Annie Pearl: evaluation

Transcript context

…Was there anything that was really hard about actually executing that, convincing people we're going to narrow and not worry about these people and any lessons from going through that process? Because I imagine a lot of founders listening are like, "Oh, that sounds we should be doing this, but oh man, we're leaving all this money on the table, people are going to be pissed." Yeah, I think it's a pretty big cultural shift. So, some of this intersects with the shift from product led growth to adding in a sales motion. So, when I joined Calendly, all of our ARR came from our PLG channel. We didn't have a sales team, we just hired a CRO who was going to build out a sales team. And so, in that world, the way you think about product, the way you think about processes, even the people you have on the team are tailored to that business model. And then, as we sort of moved up market and have now explicitly started to go after teams of users and departments of users and organizations of larger scale, everything about people, process, and product all changes. I think I touched on culture because I think that's pervasive across the entire organization. The way that things get done has to be highly integrated versus can be a bit more siloed when you're just sort of the self-service PLG business that in many ways runs itself through the product being well optimized. So, there's a lot of process change that needs to happen, the type of people that you need to bring into the organization, that changes as you layer in the new selling motion. And then the product itself of course has to change. So, I guess let's just say the example of PLG and SLG or the direct selling motion is tied in to your question around what are the things that need to change in order to get clear on your target user? And I think it's highly cultural in nature across people, across process, and then obviously across the actual product itself. I have a whole bunch of questions about how Calendly grows and maybe we just get into some of the stuff because I imagine a lot of people are interested. First, let me ask this. I imagine Calendly mostly grows through, I sign up for Calendly, they send it to everyone when I book a meeting and they're like, "Oh, what is this?" And they're like, "Oh, cool, I'm going to use this." And then they start using, it spreads, and then sales eventually finds people at a company that are using it a lot and tries to get the whole company in it. Is that roughly right?…

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