Joining Yammer

Alex Kracov: I'd love to start today's conversation with your time at Yammer. Because you joined Yammer, I think it was your first sales ops role. You joined really early on there. Can you talk about how you ended up working at Yammer, in a sales ops role?

Don Otvos: Yeah, so my background has always been in sales. So out of college, I took an inside sales role at a networking hardware company. I kind of moved my way around doing different sales roles, leading inside sales teams, doing channel sales. And, you know, around 2007, I want to say, I ended up going to work with a VP of sales I had worked with before. His name was Phil Bradley. He brought me on to a company that was small at the time called MuleSource, which ended up turning into MuleSoft. It was about 100 people. He needed sales people, so I joined. I was selling. At the time, it was an open-source community, and MuleSource was selling services to help people leverage the open-source platform. So we would get a bunch of leads, of people that would sign up for the open source, to contribute to it and whatnot. Then we would call and say, "Hey, I know you signed up for the open-source project. I would love to talk to you about how we can help you leverage MuleSource more in your environment and what you're doing." And 2008 happened. So if you remember 2008, that was kind of the economic downturn, real estate crash. And MuleSoft ended up laying some people off, and I got laid off. My VP, Phil, took me into a room. Classic, red manila folder. Right? The red folder is always the one where it's like, okay, yeah, I'm going to get laid off today. He opens it up, and he leans back. He's like, "Don, I need to tell you something, and I don't want you to take it the wrong way." And I said, what's that? He said, "I am going to be a reference for you. However, I'm not going to be a reference for you if you decide to do another sales job." And I was like, what does that mean? And he said, "I've worked with you at two companies, and I think you're a decent sales rep. You get the job done. You're not a blow-the-number-out-of-the-water guy. You also know how to do the job. You don't crash and burn. You're reliably, you know, at 75%, 80%." And he said, "The thing I've noticed working with you at two companies now is that you really get excited, and you have a passion for helping everybody make Salesforce work."

I was the default guy that everyone would turn to. "Donny, report. Donny, this dashboard. Donny, import these leads. Don, how do we create a campaign?" Everyone would just turn to me, and I'm just naturally a helpful person and I would try to help them do it. And so he says, "What I think you have done is, you have missed your calling." He's like, "I really think you should go into, what was at the time called, sales operations." He's like, "I really think you could make a career out of helping people make Salesforce work in their organization." So he's like, "I really think you should go in that direction for your career, and I would like to be a reference for you for that." And I was like, at first, I was really angry. It's like, "Why are you not going to be a reference for me, Phil?" I was pretty upset. But he ended up finding me a recruiter who had a connection with a company called Geni.com. Geni.com was a family tree. It's still around. You can make your family tree. Basically, you build out, you put yourself, you add your family. It was meant to be viral, where you could basically invite your family and they add the things that they know, and they add the people that they know and their aunts and uncles and cousins. Basically, the whole idea was to blow up this whole family tree into this amazing thing. I still use it today. I'm big on ancestry, so I had actually - I was like, wow, this is a really cool product. I'm checking it out. One of the things at Geni that they were doing is, they were like, "Hey, we need to create a platform for us to be able to communicate with each other. We want to have an internal communication system where we can asynchronously work with each other." That is an email. What they ended up creating got spun out as Yammer. And so David Sacks, who was the Founder of Geni, Founder of Yammer, thought, "Hey, this is a really good thing. We should probably create a company around this, and let's build it as a separate company." Geni was down in LA. They decided to move Geni - I'm sorry. They decided to move Yammer up to San Francisco. So there's a bunch of people that were at Geni that were like, "Yeah, I want to do Yammer." So basically, they took this company. It was like 30 people, and everyone was moving to San Francisco. And so this was like January 2010, I want to say, when everyone was kind of in the move. They're moving around. They were trying to hire people.

So I interviewed. I think it was like March, February or March of 2010. Everything was awesome. I'm like, wow, this is really cool. I think what you guys are doing are neat. We were actually using Yammer at MuleSource, so I was familiar with it. We got to a point in the interview process, when you're early on at that company, at Yammer, David Sacks interviewed everybody. So he kind of had the final say, yes or no, on anybody that came into the company. And so we met with everybody. I got glowing reviews from everyone that I interviewed with. I ended up going to David. David was like, we talked about RevOps a little bit, sales ops, and why I was trying to go in that direction. That was maybe five minutes, the conversation. And he's like, okay. He said, "You're familiar with Yammer?" I said, "Oh yeah, I'm familiar with Yammer. We use it at MuleSource, MuleSoft. I think it's really cool. We got a lot of usage out of it. It's very popular. It was very viral. I think it's really neat." And he's like, "What don't you like about it?" And I said, "Well, I didn't know you were going to monetize. Because at the time, everything was on a credit card. So it's like, that's fine if you're a small company with 30 people. It's like, okay, I'll put on my credit card and I'll expense it. But if you get viral at a company like, I don't know, IBM, you could be this secretary at an office in Lexington, Kentucky that starts it and then, a month later, there's 5,000 people using it. She's going to get a bill that's going to blow her credit card up. And I'm like, "So I don't know how you're really going to monetize that, and I think that's a big problem." And I just went on and on and on about all this little kind of nitpicky things I didn't like about it, and David was writing everything down.

