Alexa Grabell, Co-Founder, Pocus
How it's changing is that in the old days you think of "sales bros" like Corp - just kidding -
Ross Pomerantz, Comedian and Hero
Last of the Brohicans. We're fighting. Fighting the good fight!
Alexa
You're reaching out, steak and wine dinners, the golf - sort of kidding, sort of not.
Ross
Finger-gunning!
Alexa
And now it's really more about the fact that the product can sell itself in the beginning, get users on boarded and activated and then sales can engage when there's more opportunity.
Ben Gould, Creative Content Creator, Scratchpad
Welcome to another edition of Beyond Quota, the podcast. I'm your host, Pouyan. As always with my co-host Corp.
Ross
*Dolphin Noises*
Ben
And today we are joined by the one and only Co-founder of Pocus, Alexa Grabell. Maybe we should start this off by diving into how you two know each other.
Ross
We met we met at this small little, we'll call it a top 10 Business School in the South Bay of the San Francisco Bay area. It's called Stanford. Their mascot's a tree. And we took two or three classes together. And at one point, she claimed to me that she was in sales. And I laughed with her. But then I found out it was sales operations.
Alexa
Yes.
Ross
Then I laughed at her. And we've been friends ever since! Very serious, very serious stuff. And so Alexa was a year below me. Just a stand-out in class, always participating, kind of the teacher's pet, little bit of try-hard. Always sat at the front, like raising her hand all the time. It was like, Oh my God, here she goes again. And it was good, because I didn't have to talk. So, you know,
Alexa
Ross, if I remember correctly, you and I were both in the back row just hoping we didn't get cold called.
Ross
Alright that's the truth. That's the actual truth.
Alexa
But because we're sales and sales ops and everyone else was banking and consulting, we always had the best answers even if we weren't listening.
Ross
Right, because we actually did $&#!.
Alexa
Yeah.
Ross
We could actually contribute to the conversation. So yeah, that's how it actually went. Absolutely not a teacher's pet. And yeah, I think we both sat there and we're like, when is this over? But we did contribute. We learned a lot. We grew, we graduated. And now she's raised a bajillion dollars. And I'm sitting here in a santa hat. So I think we're both separate, separate but equal things separate but equal things.
Alexa
Is this how all of your podcasts go?
Ross
More or less.
Ben
Basically.
Ross
Take us through the beginning, professionally, like, what did you think you were gonna do as a kid? And when did those dreams die? And then what did you end up doing? And then we'll progress from there.
Alexa
Okay, I can start there, but before I need to know what you wanted to be when you're a kid. Was it always a sales bro?
Ross
No, it was always a major league baseball player. I didn't care about anything but baseball until I was twenty...
Ben
...nine.
Ross
No, yeah twenty-three and I realized I wasn't gonna make it. So I decided to retire from my illustrious minor league career where I was paid $700 a month.
Alexa
So my background, what did I want to be? I feel like you're just gonna make a million comments on this Ross.
Ross
Absolutely.
Alexa
I actually wanted to be a dancer and tried to convince my parents to let me go to high school and then college to study dance and do it as my profession. And they both said no, nicely. But that is what I wanted to be. And then I did a total 360 and realized I love math and science and became an engineer undergrad. And then there's a lot of steps there. But I'll let you get all of your comments out on that. And then we'll move onto the real stuff. Okay, so
Ross
I mean, good thing TikTok is around now, right? Because now you can can be a professional dancer if you try hard enough. So let's talk about when the relationship between you and your parents fractured. Was that like, right after they told you absolutely no dancing or...?
Alexa
You know I blame them, but I really think the inner nerd in me... it sounds cooler to blame your parents but I also kind of liked computer science, you know? So it was two very opposite things. So yeah, let's get past my 19 year old self. Can we maybe fast-forward a little?
