Operators Ep 36 Transcript
Delian:
Hi everyone. My name is Delian and I'm a principal at Founders Fund, a venture capital firm based in San Francisco. This is Operators, where I interview non-VC, non-CEO, non-founder operators that make the startup world go round. Today, I'm interviewing Hannah Willson, SVP of sales and partnerships at Modern Health. Prior to joining Modern Health, Hannah led high growth sales teams at Zenefits, Rainforest QA and HelloWallet, which was acquired by Morningstar. She spent more than eight years at CEB, which was acquired by Gartner where she was the top revenue generator for seven consecutive years and consistently exceeded targets for renewals and upsells. I hope you enjoy the show.
Delian:
Cool well, Hannah, thank you so much for taking the time today to hop on the podcast, very excited to chat.
Hannah:
Yeah, thanks for having me.
Delian:
So I always like starting these conversations by diving back into the beginning of people's careers before we talk about where you're currently at, i.e. Modern Health, a favorite Founders Fund portfolio company. But you started your career originally at the EDO Corp executive board where you were a research associate and then eventually made your way all the way up to senior director. Can you talk us through a little bit of how you landed there initially? What got you sort of interested in working in sales and how you grew within the organization?
Hannah:
Yeah, definitely. I mean, I started there right after college. So when I was a senior in college, I mean, I had no idea what I wanted to do. I was actually an international relations major and so I had studied abroad in Beijing but I knew I wanted a job after college. So I went to an on-campus career fair and just applied to a bunch of companies that came on campus. I ended up getting this job the fall of my senior year and so after that I was like, "Okay, I'm done. I already have the job. I don't have to worry about it." So it was more just like fell into it than really being super thoughtful or planning it. But I was actually super lucky where I landed because it was... I mean, CEB back then in the early 2000s was a really interesting company.
Hannah:
Basically what we were doing is it was a membership based consulting model. And so companies would pay an annual fee and then they would get access to this whole array of best practices research. So I landed in the sales function, doing research actually for sales executives. So basically a sales executive from a fortune 500 company would call us up and say, this is the business problem I'm struggling with. And then I would go and call 15 other heads of sales and write a research brief and say this is how this company is doing it and basically share information. So it was through that, that I just really learned about sales and learned out how important it was to the company and what a good career opportunity it was. And that's kind of what got me interested.
Delian:
Interesting. I'm sure yeah one of the classic things that I feel like a lot of the executives say is that mentorship from other heads of sales or other heads of whatever unit you're running, tend to be some of the best ways to learn. And that was effectively your full-time role, and also you were in somewhat of like a sales role. So I'm curious, do you remember times where you would actually take a lesson that you basically learn from writing one of these reports and you realize, oh, I can actually apply this to my own sales process that I'm doing internally as well.
Hannah:
Yeah back then, but when I was doing research for sales executives, I was mainly just doing the research for them. And then eventually I moved on, I was doing sales selling into heads of HR, but I think, I mean, at that point I was kind of thrown into the deep end. I remember calling VPs of sales and they're like, you have no business doing sales research. Cause I knew nothing at the time, but that was kind of the model at the company is they would take really young people and people that didn't have a ton of experience and you'd write these pretty sophisticated research briefs. And that was actually the team that ended up writing The Challenger Sale, which has become one of the main methodologies in sales today. And so in addition to what I was doing, which was writing these briefs, they were also doing these large scale studies and analysis to see what sales leaders cared about as a whole. And then taking that so, I mean, yeah it was incredible learning perspective, just what I got to learn about the function overall.
Delian:
And yeah, you ended up deciding to stay around for eight years, I'm curious, was it the sort of learning opportunities? Was it the fact that obviously the .com bust sort of happened and maybe there weren't an infinite set of companies that were doing super well. What got you excited to stick around for such an extended period of time?
Hannah:
Yeah. I mean, I think one, it was just I constantly felt like I was learning, two it was kind of like the basics, they made it really fun they had awesome incentives. Once I did transition over to the sales side, they put together these amazing trips around the world for high performers. The compensation was really good and I just felt like I was good at it. And so also, it's interesting because maybe it's just that industry or maybe it's the timeframe, but now when I look at resumes, I see people that have been at a company for three years. I'm like, oh my gosh, they have such long tenure.
