This is why I don't believe in sales quotas | Figma CRO

We don't actually have a traditional CS team. We also don't have traditional SDRs. My perspective is quotas are kind of made up.

An average enterprise rep here might have 3 to 4x their OTE for a quota. And we're happy with that. Focus and specialization, no question, as early as possible. Now, if we're talking about verticalization, ready to go.

It happened kind of by accident, like I think it maybe does for a lot of people. I mean, when I was going to school, graduating high school, thinking about college, it wasn't really like a... I mean, there was obviously the sales profession, but it wasn't something you really studied. And so, for me, I kind of fell into it. I ended up going to school at BU. I was studying advertising. We had to get a summer job and I remembered, you know, for me just like the year before I got my very first cell phone. So this is back, you know, 2000, cell phones were becoming a thing. You didn't have them when you were much younger than that. And I remember when I got my phone it was in a mall. It was in one of those kiosks. And I remember asking the woman who worked there. I was like, 'Hey, how did you get this job?' She's like, 'Well, I'm a law student and this is a way to make extra money and you can do really well.' And I was like, 'I wonder if I could do that.' So, you know, I went to the same kiosk in the mall that I bought my own phone with my mom the year before and I met this guy who was working there and I said, 'Hey, how does one get a job like this? I have no idea, but I'm home for the summer. I'm looking for work.' And he said, 'Well, why don't you start by just writing down some information here about yourself?' So he gave me this piece of paper. I wrote down my name, my address, my phone number. He's like, 'Okay, great. You start Tuesday.' And I was like, 'What do you mean?' He's like, 'Yeah, cool. You're hired, man.' And I showed up Tuesday. He handed me some pamphlets. He was like, 'These are the plans you want to sell and you make money. These are the ones you don't want to sell. No one cares about the phones. You sell whatever is in the bin. Go to work.' And he left. And I was like, 'Oh my god.' And I started figuring it out.

The first thing that jumped into my mind was be curious and really try to understand the person that you are trying to sell to. What's their situation? What's their circumstance? I don't know, that's the first thing that came. Do you have the time today to be curious? And what I mean by that is people are very cautious and hesitant with giving their time to anything. It's more like, 'Sha, I know that Figma is this size company with this X and this problem.' Do you not need to know the customer today because you don't have time to be curious? Like if you're going to do qualification on me, you know, I don't want to be qualified. You should figure it out.

So I do think it's a skill. I mean, and to be honest with you, I believe like right now more than anything else, if you want to be great in enterprise tech sales, it's not just about being curious. It's about being prescriptive. And that's an interesting balance, right? Because you're right, people are busy. And what they really want is insights. They want to know what can you teach me? What are your other customers, your best customers doing that we haven't figured out yet? And that's very much what we are preaching to our sales team every single day. But you have to mix curiosity in along the way. And I think that's the art of it is you have to be able to do both at the same time or else you're not going to be successful.

I don't think so. But what's really unique about Figma as a company, this was what I... so I joined, I've been here about four and a half years, and I started talking to Dylan five and a half years ago. And at the time, it was really early in the journey, but it was kind of unique in that, you know, Figma has been around since 2012 and really spent like six years building the product, studying customers, really trying to perfect it. Really not something that I had heard happen very, very often. And then once you started monetizing, this is like end of 2017, end of 2018, really took off and it took off very much in this not even PLG, I would say self-service way. Like most of our customers even today, at some point they started by going online with a credit card, someone bought a couple of licenses, started sharing links internally and that's how things took off. And that happened really, really, really fast. And so when I joined four and a half years ago, we were a hundred, maybe $50 million company, but in terms of our penetration in the market, we had tons of customers, way more. So I joined Datadog, my previous company, similar stage in terms of revenue, nowhere near the number of customers. So in many ways the job at Datadog in the early days was much clearer than it was at Figma. In Figma, we'd acquired all these customers so quickly and at the time, to your point, mainly what people were doing on the sales side was PLG. The sales role four and a half years ago was almost exclusively we're calling into or responding to existing customers that are on self-service plans and all we are doing is upgrading them to the higher tiers of the product. That was the motion. But you fast forward to today, it's very, very different than that. We are global. We have multiple segments: SMB, mid-market, enterprise, strategic. And if you look at what most of our sales reps are doing, especially kind of mid-market plus, it's very sales-led. The PLG motion of, you know, upgrading people to new tiers, expanding, you know, seats into the existing accounts. There's some of that, but so much of what's happening actually is what we were talking about before. It's being prescriptive. It's going into the customer with insights.