We got to the bottom of the hour, and he's like, "Oh, hey, I have a meeting. I have a meeting at the bottom of the hour. It was great meeting you, Don. Thanks for coming in. We'll be in touch." And I got walked out the door. I'm just like, okay. Well, I didn't really talk about anything about sales ops, except for like the first five minutes. And I basically prompted the part for a good 20 minutes. He probably hates me, right? I ended up getting hired. One of the things I asked David, probably like a month or two after I started, why did you hire me? And he's like, "It was pretty clear to me you were very passionate about Yammer, and I just wanted you in the building." He was fine letting you do whatever you wanted to do. "I trusted that you would be able to do the job of whatever you thought how you might be able to provide value to the company. I was going to trust you to do it." And he's like, "If you want to do sales ops, great. Do sales ops." So I joined. They had literally just bought Salesforce. I had a brand-new, absolutely clean instance of Salesforce. There was nothing in it. So I was able to go, "Great. Everybody, listen. Stay out of Salesforce for the next three weeks. Let me put together some basic processes. I'll blow out some reports and dashboards, and we'll get things going." And I did that. I want to say, May of 2010, we had a 40k deal with Nationwide Insurance. It was our first customer. It was on enterprise. So again, what we were trying to do was, if you're a small company, you could put on your credit card. That's great. But if you're a large company, you probably want to have an enterprise contract. That was kind of the B2B motion that we were trying to build, and that's what I was helping propel. It just took off from there. I mean, that was 2010. And by 2012, we were acquired by Microsoft for $1.2 billion.

Alex Kracov: It's such a great story on so many fronts. I mean it's like, knowing how big of a product guy Sacks is, you probably just love that in the interview, right?

Don Otvos: Oh, yeah. You know David, too. Yeah.

Joining MuleSoft

Alex Kracov: That's exactly what he wanted to hear probably. He's like, all the sales ops stuff probably would have been boring to him. But hearing all of the product feedback and nitpicking, it was probably like the best way to win him over. Then going back even to the MuleSource, MuleSoft days, I mean, what a great manager. I mean, that's exactly the type of tough conversation that set you on an amazing career trajectory.

Don Otvos: Yeah, it was kind of a, you know, I was 37 at the time so it was kind of my midlife crisis. It was like, okay, I need to get out of sale and do something different. Phil's like, "Don, go do this. You'll be good at it. Trust me." It ended up being a good thing. The other thing about Yammer, too, the other thing, Yammer, similar to Slack, has history. So when you join a company, you could go in and search the history of Yammer. It was one of the things that was kind of cool, right, the whole thing of onboarding. Similar to Slack, when you onboard, you can basically, rather than having to ask a question again, you can go in and search and see, has somebody already ask this question? Has it been answered? You're able to use it as kind of a knowledge base to learn. And so I literally went in, and I searched up posts to see if anybody had talked about me. And the day that I interviewed, David had an entry. It was like, "I just met this candidate Don up post, and he told us about all these things. He told me all these things that need to be fixed in our product." He mentioned everyone in the engineering team. It was like, okay, I get it, you know.

Alex Kracov: I love it.

Don Otvos: Going back to his love of product, David, he was getting it firsthand from somebody. Yammer, at the time, was really small. I mean, MuleSource was probably one of the first customers of Yammer as a freemium product. We signed up for the freemium version.

Alex Kracov: And so what was it like in that crazy scale? Because I think you went from 400k ARR to 80 million over three years and then sold to Microsoft.

Don Otvos: Oh, yeah.

Alex Kracov: I mean, Yammer really kind of pioneered, I think, the new wave of freemium products, as you sort of mentioned, along with some other companies. And so I assume there were some unique challenges, both because you scaled so fast and the freemium stuff. So I don't know. What comes to mind?

Don Otvos: So the things that really stick out for me, one of the first things that I did, and to this day, I mean, kind of the formulas that I wrote, I kind of still use. Being able to track ARR within Salesforce is not easy. And I figured out a really elegant way to have it aggregate the information from the opportunity, incorporate churn, incorporate upsells in a way that I could quickly see in reporting where do we stand, what is the active ARR right now, and being able to churn, being able to renew. That whole ARR motion was something I built out with formulas on the opportunity and the account fields in a way that made reporting extremely easy and very straightforward. Because, again, the concept of ARR, everyone is like, "Oh, it's really easy. It is the annual contract value." No, it's not. Because you have add-ons. You have co-termed contracts. You have contracts that don't co-term. You have upsells. You have renewals. You have churn. You might have partial churn. You have local churn, right? There's a lot of different components to it. And figuring out how to make that work in Salesforce was something I did really early on, that I was able to figure out and be able to give everybody reporting on an individual level, on a top-line level that everyone is able to consume in a way that made sense. And it helped us make good decisions, right? That was my whole thing. That formula and how I did that lasted from our first sale all the way to the point we were doing 80 million. It didn't matter, the volume didn't matter. And it scaled very easily in a very, very understandable, straightforward way. So that was probably one of the first things I did.

