PAT O’BRIEN ON SHAKE THE COSMOS
Powered by RedCircle
How can you overcome the pressure of building a startup? What are some sales myths? Can anyone do anything? This week, Pat and I discuss startups, as well as the process and mentality of company growth.
Pat combines his entrepreneurial ambitions, operational & sales management expertise, and start up experience, to help young technology companies grow faster by building world class teams and processes. He is a:
• Senior Operating Executive with deep startup experience
• Expert at building and leading enterprise focused sales and BD organizations
• Key team member for high growth companies with IPO and acquisition exits
• Strategic leader who can also be very “hands on.”
Specialties: entrepreneur, start-up, recruiting, building sales machine, sales, operations, marketing, sales management, executive level sales, IT, value based selling, business development, customer success, negotiation
Pat is currently leading Sales, Product, Marketing and Customer Success for Innovative Software Startup called Indus.AI which is applying Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Computer Vision to some of the the largest challenges facing the Construction Industry.
Find the him at https://www.linkedin.com/in/patobrien17/
Links mentioned in the podcast:
Daniel Pink Ted Talk - https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_the_puzzle_of_motivation
AI Superpowers book - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_Superpowers
Also, did you know that you can get yourself a copy of the Shake The Cosmos Journal as part of the personal development course? Check it out here.
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
ABHISHEK: Hi, everyone. This is Abhishek from shakethecosmos.com. My guest today is Pat O’Brien. I’m really excited to have him on this show as he’s someone that leverages his operational and sales management expertise to help startups and young technology companies grow faster by building world class teams and processes.
We actually met when I was interviewing with him for a sales role, and I really appreciated his advice and coaching that he gave me.
We’re gonna talk about three things.
We’re gonna talk about sales at early stage startups
we’re gonna bust some sales myths
talk a little bit about the exciting real estate construction AI technology space that Indus operates in.
If you’re listening right now, now is a great time to hit the follow button or subscribe button, and if you like this episode give me a rating. That helps me out in the organic search results.
Well, Pat, thank you so much for being on this show, I really appreciate your time here.
PAT: Thank you so much for having me, I’m excited to have the conversation.
ABHISHEK: All right. We’re gonna start off right away. Go Bears.
PAT: Yeah, go Bears.
ABHISHEK: Let’s just jump right into it.
What’s your definition of an early stage startup space? And what makes the sales in this space particularly different than some of the established companies?
PAT: That’s a great question, one I’ve thought about a lot, and we talked a little bit. I’m gonna date myself a little bit, I’ve been doing this startup thing and really focused on the sales piece for almost 20 years now. So I do have experience.
I would say, while there’s certainly no hard and fast rule, the number $5 million in revenue is one easy way to gauge whether we probably still are in startup phase. Some could argue it’s $10 million, some could even say it’s $2 million, but I’ll meet halfway. The signs are, are you still finding product market fit? Every company is still doing that a little bit, but if it’s mostly that, then you’re probably still doing startup sales. And if you still haven’t gotten to a place where you see repeatability across the sale, and you’re still figuring things out, you’re probably still doing startup sales. So that’s how I would define it.
ABHISHEK: Yeah, and when you say “repeatability in sales,” what does that look like for an early stage startup?
PAT: I’m now president, I’ve got responsibility beyond sales, so I’d love to answer that question more broadly than just sales, although we can talk about the sales piece too. That really is okay, for example, a sale perspective, am I repeatedly seeing the same ICP? In other words, is the ICP the same? Or is it a whole different thing? Am I getting traction in the same market? Is the pricing model that I’m pitching and talking about, is it resonating? Or am I having to customize it every time? Are the personas identified as the kind of champion? All of those important things for those of us who think about sales.
If that keeps being different every time, you obviously don’t have repeatability. But honestly, it’s more than just sales and that front end. I would argue, at least as important, and maybe even more importantly, is the success on the back end. Maybe you’re repeatedly selling customers, and I’ve seen this occasionally. But if you’re struggling with how to figure out how to drive success with them, and it’s always one off, you aren’t there yet, that scale moment. You still need to figure out the repeatability on that side.
