How to Align Enterprise Teams and Win Complex Deals

00;00;12;24 – 00;00;14;18
Speaker 1
There he is. Hello, Fitz.

00;00;14;24 – 00;00;15;22
Speaker 2
How you doing, Kyle?

00;00;16;05 – 00;00;41;02
Speaker 1
I’m just living the dream. Living the dream. And I’m excited to welcome everybody to episode five of the Race to Revenue. I’m joined today by my friend Dan Fitzsimmons. I call him Fitz because we’re that close. He’s the CRO at Pure Storage and just an absolute sales pro. Has been doing it his entire life and is going to give us some incredible thoughts around aligning enterprise teams to win complex deals.

00;00;41;09 – 00;01;01;16
Speaker 1
It’s something that’s going to be that’s incredibly important in normal times and is going to be even more important in 2023. As sales cycles elongate more stakeholders get involved. You have to start to sell to probably different personas that maybe you haven’t before. So without further ado, welcome. Fitz Tell us a little bit about yourself, a little bit about peer.

00;01;02;05 – 00;01;38;04
Speaker 2
Yeah. Cheers, Kyle. First about Pure. If anybody doesn’t know we’re a storage and data management company disruptor in the industry and an organization that supports critical applications infrastructure for leading companies around the world. Public company approaching 3 billion in revenue. Who’s been well known in the analyst community as as a top leader and and a disruptor. And also one who is well known for delivering some of the world’s leading customer experience.

00;01;38;05 – 00;01;46;15
Speaker 2
So I’ve been here for about seven and a half years and we try and stay humble and try and earn our way through it.

00;01;47;03 – 00;01;52;13
Speaker 1
3 billion in revenue. You’ve been there for seven and a half years. Are you at liberty to say what their revenue was when you started?

00;01;52;28 – 00;02;02;16
Speaker 2
Yes, a couple of hundred million. So it’s been a it’s been a journey of a few hundred people to several thousand at the company level.

00;02;02;29 – 00;02;18;19
Speaker 1
Men that there aren’t enough congratulations in the world to probably say it. So that’s incredible. So given the economic headwinds I alluded to at the Open. Any adjustments that you have made on your team, how are you directing your team to think or act differently?

00;02;19;09 – 00;02;48;06
Speaker 2
Yeah, well, first and I mentioned mentioned the word disruptor, and by that I mean our our daily plate and has been for years is to disrupt large incumbent relationships and take market share. And as a result of that, it is it is always our place to be paranoid, not delusional, even if we’re proud of of who we are and what we’ve been able to accomplish.

00;02;49;13 – 00;03;23;20
Speaker 2
You know, it’s challenging out there to take share and especially to take share from kind of large, multi-year and in some cases, you know, decade plus relationships. And as such, it requires that paranoia requires a level of diligence and kind of process inspection on a on a good day. And you know, what you referenced in terms of macroeconomic times is absolutely just reinforcing how important it is for us.

00;03;24;06 – 00;03;47;12
Speaker 2
And I think for anybody to stick to the fundamentals, to stick to diligence inspection fundamentals of sales process, looking at data and trending so that you’re you’re just all over what could possibly happen, even if everyone’s enthusiastic about kind of the potential.

00;03;47;28 – 00;04;19;07
Speaker 1
I love that being proud of your product, but also humble and understanding where the shortcomings may be. But doing all the scenario, planning to know where you’re strong and where you’re weak so you’re not surprised by anything that may happen. And I’m curious if you can tell us about an example of this kind of healthy paranoia. And the reason I ask is because I’ve seen a lot of go to market leaders get kind of debilitated by paranoia where they just get in their own heads about all the different things that could go wrong or the competitive pressure they may be facing.

00;04;19;07 – 00;04;29;27
Speaker 1
And then they end up not taking any action at all. And that’s obviously not the way to go. So how do you find the right balance and make sure that the paranoia is healthy, productive and it ultimately drives revenue?

00;04;30;16 – 00;05;07;10
Speaker 2
Yeah, I mean, by our nature we’re passionate and bullish, if not optimistic. You do have to blend it. And I think the way I would define it is we want to be truth seekers and and therefore we embrace bad news and and no sales teams ever want to deliver bad news. Those sales exact sales reps as these ever want to you know necessarily proactively share the dark side of what what could be wrong or what could happen.