Hannah:
And sometimes I think it's actually super beneficial to stay at a company for longer. You build up that knowledge, you build up your skill sets and you can become really good at something. And so I'm all also trying to think too now, as a sales leader, how do we actually keep people for even longer? And of course the cycle time is different in Silicon valley. And with all this, just the speed at which startups change, in which your roles can change, but still I felt like I was able to get really good at that job because I did it for a long period of time too.
Delian:
Yeah. I guess if you could point to a handful of things that you think you could attribute your success to, because while you searched over to doing sales towards HR executives, you ended up being one of the top revenue generators at the company. What do you think sort of were your unique attributes or things that made you stand out sort of vis-a-vis your peers during your time there?
Hannah:
Yeah. I mean, I think it's the same thing that... I mean I added it up once, how many quarters I've been selling for, it's too many to count like 50 something. It makes me feel super old, but I've basically done the same thing every quarter. And this has even gone through to management and to being a VP, you just do all the little things. There's no secret to it in some ways it's just, at the end of the day, I mean, sales is pretty much a math equation and you can figure out if I have a million dollar quota, how many opportunities do I need to have in my pipeline? And if that number comes out to 20 opportunities, it's like okay, what can I do to get 40 opportunities in my pipeline?
Hannah:
And so it's just constantly working backwards and thinking through, what do I need to do, so it's assured I'm going to overperform? And it's also this mindset, which I don't know if is a healthy mindset, but this mindset of, of course luck is going to be a part of it but if you sort of take out luck as a variable and you say my success is going to be a hundred percent attributable to the effort that I put in it, it makes it a lot easier, I think, to actually get to that number every month.
Delian:
So I assume you're a fan of Bill Walsh's The Score Takes Care of Itself and trust the process type methodologies.
Hannah:
Yeah, I think that's really correct. And I mean, the other thing we do a lot at Modern Health is we call it all the little things. You just do everything you get connected to the prospect through investors, you write really thorough emails that are really comprehensive, that are tied to their needs. You do tons of prep, you think of every single objection, you think of people you can connect them to you, think of what's motivating that person. And it truly is, all those little things just add up. So people would say at the end of the quarter oh my gosh, you've got so lucky all those last minute deals closed. And it was like, well, it wasn't really that it was all these tiny things I did every single day.
Delian:
One of the things I think is always interesting to talk about, especially after you spent so much time at one particular company is, what was the framework that you used for the decision making around where to sort of go next after eight and a half years at CEB? How did you end up deciding to go over to HelloWallet, which is a much smaller company at the time? In a sort of VP position. How did that opportunity land and how did you... I'm sure you had plenty of maybe opportunities that you could have chosen otherwise. How did you decide sort of on them?
Hannah:
Yeah. I mean, I think it was one, I just didn't feel like I was challenged at CEB anymore and I think it's always good to put yourself in challenging situations. But also strike a balance between something that's going to be challenging, it's going to push you out of your comfort zone, and you think you can actually do really well. And so for me, I've never really thought hugely strategically I would say about my overall career path, it's been more like do really well in one role, constantly be optimizing for learning, being successful. And that'll get you to the next place.
Delian:
Yeah, no it makes a ton of sense. And so, yeah can you talk a little bit about during your time at HelloWallet, what were some of the things that were very similar and could immediately be adapted from your time at CEB, versus what was just like, oh my God at a smaller company, I don't have maybe X, Y or Z infrastructure or the product market fit isn't quite as strong yet. What were the things that immediately translated versus things were maybe a little bit of a splash of cold water relative to a more established company?