The point is, sometimes you’ll have that repeatability in one part of the business but not in another, and that means you’ve still got a little ways to go. It’s nothing to apologize for, it’s not a bad thing. I’ve mentioned this before sometime on a blog post about this, there is a great pressure within early stage companies, comes from the best communities and lots of places, to reach that point.
So as a founder, or an early stage executive, you feel the pressure to say, “Yes! We’re at scale. Let’s do the scale thing. Let’s raise that B round. Let’s go hire a bunch of sales people.” Et cetera, et cetera. But I would always counsel, resist that if it’s not true. If it’s true, embrace it. But if it’s not, be careful. Pay the dues.
ABHISHEK: This pressure that you speak of that the early stage startups feel, how can founders recognize that and try to overcome that, at least?
PAT: I don’t know if there’s a magic answer, but let’s be honest about the dynamics it plays. Most young companies in the tech space, certainly all the ones I’ve been involved with, were usually venture backed. So it’s other people’s money, and they have an expectation. But there’s a pretty significant difference that founders should readily acknowledge. And if you don’t, if you think about it, it’s true. Venture teams and venture capitalists have a portfolio of companies. So they’re trying to find the ones that go, “All right, these are the ones I really want to spend the time on. These are the ones we want to double down on. These are the ones we want to put the wood behind the arrow on.” And the others? If they come around, great.
But if you’re the founder of a company, you’re all in on the one. It isn’t just about the mentality that somebody who has an investment portfolio is looking at things differently. My counsel is just, keep that in mind and resist, sometimes, the urge to do it. Obviously if, operationally, you keep messing up, then there’s probably gonna be a change. But I would say there’s no extra points for artificially getting to that place where you can scale if you’re not ready. In the end, it will cost you many times whatever perceived benefit you might get by pushing to do it before you’re ready.
ABHISHEK: Man. Imagining $5 million to $10 million revenue startup, they’ve got this pressure now. And they’re sitting across from customers and prospects.
What are some of your favorite questions to ask of prospects and customers?
PAT: I’m a big believer in the notion or the idea that’s not anything super revolutionary, but I do find it’s rare enough that it’s worth mentioning, of having a set of learning objectives. Honestly, a lot of things when you advertise in terms of sales, I believe there are things you want to think about that transcend sales.
For any meeting, or any interaction of business, I believe it’s wise to come to that with not just, “What do I want to say?” All of us know that, and we’re repeatedly reminded about that part, but honestly I think that’s easy. That’s like my pitch. “What am I gonna say? How am I gonna convey it?”
I think at least as important, and I might even argue more important is, “What do I want to learn? What do I want to understand?” And if you watch great sales people at work, they’re really good at that. Maybe you could even use the analogy of a doctor.
It’s learning objectives, and I think you want to have a broad sense of what I call strategic learning objectives. Then you want to have tactically, for every conversation you have, or every call you have, or every meeting you have, “What are the things I want to learn?” So that’s the first point.
After that, I am a big fan of the classic sales methodology, so I might talk about this more later. But if you think of something like MEDDIC, which has got a lot of traction in Silicon Valley because a lot of really successful companies practice this sales methodology. It’s an acronym: Metrics, Economic buyer, Decision criteria, Decision process, Identify pain, and Champion. But if you think about all those things, they are all guides for the kinds of things I want to learn.
If I’m in a certain stage in a deal, for example, and I’m competing with another company, I should really understand how the decision makers and the buyers are gonna say, “This is how we’re gonna decide. This is what’s important.” And if I’m really good at selling, I’m gonna try and influence that decision criteria because I asked about it early on to favor my solution.
ABHISHEK: Hm.
PAT: So learning objectives are a great idea and having any good methodology as a guide for all the things you want to learn to close a deal.
You asked for some specific examples, I will say my favorite question is one word. It’s, “Why?” It’s not asked enough. Like anything else, I always joke, you can have learning objectives, but if you go in and say, “Hey, I’ve got a hundred questions and I’m gonna interrogate you,” you’re gonna get hung up on, or they’re gonna walk you to the door. You have to earn the right to ask questions. And if you keep asking, “Why,” you’re gonna sound like that annoying six year old. But sometimes it’s the greatest question in the world.
