Ultimately, if you think about all of it, when people say, like, what's the Salesforce

model?

It was Salesforce trick, which was like, find a segment, subdivide that segment, focus

your execution, you know,

specialize your marketing, your sales, your product offering, your competitive, your training,

and optimize the hell out of it. The voice you just heard was the voice of our guests today,

Brett Queener. And the podcast you're hearing right now is Operations, the show where we look

under the hood of companies in hypergrowth.

My name is Sean Lane. If you had to explain the genesis of software as a service to someone,

there's a good shot you'd start your story by talking about Salesforce.com. If you Google top

SaaS companies today, chances are you'll find Salesforce very close to, if not at the top of the list.

So it should come as no surprise to you that for this show,

we wanted to learn from those who have been there,

done that from within the walls of Salesforce.

Today, we have that opportunity in a conversation with Brett Queener,

who spent a decade at Salesforce from 2003 to 2013 as an operations executive and also later ran specific product

lines like data.com and marketing cloud. Now, Brett spends his time today as venture partner

at Bonfire Ventures and his specialty kind of lives at the intersection of product and go-to-market.

So today he's going to help us navigate that intersection. He drops so much knowledge in our conversation. So if you've ever had to put together a go-to-market strategy, or you've second-guessed if you had the right number of reps on your team, or you're just a Dr. Seuss fan, you're going to want to listen to this one all the way through. Before we got too deep, I asked Brett to set the scene for me of what Salesforce looked like when he joined in 2003. I joined Salesforce.

I think we were doing, I don't know, maybe 10 to 15 million in revenue, which we now call

recurring revenue, although some portion, but I think was month

the month, so it wasn't clearly contract CMR at the time.

...