Hannah:
Yeah. I mean, the thing that immediately translated is we were selling into the fortune 500 space and we were selling into HR executives. So it was good because I had the momentum of having connections and knowing the space. I think what was hard is when you're at CEB you recognize that you have a big brand behind you and there's a lot of momentum behind that and there's a lot that can come just directly from having that brand. And at that period of time we had just a lot of tailwinds in our favor because of the overall CEB brand, which obviously we didn't have going to a brand new company. And also just thinking through it's kind of a hard strategy to immediately go in and sell to fortune 500 companies. And I think now, a lot of B2B companies have rethought that and maybe start with smaller SMB mid-market and work their way up to enterprise. But at that time I mean it felt like the playbook was really go directly to enterprise, which is very, very hard.
Delian:
Yeah, I'm curious, were there noticeable differences just in terms of sales culture, given these sort of different products really different contract sizes or contract types that you guys were selling that actually changed, let's say all the little details from CEB versus HelloWallet. Were the things that you felt like were very different in terms of yeah, how you either communicated with customers or what the comp plan was like or what the ideal sales team structure looked like between the two?
Hannah:
Yeah. I mean, it was just basically night and day. I mean, the sales culture was like incredible at CEB and there's been a ton of sales leaders that have come out of that culture of just like momentum and using data and all of that. But then trends... And I don't know, there's probably maybe I would say a thousand people within the sales organization at CEB and then translate that to HelloWallet and it's like three salespeople. And so you're just kind of doing everything I'm flying around, meeting with people directly and HelloWallet never got to extreme scale as say Zenefits did in terms of the number of people we had. So it was more just that day to day grind of meeting with employers and that was financial wellness product. I mean, that was 10 years ago so that was really early in terms of even thinking about what is financial wellness as an employer? Why should I care about financial wellness? So a huge uphill battle in terms of demonstrating ROI and the business case and the value proposition.
Delian:
Especially through years, yeah HelloWallet got acquired by Morningstar and you went over to Zenefits, which I believe at the time was even earlier than where HelloWallet was relative to when you joined, it was less than a year old. I'm sure it was very, very early in figuring out [inaudible 00:11:27] emotion. But it sounds like it was obviously in your wheelhouse of selling to HR executives seems like it's been a common pattern let's say across your careers, I'm starting to realize. And so I'm curious how you sort of landed at that opportunity and then what was it like joining so, so early stage in a company's life cycle?
Hannah:
Yeah. So I mean, how I landed at Zenefits I had a friend who was like a recruiter and was like, there's this hot company Zenefits, people are making half a million dollars a year, you don't have to travel. And I mean, turned out not totally to be the case, but yeah, also at that point, I'd just had a baby I'd spent the past 10 years flying all over the country. I was like, this sounds awesome this is a San Francisco based company, cause HelloWallet was on the east coast. It's growing really quickly. Even though it was really young I mean, you probably know Zenefits just grew so quickly, so when I joined, there was already a sales machine going and I mean, candidly it just sounded fun.
Hannah:
And it sounded like it sort of aligned with where I was in my life. And so, yeah, it was another one of those moves that on paper, it's not like this career ladder that just goes from every rung perfectly it was like, I went from being a VP of sales to now essentially being an enterprise AE, selling an SMB product. Most people are like, this is kind of crazy but I was like, I don't know it just seems like an awesome company, it seems like it'll be fun, it seems like I'll learn a lot and I definitely did.
Delian:
Yeah. I'm sure that sales culture... I think Parker has an incredible skillset of just building a like very efficient SMB go to market motion and a sort of like gong ring type culture. I'm curious it was that closer to the CEB type culture in terms of true nonstop sort of sales hustle, or if you could like underline what is Parker's sales... he's clearly been able to replicate it now with Rippling so it's not a sort of one time thing, if you could articulate almost the DNA of what at Zenefits made it just grow so fast and in such a intense and fast-paced environment. What do you think was the actual underlying cause of that? Or how would one create that?
Hannah:
I mean, it's a good question. And yeah Parker was an incredibly inspiring leader and as with Sam Blond, who's been a mentor of mine who is the chief sales officer at Brex now, and he was the chief revenue officer at Zenefits then. But yeah it was kind of humbling cause when you've been in enterprise sales most of your career, you kind of I don't want to say look down on SMB, but you're like oh SMB, I did that earlier in my career. And then when I got to Zenefits, I was like, wow, this is a machine, just the process that had been set up, the way that we recruited people really quickly, just the sales sort of environment that was created, how you're driving urgency and quick sales cycle, putting monthly quotas in place. I'd never been to a place that had monthly quotas before that. And so yeah, the volume was so much higher than anything that I'd done before.