Some others I like, for example, “What’s the strategic initiative driving your interest?” Sometimes somebody says, “Hey, I saw your solution. Give me a demo. Let’s go talk about it.” And you just go, “God, I got ‘em on the hook.” And you go, “Hey we have a budget.” And they tell you all these right things, it’s like, aw man, you want to tell your boss. And you skip over the part like, “Well, what’s driving this interest?” And I’ve seen too many times where, even things that eventually ended in deals, where you didn’t know that.
And what you’ve lost is an opportunity, one, if things do go off track to hitch your wagon to that, and two, it’s one of the most effective ways to increase the price or drive urgency. If you align yourself to a strategic initiative, you have a chance to differentiate yourself and maybe sell at a higher price point or strategic way.
Another one is, I mentioned before, having to decide between alternatives. Too often you see salespeople never ask that question. It’s all about, “Let me tell you about all this stuff that matters to you, or should matter to you, and what’s cool about my product.” And they never bothered to ask the question.
Then you have questions I find are really, really important. It’s a little bit of a lost art. It’s something that, in my mind, differentiates good from great in sales.
ABHISHEK: I also feel some of the questions that you’re saying adds a comfort level for the customer. Like, “Oh, this person is genuinely curious about my business and problems, and cares about my strategic initiatives.” It changes the conversation.
PAT: Yeah, and it’s fascinating. I think we might talk later about this notion of talent, and I am a big believer in talent. In the same way not everybody can be a fantastic concert violinist, everyone can’t necessarily be a great salesperson.
One of the things I’ve found that is an innate talent of great salespeople is this insatiable curiosity that has to be satisfied. So I always tell people to exercise that curiosity, let that guy go inside of you, it’s okay. And again, like anything, you can take it too far. But in my experience, it’s probably an underutilized talent.
ABHISHEK: I definitely want to talk about some of that talent. One of the things that you mentioned also, in one of your blog posts, I’m quoting, “One of the biggest criticisms I have for early software start companies, especially those with sophisticated investors and some early success, is they believe they’re totally ready to scale.” And I can think of many companies in this position.
At what point does a company know that it can focus on scaling?
PAT: We touched on that a little bit. Again, like so much else, I don’t know if there’s a magic answer, a definitive set of data that’s absolute for every company. But it’s basically when you’ve seen repeatability against the important parts of your business.
I think we talked a little about sales. If your sales start to look similar, and your delivery starts to look similar, and how you market starts to look similar, and your pricing model starts to look similar across fields. And you say, “Wow, this customer wants basically the same thing as the other customer. They want to buy it the same way as this other customer. All right. I can layer process on top of that.”
That’s the other thing you see too, sometimes, at startups, “Let’s put all this process on top of…” Whoa, whoa, on what? What are you laying that process on top of? You don’t have a repeatable standing to put the process on top of.
So, it’s seeing that repeatability. And whether that means you see three deals that are exactly the same, or five, that really depends. But if you can look at yourself in the mirror and say, “All right. Those last three deals, or four or five deals, look similar. Those last three or four implementations, we needed the same thing. We know the kind of caliber of CS person we need, how much interaction it is. We know if we need to have someone on site or not.”
All those questions are similar. “Now I can build process. I can hire a team. And I can scale this up. And I need to go talk to the investors because I need another $10, or $20, or $30 million because I can show them if I just pour fuel on this fire, it’s gonna start to rage.”
ABHISHEK: All right, Pat. I want to jump into the talent piece and the conventional sales wisdom debunked. One of the things I’ve heard and seen from you is it doesn’t hurt to be a great presenter, but it’s simply not essential.
Can you walk me through the types of things that are more important, mano a mano, than just being a great presenter?
PAT: Yeah, absolutely. Let’s double click on that point, though, because I think it’s important. Sometimes when I say that, people think, “Wow, so you’re saying salespeople being good at presenting is useless or not good?” No, I’m not saying that at all. What I’m saying is, again, the conventional wisdom if you ask someone off the street what good sales is, their feeling is it’s the same as good presenting. And it’s just not.
I think if you’re running for president, if you’re Barack Obama, we think about all these great orators being able to present to a large crowd is a wonderful skill. But that’s not usually how sales happens.
