my son is a huge wrestling fan. WWE is a, is a customer. I mean, we do things behind the scenes that I know and I see these things in real life. And I'm like, yeah, because we are busting our asses on the backend to make sure that the things that they're struggling with, we're actually coming to the table and we're helping. And by the way, a lot of times that does involve bringing partners in to that mix. And we're introducing those partners, like as non-competes, like we're like, Hey, come in. help us out and this will be better for our customer. And ultimately that means that we're gonna have a happier customer and they trust us and that's huge. And I love that part about this, because I didn't grow up to be a salesperson. I actually wanted to dedicate my life to being an education individual, which means that I really care about the outcomes of people, which is easy for me to transition. was the easiest transition period for me to do is to help feel that about companies. But the reality is like, don't. help companies. do help people still today. Like I don't talk to Nike. I talk to Dave, you know what I mean? Or whoever it is there at Nike that I'm talking to, I'm helping them solve their solutions so they can go home and they don't stay, you know, the whole weekend worrying about things, et cetera. Like they can go home and pick their kids up from soccer, et cetera. And by the way, the company's thriving and that is so huge today that we have that power in our hands as technology professionals. And that's what I am super passionate about and love being in this ecosystem. I couldn't see myself changing today unless something else happens crazy like another technology or something that happens. I'll be like, man, but this is a really cool space to be in. I feel very privileged to have the career that I have. Well, what, what box seems to do really well. And, know, something that I couldn't convince an old CEO of, is that, you know, your, your events are not just for net new customers. Your events are for your users and, and, and you can argue, and I had to argue this, this point, it's you can have no decision makers that are there at all from that customer. And it doesn't matter because those users, some of them are going to be decision makers at this company or at another. Like there's, there's this whole funnel of, of just folks utilizing your solution. And if you type them up and they love the community, they love the product, they, they're able to be open and honest and you're, you're able to get the ego out of the way. Like, I, I think it makes a big difference. And you, you attack something like a. Like a dream force, like, let's just face it, like box would have to be a dream force. There's no, there's no way around it. And so you get the big booth for credibility. You know, you want people walking by and like, we use that. Let me drop by. And then you give them swag. You make them feel good about their life. you know, you have your customer meetups, you know, your, your, your user meetups and things you do that offsite. And then where you actually close the business is going to be those one-on-one meetings. You know, and you're booking that before the event. You're not waiting for somebody to come up to the booth. You're you're booking best fit, likely customers, and they're all having meetings. You're also booking customers that have upsell opportunity like you can go after the white space like you know, you need to attack all of these angles because those users, the ones who have no power at all right now, might be the one that gets rid of your product in a year and a half. And that is such a devastating blow to the business. And if you're only focused on the short term stuff, now you're going to have to spend another 30 to $50,000, maybe even $80,000 in customer acquisition costs to go and try to replace that customer down the road. Like really, like you got to do all of these things. You got to do them well. And if you're not doing that 360, you're ultimately going to shoot yourself in the foot. Either you're going to bring in too much new business. And then you've got flawed implementation and you've oversold and now you've got churn. But if you're not doing any of the top of funnel stuff, you can't replace the customer. You can't grow new business. like, you know, some customers are just going to be acquired or go out of business and then you've got nothing to replace them. So yeah, it's, it's interesting, but yeah, box. I think the way that, that y'all attack, you know, big shows, particularly with dream force. I think really hits that it's a 360 degree view. you know, like when you're putting that together and you're kind of managing that from like the, the, the channel and partner ecosystem, do you have any like best practices or things that, that you put into place to make sure that you're having the right conversations with the right people in the right places? You're setting me up really well for something that is secret sauce and. Part of me is hoping that none of my competitors are listening to this because you know this. This is not a hard thing to follow, but it's not something that people do regularly. So it wouldn't be hard to emulate this, but this is where a lot of our success comes in. You know who's like who's sitting in our booth, Mark at Dreamforce? They are our most talented technical resources that have the ability to also communicate with customers. are they are our expensive unicorns that we pay good amounts to keep on our payroll. We keep them very happy because we value them and they understand that we value them. Those are the folks that we fly out and sit and have them at a booth. Versus, know, and no, like we