Dan Fougere: tailor each inbound and outbound sales method

Introduction

Dan Fougere: To grow, it’s like a snake shedding its skin, right? You want to be the snake. You don’t want to be the skin. And so think about how can you grow as the company grows? How do you continue to up your game and think about your role or the role you want to be in a year from now, two years from now. What are the skill sets that you see other people in those roles, possibly at the same company, possibly at other companies? And how do you work on yourself on that right now? How do you make yourself better?

Danny Wasserman: This is Reveal: The Revenue Intelligence Podcast, here to help go-to-market leaders do one thing: stop guessing. If you’re ready to unlock reality and reach your full potential, then this show is for you. I’m Danny Wasserman, coming to you from the Gong Studios. Howdy, howdy, howdy. Danny “the Rev” Wasserman coming to you for this week’s episode of Reveal in the Gong Studios. Coming to us is a force to be reckoned with. Someone who actually has crossed paths with numerous Reveal alumni. Just goes to show it is a very small world out there. But what this individual has done most recently, and obviously most impressively, is dedicating so much of his time and resources to philanthropy.

But before he had all this newfound direction to give back to his community, he took Datadog as their chief revenue officer from zero to hero, posting an absolutely historic IPO. And along that way, in between those bookends, he is going to shower us with an embarrassment of riches when it comes to all of the wisdom he gleaned along the way, taking that organization from $60 million to over a billion dollars. Yes, we’ve got Dan Fougere, former CRO of Datadog in the house, who’s talking about how you possess humanity, humility, and compassion along the way as a leader. And the necessity of maintaining those three pillars as you go through the ups and downs of this journey. Leaving no space for an absence of gratitude as he took Datadog from, as I mentioned before, really a modest business to an absolutely overwhelming whopper.

He had this timeless piece of advice. He said, “Are you going to be the snake or the skin?” What he meant by that is as snakes shed their skin with the seasonality of change, well, do you want to be the skin that’s left behind or are you going to be that corporeal snake that continues to remain relevant and present? Because we know change to be inevitable and we ask ourselves, well, do we want to continue to persist as the snake or perish like the skin? He’s also going to touch on PLG and how PLG has a time and place alongside outbound motions and sales teams. But again, I’m trying to do my best to represent Dan. And you don’t want to hear from me. You want to hear it straight from the horse’s mouth. So it’s time for me to put a cork in it and tell you DJ, spin that. Howdy, howdy, howdy. Welcome back to the Gong Studios for what is going to be much like this guest’s historic IPO. Today will be a historic episode starting from where we will kick off. We’re going to demystify and unpack what the hell PLG means. Not from a marketer’s perspective, but from a sales leader’s perspective.

And there’s so much more to this guest who has joined me with over four years running at BMC. I’m curious to know if there were lessons taken away as this guest overlapped with the legendary John McMahon. Then to go on and have a rise to sales leadership at Medallia, finally culminating with a historic finish as the CRO of Datadog currently just shy of a $40 billion market cap and a legendary IPO back in 2019 when he was at the helm of the sales organization. Folks, while he aspires to be… Did I get this right? A galactic emperor. You may also know him as a board member of nonprofits like Homes for Our Troops, Heap, and Manta. Ladies and gents, that leaves none other than Dan Fougere in the house. Dan, welcome to Reveal.

Dan Fougere: Danny, I’m just here for the intro, man. You have the best intro in the business. That makes me feel so good. Thank you so much. Great to be here.
Danny Wasserman: Well, Dan, okay, as we alluded to, here you are representing a wildly iconic, recognizable, unforgettable exit from an organization that prided itself on PLG. And I think there’s so many milestones you achieved during your runs at whether it was BMC, Medallia or Datadog. Really we’d like to understand were there things leading up to Datadog that were transferable in your tenure in sales? And by extension, oh my God, are there things that for everyone else who’s listening, ICs and sales leaders alike who want to achieve that billion-dollar milestone, who want to go out in the public markets, are there things that they can replicate? So I know that’s a meaty topic. Go ahead and just start taking bites.
Dan Fougere: 100%, man. I had the good fortune, I started as an engineer. I used CAD. I loved the software, and I ended up going to a software company called Parametric Technology Corporation. And I went there as a technical person, but that’s how I found out about sales. Because PTC had this legendary sales organization and I got two amazing things there. I got an awesome sales training and I also had an awesome network of people who I still work with and talk to every day. You mentioned John McMahon, Carlos Delatorre, Adam Aarons, you go down the list. There’s just an incredible list of these people. Scott Davis. I did four startups. Four of them had successful IPOs. The first one I went in as a rep, the second one I went in as a first-line leader, third as a VP, and then the fourth as a CRO. And I think there’s no shortcuts. You’ve got to master each level before you can take it to that next level. So I think the people you work with, the training you get and mastery of each level is going to help you be able to be successful as a CRO.

