Podcasts about agentsync

Tony chats with Jenn Knight, Co-Founder and CTO at AgentSync. This is an update episode, her co-founder Niji was on ep. 342. AgentSync started in 2018 with the focus of helping US agents and agencies onboarded and get their licensing in order and streamlined. They started with a strong compliance focus and now have grown to also have a strong focus on efficiency. Jenn speaks about their work with incredible passion and this is a fascinating episode!Jenn Knight: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jlouiseknight/AgentSync: https://agentsync.io/Prior episode with Niji: https://youtu.be/XmdhJWeLMVk?si=ZZ7nRk2fgyP2ii2iVideo Version: https://youtu.be/r0Nq8KBl6fs

In this episode of The Insurance Technology Podcast, Reid chats with Niji Sabharwal, co-founder and CEO of AgentSync, in an engaging conversation that blends culture, creativity, and cutting-edge technology.Need some inspiration to keep momentum with your New Year's resolutions? Tune in to hear about Niji's ambitious spirit, from selling candy in middle school to the journey that eventually led him to co-found AgentSync.Episode HighlightsGrowing up as a first-generation American in the Bay area (00:50)A punk rock era, selling candy and going on BMX adventures (4:22)College life and job hunting in a recession (7:54)The Zenefits journey (16:06)Starting AgentSync, finding a market (30:21)Working with your spouse (37:26)AI's impact on insurance (55:12)Entrepreneurial advice, having a north star (57:48)Leader vs. problem solver (1:02:14)Leaning into the hurt (1:04:00)

In this conversation, Rob Beller and Lee interview Jenn Knight, the CTO and co-founder of Agentsync, a technology company focused on streamlining the insurance compliance process. They discuss the company's origins, the role of technology in improving agent onboarding, and the evolving landscape of insurance technology. Jenn shares insights into the challenges faced by agents and carriers, the importance of personal connections in insurance, and the recent growth and fundraising success of Agentsync. Jenn also discusses her journey in fundraising, the importance of maintaining relationships with investors, and the evolving role of AI in the insurance industry. She emphasizes the need for human involvement in insurance processes, even as technology advances. The discussion also touches on the implications of AI for job creation and destruction, and concludes with insights into the future aspirations for Agentsync, focusing on enhancing connectivity and compliance in the insurance space. Key Highlights Jenn Knight discusses the inception of AgentSync and its focus on simplifying regulatory compliance and agent onboarding through technology. Insightful conversations about the evolving role of agents and the company's commitment to enhancing the agent experience. The impact of artificial intelligence on the insurance industry and how AgentSync is integrating AI into its processes. The challenges and opportunities faced in the current fundraising environment and AgentSync's roadmap for continued growth. Jenn shares her thoughts on the future of insurance technology and AgentSync's vision for a more connected industry ecosystem. Quotes "We started with the premise that technology could help streamline [agent onboarding] and make that ready-to-sell experience meaningfully better in this space." – Jenn Knight "Insurance is so, so personal. And there are aspects that you do not want to get wrong or be left out trying to talk to a chatbot about, frankly." – Jenn Knight "Our goal is to use technology on both sides of the fence to help all the parties streamline that workflow and get access to products." – Jenn Knight

This week's guest is Jack Klingbiel. Jack Klingbiel lives in Denver CO and is highly experienced at scaling GTM operations via Sales Development. He's built out BDR teams and GTM processes from scratch at three different companies. He set up foundations at AgentSync and scaled the business from $4m in ARR to $28m ARR, Red Canary from $10m in ARR to $80m ARR and is currently at Cortex.io with the same assignment. When not at work, find him at the gym, on the golf course or playing with his soon to-be "step-dog", Bille.  --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/uncharted1/support

Hiring a virtual assistant (VA) can be a game-changer for small business owners, especially creative entrepreneurs who need to focus on their craft. Today we are joined by Jess Whatman, the Founder & CEO of AgentSync, a company dedicated to helping small business owners scale by connecting them with skilled Filipino virtual assistants.The Good Stuff You'll Learn:The big mistakes people make when hiring and onboarding their first VA and how to avoid them.Common misconceptions about hiring a VA and what you need to know.The types of creative tasks VAs can handle and any limitations they might have.How to find the right virtual assistant for your needsHow to know the right time to hire your first VAReady to take your business to the next level in the new year? Apply to join The Next Level Club here - laurahiggins.com/apply Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

As your company expands and evolves, so do your priorities for scaling revenue. It can be quite a transition, but there are critical steps that need to be taken to be fully equipped for success. Robby Allen, CRO at AgentSync, is known for his strategic prowess in optimizing revenue at all stages of business growth and wants to share his playbook with you on how to do it effectively. In this episode of the Run Revenue Show, Robby shares the transition from VP of Sales to Chief Revenue Officer, the key tips to help make the transition seamless, and how to work best at different stages of business growth. Here's what's inside:  Focus on lifetime value. Focus not just on customer acquisition but also on customer retention and growth. Hone in on your Ideal Customer Profile and understand the cost to serve each customer, especially in enterprise segments. Analyze not only the revenue each customer will generate but also the resources needed to support them post-sale. Implementing this as a strategy will help increase the LTV of each customer, contributing to healthier revenue. Reassess incentives regularly. This plays a crucial role in driving the desired behaviors within your sales team. As the company grows and the market changes, so should your incentive plans. Keep them aligned with your current organizational objectives, helping ensure everyone is working towards the same goal. Prioritize post-sales processes and customer success teams. To prevent churn and protect revenue, a strong post-sales process and a framework for delivering value to customers are crucial. Consider making customer success a revenue-oriented function; give attention and resources to the post-sales team, include your Customer Success Managers early in the sales process, and recognize their impact on revenue. A cultural shift recognizing the revenue impact of customer success teams can be a significant growth driver.   Grab this week's Checklist    Check out RunRevenue.Pro for tips, playbooks, and advice for stopping revenue leak and achieving revenue precision.    See how Clari's Revenue Platform can help you win more deals, protect your customer base, and achieve revenue precision—even in a downturn.  → Clari.com  

There's a myriad of business models that forge the paths to success for Virtual Assistants in today's market... in this episode Sasha talks to Jess Whatman, the founder and visionary behind AgentSync the Australian agency specialising in offshore outsourcing solutions. Jess shares with us the nuances in outsourcing, time management and business growth for Virtual Assistants. After years of climbing the real estate ladder and keeping up with the hustle and bustle that is Sydney, it was a business trip to the Philippines that started it all. AgentSync. is super proud to be an ethical employer, providing opportunities and benefits to their team of incredibly skilled Filipino VAs and their families. Join The VA Way Academy here. In this episode you'll also hear about: - how Jess started and scaled her VA Agency - what innovative new product Jess came up with to revolutionise the industry - how to get sales when you're starting out - offshore vs onshore virtual assistants - Jess's tips for busy mumpreneurs... and so much more! Connect with Sasha here: IG - @sashaeburne__ www.sashaeburne.com Connect with Jess here: www.agentsync.com.au IG - @jesswhatman_agentsync

00:10 | Andreessen is a Techno-Optimist- Marc Andreessen is co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz, a $35b AUM venture capital firm- "The Techno-Optimist Manifesto" celebrates potential of technology, markets, and human intelligence for societal progress and abundance- Challenges tech stagnation, anti-technology sentiment, and excessive tech regulation- Created in response to government and public apprehension on AI, the metaverse, nuclear technology, and other emerging tech01:40 | SpaceX 2nd Starship attempt- FAA completes safety review of SpaceX's Starship rocket, clearing major hurdle for its second liftoff- Next US Fish and Wildlife Service review and approve the new water deluge system- Launch date remains TBD02:32 | Startup bankruptcies could be a bottoming?- OliveAI, Convoy, Pebble, Hello Bello all declared bankruptcy or had a fire sale- Each were big companies that a few years back would have easily been able to raise additional capital to keep going- Large business failures like this force startup CEOs to recognize that they need to drive to profitability fast in order to control their own destiny and also acknowledge that the valuations of their businesses are not going back to 2021 levels- The goal is to get to market clearing prices and these realizations are catalysts to get the market there03:57 | X.com -57% to $19b- X announced a $19b internal valuation, -57% below the Musk purchase price of $44b- Musk envisions X as the ‘everything app', implying integration of functionalities like tweets, YouTube videos, checking accounts, Venmo, merchant payments, sports betting, news article micro-payments, and shopping- Investment thesis for X centers on Musk's ability to [1] actualize the 'everything app' concept, and [2] its potential adoption by US users akin to Chinese users' engagement with WeChat, the China ‘everything app'- WeChat a primary product for Tencent with a $373b market cap06:11 | Anthropic +400% in 5 months- Google invests $500m now and commits $1.5b in the future at a $25b post-money valuation (source Pitchbook)- Google previously invested $300m in Apr 2023 for a 10% stake- Amazon invested $1.25b in Sep 2023, with potential to add $2.75b at a future date07:18 | Big capital raises- Anthropic (www.anthropic.com) | $2.0b Series F, $25b valuation- Pony.ai (www.pony.ai) | $100m Series D2, $8.5b valuation- Island (www.island.io) | $100m Series C, $1.5b valuation- Zhizi Automobile (www.xn--i8sq31b1uyx4b.com) | $76m Series B, $1.45b valuation- AgentSync (www.agentsync.io) | $125m Series B, $1.25b valuation08:28 | Pre-IPO -0.21% for week- Week winners: Klarna +2.81%, Rippling +2.41%, Scale.ai +1.53%, Airtable +1.40%, Databricks +0.70%- Week losers: SpaceX -5.29%, Anthropic -2.82%, Deel -2.54%, Stripe -1.73%, Discord -1.64%- Top valuations: ByteDance $203b, SpaceX $152b, OpenAI $80b, Stripe $51b, Databricks $47b lead in current valuationInvest in pre-IPO stocks with AG Dillon Funds - www.agdillon.com

Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines.This is our Friday show, and we're talking about the week's biggest startup and tech news. Mary Ann and Alex were lucky enough to have Kirsten aboard for the roundup, which means we got to tackle an even wider array of stories than usual:Updates from the trial of former FTX CEO SBF, more here from our own Jacquie.Deals of the Week: Mary Ann was very interested in I Own My Data, while Alex wanted to talk more about AgentSync's latest venture round.Carta's CEO tried to beat back criticism, but wound up making more noise about his company's missteps.Cruise hit a roadblock with its self-driving program; we dig into how to handle a crisis and how not to handle a crisis.And to close out, notes on earnings from Alphabet and Microsoft and what they may portend for startup-related AI software demand.Equity comes out thrice-weekly for your delectation. We are back early on Monday with our weekly kickoff, see you there!P.S. Pay attention to our sister podcast Chain Reaction, we have more coming on the FTX trial that you will not want to miss.For episode transcripts and more, head to Equity's Simplecast website.Equity drops at 7 a.m. PT every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. TechCrunch also has a great show on crypto, a show that interviews foundersand more!

Harry Stebbings is the Founder of 20VC, building the next great financial institution at the intersection of media and venture capital. 20VC has reached over 125M downloads in 100+ countries and has featured the likes of Doug Leone, Bill Gurley, Marc Benioff, Daniel Ek and more. On the investing side, Harry has raised over $400M and made investments in the likes of Pachama, Linear, TripleDot, Superhuman, AgentSync, Linktree, Sorare and more. In Today's Episode We Cover: Are LPs Open for Business: How has what LPs look for in new manager investments changed? What type of funds will be able to raise? Which will not be able to raise? What can managers do to significantly increase their chances of raising a new fund? 2. The Seed Investing Landscape: Harder Than Ever Why is seed pricing as high as ever? Why are multi-stage funds more active in seed than ever? How does this impact seed? How will seed change and evolve over the next 6-12 months? 3. Series A + B: The Best Place to be Investing Why is Series A the best risk/reward insertion point when investing today? How has the competition level at Series A and B changed? What do many people not see or know about this stage of the market today? 4. Is Growth Dead: Are Growth Deals Getting Done: What two core elements are needed if you want to raise a growth round today? How have growth round valuations been impacted over the last 12 months? To what extent do founders need to change their expectations on the price of rounds they will be able to get done today? 5. M&A and IPOs: Tough Times Ahead Why will we see continued low levels of activity in M&A markets? What acquisitions are we seeing take place? When will the IPO window crack open? Why were Klaviyo, Instacart and Arm not enough to open the windows?

Being voted a “Best Place to Work” doesn't happen by accident. Aaron Wilmot shares what's he learned about creating the kind of culture where people are excited to come to work and put forth their best efforts. He points out several leadership behaviors that are key to this environment, including the investment of time in getting to know people and what's important to them.  Aaron is the Vice President of People and Talent at AgentSync, one of the Best Places to Work in Denver. Aaron has been working in the People space for nearly 20 years, and he has experience in a range of industries from Ground Handling to SaaS and a variety of stages from mature to start up. You'll discover: What a Best Place to Work looks likeWhy time, not money, is a key element in leadership The role of the C-suite in creating a positive cultureKey traits Aaron looks for when hiring new employeesThe 5 expectations AgentSync has laid out for leadersCheck out all the episodesLeave a review on Apple PodcastsConnect with Meredith on LinkedInFollow Meredith on TwitterDownload the free ebook Listen Like a Pro

Do you want to foster a culture of collaboration in your workplace? In this episode, Nils Vinje and Christine Lavery discuss six tips for creating a collaborative environment. They emphasize the importance of creating a psychologically safe environment, having clear roles and responsibilities, being able to compromise, aligning goals, setting clear expectations, and focusing on relationships. By following these tips, organizations can create an environment where everyone feels valued and included, and where collaboration is the norm rather than the exception. Listen to this episode to learn more about fostering a culture of collaboration in your workplace. Podcast highlights: 2:04 - Psychological safety - Christine explains the importance of creating an environment of psychological safety to foster collaboration. 6:21 - Clear roles and responsibilities - Why is this so important in fostering collaboration? 9:46 - Compromise - Christine talks about how it can be challenging to truly be good at compromising. 14:40 - Alignment of goals - If you want to drive productivity and efficiency, and the getting to the end result, it comes down to this. 19:48 - Expectation setting - Christine shares the importance of setting clear goals and expectations to achieve greater collaboration in the workplace. 25:10 - Focus on relationships - How building relationships with everyone in the organization, regardless of their background, personality, or objectives can foster a culture of collaboration? Connect with Christine at https://www.linkedin.com/in/christine-lavery/ Learn more about AgentSync at https://agentsync.io/ This episode is brought to you by the B2B Leaders Academy. The cost of not consistently developing your leadership skills is enormous. At the B2B Leaders Academy, you can gain access to monthly leadership training and live coaching. Being a great leader isn't hard, you just need a guide and the right set of tools. Head on over to b2bleadersacademy.com and become the leader you have always wanted to be. #Leadership #B2BLeadership #BusinessLeader

What if I told you that you could offload 90% of your to-do list? Think about ALL those things you want to do for your business but just can't find the time? What would it mean if you could have someone do those tasks for you, at a really low cost? Today, I have the absolute pleasure of sitting down with Jess Whatman who has put her business, AgentSync, into hyper-growth reaching MULTIPLE SIX FIGURES in only ONE YEAR! Her company AgentSync provides highly educated and qualified offshore VAs to real estate businesses and other industries across the country. Jess breaks down some of the stigma and misconceptions you might have around hiring an offshore VA and shares just how powerful it can be to add a VA to your business to help you reach new levels of success by working smarter, not harder!You'll hear:

On this episode, we talk with Robby Allen, Chief Revenue Officer at AgentSync, a subscription SaaS provider that helps insurance companies with compliance requirements in all 50 states.Growing up in San Francisco, Robby was exposed to the tech scene in Silicon Valley. He started his career in sales with high-growth start-ups in the B2B SaaS world. He was lucky enough to be around some companies with tremendous growth, going from zero to over $100 million in revenue. He talks about the growth mindset with companies backed by venture funds, especially the “triple, triple, double, double, double” revenue targets VCs want to see in the first five years of a company. He sees a lot more companies valuing profits over growth at all costs these days. His company works with enterprise clients, and some of those companies have been around for over 150 years. Still, he says a lot of their customer acquisition comes from word of mouth. The people in the industry know each other, and they'll talk about vendors they like and vendors they don't like to their competitors.Robby Allen -https://www.linkedin.com/in/robbyallen/AgentSync -https://www.linkedin.com/company/agentsync/ Ready to get started with Rebar?Head to https://rebartechnology.com or email info@rebartechnology.com to schedule a call today.#Saas #Subscriptions #SubscriptionBusiness #SubscriptionService