Ross
Well I think it's important because it kind of shapes kind of shapes who we are, at least subconsciously. I think there's very little correlation in business school attentiveness and success. In fact, it might even be like a correlation of the opposite.
Alexa
Which we call inverse.
Ross
An inverse correlation! Yeah, yeah absolutely.
Alexa
We learned that in Decisions and Data.
Ross
Is that what D&D stood for?! Holy $#%!. I thought D&D came from Dungeons and Dragons and then the class had absolutely nothing to do with Dungeons and Dragons and I was like, this is really stupid.
Ben
When are we getting to the dungeon part?
Alexa
I actually just taught a class. We taught a class in sales. We got invited to the sales class before you did. How does that make you feel? That's what I learned in touchy-feely to ask you how does that make you feel? How does that land on you?
Ross
That's upsetting. Disgusting, frankly.
Ben
Corp's face right there. Ouch.
Ross
No, I'm too much of a liability to bring in because I'm gonna say it how it is. They bring in sales ops to talk about sales?! Isn't that just like... society?
Alexa
Product-led sales.
Ross
Okay, if they're talking about product-led sales Fine. Fine. Because that's in theory or in practice, it's not sales in the traditional sense of sales where people are selling stuff, its product. So that makes sense. I wouldn't go in there and talk about that. I don't know $#%! about that. I mean, I know some stuff, but I wouldn't be able to talk to a class about it.
Ben
And so when you graduated, you were like, finally...
Alexa
Time to go to KPMG.
Ross
Time to go to KPMG! That sounds fulfilling and fun. What the hell does a consultant do? If you're like to boil it down? We go look at companies, we read their balance, we read their financials. And then we do... can you just walk me through like a quick step by step of what the hell is consultancy? I genuinely think most people have no idea, including myself.
Alexa
Yeah, I mean, there's so many different types of consultants, right? You can be operations, you can be strategic, you can be just going in there and figuring out how many people we need to fire. You can be going out to do some M&A work, but I was really, really specific. I was doing strategic consulting for autonomous vehicles. So I was at Ford, researching whether they should make an acquisition of a self driving car startup and researching that market and predicting where it would be in the next five years.
So it's way more research strategy, interviewing folks that are experts in this space, putting together predictions, putting together financial models. It's some stuff that's translatable to say, like the 2% of what you do in a startup, when you have to zoom out, think big picture, get a lot of data points, talk to as many experts in the space, but then you kind of hand it over to the the client. That's where there's a huge difference between that and startups. Because startups you say, okay, that's the 2%. And then you spend 98% actually executing it.
Ross
Let's talk about building out a sales office function. Because I think most people who listen to this are obviously in sales, and all of us have no idea what's behind the curtain. What the hell goes on behind the curtain? Like, who the hell are they? Why are they doing what they do? And why are they telling me what quota should be? So can you just talk about like, what is building a sales ops engine?
Ben
Yeah and what drew you to that role coming from KPMG? Why do you want to go into sales ops, instead of being, you know, a top performer?
Ross
Yeah an absolute sales savage?
Alexa
It's funny, I think, now, especially when I went to business school where everyone was in all these other very fancy shmancy roles in product and strategy. Coming from sales operations was very random I learned at the time that I was coming from sales ops. But leaving KPMG, I was looking for a company that I really believed in the mission. I know, disgusting Ross. And really loved the people, early stage enough where I could really get in and build. Dataminr had an incredible mission. And literally we're saving lives every single day. And when I came in there was just a VP of Sales Ops at the time and myself. There was just a ton of opportunity. It was more than just sales ops, it was like, what does that strategy word mean? But it was really, come in, build, fix things on the revenue side of the world. So everything from sales comp to building tooling and systems and Salesforce. Integrating with Looker and everything from customer segmentation to going up market enterprise.
So it was really broader revenue, strategy and operations and touching on a little bit of everything. That was exciting for me. And then my boss ended up leaving after the first week so I got direct reporting into the CEO -
Ross
What did you do to make your boss leave?