00;05;07;22 – 00;05;42;07
Speaker 2
And culturally we strive to embrace that and then we really try hard to have data and automation of insights to help bring that kind of current state, if you will, to bear. So it’s not just conversations and inspection on forecast calls and deal reviews. Of course, we do that in spades, but we want to have a trend. And, you know, that’s because we talked about it.

00;05;42;15 – 00;06;11;26
Speaker 2
We’re we’re kind of data crazy around here. I’ve got dashboards coming out of my ears and and and our leadership team lives in it. And because we want to have a view of the truth, we want to have a view of reality and then test that against, you know, what are the actions that we need to take and how do we need to surround opportunities, And especially, as you referenced, large complex, be it enterprise or what I would call, you know, kind of high TAM opportunities.

00;06;11;27 – 00;06;58;04
Speaker 2
It isn’t necessarily enterprise. It could be large commercial accounts, it could be large public sector accounts, large health care accounts, but large corporate complex opportunities. Again, I’m sure anybody on the on this webinar would would agree require requires more diligence and more thoughtfulness around qualification, which leads to what’s your what’s your sales methodology and and how do you how do you bring a framework to kind of prosecuting opportunity is and not just, you know, intuitions and guts and all the rest, be it decision making, be it compelling events, be it economics value, be it technical value, be it business value.

00;06;58;11 – 00;07;18;17
Speaker 2
I mean, these are the things that a framework and a consistent approach are things that we’ve always strived to do. And again, you got to work hard at. It doesn’t happen automatically. And I do think it intensifies when when things get tighter and I’ll be the first one to admit, you know, we’re we all are seeing and feeling it.

00;07;18;17 – 00;07;58;16
Speaker 2
And all of my peers as as we all compare notes, whether it’s deal elongation, whether it’s incremental review cycles, you know, decisions that used to sit at a VP level might be, you know, sitting at a CFO or a CEO level today. And, you know, how do we navigate that? How do we best understand it? And then how do we invoke whatever types of communications we can have to kind of actively prosecute, making sure that it’s well understood at how we move through, again, qualification criteria.

00;07;58;25 – 00;08;25;18
Speaker 1
That I love that, Dan, And what I really like about the way that you approach things is you find this right balance between governing the processes that you talked about, the standardization, ensuring that the best practices are being adhered to and and making sure that as you’re running this global organization of you said thousands of sellers is right, that everybody is doing something and doing the thing, you know, in the same way or at least, you know, with with the same framework.

00;08;26;04 – 00;08;52;00
Speaker 1
But what I really like is that within that framework, you expect autonomy, you expect collaboration among the salespeople and all the supporting cast members. So talk to us a little bit about that balance of collaboration and governance, because a lot of people, I think, would see them as two separate things. But the way that you just explained it, this kind of this yin and yang sort of, I don’t know self are a virtuous cycle that the to create.

00;08;52;00 – 00;09;32;02
Speaker 2
Yeah, I mean, I think part of it stems from what I talked about, you know, embracing, embracing the truth, embracing clarity. But you’ve got to have a framework for insight and data that everyone leads in. And when I say everyone, clearly you have sellers, you have these you have what we call district manager, first line leaders to first line leaders, to regional leaders, to VP’s to on the air and the CE side, to also our entire partner organization and how they complement is we are a partner first and partner centric business model.

00;09;32;14 – 00;10;03;09
Speaker 2
i you’ve got multiple groups and then including our executive team and our product teams who are all kind of have visibility to what we’re working on. And and I’ll say it because you know, it already. I mean, Clari is a is it is it is a key instrument that has enabled us to create this transparency of what we’re working on, what stages they’re in.

00;10;03;15 – 00;10;29;27
Speaker 2
And therefore, our goal is to surround the opportunities, be it with a product or technical leadership or, you know, partnering and go to market insights or the qualification criteria and the frameworks that we’re trying to derive through our sales leadership team, or how do we invoke, you know, exec level conversations to senior level execs in our customer or prospect base.

00;10;29;27 – 00;10;50;21
Speaker 2
So this idea that a transparent framework of what we’re working on every opportunity across segments, across geos, around the world and then what stage that are in and where what gaps they have enables us to kind of triage and attack collaboratively. Snotty.

00;10;50;22 – 00;10;51;05
Speaker 1
Interesting.