We all know that property management is challenging, and many property managers leave because of stress and burnout. However, things are changing for the better. We see many coaches, trainers, and business owners stepping up to share their collective knowledge and provide solutions to the biggest challenges in property management. One of the biggest struggles, primarily for experienced property managers, is the ability to embrace change, especially when it comes to automation, software, tech solutions, and even offshore support. So how can we encourage property managers and business owners to try these solutions?In this episode of The Property Management Podcast, Kylie interviews Jess Whatman, owner of AgentSync, a company that offers offshoring, system implementation, and automation services to streamline your processes. Jess combined her passion for real estate, her love of helping others succeed, and her two decades of real estate operations and offshoring experience to bring AgentSync to life. If you're interested in reducing stress and burnout in your business, tune in to this episode and discover what tools are available to enable your team to focus on supporting customers instead of sitting behind the desk doing mundane tasks. “If I say something where it's not necessarily the best option to offshore, maybe there's automation available, we'll go down that path, where that's best for the agency.”- Jess WhatmanIn This Episode:- Meet Jess Whatman, owner of AgentSync Real Estate Offshoring & Systems Specialist- What gap in the property management business does offshoring solve, and does it help companies retain their staff?- What's causing stress and burnout in most businesses?- The top AI and tech solutions that businesses should consider- What was the property management industry like 20 years ago?- What makes AgentSync solutions unique?- The reason Jess started AgentSync- Jess recommends resources for personal developmentAnd more!!!Resources:- Trello Project Management Tool - PropertyMe Online PM Software- Inspect Real Estate - Create how-to guides with screenshots in seconds - The 10X Rule (Audiobook) by Grant Cardone- Make Maintenance Your Superpower with Tapi (Mention That Property Mum and receive one month free on Tapi)- Rental Heroes - Inspection Express- The Tarsi Way - PMVA - That PM Planner - Join Our Done for You Social Media Management Service-

Parker Conrad is the Founder & CEO @ Rippling, the company that lets you easily manage your employees' payroll, benefits, expenses, devices, apps & more—in one place. To date, Parker has raised over $697M for Rippling from some of the best including Sequoia, Founders Fund, Greenoaks, Bedrock, Kleiner Perkins and Initialized to name a few. Prior to founding Rippling, Parker was the Co-Founder and CEO @ Zenefits and if that was not enough, Parker is also a prominent angel having invested in the likes of Census, Pulley and then also AgentSync and TrueNorth, alongside 20VC Fund. In Today's Episode with Parker Conrad: 1.) Entry in Startups and Zenefits: How did Parker make his way into the world of startups? How did Parker end up being kicked out of his own company, Zenefits? How did he respond? How did that experience of being kicked out of Zenefits inspire him to build Rippling? 2.) Parker Conrad: The Leader: How does Parker define "high performance"? How would Parker describe his leadership style today? Why does Parker fundamentally disagree that with speed comes a trade-off in quality? How does Parker ensure Rippling does all things fast and to the best of its ability? How would Parker break down his decision-making framework today? How does he decide what to prioritize vs not? How does he decide what to delegate vs not? What are Parker's biggest insecurities in leadership today? How have they changed over time? What does Parker do to combat and mitigate them? 3.) Rippling: The Compound Startup How does Parker define a compound startup? What types of business do this verticalized approach work for vs not work for? What does Parker believe are the 4 core benefits of this approach? What are the single biggest challenges of building a compound startup? 4.) Rippling: The Economics: How does this compound startup approach impact ability to cross-sell? How much net new ARR today comes from cross-sell? What have been some of Rippling's biggest lessons on what it takes to do cross-sell so effectively? How do the margin profiles differ across their different products? How have the margin profiles changed over time? Why does Parker not believe that most startup margins are accurate? How does the compound startup approach change the amount invested in R&D? How does that impact the fundraising requirements of the business? 5.) Rippling: The Partner Ecosystem: How does Rippling think about building out the best partner ecosystem? What will it take for that to work? Why do Rippling want to introduce services that compete with their own products? Why do they not only build their own? How do the margins differ when comparing revenue share on partner products vs Rippling products? What are the single biggest barriers to this partner ecosystem working?

In today's episode Brandon interviews Niji Sabharwal, the co-founder and CEO of AgentSync. They talk about getting sued, dealing with emotions in a business, how Niji raised over $100 million and much more. Tune in to a great conversation between two passionate founders with a lot of value in store! Check out Niji's work: AgentSync  The Cash & Burn podcast is a weekly conversation with SaaS founders and senior executives about the challenges of creating and scaling SaaS companies. Guests share their journey of success and setbacks with a primary focus on how they overcame specific issues that could have ended the company. Hosted by CEO of Place and 3x SaaS Founder, Brandon Metcalf.

Video Version: https://youtu.be/XmdhJWeLMVkTony chats with Niji Sabharwal, Co-Founder and CEO at AgentSync, the insurance producer compliance management platform for retail agents, wholesalers, and carriers. They get agents from hand-raises to ready to sell as quickly and efficiently as possible.Niji Sabharwal: https://www.linkedin.com/in/akaniji/AgentSync: https://agentsync.io/

Garrett Koehn is President at CRC Brokerage, and he is also an active investor, mentor and forward thinker on topics such as crypto, cyber and parametric. He joins Matthew to discuss the emerging trends in risk, investment and insurance. We find out about wholesale broking and the appetite of traditional markets for new risks. Companies discussed include Ensuro, AgentSync, Zenefits, Evertas, Stere.io, Beazley, and Lloyd's. CRC Group is one of the largest wholesale insurance distributors in the US. Its insurance offerings and practice groups include commercial property, casualty, professional lines, construction, energy, healthcare and hospitality. Talking points include:  How companies are valued and the problems of overvaluation The role of cryptocurrencies in investment and insurance Finding new asset classes to insure Cannabis legalisation in the US and across Europe The impact of climate change regulation, reporting requirements and opportunities arising from the changes You can get more information on the InsTech member profile page for CRC Group. If you like what you're hearing, please leave us a review on whichever platform you use or contact Matthew Grant on LinkedIn. Sign up to the InsTech newsletter for a fresh view on the world every Wednesday morning. Continuing Professional Development - Learning Objectives InsTech is accredited by The Chartered Insurance Institute (CII). By listening to any InsTech podcast or reading the accompanying transcript, you can claim up to 0.5 hours towards the CII member CPD scheme. The Learning Objectives for this podcast are: Define the role of wholesale insurance brokers in the relationship between clients, brokers and insurance companies Identify what investors and insurers need to consider when navigating around cryptocurrency market trends List some of the opportunities arising within the insurance industry due to climate change regulation updates If your organisation is a member of InsTech and you would like to receive a quarterly summary of the CPD hours you have earned, visit the Episode 189 page of the InsTech website or email cpd@instech.london to let us know you have listened to this podcast. To help us measure the impact of the learning, we would be grateful if you would take a minute to complete a quick feedback survey.  

Robby Allen is the Chief Revenue Officer of AgentSync. Founded in 2018, AgentSync raised over $110m from Craft Ventures, Caffineated Capital and Marc Benioff. Robby previously helped scale Sales teams at SaaStr, MixMax and Zenefits. You can find Robby at https://www.linkedin.com/in/robbyallen This Episode is brought to you with the support of Bambee and Indeed --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/uncharted1/support

  OpenPhone and AgentSync are two SaaS businesses with very different growth strategies, but the same ultimate goal: to continue selling while simultaneously problem-solving for current customers. They are a perfect example of implementing a growth model, mastering it, and then expanding horizons into other growth strategies with strategic testing and experimenting. Contrary to the title of this article, the two brands prove that product-led growth is neither panacea nor boondoggle, but rather a winning strategy for the appropriate product when thoughtfully implemented. OpenPhone and AgentSync are two SaaS businesses with very different growth strategies, but the same ultimate goal: to continue selling while simultaneously problem-solving for current customers. They are a perfect example of implementing a growth model, mastering it, and then expanding horizons into other growth strategies with strategic testing and experimenting. Contrary to the title of this article, the two brands prove that product-led growth is neither panacea nor boondoggle, but rather a winning strategy for the appropriate product when thoughtfully implemented. Jenn Knight, Co-founder and CTO of AgentSync, and Daryna Kulya, Co-founder of OpenPhone, discuss how different approaches have helped each brand reach its target audience and accomplish its goals, the potential of product-led growth, and how to scale growth strategies to yield desirable results. Session moderated by Craft Ventures Partner & COO Brian Murray, discuss how different approaches have helped each brand reach its target audience and accomplish its goals, the potential of product-led growth, and how to scale growth strategies to yield desirable results. Session moderated by Craft Ventures Partner & COO Brian Murray.     Full video: https://youtu.be/L4oRfut9ufI Want to join the SaaStr community? We're the

Quickly licensing and appointing agents remains a pain point for the insurance industry. Remaining compliant with all state requirements presents agencies and carriers with significant risk. Robby Allen, VP of Sales at AgentSync explains how AgentSync solves both problems. Learn about the history of the company and get an inside look at how the company successfully navigated our company's procurement process. Bonus: Discover how one successful 'failure' led to the creation of insurtech's newest unicorn.

My guest for this episode is the co-founder and CEO of one of the newest Insurtech Unicorns in the industry. Niji Sabharwol founded a company called AgentSync with his wife Jenn Knight in 2018. They met while working at LinkedIn together where he served as the Global Sales Strategy & Operations Manager based out of Ireland and then San Francisco. Niji moved on to become the Head of Sales Strategy and Operations at Zenefits. Zenefits was a hyper-growth HR startup that received a 4.5 billion Dollar valuation. Unfortunately, they grew too fast resulting in over hiring, reckless company culture, and disregard for insurance licensing regulation. Niji was the guy tasked with fixing the problem. The remediation plans he set up for Zenefits helped him come up with the idea for AgentSync. He and Jenn have come up with a way for the insurance industry to automate producer licensing and compliance in real-time with software.We covered:· Advice for Raising Capital· AgentSync's Ideal Client· How the Zenefits Compliance Issues Created AgentSync· Why AgentSync is Crucial for Compliance

The CMO's most important job when scaling? To create focus, protect focus, and seize control of the strategic planning process - not just for marketing but for the company as a whole. Here's how to do that. Join Erica and her guest Jay Gaines, who runs marketing at insurance tech scale-up AgentSync,  as they discuss: How to avoid ‘random acts of marketing,' reinforce the role of marketing as the business scales, and drive a shared common understanding of what marketing is there to do for the business. How marketing can -- and should -- seize control of the strategic planning process for the company as a whole How to respond to a CEO who over-rotates on a demand-first view of marketing  The one question the best CMO candidates ask the CEO before they say yes to a scale job: “How exactly do you plan to expand?”  How to avoid a surprisingly tantalizing organization misstep when scaling How employees' values are changing away from ‘growth at all costs' - which means companies need to be pitching themselves differently How a tangible commitment to work/life balance and DEI, embodied from the top-down, can accelerate hiring in the long run ----- Key Links https://www.linkedin.com/in/gainesj/ (Jay Gaines on LinkedIn) https://agentsync.io/ (AgentSync website) ----- Hiring great marketing leaders is not easy. The Get is a podcast designed to inspire smart decisions around recruiting and leadership in B2B SaaS marketing.  We explore the trends, tribulations, and triumphs of today's top marketing leaders in B2B SaaS. This season's theme is Solving for the Scale Journey. The Get's host is Erica Seidel, who runs The Connective Good, an executive search practice with a hyper-focus on recruiting CMOs and VPs of Marketing, especially in B2B SaaS.  If you are looking to hire a CMO or VP of Marketing of the ‘make money' variety - rather than the ‘make it pretty' variety, contact Erica at erica@theconnectivegood.com. You can also https://www.linkedin.com/in/ericaseidel/ (follow Erica on LinkedIn) or sign up for her newsletter at http://www.theconnectivegood.com (TheConnectiveGood.com).  http://thegetpodcast.com (The Get) is produced by http://twitter.com/evoterra (Evo Terra) and https://simpler.media (Simpler Media Productions).

Photo by Suzanne D. Williams on Unsplash Are you wondering how to move from K-12 to Customer Education? Or academia to corporate learning? In this episode, we’re diving into how Customer Education professionals get into the business. Many professionals make a move into Customer Education from teaching, K12 or academia. Others move from Customer Success to Customer Education. Today’s guest has actually worked in each of those worlds! So tune in for a discussion with Monica Sindwani from AgentSync. Monica made the move from teaching to Customer Success and Customer Education. In this episode, she shares tips for teachers and academics making the move into instructional design or corporate learning. We discuss the paradox of transferable skills and how intellectual humility plays a big part in reskilling. And we talk about how programs like Salesforce Trailhead and other credential programs can be a huge asset for anyone looking to move into the technology field. Episode Links: Pivoting out of Edu Podcast

Photo by Suzanne D. Williams on Unsplash Are you wondering how to move from K-12 to Customer Education? Or academia to corporate learning? In this episode, we’re diving into how Customer Education professionals get into the business. Many professionals make a move into Customer Education from teaching, K12 or academia. Others move from Customer Success to Customer Education. Today’s guest has actually worked in each of those worlds! So tune in for a discussion with Monica Sindwani from AgentSync. Monica made the move from teaching to Customer Success and Customer Education. In this episode, she shares tips for teachers and academics making the move into instructional design or corporate learning. We discuss the paradox of transferable skills and how intellectual humility plays a big part in reskilling. And we talk about how programs like Salesforce Trailhead and other credential programs can be a huge asset for anyone looking to move into the technology field. Episode Links: Pivoting out of Edu Podcast

There are few marketing leaders with the perspective, experience and insights of Jay Gaines. He's also one of the more generous people I've met; he truly enjoys sharing his expertise to help other marketers. In this episode, Jay talks about:Covid and the resulting content tsunami - good content just isn't good enough anymoreThe value of context and empathy in marketing (you read that right)How to use a quarterly "lightning strike" to cut through the noise and drive revenueMaking the case for creative - it's not all about the numbers (but you need to manage your KPIs)How to use direct mail in today's world (yes, USPS direct mail)When and how SaaS founders need to invest in product marketingTalking the language of CFOs, a skillset that's as valuable as it is under-appreciatedAnd moreIt would be hard to imagine anyone not learning something they can use from this episode. Enjoy... and please let me know what you think! Thanks!Resources for SaaS ExecsRecently closed a funding round and need to ramp growth?Check out our comprehensive "scale-a-saas" guide:Think your website could generate more leads?Get our inbound lead generation self-assessmentWant to be a guest on SaaS Backwards?Click to meet with Ken Lempit to talk about an episode.SaaS Backwards is a free service to the SaaS community.  

Friends, we're almost there: the end of the year that felt like a decade. This week, Mary Ann, Natasha and Alex put aside their 2021 fatigue and talked through a week full of news - and candidly, tensions. As always, shout out to Grace and Chris for producing the show and making us sound a whole lot better. We got into the Lyft mafia, garbage, and why our local truckers are giving us creator economy vibes. Or more specifically:Kenya's Pariti raised $2.85M led by Harlem Capital to develop startup ecosystems in emerging markets, proving yet again how Africa's entrepreneurial scene is one not to miss. The empowerment trend continued with TrueNorth's $50 million fundraise to help biz-savvy independent truckers, and freshly-anointed unicorn AgentSync with news, as Alex reminds us, that insurtech is very much alive. Opensea got a new CFO from Lyft, which led to IPO rumors, denial, and rumors about why there's denial about going public. Plus, as Natasha notes, if you're not leaving Lyft to join crypto, you're leaving Lyft to join climate. The Trump Media SPAC is a mess, as we anticipated, frankly.Mary Ann is all over the Better.com saga as its comm, marketing, PR heads all submitted their resignations this week and CEO Vishal Garg issued a poorly-received apology for how badly he effed up the mass layoffs last week -- and as she hints, there's a lot more to come.We disagreed more than usual this episode, which is refreshing. So cheers to more of that next year, and we'll see you back here on Monday.