Alexa
I'm a terrible person. No, I actually think this was one of the biggest learnings I had when you're kind of junior in your career and that stuff happens. You can go to one of two ways: you can get really freaked out and not know what to do, or you can step into the opportunity and just go with it. And so
Ross
Or freaked out and then step into the opportunity.
Alexa
Yeah, why not a little bit of both? As long as it's like 80/20, maybe 90/10. And so, I then got the opportunity to report to the President at the time, who was really leading everything revenue. So it was a lot more working with the executive team, fixing different problems throughout the organization. And then at that time, I have a running list of just things that I solve.
Ross
So you're alluding to a few things around revenue operations, which we can talk about that here in a moment. But can you just give the people at home a quick? Like, how the hell is quota calculated? Like, what do people do? Is it a guess? Is it a financial model? Like how are they doing this thing?
Alexa
It depends on the organization. And a lot of it, I mean, you know, it's art and science, right?
Ross
I mean of course, like sales, obviously.
Alexa
You have some data available of what you've hit previously. And what you think you can hit in terms of revenue targets the next year, three years, five years. Conversations with the board, conversations with your executive team, 'here's what we think is achievable as a company' and then this is broken down what we've seen as sales rep productivity over the past quarter, two quarters, three quarters. Then use that to inform. I'll say it's never perfect and it's constantly iterating. I feel like sales comp and pricing are those two things that will just never be set in stone. It's something that consistently changes as you build new product features, test different markets to go after, expand your TAM, whatever that is, going up market, going down market to self serve, is just one of those things that it leans more art than science sometimes.
Ross
When you guys are in those discussions? Is there a number that organizations typically say 'we want this many reps to hit this percentage of quota?
Alexa
I've seen everything and I'm figuring that out for my own organization right now. I think it also depends on the stage of company that you're at. If you're a Salesforce, by now you have a number that you know, you have a playbook to run, like there is a formula. If you are Series A, B, C, I think you're constantly trying to get to the next stage of product market fit. And what that means is there's going to be some ambiguity with reps around what is possible and how many of them will hit it. I know I'm not giving you a straight answer because I don't think there is one.
Ross
Are you saying therefore, more reps as you mature will hit quota? Or you're saying that consistency line will just kind of even out a little bit more? Like you don't know so you can't say 'Oh in theory 70%, 60%, 50% down to like Salesforce, which is like, hopefully 70% in my mind.
Alexa
You'll have more insight into what is possible and have more numbers and inputs into the model that makes sense. It's up to the executive team. Like it's also the mindset of some people like setting OKRs that are like way out of reach so people can always be striving whereas other leaders say, you know, we want to set something that's attainable, that we can align through the executive team board and all the ICs in the company. It's like totally a mindset of how executives and leadership want to run their organization.
Ben
Where do you fall in that? Are you giving your your rep a unattainable OKRs?
Alexa
Yeah, it's something we've been thinking about a lot. So we're building up initial sales team right now. And what I am searching for is folks that are actually optimizing more for - so there's three buckets: there's can cash, you can have incentive commission, or you can have equity. And I'm looking for folks that get very excited about equity actually, at this stage. I mean, we're Series A, we're early on. People who want to come in for the long term and build and really feel like an owner, rather than someone who's just here for like a quick cash payout and then leaves the next year. So everyone, pro
Ben
Ross's three favorite word's...
Ross
Eh-qui-ty. Ooo. Nothing gets me jacked up like equity, you know?
Alexa
As much as the Tonal?
Ross
Yeah, well, I'm almost.
Ben
How would you describe RevOps? Is RevOps sales ops? Is Rev ops a CEO like having another CEO at the company?
Ross
Shouldn't RevOps be your first hire? I mean, assuming like RevOps is as important as they talk about themselves. To me, it goes like founding team, RevOps, marketing, HR, legal -
Alexa
You have HR in the early days that's shocking for you?