Delian:
And then for the first time in your career as far as I can tell, you then switch to an organization that was selling to a very different type of client, you switched over to the VP of sales at Rainforest. And correct me if I'm wrong, but I assume there you're largely selling into, I assume VPs of engineering. I'm curious both, how did you end up transitioning? And then I'm sure that was probably the first time where your customer set obviously changed a lot or maybe even the language and pitch and product and things like that changed a lot curious what that transition was like?
Hannah:
Yeah so I went there because Sam who was the CRO at Zenefits ended up going there, and so then I went there really because of him because I wanted to learn directly from him. So I think it was maybe a little bit less about the company itself and just about that mentorship and career opportunity. And it was a huge challenge for me, but one that I really wanted because I've been selling to HR executives for most of my career and so again, I was trying to optimize for, how can I learn things that I don't know today. And I mean selling to VP's of [eng 00:15:25] is a totally different sale everything is different about it. And so yeah that was an awesome experience to get that.
Delian:
Can you dive into a little bit of that of just like how customer persona changing changes sale cycles. I feel like that's a really interesting thing that most people don't realize that yeah, depending on... Enterprise sales is not just the same enterprise sale across every type of SaaS based business. It largely depends on sort of who the buyer is and so I'd love if you have examples of maybe it's sales motions or how to actually get somebody over the line and convince them that was very different from selling to HR executives versus selling into VPs.
Hannah:
Yeah. I mean, one simple difference I think of a bunch, is that when I've sold to heads of HR before even HR technology, they more want to know about what is the employee experience going to be like, is this something that our employees will find value in? And oftentimes when you do the demo of the product if you will, you might even just share screenshots or an envision app or something. Whereas obviously if you're demoing to a VP event that's just not going to cut it they want to see exactly how the product works, they're going to pull it apart. So you just have to be so much more knowledgeable about all the intricacies of it. And it's not to say that one is harder, easier it's just the persona is so different that you're selling into.
Delian:
Makes a ton of sense. And then after roughly two years there, you joined your current role in Modern Health. Would love to again, just want to hear sort of how the opportunity came about and then was part of the attraction the fact that, I assume with Modern Health you're selling a sort of benefits program, which I assume sells it to HR executives, was a part of the attraction, you could lean back on those core skills that you developed over the course of many years.
Hannah:
Yeah. And after rainforest, I wasn't even really thinking about getting back into the HR space. I think the blessing and the curse is that I knew all the challenges with selling to benefits leaders and HR leaders. But then I got connected to Alyson I'm forgetting how, through a friend and that's our founder and CEO, Alyson Watson. I met her for coffee one day, we talked for five minutes and I was like, I have to start at this company. And it was basically, she just knew the market so well and she knew what all the challenges were and she'd spent the last three years working in this market, understanding what the gaps were in the space.
Hannah:
And I was like, from my time at HelloWallet, I knew all the challenges of selling into this market as well and I just thought to myself like, wow there's really something here. And this is even before the pandemic and you could tell mental health was becoming that next big pillar of benefits after medical, dental, vision, if you will. And so, yeah, that's what got me so excited to work at Modern Health and Modern Health was actually the earliest stage company that I'd ever been at, cause I think at that point it was less than 10 people.
Delian:
Wow. Okay so there's I assume very little sales structure, sales motion built out at that point. So I'm curious, what was it like landing there on the ground and helping actually go through that sort of discovery process for what all the little details and ideal customer persona and customer path look like?