00;10;52;03 – 00;11;25;22
Speaker 2
Because again, you need to coach and drive that without accuracy. That kind of foundation breaks down. And so that’s another aspect that is kind of a tireless pursuit that the day you you relax on it, it ebbs with the wrong direction. But I’m a huge advocate and we are huge advocates for, you know, kind of interrogating and inspecting and coaching and reviewing kind of every opportunity.

00;11;25;27 – 00;11;39;02
Speaker 2
So that’s accurately depicted again, that goes back to that culture of of embracing reality, embracing truth, being comfortable with with bad news, if that’s the case. So we can attack it.

00;11;39;02 – 00;12;01;29
Speaker 1
I love this. And so you’re looking you have the capability of the transparency and the visibility into every single deal at every single stage. And it sounds like you have this framework that gives sellers some sort of actions to take when they hit any sort of scenario. And so the what we’re talking about today is the art of navigating complex deals.

00;12;01;29 – 00;12;23;19
Speaker 1
And it sounds like you embrace the complexity and what you’re doing with the visibility across all these global deals that your team is running. Is your pattern matching to find where are the areas of complexity that are coming up over and over again, and how do we engage the use of the stars or our professional services team or our partner network or whatever it may be to address a certain type of complexity in a repeatable way?

00;12;23;19 – 00;12;24;24
Speaker 1
Is that a fair framing?

00;12;25;10 – 00;12;54;19
Speaker 2
Yeah, frames perfectly. What I what I would add is also and again, you know some of this because we’ve talked about it, we also look at our business in aggregate, you know, through the lens of trending. You and I have talked about math. We’re, you know, whether it’s A.I. math, whether it’s any kind of math, we we we derive we’re kind of math nuts over here as well.

00;12;54;19 – 00;13;37;03
Speaker 2
And so while well, what we’ve been talking about is pretty opportunity centric and how do we bring the cavalry around opportunities, visibility and triage and so forth. At the same time, we overlay all of that with a tremendous amount of math analysis, trending analysis, and think about forward and forward looking indicators like, you know, pipeline and pipeline growth and breaking everything we do, We break down all the way from, you know, globally at my level to theater the Americas, I me Asia, to subregions to segments, enterprise, commercial public sector, all the way down to the territory level.

00;13;37;03 – 00;14;15;17
Speaker 2
And so we will we will always be in the world of, you know, prosecuting opportunities and especially larger ones and complex ones. We’re also equally as evangelical around what is the math. Tell us what is the trending, Tell us and what’s the health overall? And again, stuff a little bit of mom and apple pie. But, you know, you think about coverage, you think about coverage math and and, you know, do you have enough there to navigate, you know, the risk of blank happens, Right.

00;14;15;17 – 00;14;38;16
Speaker 2
And you know what? If this happens now, how do you backfill it and so forth? So, you know, we create a lot of dashboard in automation and visibility in real time to be able to, you know, kind of counterbalance the, you know, the opportunity of view with the kind of the math use, if you will.

00;14;38;26 – 00;15;17;08
Speaker 1
That it makes perfect sense. And you’ve mentioned this before, you this orientation that you have as a leader around data. I imagine it cascades to all the different leaders that you have and all the different functional folks that you have collaborating with you to to help build this modeling and help these strategic decisions that you’re making. And so if we go even further up the funnel before we’re even talking about pipeline coverage or we’re talking about opportunity creation, and let’s talk more about go to market strategy fits any changes that you’ve made for geo targeting or segment targeting new verticals that you’re looking into or pulling back from has as the macro environment change any

00;15;17;08 – 00;15;18;11
Speaker 1
of that kind of targeting for you?

00;15;19;02 – 00;16;02;12
Speaker 2
Yeah, it’s it might be a little counter to what some of the news that’s out there. But for us and it’s reflective of of again humbly some of the success we’ve had we’re in invest mode. So we’re actually investing to hire a significant amount of incremental sales horsepower. And and again, the hypothesis behind that is first and foremost, we play in a very large market, depending on how you look at it, 30, 40, $50 billion market we’re playing in, we still have plenty of share gain to to achieve that’s available to us.

