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foreign Scott Pugh I've uh I'm the VP of sales and GM of figma here in APAC and one of the cultural values at figma is about building community so really pleased to be here and give what I've learned give a little bit back to the to the sasta community from what I've learned over the years of uh of building SAS sales teams here um yeah I'd like to call it I'm sure there's a lot of people in in the room here that could get up and do a present presentation like this and have have learned a lot from your years and I look forward to networking and learning with you as well and yeah I just want to call out a couple of the people that I've learned a lot from my career I've got Pierre Berlin and Dan dakum two people that I've followed the last three companies and a lot I've shared today I've learned from from these guys as well and before I share my story I want to get a bit more of an understanding of people in the room and and the companies that you work for and their location so if you can just raise your hands and if the the company you work for or the port or the majority of your Port codes if you're a VC if you're based in Southeast Asia okay there's a few there in in Greater China region no ANZ uh India is good for you from India um any from emea any other companies who are headquarters okay and then he from North America okay and just now I'm from North America and the reason I asked that is that the majority of my experience has come from helping U.S companies open up in Asia Pacific and um and so yeah I'm gonna share a bit and what we're going to talk about today is Recruitment enablement and building culture and it's something that U.S companies actually do a really really good job at so I'd like to share some of these learnings so a bit about my story so um I started working in SAS around 11 years ago and I started working at LinkedIn any LinkedIn alumni in the in the crowd yeah sweater over there nice one um so yeah I joined uh joining 2012 prior to that I'd been working in in media and online media for many years and uh and yeah this is a picture here of me and my old boss Adam Gregory on the first day of the Hong Kong office we launched the Hong Kong office there and now I know what you're thinking that there's something like eerily familiar about that photo right yeah it's like it's very similar isn't it it's like eerily similar now I know what you're also thinking did he honestly just liken himself to Steve Jobs no definitely not I just wanted to call out the Adam Gregory my old boss is a doppelganger for Steve Wozniak so I like uh he's just as handsome yeah um but yeah we had amazing amazing seven years at LinkedIn and I think we I was managing the LTS Talent Solutions business and uh working with the Recruitment and staffing companies we grew to a team of 20 people over 20 million ARR and it was very formative for me in terms of learning about building culturing companies and and there's a lot that I'll share today that I learned from from that experience 2019 I joined mixpanel leading product analytics uh company um the leader in the region I'd say there might be someone speaking later that would uh that will contest that but um but yeah leader in the region and we started with a team of uh of like just seven people in 2019 and we scaled to over 50 in uh in the three and a half four years that I was there when I joined we were around 12 of global ARR here in APAC and by the uh at the end finished up the end of this year with 20 uh 20 of global ARR so it was real hyper growth through through 300 Revenue over those years really fun ride and shout out to the mixed panel crew over here I can see a couple of xmix handlers there yes um and so in the last year four months ago I got the opportunity to join figma to help launch the APAC business for um for fig man for those of you who don't know we are designing UI ux design software but really what we're doing is transforming the way companies build products from brainstorming ideation whiteboarding through to the design through to the handoff for the development and in a really collaborative unbelievable transformation transformational platform so incredible tool and we're building an incredible team here's a couple of the figma crew in in the crowd here as well and so we've got 10 people on the ground now we're going to be scaling to all 50 by the end of this year so really really exciting Journey many of you would have heard about the the imminent acquisition for from Adobe and obviously Jason mentioned it earlier as well I had nothing to do with that unfortunately I can't I can't claim to have had any influence on that it went through before I joined but I'm really happy to be part of the next stage of the growth story for figma Keen to talk to you all about how my experience of scaling SAS teams whilst building culture and it's broken down to three areas starting with the recruitment how to hire the best talent to scale your sales organization how to enablement and how to set those that team up for success and invest in their professional growth and finally but probably most importantly building a culture and developing subcultures within sales that enables the team to successfully scale and so we'll kick off just talking about the recruitment piece and there are two types of SAS companies those that are either a category creator or they're they're a challenger of an incumbent technology and in either scenario a lot of the time you can't you find the you can't hire from a competition so if you're kind of created there is no competition to hire Force you need to be really creative on the type of profiles that you hide that you hire same if you're a challenger you don't necessarily unless you're Salesforce with Oracle you don't really want to hire from your uh from the company you're trying to disrupt at LinkedIn for example we were changing the the um the job board business with our talent solution but we didn't really hire people from job boards because they were transactional sales people and we really needed Solutions based SAS sales people so we had to really um think uh think broader around the type of talent and similarly at figma there really isn't sort of a competitive technology really within our space and we don't like to hire people from sort of adjacent technology so what we've uh what I like to be able to do is actually think about some