00:17:05 · Molly O'Shea
[00:17:05] S1: How do you build the internal team out for that? Are you pulling from public sector? Are you training people? How do you get that type of, and what kind of expertise do you look for?
00:17:15 · Teresa Carlson
[00:17:15] S0: I found when I built this business, it was very different than my business at Microsoft. In fact, I love my team at Microsoft. They were so good. I've honestly, when I look at myself, I think one of the things, my superpowers has been building good teams. I love people and I like to make sure those human connections make sense in building out a team and that there's good synergy and energy. And I also look for people that have a burn in their belly for that industry. I used to say for every leader that I hired, like my state and local, my education, my intel, I tried to find somebody that loved that industry as much as I love the work I was doing. And I know that kind of sounds silly, but when I saw that in their eyes and the way they behaved, I knew if they were smart, they were diving deep and they wanted to deliver results, I was moving in the right direction. But at Microsoft, we had very more, I would call it transactional leaders back then, not in a bad way. They were very good, but we had tools and products that they took and they put it to work. They sold it into government, and that was their job. So they configured an enterprise agreement. They configured something specific. And they had to be able to talk about what the tool did, but it was more transactional. At AWS, it was very different. We were actually, in order to get the customer to buy something, we had to first demonstrate their desire and their delight in using that tool because in a software license model, it's a one to one transaction. I sell you something, you pay for it, you get it. In cloud, that's not the case. You only paid for what you used. So, and this is kind of a funny story. When I first looked at my spreadsheet of what customers I had and how much they were using, I had hired my biz ops guy that came over from Microsoft. And we looked at a spreadsheet and I said, Oh, that's like, okay, this is good. Here's four customers. This is 100,000. This one's doing a million. And he said, No, that's a dime and that's a dollar. And they were literally spending a dime and a dollar. And I was like, What? How are we ever gonna make any money if they're And spending dimes and they would get a charge as they spin up the instance. So they might spin it up and then stop just to get an account going.
00:19:47 · Teresa Carlson
And so what I realized, I had to hire people if I was only going to pay them if they were an account executive. They had to have a spirit of more consultative account management and sales. They had to delight the customer. They had to love that customer's mission and had to go in because they wouldn't get anything on top of their salary until the customer started using the tool. So in order to get them to use the tool, they had to dive deep. They had to be very curious. They had to spend time. They had to listen to the customer's needs. So this is the type of person I had to hire. It wasn't a transaction and how do I get a deal across the line. It was, let me hear what you're saying. What's your mission? What things are you trying to solve? Let's whiteboard this. Let's talk about how we can do this. Let me bring in a solution architect. Let's try it out. You can spin it up. You don't have to spend a lot of money. And so I really had to find these people that were hungry to solve the mission problem, not the tech problem. So these were the two big differences I saw. So the type of people that I hired were very different, very different backgrounds from people who had been on Wall Street, a lot of technical people I found, you know, I thought it would be easy, but it was hard technically for our customers. So I need a lot of very, my solution architects, I look for those that were aware and had good EQ with customers because you couldn't be also dry. You had to, again, be a good listener, be able to solve the problems, whiteboard, have a good conversation. And it really did change the type of people I hired. I had a totally different group. And I will say, I'm so proud. It was probably one of the best teams I ever built globally. I just had like a phenomenal set of leaders and I made mistakes for sure. And I tried people that had worked for me before and they were amazing individuals, but this was just not the right place for them. And, you know, on a personal note, even for myself, the business was growing and scaling so much. There were days I would say, woah, can I do this? I would literally look in the mirror and say, we're growing at a rate. We're opening these countries. These customers are so like, do I have the skills? How do I need to readjust what I do as a leader?
00:22:20 · Teresa Carlson
And how do I learn the business in a way that I'm interpreting it in the right way to make sure that we're growing? So it was just a really different dynamic.
00:22:31 · Molly O'Shea
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00:24:34 · Teresa Carlson
[00:24:34] S0: Well, one of the things that we did at Amazon, at AWS, that I really loved is we would say, we'll do this till we know better. And that is a really good way to look at any business and be innovative because you got to constantly be looking around corners. And the thing I would say to my team, like literally we build out how you did sales around this. Like there was no model of how like in Salesforce or there isn't, there is not a good approach or methodology to how you did forecasting as an example. Because again, if you're forecasting based on a server license, that's easier. I'm selling a 100 of this, I'm getting X amount of dollars. In cloud computing, we were launching so many services that one, we had to keep all our people fresh and trained because we went from like the first year I was there launching 23 new services till last year, I want to say it was like 2,800 new services and features. And it was the sellers, the account executives, I hated to call them sellers. I wanted them to be account focused and customer. So our customer account executives had to really understand and know those services. So one, I had to ramp up like sales orientation, product orientation to make sure that our teams were fresh. So I built up a training and certification team internally and made sure people got trained up. You know, I tried to listen to what they were telling me that they needed more of, my teams, my people in the field. How did we build programming around field marketing to make sure that we were, to your point on industries, you can't just go and talk to a customer in one way. You can't go to financial services or agriculture, environmental, or defense and talk to them exactly the same way that you're talking to telecommunications, right? You've got to have a story that they understand when you're talking about your service. So we started building out more of that. But also the thing was data. One of my big lessons was data. I got really good and I built out an unbelievable business operations team on how we looked at our data. And we built things with Tableau dashboards, and we wanted something that we continually understand how customers were buying and what they needed.