Oh, yeah. 100%. Not 100% of our business outbound, but 100% in that what the sales team is doing at Figma is majority outbound today. Now, it's outbound though into an existing customer base. That's the part that's unique. So these are companies that are using Figma. But they think they're happy using Figma. They figured out how to use us in a particular way, but we, through curiosity, through understanding patterns from how other customers are using Figma, we are approaching them with proactive insights for how they should be thinking about doing more with us.

We don't actually have a traditional CS team. When I started, we had a lot to figure out in terms of what is the motion and what we realized is coming back to that earlier premise. Most of our customers found us through a website and a credit card and they made their own decision on what they thought the value is that Figma could deliver to them. And if you look across our customer base, and this is even true today, and you compare what an average customer is doing with Figma compared to what we think they should be doing with Figma, there's a pretty big gap and a pretty big discrepancy. And so our job is how do we go and proactively educate the customer on the more that they can be doing? And so we asked ourselves, is that a CS function? Is that an account management function? But where we landed is for the most part that is a hunting motion. That is a motion where in order to be successful doing it, you have to go in and you have to actually get in some cases existing champions, but in a lot of cases, you know, new prospective champions and EBs to be really excited about something new that they haven't learned about Figma before.

Yeah. I honestly, it is both. I think for the most part, and by the way, this has evolved too as we've gone from single product to multi-product. I would say right now it's probably a little bit more in the using new products side. And it could be the same people using those new products, but oftentimes we're talking about new personas. You know, getting new individuals exposed to some of the things that we have to offer.

I don't know that I have that exact situation that you presented, but I think you're saying if the power is the platform, you know, versus the specific features and functionalities of one particular product. Yeah. I mean, I think frankly like the best sellers are not the ones that are focused on this feature is better than this other company's feature in this product. I think they are better at understanding like where a company's trying to go, you know, where their business is trying to go and connecting the value to the overall solution to those things that they're trying to accomplish. And there's a storytelling aspect. There's obviously the curiosity that we're talking about there. But I think you have to be generally just honest with yourself about where is the customer really going to get the most value from what you have to offer compared to the competitor. Right? And if that is through the point solution, then that's what you were focused on. And I still don't think you use feature and function to get there. I think you focus on value and value drivers. But I think if it's the platform, then that's the narrative that you want to get the customer to believe in.

I haven't seen anything in our business that would suggest to me that that's the case. I think it is hard to predict the future on this one, honestly. But if you look at our own business, I mean, we had our earnings call a couple of weeks ago. You may have seen it. We added five points on our net retention. Pretty significant. I think we went from 131% to 136%. Obviously, today we're in a pretty much exclusively seat-based model. Now, you might also know that that's changing in just a matter of a few days where we're going to start monetizing our AI usage through credits as well. But so far we haven't seen that in our business. Part of that I think may be just the fact that because of all the things happening in the world and in technology, there's just more and more builders I think coming into software as it exists. So is that part of the reason? I don't know. But there's nothing that we've seen in our business yet that suggests that's dead. I do think it's a tough one to predict long term.

Yeah. I mean, like that makes sense, right? If that's... I'm just not as knowledgeable about what's happening in those other businesses. From what I can see in our business and the people we're selling to, that doesn't feel like a thing that we've encountered yet.

Well, I'm kind of smiling because we also don't have traditional SDRs. We've really tried to be first-principled with how we built the go-to-market at Figma. And by the way, this is coming from someone who had, you know, by the time I left my previous company, maybe a 200-person SDR team, a pretty traditional one. So here's what I'll say. First is SDRs are not... and you probably know that you spoke to my former boss at Datadog, Dan. AEs have to be responsible for their own PG, like full stop. That I think is consistently true anywhere I've been and I firmly believe in it. I think that's critical. That is the job in a lot of ways, like the most important part of the job. I think with SDRs, I've always tried to be really thoughtful about where is the SDR actually adding clear incremental value in a business where you expect AEs to PG as well. And honestly, anywhere I've been, it's always been a little bit challenging to really isolate, okay, what did the SDR do versus the AE do? Do you have them share accounts? Do you have them split and have the SDR work on some and the AE work on some? So it's hard, honestly, it's hard and I think I've always kind of struggled with it. At Figma, there's this other unique aspect which is again our problem is not acquiring new customers, right? We have a lot and so much of our focus is how do we expand in those customer bases and yet even having a lot, what we've been trying to figure out is what is the job that needs to be done and you know we've tinkered with SDRs partnering with AEs to go expand into specific personas and do things like that but actually recently we made a new shift and we said even that we're going to kind of take the focus away from and we're using them now in a more pointed way on existing customers and managing small transactional renewals to get those off the plates of some of the more strategic AEs and the strategic work we want them to do. So we're always kind of tinkering with like what's the best way to deploy that resource to get value and then of course there are a talent pipeline as well, there are future reps.