of the the personality and the startup skills and and um and the softer skills to be able to to hire from and a couple of things to point out here is just around the grit and resilience are really important to me and they should be for any especially start up SAS sales people people that can deal with rejection people that can go through tough situations and um and be able to bounce back through them and this hiring profile should really Define the type of hiring process you do and the type of questions and the kind of uh um that you ask of of candidates diversity is really important when scaling you're scanning your teams and for me what this means is representing the customers that you serve or that you aspire to serve and here in the Asia Pacific region obviously you're extremely diverse region covering many many different uh many different geographies ethnicities cultures and uh and yeah it's important to represent those but diversity within gender as I said with the ethnicity but I think an important one is introvert extrovert no one wants to work in a team where there's a group of extroverts all shouting over each other so that's a really good uh good balance to have um and in addition to that educational background uh sexual orientation there is however one diversity that you definitely don't want in your organization and that's positivity and negativity if there is any negativity within your business you need to cut that out it could be like a virus and it can bring the entire team down and a way that I'd identify this is through the recruiting process making sure that you're asking questions and that around and if any candidate ever gives negative feedback on their prior companies or their prior boss immediate red flag and it's something that would mean that I'd discount them from the hiring process so moving on to hiring process and and your recruitment partner I probably spend 30 of my time recruiting at the moment we're in we're in hyper hyper growth mode and if I was to and having a an exclusive recruitment partner either in-house or an RPO but someone that's exclusively helping you will make sure that they are focused on the outcome and only delivering candidates to you that are the right fit for your company if you're working with contingency recruitment companies they're focused on a fee they're focused on getting a getting a deal done and so having an exclusive partner that you can really work very closely with that can understand your hiring profile deeply will make sure that you minimize the amount of time you spend interviewing so I probably reject five or ten percent of the candidates that both my recruiter or in-house recruiter at mixpanel were used and that works with us and we use a company called hire as our RPO for figma and my rejection rate for that first interview is very very low I think getting the right hiring panel in place is is important the right questions around the hiring profile that I mentioned earlier doing really in-depth background checks and back channel background checks often the referees that a candidate will give they're generally always going to there you know they're always going to give positive feedback they're hand chosen use your network to find out what they really are like to work with to get a 360 view of the candidate and then finally for me it's around creating an exceptional candidate experience we talk a lot about creating great experience for our customers and I believe that we should do so for our candidates as well we want a candidate that even if they've been unsuccessful in the process to be able to go and speak to their friends their Network and say spoke to figma it wasn't successful but really like the company like the product like the team you should definitely go and speak to them as well it's gonna it's gonna really help your your employer brand and then hiring Talent magnets hiring people that have a track record of bringing people with them to their new companies and that people follow as I mentioned I've my last uh three companies I've worked out I've followed people there establishing a a really a generous referral fee is a great way to to sort of fuel that as well uh we offer like around 5 000 very generous around 5 000 us referral fee I think we did the same a mix panel 20 of our Highs at figma are from from referrals and the team my initial team that we've uh that we've built in Asia Pacific around 60 have been from my personal Network as well now there's been it's a pretty tough time in the in the SAS industry at the moment and I think a lot of companies are over hiring at the moment and actually when I joined mixpanel I remember my first day I expected to hire around it was around 10 to 14 I was in my interview process that would build the sales team too initially for APAC and on my first day uh boss sat down and he said you need to hire 22 sales people and you need to hire them tomorrow and I was like okay well it's a tough hiring market and and then I and then at that point we didn't have any marketing we didn't have SDR we didn't have enablement we didn't have any partnership program set up and so really I it was a concern for me that we weren't going to be able to help these people be successful um one of the recommendations here is to like stagger your recruitment process what we do at figma is we we set an annual plan or like a hiring plan but then we only enable we only released that plan every quarter for the for the uh two quarters ahead so it means that we can assess where the business is especially in this constantly changing Market are we is it the right time to add on capacity going into into the next quarter okay moving on enablement you've hired the team how do you set them up for success and invest in their their professional growth I love this quote I'm sure many of you have seen it before CFO asks what happens if we invest in developing our people and they leave us what happens if we don't and they stay and I've been lucky to work for for some incredible companies that have invested in my enablement over the years and actually at LinkedIn for I'm sweater or a member when you first day you joined LinkedIn they tell you when you leave LinkedIn so on the very first day they're talking about when you're going to leave the company we want you to go away having changed the trajectory of your career so we want you to leave the company being a better professional from the