Jay Gaines is passionate about great marketing leadership that drives innovation, positive transformation, and measurable results. His career spans more than 20 years in a variety of B2B industries, and his experience includes organizational design and leadership, marketing strategy and planning, branding and category design, demand creation, sales and marketing alignment, and digital strategy. Jay has held executive-level marketing and business development positions at both well-established and startup b-to-b companies where he consistently transformed marketing organizations to achieve significant and measurable business contribution. Jay is currently head of marketing at AgentSync, and prior to that, he was chief marketing officer at Forrester and SiriusDecisions. Jay has worked as an advisor to many leading Chief Marketing Officers to drive positive organizational change, innovate, and help them to create the most effective, measurable, and focused marketing function possible. He holds a bachelor of arts degree from Columbia University. This week's episode was brought to you with the support of bambee.com/scale and marpipe.com/uncharted --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/uncharted1/support

Jenn Knight is the Co-Founder & CTO at AgentSync. Additionally, Jenn Knight has had 3 past jobs including Head of Internal Systems at Stripe. As co-founder and CTO of AgentSync, Jenn Knight is building the tools and infrastructure powering the insurance industry. Knight has spent much of her technical career as one of the few women in the room, which makes her even more focused on hiring a diverse team at AgentSync. (https://boards.greenhouse.io/agentsync) This week's episode was brought to you with the support of shopify.com/scale, Indeed.com/scale and Netsuite.com/scale --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/uncharted1/support

News from Casa Bonita, AgentSync, zvelo, Ping Identity, Red Canary, Coalfire, Absio and a lot more! Support us on Patreon! Fun swag available - all proceeds will directly support the Colorado = Security infrastructure. Come join us on the new Colorado = Security Slack channel to meet old and new friends. Sign up for our mailing list on the main site to receive weekly updates - https://www.colorado-security.com/. If you have any questions or comments, or any organizations or events we should highlight, contact Alex and Robb at info@colorado-security.com This week's news: Join the Colorado = Security Slack channel South Park Creators Agree to Buy Casa Bonita for $3.1 Million DIA inks $84 million in contracts to start major planning for 7th runway Meet 50 local startups making waves in 2021's Colorado Inno on Fire Fast-growing insurtech startup opens new office in Denver Cyber Threat Intelligence for Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) Ping Identity Acquires Singular Key | citybiz So you're thinking of starting a cyber threat intelligence team Staying current with HITRUST advisory changes The Physicality of Data And the Road to Inherently Safer Computing Job Openings: Red Canary - Product Security Engineer Red Canary - IT Support Manager Lumen - Vice President Security Development - Nationwide Fluid Truck - Application Security Engineer AXS - Security Engineer Zayo - Sr Manager, Corporate Cyber Security Gates Corporation - Sr Security Threat Hunter Regis University - Director Infrastructure Operations and Security DISH - AWS Security Engineer Alteryx - Application Security Engineer Upcoming Events: This Week and Next: Spectrum / Charter Job Fair - 10/13-14 Application Security Testing (AST) Tools - 10/15 View our events page for a full list of upcoming events * Thanks to CJ Adams for our intro and exit! If you need any voiceover work, you can contact him here at carrrladams@gmail.com. Check out his other voice work here. * Intro and exit song: "The Language of Blame" by The Agrarians is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Hosts Chris and Adam speak with Jenn Knight - Chief Technology Officer and co-founder of AgentSync. Jenn leads the product and engineering teams as they develop a frictionless, modern solution to some of the biggest pain points associated with insurance producer management – broker onboarding, contracting, and compliance management. Jenn and her co-founder and husband, Niji Sabharwal, believe that using technology to solve back-office bottlenecks will empower scaled innovation across the massive, fragmented insurance industry. As one of the industry's leading Salesforce developers, Jenn has helped solve back-office problems for leading technology companies including LinkedIn, Stripe, and Dropbox. Find out more about what we're up to at range.vc and connect with Adam and Chris and the Range Ventures team on LinkedIn.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

On this week's episode, we have Collin Stewart - Host of the Predictable Revenue Podcast welcome our very own Robby Allen, veteran sales leader and current VP of Sales at AgentSync. At the time of this recording, Robby had grown Zenefits' sales team to 250 reps. Grew Flexport's sales development-sourced revenue by $80M, en route to a $110M Series C round, at just shy of a $1B company valuation. Now, he's helping startups of all kinds grow their sales machines. Suffice it to say: Robby knows a thing or two in the world of revenue generation. This week's episode was supported by Oracle NetSuite (sign up for a personalized product tour at www.netsuite.com/scale), Indeed (get a $75 credit for your job post at www.indeed.com/scale) and Bambee (Get your HR Audit for free at Bambee.com/uncharted). --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/uncharted1/support

I was super excited to have Niranjan "Niji" Sabharwal as a guest on the Leadership in Insurance Podcast. Niji is one-half of a husband and wife co-founding team behind AgentSync the broker compliance management system.Agentsync has been super successful from the outset and when your founding team has resumes like this one: LinkedIn, Stripe, Dropbox, and Zenefits you can see why. It's out of the most problematic time of Nijis career at Zenefits that AgentSync was born. In this episode we discuss: The bottleneck of compliance Building on the Salesforce platform How compliance is a barrier to entry and therefore creativity in insurance Not realizing how large the demand would be - timing is everything Tech debt in the incumbent market and how tools such as AgentSync can help The importance of failure in success Funding rounds and timing - the difference in USA and Europe attitudes and failure rates Why AgentSync bootstrapped Raising too much money can lead to disillusionment Is there too much money in the market What is it like being a founding team and husband and wife? What raising capital has enabled them to do Senior hires and the importance of capital raises What else investors bring to the table beyond capital Do we expect too much from staff who join start-ups? Why is Insurance having its tech moment? How to build the right culture and the importance of hiring well Acknowledging Hiring representatively is time-consuming Why talent pipelining is important The advantage of having high profile female leaders especially in engineering Head of Talent and their role in driving diversity The challenge of remote hiring Thanks, Niji for being a great guest This podcast was brought to you by FinPro an executive recruitment business that works in the Insurance and Instech space Our host is FinPro Director, Alex Bond Please like and subscribe if you enjoyed this podcast Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information.

When Zenefits ran into one of the largest compliance crises in the industry, they turned to Niji Sabharwal. He learned two important lessons. One—in his own words—brokers aren’t going anywhere. Two, they really need help with compliance. So a new insurtech was born. Rapid traction in the marketplace, $36 million in Series A funding, and 61 employees later, Niji, as CEO of AgentSync, sees a new wave of insurtech heading our direction.   Niji and podcast host Michael discuss:   Why agents and brokers aren’t going anywhere, and how they’ll look different in the future How the next wave of insurtech will affect the independent agency channel The steps agency principals should take when considering new technology   If you want a window into the future of the agency world, do not miss the insights from this tech pioneer.    Presented by Agency Revolution, the Connected Insurance Podcast provides weekly opportunities for listeners to dive deep into the trends affecting insurance agents and brokers today and to gain proven strategies and tactics for agency growth. Our hosts facilitate thoughtful panels and 1:1 conversations with a variety of prominent thought leaders, with a focus on how to streamline and drive operational efficiency for your independent agency through the intelligent use of technology.  

Parker Conrad is the Founder and CEO @ Rippling, the employee management platform allowing you to manage your employees' payroll, benefits, devices and more—in one place. To date, Parker has raised over $197M for Rippling from the likes of Founders Fund, Kleiner Perkins, Initialized, Bedrock, Greenoaks and Coatue. Prior to founding Rippling, Parker was the Co-Founder and CEO @ Zenefits and if that was not enough, Parker is also a prominent angel having invested in the likes of Census, Pulley and then also AgentSync and TrueNorth, alongside 20VC Fund. In Today’s Episode with Parker Conrad You Will Learn: 1.) How did Parker make his way into the world of technology and startups? What was the founding a-ha moment for Parker with Rippling? How did his journey with Zenefits change or alter his leadership style today with Rippling? 2.) Why does Parker believe that the conventional advice of focus, focus, focus is BS? What does Parker mean when he states, "The Compound Startup"? How does the approach of the compound startup differ from traditional approaches of product and company building? What are the core benefits of using the compound startup approach? 3.) How does Parker think about providing sufficient product quality with an increasing breadth of product offering, entailed within a compound startup? In what way does pricing differ when comparing compound startups to traditional startups? How can compound startups optimise their pricing on a bundle basis? What has Slack and Microsoft taught us about this? 4.) Why does Parker disagree with the conventional analogy of the VC founder relationship being a marriage? Why does Parker refer to it more as a "General Contractor" relationship for a house? What can founders do to sufficiently protect themselves from overarching VCs? What can VCs do to be the very best partners to the founders they work with? 5.) How does Parker evaluate his relationship to money today? How has it changed over time? What does Parker know now that he wishes he had known at the start of his founding of Rippling? What have been Parker's biggest lessons on talent acquisition? Why did Parker decide to bring on a COO when he did? How has it changed his role? Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode with Parker Conrad Parker’s Favourite Book: Matilda by Roald Dahl As always you can follow Harry and The Twenty Minute VC on Twitter here!

Niji Sabharwal, Cofounder & CEO of AgentSync (www.agentsync.io), talks about launching the company, leaning into alliances early, and how investing in SEO helped them land their early customers...all while moving from the Bay Area to Denver in the midst of a pandemic! This episode is brought to you by Codescience. CodeScience is a founding member of the Salesforce Product Development Outsourcer program. The only Master PDO, CodeScience helps businesses thrive on the AppExchange by guiding them through the full solution lifecycle, from building to commercialization and deployment. CodeScience has helped build 10% of the apps on the AppExchange, including solutions for nCino, IQVIA, Salesforce, MailChimp, and more. Visit www.codescience.com to learn how CodeScience can help your business win in the Salesforce ecosystem.

This week's episode featuring Niji Sabharwal from Agentsync.io is brought to you by Oracle NetSuite (Sign up for a personalized product tour at www.netsuite.com/scale) Niji was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area and has more than 10 years of work experience at companies like Linkedin & Zenefits managing functions ranging from sales strategy & operations to broker compliance. Niji and his wife, Jennifer Knight founded Agentsync with the mission is to automate the distribution compliance burden by leveraging technology to do the heavy lifting - ultimately creating opportunity and efficiency in an industry ripe for disruption. Niji holds a B.A. in Business Economics from the University of California, Santa Barbara.  Connect with Niji Sabharwal: https://www.linkedin.com/in/akaniji/ Connect with Robby Allen: Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robbyallen/           Connect with Poya Osgouei: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/poyaosgouei/                                       --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/uncharted1/support

This week's episode features Paige Robinson, founder of Will Reed. Will Reed is a recruiting firm that partners with innovative tech companies and VC-backed startups to scale sales organizations and actualize growth strategies. In other words, they hire the best people to help the best people find the best jobs. Paige's story is one of perspective, a perspective that I hope will provide encouragement to many listening. In this episode, you will hear Paige talk about balancing running a business while being a mom to three kids under the age of three. Her advice to folks looking to hire their first sales hires, and you will also hear about Robby's recent experience moving over to full time to build AgentSync, and why we believe in the importance of story telling. Paige also talks about her childhood, being supported by loving parents and siblings, and when entrepreneurship became a part of her journey. Tune in to a great episode! Connect with Paige: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paigesrobinson/ Connect with Poya Osgouei: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/poyaosgouei/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/IamPoya Connect with Robby Allen: Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robbyallen/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/_RobbyAllen --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/uncharted1/support