Danny Wasserman: Amazing. Let’s talk about PLG in particular because there’s so many things that we can unpack with Datadog’s run. But PLG seems to be what comes to mind when most people think, “Oh God. Yeah, there are lots of PLG companies, but you guys were on a rocket ship.” I think from $60 million when you arrived in ARR in 2017 to well over a billion by the time you left. Takes a lot of, well, we’ll say strategy, a lot of skill, maybe a little bit of luck in there. But tell us how PLG fits into that smoothie of dimensions.
Dan Fougere: Awesome homework, man. So when I showed up, we were doing about $60 million a year. I started in January of 2017, and we just ticked over $60 million ARR, which is amazing. We were doubling year over year, which is also amazing. But we were really primarily focused at that time on inbound deals from other cloud-based startups who would buy oftentimes via credit card for month-to-month deals. So I was brought in to do a few things. One, build out an enterprise or team, build out international, build outbound in addition to the inbound that we had, have accurate forecasting, build out the channel and be able to recruit an awesome team that could scale. So we put those two things together, easier said than done, but that was actually… Here’s a funny thing. I think AWS maybe started yesterday.

Danny Wasserman: Yep, it’s going on this week.

Dan Fougere: Six years ago I presented a 40-slide deck to Olivier, Alexis, the two co-founders, and Amit Agarwal, who was at the time chief product officer, who’s not a founder, but effectively one. And those are the three geniuses that built the thing. And I presented to them, that’s what I’m going to do. They seemed to like it. They hired me and that’s what I did for the next four and a half years.

Danny Wasserman: This is an anniversary. This is just a homecoming.

Dan Fougere: It really is. It’s crazy. I know. It was after all the meetings. Those guys are so hardcore that they did meetings all day and then we had dinner at 8:00 at night and I brought my laptop like a crazy nerd to this super fancy restaurant, and I presented while everybody ate and we closed the restaurant down at 11:30. And then they even got off the elevator with me. It was like a magical thing where I had the piece that they needed and they had the piece that I needed. Because at that time, having been through four startups… Because I was actually at another startup that was a bad decision and I got out of there in three months. And I learned a ton from that as well. But the ones that I worked with, I realized how important great engineering is and great product. And also I wanted to work with somebody who was like me, had a chip on their shoulder, a lot of people told them that they weren’t the right person. Maybe got passed over. And for those guys, to the extent I can tell part of their story, you can’t build a great software company in New York. Nobody wants another monitoring company. The cloud’s never going to work for enterprise companies. Those guys punched through all that stuff. And for me, I feel like I had a similar story where I had to fight my way up. Engineers can’t sell. Maybe I didn’t do as well in different companies as some of my peers, which I think is true. But just keep working your way up, fighting up. And when we met, it was like, hey, let’s work together and make some amazing stuff happen. And that’s like you said, it’s an anniversary. It might be six years to this day.

Danny Wasserman: Oh my goodness. Oh, it’s giving me the chills. So let’s talk about… They’re at $60 million, they’re doubling year over year. That’s nothing to sneeze at. You’re clearly not breaking bread with slouches. And here you are saying, “Guys, we can’t ignore outbound.” And here they’re saying, “Well, we got here on the backs of PLG, so what the hell do you know that we don’t?” How do you broker that balance? Because there has to be a little bit of finesse in not calling their baby ugly.