than the day you joined uh and yeah it's a it's a really nice way to think it's very pragmatic right you're not going to spend you know we're not in Japan we don't work for the same company for entire life and uh and so it's a really upfront social contract that you're going to leave eventually hey let's make this the best experience that we possibly can and so investing in the enablement process is a really important thing to do and part of that is hiring sales Ops and hiring an enablement team really early on then investing in the right tools to be able to help that enablement and so at mixpanel and early doors when you don't have a really robust enablement program you might use a sort of project management software or we use notion at mixpanel to build out an enablement plan at early days at figma we had Asana to be able to go through the process we've kind of moved on here uh figma now we use work ramp and we've got a very clearly built out enablement program that that covers like the the product it covers the um the the market and on all of our customers as well and it's like a one month onboarding program to set people up I'm also a massive fan of Revenue intelligence tools uh we use gong a mix panel we use Chorus at figma but this enables people to actually go and listen to calls and be able to learn from what some of the other sales people have done as a sales leader it's really good to truly analyze deals on whether they're real or not and to be able to go a bit more in depth uh but yeah a big big fan of those those products as well as you're scaling quickly I I have like 10 reports at the moment and uh and it's difficult to be there for for everyone all the time and to be able to coach each individually and to setting up a buddy system where you have your more tenured sales people supporting and enabling and training your newer hires is a really good program and a scalable program to set up it creates an opportunity for for those um for those people to you know learn coaching to be able to learn leadership skills and be able to set up for future leadership um and as I say it just makes it really scalable uh and and so I recommend uh setting up this kind of Buddy system and then it's important to to show empathetic leadership to give room for your team to fail to to grow to learn I think that we're often so fast to say if you're not successful then you know you may be going on a performance plan really quickly but you really should sort of trust your hiring process if you've hired the right people then you need to then trust that they're going to be successful and if they're not there's probably some other things you need to fix in your business whether it be product whether it be the market they're covering Etc and uh so this is going to be especially the case in Enterprise where the deal cycle can be much longer and uh and so focusing on both the quality and the quantity of their output and their work is uh is really what uh what you should be looking at and then setting correct goals for the team and for the sales team and and the right ramp for their for their quotas as well uh typically we see like a five month ramp for for an Enterprise sales rep and for SMB mid-markets typically around sort of your two to three months um so give that room for people to sort of to to grow into um to to achieving their numbers it's also a good idea to potentially reassess the quotas and so maybe doing six month quotas especially if you're in hyper growth mode predicting a year ahead is quite quite difficult so you might want to do six months and then you can either reduce or increase depending on uh what's happening with the market and the product and the um and the product Market fit okay last but not least uh and for those that have worked with me in the past or the companies that I've worked out I know culture is I've extremely extreme I'm sorry I'm very very passionate about and I love this quote from Peter Drucker a culture eats strategy for breakfast it doesn't mean you don't need strategy it just it means that that cult without culture is absolutely absolutely useless and uh at LinkedIn uh Jeff weiner was um joined I think it was around 2008 and he'd uh he really sort of profoundly changed what the culture of that company was he joined when it was 400 people and it had come he'd come from Yahoo which is very traditional media online Media Company who didn't really value culture and values it's like BS it was that stuff that was written up on the wall that no one really adhered or or or listened to and then when he joined LinkedIn he went through a a process of codifying the the culture and values and bearing in money wasn't the founder you know he was a kind of Reid Hoffman talks about him is like every company has many different founding movements and Jeff joining sort of five years into this life cycle of the company it was a founding moment and he worked with the guy called arvind Rajan who was the previous GM of aipac for uh for LinkedIn and was uh at HR he ran HR at the time and uh and essentially what they did is they created this sort of belief system and this culture and my wife used to tell me about like drinking the Kool-Aid that I was like obsessed by I still am as you can tell um but the um essentially what it does if you when you build culture it helps democratize decision making across the business it builds a framework to enable people to make decisions without having to to go up and and ask other people um and at figma we've got we've also been through a similar process so it was only three or four years ago that we re-codified these uh these culture and values and just recently and this is I talk about like you need to iterate on those culture and values and just recently we announced that our fifth culture and value which is play and for us it just I've only been at the company four months but it really is a fun playful company to work for we just got back from our sko in Miami and those are there as like an absolute rocking time but they um but also it epitomizes the products that we sell for anyone that's used fig Jam or figma it's an amazing fun engaging and playful product to use so consistently iterating on your culture and values and don't just having them be set in stone they can be they can evolve over time and they change with the scale of your business and the stage of your business now it's also important to align your teams