Hannah:
I mean, one big benefit that I had coming in and this was also something that was really exciting was just Alyson herself as a founder was so good at Sales. And I sometimes was like, well you've never really even done sales, but you're already really good at it, and she just got it why it was so important to the overall growth of the company and even though it was super early, had already built a good foundation. She'd hired two really good AEs who were cranking and she was in every opportunity, she was listening to the market, she was leading calls that we had with perspective customers. And so that really helped in the early days that it was like, you're not coming in cold or having to prove the value of sales you can actually just build it from the ground up. And so there was a lot of things, obviously that I took from all the different parts of my career to say if we can build this from the ground up, what is the best way to do that.
Delian:
And I'm sure across all of your roles team management and team building has been a core component of it. But I'm curious at a place where you're sort of truly starting from scratch, how do you guys at Modern Health think about what has been the process for... Where did you start to build the team first, how do you structure the sales team? How do you determine whether or not somebody's a fit for modern versus maybe they would've been a fit at prior sales teams that you were part of, but what's the sort of unique special sauce that makes somebody a fit for modern?
Hannah:
Yeah it's a good question. I think a lot of sales skills translate across companies and the one biggest thing I look for is performance at a previous employer. And so if someone can show that they've had success at one company and have moved on to multiple roles and have been number one or number two in the sales organization there the chances of them being successful at another company in a sales org are pretty high. So that's probably the first thing I look for but Modern Health is a bit of a unique sale just because we're selling into HR and benefits leaders and this is a benefit that they're rolling out to their entire workforce. And so it's a very visible sale in the sense you have someone putting themselves on the line if it goes wrong, it's every single employee has had access to this and it's a healthcare product.
Hannah:
So the bar for building trust is really, really high. So that's one thing is really good EQ to be able to build trust with our buyers. And then the other thing is just overall, thoroughness, diligence. Because it is a regulated industry and because we also have this interesting sale where we're selling directly to employers, but often through benefits brokers like Mercer or Willis Towers Watson. Attention to detail is really important, thoroughness of email responses, crossing every T dotting every I. So we also need to look for AEs that have that quality as well and aren't just going to fly over the details.
Delian:
And you talk about the, let's say both benefits and complexities that come with having... In this area relative to I think most enterprise SaaS channel partners, like Willis Towers Watson are incredibly critical to success of a company like this. That is very atypical I feel like an enterprise [inaudible 00:21:16] it's not like when you were selling Rainforest QA to EPEs, if there's a large channel partner that is expected to be a part of the transaction. Can you talk to that cause I think it's something that's pretty opaque to folks that aren't involved in this sort of digital health world and I think that enterprise sales or digital health is just like any other type of enterprise sale.
Hannah:
Yeah. That's a good question. So for those people that don't know, any big company has a benefits broker that they work with. So if I'm like Slack, for example and I'm their benefits leader I'm not just going to go and call Blue Cross or Blue Shield and get my benefits, I'm going to go through a benefits broker who's going to help me select that benefits package. And so it's this really interesting dynamic where we're selling directly to employers, but we also need to convince the benefits broker that it's going to be helpful and the benefits brokers often the ones that are running those evaluations. And so there's been companies in this space that have come up that have said, we're just going to work directly with the employer and we're going to leave out the benefits broker. And those companies have very clearly not been successful.
Hannah:
And so even from the early days, we've done a really good job of... we have a whole partnerships team that works with benefits brokers, that communicates our value, that talks about what are the benefits going to be to them and to their companies. But it is an interesting dynamic because it's like, you're almost selling to two different companies at once.
Delian:
And then I think one of the other things that's unique in digital health is also just the timeframes and timelines for both getting customers over the line, but then also utilization as well. Which I imagine makes it difficult to have a Zenefits style one month quota. I'm sure that things move a little bit more slowly in the digital health world, but yet, you guys have managed to scale quite rapidly. Can you talk about benefits like sales cycles and how that compares to just traditional enterprise sale? And then also maybe how customer success compares to traditional enterprise sales i.e. utilization from the actual employee base and how important that is.
Hannah:
Yeah so companies tend to select benefits on an annual cycle, so January 1st is when we're going to roll out all of our new benefits, we'll do this open enrollment period in the fall. And so most benefit buying decisions or aligned to that which makes planning from a business perspective, a little bit complex for us because we have so much of our revenue that comes in at the end of the year. And so many new customers that are coming on at one point in time, which can strain us from an operations perspective. And so it is just something we need to think about.