Guest: Jenn Knight - Co-Founder & CTO @AgentSync (Formerly @Stripe, @Dropbox, @LinkedIn, @Bluewolf) Guest Background: Jenn has worked with hypergrowth businesses like LinkedIn, Dropbox, and Stripe. At LinkedIn (IPO 2011, Acquired by Microsoft for $27B in  2016) Jenn was the Manager of Solutions Architecture. After 3 years at LinkedIn, Jenn joined Dropbox (IPO in March 2018, $10.5B Valuation). She was there for 3.5 years where she was the Head of Business Technology, managing technical teams spanning financial systems, sales systems, web services (CMS), integrations, and business intelligence infrastructure. Over an 18 month period, she scaled her teams from 15 to 35 people. Jenn has since joined Stripe ($20 Valuation, $785M Raised) for the last 2 years as the Head of Internal Systems. Guest Links: LinkedIn Episode Summary: In this episode, we cover: - The Playbook for Building Business Systems, Tools, and Technology Teams - Mindset, Structure, Chronology, Methods, and Best Practices - The Internal Business Technology Team Superpowers @Stripe, @Dropbox, and @LinkedIn - How to be an End-to-End Process Thinker - Stakeholder Management Tips & Advice Full Interview Transcript: Naber:  Hello friends around the world. My name is Brandon Naber. Welcome to The Naberhood, where we have switched on, fun discussions with some of the most brilliant, successful, experienced, talented and highly skilled Sales and Marketing minds on the planet, from the world's fastest growing companies. Enjoy! Naber:  Hey everybody. We have Jenn Knight on the show today. Jenn has worked hypergrowth businesses like LinkedIn, Dropbox, and Stripe. At LinkedIn (who IPO'd in 2011 and was acquired by Microsoft in 2016), Jenn was the Manager of Solutions Architecture. After three years at LinkedIn, Jenn joined Dropbox (who IPO'd in March, 2018 and they have a valuation of $10.5 billion). She was there for three and a half years where she was the Head of Business Technology managing Technical Teams spanning Financial Systems, Sales Systems, Web Services, Integrations and Business Intelligent Infrastructure. Over an 18 month period, she scaled her teams from 15 to 35 people. Since Jenn has joined Stripe (who has a $20 billion valuation on $785 million capital raised). For the last two and a half years, Jenn's been at Stripe as the Head of Internal Systems. Here we go. Naber:  Jenn Knight. Awesome to have you on the show. How are you? Jennifer Knight: I'm doing well. Thank you for having me. Naber:  Awesome. Thank you for coming. It's amazing to have you. I'm excited for so many reasons. we know each other well and we've worked together in the past. But your brain, and getting to share that with people in the audience is really exciting for me. it's hard for me to contain some of the excitement with my emotions. But, I'm excited to go through some personal stuff today. So go through and dive into who Jenn is as a person. Start from where you grew up, and some stuff from your childhood. So people can get to know you a little better, like I do. And then, we'll hop into some professional stuff. Why don't we just get started. So, you grew up in San Francisco, you're smarty pants. Anyone that has met you for more than a minute knows that, but it's written in you DNA as well as your GPA, as well as your accolades. Walk us through, a few different things about what Jenn was like as a kiddo, and what it was like growing up with as Jenn Knight. Jennifer Knight: Well, I grew up north of San Francisco, in Sonoma County, in Petaluma, which was a ton of fun. It has changed a lot now, but in the early nineties, it was very rural still. Get on your bike, ride into a field, find some mice, hang out. I was a pretty nerdy little kid. I grew up in a house that didn't have a TV. My Dad is an engineer, so we were always puttering on things. He had a garage full of tools, and we're always being taught new things. I was always encouraged to be outside or around. Got a computer pretty early, which was neat. My brother and I, very nerdy, would love to do things like see how many files we could delete to destroy the operating system, and then rebuild the thing. Built a few computers growing up, but really enjoyed that part of life. Yeah, I was a kid who had a little bit of a different experience growing up just because of the nature of my house. And spent lot of time outside, and a lot of time building and poking on computers, and just hanging out. Naber:  Cool. Were you a particularly social kid? Jennifer Knight: That's a funny question. I always had good friends, a few good friends. I think I'm still that way. I'm someone who finds people that resonate with me and I keep a few close. I really enjoy the company of others, but I've always been someone who has had two or three really close friends, than whole big group. And growing up I had to change schools in middle school. And so at 12 years old I had to move across to a school across town. And that taught me one that you can make new friends but was pretty scary I think at the time. So you get close to people in elementary school and then didn't get a chance to stay friends with those people. I had to make new friends at 12, which was great in the sense of it taught me that you can, and you can survive. But it definitely meant that I had a few folks that I kept close. Naber:  Cool. I like it. A small, very close circle. And you said you were always building things, or tinkering, and having some nerdy fun. Tell us about a little bit of the nerdy, fun hobbies that had. Jennifer Knight: I think, I actually laugh when I look back on this...A very good example of this is my fourth grade science project was about different forms of energy, and it was about potential versus kinetic energy and the conversion. So my Dad had me worked with me to solder a little, wind mill thing that was powered by candles. That might give you a good picture of what my house is like. And then we did things like gardening. That was always fun in the summer. Petaluma was a great place to grow a garden in the backyard, so my parents did that. Just those kinds of projects. Those are the ones I remember the most, I think partially because you get pictures of them, and they're the stories that get told. But there were always a million little things we were playing around with. Naber:  Yeah. Cool. Love it. That's great. And let's see, quick stop on high school. What was high school like for you? Jennifer Knight: High School was a lot of fun. I wanted to get out of Petaluma. I knew that that wasn't where I wanted to be, and I knew I wanted to go somewhere for college. In my family education was really important. So, all growing up it was, you're going to go to school, you're going to do well. You're gonna learn a lot. You're capable of learning a lot. You're very smart. Put your head down and learn. Go get opportunity. So that was just the ethos of my growing up. One thing I will say is my parents were not obsessed with grades, they didn't push me to be perfect. I weirdly pushed myself, and at some point they were like, you need to calm down a bit. But high school was a lot of fun. I had a really close, like once again, handful of very close friends. We all encouraged each other to go after where we wanted to go next. Really great study groups. It was also for me a hard time. My Mom was sick when I was growing up, and she got really sick again when I was about 16. So that was hard at home. My parents dealt with it really well, but I had the mix of trying to be the kid who was studying and then dealing with some things at home. So I think once again, close knit group of friends is really important for me because they were people that I could lean on and really knew what was happening in my life at. And the rest of it, was just getting through it. Naber:  Interesting. Some things a lot of kids that age don't necessarily have to deal with obviously. So you wanted to get out of Petaluma, but you were trying to be perfect so you could have all the opportunities in the world to do that and chase your dreams. Your dreams brought you to Beantown Boston. So tell us about going to BU. Tell us about why, and what were like at BU. Jennifer Knight: Yeah, so, my parents had saved a bit for us to go to school, but couldn't go anywhere. So one of the reasons that studying was really important for me, was ultimately getting scholarships, and getting the opportunity to go to school. And I actually went to Boston site unseen. I'd never been there. I didn't know anything about the school. Yeah, it was funny. So they reached out to me, and they offered me a really amazing scholarship, and it actually brought the price of the college down to closer to what a UC would be for me. And so I was making a decision whether to stay in California, or go somewhere else, and my parents were very open to encouraging me to try something new. My Dad said...he always jokes that I was running away from them. He said to me, "Leave California now. If you don't like it, wherever you go, you can always come back. But if you don't leave now, you may never actually leave the state, and and you may not see what the rest of the world's like." So, I accepted to BU, and I had a choice for my parents to come with me for orientation or to help me move in. So my Dad came with me for orientation, and that was the first time I saw saw the school and saw Boston. Naber:  That's a very Jenn Knight thing to do. You're so adventurous and fearless. I love the courage and the fearlessness. It's cool. It's a good example. Jennifer Knight: Looking back on it, it's funny, I think I was mildly terrified. But I really wanted to study international relations, and or something along that, and the UC schools that I was looking at only had international economics, and I'm more interested in people problems than technical problems actually. So BU had an amazing international relations school, and that was ultimately what encouraged me to go. Naber:  Awesome. And international relations. And you also studied French in for a year in France, correct? Jennifer Knight: I did, yeah. So I was a international relations major. Foreign Policy and Security in the Middle East was the focus of my studies, but I also did a minor in French. Naber:  What was your experience like in France? Jennifer Knight: It was an amazing experience. Once again, it's a different time now. At that time there were cell phones, but not really. There was internet, but not really. I didn't have a laptop with me that could connect to the internet very often. So it was an interesting experience at 19 to get on a plane and fly all the way across the world, and then get a calling card and get on a pay phone at seven o'clock at night to call your family, to handle the time zone difference. I was ready in that I had studied French in high school. I was also not ready in that I had not studied it for a semester before I went. But I had an a pretty incredible experience on my way over there. Being from the West Coast, the program that my school ran didn't actually coordinate my flights because they coordinated everything for kids on the east coast. So once again, I was put on a plane, and my parents said good luck. And when I landed in Paris, I had no idea that Charles de Gaulle was kind of a mess. I was running through the airport. and I saw the group that I was eventually gonna study with being guided through the airport by an adult. And I was running for a gate, to miss my flight. But I got to the gate, and right behind me showed up a woman who's about my age, and she had actually been studying English and in the US during the summer. And I had no idea what to do. And she just grabbed ahold of me, and she took me to the ticket table, and she handled everything. And we went to a different airport, got on a flight together to Leon. And then her parents drove me to Grenoble with her because they were going home. And it was totally surreal experience, but also one that I think back on a lot that the world is actually a very generous place, and it's a very kind place often, if you're open to it. And I know it has its rough edges, but at a young age being able to travel over there and see that people are people across the world, and people are willing to help, was really incredible start to the journey. And that things don't always go perfectly, but they will end well, was something that was fun. And then it was a crash course in trying to navigate another culture, which I've always looked back on and really appreciated what the program gave me. So it was a fun year. Naber:  Very cool. Good story too. Good story. I always feel better when I talk to you, Jenn. You keep such an optimistic, positive light. So you studied at BU. Walk us through your first couple of gigs, up until before LinkedIn, so up through Bluewolf, and let's do some hops. Explain it. Typically we go through a few different things within those gigs. What I want to do is get to LinkedIn, Dropbox, and Stripe and talk through a couple of examples, and some of your superpowers, and we'll get there. But anyways, why don't you hop us through just so we have a good understanding of where you came from professionally. Hop us through some of those gigs and what you're up to. Maybe in like maybe like five, seven minutes. Jennifer Knight: Yeah. Seeing as I studied a bunch in high school, I actually entered college as a sophomore, finishing in three and a half years because I took a bit of extra time to go to France. So I graduated actually December 2006. For family reasons with my Mom being sick, and not being very clear how long she was going to be doing well, I decided I wanted to come back to the west coast. I had the most useless degree on earth to come back to the west coast. There, there is very little to do with international relations with a focus on the Middle East in San Francisco Bay Area. So I came back had to figure out what I was going to do. And I ended up just on craigslist looking at jobs. That was the way back then, that and the newspaper. Which was 2007, and it sounds crazy, but that's the truth. LinkedIn was, I suppose, kind of a thing, but it was very, very small, not really a thing. It's just starting out. Right. Naber:  It had volume of users, but not a lot of density and a lot of engagement. So it's just less useful at that point. Jennifer Knight: Yeah. So I just applied, I mean, toeverything I could. And then I ended up getting a job as an Office Manager at a solar company in Berkeley. And I, with my college degree, went and answered the phones and opened to the mail. But it was the thing that afforded to me to get my first apartment, and my first foray out into the world. It was a great community of people. It was an opportunity for me to be in an environment where I could just see how I could help. And so I learned as much as I possibly could. I had a lot of fun working with the outsourced IT guys who would come in and help with the servers. And then, we hired a Director of IT, and he was a bit overwhelmed and he asked me if I wanted to help him Administer Salesforce, and so I started doing that. I was there for two and a half years. The company's split, part of it was sold off - the residential was sold off, stayed with industrial side, learned Salesforce development. I was quite lucky in that I became a Salesforce Administrator right before Salesforce opened up as a platform. And then my boss at the time taught me how to program on the platform. It's very similar to Java. Apex is Salesforce is language. So I got to iteratively roll into this platform as it was growing. And I was one of the first 500 administrators certified, which is very...I look back on it, and it's a nerdy moment in that...but just a good timing moment. So I was doing that, but I was pretty stuck. And after two and a half years, I was pretty burned out actually. When the company split, I was the only person doing my role. And I enjoyed a lot of my coworkers. I have, actually, one of my best friends from that job. But I just wasn't loving it anymore, and I was too tired actually to really look for what was next and know what I wanted to do next. So I decided to take six months off, and this was in 2008-2009. So everyone thought I was out of my mind. But I did, and it was really fun. I moved to San Francisco. I worked in nonprofit, so I actually did nonprofit work at, Salesforce nonprofit, at a women's community clinic and at an urban garden. So the women's community clinic in San Francisco and at the place that does urban gardening in Oakland. Helped them set up their Salesforce instances. The urban garden one was amazing. We use Salesforce to track plants, and pests, and tools, and acreage, and all sorts of crazy stuff that you wouldn't imagine. Yeah. So I did that, and when I moved to San Francisco, Craigslist again, my craigslist roommates - one worked at Salesforce as a Sales rep and one worked at Bluewolf as a Sales rep. And my roommate Chris, who worked at Bluewolf said, hey, we're looking for developers. I don't think you want a full time job right now, but do you want to come contract with us, and check it out? ...did some contract work, and then after probably four months I decided to join full time. And that was the first time...and one of the reasons I did it, that was the first time I got to figure out if I was any good. And when you do something alone, you have a sense like I knew I could make things work, I knew I could solve the problem, but I had never been around other Salesforce developers where people with technical backgrounds, to find out if I was actually good at it or not. And I had an amazing group of people and an amazing support system at Bluewolf to help me grow and some great mentors there. So I couldn't be more thankful for them. They were extremely patient as I was plotting through things, and then also threw me at some really, really tough challenges. So I was doing a lot of the development for west coast projects, by the time I left. Did that for about a year and a half...um, I am not a consultant. I love the design. I didn't love flying in, building something, and then leaving it. I also didn't love being on a plane all the time. So I hadn't really known that I was going to do with myself, but I put my profile up on LinkedIn, and then LinkedIn found me on LinkedIn. And that's how I ended up at LinkedIn. Naber:  Nice. Awesome. Okay. We've got to LinkedIn. That's a really good story. You got to work on some, excellent cool projects, while you were trying to figure out your actual depth of your prowess around this new set of skills you were learning. But it's probably also really stimulating for you because you're such a smart person. You're also trying new things all the time, and wanting to build. So I'm going to guess that was really stimulating to learn this whole new world of technical bricks that you could build with. Jennifer Knight: It was, it was a lot of fun. It also taught me that that skill set around Salesforce is something it can be really can be used anywhere. And it's something I talk about with my teams now. It's quite fun, and I think a lot of skills in a lot of different areas of the business are transferable, but if you want if you want to work at a small company, if you want to work at a big company, if you want to work in nonprofit, if you want to consult, there's kind of a home anywhere. And that is pretty liberating because you get to go pick your family, and pick where you want to be. Naber:  Cool. Love it. All right. So, give us a quick chronology of what your responsibilities were, and what you're up to at LinkedIn. And then I have a couple of questions for you to follow-up and dig into your brilliant mind a little bit. Jennifer Knight: So I joined LinkedIn as the first Salesforce developer, joined the team that was in existence. There were five at the time, and the were two of us who joined, myself and a woman who was also doing Salesforce administration at the same time. So we grew to a team of seven. I still work with today, one woman from that team. I could not be more thankful once again for what they taught me in terms of how to approach an environment and how to approach work, just work. I was the youngest by far, and I was coming down from San Francisco, and I'd come from...Bluewolf was a really young environment as well. So that ethos of chaos, and running around, and experimenting, and trying new things, and to go from that to a place where people were far more measured, I hadn't seen that before. It was, yeah, we can do this. Like we're gonna think about it, we're gonna make a plan, and we're gonna go after it. It was really intense. We were building a ton, but it was very focused and measured. and it wasn't all over the map, and that was both due to the team that I had around me, and also a lot of the partners that we had at LinkedIn. So I joined as a developer, and then I helped grow out the Salesforce Technical Architecture and Development team over the course of my three years there. And so I was responsible at the end for our project work. We restructured the team, our lead structure the team as a Plan, Build, Run. So PMO, a business analyst doing the business requirements gathering, build was my responsibility - so those were the big project work, and then run was kind of the day to day administration, and keeping the lights on, minor enhancements, things like that. My team would do both technical development, but also if there was a administrative component of configuration, we might partner with an Admin to do that. Naber:  Nice. Very cool. One of the questions I have for you, and this is actually a good segue into that...you had a lot of experiences, at