Every once in a while, and I know I’ve had to do this, you have to get in front of a room of dozens of people. And that does become more of a presentation and less of an interaction and a conversation. But that is very rare. Normally it’s the salesperson and one other person, that’s 90% of the time. And 8 or 9% of the time it’s two or three people from the selling team and two or three or four people from the buying team. It’s still an interactive session. And again, 1 or 2% of the time it’s a real presentation.
That’s kind of the point, so if that’s the case, if presenting isn’t gonna be the skill that differentiates me as a salesperson, then maybe I need to work on the things that will. And that is really just being able to drive a conversation.
You mentioned talent. I’ll touch on that because I think it’s related. I have my own belief when you think of talent. In other words, what’s innate, what’s not a skill that I can develop from the grassroots? All of these things, obviously, you can enhance. But in the same way that somebody who’s five foot five is gonna have a really, really hard time playing center in the NBA because they’re just not tall enough. It’s nothing to debate, they’re probably good at something else. I think there are certain traits where if it’s not a strength, it’s gonna be hard to be really exceptional at enterprise sales. Again, it’s not to dismiss enhancing skills.
We talked a little about curiosity. Great salespeople naturally ask questions and usually that’s because they naturally can’t help themselves because they’re naturally a little more curious than the average Joe. And they have this insatiable need to satisfy that curiosity, it just gets turned on in sales.
The next one is rapport. We talked a little about what’s different about startups and big companies. Big companies are built up by big companies. They just are. So when you work for a startup, you don’t get the benefit of some of those things, so you have to figure out ways to compensate for the fact that maybe you don’t have Cisco or Salesforce on your business card.
And that means, as an enterprise sales rep at a small company, you have to be able to substitute for that credibility, that the name of your business already has because it’s established. So you have to be able to build rapport quickly. Some people do it with a sense of humor. Some people do it just because they’re friendly. Whatever. I would never prescribe style. But there are some people who are good at that, and others who aren’t.
I think the last one is what I call drive. It’s ability to drive. So there’s personal drive, which is great and that’s good for everyone. But if you watch a great salesperson at work, and I’ve seen this myself. There could be a meeting and there are six or seven people that work for this buying company, and there’s the salesperson. If you just scratch your head, you might go, “Well hang on. The salesperson is basically telling everyone else what to do.” And you can’t do that unless you know how to work it. There’s a skill and a talent to doing that.
Those are some of the things that I believe are important to sales and, in particular, enterprise sales at a young or startup company.
ABHISHEK: I’m thinking, at an enterprise sales and young startup companies now, trying to hire Salesforce and some of the traits you mentioned: Curiosity, rapport, and being driven. What can the companies do to come across this hurdle when they’re hiring the sales talent?
PAT: Yeah, there’s a question about, “How do I determine if a salesperson is good?” And we can talk about that, and, “How to attract and retain those,” are two different questions but they’re clearly related.
To the first one, like so much else, there’s not a magic answer. I think a lot of the things people do for this are good things. But I do believe that an actual recruiting process, the process of somebody being interested in working for a company and “selling themselves,” and the company saying, “Hey, we have a need we have to fill,” and assessing this person, or multiple people and comparing them, looks a lot, darn it, like a sale. It’s not identical, but it’s very similar.
At least for me, in my experience, it’s a great test for how people operate, how they carry themselves, what they do. Do they operate with integrity? Are they straightforward? Do they follow through? Do they know how to exercise curiosity? Can they drive? Do they know what it means to talk about strategy, and ask questions about what’s driving the decision? All those things that you would expect a good salesperson to do when they’re trying to sell and make a deal happen, they probably need to do when they’re selling themselves. Again, it’s not identical. So that’s, to me, first and foremost.
Do you want to do reference checks? We talked a little about startups and repeatability. Do you want to see in their background and their history repeated success? Of course. I caution that a little bit, though, especially with startups because sometimes people are great but they’re just in a situation that is impossible. And that just happens with startups.
You see five or six of those in a row, then you’ve got a red flag. But every once and while, that happening to a good sale… And vice versa. Sometimes people jump on a rocketship that’s going to the moon and it was on its way anyway, and there could be stragglers honestly, and just because they were part of this giant success story doesn’t necessarily by itself merit they’re perfect and incredible.