Alex Kracov: Super impressive. I can't imagine many sales ops people could say what you just said, that what they did at the beginning actually scaled all the way up. I feel like at Lattice, we rebuilt our stuff so many times.

Don Otvos: Oh, it scaled all the way, yeah. That was a crazy thing. Even as we brought the ERP and everything else, it was like, ERP was the financial thing. Everyone in finance, they can do whatever they want, right? But I was trying to bring intelligence to the sales teams, to the CSM teams, to the SDR teams, right? That's what I wanted to be able to show them. Like, "Hey, here's how you're tracking to quota." Because other quotas were tight. ARR. For CSMs, here's how your upsells are doing. Here's how much ARR you're responsible for. Here's your net revenue. Here's your net recurring revenue. All that stuff was stuff I just built out with formulas within Salesforce that made it easy for everybody to know, like, hey, here's where I stand. Here's what I need to do. It was very straightforward. It wasn't confusing. And I did some documentation around it, like, "Hey, these are the terms you need to understand." It's very basic. Boom, boom, boom. So there's a little bit of an enablement piece to it. But again, I think most people are pretty smart. Once they grasp the concept of ARR and all the pieces of it, it's pretty easy to consume. Then having that available for them in Salesforce, to know and see in dashboards and reports, it was pretty important to me to have that early.

Transitioning to Solutions Consulting at SalesLoft

Alex Kracov: I'd love to skip ahead a few years. Because you did the Yammer thing, and then you had a few different roles leading RevOps at a few different startups. But then you joined Salesloft as VP of Solutions Consulting, which, I mean, Salesloft is another one of these iconic companies sort of the era. So I'm curious, like, how did you end up at Salesloft, and then why the switch into solutions consulting?

Don Otvos: Yeah, that's a great story too. So fast forward to, let's say, 2015, I was at a company called Datahug, a small startup. It got acquired by CallidusCloud, who got acquired by SAP. That kind of folded into SAP now today. But at the time, I mean, I don't think we ever got bigger than 30 to 40 people. The company was based in Dublin, Ireland. We had a small San Francisco office. And I got approached by First Round Capital. So First Round Capital has a blog. Check it out if you haven't seen it. It's pretty cool. First Round's philosophy is, they want to get in early-seed stage, series A. They really want to help founders grow the different parts of the company, and they want to be able to fill in the parts that maybe the founder isn't good at. So if a founder is a good product person, maybe they need help on the sales side. If their founder is a good salesperson, maybe they need help on the product side. So they have this blog that basically goes in-depth on a lot of different topics to help founders and early companies kind of understand the pieces that they might not have. They kind of heard the story of me at Yammer, and they approached me. They said, "Don, we would really love to do an article about your experience at Yammer and kind of what you're doing today in RevOps, because we think it would be really great to share with other founders."

They have a woman, by the name of Camille Ricketts, come and interview me. Her and I talked for about an hour and a half. We talked about strategies, just talked about Yammer, kind of some of the things I was doing at Datahug. She wrote this 5,000-word article on the First Round blog. And I'm like, whoa, it was a really long article. And come to find, I didn't know this, but Camille Ricketts was a former Wall Street Journal reporter. He does these really in-depth articles. And so she did this really long article. It was very flattering for me. It spoke highly of what I did at Yammer and what I was doing at Datahug. First Round loved it. They were like, "Wow, this is a great article. Don, would you mind maybe speaking to some of our other founders? We have a forum kind of similar to Reddit where you can hop on and kind of do an ask me anything. We'll let all of our members know that, like, hey, if you want to know about sales ops, RevOps, Don Otvos. Here's the article. You can come ask him whatever you want." And I'm like, "Yeah, I'd be happy to do that."