have a combination of people, but at any point if you show up to a box booth at any one of our events, you're going to find out that you have a team of very capable people that care about you as a customer or a prospect, and they're passionate about what they do. So liken this to like, imagine the contrast of this is like you call into Verizon or Comcast and you're having an issue with your internet, right? Can you imagine if you walk up and the person or the, I'm sorry, you call this, this hotline and instead of getting a person that knows nothing about what you're talking about, they don't know who you are, et cetera, et cetera. And they're just like, you know, following a prompt, et cetera. And it's the most generic experience you've ever had, which is what we all experienced. And I don't blame all centers for that, right? it off and on again? It's like, I will stab you. You got it, yep. And by the way, if you just so happen to do all those things, right, and then I'm still your person and you're still on the phone with me, then I'm gonna get you to a different person and then we're gonna continue to escalate this up the chain. No, that's not the way that we do it, especially at these events. Like we set up, the people that are in our one-on-ones and at our booth and at our happy hours, et cetera. They are the people that are most talented that can answer any technical question that you have and they have really good people skills. like when someone walks up to the booth, our folks are, I am so excited to introduce somebody to one of my people that I'm working with. was, I took a different role this year at Dreamforce. I was a, we just kind of deemed this year, it's never existed, just a booth manager. And all I did for my time on that booth was sitting there and I was watching and helping facilitate getting the right people in touch with the right people at all times. it's really hectic. talking about 1200 leads over the course of three days. like you span that. Yeah, pretty much. And a part of that is because I'm involved in so many conversations in my role today, you know, because of my, as a SME, a subject matter expert on Salesforce, I'm talking. a lot of to a lot of different customers with a lot of different use cases, et cetera. So I have a pretty good understanding of like where people are. Like when I start hearing certain things, I can understand where they're at on their journey, who to get them in touch with, et cetera. But like the point being is like, we're not just bringing only the people that live in the city or, you know, for because it's cheap or we have some of those folks that that's also help us supplement. like We will never be without the folks that you can walk up and get a real answer. Hey, listen, I'm a box customer or I tried box. I tried to download box two years ago and the folder structure blah, blah, was wonky or something. I couldn't get this to happen. And I tried Apex coding, et cetera. It's like, cool. I got you. Let me introduce you to so-and-so right now. And they will walk you through this right now. Like what else you got? Throw us your hardest problem that you possibly can. and there won't be another person behind it. Like this is the person. Like this is the person that I would, in a normal scenario, we would escalate, you know, multiple chains up. Those are the people. But you know, I learned that a couple of years ago in my first true sales role in Salesforce as an AE, I moved to Colorado, crazy experience, moved with my wife and we both. quit our jobs and I took a different job with Conga. I don't know if you've heard of them, but they're pretty strong in this ecosystem. do, their claim to fame and what they're really well known for is like, know, automatic document generation, right? So they'll generate documents and pull fields in and create really cool stuff for you. So they spent their first like 10 to 12 years on what they would do is if you called into Box Support, who you got in touch with first? was actually the person who had been promoted into that position versus that's your first line is the, right? You hire somebody to be that first line. We do, they did it opposite. And I got to be really good friends with a couple of those people and realized that my customers like me now a lot because I know those guys and they will take a call like off the clock, et cetera, to help me out. And I just listened to the calls because it was a wide open space because this is how every SaaS company is these days, right? It's like an open floor plan. So I would listen to that call come in. And normally, contrast, I'm not going to tell you the company I was at right before that, but a support call comes in in a very specific area because that's all they take is support calls. And it's like cringy almost. you're like, my god, I want to crawl under my desk because that was a customer I sold to six months ago. And they're calling in. And I'm listening to the experience that they're having and I'm like, I didn't expect it to be that way. I feel terrible. I want to drive to their office right now. And I want to hug them and tell them I'm sorry. You know what I mean? Like that's the experience before, but like I got, and then I contrasted, start contrast went to conga and it just so happened that this series of experts sat in a cubicle, a set of eight like seats next to my team. And it just was. logistics of the seating. had nothing to do with like how we operated as a company. And I would listen to those calls. And I was just like, I would literally like a call would get done with it would be 20 minutes over like something simple. And by the end of it, you know, there's like, I'm literally walking out, I'm taking my