I will comment, I don’t know if you were asking this, but I think it’s a fascinating thing and I want to make a plug for a piece of content I absolutely love. Dan Pink did a TED Talk on human motivation that is just fascinating, and it’s filled with lots of interesting data and supporting arguments. Basically the premise is this: Money is not a great motivator. Go to a conference of sales leaders and you say that, they would probably start throwing their lunch at you, like, “What? What did you just say?”
But it is something to think about. I highly recommend checking it out. Basically the net of it is, what you want to do as a sales leader, I think it’s the number one task, is to attract and retain great talent. And one of the ways you retain great talent is you make sure you pay them well.
In terms of motivating them though, that happens in other ways. I won’t babble on about the TED Talk, but it’s worth checking out. And we talked a little bit about conventional wisdom.
ABHISHEK: I think it’s great.
PAT: Just imagine you have a sales rep, and we’ll use easy numbers. And they have a $2 million deal, and they get paid 10%. So they’re gonna make a lot of money, $200,000 if they close this deal. And then you go to them and say, “You know what? I’m gonna make the commission 12%.” Do you think that they’ll go, “Oh, now I’m really gonna try!” You don’t think they were already trying? They were.
At some point it is not about the money. If that salesperson can find all the same other motivation somewhere else and make more money, well of course that matters. So I’m not saying it doesn’t matter at all. But it’s probably not the number one thing.
So when we think about keeping, and attracting, and retaining talent, we probably need to think about things that go beyond just the paycheck.
ABHISHEK: I think it’s interesting you bring up the Daniel Pink TED Talk. I have seen that, I’m familiar with that. A follow up from that as we’re going through this, what might be other levers that companies can pull to retain and to grow the talent, especially sales talent?
PAT: I think that begins to become very case specific, company specific. But let’s talk a little about startups. In my experience, and I can even talk about myself, one of the things I always joke, and people go, “Pat, you’re going to work for an early stage startup, a sub-million dollar startup again. Are you totally nuts?”
And I say, “Well, first of all, you know me. You already know the answer to that question is yes. Certifiably nuts.” But the thing you get at a startup is this opportunity to grow. Sometimes it’s “grow” like “pull your hair out and jump off a cliff at the same time” kind of growth.
But all these fundamental challenges exist, and there’s a certain type of person that craves the ability to say, “You know what? I think I can be a key part of tackling those fundamental challenges.” Which I would argue, not in a bad way, those start to fade when a company is doing $20 million or $50 million in sales. They’ve kind of figured it out, and it becomes much more of a pure execution play, even at that stage. Heaven forbid a company at $100 million.
You can get paid a lot of money helping a company that’s at $100 million grow to $250 million. I’m not dismissing that. But the kinds of challenges, sometimes, they’re more about execution, and refinement, and growth, not the fundamental existential threat questions.
So when you’re thinking about attracting salespeople to that, you say, “All right. I’m gonna help you make money. I’m gonna take that issue off the table so you can still make as much money as other places. But are you interested in taking the next step in your career? Because I would argue you’re gonna get a much better chance of doing that here at my startup than you will if you were to work for, example, Salesforce.”
It’s about attracting that kind of person. And if that’s the kind of person you want as a startup founder, or leader, or whatever, you have that in your bailiwick. And to me, that’s an asset that a bigger company doesn’t have.
ABHISHEK: I’ve never thought about it as an asset. It’s interesting. Early stage startups do offer that growth opportunity, and that need to tackle these problems, that others might not.
PAT: I’ll say another thing again, I’m obviously an unabashed advocate for early stage startups. But you can’t hide at a startup. You cannot hide. And there are certain people who crave that. They don’t want to be in an environment where there are people who are just going through the motions. At any successful startup, that’s impossible. You stick out like a sore thumb. I find in sales, sometimes, some of those hard driving folks, that’s what they want.
Again, there are people that make lifestyle decisions based on… There’s no problem about going to work at a big company. I’m not dismissing it. It’s not for me, but I’m not dismissing it. But in terms of attracting talent, you want to say, “This is the profile of the person I want, and I want that profile to match the assets I have to sell.” And young companies have really interesting assets.
So to your point, hopefully you’re taking what some people might say is a downside, like a risk, and turning it into an asset. Because, at least for me, it is.