Dan Fougere: Such a great question. It’s even crazier because you have… I don’t know if you’ve talked with Alex, who was the CMO over there, but he had some amazing innovation around the way that Datadog gets leads at events. Just the best in the business. The best booth at AWS every year. So there was also a lot of pride for everybody that hey, we got inbound but I knew a couple of things. One, the inbound is not going to work for enterprise. The enterprise sales that we did were more like traditional sales. You can’t load software agents onto production servers for enterprise companies without going through the procurement process. And then also the slope on the curve for the number of leads and the growth that we wanted to have as we scaled if we wanted to get to a billion ARR and beyond. A billion was really like that was our dream. And so I knew that there was a delta there and that delta has to be filled outbound. And also things change. I heard Adam Aarons on your podcast and he was saying the same thing. I was like, man, he’s saying the same thing I’m going to say. I love him. He’s amazing. Is that you can’t rely on the fish to keep jumping in the boat. You got to learn how to fish. And so that was one of the biggest, hardest things I did. And there was even one point when Olivier, the CEO said, “Hey, I don’t want you to do cold calling. Engineers don’t like to be cold called.” And I said, “Olivier, nobody likes to be cold called. I don’t like to be cold called. But we got to do it in a way that’s professional and differentiating in a way that we show up with our lunch packed.” Meaning we’ve done research on the person, we’ve done research on the company. We are pithy, concise and compelling in our messaging. It fits on a phone. We have something like six to eight different steps prepared ahead of time, and we are talking their language. We’re constantly training ourselves to be great at understanding what is Redis? What is all the different crazy cloud components, open source components. We trained on that stuff every day.

Danny Wasserman: So talk to me about… You come in and say we got to do outbound. You convince the co-founders that they aren’t mutually exclusive as PLG legacy experts with you guys coming in, especially in the enterprise arena. What I want to understand is, okay, you start getting signals, you get feedback. Resonance or lack thereof from enterprise customers as you’re going out and doing this outbound thing. And some of those signals, they may fly in the face of what the telemetry from PLG is telling you. They may contradict previous hypotheses from Alex or your predecessors. And I’m wondering, how did the power dynamic shift when you say, “Listen, I know what I heard, the customer told me this, and the telemetry says something totally different.” Who’s right, who’s wrong or how do you reach consensus when you have contradictory opinions from contradictory methodologies of going to market?

Dan Fougere: Yeah. That’s another awesome question. I feel like as I thought about your question, it was almost like… I don’t know that we ever ran into something where it was too absolutely contradictory forces. This is how I think about it. This is a lesson to me having done this because even though I did the CRO job at Datadog, I also got to do a lot of it at Medallia in partnership with Scott Davis. One of the great things about him is he recognizes what somebody needs, and he knew I needed to always be growing and learning and he gave me the ball for a lot of these things. I think about it like we’re creating a new creature. How do you create a creature? You create it with DNA. So we’ve got three different strands of DNA. The first strand of DNA is that stuff that have anybody from the PTC lineage, the John McMahon lineage on here. It’s going to be the medic and excellence and execution and high activity pipeline generation, all that stuff that a lot of people say not everybody does, but a lot of people say, but the people I mentioned, they do it. And then there’s going to be the strand of DNA that existed before you showed up. So that’s the stuff that the founders and Alex and everybody figured out before I even showed up. And then the third strand is the stuff you create together and you put all those three together and you create the new sales process, the new hiring profile, the new forecasting methodology, the new qualification methodology. I really tried to have collaboration with my C-suite peers.
Because I think a mistake a lot of people make is they come in like a bulldozer and they come in with, “I have medic and I have the sales process for my previous company, and we’re just going to jam it down everybody’s throats.” And I’m saying don’t do that. You got to respect what existed before you showed up. Because at Datadog, they had an incredible model for software startups that were born in the cloud that were familiar with the cloud, don’t mess with it. That was one of the big things for me. Don’t break that thing. It’s amazing. So how do you build everything else around it and not break it? And how do you leverage some of those parts for the new things like enterprise and how do you leverage some of the new things like outbound for the SMB, which we ended up doing? We became amazing outbound for SMB. So then it took a lot. Because the thing is, once we got it going, we dug in. We also as a company that’s very much into data, we built a strategy team. There’s a guy named Evan Peters who we met through Alex Conrad from Forbes, who’s a genius guy. Went to Amherst, went to Stanford Law and was like, hey, he’s a genius. Let’s bring him in and help us figure things out. And Evan became like our growth guy. He became head of our growth strategy. And he figured out through the data that no matter how many more people we were hiring in the commercial teams, we weren’t getting out of a band of revenue. And so, okay, that means people are actually not doing the outbound. So then you got to dive in and go on the calls with them and start to… And once we unleashed that boom, the revenue really went up. So anyway, just an example of collaboration and building together. And when you find some of those hard edges where there seems like some conflict, there’s probably an opportunity to bring some of that DNA together.