headset off. I have nothing to do with the call getting up. I'm taking, I'm walking over to that person's cubicle and high fiving them and being like, that sounded awesome. Like seriously, you just crushed that. That person has to be so happy right now. And so I learned that now that is not super cost effective on a scale. like, unfortunately, like I can't convince or tell people that that's the right move, but I certainly can tell you that if you do enough of that, and that is at least a priority for your organization to figure out how to manage that appropriately. Like we use Slack today as a technology and any of our customers that have a messaging technology, any of our customers that have Slack, my first level of recommendation as they are adopting our technology is to put me on Slack. and connect with me so they can connect immediately to me. And I am always doing what I can to support my best technical resources, almost like a quarterback that gets really good support from their offensive line, right? That's me. And that's like I'm. 18 of 18 Jared Goff on Monday night? Yeah, like, yeah, exactly. Like he so Jared Goff had a great game. He should be buying steaks and et cetera for his offensive line. And that's the way I look at my role, like the people that support our customers the best and give them the best experience are the people that I want to buy steak dinners for. And I do everything I can. If they ask me for anything, I don't care what it is. I don't care how busy I am. Like they are my priority because I know I can deliver that customer experience to them. to my customers the next time. I feel pretty good about that because I'm taking care of the people internally. But an organization that prioritizes that, which Box does, and so did Conga back in the day when I worked there. I know things have changed a lot because there was an acquisition. So I'm not speaking for them today and I'm not saying anything is I just don't know better because it's been a year since I've been there. So I can't I can't tell you how they operate today. But that taught me enough about like how to like there is a way to do this. There is a better way to do this in technology. And if we just get out of that old mechanism of thinking it's okay to go the other direction where it's like just the people that are fresh off the cuff like for like two weeks, you've got those on those people taking your frontline calls like that's tough. It really is tough to have that. And again, I get scale like I'm not, you know, I'm not in that position to to be the financial person that's paying for this type of resources. But there's enough of this that exists in every organization in my role. I don't pay for it, but I see it. because I go and talk to those folks. I do everything I can to know the people in my organization. And ultimately my goal is always to provide that experience because I also love it when I get wedding invitations from my customers or a happy birthday or a card in the mail because they were successful and they got promoted, et cetera. Like you can't, I can't even tell you like how elated that makes me. And that makes all of this journey just so much more validated for me. know, there's good money in technology. That's obviously really makes a level of happiness. There's really good flexibility as far as like work life balance for the most part in this industry in which I don't take any of that for granted. But the thing that like literally gets me going is like if a customer is actually thankful for a different type of experience that they've had, man, like I can't, I can't, that does that. That is the best feeling. period because we spend a lot of time doing this. Right. And I have always told you this, like, and I tell everybody I work with, like, I'm not the guy to come complain to at work because I just feel like if you're there for like eight to 10 hours a day or whatever it is that whatever you're working and hopefully, you know, hopefully it's only three hours. I don't know what you, know, what everybody here is doing, but like, I hope you're super efficient and only work an hour a day and create mega success with that. Like I don't, you know, I'm not a person that counts the clock, but like however much time we have to spend there, like be good at it. to find a way, find a way to gamify yourself and be passionate about it. And that is, that's what like those elements of like customer relationships for life. And that's where a partner manager role is very different for me. And I love that about it is that I literally make these relationships and I, I don't, they don't go away once a sale's done, right? Well, and I think too, if your, if your company is series C or smaller, the same thing goes true with how you staff your large conferences, because the worst I've seen it staffed is where the entire executive team is doing all of the offsite meetings and just left the booth completely alone. You need to have somebody there who can speak on behalf of the company because you will inevitably get. that customer, that prospect, or even that analyst that drops by that booth. And you do not want their only interaction to be, you know, that, that, that marketing coordinator that they talk to, like, you know, and, shout out to the hardworking marketing coordinators out there, the field marketers, all of, all of the event staff, but, but I'm sorry, you don't, you don't want them having that conversation. So, you know, divide and conquer. I have been at companies where the majority, if not all of the executive team thought that they were too good for the booth. And I think that there were several missed opportunities in that. Now, as you get bigger, you have to start