ABHISHEK: Actually, can you tell me more about why you like working in the early stage sales piece, as well? I’m just thinking, another sales wannabe is listening to your story, and maybe they get inspiration there.
PAT: I’ll give you the Reader’s Digest, I don’t want anybody to listen to this, heaven forbid I put them to sleep, and then you get hate mail on your column and all that. I don’t want that to happen, but I’ll give you the Reader’s Digest version of my story.
I happen to have an engineering degree from UC Berkeley here locally. Go Bears. My friends will go out, at least once a month, outside, look up at the sky, put their hands together and go, “Thank God that’s not the dude building the bridges we drive on, the cars we drive in.”
So I got into sales early in my career, and kind of found my calling. But I’ve always had the ambition of being a founder. And I won’t bore you, I’ve taken a few swings of starting my own companies here and there, and around the nearest success or failures. But I don’t regret doing them. And I eventually found I was good at sales, and early in my life I was making a ton of money. Lots of money.
But what I found is, what really turned me on, is I’ve got a chance to go to work for a company broadly speaking. And one of the ways I choose a company I go to work for, where I can honestly say this company has a chance to put… I’ll use a Steve Jobs-ism: To put a dent in the universe. Hopefully the money follows, and certainly I’m as much a money grubbing as the next sales guy. And I want to get paid for the hard work I do. As we talked about before, sometimes it becomes about more than that.
So what attracts me is the chance to put a dent in the universe. And what I’ve found at startups is, and I do this everyday now, I’m living in this, there are just big, important, sometimes existential threats to the company things that need to be tackled. And it’s wonderfully rewarding to do that. Is it sometimes deeply frustrating at times, too? Yes, it is. But I think the reason I keep coming back is I look back on those experiences and say, “Wow, that was fun,” even in the cases where it didn’t pan out. The relationships I’ve made, the way I’ve grown personally and professionally. That’s why.
And I can say quite honestly I’ve done all right for myself. I’m probably nearing the point where if I didn't want to work anymore I don’t necessarily have to. But I’m gonna keep doing this until people tell me, “Pat, get lost, man. You’re bothering us too much.” It will soon not even be about the money. Although, again, that does matter. But I just keep doing it.
We can say all we want, and not to be too philosophical here, about the challenges in Silicon Valley. And there are some: The wealth inequality, all that fun stuff we could talk about. But this area where we live in has all of these young companies and these extremely bright people married with ambition, and drive, and entrepreneurialism. It’s intoxicating, man, it is. So I dig it. That’s the shorter version of why I keep coming back and going to work for young companies.
ABHISHEK: I appreciate you sharing your story. What would be your advice to someone, on the other end now, to someone who’s trying to break into sales?
PAT: We talked a little about it. I have two kids in college, and the advice I give them, or anyone, is be honest with yourself. What are you good at? What are you not? What are you inclined to do? And this is not to say we all can’t improve skills, we all can’t be better people. All those things are true, but as we mentioned before, look in the mirror and be honest. What are your inclinations? Don’t decide you want to be a particle physicist if you have a hard time with algebra.
And I think too often the common culture is that anyone can do anything. It sounds like, “Pat, you’re hating on empowering people.” No, that’s a disservice. Anyone can’t do anything. That’s just not true. So that’s the first thing.
I think the other thing is there’s a mentality in sales that can be a little ruthless, and it’s stressful, and it’s different than other jobs. Not to say that other jobs don’t have stress too, but you are on the hook. As they say, it’s, “What have you done for me lately?” You can have a killer quarter in the next quarter and it’s like, “What quarter? We’re now, man. Talk about the deals now.”
Assuming you believe you have the talents, and we talked about that, assuming that mentality energizes you, it doesn’t frighten you, or scare you, or depress you, then I would say it’s like anything else. Pay your dues. I’m a big basketball fan, but there’s nothing wrong with going to work as an SDR, and just learning sales. My daughter’s in this space now and that’s what I’ve done for her. She’s worked her way up, and you see it. I’m a fan of the story, if you’re a basketball fan, that people might be familiar with, Erik Spoelstra, he’s been a long-time Heat coach in the NBA basketball. He started basically as a work-for-free kid in the video room of the Heat basketball organization. Back in those days, they really didn’t pay those guys. He’s the head coach and has two or three championships, and is regarded as one of the finest coaches in the NBA, if not all sports. He paid his dues. And there’s something to be said for that.