So when I started it was basically we had AEs and AMs and we had two segments, mid-market and enterprise. And if you looked at what mid-market and enterprise was doing back then, it was effectively the same thing. They were doing PLG, they were upgrading people. It was a single product company. And then AMs were, you know, effectively doing CS type of work. They were driving seat expansion, but really like they were doing support. They were trying to be really responsive to the customer. It was necessary for the point of the business we were in. When we looked at it, we said, 'Okay, what do we need in the future?' And one of the things we said is like the things, one of the things I believe in the most is you need to have focus. Like the best sales teams are the ones that are like really, really focused and specialized. So if you're asking a rep to do 14 different things, it's too hard for them to be good at all of those things. So we looked at our business and we said, were there places where we can create focus? And the first thing we realized is like, let's isolate this PLG motion. So when we looked at it at the time, where is the PLG that upgrade... you know, when I say PLG, so by the way, maybe to define this for everyone, I think of our business in three... I think we kind of have three distinct businesses at Figma. One is self-serve, that is people go on the website, they put in a credit card, they buy what they think they need and you can buy our lower tier plans directly, you know, through the website and then you get a link, you send it around and you grow. Then we have what I'd consider our PLG business which is really concentrated in our SMB segment. Those are reps that are covering 0 to 500 employee businesses. And then we have mid-market... well, we have our sales-led which I'd consider mid-market, enterprise and strat and those are just basically smaller book sizes, smaller companies. So that's the way we're kind of set up right now. That PLG motion, we said let's isolate it to SMB because we looked at the companies that were typically in that position to be upgraded from self-serve and almost all of them were under 500 employees. Basically, it was new startups that were coming into the ecosystem. They were buying licenses themselves and then we try to be really sophisticated around when is the right time for us to proactively reach out to them based on product signals, maturity that we see happening to then have a conversation around, okay, you need to move up tiers.

I don't think it ever hurts to do it a little earlier rather than a little later because I think what we do still find is we think it's the right time based on our formulas. You still have to convince someone that that's the case and that might take a couple of go-rounds. Our SMB team, they'll often lose a deal, right, as in an upgrade transaction and then they'll win it a couple of months later and that's very typical. It was typical at my last company as well. But what I think is dependent on so many factors around how people are using your product, which features you're gating, how they're interacting with it. I think I don't know if there's like one specific answer to that.

Oh, yeah. So, by the way, just to finish what we did is we said SMB, that's the PLG motion. Everything else is sales-led. Everything else we do, mid-market, enterprise, strat, which is the majority of our team and the reps that we have, it's running like a very traditional SaaS sales business. Again, what's unique is they're pinging primarily into what you would consider to be a customer. We almost don't think of it that way, right? We are... the job of a sales rep, they get their book of accounts, right? And every year we've created more focus around them and we've had to do ruthless prioritization on like which accounts are we going to really go deep on. But once they get their accounts, the job is you map it out. You map out that org and you basically have a vision of what does a best-in-class deployment of Figma look like based on your understanding of this type of business and where are they today? And that gap between those things is your job. And you need to go figure out how to do discovery, how to do new business meetings, how to actually go build champions to get them to go from where they are to that future state that you want to bring them to through insights and a point of view. And that is 100%... we do like they do PG, they create opportunities. We do pipeline reviews constantly. We do forecast calls every week where we're digging into it. Nothing super unique in terms of how we run that part of the business except for the fact that it's not traditional net new that a lot of other companies would use as a definition.

There's a few things. So first is you have to bring them insights. Insights that are relevant to what they do and what they're thinking about. That value, I think, is the biggest thing that makes a champion go, 'Okay, I'm all in.' Because it's not just 'I love your product.' Of course, like the Figma community is incredible, but you want to build an enterprise champion. Like, educate them, teach them something that they don't know that's going to make them and their teams more effective at their jobs. That's the first thing that comes to mind.

I've got controversial, I would say, opinions on quotas in general. My perspective is quotas are kind of made up, honestly, and I say that all the time to my team. I think there's this... what I mean is I think there's this kind of prevailing wisdom with quotas that I've seen especially when you're going into planning and you're trying to map out your year where you kind of go, okay, how much ARR do I need to generate? How many people do I have? How much quota do I need to then dish out to feel like I've got enough coverage where if we're trying to add 500 million next year? If I've got 600 million of quota out there, that means even if people end up at 80% attainment, I'm good. And I just think that's made up. I don't think that has anything to do with how people are actually going to do. And so the way I think about quota is it's more about a philosophy that you're trying to implement around what is the work that needs to be done and how much reward do you want to dish out for that work that needs to be done and I think it generally comes back to that and so I don't have a singular philosophy.

No, no, no. I believe in quotas. We have quotas. What I'm saying is I don't necessarily believe that you completely de-risk your year by making sure that you've dished out enough quota to cover your target. I think that's a bit of a false sense of comfort. What I believe is that with quotas, you want to try to determine what are you trying to accomplish, right? So and the way I would think about it is I don't think there's like a single answer and I think even at Figma we've evolved, right? In the early days of Figma, right, which may be similar to what's happening at ElevenLabs right now, it was, you know, the job was primarily take this product, make your customer really happy, know the product really, really well, support them and then viral expansion would happen. And that there's frankly that if you think about that, the job to be done there is pretty wide population of people that could likely do it. If they come in and they care about like learning and the product, etc. That's one thing. And so, you know, if you have that business, you have to think about what is the reward for that? What is the population of people that you can do that job? When you're...

No, I mean, I think there's things about it that are hard. I don't want to say it's easy, but I think the way I think about it more is like how many people out there could probably do it if we brought them in, right? Trained them and they had the right personality, they had the willingness to learn. I think about it as there's a big population of people. You don't need to have 20 years of sales experience to figure out how to do that. Even if there's things about it that are challenging, I don't want to diminish what the job is, but I think in that type of situation, right, you're probably focused more on driving efficiency in the business, right? Where we are right now in that SLG motion in particular, which is again mid-market, enterprise, strat, what we're asking people to do, the stuff you just heard me get so warm and fuzzy about when I heard customers talk about in terms of bringing insights and building champions, that is strategic work. You need people who can really understand how businesses operate, who really understand not only the product but the landscape that we're operating in, who are able to PG and build these relationships, bring these insights, manage complex multi-stakeholder deals. That is hard work and it's very, very strategic work. So our philosophy now at Figma is kind of the opposite, which is we want to have really aggressive, as in like, you know, relatively easy quotas compared to, you know, what's out there in industry standard because the work is hard and it's strategic and we want to really reward people that are doing that great work. And we also realize the population of people that are capable of doing it is smaller, right? They need more experience. They need certain qualities and attributes. So again, I think what ElevenLabs is doing is probably perfect for them. I'm on the opposite side of the spectrum right now where it's like I want people to feel like Figma is a place where you can come in, you can do this hard strategic work that's really driving value for your customers and then you can be outwardly rewarded by it. And so our, you know, an average enterprise rep here might have 3 to 4x their OTE for a quota. And we're happy with that.

If those are the two options to choose from, I would take the person with the experience doing the deal because I think the industry experience you can teach to the person who's got, you know, the right willingness to learn and the curiosity and obviously you need to make sure you have that in a person and you test for it. I'm kind of making a bit of an assumption that with those two choices, the person who's done the really big deal hasn't just got a bluebird, right? That they've managed multi-stakeholder, long sales cycle, have to build a lot of champions, have to get to EBs, you know, they're likely leveraging something like MEDDIC and they're familiar with these concepts. There's a lot more confidence that I think that needs to be built over time for people to be really good at that and I think generally speaking smart people can learn industries and landscapes in a shorter period of time. So if those are my two only choices, I would probably take the person who's got the deal experience.

I don't know that it's changed that much to be honest with you. I mean the first thing there is I think what you see on paper, right? And I think that matters and I think increasingly I've become more opinionated on what I'm looking for there and what I'm not. And I have to admit some people don't agree with this. I have a usually a pretty visceral reaction to people who are super jumpy, you know, in terms of a resume. So, um, and...

Exactly. Like 12 months here, 18 months here, you know, 12 months there. If you just... and again people, there's so many reasons why, you know, people would encourage me to have more of an open mind for it and I get all of that but generally speaking when you're doing this at scale...

Right, it's saying something. It could be culture, it could be family, it could be whatever, but four times.

So I mean look, when you're talking to someone, it's a lot of the obvious things, right? Can you learn from them that they have the grit, that they are willing to persevere. That's a really important one for me. Do they have...

Oh god, it's so hard. I don't know. It's really hard. I mean, you know, I think Dan, like Dan would tell you and I think he mentioned it when he spoke to you is like he really wants to get like the full history of the person kind of going back to school days and how they made their decisions. I will do that from time to time. I don't always do it. I think frankly the thing that tells me the most on that front is the resume. You know, where did they... you know, looking at the places they were and having a sense of like the arcs of those places when they were there. Is this someone who was just chasing something that was easy or were they really actually, you know, sticking with something and making success out of something that wasn't successful? I think that's a big part of it. I think, you know, even you can create a process that forces perseverance through it in terms of an interview process. So we always make people do, you know, a challenge or an exercise at the end that requires some heavy lifting in terms of like learning a bit about our business. But also showing off your, you know, basic sales skills, run around discovery. So I think that's a way to do it, too. But it is hard. It's hard.

It's a take-home assignment. It's a take-home assignment. We've evolved it over time, but it's kind of a combination of disco demo. You know, it's basically like we want to give people a use case, you know, a case study. You're going to go pitch to this customer. Here is some information about them, learn about them, and come in prepared to lead a conversation, you know, do some discovery and then, you know, turn around and get in the product a little bit and show us a quick workflow that you think would be interesting. And personally, I'm much more interested in how they do, frankly, on the discovery side of that, because I think, you know, it's probably a little bit unfair to expect someone to be doing this amazing demo of your product with just a few days of playing around with it. But I do think actually the product piece we've kept in there because it does show an element of perseverance if someone is actually willing to spend the time to learn a little bit of it. I think it's telling. And then the way they approach the discovery part I think tells a lot around, you know, their ability to actually be curious and do all of those things.

One of the things that I always try to do is back-channel. I think that's a little bit outside of the question you're asking, but I think getting signals outside of the process in some ways I think are like the most valuable insights that you can get on someone. I think on the offer stage itself, look, you have some people who are going to naturally negotiate. You're going to have people who are not. I don't necessarily make strong judgments there because I actually think oftentimes the person who's not negotiating is not negotiating at the end because the hiring manager, the recruiter have done a good job of positioning ourselves and our offer in a way that makes them really just happy to jump in and take it. I think what we... the biggest thing I'm looking for at that point is someone's got to be all-in. Like they have to be really excited to come on board. And so I think if we have and...

Look, I understand people have choice, and I fully respect, you know, going through the process with multiple companies. But if at the end of a process, you know, with Figma spending a couple of weeks doing all this work, if you're not like, 'All right, I'm in, I want to do this,' it tends to be a little bit of a yellow flag for me. And if they're actively trying to pit you against, you know, another company, I just get nervous because we've seen some people who we've hired like that, and then, you know, as soon as things are tough or what, you know, they didn't have the initial success they expected, or that other company that maybe they didn't tell you but they're actually more excited about came back with a better offer or a different offer, they leave. And so do all the investigation you want to do during the process, but then by the end, like, both sides should feel like they're all in on this candidate.

I think it's between those two choices. I would prefer to go slow and risk potentially missing the hiring plan because if you make that wrong hire, it doesn't matter how fast you move. You've cost yourself time, in my opinion. And look, it's a balance, but at the end of the day, if someone comes to me and they're like, 'Hey, I know I've been sitting on this open headcount for three months. I have someone I'm not that excited about. I think they could maybe grow into like a solid B player,' I'm never going to say hire that person. I'm just not going to do it, even if it risks the hiring plan.

Yeah. I mean, so look, the flip side of it is there is the reality of, you know, it's not — I think it's slightly different than resigning yourself to hiring that B player, but I think it's facing the reality that you can build the best process, you can have the best instinct. And I still come back to the little joke I made earlier, which is like really figuring out if someone's great in an interview process is actually freaking hard. So you have to realize that only part of the job is getting the person in. That's when it actually really starts, where you have to figure out do you have someone who's going to be able to grow and be successful, or did you make a wrong hire? And do you have to do something about it? And I also think that it's not always as simple as right hire, wrong hire. I actually personally think most people have the potential in them. Some don't, and you might make some mis-hires, right? But a lot of people I think have potential, and there's so many factors that actually contribute to are they going to be successful or not. You know, how great is their leader? How great is the enablement? How much of a chance did you actually give them? I've got people who've gone on plans. The person I'm thinking of actually for my last company went on a performance plan and was really struggling. But we kept looking at like all of their inputs. There were so many great things that they were doing. And we said, 'Let's focus on just coaching around the areas that are gaps,' and came off of it. I'm long gone. That person is still there, multiple promotions, one of their most successful reps. So I actually think that it's not as simple as did you hire the right person or the wrong person, but did you put them in an environment where they can succeed, and are you actually holding them accountable to the right things?