a lot of different teams, also built a lot of differe teams with LinkedIn, Dropbox, Stripe. You can go across those if you need to to pull experiences. But, is that the typical anatomy of a Internal Business Systems and Tools team? Or, if it's not, what is the typical anatomy, and can you give us a little bit of a breakdown? Jennifer Knight: Yeah. So those functions are the three behaviors that you see across the board. Alex, who's my Manager at Dropbox, said way back in the day...it's people, process, technology. And that is true always. So do you have the partner, does the partner know how their processes articulated? Do you understand how to reinforce, and support, or automate, or speed up, or whatever you're trying to achieve, that process with technology? And then there's the iterative, like, continuing to keep that alive and continuing to improve it. I think about the world in that framing all of the time now, that's how we approach it. And so our team is staffed for each of those areas. The plan side is always about, let's sit down with the people we're partnering with, and let's understand their process. Now that team on my team is responsible for really understanding the business partners' process, and then starting to think about who do we need to engage with from the technology side to support that process? Then the build side is the actual team that's saying, okay, now I've got the process. How do we empower this with the tools we have? Or what tools do we need to go buy? And run, of course, being the day to day maintenance. Those functions always exist. They are not always carved out as specific teams because depending on size, you just don't have the resources. When I joined LinkedIn, each one of us was a little mini plan, build, run. There were only seven of us, and we were supporting a lot. And so we would go sit down, and get the requirements, and then we would go off, and going to build something, and then you're the one who kept it alive. And and then eventually when you got a little bit burned out on that area, you'd switch it to one of your other team members. So I ended up with Sales Development work because April was done thinking about that problem...and then we've cycled through. But those, those pillars exist. They just evolve. And how you structure the team varies quite a bit. There is not a perfect way to do that. I think it depends a lot about where the organization is, what they're valuing at the time, and then who do you have on staff. But the core behaviors that remain the same across LinkedIn, Dropbox and Stripe. Naber:  Okay. That's awesome. That's a really good answer. Thank you so much. And while we're on LinkedIn, can you explain,what LinkedIn does extremely well from a Systems, Tools, Building leverage resources? And when you do that, could you lean into some of the things you do really well within the respect of Sales and Marketing? Because I think the audience is going to want to want to understand each one of these businesses, both what they were good at, why that's important, and how do they do it? Jennifer Knight: Yeah. So it's been a few years since I was there, so I'm sure it's evolved. But one of one of the overarching things that I remember from that time is actually just Focus. I think LinkedIn did very well...and as a partner to it, I appreciated it a lot after I left. There's always thrash. Nothing's perfect, the business evolves. Part of my responsibility is to be flexible enough to accommodate the fact that business has changed. They chart a course, but it's not like...Product Development is exactly the same way. Factors change and they can change fairly rapidly. And so the needs of the business can change fairly rapidly. That said, knowing more now and seeing, having seen different environments, in the face of that, I'd say LinkedIn did very well on remaining focused and what the core objectives that they were trying to enforce were. And then systematizing those. And maybe doing some experiments on the edges of other like creative things that we could potentially do to drive the business, but making sure that we were focused on being excellent at a few things, doing those very well, and those being backbone things for the business. So it was the first time that I had to work on some of the end to end workflows around Demand Gen. And how do you think about that, and how are you optimizing that? And not about a lot of bells and whistles and not always about crazy experimentation. It was first let's get it right. We have a core business objective, and the objective is not changing. It's reduce the time to touch. Okay, let's go like nail that one to the wall. And then once we get that one done, we'll be find the next one, and we'll like nail that one down. And those are the focus areas that don't change, right? Even if your approach changes, or your markets change, they're just really core parts of how you want to operate a business. So that was something LinkedIn did very well. One of the reasons that I left LinkedIn though, on the system side, is that at the time that I was there we were very silo'd. So we had a lot of autonomy in the space that we operated in, in partnership with our Sales ops partners. But some processes are actually cross business units. And some Systems work best when they're integrated across. A good example of this is a CRM to Oracle. A CRM to an ERP. So Salesforce to Oracle, or Salesforce to Netsuite, or I mean, no one uses anything besides Salesforce. That's not entirely true, but, Dynamics to SAP, any of those. Those flows were something that were interesting to me, and I didn't have the opportunity to work on as much. We could influence it. We could encourage. We couldn't work on it as much. When I got to Dropbox, that was the first place that I was able to think about end-to-end flows. And that was an area...because I had the autonomy to go own those. So that was an area...I think LinkedIn did very well on the focus, focus in depth in a particular system space. But we struggled a bit on the cross Systems, from where I was sitting. This is not a universal picture, but but from where I was sitting. So when I moved to Dropbox, I got the opportunity to think more cross platform, and that helped smooth some of the edges across teams, which was a lot of fun. At Dropbox we were in a bit of a different mode, so we were doing a lot of crazy growth. Naber:  Awesome. This is good. This is a good transition. So ell us what you're doing with Dropbox. Jennifer Knight: So I joined there to do Sales Systems. It was still really early days. We were still hiring out our Sales operations team. And so, I at that point, learned the importance of the people process part. When you put technology first, it it proves to be a bit of a challenge. That one was...I learned a lot more about meeting my business partners where they were. I actually leaned more into some of the operations and business analyst part of my role. That was not what I was doing at LinkedIn, but at Dropbox by necessity, you're saying there's these three functions, I was doing plan and build and run. And as I hired my team out, I hired them to do run first, and then started building from there, so that I could figure out what the needs of the business were, and then try to make some educated decisions around what we were going to invest in on the technology side. We had a ton of fun and we were building from scratch. There are things at LinkedIn, even by the time I was there, that had become so complicated that you kinda didn't want to touch them. When I got to Dropbox, it was the first time I got to build an order to cash process. And had amazing partner, who was also new. He had never built it before, and he was coming from the finance side. And he was really passionate about making this a really amazing experience for people. And so we just partnered really closely together to make that happen and thought about how we did it end to end. We ended up over the course of probably two years, building a flow that I'm still very proud of, but it was very focused on these business objectives again. We wanted the experience of someone who was buying Dropbox through a contract, from a provisioning perspective, to mirror the experience of someone who was buying with a credit card. And that was our goal. So we set that as our goal, and then we also set a goal that along the way that we had as smooth as possible process with the Sales team, so that there was a lot of transparency about what was happening. Contracting, as some of you know, can be very complicated from the Sales side because there are legal people coming in, there's financial approvals, there is these multistep processes, and it can feel like it's taking forever and you have no idea what's going on. And then maybe the thing is signed, and now you don't know why your customer hasn't been given the Product because it's fallen into another manual process where someone has to go into some backend system. Or in the case of, and this was happening when I got there, you as a Sales rep now have to go into some backend system that you maybe don't fully understand and punch a bunch of buttons, and then hope that everything works out, and that your customer gets the Product they want. So we started once again with that focus, and we were really successful there. And those kinds of activities were the things that made my team successful. When we could find those focus areas, through our rapid growth, those are long pull items. They take a long time to get right, and if we kept focused on it, we were able to drive impact. So we were really...I brought that from LinkedIn, that focus in our space. Naber:  Hey Jenn, can we pause there for a minute?0 So let's use the order to cash process that you built. Can you walk us through the phases you go through to build the case for it, plan out the project, resource and manage the project, you've got to have Internal buy-in, then you've got to have pull through for people, actually making sure that they do what they need to do in the field and the business? Can you walk us through using that as an example for number one, what the steps are? And number two, from a Sales and Marketing or just really from a stakeholder perspective, what are some of the best practices in working with your team so that we can be better at doing that? As you go through it. Jennifer Knight: Yeah, so, let's break it down. How do we approach it? So now, one of the things that I think a lot about when I'm approaching these types of projects is how do we think about, an ask, and it's end to end? So one of the things about working with a Systems team is that we're ultimately accountable for the overall health of the Systems. And it's an interesting process for us to understand what a business is asking for. And then trying to put that in the context of either another set of business asks or the platform on the whole. And we also have situations where, there are multiple stakeholders. And order to cash is a good example of one. Demand Gen flows is another good example of that. Where as a business owner, or as maybe a Sales Manager, you're saying, in your inner mind thinking, it's taking too long for my teams to get contracts out the door. And then on the other side, the finance Systems team is thinking, like, I need to be able to ensure that this contract has the correct margins, or is feeling good about that. And the legal team is sitting there thinking like, what are these contracts terms? Let's make sure that those make sense for the business. So when we get these asks, part of what we think about on the more complicated asks, but even on the smaller ones, is who are all the players in this ask? What is it in the context of the larger process flow? And what is it in the context of the larger Systems? And that's something that I've had the opportunity to do a lot, and something I quite enjoy is how do we put this in, frame it out, and where it wants to be. The other thing that we need to do on our side, is thinking about how we get from point A to point B? And can we do it in one shot, or to your point, does it have to be a multistep process? And some of these things are quite complex, and so we're not going to win it all at once. So for us, starting with that problem statement and then working through with our business partners to get an alignment on the overall problem statement, what we ultimately want to achieve, and then agreeing on how do we iteratively get there. So what are interim wins along the way, or something that we benefit from, and we benefit from that partnership. In terms of resourcing and implementing a thread...I'd say it varies wildly depending on your circumstances. And Systems tends to be lagging behind the business. I have yet to be an environment where we weren't coming in two, or three, or four, six years late. It's just the nature of it. I think SaaS has this sheen on top of it, where you're just oh, I can just get a Salesforce account and probably have one person manage it, and it's going to be okay. Like it's easy, right? And actually, that's not wrong for a period of growth. But then when you start to get into these more complicated asks , or you start to get into Architecture questions, or you start to need to do development, then that tool becomes something quite serious to take charge of, and you need a team that is dedicated to it and experienced. I talked to folks about this a lot, where there's a whole period of time where you really just go experiment, like try to find your way. You don't need to hire a technical architect, and a full team, and everything right out the gate. But as your business starts to take off, and you start to have those needs, having an experienced person, who's seen it before, come in can really help you figure out what you want to navigate over the course of the next two years. So I think the resourcing thing, it's very varied. But if you want to tackle a more complex workflow, or you want to really empower a part of your business, that's the point where you start to think about these dedicated resources. And that's when I'm looking at it...for my team, when I come in, I look...survey the landscape. What are our biggest challenges? What do we want to think about? And what are our business partners talking about? What aren't they talking about that is probably going to doom us anyway. And then how do we line those up, and what kinds of resources do I need? Do I need a lot of business analysts? I might need a lot of business analysts right out the gate because I may need to spend time helping the business articulate their ask. That actually is a weird one. Often I work with business partners, and they're like, where's where's the admin? And where's the developer? And I'm saying, well those are execution folks and you want a partner right now is going to help you think through your process, and then make sure that we're reinforcing the right behaviors. So I'm going to actually get business analysts to define that. And then once we have those definitions, we have a bunch of different levers we can pull in terms of execution. I personally enjoy building teams that are really dedicated to the business. So we always have a mix of technical and BA full time on the team. Most of our projects, the big ones take 12, 18, 24 months. So you really want someone who is excited about the end to end and will build the continuity. But there are amazing, I worked for one, they're amazing partners who will come in and help you with resourcing. And we also pull that lever a lot on our team. But we do it in the context of making sure that we have the business requirements anchored, and we know what we're going after. S to kind of rewind back to your question to how we approach these things. What's important for us is understanding what we're solving, and being able to really work with the business to understand what their objective is. And if it's a project where we know it's going to take more than a quarter of more than a month to go after, making sure that that objective is something that is very solid. And that's what I was talking about earlier. Your objective being speed to lead, your objective being speed to contract...there's those kinds of objectives where even as time passes, we're going to keep after that. So we feel successful together over the course of the year or two it takes, and that we can measure our progress against it. The failure modes that I've seen is when we don't know what we're solving for and instead we get the kind of partnership where it's, I need this field, I need this thing. I've already solved it for you, justt go build it. We can do that. The probability that it will ultimately build into the kind of system or process that we both want together, is not super high end. On the margin, it's okay. We'll put in a field, we''ll kind of get going. We are here to empower and enable the business. And that's something that I talk about with my teams quite a bit. Like, our responsibility is to empower the business, and so we should understand where they're coming from and then try to get them there. Ideally we do it in partnership, and process, and Solution design. Sometimes we just have to crank. Naber:  Cool. So that was awesome. That was an awesome answer. I love it. It's almost like you read it out of a book, so, and maybe you wrote the book. So, one more question, and then we'll move on to Stripe because you already gave an example with the order to cash and that was great. Actually, two more questions. You mentioned a couple things that Dropbox was doing well, but what's the one thing you think they do extremely well from a Business Systems, Internal Business Systems, Business Systems and tools, leverage resources that they're building, etc. What's one thing they do world-class? Why is it important? And how did they do it? Jennifer Knight: An interesting question. Naber:  I mean, LinkedIn was focus, if you had to say it in a few words, Dropbox is obviously world-class at a few things. Jennifer Knight: So what I would say, and it was very different in its approach. When I got there, like I said, I started to do Sales Systems, and I got to grow in my role and pick up other teams. And so that's where I learned about Finance Systems, and ended up taking that over and building that. I'd say, maybe the flip side of what I was experiencing in terms of rigidity at LinkedIn, Dropbox had an environment where if you wanted to go tackle a problem ,and you could rally your resources around it, and you could get get the team together, we can go tackle the problem. And that was super, super fun. Obviously from a system side, I think that was a strength there, where we had once again the autonomy to go try to solve these problems and could get sponsorship to go solve these problems. If you could find your partner on the other side, and shake hands, and go after it we could move ourselves forward. And there wasn't resistance to that. There is a push to, however we get to a better place, let's get to that better place. Not about who you are, or what team you're sitting in, or my priorities versus your priorities, and how our roadmaps, and all that fun stuff. It was hey, we have this problem, and yeah, it's going to involve like three or four teams. Let's go figure out how to do that, and we'll get together, and we'll go agree on the problem, and we'll go solve the problem. And so we got that was one of the things that helped us build some of this really cool stuff and these experiences. And I'm really proud of the teams that did that because we thought about not ourselves. We thought about what we wanted to achieve both for our customers, but also our external customer experience, and we were able to drive to that. Even when it wasn't easy, even when we weren't aligned on exactly how we planned, that was something that we did really well there. And I think the culture of the company of empowering people within the company to go tackle those kinds of problems made that successful. Naber:  Do you have any idea how they did that within the culture? Maybe it was like one or two things that empowered people to be able to go solve those problems, and have that autonomy? Jennifer Knight: Yeah. And it was that way pretty much from day one. I mean, so there's flip side. Anyone can buy anything, right? Which, on on the system side, is its own like special crazy. But there wasn't like a specific tenant that we followed. There wasn't anything like that. The one thing that, Dropbox also did well, and LinkedIn had this, but they stressed it in a different way, was this concept that we called cupcake there, which is let's have fun together in this. And so I think that that empowering you to go out and like build community, build team, and have fun with it, was something that Drew and Arash really instilled. But there's not a like phrase or a specific behavior other than encouraging an environment of community, and communication, and through that you could go find your people, and find your path. Naber:  Yeah. Yeah. It makes a lot of sense, and it's extremely empowering. I felt that when I was at Dropbox as well. But cupcake, it's a really good thing to add. Like having fun while we're doing it, and working on cool shit together That's pretty cool. And that's a good place to start for all the stuff you want to work on versus just what's necessary or having a less creative mindset around it or vantage point? Awesome. All right, let's move on to Stripe. So yyou're leaving Dropbox, you're heading to Stripe. Why do you make the jump to Stripe, and what are you up to there right now? Jennifer Knight: So, it's been a progression of scope actually. Something that I laugh...I love my job because I get to be incredibly nosy and learn everything about the back end operating of a world. So at LinkedIn I got to learn so much about how Sales and Marketing think, what they prioritize, personalities, what's top of mind, what are the pressures, what are the challenges? I mean I knew it because I actually interviewed for some Sales jobs. I will never be a Salesperson. That is a such a hard job. And being on the technical side, I also appreciate the challenges of a technical world. But having the opportunity to be in with Sales teams and Marketing teams, and see how they think was something that I got to do at LinkedIn. I got to Dropbox, it was doing that and then I got the opportunity to learn how accountants think because I took over finance Systems. But it dropped off, and it's totally different world. I took an introduction to financial accounting after sitting in our first CFO's staff meeting because, I was like, I literally understand none of the terms. And I had an amazing partner in our revenue accountant. She was Sarah, she was patient person. I took over the finance Systems team, and we were working on a project. And she was describing debits and credits, and she's walking everything through with me, and she's willing to repeat herself as I'm stumbling through it. And I got to really understand that the pressures in their world are really fundamentally different than the pressures in Sales and Marketing. And they have external pressures with GAAP, and all of these other requirements that they're marching to. And so it got to learn about that. At Dropbox though, there was no mandate when I was there for the Business Technology team, we were slowly picking up pieces. And that was a fun way, but it was also hard. Sometimes, I was picking them up and they were healthy, and sometimes I was picking them up, and they were in an interesting place. So I'm going through that, and we were getting pretty big, pretty stable as a team. And then through a friend, ended up chatting with the CFO at Stripe, and they were looking for someone to lead Internal Systems. And that would be Finance, Sales, Marketing Support, People, the whole set. And that's what ultimately pulled me there. Also the fact Stripe earlier reminded me, in tone and approach, to LinkedIn in the early days. There was just something about it that, frankly, just felt familiar. And so that was why I decided to take that opportunity. Naber:  It's amazing how often someone's tone and what they say...when you've been at a few different tech businesses, you understand what good culture looks like. And you walk into a place, and you're having all these conversations when you're going through the recruitment process. It's amazing how often it comes up where, some version of, it felt like I was coming home, or it felt like I was going to something that I already knew, and I could see like where the movie was going. I've seen this movie before. I've directed it. I like the culture because it feels like coming home. A few of those different things happen a lot when you're making your third, fourth, fifth jump into a lot of these businesses, you start to get a really good sense of the bullseye for what you want as well. Maybe I'm just ahead of my skis on that, but it sounds like that's you felt as well. Jennifer Knight: Yeah, I think it's very true. At some point...So, I think everywhere you go, you learn, right? Every situation you're in, you learn. And you learn what works for you, and what doesn't work for you. And it's not even a judgment call. It's just part of who we all are, and what makes us happy. We find our people, and we're successful with our people, and hopefully we get an opportunity to meet many, many people of many different approaches. But I think at the point that you're talking about, for me, I think about the fact that...Of all the three places that I've been, that are roughly similar shape, they all have the same problems. So you're actually solving the same base problems very frequently. Naber:  Can you run through some of these as you're thinking about them? Jennifer Knight: Yeah, so, actually the reason I talk about order to cash is that's a problem for everyone, everywhere. It's a really complicated, really tough flow. It's hard to get right. It's really frustrating when it's not supported. And that's one that I've seen everywhere as a challenge. Data models, everyone gets their Salesforce data model wrong, everyone - like, it just, it happens. One of my first projects at LinkedIn was fixing the data model. One of my first projects at Dropbox was fixing data model. That can be really hard to fix. You can be like, oh, like that sounds simple. But you put the wrong data model in place, and then you lock it in place with a bunch of integration, and a bunch of automation, and a bunch of tooling. So by the time you get to the point where you need to roll it back, you have to roll back a lot to get back to that place. Naber:  You're duct taped, and scotch taped, and glued everything together. Jennifer Knight: Yep. So in order to do some data model work at Dropbox, it took me 12 months to rewrite a piece of code that was running on a python script under someone's desk, so that we could unlock it. There's that kind of work. The exercising the capability and the muscle around planning, planning your Systems change. You're often in an environment where everything is moving extremely rapidly, and on the process side you're iterating, and you're iterating and iterating. And then Systems don't always benefit from that rapid of iteration. There's a point where you have to be able to experiment outside the system. And when you get closer, you don't have to be perfect, but when you get closer to your ideal process, then you want to systematize it. So when a team like mine comes in, one of the big challenges we face is not actually a technical challenge. It's working with our partners to say, I know this feels like we're slowing down. We're not saying no, we're not saying stop, but we have to take a step back, and we have to once again put this in context, and figure out how we rationalize this within the system. And so that muscle, it's a challenge for everyone. It's a challenge everywhere. So that's one we face. These problems are very similar. And to your point when I'm making a decision now about where I want to go, you're living with this community and in this environment for a pretty significant portion of your day or your life, over the course of time that you're at that company. And everyone that has worked in tech knows it's not nine to five. If you've managed to pull 9-5, you're lucky. So you're probably spending most of your waking hours for several years, in that environment, and that being one that you feel supported in, feel excited to go to, that resonates with who you are. And where you are in that moment in your career and your life, I think is incredibly important. You can't always get it right, and you're going to find an environment that isn't the perfectly resonant one, but that's okay because then you learn aspects of that. And I think even there, you can take aspects of those environments, and take them with you going forward. But I agree. Especially the third or fourth time around. I think it's true. We always try to find a place where we feel might be a bit more like home. Naber:  Cool. Good one. All right, Stripe. Two things - why don't we start first with an example of a major project you're working on, and maybe you could talk through as much as you can give us without giving confidential information obviously, but what are some of the really cool major projects or one major project even to give us an idea of the type of stuff you're doing at these different companies. So you've given really good examples so far. Give us a profile of Stripe and some of the things you're working on. Jennifer Knight: Yeah, I'd say actually I'll do a little bit of a different answer than a systems answer because I always loved the technical stuff. The project that I'm working on at Stripe, and that's been the thing that's so top of mind for me over the last two years, is actually establishing the team. And establishing a team that is proactive and not reactive. Understanding what our actual needs are. So to give you a sense, my team when I joined, there were a few people in the organization who were part time working on Systems. And so the Systems were pretty underfunded, and that was one of the reasons they asked me to join. But putting language around what it actually looks like to manage these Systems well, putting language around the fact that we have huge gaps right now, and with that language also still keeping my team motivated, is that dance of being able to say we're here, we're growing, we're here to support you, and in the same breadth, I appreciate and understand that there is a laundry list of things that we were not able to do. And keeping that dialogue going, and figuring out how we grow up into Stripe as an organization, and how we try to close that, as rapidly as possible, close that gap. Which on the surface frequently looks like we aren't moving fast enough because some of these things, I mean they're around hiring, they're around team structures, they're around normalizing as a team. They're around that the thing that I just mentioned about learning how to partner with our partners, helping our partners understand planning processes. The big project that I've, there's a bunch of technical projects, there's a bunch of these kinds of negotiations, but actually the big project that I've been working on at Stripe is around that area. How do we understand how to best serve the organization? How are we getting out of this proactive mode? How do we become, I think we always are a value add, but how do we really drive that value forward? And how do we become a team that is not a handful of people who are just heads down executing, and trying to like scramble to the next thing, and are more laying the foundations and partnering to lay the foundations with our business partners? Knowing that we're a couple of, frankly, we're a couple of years behind, so we have a lot to lot to catch up on. That's really been, if I look at it across all of my teams, and what my function is doing right now. We are working on technical projects, we're delivering things every day, we're trying to move those forward. Kind of core things, core capabilities that I've discussed before are projects that we're working on. But really more than anything right now, we're focused on - how do we partner? How do we partner for success? How do we understand what we should be investing in with our partners? And how do we really surface their underlying needs versus the rapid fire day to day? Naber:  So that is really interesting. I've got a question for that. So can you explain what the end result looks like? What does euphoria look like when you get to this place where...maybe not euphoria, you get what I'm saying though... you get to this place where you're being proactive, you're working with the business on the things you should be working on, and it is working like a smooth machine that is operating on all cylinders. What does that look like, and what do you guys accomplishing when that happens? Jennifer Knight: Yeah. So maybe I'll start with what it doesn't look like. There's no world in which we're done, and there's no world in which there's no backlog, and there's actually no world in which we are doing everything the business wants you...all 10 items, every sprint. That just, that has never happened in the course of my career, regardless of the team size or anything like that. There will always be needs. There will always be needs that we can't serve immediately today. And part of that is actually the right investment model for the business overall. So we're always looking at prioritization. I think when it's smoothly, the factors that I look at are..We have transparent and clear communication with our partners. They know what they're getting, and we're delivering that in the way that we've committed to delivery. They are actively engaged and partnering, and feel good about the prioritization. They know why. They know the business impact, because they're defining it. But there's a lot of really clear communications there. And then on our side, like I said, we're delivering on time or delivering in a way that is thoughtful and accountable to the rest of the ecosystem. So we're not breaking each other, and we're not breaking the system. That actually gets quite difficult at scale. If you have five developers on a platform, and sometimes they have overlap, you have to make sure that they're all developing the Product that is your CRM or the Product that is your Marketing automation platform in a way that is conscientious. So, we are, when we're operating smoothly, we are not blowing up each other's work. That's a pretty obvious one in my mind. I think when we're operating smoothly, we are responding to the right things, with the right urgency, in the right SLA's. So this is one of the reasons we end up with a Run function. Not every ask has to be treated like a project, but not every ask can be treated like a quick win. So you want to have varying SLA's and varying approaches, and when we're running smoothly we have an intake process that allows us to triage those, and be very quickly responsive where it's appropriate, and be thoughtful and measured in our approach, where that's appropriate. But not trying to do a one size fits all. Those are the core tenants that I look to when I think about how my team is running smoothly. I think that maybe one that we don't talk about with the business as much, is we also spend some time thinking about the technical foundations, and how those potentially need to evolve because our SaaS partners are evolving different features, and giving us different capabilities. So maybe we set up an integration one way four years ago because that was what Zendesk allowed us to do. And that might be really difficult for us to maintain and manage. And on the business side, it may look like it just works. And on our side, it may be a ton of toil and work to keep it alive. And Zendesk releases a new feature that simplifies that. How do we also continuously bring technical, underlying improvements, infrastructure improvements, into our roadmap. And then when we're working really well, socializing those up with our partners so they really appreciate why us doing that work actually improves their world and makes us more efficient together. Those are the high level things that I look for when I think about my team operating well. And like I said though, the work will never stop. It will always be there. Which is the exciting and fun part. So really it's about transparency, and process, and prioritization. Naber:  Nice. Awesome answer. Thanks so much, Jenn. So last question, and then we'll wrap. Okay. I've got one rapid fire question for you as well. So, one of your many superpowers, that you've alluded to a little bit, throughout your answers, but is...As you're going through every single one of these projects and all of your decisions, thinking as an end to end process thinker, where you're keeping the big picture in mind while you're able to zoom in and out of the details and the different requirements, and how do all these things stick together over an entire project over a sustained period of time. How do you bring stakeholders along with you in that journey? Because you're saying no a lot, you're saying yes a lot, you're saying no a lot more than you're saying yes. And you're also telling them, hey, please wait. Being a Sales and Marketing operator myself, I know that we could be inpatient every once in a while. So how do you bring stakeholders along in those conversations, and what are some of the best practices that you use for communicating with stakeholders? Because you're so good at that naturally, but that is not necessarily a Sales of Marketing operators forte as they're thinking about, just what they want to do for that quarter or that half of that year. Jennifer Knight: Yeah. Yeah. So I've had a couple of different approaches. I think once again, this is an interesting one...That you say it's a strength that I can think that way. And sometimes one of my weaknesses of getting it out of my mind, and onto a piece of paper. And so what I've gotten better at over time is making sure...everyone who knows me knows I love a whiteboard. I actually don't think that most people in these complex scenarios, there's a few of them that can, if you describe it with words, actually can follow along. I'm someone that, if someone starts, if I focus extremely hard and someone is describing something, I can usually think that I've understood. But sometimes when they put it on the board, I realized actually I didn't. So one of the techniques that I use, and I actually encourage everyone on my team to do, and I encourage our partners to do, is write on the board. Write your process on the board. On our side we will write then the system on the board. And let's all look at it, and then talk about the areas that we don't understand, or talk about the areas where we want clarification. In our side, when I start to think, okay, here's our end to end process, now you have all these Systems. Helping people come along, part of it is by laying out, here's the areas that maybe we're gonna be able to accelerate quickly, and here's the areas where I either don't have complete control - I'm going to have to negotiate with a partner, or is technically complex. So let's look at the whole thing end to end. But starting that visual from the process. And it doesn't have to be elegant. It doesn't have to follow all the fancy flowchart, actual diagrams. I do love that stuff sometimes, but get a pen out, sit down together, and make sure that you both are actually speaking the same language. And then that your priorities align. So I might get really passionate about some part of the process that somewhere else I've seen be really interesting, and that might not really be what you're passionate about. Or I might be able to bring some insight because I've seen this at a larger company. I can say, hey, two years, we don't have to face it today, but two years from now we're gonna need these kinds of controls. I'm telling you that I want to build this foundation in today because I'm looking forward. Do we agree that that's an okay thing to do? But even to get it out of your mind, get it onto a board. That's a huge one. Then, like I said, on the transparency side for our team, we have milestones. We are sending out sometimes weekly or biweekly updates on how we're progressing against those phases of the project. We're checking back in what has changed. Have our priorities changed? Have some more micro points within the plan, do we need to adjust? Have we learned something new that's going to shift something out? Those are the muscles that we exercise. But I think the first and most important thing is - can we all get in a room, and can we look at this thing end to end, and do we actually, are we speaking the same language? And I'm not going to say it verbally to you. I'm going to show you. And then pull out a pen, and mark it up, and tell me where it's crazy, or tell me where it doesn't work, or tell me where your world is different. And that way we on my side of the house, have the context of where you're coming from. And you on the business side, can understand how we're thinking about the approach. And no one is surprised. That would be the tactic that I think about a lot. Naber:  Man...I wish I could wrap that thought up and hug it because I loved it so much. You and I have a similar brain in some respects, and I'm loving that answer. Okay, last question. We're done with going through all these different examples, all this information. As you wearing like a tweed jacket and a hat right now, because you just professored everyone with all of your knowledge. So, one rapid fire question. So, I ask this to people on their birthdays every single year. It's not your birthday, but I'm asking anyways. Our audience has heard me say that a hundred times, apologies, but I'm explaining for the guests because they don't know. Maybe they've listened to all of them, nope they haven't. Most important learning or lesson you've acquired professionally in the last 12 months? Jennifer Knight: I would say, I've always been a patient person. But in the last 12 months, I've actually gotten much better at learning how to be both patient and persistent. Which is kind of a weird abstract learning, I'll give it that. But in environments where a lot of changes driven by influence or cross team collaboration, and everybody is under a lot of strainm under resourced in their own way...Figuring out how to navigate that in a way that continuously feels constructive, is not something that I would say was my strength in the past. I am definitely someone who likes to get things done, and I'm a bit principled in my approach. But same thing happens to my team. People are coming to me and saying, Jenn, can you do this thing? Can you do this thing? And I'm saying, no, we have to put it in this roadmap. Learning how to be the customer on that side. And how do I navigate that? And how do I continue to emphasize the importance of something or being respectful and patient of the process that I'm in? And being okay with that patient. Part of it is with my partners, and part of it for me is actually with myself. It's knowing that when