Danny Wasserman: Well, I like your philosophy coming in. You’re not here to storm the castle guns blazing and bulldozer steamroll what’s already effective. And it reminds me of a quote from my mentor. Talks about when you arrive at a new organization, the temptation, the tendency, the pressure to immediately demonstrate your value inadvertently and counter productively actually makes you look like a schmo because you come in and you start pointing out every hole you see in the boat. And the holes may be there, and yet the boat is still seaworthy in spite of your either arrival or absence. So shame on you for calling everyone’s baby ugly when you just showed up. The holes over time can be gradually and constructively pointed out, but we all have to resist those competing forces. I don’t know if that resonates with your arrival at Datadog.

Dan Fougere: Resonates 100%, Danny. That is solid gold wisdom right there. And I see a lot of people in the CRO role who come in and they just like, “Everybody here stinks and we’re going to get rid of them.” And it’s like, okay, well… For example, I was not a subject matter expert in customer experience management when I joined Medallia. I was not an expert in cloud infrastructure monitoring when I went to Datadog. If everybody quit, we would’ve been screwed. And the other thing is, yes, you can poke holes in the things that are there right now, but whatever you build, somebody else can poke holes in that too. The point is how do we build more good things together and how do you build on top of what existed? And so I think that’s the thing that we really did well, and that takes work. And I think the other thing… People talk about… I don’t know if you’ve heard of this concept of the beginner’s mind. And years ago I read this book, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, and I actually talked about this with Pat Grady at Sequoia recently and sent him the book. Because he actually brought it up to me is that regardless of your previous successes, you need to leave your ego at the door and you need to approach something… I’ve taken a bunch of martial arts. I stink. Every time I show up, it was like, God, these guys are so good. So it is a nice dose of humility there. But you need to be a learner. You need to be somebody who says, okay, I was great at this one thing before, but this is a new thing. How do I become great at this? How do I learn? How do I learn from everybody around me? And I think when you have that approach, it makes your other… For example, in this case say the C-suite peers more open to collaboration when you’re not coming in acting like you know everything, you had the success at this last company, that kind of thing.

And you see it with the people who are really successful. They’re not bringing their ego. They’re learning, they’re questioning, they’re curious, they’re collaborative. And I think if you as the leader can be like that, then you’re going to create an organization like that. And so a thing I’m super proud of is that right now of the team that I had when I left Datadog about two and a half years ago, four key leaders now are CROs at companies like Figma and Airtable and Datadog. Because Sean Walters took over for me. But three of them left. But everybody else is pretty much still there. And so be creating an organization. Because I think part of the success is not just having the IPO. For me, I wanted to have a big IPO where I was a CRO. That was a career goal. I wanted to be an executive officer of the company and have the forecast met for a year. I wanted to get to a billion ARR and I wanted the thing to keep running in a beautiful way when I left and I rode off into the sunset and as if nothing happened. And I think that all ties in together.

Danny Wasserman: An innovative culture gets results. The companies that promote that exact culture of innovation, they’ll reap the benefits. Dan’s own experience validates that, but along the way, the numbers support this theory as well. Boston Consulting Group or BCG revealed that businesses who prioritize innovation are… You ready? 52% more likely to outperform their competitors. This tells us it’s not only beneficial internally for employees who love the thrill and the excitement of innovating, but externally, customers love it as well. Dan knows that keeping up with changes and embracing them is a way to keep business moving and driving success. Well, that’s absolutely critical. Unfortunately, Forrester found that 80% of businesses actually fail in succeeding largely because they don’t keep up with the changing needs of their customers. So we know Dan’s theory is we got to lean into change. We can see that Forrester tells us the vast majority of businesses out there aren’t keeping with the times. Let’s close this gap. Dan said it best. Change is inevitable. So will you be the skin that the snake sheds or will you be the snake who evolves with the times? Let’s get back to Dan and hear more of his sage advice.

Danny Wasserman: As you examine, so it’s four or five years at three recognizable logos. Obviously we talked about BMC and we talked about Medallia and obviously Datadog. When you think like your children. I don’t know. They’re all special snowflakes.

Dan Fougere: Yes, they are.