Hannah:
And I guess one thing that was interesting is COVID sort of threw that out of the window. During COVID people just wanted to give mental health support and still do to all of their employees. And so in the early days of Modern Health I think there was a lot of the revenue did follow that one one cycle. And then as soon as COVID hit that kind of... It was companies wanting to buy almost every month because of just the extreme need.
Delian:
Can you talk about how you guys adapted into the COVID world, both in terms of how internally you operated, or in terms of shifting from a I'm sure in person office culture to then being fully remote. But then also how you adapted to this new world where all of a sudden sales cycles just got blown out of the water and everything just looked completely different. And there was obviously extreme demand for the types of services you guys were providing.
Hannah:
Yeah. I mean like every business, we were just kind of doing what we could on the fly. Everyone was suddenly home we had to communicate just through Slack all day. At the very beginning, we had literally daily meetings with the sales team. So it was like, let's just all stay super connected because I mean in this space overall it's growing so fast, there's so many competitors in the market. Our sales team needs to stay super close and if one person hears something we want to make sure that everyone... that knowledge share is happening and that used to happen in the office environment. And we really fostered this culture of people sharing ideas with each other, Gong has been an incredible tool for us to do that as well virtually, but we just needed to stay super close.
Hannah:
And so we had daily meetings, over time that's obviously gone down a bit, but I do think we've done a good job of staying really tightly connected as a team. And then the other thing that we did at Modern Health, which had come from some of the experiences that I had at Zenefits and other places was that we kept the team really lean. I mean, there's definitely been some downside to that, but I think the upside to that is that it was easier to have that really tight feedback loop with a very lean sales organization.
Delian:
Yeah I guess down a vein, could you expand a bit on how the team needs to be structured when it is so lean and then maybe also more broadly, this is one example of a lesson brought over from Zenefits. If you could talk through other examples of things, whether it's even from CEB, HelloWallet, Rainforest et cetera, that are lessons or structures or comp plan that have come from some of the prior experiences that you've had.
Hannah:
Yeah. So basically when I think of how many people to have on the team, it's kind of just a simple math equation of what's the revenue target that you want to get to, and then divide that out by what you think the quotas can be. And now getting the quotas right is really hard and in the days of Modern Health, I think we were a bit aggressive in terms of the quotas that we felt like AEs could carry, but we had phenomenal AEs and they were all exceeding those. And so, we had fairly high quotas, over $2 million for account executives. And so basically what that allowed us to do was have a leaner team and the thinking there as we were building it was, one, if you have a higher quota and you have a standard based commission rate, or a percentage of every opportunity that you bring in, then you can have a higher overall OTE or on target earnings.
Hannah:
And so that really helped us recruit really good AEs in the early days is cause we had these high quotas, we were still efficient as a sales organization but the thinking was let's continue to bring in really good AEs, give them a lot of advance and make them really successful. And then you kind of get this flywheel going where they tell their friends and then it's this virtuous cycle. Whereas other organizations that I had been at where we added AEs added SDRs really quickly. Maybe figuring out the quota is even easier than figuring out what is your lead engine. The AEs productivity is largely based on how many leads that you can funnel into those AEs, but you need a pretty sophisticated model to figure out are we going to have the right number of leads for the right number of AEs?
Hannah:
And even if you're in a really fast growing market and there's a huge total addressable market it still can be difficult to figure that out. And you definitely just don't want to get to a place where you've hired all these really good AEs, and then for whatever reason you can't get that lead engine cranking because then you have this cycle where AEs aren't hitting their quotas, all these really good AEs you've hired, they might leave they tell their friends. And so it was really important to me in building Modern Health that we had this really good sales culture, which starts with having a winning sales culture, the foundation is AEs hitting their quotas.