Guest: Niji Sabharwal - Co-Founder & CEO @AgentSync (Co-Founder & CEO @AgentSync; Formerly @Zenefits, @LinkedIn) Guest Background: Niji was the Global Sales Strategy & Operations Manager at LinkedIn (IPO in 2011, $27B Acquisition by Microsoft in 2016), where he led global, best-in-class sales ops teams focused on driving sales pipeline for all of LinkedIn's B2B businesses. Niji then worked with Zenefits ($4.5B Valuation, $584M Raised) as the Head of Sales Strategy & Sales Operations, where he built the Sales Ops & Strategy function consisting of the CRM, metrics & insights, sales compensation, sales productivity, territory design and deployment, and deal desk teams; enabling growth from 20 to 500+ sales employees.  Niji is now the Founder & CEO of AgentSync, an application built on Salesforce.com that automatically enforces state producer licensing & appointment regulatory requirements through an integration to the National Insurance Producer Registry (NIPR) - Minimize your compliance costs and prevent regulatory violations before they occur by letting technology do the heavy lifting. Guest Links: Website | LinkedIn Episode Summary: In this episode, we cover: - The Playbook: Build Your Sales Strategy & Operations Function - Sales Systems & Tools Function - 1st Hiring Profile, Landmines - Sales Capacity & Resource Planning & Analysis Frameworks - Sales Metrics and Reporting - Leading & Lagging Indicators - Tips for Managing Sales Strategy & Operations Stakeholders - Maximizing Your Inbound Lead & Sales Engine Full Interview Transcript: Naber:  Hello friends around the world. My name is Brandon Naber. Welcome to The Naberhood, where we have switched on, fun discussions with some of the most brilliant, successful, experienced, talented and highly skilled Sales and Marketing minds on the planet, from the world's fastest growing companies. Enjoy! Naber:  Hey everybody. Today we have Niji Sabharwal on the show. Niji the Global Sales Strategy and Operations Manager at LinkedIn (LinkedIn IPO'd in 2011, and then were acquired by Microsoft for $27 billion in 2016), there Niji led global best in class Sales Ops teams focused on driving Sales pipeline for all of LinkedIn's B2B businesses. Niji then worked with Zenefits (who have a $4.5 billion valuation on $584 million capital raised). He was there as the Head of Sales Strategy and Operations where he built the Sales Ops and Strategy function, consistency of the CRM, metrics and insights, Sales Compensation, Sales Productivity, territory design, deployment and deal desk teams. They enabled growth from 20 to 500+ Sales reps while Niji was at Zenefits. Niji is now the founder and CEO of AgentSync, an application built on Salesforce.com that automatically enforces state producer licensing and appointment regulatory requirements through an integration to the National Insurance Producer Registry (NIPR). It helps minimize your compliance costs and prevent regulatory violations before they occur by letting technology do the heavy lifting. Here we go. Naber:  Njii! Amazing to have you on the show. Thank you so much for joining us. Niji Sabharwal:  Yeah, thanks for having me. Naber:  Yeah, no worries. We've known each other for a long time, almost nine years now, I think we've known each other. Niji Sabharwal:  A little too long. Naber:  Haha, that's right too long. That's right. We should, we should cut this off. We should actually, before it goes downhill too fast, we should probably cut it off. We really can only go down. So I'm pumped to have you on for so many reasons. We are close enough where I know you personally and professionally, and we've gotten to know each other on many different levels. One of the things I want to do is have people get to know you, a little bit more personally because I want their fascination to grow in you, as my admiration, and fascination, and inspiration from you has grown. So we'll talk a little bit what it was growing up as Niji, what you were like as a kid, all the way through to decisions you made around where you went to school, and some of the things you did, and interests, and some of the first jobs you had. And then we'll jump into the meat of it, which is talking about your roles at some of the amazing fast growing hypergrowth Unicorn businesses that you've been at. Because you've been at some of the fast growing in the world in some pretty senior, significant roles. So, why don't we start with first, Niji as a kiddo. So, I know you grew up in San Francisco, grew up in Palo Alto and your Mom and Dad are amazing. And you had so many different varied interests as a kid. You went to a bilingual school, high school in Palo Alto, you got went to uni at UCSB. Let's walk through some of that stuff. Give us maybe three, five minutes and it's going to be longer, because I'll ask questions, but what was it growing up as a kid in Niji's life? What was Niji life as as a kiddo? Niji Sabharwal:  Yikes. Naber:  Ha, that's a good start. Niji Sabharwal:  First off, my dad's from India, my mom's from France. I was conceived in Maryland, actually that's where they met. And they were both on foreign exchange programs, in Frostburg, Maryland. Quickly after news of conception was heard, they moved to San Francisco for better opportunities. My Dad actually went to Golden Gate State, basically a community college. I was born in San Francisco, basically first generation. And so I was raised speaking English and French, and I started school at Ecole Bilingue, which is a French-American bilingual school in Berkeley, California. Naber:  So tell us a little bit about that. You were learning in French, correct? Or were you learning in English? Niji Sabharwal:  Both, which is kind of crazy to think about now, until probably, when I actually went to high school, I can't remember if I if I thought in French or English. But even to this day, sometimes I'll think of a French word, but...I'll think of a word in French first, and the English word won't exist, for it. Naber:  Haha, that happens in French a lot actually. Niji Sabharwal:  Yeah, totally. Yeah. The languages come from the same place, but there's a lot of French expressions that you just can't do in English. Naber:  Right, right. So, you and your brother both went to the school, correct? Speaker 5:        Yeah. So five years, five years younger. Naber:  Cool. And then what were you interested in as a kid? What were Niji's interests? What were your hobbies? What were you doing? Niji Sabharwal:  I was really into Green Day, Green Day was my favorite band. Got into rock, and then punk rock in the early days. Naber:  Best best green day album? Dookie? Niji Sabharwal:  Dookie, for sure. Hands down. Naber:  Just making sure. Just making sure. Niji Sabharwal:  Yeah, and I was always into building things. Legos, and...and Sim City 2000. I don't know if you've ever played that chorus. Naber:  Of course, of course. It's a throwback. Niji Sabharwal:  There you go. Lemmings is my number one favorite game in the entire planet. Naber:  Awesome. So you're into building things, that makes a ton of sense for what you're doing professionally right now, and how your mind works. Tell us about going into high school, and how you were in high school, and some of the things that you're interested in as well. Niji Sabharwal:  Yeah. So going into high school, I had little bit of a tough time. I was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease when I was 13. So I was hospitalized, basically for a summer. It was an autoimmune disease that affected my nervous system. So I lost a ton of weight, had trouble with motor functions for awhile. So it took me a couple of years to get back into it as the beginning of high school. I've been fortunate, but luckily I got through it pretty much unscathed. I have trouble with balance still today. If I closed my eyes in the shower, I don't know which way is up. Yeah. Which it can be challenging sometimes, I still ride a motorcycle today, which, I'm just gonna make sure never to close my eyes. Naber:  And you've always been in a motorcycling, sorry, motorcycle riding. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Niji Sabharwal:  Yeah, there's nothing like being on a motorcycle with wind at your face. It's almost meditative in a lot of ways. When you're on top of a motorcycle, there's nothing else you're thinking other than the moment that you're in, every second. There's something really, really special about that. I've tried to meditate in a lot of ways, and never been been able to fully do it, completely unconnect. Except for on a motorcycle. On a motorcycle, you're not thinking about anything else. It's kind impossible actually, it's actually very dangerous. Naber:  Right, right. I mean, and Niji likes to go fast, on on a bike. Tell us a little about how motorcycle riding has played a role in high school, and as you were growing up. Because you were really good at it, and you did it with a lot of people, it was a big part of your life. Tell us a little bit more. Niji Sabharwal:  Yeah. So, it's a very dangerous sport, first of all. So we would, basically ride in pretty big packs, full leathers. We would go up and down the coast, and all the way out to almost to Nevada and back, through these mountain roads. And yeah, a few guys from the group, broke tons of bones. Luckily we didn't have anyone die on the team, but, had a couple of guys actually helicoptered out of the canyons from crashing. And so it was a pretty intense sport, and intense group to ride with. But, looking back on it now, now that I'm middle-aged and have have a lot more to lose, I would never go back to those days. But in the moment, there was was something just so excited taking life to the edge as much as you can. Putting myself back into my 20 year-old body, there was nothing more exciting. There's nothing cooler that you can do. I'm glad I made it through that period, and didn't die, of course. Naber:  Jenn's glad too, Jenn's glad too. Again, I've known you for a long time, I know you really well, but I always think that those stories are fascinating. And it's such an interesting hobby that so many people don't have, and not a lot of people know that much about. And again, I just think your story is fascinating. So you're in high school. You went to Palo Alto High School, and you're going to go to UCSB. Why UCSB? And tell us a little bit about you there. Niji Sabharwal:  Yeah. So, when I was in high school, I was in California, it was a very competitive time. I graduated in to 2003. It was a very competitive time to be entering the college candidate pool. And I applied to most of the UC's which, in California, they're public schools. They're still ungodly expensive, but, I knew I wanted to do that versus going into private school. It's a difference between $9-10,000 and $40,000 a year. So I was really vying for a state school. Either UC or a state state sponsored school. And there was insane amount of competition, and I didn't have the best grades. I probably didn't apply myself more, as much as I should have in high school, and a graduate with a 3.3 GPA. And my SAT's were pretty average, 1330. But I had a really, what I thought was an amazing essay. And the essay that I wrote was about my second chance at life, going through the autoimmune disease I had. Facing death at a very young age, especially entering high school, and having to really face that head on, and getting through it, and having full capacity coming through it. It really a second chance. And English professor, English is probably my worst subject. I'm terrible at writing, I barely know the English language, and I actually scored way higher. on my French SAT's than I did on my English SAT's, which is pretty funny. Naber:  Wow. Niji Sabharwal:  So my English professor in high school was a UC Santa Barbara Alumni. And he spend some time with me crafting the essay, and giving me notes, and helping me make it, you know, a pretty compelling story. So I think that's what ultimately actually got me over the edge. Because, UC Santa Barbara had a 1% acceptance rate, something crazy that. So luckily, 3.3 GPA, it was decent, but at the time there was they could have easily only accepted 4.0 and still had twice as many applicants as they had spots. And I was pretty fortunate there, it was an amazing school to get into, especially because my focus has been economics and business, and UC Santa Barbara had an economics professor that actually got the Nobel Prize for economics, in Finland. Naber:  Wow, cool. And that's an awesome segue, and it's a really good story for how you got in, and the essay around your second chance at life, and your mindset at such a young age. It's incredible. So let's talk about you at UCSB a little bit. What kind of student were you? And what'd you study? And then we can get into some professional stuff. Niji Sabharwal:  Yeah. So pretty terrible student. Yeah, I hated going to lectures. I hated the whole system of having...because UCSB was on a quarterly system. It was kind of this terrible cycle of just studying your nuts off, the day before midterm or final. And if you can master that you can get through college, no problem. Which is kind of a terrible way to do it because...it's really terrible. I kind of gamed the system in a way, and figured out that, okay, if I just really apply myself the week before midterms, the week before finals, I can get through the whole thing. So to be brutally honest, I kind of squandered my education, and didn't take out of it what I probably should have, had I known what I know now. And we'll spend...I would l ove to go back to college right now. If someone could, like, float my life to learn for four years, there couldn't be anything better for me. Naber:  That's cool, it's an interesting thought process Niji Sabharwal:  Of course. But at the time, the only thing I was concerned about what's next, and partying, and socializing, and all that good stuff. So I spent probably a little too much time partying. We bought a bunch of jet skis and we would, we would basically launch jet skits directly from the beach in Santa Barbara, and just launch them off waves. Tons of fun. But honestly, yeah, I definitely squandered my education there. I didn't spend enough time studying, and spend too much time partying, but got through it nonetheless. Naber:  Nice. Got through it. It sounds the thrill seeker in you still has an unquenchable thirst at that point. And so you graduate from UCSB. What's your first role out of school? Do you go into HP at that point? Niji Sabharwal:  So out of school...I did an internship at HP. It was an emerging markets business unit that they've formed, selling a PC to small villages in South Africa, and Brazil, and some parts of Russia - where it was a shared PC unit to provide internet connection, and the ability to communicate and create an e-commerce marketplace for small businesses within those communities. I did that internship for about two years. So basically two summers It was actually really rewarding, a really rewarding project. HP ultimately ended up sunsetting that business unit, but it was a great launch into tech. And you're coming from...in college, Facebook was just starting to get traction at that point. So at this point people weren't quite...the internet was just becoming a real powerhouse as far as connecting people and creating a a marketplace online. Naber:  That sounds like a really rewarding project. I mean, the goal and the mission of the project must've been really rewarding, especially as you're going through school and had your first types of professional experiences. This must have been really rewarding. Alright, so you go through those projects, and then you end up at LinkedIn. Tell us how you got to LinkedIn, and then walk us through what you're up to at LinkedIn. And I'll stop, and ask a bunch of questions on some of the things that I know you're both good at, as well as some of those experiences you had. Niji Sabharwal:  Yeah. So after I graduated, I graduated in 2009. The worst year that you could possibly graduate with an economics degree, as this was right after the economic crash. I couldn't get a job at Pete's coffee. I applied to two Pete's coffee's with a degree in business economics from UC, and couldn't get a job to save my life. But went on an ggressive job hunt for months after I graduated, and ended up landing a job as, basically, a front desk cashier at rubber stamp company in Berkeley. Yeah, Berkeley Stamping & Engraving. They did rubber stamps and trophy engraving. Naber:  Trophy engraving and rubber stamps. So what were you doing for them? Niji Sabharwal:  So at first I was manning the front desk, taking orders, accounts receivable, accounts payable, and then the owners of the business trained me up on how to actually make the rubber stamps and operate this this old school engraving tool that they had that was run on an old, very old, DOS system that had different fonts for engraving different surfaces. And that was honestly probably the funnest job I've ever had. A whole workshop of rally cool shit to play with. They still made stamps the old fashioned way with a photo emulsion. So, we'd do typesetting digitally, and then we would take the typesetting and convert it to basically a film negative. And then film negative to imprint onto photo emulsion, so that you actually get the crazy amount of detail versus just doing it fully digital. And Berkeley Stamps & Graving was one of the...if you ever look at a bag of Pete's coffee, they don't use stamps anymore, but 10 years ago, if you looked at a bag of Pete's coffee that had a stamp on it that said, dark roast, the odds of me physically making that stamp are like 99%. Naber:  That's cool. Niji Sabharwal:  Yeah. It's funny that I couldn't even get a job at Pete's coffee, but, they were keeping that business alive, more or less. They were based out of, Oakland, California, and they really invest in local businesses. So they would only use local businesses for things like stamps that they use for all the locations nationwide. And that was the account actually kept Berkeley Stamp & Engraving open for so as long as they were. Naber:  Would it be fair to say you couldn't get a job at Pete's coffee, but you really put a stamp on their business? Niji Sabharwal:  Oh Man. Naber:  I know, I know, I nailed it. Niji Sabharwal:  Typical Brandon. Naber:  Haha, typical. So let's move to LinkedIn. So you hopped to LinkedIn at that point, how would you make the move, and what were you doing while you were there? And just run us through very quickly the jumps you had while you were there. And then I'll ask you a few questions about them. Niji Sabharwal:  Yeah. So, I was working in Berkeley Stamp & Engraving, I was living Oakland with a crazy ex-girlfriend at the time. I was actually at, my parents throw this epic Halloween party every year - my parents are pretty multicultural, and have a pretty eclectic, group of friends - and I was talking to this guy at the party. It was one of my mom's friends, boyfriends at the time, and he just joined a company called LinkedIn. And he was telling me about what LinkedIn was, and at the time LinkedIn was 200 people or less maybe, a small company based out of Mountain View. And I was honestly pretty drunk at the time, and we had a pretty long conversation that I probably only remember half of. And a couple of weeks later, he reached out to me about a potential job for LinkedIn in their Sales department. Yeah, completely out of the blue, and I was obviously looking for a better job to really launch my career, and given where the economy was at the time and the job opportunities that were available to me, it was a really great lead. So, after months of interviews, finally landed a job as a Sales Development Representative selling LinkedIn's Recruiting Solution. Naber:  Love it. And in your Sales Development days, one of my favorite parts about your story is you're relatively self-taught for your jump into Sales Operations and Strategy, learning some of the tools and systems. Talk a little bit that self learning, and then we'll get into your Sales Strategy and Ops role. Niji Sabharwal:  Yeah. So, started off at LinkedIn and in Sales, and we were...and it as the wild, wild West back then. I was a junior Sales rep. At that point Sales Development was kind of a new idea that was really pioneered by a couple of folks at LinkedIn, Brian Frank being being one of them. And the idea was to have a junior Sales function that would do a lot of the lead generation, and tee-ing up qualified leads for Account Executives to run the Sales cycle through. The idea was to, almost like factory line the Sales process, which seems totally obvious today, but at the time it was pretty revolutionary to have this function tee up Sales leads for Account Executives to close. And I think honestly at that point, the issue was that people didn't want to invest in junior Sales folks knowing that the average return on investment for an Account Executive would...industry standard was about eight to one. Meaning, if your business is run really solidly, you can expect to return $8 on every $1 that that you spend on your Account Executives. So you hired junior a Salesperson, you're not gonna get that return out of them. But, the revolutionary idea that turn in Sales Development was that if you can basically make that Account Executive that much more productive, by offloading all the prospecting and lead generation that is, I wouldn't say administrative, but less strategic than runninga full Sales cycle. you can improve those efficiency ratios. And that's really what landed with me, and making Sales Development what it is today. So, at that point, I was doing Sales and realizing that the processes we had in place were pretty inefficient. At the time I was hired, I was I think the fifth Sales Development rep at LinkedIn, and the Sales processes we had in place were all over the map. It was kind of like, whoever could provide the most leads wins, and that was kind of it. You were given a loose lead list, and we were given the opportunity obviously to sell into LinkedIn's subscribers, their members. So that was the raw tools we had available at the time, but there was no real process to how you go get those leads. So at the time I partnered up with our Salesforce Admin, this woman who probably taught me everything I know about Salesforce. And she howed me the ropes of how we can leverage Sales tools to make myself and the team more efficient. And at the end of the day, I wouldn't consider myself to be a type A personality, and as I don't really enjoy selling, I don't see myself doing that everyday, all day long. So I pitched the idea to my boss at the time, that I thought my skills would be best used in Sales Operations, leveraging Sales systems and Sales tools that we had to make the Sales reps that we have more effective. And that whole process was maybe two days to pitch the idea. And he was like, I totally buy into that, let's do it. And two days later I was now in Sales Operations, or the Sales Ops person. Naber:  And how long were you doing that role at LinkedIn? Niji Sabharwal:  Which role? Naber:  Well, you were in Sales Ops, and then you're leading teams after that. How long were you in Sales Ops at LinkedIn? Naber:  Yeah. So, I was doing Sales Dev for a couple months, then converted myself into the Sales Ops function. Grew that function out. We built the Sales Ops team and the Sales Development team out significantly over the next few years. We were providing structure, strategic planning, building Sales territories, Sales process, prospecting process, prospecting tools, and ended up expanding from just a small office in Mountain View to, nine global offices. And from when I took on the Sales Ops role to that point was probably about two years. And then, once we expanded into Asia, Australia, EMEA - the office in Ireland, I pitched to my boss at the time, a new boss, that I wanted to expand my skills, and take an opportunity in Europe to build out the Sales Operations team there. So I was fortunate enough to get the opportunity to move to Ireland to build out Sales Operations function, and my pitch was to bring the North American rigor to to EMEA. Naber:  Nice. Awesome. And how long were you doing that? And then, tell us about the next jump as well. Because you were there for a little bit, and then you moved back to San Francisco after that. So tell us about when you were in Ireland, how long you were there, and then tell us about the move back to San Francisco as well. Niji Sabharwal:  Yeah. So, when I moved to Ireland, that's where I met your pretty face. Built out the Sales Operations team there, and learned a ton about how this type of business was done in Europe. And specifically the challenges of operating with multi-languages, multiculture...you know, learning the hard fact that if you have a thick Spanish accent, and you're trying to sell into the UK, that you're not gonna have a lot of luck. Americans are easy, they'll buy from anybody. But learning how to navigate the European cultural differences, was actually the biggest learning for me at that time. Naber:  Niji, let's pause there for a minute. If someone's going to go into, either running global portions of Sales Operations, or put global portions of Sales, what's some advice you would have around the mindset they need to have expanding into Europe and starting to own some of those markets that you learned, and maybe some piece of advice you would give? Niji Sabharwal:  Yeah, I mean that is a great question. So every market is completely different. I mean, my experience has taught me that if you know how to sell SaaS in the US, that doesn't mean you know how to SaaS anywhere else. Understanding the markets, the cultural differences, the differences in languages and how things translate, and thinking you can scale something from a US market to other markets just because the idea makes sense is not all that that's involved. You need boots on the ground to really understand what's going on. I mean, think of India as an example. Everyone thinks that because of the population and the amount of money that is potentially made in India...it doesn't translate that easily. There's an insane amount of language, cultural, behavioral differences from market to market. Naber:  Nice one. That's great. All right, keep going. This is good. So, you're in Dublin and then you're working on some of these projects. These are some of the things you learned. You're about to make the move back to SF. What are you doing there? Niji Sabharwal:  Yeah, so I was considering...I was planning on doing a stint of...It was open-ended, I was planning on doing about a year in Europe, or a year in Ireland specifically. I was thinking about my next plan after I'd built the team out there, and I was looking at a role in London for one of LinkedIn's newer business units. But, kind of a tricky situation, before I moved to Ireland, actually right after I made a decision, I started dating this this woman knowing that I was moving to Ireland, it was an eight month timeframe. Because I had to basically build a transition plan, hire a replacement to lead the North America team. So I had an eight month ramp time before I was gonna move. And so, I met this woman who completely blew me away, and we started dating. And knowing that I was gonna move away, it was a tricky...a tough concept to deal with. We ended up breaking up right before I moved over to Ireland. And knowing that the long distance thing is challenging and best - I was 28 at the time? We figured that it was just not worth trying to keep going. But while I was there we stayed in touched, and I ended up having to make this tough decision where, I was going to potentially move to London for this role with the new business unit with LinkedIn, or I could move back to San Francisco and actually make a go at it with this woman. I ended up moving back to San Francisco and moving in with my now wife. It definitely worked out in the end. So came back to San Francisco with LinkedIn, moved in with the wife. At the time, we dated for three or four years before we actually got married. But, I was back in San Francisco for about six months, and I was presented with an opportunity to work in a new startup in the HR technology space, a start up called Zenefits. Naber:  Yeah. Awesome. Awesome. So, let's walk through Zenefits quickly - some of the roles that you had...actually let's pause there for a minute. So while you were at LinkedIn, and while you're at Zenefits, one of the things you were known for is building Sales Operations functions, and having an understanding for all the different pieces involved in that. If someone's going to be building out their Sales Ops and Sales Strategy function, what's a framework that they should be using as they're thinking about the different pieces involved, as well as where to start and the phases that they'll go through in order to build that out? Niji Sabharwal:  Yeah, that's a good one. So, first and foremost, as you start thinking about Sales Strategy and Operations, the first question you've got to answer is what is what is the financial plan, or what is the go to market plan? So I think where a lot of folks get it wrong, is they have a product market fit that makes sense. They have a market that they know has demand, but the amount of demand is completely up to what the CEO's telling you exists. So, one of the key functions that Sales Strategy and Operations play is the ability to quantify that demand, and really put a plan together where you can really make the rubber meet the road. In taking...at an early stage you're not going to have a ton of metrics that you can really pressure test. But, good Sales Ops folks will take the data that you do have, identify the lead volume that you've been getting across the different channels, and put a strategic plan together, a go-to-market plan that quantifies that demand. And we'll extrapolate by channel what your conversion rates are going to look like, should look like. What are good industry benchmarks for those conversion rates? And then taking your Sales capacity, the AE's and Sales Development reps that you're going to hire, based on the amount of revenue that that they're gonna bring in - which is a function of the amount of leads, times the conversion rate, times your average selling price to get to a month over month extrapolation of what your business can actually do, versus just putting your finger to the wind on yeah, I think we could turn this into a hundred million dollar business overnight. Naber:  Okay. So that's the first step. And what are you doing after that? Niji Sabharwal:  So, I would say the core pillars to a Sales Operations team are going to be...Sales systems and the core Sales tools that the Sales team is going need, a function for that...and these functions can be carried by one or one or more people. I think over time you're gonna start to specialize these functions, but right off the bat you're probably going to have one to three people wearing a lot of hats. So Sales Tools & Sales Systems is going to be a pretty core functionality that you're going to wanna to knock out right up front. Second is going to be the strategic planning and analysis function, where you're going to want to want somebody that can think strategically about where the business is going, a solid partner with the Sales lead to understand what's possible and the demand that's out there. And then reporting and analytics. That's a really core function that you're gonna want to keep in place. So somebody that can set the metrics, based on that go to market plan, set the metrics, and provide the visibility to leadership team, and on an operational basis to the Sales team, so that they have a true north. I can't tell you the amount of businesses that I've seen that can't even tell you how much revenue they're generating every month. That's an enormous problem. And there are so many level setting activities I've seen where, I went through this Zenefits a few times, where we didn't set the right measurement capabilities in our system to be able to accurately represent how much revenue is coming in. Because as Zenefits was mostly funded by insurance commissions, and insurance commissions are...you don't fully realize them until month two or month three after you sold the deal. So when you have a situation where the company's in crazy hyper growth, if you can't fully realize those revenues until month three, you could be in a ton of trouble. So having measurements in place and having that true North is absolutely critical, and putting as much emphasis on that as you can. Naber:  Nice. Love it. And so let's go through each one of those things for a second. So you said systems and tools. If I'm going through systems and tools, and building out a SaaS Sales function, what should I be thinking about for the best practices for one, the person that should be doing that, and two, the types of systems and tools that I should putting in place? And your evolution for how that's gonna evolve over time, what you need to be good at in order to get that right? Niji Sabharwal:  Yeah. So that's not an easy question to answer. I think depending on the business, it, I'll have completely different answers. But as a general rule, experience is key. So trying to try to put somebody that has used Salesforce in the past...If you're an early stage company, generally the CEO or Head of Sales doesn't quite appreciate the importance of systems and tools up front. And they will put in place the person who they think has the most exposure to systems. So, putting somebody in place that has used Salesforce in the past, and they're not quite sure what to, what to do with them in that role, is probably the worst idea you can have. So if you're planning on building a business for scale, you're gonna want to put somebody who has war scars and has seen what good looks like, seen what bad looks like. You're gonna want to put that person in the role. And I've realized that by saying this I wouldn't be sitting where I am today because I wouldn't have gotten that opportunity. But, had I been in a decision making role, I never would have put myself into the role that LinkedIn put me into. Naber:  Okay. That makes sense. And what are some of the things that both LinkedIn and Zenefits are really good at from a systems and tools perspective? And maybe you can give a couple of examples. Niji Sabharwal:  Yeah. So I mean, LinkedIn was a pretty special case. They were a picture perfect example of what good looks like. Naber:  Yeah, describe that. Naber:  They had a very seasoned leadership team. As far as tech companies go, most tech companies do not start with a seasoned leadership team. If you look at the folks that were in charge of making decisions at the time at at LinkedIn, at the very beginning of it's hyper growth, all those guys knew exactly what the fuck they were doing before. They've done this before. They had a very clear vision. They didn't come up to off with with a cool idea, and then got the people that were closest to them to tell them with that. They were very thoughtful about how they put that leadership team together, and scaled the company, and really came up with that. They were true disruptors. Where, I think a lot of companies, like Zenefits which just grew way too quickly without thinking through all the systems and support that was needed to scale a company at the rate that both LinkedIn and Zenefits scaled at, I think that was probably the biggest difference between those two. Naber:  What are some of the mistakes, whether it's specifically or just generally, that most of those types of teams that either grow too fast, and don't take the appropriate amount of account for systems and tools, or they just get it wrong - what are some of the landmines you can step on? Niji Sabharwal:  Yeah, I'd say the biggest thing is doing fewer things better. And that was something that LinkedIn has imprinted on me, is don't get distracted by all the shiny stuff along the way, and focus on the things that are really going to be core. And if you can't nail on those things, don't do anything else. At Zenefits I was just as much a blame as anyone else for this, it was really easy to get distracted by all the shiny stuff along the way, and we tried to do everything for everyone. And that's not a recipe for success. Naber:  Fewer things done better. Focus. Love it. All right, let's hop into...you had mentioned resource planning and analysis. So let's talk about that. What's output, and what's the goal of resource planning analysis? Walk us through that process where you can give us a vision into how you think about going about the process of resource planning, and what the purpose of it is, and what the best case scenario is with your output? Niji Sabharwal:  Yeah. So I mean, I'm assuming the question is specifically for the Sales function, and building out the go to market plan from a Sales capacity perspective. So resource planning is always a pretty tough one, especially when you don't have a lot of data to go off of. So if you're talking about building a financial plan for the next year, when you've had three years under your belt, it's a lot easier to straight line. Naber:  Let's, maybe we should do some examples at LinkedIn. What would that process look like? And then at Zenefits ,differently, what would that process look like? Niji Sabharwal:  Yeah, so at at LinkedIn I was fortunate enough to be learning from a ton of really experienced folks and getting to take what they built and build on that. At Zenefits, we were doing everything from scratch, and the straight line was insane. It wasn't a straight line. It was an exponential curve where...when I joined Zenefits, the year prior we did just under 2 million revenue. And the year I joined we did 10 million. And plan for the next year was 100 million. So it was just absolute bananas, bananas growth. So we were operating with very little data, and almost, with a gun to the head, how much can we do if we really squeeze as much juice out of the lemon as possible. So yeah, that that planning process was...the best way to describe it was we would take all the different Sales channels that would provide fruit throughout that year. So the key ones I would zero in on are inbound leads - so how much coming Marketing, from both word of mouth, our SEM spend, basically all the contact us leads that we get from our website, chat leads we get from from the website, all in the one bucket. Second would be events - so webinars, trade shows, in person events, those kind of things. That would be our events bucket. And then content. So, we would generate white papers, data sheets, we would try to circulate them through every avenue that we could. And that would make up our requested content bucket. One more I would call out is email. So cold Marketing emails would be the fourth bucket. And that was a really important one at Zenefits, especially as we had one of the most ingenious email marketers, probably on the planet, at the helm of the ship that point. So, we took those four different channels and figured out, okay, how much can we squeeze out of those channels, how many leads, given the size of the market? So we did a total addressable market sizing exercise, and understood that okay, there's 8 million small businesses in the US that fit our demographic. How many do we think we can actually go get, and how many are within the general confines of what makes sense for our targeted demographic. Meaning, we wouldn't consider businesses that don't have email addresses or basic things like that wouldn't make them a good candidate for a technology solution. And that was basically our addressable market. And we figured, okay, well let's say we can get there in the next 10 years. So we would take all the different Sales channels that we have, based on the conversion rates that we knew we can get from those channels, and looked at both the costs and the resources that were needed against each channel to generate those leads. And that would be covered in the cost section in the analysis. And on the capacity side, we would figure out, okay, how many, for example, Sales Development reps who we need to qualify a hundred leads. And based on the conversion rates that we knew across the channel, how many of those leads would turn into wins. And so we would, we would take that analysis of total leads by channel, and have...there's a lot of art and science to this stuff. So it's not always going to be an equation where the left side equals the right. So we would take a total amount of leads that we generate by channel, and figure out, okay, how many, Sales Development reps do we need to generate those leads or even qualify those leads. And then how many Account Executives do we need to be on the other side to, to handle those leads. And what we would do to calculate the amount of Account Executives, which I think was one of the biggest faults to original model, was assuming that, okay, how many hours does an encounter executive have in a day to qualify these leads? And we were thinking okay, well it's not just new leads are qualifying, but how much of their day are they going to spend on the second touch, third touch, fourth charge of their current pipeline. So we, generally in that equation a lot of companies will underestimate the time it takes to actually follow up with the Sales cycle. And just think that you should probably spend most of your time on new leads versus following-up on old pipeline, which is absolutely the wrong way to do it. So a good way to think about it is, okay, a third of your time should be spent on new leads, two-thirds should be spent on following up with the existing pipeline. That's obviously a very peanut butter spread metric. And based on whatever that time spend allocation ratio is, you could figure out, okay, how many new leads can an Account Executive actually handle, based on Sales cycles and everything else. So, taking, taking that equation, you can figure out, okay, this is how many leads can go through the system. This is how much capacity each AE can take, and this is how many Sales Development reps we're going to need to support them. And then you play with both the inputs, mostly the inputs, to figure out, okay, at what point do we hit a breaking point in the system, where either you get diminishing returns by generating more leads...it costs you more money to actually generate those leads than it does to put numbers on the scoreboard. And so that was a very long winded way to answer that but yeah, that makes sense? Naber:  Yeah, of course. That wasn't long winded. It's a lot of detail, which is exactly, what we're looking for. It's great. I was actually hoping you go into some detail because your mind is brilliant, and I I'm glad that we got to see a little bit more into it. Let's say you go through that process, you come over with that Strategy, you've got your numbers, you got your Head count plans, you put the budget against it, you're going to deploy the Strategy next. Then you talked about reporting, metrics, and measurement. So what types of reports, or reporting, or metrics are you building out for each different type of stakeholder in the organization? So Marketing, Sales, maybe C-level, and then subsequently water falling down into management or director level, and maybe even down to rep level, but probably not. What sort of reports, metrics, and measurement are you putting in place, and how do you think about doing that? Niji Sabharwal:  Yeah, so, the way I usually think reports, and dashboards, and KPIs is leading and lagging indicators. So lagging indicators are pretty straight forward. I'm thinking okay, what was your conversion rate over this period of time? What was your win rate? What your ACV or average selling price? Those things can easily be calculated, based on the results that you see. I think what's a lot more interesting...Obviously those are going to be the key, really the KPIs that you want to put in place that you can measure business against. And those are the gonna be the KPIs that are built into your go to market model. So that if you're starting to miss on certain KPI's - conversion rate, win rate, ACV - you're gonna start to tend to see those results, on the scoreboard very quickly. But, by the time you start to see the revenue dip below where the plan is, you're way too late. So one of the keys is figuring out what those leading indicators are, so that you can suss out problems, and build almost like an early warning system, before it's way too late. What will tend to happen is...let's say your Marketing machine is starting to either hit its point of diminishing returns, or the messaging is just not landing anymore, or there's a new competitor on the market that your old demand, or the demand that used to get, is starting to go into this other competitor. By the time that you know that that lead, which would usually turn into a qualified lead that would be brought into a Sales cycle by an AE that would eventually close, by the time that that lagging indicator starts to go down, depending on what type of businesses it is this could be anywhere from 30 days to 180 days...By the time you figure out that that your revenue is going down, your 180 days too late to solving the problem. So, really understanding what those lagging indicators are and understand that you should be really fucking concerned if you're used to seeing, let's say, 3000 inbound leads, against that one channel of four channels for inbound leads. If you start to see that number go down by 10%, and the next month go down by another 10%, you should be really, really worried and you should address that right up front. And the only way you're going to do that is by having really good reporting and analytics against this. And the sophistication, or the support by leadership that, if you see that metric go down that you can call fire, and go address it right away. Or it's just having your leadership team say, hey, the numbers look good today. we're closing as much revenue, why should we be worried? Naber:  Yeah. All that makes tons of sense. Thanks so much for joining on the detail. And you just raised one of the super powers I believe that you have, is gaining the trust to be able to yell fire, and people listen, and act. How would you suggest, or maybe a framework you think about, or maybe it's a mindset you have, on how do you build that trust so that when you say fire people listen, take it seriously, as well as act on it? Niji Sabharwal:  To be honest, I would say that is probably one of my weak points. There's a politics to this that I've never been able to master. And I think that's actually one of the key things that people in my position need to figure out, is how to do better is articulate points in a way that will resonate with leadership team. When I see that kind of stuff, I see the numbers, I understand them probably...a lot of Sales Ops folks will understand them most better than most people will. And I will see a fire, and I'll yell fire, and I'll show them the numbers, but that's never enough, right. If you're gonna yell fire, there's going to be significant resources behind the firefighting effort, and potentially to scare to the rest of the company, it's not a very popular idea. So understanding how important the politics side of it is and the optic side of it is actually, something that shouldn't be undervalued. So building, upfront, way in advance from day one in the job, build the best relationship with leadership team, from the CEO to the VP of Sales, to the CMO, whomever, building those relationships up front there are absolutely critical. And that becomes really challenging, especially when if you have...In Zenefits case, leadership turning over over, every year, every two years...When you're at a company that has leadership changes more than one or two times, it's really easy to say okay, well there's gonna be somebody else. It's not worth the time to build those relationships. But it always is. Having that credibility, and the trust in leadership team's absolutely critical, regardless if you think there's going to be a new guy coming soon or new gal. Naber:  Yup. Yup. Got It. Awesome. And you hinted at it a little bit there. I've got just two more topics to talk about, and then we'll wrap. Thanks so much for your time. Actually maybe three, I think it's three. So the first one is, you hinted a little bit there, stakeholder management. When you think about stakeholder management, how do you manage stakeholders from Sales, differently than you do from Marketing, differently than you do from Eng and Product, etc? I mean, do you have a general thought process where, from a Sales Ops perspective this is what's important to Sales, from a Sales Ops perspective this is what's important to Marketing, and product and eng, etc? Niji Sabharwal:  Yeah, that's a really good one. So, yeah, I think the best way to think about it is to meet them where they are. The type of character, the type of person you're gonna deal with from Head of the Technical team, to a Head of Sales, to Head of Marketing, to a Head of Customer Support. Those profiles are enormously different, right? People are enormously different, right? And so having as much empathy, and I would say empathy is the key key thing that you should be thinking about, is figuring out what's important to them and making whatever you're trying to accomplish, aligning your vision with theirs. Can't stress that more. Naber:  Yeah. Let's look at an example. So if I'm going to Sales, what's your head space when you're going to someone in Sales, and we'll go through each example. Niji Sabharwal:  The number. Convincing your Head of Sales, I mean obviously this is very hypotheticaland not all situation here align up to this, but convincing your Head of Sales that what you're trying to do is going to provide the business value that's going to get them to their number. If it's Support, just getting them to understand that what you're trying to do in that moment is going to improve user experience, customer experience, and ultimately provide a better end to end customer customer journey. Naber:  Nice one. And what about Product and Eng, you've done a bunch of projects between liaising between Sales, and Marketing, and Product and Eng. What are some of the things that you need to think about in Sales Ops, Sales Strategy, Sales Tools, Systems, as you're having those types of conversations? Niji Sabharwal:  That's a good one. So, I mean, I would say it'd be very similar to, trying to hit on the same points as what would be important to, a CRO or Head of Sales, as well as, speaking to customer experience, and ultimately,customer retention. Interfacing with with CTO's, and Head of Product, Heads of Product can always be pretty challenging because they can have a much different vision, and be motivated by different motivations than, just, just trying to optimize profits. That makes sense? Naber:  Yeah, absolutely. How have you, any, do you have one or two tips on how to navigate that? Niji Sabharwal:  So yeah, this might sound a little cheesy, but honestly, just building relationships with those folks that our real. Having a beer with them, having lunch with them, having more personal connections with those folks, goes a really, really long way. Not trying to sound you're trying to buy their affection, but, that honestly to me has been the best way to actually navigate those situations, building personal relationships with them so that they can, they can trust where you're coming from. I mean, I'm assuming you are trustworthy person. Naber:  Fair enough. That's great detail. Thank you. So you're at LinkedIn, one of the fastest growing companies ever. You're in Sales Ops and Strategy. Then you move to Zenefits, also one of the fastest growing companies of all time. Two more things that I see as a bridge or a commonality between those two things. One is, something you had to do often. And the second one is something that they did as one of their, I think core competencies did really well. The first one is, you've had to sell a vision to a group very often. And my understanding, it's one of your fortes, and one of your superpowers. So how do you think about going about doing that? Getting people to, the right place with the business case, getting people to act, doing the right thing for the business based on the vision that you have, and even if it's not necessarily one of the things that they want to do, or if it's not necessarily within the scope of the way that they see things in their vision? Niji Sabharwal:  Yeah, I mean, that's a million dollar question. Naber:  More than that. Billion dollar question somewhat. Niji Sabharwal:  I'd say really thinking about your, wherever you're selling this vision to, making a shared vision. And that's really the key is understanding your audience, where they're coming from, and going back to the empathy issue, where you need to connect with them on a level where it means something to them. And it sounds super obvious, but tailoring that message to connect with them on a level that makes sense for their role and what they're trying to achieve. It's really hard to do obviously when you're, when you're pitching big business direction change for example, to the leadership team, where you have representatives from each side of the business. But thinking through how, not that you have to pretend that or change the mission or the initiative that you're pitching, but making it resonate with all the folks that are in the room, or all the folks that are going to be making this decision. And that's absolutely key. Naber:  Right. Awesome. And then do you have a process you go about doing that? To make sure that it's a vision. Do you have a checkbox list of things that you check off in your head, or maybe a couple of steps that you take in order to do that? Niji Sabharwal:  Yeah, so it really depends on the environment, the company. I think an easy to go to would be, thinking about the company's mission statement, or the company's key values. LinkedIn was really great about this where, every employee can on command recite the company's mission and value statements, at any given point. Even as those evolved over time. So those are really easy to go to's, where you can get everyone rallied behind that initiative, if you're able to hit on those values. Otherwise, thinking through, just to folks that are going to be in that room are the folks that you really need to get to, thinking about what is what is relevant to them in that moment or what is relevant to them, for that specific initiative. Naber:  Yeah. Nice one. Okay. Last topic, Niji, and and then we'll round it out with two rapid fire questions. So last topic is building an Inbound Engine. You've had to do this at LinkedIn with a significant amount of sophistication. You have to do this to build massive scale into Zenefits growth model. The way to operationalize a lot of this growth, is to make sure that you have a very sophisticated Inbound Engine. What are the steps you go about in order to build that out and make sure it's sophisticated enough from a Sales Ops and Strategy perspective? Niji Sabharwal:  Yeah, so there are so many tools out there today that that make this stuff a lot easier, as far as systems go. But I'd say the most important piece of operationalizing it would be speed to lead. So figuring out speed to lead. So figuring out whatever you need to do to minimize the time between once somebody raises their hand or submits an inquiry, to getting back to them. So, at LinkedIn, the process was somebody would submit a Contact Us form. We would usually respond within 48 hours. So pretty typical to a lot of Sales functions. But what we we figured out very quickly is that the inbound lead channel is by far the highest converting channel. Somebody raised their hand saying, I want something, give it to them. Why wouldn't you? And so providing as many those touch points as possible. Chats a really great example. Chat was extremely valuable when we launched at LinkedIn. When we launched it at Zenefits, same deal, it was gangbusters. If you're able to connect with your buyers, in a place where they're coming to you, take advantage of that in every way that you can. So I would say that that would probably be the number one thing I would think in operationalising and the inbound channel. Speed to lead. One more thing I would add there actually is...Speed to lead and also just making it stupid easy for people to come to you. If you have a contact us form that has 10 fields to fill out, you're gonna have a lot less people coming to you. If you have somebody coming to you where you just ask the basic question, give me your phone number, I'll call you back. You're going optimize conversion rates with the ease to get to you. Naber:  Hey everybody, thanks so much for listening. If you appreciated and enjoyed the episode, go aHead and make a comment on the post for the episode on LinkedIn. If you love The Naberhood Podcast, we'd love for you to subscribe, rate, and give us a five star review on iTunes. Until next time - go get it.