Danny Wasserman: And you parent your children uniquely and differently. I also wonder, are there lessons in parenting in the same way, lessons in sales leadership that transcend those three chapters that you could apply as Dan’s winning recipe wherever he goes as a sales leader or is that the inherent mistake? Is that you should not attempt to cross-pollinate or even replicate what worked at BMC to Datadog because they’re such different beasts altogether. I’m wondering for the listeners out there who want, as you described, riding off into the sunset, could they take things that you’ve learned or is that actually an appropriation and we should avoid doing that at all costs?

Dan Fougere: Well, I think the first one is optimized team performance. I would say recruiting is probably the first one. But let me just do optimizing team performance first. What I mean by that is what I said before where you want people… How do people learn? Okay. We have three concentric circles. The first one is on the inside is your comfort zone. You’re having a beer, you’re watching Netflix, you’re not learning anything, but you’re comfortable. The third outer concentric circle, fight, flight or freeze. The reptilian brain says, I need to survive. I’m not learning anything, I’m surviving. The middle concentric circle, that’s a heightened awareness state and that’s when we learn and that’s where you want your people. And that is going to be different for different people. For example, a classic situation, and if you read John McMahon’s The Qualified Sales Leader, which he was nice enough to ask me to write part of the intro part. Is that he talks about doing a forecast review in front of all your peers, which I think is an important part.

Some people can handle that better than others. It doesn’t mean that they’re more effective revenue generators. And they might be having a bad day. Have some empathy. Have some understanding of, hey, this person… I think about it… Maybe this is the engineer in me, but the position on a graph. I can see your point where you are and I can see your vector. I can see where you’re going and I can see your velocity and your direction. My goal as the leader is to work with you to help you get to a better place a little bit every day. I’m not saying you’re not as good as that other person, so you stink and I’m going to embarrass you in front of other people. And everybody can see this. These are all very smart people. And so when they see that… The same thing with, “Hey, I was on a call, I said this, it didn’t work.” Or, “I should have been more prepared.” I would say that and like. Because after every meeting… This is another great thing is that before every meeting we should prepare. We should make the time to prepare for every meeting. What are we trying to get accomplished? Who’s on the call? Who’s got what roles for the meeting? Then we execute. Then right after the meeting, mandatory, we have a review. Even if it’s 10 minutes. 10 minutes and everybody gets to give feedback on everybody else including me.

And sometimes I’m telling you like Dale Weideman at Medallia if he’s listening to this, we had a meeting in Pittsburgh. I knew it. He was waiting. He was ready. Because I was the guy telling everybody what to do all the time. And he had one and he was right. I doubled. I kept saying the same thing that somebody else said, and it made the meeting go longer and it wasn’t value add. I had a bad day. He was right. I remember it here 10 years later. And so that’s how you get better each day. And so anyway, creating an environment like that. And we had Slack channels, Google Docs. We were just sharing stuff all the time. People get excited. They’re like, “Oh, I just learned this.” The way I think about it is when somebody’s competing with one of us, they’re competing with all of us. We have the bored brain, we’ve got the hive mind, we’re all in this together. So that’s one thing. How am I doing so far?

Danny Wasserman: Keep going. Don’t stop now.

Dan Fougere: Recruiting. So this is one where when I went to Datadog, it was competitive for the CRO role, but no enterprise people wanted to go there. The reputation was engineering company. They don’t like salespeople, they don’t pay salespeople. The deals are small. They only sell this to cloud-based startups. But there’s a lot of reputations, there’s a lot of truth in it. But that to me was the opportunity. I was like, I can create an amazing sales culture. And these guys who are Olivier and Alexis have already created an amazing engineering… And Amit have created an amazing engineering product culture. If we can bring these things together, we could have something special. So it was very hard to recruit. And so I put everything I had into… I had to get somebody amazing. And my white whale for multiple years had been this guy Steve Maloof. Steve, who I just talked to last night. I told him I was going to talk about him. He was my game changer for enterprise. We got somebody.