00;16;02;12 – 00;16;29;22
Speaker 2
And again, some of this is mathematical. We we analyze what we call at bats. But, you know, think about the number of opportunities you compete for on a quarterly basis. And we have this for years by theater, by region, by segment, so forth. And then you you add that in a formula to win rates and price. And again, different organizations look at price differently.

00;16;29;22 – 00;16;50;27
Speaker 2
We do it one way. But if you think about a formula that says at bats, times win rates, times price, and we look at the trending at the global level theater level region segment and so forth, are our belief is that more horsepower will yield more at bats and we believe we can hold win rates and hopefully hold price.

00;16;50;27 – 00;17;24;03
Speaker 2
I mean, that’s a that’s a ongoing play. And therefore our real goal is to drive more opportunities. And so we’re investing and hiring a significant growth in the sales organization to get in more fights. So not everybody is doing that. It’s not without risk given, you know, macro and so forth. But again, our our kind of history and and trajectory of of taking share and kind of outgrowing the market is giving us the confidence to do so.

00;17;24;03 – 00;17;50;11
Speaker 2
And then to your point about verticals goes, I mean, we’re around the world today over the past several years we have segmented all the way down through the sales organization really across three segments, enterprise, commercial and public sector and corporate being that, you know, the lower mid-market segment. And we have we have sales teams in each theater by segment.

00;17;50;11 – 00;18;23;07
Speaker 2
And so, you know, we’re we’re very intentional and specific to try and drive, you know, focus and intention to where the largest opportunities is. Again, what we call high TAM exist in the market across all those segments verticals. It wouldn’t surprise anybody. Financial services, telcos being some of the biggest spenders in our industry. Health care, health care and life sciences is also a significant vertical.

00;18;23;07 – 00;18;39;05
Speaker 2
And so that combined with public sector, which is both the state and local and education spaces as well as federal government, both domestically and internationally, we verticals in those areas, all of those as well.

00;18;39;13 – 00;19;02;13
Speaker 1
That super impressive. I mean, you talk about the complexity of just running any large deal and then multiply that complexity across all those different verticals that you mentioned, that it’s mind blowing. I’m curious to hear, you know, one of the top deals with top TAM deals, as you call them, that your team just ran. What stands out to you about the reps behavior, your sellers?

00;19;02;20 – 00;19;11;05
Speaker 1
What are the best sellers doing differently in this environment that, you know, some of the mid-tier or lower tier sellers aren’t doing?

00;19;11;05 – 00;19;44;20
Speaker 2
Yeah, And I mean, obviously, I know I would love to think we’re some of the best sellers whether we are not again staying humble on that what what I think and you alluded to it early but what what matters most in in any kind of disruptive time, but certainly in a in a in a time of tighter macroeconomic phenomena, is that diligence across business value, technical value to understanding decision process, understanding, compelling event.

00;19;44;20 – 00;20;11;20
Speaker 2
Again, this is probably mom and apple pie for a lot of people. But in our experience we have to be super diligent in this area and we operate in a very technical space in in critical applications, infrastructure in the data center, people running their most important companies running the most important apps that have to be availability, high performance.

00;20;12;08 – 00;20;46;17
Speaker 2
So it’s very technical. The trap is you you end up getting very technical and into technical differentiation. You know, if you if you have a gap in around financial business model and and business value, there’s risk. And so making sure we’re playing the business value and the technical value as equally and aggressively and then again, moment apple pie, you know, understanding decision cycles and who are ultimately economic buyers and influencers.

00;20;47;12 – 00;21;31;12
Speaker 2
And again, we’re in a very competitive space like probably most most good technology industries and therefore, yeah, that, that level of differentiation across those dimensions, you know, on the on the economic value and the technical value as well as customer experience and lifecycle, which is something that we’re quite passionate around then. And then in the last piece I would add, and again this applies to us may not apply to everybody else, but at the kind of environmental level, and I don’t mean the globe’s environment, but you know, the footprint of technology in that we are, you know, a combination of of software and hardware.

00;21;32;04 – 00;21;45;18
Speaker 2
There’s a significant kind of environmental energy, you know, opportunity that is becoming more and more important with companies who have significant ESG initiatives. And how do you align to that?

