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.
00:27:01 · Teresa Carlson
Because again, if you're only paying for what you use and you're looking at usage as your bar around this, like your sales environment tool, and you're saying, okay, I'm looking at usage now. And if all of a sudden you forecast it up here and a customer drops down because of a workload, we needed to understand capacity. Like we need to understand what type of capacity did our customers need. And the reason that was important was because my building team, the team at AWS that was building all of those clouds and all that infrastructure, if all of a sudden I had massive customers coming online, and then my infrastructure team at Amazon would say, We don't have enough capacity. So I had to learn how to do capacity planning with our tech teams. And so we did a lot of capacity planning, and we had to teach our customers, let's look at what workloads that you're going to bring online, and let's think about capacity. Because we never wanted to go to a customer and say, sorry, we don't have enough space for you. I mean, you're talking about mission critical activities. So these are the kind of things my brain was constantly like, so it wasn't just a widget selling anymore. We were actually helping define capacity. We were working with our infrastructure and services teams that built the tools. And we would say to our services teams, hey, the Intel team needs this. Can we build it? And we would work closely with them to update a tool or build a new tool. So the Dynamics and Cloud working in the field with a customer was like I was attached to the hip with my team in Seattle. Like it was that's what made it so fun actually, because I felt like I did something more than just delivering. I was actually with my team shaping what we were building and giving that continuous feedback loop so to ensure that as a company, we were delivering really what the customer was asking for, not just what we thought they needed. And that was a good combination, I think.
00:29:13 · Molly O'Shea
[00:29:13] S1: What was it like building this out in step with Jeff Bezos and Andy Jassy? What were the biggest lessons that you learned from them?