Ross
Then sales. You gotta bring sales in like at the end, you know?
Alexa
Totally. So it's interesting, I was just at coffee yesterday with the head of Ops and really Head of RevOps at Ramp who's incredible. And we were talking about what does RevOps oversee now and have been having a lot of these conversations because we RevOps is our buyer at POCUS and it's really interesting how it's evolved from even four years ago since when I was in sales ops. Because you have sales ops, you have marketing ops, and now I see a lot like BI and analytics also falling under that and then you have the traditional Salesforce admin, which used to be like everything.
It used to be when you thought of sales ops, a lot of people just thought of people who are really good at Salesforce. And now I've even seen go-to-market ops as a role. We're working closely with the go-to-market strategy and ops team at Miro. So it's everything from the more operational things of setting up Salesforce right and making sure your sales process is operationalized. And thinking about things like sales comp and quotas. But then it's all other strategic elements as well, that inform sales, marketing, customer success. So it's definitely evolving. Also, something that's really interesting is usually RevOps or sales ops folks would report up to a sales leader. That would be their go to person to help build and operationalize. I started now seeing almost peers where you have like a CRO or SVP of sales and next to them is an SVP of sales ops.
Ross
I mean, it makes sense. For PLG, like, absolutely makes complete sense. And can we like, define what PLG looks like now? Is this the future of sales? Is PLG what buyers want?
Alexa
Yeah, I'll talk about PLG, product lead growth, as well as PLS, product lead sales. So product lead growth feels like a buzzword all over Twitter and LinkedIn right now. But the simplest way is to think about the product itself as the leading mechanism for conversion acquisition, upsell expansion. So you can think about Slack, Calendly, Notion, Zoom, these tools where you sign up online, you use it, you get activated, you pay for it. Product lead sales is really using that self serve funnel of users that you've built from the product lead motion to then inform your sales motion. So I'm a sales rep at Zoom, I can see a bunch of users when the free trial or the free plan or the lowest pricing tier, I can use that information to figure out where I should go to convert them from the free plan to the paid plan or upsell or expand into the next tiers. How it's changing is that in the old days, you think of you know, sales bros like Corp... just kidding. Traditional salespeople -
Ross
Last of the Brohicans. Were fighting. Fighting the good fight!
Alexa
You know you're reaching out, steak and wine dinners, the golf, sort of kidding, sort of not.
Ross
Finger gunning, you know.
Alexa
Yeah, no. And now it's really more about the product can sell itself in the beginning, get users on boarded and activated and then sales can engage when there's more opportunity.
Ben
You were set to take a role at your mentor's early stage startup when you were about to graduate from Stanford. Is that correct? And then you thought, 'no, I'm actually just going to do it myself and start my own company.'
Alexa
Yeah, so I was really lucky to intern at Monte Carlo when they were Series A, I think they're series D now.
Ross
Is that a GSB company?
Alexa
It is. The CTO is GSB. And I worked there, kind of did the same thing I did at Dataminr. Showed up and figured out where they needed help. Ended up setting up like V1 of a CRM and doing some sales ops-y stuff. They only had one sales rep. And a little bit of just everything.
And I loved working there, it was the definition of just do something. Like just start implementing, learning and iterating. And so if I didn't start Pocus, I would have definitely explored the opportunity to build out sales ops at Monte Carlo, but I definitely got the itch there to start something myself.
I think GSB also gives you a lot of confidence to start something because you're just so exposed to it. And you're like, all these people are starting things. And if they can do it, then I want to dive in and try to. So I definitely got the itch and quickly met my co-founder and started at ideating right after that.
Ross
Can you talk about the just briefly about the raise process? And how does that even happen?