So I jumped on. They're all asking me all these questions. I do this ask me anything, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Then I think Pete Kazanjy was on there. And at the end of it, Pete got in contact with me. He's like, "Hey, I'm a founder." He found a company called TalentBin that got acquired by Monster. He was kind of working with First Round trying to figure out what he was going to do next. And he's like, "I'm an engineer, but I really want to solve the sales problem." And so if you look at Pete today, he's the founder of Atrium, a great sales management platform for understanding how to help your reps do better and really trying to help others solve that motion of revenue operations. He's wrote a really good book about it. Reverse back to 2016, he hadn't done any of that yet. And so his whole thing was, he wanted to see what he could do around creating a community for RevOps. And he's like, "I'm going to do a dinner at the First Round office, and I'm trying to find other people that do RevOps. Would you want to come join us for this dinner?" And I'm like, sure. So it was a dinner, you know, 20 people. What it turned into was what is today Modern Sales Pros. Modern Sales Pros is a fantastic organization I'm really proud to be a part of. There's thousands of people on it. Basically, it's a community of RevOps folks that are just like, "I need to solve this problem. I don't think this problem is new to me. I don't want to reinvent the wheel. How do I do it?" It's a really good forum for asking those kinds of questions, of doing those kinds of things. So I did that and then that started to grow.

Fast forward to 2016, I'm at Datahug. Datahug gets acquired. I was a customer of Salesloft at the time, because I had met Kyle Porter at a Salesforce event. You know, one of those side events. You know how Salesforce always had all these little side events. He was speaking, and I was speaking from Datahug. I'm looking at what Salesloft is doing. Again, if you go back to 2016, this is the days before any kind of sales engagement platform existed, right? So what Salesloft was doing back then was really revolutionary. I'm like, wow, this is really cool. So I'm peppering them with questions, right? I turn around, and there's maybe five people in the audience. I don't want to ask all the questions. And so at the end of it, Kyle was like, "Who are you?" I'm like, "Oh, I'm Don Otvos. I run RevOps at this company called Datahug. I think what you're doing is really cool." And so I ended up becoming a customer. And I raved about on Modern Sales Pros. And so every time, when someone's like, "Oh, what do you think of Outreach versus Salesloft," I'm like, "Oh, man. Go with Salesloft. They're way better." I'm just a total cheerleader for Salesloft. Then the day that Datahug gets acquired - which, oh my gosh, I think it's exactly eight years ago to the day. Because it was right around the election eight years ago - Kyle calls me and he goes, "Don, how do I get you to join Salesloft?" I'm like, well, you probably want a RevOps person to be based in Atlanta. I know somebody who's amazing, Erin Bush, who is actually a member of Modern Sales Pros, who I know is looking for a job. I'm like, "You should probably hire her because she's fantastic, and she's in Atlanta." So they ended up hiring her. And he was like, nope. He's like, "How do I get you to join us? I want you to come join us." And I'm like, well, again, I don't want to move to Atlanta. What am I going to do in San Francisco? And he's like, "Don, I'm going to send you a Google Doc with some ideas about roles that I think you could perform for Salesloft and stay living in San Francisco. You tell me what you think. I want you to pick one of them, and we're going to make it work." I'm like, okay, Kyle.

And so Kyle sends us over. The thing we ended up settling on was, wouldn't it be great to have somebody on phone calls with the sales team that had the experience of being a user of Salesloft, having a RevOps background, someone that could talk, knows how to wear a sales hat basically, come at the angle of like, "Hey, here's where I have seen success in using Salesloft. Help me understand what you're trying to do. Okay. Great. Here's how I think Salesloft can help you." So basically, be that technical resource for the sales team and be able to talk the talk and walk the walk of being a consumer of Salesloft, and really be able to help to serve that customer and help them out on their journey and what they're trying to do and accomplish, and have Salesloft be a part of that. And so that's what it ended up being. It ended up being solutions consulting. I grew that team to seven people and rode that wave with Salesloft. I was going out to Atlanta all the time, but I stayed in San Francisco. We had two to three people in San Francisco and just grew the company from there. Every time, I told the sales team. I'm like, "Look. Whatever you need from me, put me on the call. If it's somebody in San Francisco, I will go sit in the room when you are on the call with that customer." Basically, I was at the space of Salesloft in San Francisco on these phone calls, and I was on them in a non-threatening way. Again, the end goal was really key to Kyle's philosophy of being able to serve the customer. That's all I wanted to do. I just wanted to help. I was a customer of Salesloft. I knew how Salesloft works. I know how to fit in the tech stack. How can I help you? And that's all I did. And I did that for almost four years at Salesloft.

Alex Kracov: You must have been such an amazing asset for Salesloft. I can't imagine having somebody who has that depth of RevOps experience and the passion for the product and being able to actually get on calls and help people and stuff. Because when I was looking at your resume, I was looking at resume, I was like, "Oh, solutions consulting. That's interesting." And now it makes so much sense of, like, oh, you were-

Don Otvos: Yeah, because everyone's like, "Why did you leave RevOps? Why did you do solutions consulting?" I mean, I didn't really leave RevOps because I was still talking RevOps every day.

Alex Kracov: No, it was just like you were able to help not just the company you worked at with RevOps but all of these companies with RevOps. You can get into their tech stacks and help them with, I'm sure, their Salesloft and Salesforce integration and how it would work and how they should set up their dashboards and reporting. I sort of love what you said there of, like, doing it a non-threatening way, in a non-salesy way, in just a way that's about authentically helping the customer, which is what I think, ultimately, sales should really be about. It's not just signing the dotted line. It's about being a consultant and being authentically helpful, which it sounds like a sort of your mindset at Salesloft.

Don Otvos: Well, yeah, and that was really - I credit Kyle to that. Kyle's whole philosophy was serving the customer. I was able to just fit. It was just a fit like a glove for me because I love to help by nature. And it just ended up being such a good alignment and something I really enjoyed doing. It helped grow the company into what it was.

Alex Kracov: Did you work at all with product at Salesloft? I'm curious. Because I imagine you probably were using the product and had all this feedback from customers. Did you interface with sort of that side of the org at all?

Don Otvos: I did. I did. That side, I did a lot with customer success too. There was a lot where I was like, "God, it would be really neat if we could do this for our customers." It may not have necessarily been a product thing. Sometimes, there was somebody on the CS team that I ended up working with pretty closely. I think he is still at Salesloft in product. But one of the things him and I came, you know. It was my idea. He built it, but I kind of was giving him the ideas around it. My whole thing with Salesloft was like, hey, this is really cool. A lot of people don't live in Salesloft for reporting, right? They want to see it in Salesforce. So how do you build or replicate the reporting that we're doing and put it in something consumable in Salesforce, which is where everybody lives? And so he ended up building an unmanaged package of reports and dashboards that pulled in all the Salesloft information but presented it in Salesforce. So you basically take it and use it as it was. Or you could look at it and go, "Oh, I see what this is. I'm going to incorporate this into my dashboard," or edit it as you needed. And it ended up being this really amazing thing that really took of and was really popular with the CS team. So it wasn't just product but it was like, wherever I think I could help, I would jump in, you know.

Alex Kracov: I mean, there's like, what's that saying? There's like missionaries and mercenaries at companies and startups. I think the missionary mindset is always the right one, of just like, how can I help each other and your teammates and customers? I think companies that are made up of missionaries usually do pretty well, like Salesloft. It's so interesting to look back to. On 2016, like sales engagement wasn't a thing. I mean, I remember at Lattice, I think we probably bought Outreach, I think. Sorry. But it was such an early thing back then. And now it's so funny to see how far that whole industry has come. And now your AI SDR or whatever, people are trying to do now.

Don Otvos: Yeah, sales engagement is table stakes now. You can't really operate efficiently or competitively without having a sales engagement platform in your organization, I would say.

Joining LeanData

Alex Kracov: And then the next company you joined, LeanData, I was a customer of. I remember LeanData. I remember at Lattice, I was doing all the sales routing myself, even as the marketing lead. And I was like, "I can't do this anymore. I don't really care who the leads go to. I'm just trying to get you guys more leads." And so we ended up buying LeanData, which was a great tool. And you joined there back in a more traditional VP of RevOps role. I think it was like a bigger company when you joined. Is that right?

Don Otvos: I did. I mean, the story there is kind of funny too. It kind of speaks - people love hearing this story. Because I remember it was like, "Don, how did you find this job? How did you do this? How did you land in all these companies?" A lot of it, not all of it, but a lot of it was as a result of my network. Right? It just goes to speak of how important it is to be meticulous about how you're building your network on LinkedIn. Generally speaking, my network is pretty much people I have either worked with, met with, met at conferences, spoke with at conferences or been on calls with. I try to make my network that. I just don't randomly add people because I want it to be valuable to me, right?

LeanData came about because one of my managers, back in 1997, like my second job, was a guy by the name of Steve DeMarco. We worked at a company called Ramp Networks. I was there a couple years. They got acquired by Nokia. It was a company that was bonding together 56k modem lines to provide high-speed internet by combining 56k modems. It was a great product, right? Like today it wouldn't make any sense. And so he was my manager, and I just always stayed in contact with him. He happened to play hockey. I played hockey. I'd seen him at the rink. I always see him at Shark's games. He was in the Salesforce ecosystem. I ended up in the Salesforce ecosystem. We see each other at events and whatnot. He kind of tracked my career. I kind of tracked his career. He ended up joining LeanData as CRO. And he was like, "God, Don, I need somebody to help me with RevOps. I know you know how to do this. We need somebody to just come in and fix everything that we're doing." And I'm like, okay. And I talked to him. One of the downsides at the time, it's kind of funny. I was living in San Francisco. LeanData was at Sunnyvale, and I didn't want to drive to Sunnyvale every day. It's like an hour drive. I don't want to do this every day. I told him like, "Look." This is 2019, this is pre-pandemic. He wanted me to be in the office every day. I'm like, "Look, I don't want to go the office. I don't want to commute, and I really don't want to do that." Back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. Finally, he comes to me. He's like, "Don, look. Can you come into the office twice a week?" I'm like, okay. Twice a week, I can do. And so I ended up moving forward with the interview process. I had my final interview on March 4, 2020. I got my offer March 5. Then I said, okay, give me two weeks. I was going to start on March 23, 2020. So if you remember those dates and kind of what was going on, March 6, the following week was kind of like, "Hey, you might have to work from home from this thing. This virus is going around. It might be a week or two." Then by the time I was supposed to start, everything shut down. So the irony of this was, I was complaining about going to the office every day. I got it down to two days a week. And it ended up, I didn't go to the office for six months.

Alex Kracov: Too funny. Life was funny.

Don Otvos: So I joined LeanData. I did it remote. I didn't meet my team at all. It was just the people that I had interviewed with. The big thing that I started with there was, they wanted somebody to come in and take LeanData and redeploy LeanData within the organization. They were very confident that it would just needed to be reset. And so I went in. I redeployed LeanData at LeanData and got everything up and running, back on a new course. I brought in some new tech into the tech stack that they didn't have, things that I thought were missing, that I thought were important. Yeah, I was there almost five years. And again, the funny thing with LeanData, when I was a Datahug, back when LeanData was pretty small, we were kind of bumping into each other. Because there were some lead and matching things that actually Datahug was doing. We actually stole one of their deals. So I had actually run into Evan. They all knew who I was. I knew who they were. So it was like, I wasn't strangers to the company. We were using LeanData at Salesloft as well when I was there. So it's like, all these things, everything ties back. It's just so important not to burn bridges. I think Pete said something to me one time, Pete Kazanjy. I have to attribute him to this quote, or else he'll kill me. He said, "Life is long and the valley is small." You keep that in mind as you go forth with what you're doing and how you treat people. It's a big deal. Because things come back around to you.

Alex Kracov: Totally. And I think it's amazing how you've built your career, too. I mean, it's really fun to watch your career progression from traditional sales rep to sales ops, to the solutions consulting ops thing, back to ops. Then now you did the VP of Business Development and Alliances at LeanData and your evangelism at Chili Piper. And in some ways, you've taken one of your big strengths, which is the networking and the community around Silicon Valley and all these companies and actually made that like your your day job, it seems like. Is that sort of how you think about it?

Don Otvos: Yeah, and again, if I talk about that for a second, the Lean data, like what happened to LeanData, after a couple of years, I kind of got RevOps working and I was getting bored. I was about to leave the company, actually. My CRO was like, "Don, don't leave." He's like, "Hold on. Maybe we can use you in partnerships." Because I had worked with him in the channel at Ramp. He knew I was really good at doing channel partnerships and he's like, "You know everything in the tech stack and how it relates to LeanData. So who better to have in partnerships and working with our partners on the tech side than you?" That's how I ended up moving into partnerships at LeanData. It ended up being a really natural progression for me. Because, again, understanding the RevOps ecosystem, knowing how LeanData fit in all the pieces of the tech, being able to drive those relationships and kind of the art of the possible, ended up being something I was really good at and I really enjoyed doing. Then that's how I ended up in partnerships at LeanData.

When LeanData came to a close, this is like September of this year, 2024, the day after I got let go - I got laid off from LeanData - the founder of Chili Piper called me. Nicholas Vandenberg. The reason he called me, the reason we were connected was because when I was at Datahug back in 2015 - as I said, we were a Dublin-based company, but we had an office in San Francisco. The office that we had was kind of in a shared, kind of like WeWork. It was a shared office space called Rocket Space, and it was small offices and hot desks. The hot desk that was out there was occupied by Nicholas and his wife, Alina, because they had just started this company called Chili Piper. Being in that same floor and we were in an office off to the side, we would come out and be like, "Hey, what are you working on? Who are you?" There were folks from G2 back when G2 was really small. They were on our floor as well, which would be just like, "Oh, what are you working on?" I mean, we were all going to get lunch together. We all get drinks after work, whatever. I'm still connected to all these people, our early G2 folks, Nicholas and Alina from Chili Piper. So they knew I was at LeanData. We were competitor. He caught word that I got let go. He's like, "Don, how can I help you?" It's literally what he said. It wasn't even like, "How are you doing," or anything. He was like, "How can I help? I want to be able to help you. Let me see what I can do for you." And so now what I'm doing for Chili Piper, it's not even a full-time role. I'm just on contract helping them out with go to market. They really want to replicate the partnership program that I had at LeanData that kind of got taken apart about a year ago. Not my choice. Chili Piper, they had gotten feedback from other partners that like, yeah, LeanData had this great program and now it's gone. And so Nicholas was like, "Don, take whatever you're doing that made those partners happy and replicate it at Chili Piper." And so that's what I'm working on. I'm basically rebuilding the same kind of motion that I had built at LeanData that made a lot of partners really happy at Chili Piper

Advice for Building a Partner Program

Alex Kracov: What goes into building that motion as you sort of thinking about standing up a partner program?

Don Otvos: The one benefit that I had at LeanData that I was really grateful for is, I had a CRO, Steve DeMarco, who really understood and appreciated the partnership motion. I think one of the things that I've learned in being in partnerships now for almost three years, if you have an executive team or executives that don't believe in partnerships, it's very hard. Build something and get investment in the right ways to get it to grow in the right ways. And so Steve understood that and was willing to make the investment to build it while he was there. He left about a year before I did. So during that time that he was there, we've really built this really great thing. Because he was bought in on the idea and the concept of how partnerships can grow your company. And I'll say this too. The other thing that I got introduced to as part of partnerships was kind of getting closer to Crossbeam. In Crossbeam, Bob Moore, his whole philosophy is, you shouldn't have to have cold calls. If you have a good ecosystem and you have a good partnership landscape, you should be able to drive a lot of your business through connections you have, through your partners. He calls it "ecosystem-led growth." He wrote a really good book about it. One of the things I've learned is like, if you don't have buy-in at your executive level to make that work, it just doesn't work. And so I think one of the first things I asked Nicholas when he wanted me to join him, like, "Are you all in on partnerships?" Because, again, it's very difficult to go back and say attribute. Attribution for partnerships is very difficult. It was one of the challenges that I had, right? So when I looked at it, I kind of have the belief that nothing is - people that come in on your demo request form, they don't come out of nowhere. Right? There is a reason why they're coming to you, right?

And so one of the things I found was, in doing research on our inbound leads, from our contact us, I want a demo form, I would ask the sales rep to just ask the question. Like, can you ask them how they heard about LeanData? The thing that we found was 40%, 44% - I think it was, 44% of the time, it was a partner that had told this person about LeanData, and that's why they were coming to check it out. And so I could literally go back and say, wow, okay, all these inbound requests that was contact me now weren't from marketing. They were from partnerships. Right? And I had documented all this. My team did it, and we were really proud of it, right? Because, again, a lot of times partners, you put in these referral programs where it's like, "Register the deal. Tell me all the details, and we'll give you a referral fee." Well, a lot of times, that doesn't necessarily work. Because sometimes there are, I mean, I will say there are partners that are like, "I don't even care about the referral fee. I just want to do the right thing for my customer. If the right thing for my customer is to position your product, well, then I'm just going to tell them to go check it out." Well, that's what happened all the time, right?

Even the same thing happens on technology side. You have technology partners that aren't going to register deals, but they'll talk about you. Right? They'll be like, "Hey, go check out this company. Go check out LeanData." Right? If you're a technology party in an integration, they're not going to register the deal but they're going to talk about you. And that kind of very subjective attribution is difficult to track, and you have to have executives that understand that there's going to be an investment around this that is not going to be one-to-one ROI attributable, that you are just going to trust me to go do and build and make happen because you have to have it, and you have to understand that you're going to get business from it, that I'm not going to be able to track for you. And Nicholas gets it. So I was really glad to join and kind of build out what I was doing previously and making it work for these partners that obviously really liked what I was doing.

Alex Kracov: It reminds me a lot of just generally marketing in general, where I think some of the best marketing you can't perfectly attribute. Posting on LinkedIn or a billboard or things like that, it all really drives a huge impact even if the little UTM tag in this form didn't say that. And so I think of partnerships the same way. We tried to stand it up multiple times at Lattice. It was kind of okay. But yeah, we never really got, especially on the technology partner side of things, the engineering resources to actually go build the integrations. And so it's like, all right, this isn't working because we didn't invest in it. I think that's kind of what you're talking about. And I'm curious. When you think of building partnerships, is it technology partners? Is it co-marketing marketing partners? What type of partners? Or maybe it's all.

Don Otvos: Yeah, I mean, what I've kind of said on the technology partnership side, I'm like, you can go build integrations. Those are great, right? Will they get used? Will they get adopted? Who knows? Maybe they will. Maybe they won't. If it exists and it's not being used, if you are still doing the right things otherwise, it really doesn't matter that you have an integration to begin with. Right? Because if you're building out the use cases, you're building the relationships, you're doing all the right things on the back end, getting the sales teams connected through Crossbeam so they understand, if I have a deal and they have a prospect, or I have a prospect and they have a deal, we're going to cooperate and then talk about what the use case is, we're going to talk about the integration if there is one, that is the key. Right? That is what's going to drive pipeline. That's what's going to drive revenue. Yes, the integration will make it sticky in the long run, but on the front end of the sales side, like where you're going to close deals, where you're going to generate pipeline, the integration isn't really as, you know. It's more of a Trojan horse. It doesn't really matter, right? It gets you in the door. What you want to be able to do is drive that partnership between the sales teams, drive the marketing, the co-marketing, doing the definitions of the use cases, doing the webinars, educating your customers. That's the key piece in my mind.

The back-end piece, is like, okay, now they're a customer. Sure. Yes, CSMs, please go get them to use the integration. It will make it sticky. But even if you don't have high adoption on that integration, if you do the right things otherwise, it doesn't really matter. Again, that goes back to having an executive team that understands, look, tracking adoption isn't the Holy Grail. Right? Going back to understand, like I said, how many referrals are we getting? These inbound contact-me-now requests, are they coming from our technology partners? Well, great. That's success in my mind. Because what I want to do as a partner and leader is bring pipeline in. I want to get pipeline through the front door. Sales team, CSMs, they're going to do their job once the deal closes and once the deal is in the pipeline. I think partnerships are the front end, just need to be a pipeline generating machine. And they need to do it through those relationships they have with partners, whether it's technology or service partners.

Networking at Events

Alex Kracov: I totally agree. I'd love to end today's conversation just talking about maybe your approach to evangelism, at events in particular. Because I met you at the Modern Sales Pro boat party conference, which is hilarious, over the summer. I remember it was awesome meeting you. It was fun, and it felt like you knew everybody. You had your trademark of, like, Hawaiian shirt on. So I'm curious, like, what's your mentality when you go to these events? Is it just to have fun and talk? Or do you have a game plan where, like, alright, I got to set up meetings with these five people and so on? How do you sort of think about and approach these events? Because I know you go to a lot of them.

Don Otvos: Yeah, when I go to these events, it's really absorbing as possible. Right? I think I did it when I met with you, right? So I'm like, what does Dock do? I've never heard of you. Like, tell me more. I really want to understand. Because going to these events, sometimes, it's like I don't know what I don't know. And if there's something in RevOps where, you know, maybe I've heard of Dock. It's like, okay, well, who are you? Like, I've heard of you, but I'm meeting you as a founder. Tell me more. Absorbing, being a sponge at these events and seeing who sponsors. If you're there, if you're at an MSP event and you're sponsoring an event that I'm at, you're probably in my wheelhouse and I want to understand what you do. Because I want to be able to know how you fit. I want to be able to know, is there something I can do on my end to partner with you? What is the art of the possible look like? That's a lot of what I do when I go to these events. And then meeting with people individually is like, it is a lot of the, like, hey, meet me people in person that I've had on LinkedIn, that I may be connected with on events virtually over the pandemic. A lot of that happens still. I'm just being very meticulous about how I connect with people. So when I connect with somebody on LinkedIn when I'm at an event, what I do - this is my little LinkedIn trick, and I don't mind sharing it. If I connect with you, I will send you a message right away. I'd be like, "Hey, it was great meeting you at the MSP boat party this week." Then that way, if I ever have to go back and someone goes, "Don, how do you know Alex at Dock," I'll be like, "Oh, I don't know." Then I look. Sending you that message is my breadcrumb for the future. And if you ever come back to me, I'd be like, "I remember how we connected." And it's like, "Oh yeah. What does Dock do?" And if you have any ask of me where you need my help, I now remember who you are, what you do, how you fit. And I'm happy to - again, my nature is to be helpful, so it's like I'm going to want to help you if you're asking me for help. That's kind of how I approach events, you know.

I wear the Hawaiian shirt because - I started doing it, I don't know, two or three years ago. My background, my ancestry is Portuguese-Hawaiian. So it's just kind of, Hawaiian shirts, I've always just kind of had. And you stick out, right? I'm not a tall person. I'm about 5'4, 5'5 if it's windy. You have to kind of think of things to do to stick out. And so the Hawaiian shirt, I'm like, you know what? I'll do a little custom Hawaiian shirt, and I'll wear it to events, every time I go to event. Now if I go to event and if I'm not wearing the Hawaiian shirt, like, "Don, where's your Hawaiian shirt?" People remember me now, and they come up to me. It just drives that engagement for me and my personal brand to be able to do the things I want to do for whatever company I'm at. So if it's Chili Piper, a lot of the events that I've gone to in the last month, it's like, "Don, oh my god. I heard you're at Chili Piper now." They see me with the Hawaiian shirt, "Hey, Don. What's going on? Tell me more." It's an excuse to re-engage, an excuse to move the subject forward on, "How can I work with you with Chili Piper? Let's talk more." I think that's why Chili Piper has me going to a lot of events too. I think I've gone to four events in the last month, you know. It's just been resetting the conversation of, like, "Yep, I used to work at LeanData. But let me tell you what's great about Chili Piper," and being able to change the direction of the conversation that I had before into the things that Chili Piper can do for you. And I've been really enjoying it.

Alex Kracov: Well, thank you so much for the time today, Don. It's just like an absolutely iconic career. It was so fun to walk through all these different stops along the way. So I really appreciate it. It was a really fun conversation.

Don Otvos: Yeah, you bet.