changing things. But I think your point on having people there who know their shit and can handle any of those instances because this is not rocket science. Y'all the statistical probability that somebody from the press or an analyst will walk past and up to your booth is not nothing. You know, the statistical probability that somebody is going, you know, is a a happy or an angry customer and they're going to come up to your booth. It's a pretty significant amount like. You got to prepare for that stuff. And I think the people that are, you know, staffing their booth with nobody and then doubling down just on the private meetings, I think is a problem. And at least those people are doing better than the folks who are staffing both with folks that. You know, don't know everything, but I think it's this tiered system and I think people, people need to take your advice. I think. having having people and not just that in-person events, but I love how you likened it to calling in the support line. Like who and who is answering support calls? And, I mean, we used to do this thing where, you know, back. So I've managed STRs for a long time and, I've always done this thing where where I will do a call contest where I'm making the cold calls to still do it. I used to do that with him, by the way, so I can vouch for him. He's not lying. And this would be an after hours thing. We would do this after hours together. Yeah. And so I think, I think what, what people are, are maybe missing and, as you start scaling up these organizations, it doesn't mean that you need to have somebody full time answering that call for eight hours a day, but it does mean the people who know their shit have to put their egos aside and do it for an hour every week. So that way there's education out of that. There's baseline set and you're never going to know what is or is not working until you actually do the job. Good point, Mark, honestly. you're right, you've been managing SDR teams for I don't know how long you said, but I was there for your first one when you launched, when you met for your very first SDR team. So and I did see the work you put in, but before you had that SDR team, we were your SDR team because that's again, that's where we started to shift as. back then. everything, sales did all of it, right? And so as we, know, our entire organization, as you onboarded, like everybody, like there was a process, but Mark had his own process and his process involved making you as uncomfortable. First of all, interviewing with Mark is very comfortable. He very personable. He asked you some really like cool questions that no one else will ask you, like no one other interviews ask you. So you feel like there's a human element to it. But then at working for him, that first week, he will challenge every part of who you are as a human. Like literally, it's like boot camp with Mark, except for, you know, you get to go home at a reasonable time. He's not keeping you there over after hours. He's very respectful of the time that you have. And as a human, like you have real lives outside of this, et cetera. But like inside the walls, like let's get you really comfortable with being uncomfortable right now, because the most successful people in these roles are OK with it. And that is a that is a That is an art form that, because of your empathy upfront, works really well for your because of your management style, because we respect you for it, because we see. And then also, again, he did those calls with us. It was pretty awesome. He would be in there and we would just go, his turn, my turn, his turn, my turn, his turn, my turn. And we would just be, we're on the same Rolodex, we're on the same, you know what mean? We're on the, we're pulling from the same reports and it's just one after another, right? And that's pretty. is, but my memory has me winning those contests. So I don't I don't know. I don't know how I don't know how things would go today. We're both a little bit a little bit grayer. So we have to have to try that again at some point. But yeah, just. can use iDashboard as a, we both know data sets and databases and visualization well enough. We could just do like a hundred calls. Let's see who comes out on top. just for, just for shits and giggles. Maybe it's something, so we post on Facebook marketplace. don't know. Anyway. All right. So I always end these, these, calls the same. I, I want to give you the last word and I want you to speak to rookie Scott Jones, like fresh in SAS sales and like, and go to market. What advice would you give rookie Scott Jones? this one's so easy for me, Like you do belong, you do belong and anybody that gives you, hires you. They're they're hiring you because they they saw something in you, which is your human element when you were in those interviews. And I would say also in the interview process, like some people are really nervous. like outside of that, like you're totally somebody different in an interview process, like try to be yourself because it's an opportunity for you to help them understand who you are because the people that are hiring you for this role are experienced in that role and they understand what successful people in that role look like, et cetera. So like if you're not gonna be a good fit but you faked it all the way through and you're not gonna be happy internally, like that's not gonna do anybody any service at all, mostly yourself. But that's not to say don't fake it till you make it because if you know you want to be in that role, and you think you belong there and that is you're going to be passionate about being there by all means, fake it. Like, I mean, just do your best to just be confident when you don't feel confident