around your culture and values I think it's all very well Dylan our CEO set in a cultural values here they are all going to live by them but it's important for the team to really take them on board and feel a certain degree of ownership with those culture and values and when I joined mixed panel early doors we actually got in an external trainer a company explore performance friend of mine Grant ax Rawlinson call out to him he's Legend I recommend you work with him but he's a external trainer and he came in and he did an experiential session around decision making using our culture and values and we also did a breakout session going through each of our five culture and values at mixpanel and defining what behavioral statement we wanted to put behind those so it went from okay this is the company's culture and values you know go live by them to actually us saying what they mean to us and having some degree of ownership over them and what came out of that is that we actually aligned around one team as our main culture and values and we we came up with this uh this behavioral tenant which is to support each other to win together and honestly I I believe that this was a really important part of our success over the last few years and continues to be and uh and yeah like we 2021 90 of people hitting Target we uh we delivered 110 of plan three years running as a as a region and largely because everyone adhered to this statement that the team had come up with and bought into it's tough out there in SAS at the moment isn't it there's lots of external factors that are impacting what we do I'm a big fan of Simon sinek and uh I don't know if you've read the book If anyone that's read the book Leaders Eat Last I recommend you get your hands on it it's a it's a great book and he talks in in the book around the concept of creating a safe space within your organization and focusing on the the external factors as being the danger and that could be macroeconomic it could be Market it can be competitors but essentially you want to create an environment within your organization where you feel safe and that you feel that you're you're looked after by your by your colleagues by your leaders and an example of this being like before I worked in SAS I worked in a media company in Hong Kong and your environment can create the culture as well and in that company we're in in the middle of uh one uh middle of um lancois Fong and in that building all of the offices that for the executives were round the outside of the office they all had this fantastic view of the Hong Kong Harbor and everything and then all the Minions were in the middle and they were like surveying over there over the minions and it it had this really insipid culture of this dictator-style culture and honestly felt there was a certain amount of presenteeism you couldn't leave your desk until your boss left and it was honestly like really horrible horrible culture switch that to when I joined LinkedIn and it walked into this environment where it was a environment of autonomy and trust and going down and do it I've never worked harder in my life as an individual contributor and uh and great experience and similarly with the office all of the all of the exec's office although many of them worked on the floor were actually on the set in the center part of the building and all of the sales people had the window seats looking out for the amazing views and uh and um yeah so I think the your environment can create the culture as well now one thing just to note on here your work is not your family you're not going to put your kid on a performance plan I I mean saying that I probably need to put my own performance plan to brush his teeth and go to bed on time at night but I'm not going to fire him maybe but uh but yeah it's important to note that like remember your work isn't isn't your family and so as Leaders we need to lead from the front we need to uh when I was at LinkedIn we had a leader called Mike gamson that used to talk about as a leader you need to set the standard you need to demonstrate the standard and then you need to hold people accountable to that standard and that goes with the culture and values it also goes with many other things within the organization for example at figma the interview process that we do for sales people we do very similar for our sales leaders so me coming on as the as the GM of vpsls of the region I had to do a discovery and demo to our cro and I had to demo the product to our cro likewise our enablement I had to go through exactly the same sales training that our account Executives and account managers go through as well okay now lastly creating an environment of recognition and and feedback I think is a great way to to build culture and at mixpanel we every qbr we used to actually give do it put out a survey just a Google Sheets Google um where people would vote across four categories the the Rookie of the quarter the cross-functional partner silent hero and the MVP and we used to actually get people to give verbatim feedback about each other and uh and it was all very positive we used to share it with the uh I used to share all of the bait and feedback and every quarter we'd do this and it would uh it would create a really good environment of people recognizing and and especially people that weren't in sales like earning big commission checks those that were just in the supporting function gave them the recognition and um what the Yeah and then we would share this publicly but I am also a great believer in uh in giving constructive feedback as well so I I don't know if any of you have read the book radical Candor by Kim Scott but I highly recommend it and really it's about giving direct feedback but really caring about people as well uh now with that it's important that if you're giving constructive feedback it needs to be in person one to one but if you give you positive feedback doing externally and letting other people hear it gives the gives the nice feels for for everyone as well very good so that pretty much uh that pretty much caps what I wanted to run through today so um really if you can combine these three areas of uh recruiting the the best talent uh enabling them to be successful and setting and building a culture that makes people love what they do and uh and and do good work then your sales team can be the engine for you becoming the next billion dollar startup foreign [Music]