Alexa
I think people get way too distracted by fundraising and VC in the early days. I mean, of course you need some capital upfront to get you somewhere, but you can do a lot with nothing. We spent the first three months talking to 300 different salespeople and RevOps people and just learning and iterating. Building figma mocks, selling fake things that were in figma. Just testing a bunch of different ideas, seeing what people would buy even if it wasn't fully built out. And from there once we landed on this idea of what Pocus is, is a product lead sales platform. So we give sales teams access to product usage data to inform what opportunities sales reps should go after and how.
So we saw this broader vision of how do sales and marketing and customer success and non-technical folks get access to data? And the answer is, it's really hard. And I saw that firsthand at Dataminr. And so when we started talking about this idea and pitching it and building figma mocks, we had people literally being like, I would pay you 100k, if you build this thing. From there, once you feel that pull from customers, quickly you also talk to one VC when there's a real problem, real need in the market and you have founders that have experienced it before and you're building a core team and there's validation from your design partners that you're working with. That's when the VC funding can come more naturally, rather than starting out just searching for VC funding.
Ben
One thing I was going to ask that I think you've mentioned in previous interviews, that was a motivation for starting your own company. First, did you ever think that you were going to start your own company when you went to Stanford? And also like, what is the importance or significance of being a female founder?
Alexa
Yeah. So I didn't know starting a company with a thing. I think a lot of people, when they look at founders, they're like, these people have been training for it their whole life. Someone once said, you can train to be in marketing, you can train to be in product, you can train to be in sales, you can also train to figure out how to be a CEO and a leader and founder. Not just saying it's easy and you snap your fingers, it's the hardest job I've ever done. But it is something that I didn't know was even an option. I was that random person in sales ops Ross, that's not really a career path to founding a company. But when I got to Stanford, I went initially because I was fed up honestly about the lack of women in tech, both in consulting, and then also in startups. And, you know, the exact team I was working on, I was often on the exec offsites and working for them as the only, it's common, but oftentimes the only girl or the only woman. So I got to Stanford, did what everyone at GSB thought of like, I'm gonna be a female investor that invests in female founders. And that's how I'm gonna make my impact.
I ended up actually starting a fund for my class called the 21 fund, where we raised money from our class and invested in our classmates. And during that time, what I liked was actually getting in the weeds with founders, not the investing part. And I was thinking, Where can I make an impact more? And it's really the building phase. When you look, there's no female founders in data and sales? Or there's not none, but there's very few. And that's kind of the motivation that keeps me going. I want to take this thing all the way and get more female founders doing that as well. And I also learned, I would be a terrible VC. And I don't want to go back to sales ops, necessarily. So I guess I'll become a founder.
Ben
How would you describe salespeople after, you know, kind of witnessing them from an operations perspective?
Alexa
So I've been working with salespeople at product lead companies for the past two years. So things like Linear, Clockwise, Miro, Webflow, and it's some of the most data driven and strategic salespeople I've ever met. I think in this world where you have sales at PLG, you really need to think about 'what is the data telling me? Where should I prioritize my time? And what's the next best action to take? How do I make sure that we're getting all the use cases rolled up into one motion or thinking through what's the right playbook to run?' So I think that this new generation of salespeople have to be very data driven and strategic.
Ross
Are you a love to win person or hate to lose person?
Alexa
Oh, love to win. Who hates to lose?
Ross
I f@$%ing hate losing.
Alexa
But aren't they the same?
Ross
The way I think of it is that winning to me should be status quo. When I win, I'm not going to celebrate. I'm gonna go shake someone's hand like deadpan, but if I lose... I'm so goddamn mad.
Alexa
I'm more on to the next thing.
Ross
Winning is business as usual. Losing is absolutely unacceptable and I'm gonna lose my $#%! behind closed doors.
Ben
Anyway. Thank you so much Alexa.
Ross
Alexa, I'm gon' text ya. Thanks for joining. We'll see ya next... time.
Alexa
What's my last name Ross?
Ross
Grabelllllll. It's Grabelllllll.
Alexa
This was an interesting podcast. Thank you both so much.
