Mohit Aron, a proven tech founder of two multi-billion dollar technology companies, Nutanix and Cohesity.
If you just hire like a sales guy and expect that guy to just do the selling, that is not the right way. You're actually going to fail. Long story short, the founder actually is the sales guy. When you're an early startup, I would not even recommend that you go get a very big guy.
Is there something like an AI native salesperson?
I'll say the fundamentals of selling have not changed.
You have uniquely scaled zero to 500 million plus a couple of times. As you went through these stages of growth in that journey, are you hiring for two years? Are you hiring for leaders who can run the full thing?
The hope always is when you hire a person that the person goes as long as possible.
Fortunately, that's the reality. Not everyone is going to scale.
Top three mistakes which you have done in go to market.
The top top mistake I made was not using hiring scorecards and just interviewing like feel on feel chemistry match.
Mohit, welcome to Step One. I'm personally really excited to talk to you. He's also my senior from my alma mater Delhi. So has been a personal hero for a long period of time. Really excited to welcome you to Step One, Mohit.
Thanks for having me here.
So Step One is about one company building topic only, and then we want your views on that. The first topic I want to talk to you about, as a technical leader who has scaled two companies, I'm sure you will agree with me that go to market is at the heart of building large successful businesses. You can have an interesting idea and innovation, but if you don't have distribution, nobody cares. So I want to start with your experience of building the early go to market team, right? And what does it look like? What is the founder's role in the first one year? Let's say let's start there and would love your perspective.
When we speak about a company that's really early, please note that even the messaging is not perfect. You really don't know what will actually fly with customers because you have to try to sell and talk to a bunch of customers before you find out what exactly is resonating with them. So if you just hire like a sales guy and expect that guy to just do the selling, that is not the right way. You're actually going to fail because what happens is that you hire a sales guy, you're going to tell the person what to say and they'll say exactly that. They don't feel they have the luxury to tweak the messaging. They're not the visionary behind the product. So long story short, the founder actually is the sales guy. So even though you hire a salesperson and maybe the salesperson at the company is the founder, but the real selling in the early stage of the company is actually done by the founder. And the founder is going and talking to every customer and they're figuring out what's working, what's not, and they're kind of tweaking the messaging, right? And then finally what you want to do is you want to come to a point where the resulting messaging is working. And that is the point when you can start offloading a little bit to that sales guy because now that you know that this is how you can position the product or your company to the customer and that's the pitch, that's the message that you can hand off to the sales guy and then he or she can run with that. But until that happens, you really want to be in the mix. And you actually want to be in the mix for other reasons also. Initially, the bet is on you, the customer is betting on you. So even for that reason, even if the initial discussions are initiated by the sales guy, when he has the right messaging, you may want to be there to close the deal. You may want to insert yourself even in the middle of the sales. Because frankly, there is a certain level of comfort that customers get. After all, they're betting on a new company, right? The company may turn belly up. But you being there, you giving the assurance that you're always going to be there, that gives a level of comfort. And so the founder has a very important role.
Just out of curiosity, when you were doing Cohesity, how many customer meetings or what did you do? What was that phase? Did your ego come in between? Like, man, I'm a successful founder, I built a multi-billion dollar company, what am I doing starting from zero again?
No, that ego went down pretty fast when I realized I learned a lot, I made a lot of mistakes, I've learned a lot of things the hard way. And very soon I realized that if I'm not in the mix, this thing is not selling. So you got to drop your ego, you know, no matter what ego you have, no matter how successful you've been in the past, every new company is different. The founder has to start from there. Perhaps because you had seen success, you knew it more with higher conviction that this is the only way to scale. This is the only way to succeed. And now that I'm doing my next company, Siphon, right? Which is in the area of kind of sales technology, yet I'm playing exactly the same playbook. I'm actually talking to every customer, tweaking the messaging, same playbook.
Interesting. Yeah. So and you have a very high bar for product market fit based on your views I have which are in the part which is fascinating that helped me to think about. Would you share your definition of product market fit for the audience?
Yeah, absolutely. So, my definition is, and I'll go slow on this one, product market fit happens when you can hire an average salesperson, not an elite salesperson. Elite salesperson can sell to whoever. An average sales guy, I mean, you don't get to hire all elite guys, right? So, an average sales guy, and that average salesperson can sell to an average customer because, you know, the run-of-the-mill customer will be an average guy. So an average sales guy can sell to an average customer without involving the headquarters people in headquarters because people in headquarters are a limited commodity. So if you can follow this rule, average sales guy can sell to an average customer without involving people in the headquarters, then you basically have repeatability, right? And now you got product market fit.
That is a fascinating bar and I think it is really important for founders to think that way. I think it's a high bar like in my experience at least even probably at series A series B most companies are not there at scale but it is a really good one to achieve for. But I'm assuming that the first real sales leader hiring happens before this, right?
And then what are, so talk to us a little bit about what are the telltale signs that you are ready for hiring the first sales leader and a couple of early sales reps? What are you looking for in that sales leader?
So multiple questions there. So first of all, when you're an early startup, I would not even recommend that you go get a very big guy and definitely not hand off like fancy titles like a CRO or whatever because let's think about it, if a person is really good, they're making probably tons of money selling in some other company, why would they come to your company when you're not selling anything, right? So you're basically going to take possibly a mediocre guy and give that person like a CRO title, right? And that's a big mistake, don't do that. Given that the initial selling anyway is done by the founder, my recommendation is to actually think about not hiring that head of sales instead hiring like maybe a first level manager like a district manager and hiring that person close to your geography so that you can actually when this person goes to a customer you can actually go easily and meet that customer. So you build a small team under that first level manager and once that team is successful, you can do something similar in another geography which might be a little bit further away. And then when you have like a few of these then you can say okay now it's time for us to hire a leader on top. And so you can take one of these people and that's also something that motivates them. You can put whoever is the best guy, you can either elevate that person or you can also start hiring or at least start generating a pipeline from external people and then give the job to whoever is the best. If you feel the internal person is the best, give the job to that person or if the external person is the best, give the job to that person. That also creates a little bit of competition. This is how I would normally recommend. The only exception I would say is if you know like a great sales leader and they want to join you. Like I've known people in the past and so Siphon I've hired my VP of sales. This is only because I know the person and I'm comfortable going with the person but otherwise I would do it exactly like I told you.
Out of curiosity what was the error when you hired the first sales leader either Nutanix or Cohesity more or less?
No, we again the initial sales guy we hired early. Yeah, but the selling zero zero zero. Oh, okay. Zero. So remember, we want to get that person so that they learn how to do the selling. Even though we are doing it, they're accompanying us, right? And then there is a time when we pass the baton to them that hey, now the sales are happening. Now money is coming and you take the baton, right? We can still be involved. Yeah, that's kind of how it happens.
And then the first few sales reps, did you hire along with that leader or that happens a few months out or?
Yeah. So the leader is a little bit of a misnomer. They are actually doing the selling right even if they are like the leader they should act like a sales rep. So the combination I would say you should hire is definitely the sales rep, maybe a leader acting as a sales rep and an inside sales guy or a SDR. You know SDR is someone who can do phone calls. So the SDR can generate leads. So, you can buy a list or use ZoomInfo or something they can generate leads and then the SDR can call that customer and there's of course certain level of rejection that happens. So, but whoever wants to talk to you then the sales guy can go initiate that conversation, pull in the founder and that's how the initial magic happens.
