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Fireside Chat with Brett Queener,
OG Sales Ops @ Salesforce
Fireside Chat with Brett Queener, OG Sales Ops @ Salesforce
Learn from The Father of Sales Ops.
Brett Queener. The man. The myth. The legend.
Brett's entire career has been focused on growing software companies - fast.
From 2013 to 2016, Brett served as COO at SmartRecruiters, where he partnered with the founding team to convert a pre-revenue company into a leading enterprise player in the recruiting technology space, serving high-profile customers like Visa, Bosch, and IKEA.
Prior to SmartRecruiters, Brett was an executive at two of the fastest-growing software companies in history.
He spent a decade at Salesforce serving in a variety of senior leadership roles in Sales, R&D, and Operations focused on driving the company growth and expansion across market segments and product categories.
Prior to Salesforce, he held senior marketing and business development positions at Siebel Systems, which was eventually acquired by Oracle Corporation.
Brett also sits on the board (and invests) in some of the fastest growing software companies, like Atrium, Tourial, Trustpage, Spekit, Pendo, Invoca, and many others.
Today, Brett is Managing Director at Bonfire Ventures which focuses on seed-stage investments.
Discussion topics
Father of sales operations at Salesforce. The journey from early stages to later.
Advice on how to take on incumbents.
Journey from being in sales ops to running product.
How tech stacks have changed over time.
Building a movement through new category creation.
Big mistakes that early and mid-stage sales teams make.
Moving from operator to investor.
Key Takeaways
When going about an incumbency, you must focus on the end-user of your product and the person responsible for your product. Promote the hell out of that person.
The modern tech stack is changing. There will be a consolidation of the stack and the next generation of it will actually help and improve performance.
When creating a new category, you must find your external voice (and internal). Be the pied piper of your new category/product. Find the person with unmet pain - people buy software, not businesses.