Some people are gonna step in, and the talent’s gonna be obvious, and it’s gonna accelerate. So find an opportunity. It doesn’t have to be the glorious, “I’m the top sales rep, day one.” If you get that, wonderful, but for most of us we have to start in a typical starting role in sales. Maybe an SDR. But you have a plan. You put a plan in for yourself and say, “Here are the things I have to do to be good in SDR, but here’s the plan for me to take the next steps.”
It sounds like motherhood and apple pie stuff, but that’s it. Have a plan for your career. Be willing to pay the price, the dues. Recognize and be honest with yourself about your own talents. And go for it. The thing I would say is the prototypical salesperson, in my experience, aren’t necessarily the successful ones. Does it hurt to be gregarious? Of course not. And having a sense of humor? That doesn’t hurt.
But there are lots of great salespeople who are shy, lots of great salespeople who are maybe a little monotone. That’s not it. We talked about some of the talents. Just don’t let the stereotypes scare you away.
ABHISHEK: I know there are some exciting things happening, as well, in your own career with Indus. If you’re okay, we’ll shift topics to that a little bit.
PAT: Yeah, I appreciate you asking! I won’t make too much of a plug. I’m obviously very excited about what we’re doing with Indus. I’ve been here almost two years, and at the end of the day what we’re doing is taking two core technologies, which is computer vision and AI/ML, Machine Learning, and applying that to large scale construction to essentially reduce the inefficiencies in construction.
Sometimes people, even in our space, sort of “poo poo,” like, “Oh, man. Construction, they’re way behind the times, and every other space is way ahead.” That’s not terribly fair. Some of that is a little fair, but not totally because if you go to a construction site, I think most people know this, people’s lives are at stake. People die on construction sites all the time, unfortunately. Not nearly like it used to be, but it still happens.
Unlike MarTech or SalesTech where nobody’s gonna die if you make a mistake with your pipeline. But if you’re too casual about trying new things on a construction site, there could be dire consequences. So I think the uptick in technology’s been suppressed because of that. But now there are trends happening in construction, in particular, like any other space, the need to be more efficient. Also, broadly, there’s a talent crisis in construction. They don’t have the talent they need, so the only opportunity for them to tackle this is through technology.
We’re diving in on that, we’ve got a lot of exciting things going on. As we’ve mentioned, it’s a startup, so we also have challenges we’re tackling. But I’m energized by it, and I’m excited. Great team, got some new leadership involved, and we’re hopefully taking the world by storm.
A little bit of an impact from the pandemic, like many businesses, and we can talk more about that. But we think we’re on the other side of that, and excited going forward.
ABHISHEK: Great. I know I reserved some time with you, and we’re going over that, so I do want to be mindful of the time we have with you.
PAT: No problem, I get it. I made myself a little block, happy to keep to that.
ABHISHEK: Okay, well I think you mentioned there is some impact of Covid on the business, as well. What does that look like in your industry?
PAT: Like a lot of businesses, maybe not all of them, I mean Amazon is doing great, and some others, and Zoom. But for most businesses this has had at least somewhat an adverse effect and construction’s no different. In particular, doing construction, you have people getting together to do the construction. By nature, they have to be on the site, and sometimes have to be close together. So the first reaction by a lot of the companies, and policymakers, and regulatory agencies, was to shut these sites down. Obviously that put a damper on the industry.
Now the good news is, many of them have been viewed, in most cities, not universally, but in most cities, as an essential business. At some point if you don’t have enough apartment buildings, don’t have enough places for people to live, and people recognize you can’t just turn that off. So things are mostly back to normal. It took a little while. So that’s good news.
There was a pause, and there was a break, and we had to actually slow down our own business to mirror that. But now we’re essentially full steam ahead. That actually just happened in the last month: Hiring salespeople, hiring on the tech front. It’s changed, though. I imagine it’s changed probably for a little while, and some things maybe forever.
Obviously you have this construction site. The notion of health and safety was already a deeply important subject on construction sites, but I would argue it’s become even moreso. Because, “Hey, I want to reopen my construction site,” and you have the neighbor across the street saying, “Hey, you have all these folks coming from out of town. Are they all gonna be wearing masks? Are they all gonna be social distancing?”
So these companies have almost a PR. Obviously they’re concerned about the health and safety of their employees and people on the construction site. But there’s also a PR element to this, to be able to advertise to regulatory agencies and others that they are operating a safe site. Employees, subcontractors, we’re helping some of those companies with that kind of thing, and it’s a change.
As we all know, if we follow the news, unfortunately this Covid pandemic thing is not gonna turn off tomorrow. Hopefully, the sooner the better. But we’re probably looking well into 2021, and frankly, as I mentioned, there will probably be a broader change. Folks will be more conscientious about health and safety for a long time, probably in good ways. You asked about the near-term impact, and that’s the classic thing.
But there’s also some more medium- and longer-term impacts we’re seeing, for example, on the health and safety piece.
ABHISHEK: So what’s next at Indus, then, looking at the future?
PAT: Continue the business, continued growth, all those standard things any business wants to do. We have a few things that we’ve made a recent decision on. One is, actually this happened this week, we’re gonna go international. One of the things when I get involved with startups, and I’ve worked for several but I’ve also had the opportunity to advise others on the side.
To me the number one challenge I see at early stage startups is focus. The natural inclination when you’re in an early stage startup is, “I want anyone anywhere who will say yes to me, and get going.” When you think about focusing, “No, no, I’m gonna keep the lens wide open. I’m gonna keep my possibilities. I want my ICP to be the same as Google.” Which is exactly the opposite of what you should do because you have these fixed resources in terms of your sales team, your support team, obviously your tech team. You need to focus on the things that can have the most impact. We suffered that challenge at Indus in early days, and so we’ve got focus, but now we’ve earned the right, based on success, to go international. That’s really exciting.
I think the other thing, if we get into the weeds just a teeny bit, is the great promise of technology, at least in construction, is if I have a plan can you “automatically” tell me when I’m off the plan? Our technology in many ways is helping people see what’s happening. Well, if I can marry that to the planning that’s happening and be able to help companies autocorrect, auto alert, more easily. And get in front, and figure things out two weeks before they might manually do it. There's a massive advantage to that. Completing a construction project a month ahead can mean millions of dollars and benefits. So that’s the next thing we’re gonna be doing.
Finally, right now we’re very focused on computer vision, so cameras, and capturing things, and figuring it out, and using AI to determine, is someone wearing their hard helmet or not? What they’re doing, is that excavation? Or is it some other form of activity? The next step will be to add other sources of data beyond computer vision. So that’s what’s next.
Exciting stuff. I’ll make a little plug. I decided a couple years ago, I don’t know that I’m gonna go to work for the foreseeable future for any company that pretty much anyone says they’re an AI company, but for a true AI startup. Because I do honestly believe AI is gonna change the world.
I’ll make another plug, there’s a book called AI Superpowers. It’s a fascinating book. It just talks about the distinction between who’s gonna win the war of AI, China or the US? But in the process of making the argument, this author highlights a lot of really interesting, informative things. I happen to be somebody who really believes this technology is gonna be more transformative, honestly, than the internet. I know that sounds crazy and maybe a little too provocative, but I believe that.
So I’m excited to be a part of a company that’s applying that to a new space and, again, doing our best to put a dent in the universe.
ABHISHEK: Exciting to hear about the next things at Indus, and if you’re listening right now I’ll be sure to include the links to the book Pat mentioned in the podcast as well.
As we’re wrapping up here, Pat, any parting thoughts or anything else you would like to share?
PAT: I don’t know. Hopefully there were some nuggets in there that are useful or helpful. I would just say, it might sound lame, but follow your dreams. I think there are enough of us, you hear the stories where people do things, maybe for long times, and go, “God, I wasn’t fulfilled. I wasn’t happy. It’s maybe more of what my parents wanted to do.” And I’m not saying go on a wild goose chase forever, for your whole life.
But I will say there’s a lot to be said to finding something you’re good at, you’re passionate about, it excites you. If that happens to be sales, more power to you. I wish you all the best. I think it’s the greatest career in the world. I believe that genuinely. It’s been great to me. And I hope some of this has been helpful.
ABHISHEK: Thanks so much, Pat. I really appreciate your time.