Delian:
Yeah. How do you guys think about growing as aggressively as possible while maintaining employee retention and not under utilizing folks. It seems like a tricky balance to gauge where, if you obviously ever have an under utilized AE and they're unhappy, but also on the flip side, if none of your AEs are under utilized you're probably potentially dropping the ball on potential growth that one could have. How do you think through the planning around what is the right number to have such that you're leaning in as aggressively as possible, or how much is the appropriate amount before you suffer from like employee retention problems.
Hannah:
Yeah. So a couple things that I would've done differently in the early days, one is looking at sort of more of a bottoms up approach, so saying well, it's great if you can give AEs this super high quota, really high OTE, but can they actually work all the opportunities that they have sufficiently? And so now we've started to do bottoms up analysis where we say, how many at bats can an AE actually work, cause you don't want to get to that breaking point where we can't work all of the leads that a particular account executive has. And so for that it's more of just talking to managers and figuring out what is the right number of opportunities that an AE can effectively work at one time.
Hannah:
But then also just, thinking through what is... There's a lot that goes into it. I mean we think through the segments how big of a spread can an AE work and that was also something we did in the early days was we made really big segments. So we had one AE selling to both SMB companies and enterprise companies. And over time we've created more segments but I do think that helped us in a number of ways, just giving AEs more at bats, but another mistake I would say or something I would do differently next time it's just what is the support that you have around those AEs, so they're not at their breaking point.
Hannah:
So for example, in our business we have to fill out a ton of RFPs and that was getting down to the AE who would have to fill out these RFPs that would literally take them out of pocket for a week because there's hundreds and hundreds of detailed questions. And so building those support functions earlier having an RFP writer and a whole team to work on those RFPs, so the AEs can work on different activities, or sales enablement, for example I would hire those probably a bit earlier.
Delian:
And I'm curious, in modern obviously because of the structure of the market, you have these partners that are critical for success. I'm curious how you think about sort of long term management of those relationships in making sure to keep those super happy. Do you almost have customer success folks that aren't just dedicated just to the particular end customers, but also to the sort of intermediate partners that you guys work with to deliver your service?
Hannah:
Exactly yeah. So we've built out a partnerships team and within that partnerships team, there's different components of it. But one component of the partnerships team is just to work with brokers and consultants and so we have them aligned by firms, and we even hired people who've come from those firms. And we've hired people, customers actually who've rolled out the benefit at their organization who have now come to work for Modern Health. And so having that benefits expertise and having the credibility is really important than just putting like a SaaS sales executive on a partnership opportunity.
Delian:
And then if you were fresh grad starting out today maybe with a slightly more forethought than you had going into, let's say your first role. And wanted to end up in a position where they were a sales executive at a large Silicon valley based company. What advice would you give for let's say the new landscape of today where obviously back in 2000 the set of types of companies that were actually doing let's say, Silicon valley based enterprise sales was more limited than it is today, right? Digital health, obviously wasn't even a thing really back then. What advice would you give to them in terms of where to start, how to learn, what things to be targeting, what to trends to latch onto in the world of 2021 versus the early 2000s.
Hannah:
Yeah. That's a good question in terms of what's changed, cause I oftentimes think about what hasn't changed too. And if you want to be successful in a sales career, it's kind of like... What's that saying, the hard way is the easy way. If you just hit your quota every quarter then you get promoted and you move up but obviously that's easier said than done. I would optimize for organizations maybe less based on industry cause I mean there's so many interesting industries out there and you can learn a lot from a variety of industries. But maybe optimize more for the sales leader that's there, and it's someone that you feel like would be a really good mentor and you can really learn from.
Delian:
Makes a ton of sense and a hundred percent agreed on the mentorship perspective. I think most people don't appreciate how, I think almost everything in business is done via... Apprenticeship is almost always the best way to accelerate a career. But yeah, thanks so much for coming on the podcast today Hannah was really a great conversation appreciate you hopping on.
Hannah:
Yeah thanks for having me.
Delian:
Thanks for listening everyone. If you'd like to support the podcast, please sign up for a paid Substack subscription, which we use to pay for transcripts, mics and other improvements. If you have any comments or feedback on what kinds of questions I should ask, who should come on the show, or anything else, please do let me know. Have a great rest of your day.