00:19:15 · Michael Sindicich, Miguel Armaza
Once the pandemic started ending and travel came back, we just saw the volumes just growing like crazy because the install base of the companies we had sold that never traveled with us started traveling. We built products like R Factor dashboards, COVID dashboards, employee tracking and monitoring, all these types of things for admins to basically leverage our technology to help us or help them navigate through the pandemic. And I think people love that. We doubled down on support. So I don't know if you remember, flights were getting canceled. Employees were stuck Europe or in The US and they couldn't get home. So just really 20 fourseven hands on support to help our customers. And yeah, think it allowed us to basically scale fast. During that time, we also made some acquisitions. So I think we've acquired, we probably acquired about three or four different travel agencies and companies during that time as well, which then helps us to scale globally, internationally, have licenses, better agreements, all these types of things with the suppliers. Yeah, we absolutely went for it. I think it paid off big time. [00:20:22] S0: Michael, what does it take to build a world class sales organization? Especially, obviously, here we're talking about B2B.
00:20:33 · Michael Sindicich
[00:20:33] S1: Yeah. It's a good credit. It takes the right CRO. And we have a guy named Grant McGrail who is just phenomenal. He's an absolute killer. But I think if I were to start it all over again or think about how to build world class, first thing starts with the people. And I think there's different schools of thoughts and playbooks around basically processes for sales. And so we use something called the MEDDPICC process. But basically, we have different stages throughout the sales cycle. We have different qualification criteria. We have different ways to move from a sale from, you know, one stage to the next stage with gates that are actually measured. The important thing also is consistency. So everybody around the globe is actually speaking the same language so that if I know, you know, this company, I'm preparing for a big meeting with the CPO of a company, and I know they're in CI stage champion identification, I know where we exactly are in that deal and everyone who's helping support that deal knows exactly where it is in the various stages. So it's kind of like this methodology. And there's, you know, you could write a thousand page book on, you know, this methodology and process and everything, but it's consistent and it works really good. And it's actually crazy watching the sales switch from an art sale to actually a science sale. And I I I never really believed it. I thought good salespeople were good salespeople because they're likable. But actually, salespeople don't need to necessarily be likable. They need to know the playbook and know what all the roadblocks are, and they're kind of orchestrating the entire deal behind the scenes. And it does feel like a science now. So I would say the people, the methodology, consistency is really important as you're building a sales organization. The next thing I would say is the tooling. So are you leveraging the best tooling, the best technology to be able to help through that sales process? Whether that's do I have the right email addresses and phone numbers for people? Do I have the right technology to do call recording and to make sure, you know, we're we're following the demo process accurately to train the reps, to help them get enabled on all the different systems, to track the deals. Right? Do you have a Salesforce or HubSpot, like, or or one of these systems?
00:22:51 · Michael Sindicich, Miguel Armaza
There's a lot of automation being built right now. So even in the outreaches and these types, but there's a lot of new companies as well that will basically see, okay, somebody liked this random thing on LinkedIn that talked about operational efficiency and this is how it ties back to what you're building at your company, and then therefore here's a handcrafted kind of email that you can use to prospect into them. So there's that process as well. And then I would say the other pieces around the people, essentially, like the type of people that you're hiring. Our Salesforce, more than 50% of the closed won opportunities are actually self sourced by the account executives. And so we put a lot of emphasis and hire a lot of SDRs. And these people are cold calling, cold emailing, being very strategic on how to break into accounts. But at the same time, one thing we measure very aggressively is how much is the account executive itself prospecting and doing what we call PG or pipeline generation. And we hire the type of people that are just very hungry and owning their books of business and partnering with the SDRs and the marketing team, but really knowing that they're the CEOs of their book of business and they are the ones that are responsible for delivering the outcomes. So that's a very high level kind of thing, and there's a billion more things. But yeah, our CRO, Grant, is just incredible and knows exactly what to do. [00:24:15] S0: So you started as an SDR? [00:24:17] S1: Yeah. AE, but both, know, early days.
00:24:17 · Michael Sindicich, Miguel Armaza
[00:24:17] S1: Yeah. AE, but both, know, early days. [00:24:20] S0: Yeah. Early days. I'm sure you did everything. Now you're president of the company, Palca traded. Was there a period, obviously linearly looks great, but was there a period, was there an instance where you thought you were gonna get fired?
00:24:34 · Michael Sindicich
[00:24:34] S1: Oh, fired? Yeah. Like, yeah, all the time. All the time. No, for doing something morally bad, no. And I think that's important when you're building a startup is basically hiring people that are so mission driven that if something feels off to the mission of what you're trying to do, you will be insistent and just crazy until it gets fixed. Our first value, anybody at Navan will be able to recite at any time, if you ask them what's the values, no one will know most of the values. They're gonna know the first one. It's all about the user, all the users, all the time. And so we wake up and go to sleep every day thinking about that there better not be any traveler that's stuck, any admin that can't do something, anyone who's having a bad experience with our platform. We want to make it better. We want to support them. Even if it's not our platform but your United fight gets canceled, we're there to support you. And that's the first one. Just for kicks, the second one is seriously fun. Those are the two that people will remember. And I think there's been times where that was tested at the user and I was probably a little aggressive for trying to fix it. But I would say nothing because something was ethically or anything like that wrong. The one that comes to mind is early days. A customer messaged me and was like, Hey, Michael. Your system's cool, but I run a company. And if I show up airport and I thought I booked a flight and I don't have the ticket, you're actually impacting my revenues, my customer relationships. My entire business is at risk if your thing doesn't work. And that was such a wake up call. This was like probably first six months of the company. And what I did is I then started tracking and worked with the engineers to log every single action in the product. And I wrote on the whiteboard at the company one weekend every single example of someone who tried to make a booking and whether it happened or failed. And I wrote it big on the whiteboard. And then that Monday morning, I called our CEO and our co founders into the room. And I said, What do you guys want me to do with this? This is so messed up. People weren't able to book. They were having errors. They were having cancellations. Nothing was working in the system or it was working half of the time. I remember I was really aggressive and it was a very aggressive conversation.
00:27:06 · Michael Sindicich, Miguel Armaza
In the end, they were both like, You're so right. We have to solve this. We have to fix this for our users, we fixed it. And one thing we monitor all the time now is booking errors and making sure that that ratio stays low. And to their credit, it's nothing to do with our solution. There's a lot of different players in this space and infrastructure and piping of systems and airline technology connected to GDS technology connected to us. But one thing that we're very, very insistent on is making sure that when people go to make a booking, the booking happens and actually they get ticketed. [00:27:44] S0: That's actually interesting that you track booking errors. I guess you can call it a KPI internally. What are some other KPIs that [00:27:54] S1: you track [00:27:55] S0: outside of revenue?