00;21;46;23 – 00;22;18;02
Speaker 1
Man? It’s so funny. It’s like when I asked this question to two leaders about what are the things that sellers should do or do differently, The answer is always about the basics, and it’s not on the the basics are not easy. They’re basic for a reasons because they work. It’s this foundational things that you mentioned, understanding the buying group, doing full discovery, understanding business value, building the good business case, like all these things that are not sales 1 to 1, but that every seller knows the best sellers just do better is Yeah.

00;22;19;23 – 00;22;45;23
Speaker 2
I would emphasize it doesn’t mean it’s easy and and and it doesn’t mean people who don’t do that as consistently, you know, are lazy either. It’s yeah, this is spadework to take it to the details and take it to the diligence and and you know I don’t I don’t our team is far from perfect for sure. But you know we we, we care about it.

00;22;45;23 – 00;23;06;28
Speaker 2
We talk about it and we try and, you know, we try to operate as consistently as possible and to have that either fundamentals or framework to fall back on. So it’s not all art and unique, right? Everyone would tell you every opportunity is unique. But again, you can apply a framework to every opportunity to be pretty consistently.

00;23;07;17 – 00;23;26;14
Speaker 1
You have this beautiful combination of this art of the collaboration and the feedback loops that you’ve mentioned to understand where the complexity is and then pattern match and solve that sustaining going forward. But then you also have this scientific way of governing the process, standardizing things, ensuring people that are ensuring that people are doing the right things at the right time.

00;23;26;14 – 00;23;45;23
Speaker 1
So I love the way that you’re thinking about the soft side of sales and then the scientific part of sales, which often gets overlooked. We have time for one more question for you, Fitz, which is what is your role? You see, drove a global company, thousands of sellers. What is your role individually in helping navigate complex deals with your sellers?

00;23;45;23 – 00;24;27;17
Speaker 2
Yeah, you know, first and foremost, it’s it’s to try and ensure that, you know, we are we are doing what we just talked about kind of applying consistency and framework and and cross-functional collaboration. So you know some at some level you know, I’m a, I’m a coach and guide and an inspector to try and ensure we’re consistent. And then probably like anyone who grew up in sales, you know, I, I love and try and prioritize as much, you know customer prospect and partner facing activity as I possibly can.

00;24;27;28 – 00;25;10;00
Speaker 2
It’s also where you learn the most about what’s happening in the market, what’s happening with your competition. And so while it’s not as much as I would probably like, given some of the other the tasks that land upon me, you know, that’s to me, that’s if sales leaders aren’t in, whether it’s in the field, on the horn, you know, however you’re your coverage model, you know, is is currently you know sales leaders need to be in market in customer or partner facing activities to be there, to coach, to guide, to inspect, to learn.

00;25;10;26 – 00;25;18;01
Speaker 2
And so that’s a huge, huge part of our culture. And we want to keep that going for sure. Love that.

00;25;18;01 – 00;25;24;18
Speaker 1
Leading from the front, getting in the trenches, get your hands dirty. It’s it’s the most fun we have and we don’t get to do it enough because.

00;25;25;06 – 00;25;25;14
Speaker 2
Every.

00;25;25;28 – 00;25;37;29
Speaker 1
We get going on. So thank you. That’s for the time. If people want to learn more about you or learn more about your storage, aside from finding you in Steamboat Springs and catch you on the mountain, how can they learn more about you? How can they learn more about Pure Storage?

00;25;38;10 – 00;26;09;20
Speaker 2
Yeah, certainly can. You know, hit me on LinkedIn. You can find me on Twitter occasionally. And I’m happy to happy to interact socially and or, you know, you know, expand expand my own network. It surely we are we are still lifelong learners and and well, I’ve got some pride in what we’ve been able to accomplish. We still have plenty to do, plenty to learn, plenty to evolve and adapt to.

00;26;09;20 – 00;26;11;11
Speaker 2
So, yeah, bring it.

00;26;12;08 – 00;26;26;11
Speaker 1
Best of luck in 2023, my friend. Thank you so much for all the wisdom today. I really, really appreciate it. And that is a wrap for this episode of The Race for Revenue. Dan Fitzsimmons CRO at Pure Storage. Thank you very much, my friend. Have a great 2023 Kyle Cheers.

00;26;26;11 – 00;26;43;10
Speaker 2
Thank you. And thank you for what you and Clari do for us. You know, it’s a meaningful part of our of of our process and how we run revenue. So we look forward to continue to work together on that site. Happy New Year, brother. I know.