That was probably the best recruiting I ever did in my life, maybe. Because here’s the thing. January 2017, there were really no meaningful enterprise applications on the cloud. Now, okay, Netflix, different thing. I’m talking about JP Morgan Chase, Capital One, American Express. There were none. Shardul. I don’t know if you know Shardul from Index. Shardul, Amit and I went to a bunch of dinners with CIOs, CTOs, January, February, March 2017. Nobody wanted to talk about cloud infrastructure monitoring. We had very nice wine, we had very nice food, but we were like, wow, we got work to do in the enterprise. So getting people to come. So anyway, recruiting. So just that was my biggest focus. Every morning I would wake up European time, work out, and I’m recruiting in Europe at 6:00 AM. And then at night I’m recruiting California at 10:00 PM. There were certain days I had 10, 15 meetings. I’m just recruiting, recruiting, recruiting.

Danny Wasserman: So we’ll get to my second to last question in a second, but recapping some of the things I heard that are inextricable to your success playbook is as a leader or really for that matter anybody, but especially in leadership visible roles. Exemplifying humility. You saying, “I got it wrong.” And I think that trickling down throughout the whole organization I think is really important. That even with the pressure you feel, which is elevated as you move further up, not being too proud to admit your own either inadequacies or shortcomings. I love that. The other thing is compassion. And I think that finding the ability to monitor your pace and the pace of the business and when you feel things accelerating, getting shorter, getting curt, brash, and making sure that that does not absolutely cannibalize your human to human obligations of maintaining compassion for people who have a hard day or who have things going on outside of work. So I love those lessons so much Dan.

Dan Fougere: Here’s another one. If you’re at a startup… So I’ve been part of five of them. Four had IPOs. Billion dollars or more. One of the things I’ve learned is… And I’m not the first person to say this thing. But every six months it becomes a different company if it’s going well. If you’re growing a $10 million-a-year company is way different than a $25 million, 50 million, et cetera. So to grow, it’s like a snake shedding its skin. You want to be the snake, you don’t want to be the skin. And so think about how can you grow as the company grows? How do you continue to up your game? And think about your role or the role you want to be in a year from now, two years from now. What are the skill sets that you see other people in those roles, possibly at the same company, possibly at other companies? And how do you work on yourself on that right now? How do you make yourself better? That’s how software companies grow is that the product gets better, the go-to-market gets better. And so you have to get better too, and otherwise you’ll be the skin.

Danny Wasserman: I like that analogy. Certainly something I’m going to be taking away from this episode is are you in fact the skin or do you possess that omnipresent, corporeal essence of the entity in the snake itself? That’s great. So we’ve talked a lot about what will transcend Datadog to apply to anything else that you do. I’m wondering in the tell-all episode that is Dan Fougere, any tales from the crypt that haven’t become publicly available or widely understood about the journey? Tales from the crypt of times when obviously we know about the Hollywood finish, but times when you’re like, I am down on my luck, or I am wondering, are we going to pull this off? Or even other pivotal turning points or formative watersheds that you could share with us before we wrap for the day?

Dan Fougere: Yeah. There are a number of those. I don’t know if some of them are too esoteric to be entertaining to other people. The thing that people know the most is the infrastructure product that started the whole thing. But we kept building out the platform. And so each time we came out with a new product, a genius thing… I don’t know if I said this before, if you’ve heard this. But we would buy the company and then have them rebuild the product in the platform. I never saw it before.

It was an ingenious move. But each time it came out, we would have less features than say for log splunk or for APM AppDynamics. And so the platform integration made it easier to sell, but the lack of features made it harder to sell. And also, listen, this is a consumption model. And so most salespeople, this is probably valuable for anybody who has not been part of a consumption model like a Datadog or a snowflake or something like that, is that there’s real costs behind the scenes. And so logs, for example, we were selling logs. We did a really game-changing deal with a big video streaming company that a lot of people are customers of. And it was so successful that we realized our model might be off. And so how do we actually… Same thing with APM. How do we actually price this thing in a way that the economics are good from the beginning? Instead of doing a deal and just saying, “Hey, we did a deal. Hooray. Well, we’re losing money. All right, well we’ll figure that out later.” We were like, no, let’s figure it out now on this deal. And so there was a lot of friction in there as we tried to make sure we had good unit economics right from the beginning on new products in the midst of the landmark deals. And I think that really took a lot of real hard conversations to have.