because you know that you'll get there, et cetera. But what I'll say is like I said earlier in the conversation, I did a lot of things that ended up working out for me well in my career from a technology and adopter and working super fucking hard. Like I was no one beat me. like from how many hours I worked, there was no doubt about that until I had kids and then I became like mega dad, et cetera. So like that's my Superman role or whatever. But like up until that point, like no one was going to outwork me. But it was always about the results. like I did deserve to be there. And if I would have trusted myself earlier in my career, it wouldn't have taken me as long to get to the point that I'm at. I've known that I needed to be in this role for about eight years. And so I spent five years. hunting around for different roles that I didn't want to be in, but thought that's where I belonged in a sense, because I knew how to speak the lingo, I knew how to do the job, et cetera, but I always wanted to be in the role that I'm in today. And so, but I wasn't confident enough to go and ask for it. And truthfully, in all fairness, like people came to me and asked me to come into this role. So that's how that worked out. So if I could go backwards and say, like, listen, the crazy part is A year before I got a recruiter to reach out to me and tell me that I belonged in this role, I was driving home from vacation with my wife and I had just, could not, mean, neurons firing a thousand percent. And I was like, I need to make a change and this is what I want to do. I wrote, had, all we had were paper plates in our car because we were on like a camping thing. And I asked my wife, I was like, can you grab though, like grab anything to write with? Can you scribe some things down for me? And before I knew it, three paper plates. back to back to back to back, front and back, completely written down with this is exactly what I'm gonna do, this is how I'm gonna do it, and then I waited another year. And I waited and I didn't do shit with it except for know that someday I'm gonna be ready, someday somebody's gonna think I'm ready for that role. And sure enough, as soon as I got into the role, I was totally ready. I was overly ready to do this. So I would say use who you are at your core. to your advantage and trust yourself for those things. Like you have people around you that love you, that respect you, et cetera, that give you all this love and praise for like the things that you do. That's real genuine stuff. like, and if that's who you feel you are, like go find a role and find something you can gamify yourself for that you'll be passionate about, that you know that you will want to do, that you'll be successful in. Because just being in a role because it pays you well today or because you've already had three AAE roles, so you might as well apply for the next AAE role because you don't know how to do the other thing. Like I've done this a couple of times in my career where I stayed longer in roles and just transferred from company to company doing the same job that I didn't like doing because I didn't feel like I was ready for that and I was wrong. So like that's what I would say, just be confident in where you want to go. And the worst thing that can happen is that it doesn't work out and you go. and find a role back where you were before or whatever, right? Or you'll find out a new thing because they're going to give you feedback, right? Like so, yeah. And I would say the other thing is just like really learn to how to lose ego across the board. If you can learn how to lose ego and life in general, like it's going to help you across all your personal relationships, your friendships, long term friendships, your business colleagues, relationships, cross departmental, etc. Ego is real. You got to have an identity and you got to know who you are and the morals that you stand up for but morals and ego are two different things so like learn how to not be stubborn about things and listen and Absorb and see if they do jive with your morals. It's really the compass that you need to use It's not about who's right or wrong or like what feels prickly or not like be comfortable with like hearing new ideas and Etc and not and being okay with not being the smartest person in the room because I tell you I'd never been that person But the best, I've never been the smartest person in the room, but the rooms with more smart people, people that are smarter than I am versus the ratio that are like closer to me, it feels way cooler and way better being up here with people that you're constantly learning from and absorbing new things from. You're evolving, you can feel yourself evolving. It's a really awesome thing. So those are probably two things, but yeah. And then also last, stay in touch with your friends. Like Mark, we've been friends for 10. 10 years at least or so at this point. And it's been different transitions. And the only commonality we have is we work together for like two years, right? Outside of that, we've been friends and I've moved across the country twice since then. We've both had, I've had three kids since we knew each other. Like life got crazy, your kids have grown. Like life is just crazy. But when we see each other or we talk to each other, reach out or text or whatever it is, it's always the same. It's always familiar. It's always like, I'm excited. And it doesn't have to be complex, just keep good people in your life, people that support you, people that also you can learn things from. And I learn a lot from you, Mark, and other people that I keep in my life, and there's value there. yeah, those are three things out of one, and that's a pretty typical Scott answer.