And that’s I think a thing that I would also say to anybody who’s… My goal… I mentioned this to you. Today is my birthday. If you’re on video, you can see my assistant put that up behind me. So my gift to everybody on my birthday is if you want to be a successful CRO, hopefully there’s some good stuff in here for you. But I think to really try to have open conversations. There’s just no chance that you’re going to do something so successful without having those moments where there’s like, well, the sales team has this deal. Well, product says the economics aren’t good enough. Hey, we forgot to include the backup costs on it or whatever. Those are hard conversations. Have them in a way where it’s professional and respectful and we’re not against each other. We’re trying to build something great together and we’re working together and we’re listening to each other, but we’re still moving forward. So anyway, hopefully that was good.

Danny Wasserman: Your discussion of having hard conversations resonates with what I’ve read about and how Frank Slootman, the CEO of Snowflake and Chris Degnan, who’s a CRO, how they try and reframe the word conflict in the workplace. And societally we associate conflict with, oh, that’s bad on any front, personal or professional. And what they’re saying is conflict has to happen, but it can be respectful and it can be productive. And if at the end of conflict or those hard conversations you described, we actually come out the other side with progress, we should not shy away from that because of people’s feelings. Obviously we are not here to steamroll or just completely neglect feelings, but you need to be willing to courageously engage in conflict in the service and in the name of progress.

Dan Fougere: I have so much respect for both of those guys. Frank was on the board at Medallia. Spoken to Chris a couple of times. He went to high school with Adam Aarons. Whatever they’re doing in that town, keep doing that. And so same thing for me and Olivier. And I’d say Amit as well. In the beginning you’re trying to transform. Everybody’s trying to build something great that didn’t exist before, and inherent conflicts are guaranteed. And so I actually hired an executive coach. And I’ve done years of psychologists for myself.

But that also helped me professionally. And I also have had years of executive coaching and I hired an executive coach to help me be able to have those hard conversations better with the founders. And then about two months into it, Olivier is like, “Hey, whatever you’re doing with that coach, it’s working. Keep doing it.” Because you have really smart, driven people who are strong-willed. How do you defuse it? Take the ego and the personality out of it and put the actual data on the table and say, how do we make this thing great with listening to what we both are trying to do here? Here’s the other thing. Come out of it with agreement on a way forward and everybody puts everything into making it successful. Because what you don’t want is a proof of failure. You don’t want somebody to come out of it and be like, “Ah, that idea sucks. I’m going to make it fail.” Because everybody’s too smart for that. Anybody does that, you’ll see right through it.

Danny Wasserman: Totally. Well, Dan, we try and put a bow on every juicy morsel or lesson or piece of wisdom that you’ve offered in this episode. I’d be remiss if I didn’t also ask the same question that we close every episode with. And given you heard Adam’s episode, this shouldn’t come as a surprise to you. But as our capstone to today’s episode, Dan, if you could describe sales in just one word, what would it be?

Dan Fougere: Growth.

Danny Wasserman: Say more.

Dan Fougere: To me, it was about personal growth. As an engineer cold calling was super hard. I had to learn that. Saying no to an unqualified POC, super hard. I had to learn that. Becoming a leader of salespeople and having to be the tip of the spear when everyone else is saying, “Boss, show me what to do.” That required personal growth. Being somebody who’s like, “Hey, I have a vision, I’m a CRO at this company and we’re going to double every year for the next two years. We’re going to have an IPO. You’re never going to have to look for another job again.” Being that person who can inspire people like that, that took growth. So when I think about it, it has been the way that I have grown as a person my entire career.

Danny Wasserman: Well, again, I’ll just remind listeners, the growth, the grit, the tenacity you exhibited was not in any way mutually exclusive with your vigilance in maintaining humanity and compassion and vulnerability to get to the success that you so rightfully deserve. So from your days with McMahon at BMC all the way to what is an illustrious going out in the sunset on your own terms with Datadog, you were certainly the envy of all of us who think, as we’re early in our careers, what does success look like? So thanks for setting such a sterling example, Dan.

Dan Fougere: Danny, you do a great job. I love what you do. Thanks for having me.

Danny Wasserman: All right, ladies and gentlemen, that is Dan Fougere, former CRO of Datadog. You can find him online on LinkedIn. In his free time as I mentioned before, doing absolutely noble work on the board of multiple nonprofits. Dan Fougere, thanks so much for being on Reveal.

Dan Fougere: Thank you.

Danny Wasserman: Thanks so much for listening to this episode of Reveal. If you want more resources on how revenue intelligence can help you create high-performing sales teams, then head on over to Gong.io. If you like what you heard, well, along the way, give us that five-star review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen.