24: ממחלקת מכירות לקבוצת ייעוץ (English)

And I think the name is a good example of the mind shift, but at the end of the day, we are sales. Let's not fool ourselves or fool anybody else. We're selling something. But by calling ourselves consulting, it puts us in that right mindset that we need to be in. And I think this mindset is something that we all share in the company, if I'm correct. Yeah. I mean, if we look back at the basics of how we built the product and how we built the company, it was always giving value to users and then letting them expand. Mitch mentioned that back in the days we didn't have a sales team. It's because many of our users started adopting the tool without any human touch and started scaling. But at some point, we realized that they're limited in where they can get just by using the software themselves without talking to anybody on Monday. And basically what happened is that we created a sales team initially and we started trying to sell the software to people. And it worked, but we had to make the change from sales to consulting mainly because we realized that the majority of the value that we can give to our customers is actually when they need to scale. It's not about buying the software in the first place because that's kind of easy. We optimized everything in the funnel for that. But once you get trickier, like once you pass a certain threshold of users, that's 25 or 50 users, you get to the next step, it's much more than selling software. It's much more about consulting them because I think what's unique about our platform is that you really need to understand the business of the customer in order to make kind of the next shift in the size and what you can do with the software. And I think

This is exactly where the consulting team fits in, in a sense that they help the company scale past that point. And also if I can add in, I think as we release more and more features, there's really so much you can do with the platform. And it's nearly impossible for someone to know all the potential use cases on their own. So by having a consulting team that really digs in to understand what their work process is, who are the different departments that are potential users, understands what they're currently doing, the pains they might be having with the current softwares they're using, we're really able to help them tailor the solution to how they work. And I think it's that certain amount of handholding that's helpful and needed as we want to scale inside of organizations. Also, there's lots of moving parts in these more complex deals. We're going through legal, we're going through security, we're going through procurement. It's not something that's just going to happen on a self-serve checkout page. Or overnight. Or overnight, yeah. The sales cycles are much longer, but at the end of the day… How much longer? So I think traditionally when we were kind of more in that fast-paced environment, a typical sales cycle was around one month, three weeks to a month. I believe the average sales cycle now is somewhere approaching like three months. Yeah, I think another aspect of changing the name is also kind of there's a cultural aspect to that. Right. I was going to mention that. The seeds for this mindset you just mentioned, Mitch, are there since the beginning of the team, if I'm correct. For example, the no commission aspect of your team, if you want to talk about that for a minute. Yeah, now the secret's out. And you're smiling. We're not as rich as everyone thinks. We don't make commission. But there's a lot of reasoning behind that. It's the culture internally. We don't want our reps fighting each other over leads. We want it to be a collaborative team environment where we help each other and we're not fighting who gets this one, who gets this one, and that kind of cutthroat environment. And secondly, I think a core, core principle of the company is being customer focused. So we never want to sell someone something that they don't need or they're not going to use or sell it in a way that's wrong or pushy. So I think by removing the commission element out of the picture, it sort of does away with that potential harm that you can do in sales. So we don't have any selfish interest in selling someone something because we're not actually making something at the end of the day out of it. We're aligned with the company goals and we want to scale, of course, and we want people to use Monday and be happy using it. But yeah, there needs to be a valid use case for it. Yeah, I mean, the no commission is a big deal. And for us from the very beginning, I think we saw a lot of sales team in different companies. And one thing that was in common for all of them is that toxic environment of people competing with one another. And it was more of a personal goal as opposed to a company pushing towards the same direction. It wasn't an easy decision. But we decided very early on that we don't want to have commission in the team. So everybody, again, not competing with one another. But I think that also changing the name from sales to consulting meant another thing. I think when you say a sales team, the focus is on the sale itself. You know, when you say a sales team, you basically need to sell. And this is how you direct the team. But when you say consulting team, I think there's an aspect to it where the main core of what the team does is actually consulting. And sales is a byproduct of that. And if you consult it in a good way and help the company, you're also going to benefit from a very good sale. But that really kind of changed the mindset and the focus on that. I think also another thing that is important to understand here is that most cases where you sell are to companies where there's already a team that has adopted in the past our platform, if I'm correct. For example, the no commission aspect of your team, if you want to talk about that for a minute. Not necessarily. In the present. Not necessarily. A lot of the accounts we deal with, they might have one team using it. It could be a small team, five users, 25 users. But, I mean, we have lots of signups on a daily basis. I think, like, today, actually, we had, like, 8,000 new trial signups. So a lot of these are brand new companies that have never seen the platform before. So it's a mix of both. But it's all okay. So let me correct myself. It's all people that approach our platform themselves. It's not cold calling. You're not calling someone and suggesting for them to try something they never looked at before. That's correct. We don't do any cold calling. All the leads or the accounts that we work on are completely inbound. And are completely people that already signed up to the platform. Yeah, people sign up for a free trial. And these are the type of people that we engage. Now, obviously, we can't touch everyone. You know, there's 5,000 to 8,000 people signing up.

on a daily basis. So we have to be strategic in who we think is a strategic account to work with, who we engage. How do you do that? So this is dealing with sales operations. We have a way that we score the accounts based on a plethora of factors. Where they sign up from, the type of company they work at, the position of the person who signed up, how many people are in the trial. And we basically score the leads. And based on the scoring, these are the leads that get distributed to the consulting group. So what else does it mean to change the name from sales to consulting? In addition to the shift in mindset, it's a shift in methodology and how we approach customers. So we used to have a transactional approach where things move very fast. And when we would give someone a demo of the product, it was more like a feature run through, right? We weren't really going deep into how they might specifically use Monday. What are their pains that they're facing on a day to day basis? Everyone was kind of getting a standard walkthrough of all the features and capabilities of Monday. Now, two different things happen. One, the platform has a lot new features. So it would really be impossible in 30 minutes to give someone a full rundown of all the different things they could do with the platform. So we really have to-- And unnecessary as well. And unnecessary, yeah. You don't want to bore people with features that they'll never use that aren't relevant to them. So the way we do demos now, they're based on an in depth discovery call that we do beforehand, okay? And this is where we're really getting to know the customer, getting to know what they want to achieve with the platform when they signed up for a trial, what they were looking for, what softwares are they using, what pins are they having in their current softwares. And then in the demo, from the very first touch point, it's a completely tailored experience. We're showing them boards in the platform that they can relate to. They say, yeah, this is exactly what I wanna use the platform for, this is exactly what I was looking for. This is how I'm gonna-- You're painting the picture for them. Exactly, we're creating a story for them. They can imagine themselves using it. This is exactly what I need to manage my team or manage my clients. How do you keep up with all of the new features? It's hard. This is one of the challenges that we face. I think that's part of the reason the position that I'm managing was created, this training position. It's not only for new employees and onboarding them, which is super important as we're scaling very quickly, but it's also ongoing training with the current members of the team, whether this is sales techniques, whether this is new features and making sure everyone stays up to date. We have to learn the features, but also what's the value of the feature? Like how is someone actually going to use this in their company? What does it mean for the team? Can you give an example of a feature that doesn't mean anything by itself, but the use case makes the value? Yeah. So I think it's more about like when we're showing the product to people, it's less about showing the feature and more about painting a story of how they're going to use it. So we have a feature called My Week. This is sort of a view where each person is in the platform. They can see all the tasks and projects that are assigned to them in the given week, right? So when we're giving someone a demo of the product, we could say, this is my week. This is where you see all the tasks that are assigned to each person, right? And that's one way of doing it. Another way of doing it is imagine you come into work in the morning and you open up my week and right here you see all the tasks that you're responsible for this day and that week, right? It's a completely different way of painting the picture. So I think in painting, showing a story of how it's actually going to be used for that specific user on a day to day basis really makes a world of difference. Another way that we involve the consulting team into new products is basically involve them into task forces. We use the same method with the customer success team. So basically in task forces of their working on new features, we involve people from the sales team. They come to the sync meetings, they're part of the brainstorming, and they also help shaping those new products. And that really helps. I think there's one thing about knowing a feature exists, but it's a totally different thing to know what was the thought process behind it. Why was it created the way it was created? And I think that really benefited us. And then that person that was part of the team comes back to the consulting team and shares his knowledge and his experience. And I think it really helped kind of harness everybody on new features that we release. Yeah, that's something that's really important to us is understanding how the features are going to be used. So we released another board view called Charts. And you can make graphs and charts here. And it's one thing to tell someone, you can take the data on the board.

Have it in a chart view, right? But how is that actually used? So when you can show it to someone as an actual example, like here's a sprint board for your developers. Here you can have a bar graph and see exactly how many story points are assigned to each developer in a given sprint, right? That really changes the way they look at it and the understanding behind it. I hear the two of you switching all the time between sales and consulting, and I'm asking myself, how real is that? And how do our customers react to that? I mean, how do you present yourself on the phone? Do you say you're a rep from a consulting team? What do you say? So on the phone, we say that we're product consultants, right? Like we really come with a deep knowledge of the product and how to use it. What's the reaction you get? I think people have a natural defense to the word sales, right? Like they think of car sales. They think of sleazy sales. Like there's a connotation to it. And I think by removing that, a bit of the defense is let down. But it's more than just the name. Like, okay, maybe they see the title in the very first email that you send someone. They see product consultant as opposed to sales executive. Does that really make a huge difference? Maybe. But I think from the very first call, we're really focused on providing value. And I think that's what's sensed. Sales has a connotation of being selfish, right? Like the sales rep is doing something for themselves without actually giving something in exchange. Right, there is no alignment sometimes in this call if it's sales rep and potential customer. Right, and I think that's an old way of doing things. I think now when people have so many options and you're not meeting people face to face and you're selling over the internet, right, and they're on trials, like the only way to get someone to become a customer is to actually give them value in something that they're gonna use. So that's what we're trying to do. Yeah, I think in the past, companies used to sell a product, showing a bunch of features, and then you have to buy the product in order to start using it. And I think part of the magic here and part of the reason why we can call it consulting is that those people either try the product during trial period or using it for a couple of months. And then, you know, the sale become easier in a way, but also much more deep because at that point, you need to kind of give them the next level of what they can achieve with the platform coming from what they're trying to achieve and understand how this correlates to their business. And I can imagine cases where even your clients don't know what's the next use case. Because if I understand it correctly, so some of the accounts we would like to expand are of different teams, different departments, not necessarily people that are working together right now. What do you do then? Exactly. So typically when someone signs up for a trial, they have like one, maybe two particular use cases that they came to us for that they were looking to solve. And we show them how to do that. But then we show them other ways that they can use the platform that they might never have thought of. So actually like a lot of times, like the real wow moment, it comes when we show them our actual company account and all the ways that we use Monday internally. And you can really like feel like the light bulb go off and they get the gears turning. And this is how we show them how they can use Monday organizational wide. Because a lot of teams, it's like a team leader. They come in, they sign up, they're looking for a tool for their team. Right. And they find the use case for that. But our mission as the consulting team is to show them all the other use cases that the platform can be used for and how they can leverage it and how they can collaborate with other teams in the company and do it all in one place. So it's really about like expanding their mind and expanding like what they thought they were going to get out of the platform and show them all the other things that they can do with it. Isn't there still an element of, I don't know, like going to someone else and starting to pitch them a new tool that they might need? Why would people do that? Like how do you get someone to go and champion you in another department? Yeah, so that's actually one of the major challenges that we currently face. And just to give the context again, the way we start today is that anyone can start using the tool. It doesn't have to be the IT department. It doesn't have to come from a CEO or from a very top person. It can start from the HR department, whatever you want. Or even like a team leader can start using it. So it's a great starting point, but then scaling from there sounds challenging. It is, and it's a great question. And I think it relates back to providing value. So the first thing you have to do is make sure that the reason they came to you for is being solved, right? Like this initial…

Use case, this initial way that they wanted to use the platform, we have to make sure that they're able to do that and happy using it. Only once they're satisfied with that can we think about a growth and an expansion. So I mean typically if a department head or a team leader, they're happy using the platform and they're finding value from it and it changed the way that they work, this is going to be a strong champion, right? Because they want the other teams in their company to succeed as well. Sometimes people like don't want to put their neck on the line internally, they're busy, they're stuck with their day-to-day and they only have budget for their team. This is a challenge. It's creating these like internal champions and how you get them to give you an introduction either horizontally to another team leader or vertically to maybe their director. But these are the things that we're working on and I think Eran would know better, but I think we sort of used to have like a bottom-up approach, right? Like we would get in with different teams in an organization and sort of mushroom out. We still talk about bottom-up, but I think with the help of marketing, the direction we want to go more now is top-down or even mid-down. So where we get in with like C-levels who are responsible for multiple departments. And this really helps us shape the conversation from the very beginning where from the very get-go, they're thinking of Monday as a tool for the organization or for multiple teams as opposed to a tool specifically for one team. We always was and always will be bottom-up, but I think one thing that's very different in how we do sales, first of all, let's talk about traditional sales model. The traditional sales model said, you know, we're going to get leads, we're going to qualify them. That's what's called like a marketing qualified lead. Whatever we get from our marketing team, we're going to qualify the relevant leads from that. And then we're going to go to a sales qualified lead, which is a lead that we know is relevant and schedule a demo with. And usually what happens in those companies that you realize that only like the top executive layer was able to make a decision. So you usually filter out everybody else and try to contact only the director of the company or the CEO or one of the VPs. And we took a different approach. It actually has a name now. It's called the flywheel approach. And that basically means that you start with a team, no matter which team is that from the organization. But then it's our responsibility and the product responsibility to expand the usage organically. Because what you essentially want is to get to that VP. And I agree. I mean, that VP has to make a decision in order to adopt the product like horizontally across the whole company. But my ideal scenario would be to reach him and for him to use Monday before you guys actually contact him. And how will we achieve that? I mean, it's very much about creating a better product in a sense that you want to introduce the product to more and more people. You want to have features that might be relevant to your manager as opposed to your team. And it's a lot of things we need to add to the product and enhance it. So I think it's very much about creating more traction and more adoption organically as much as we can to make the sales team life easier. And then from those people that actually use the platform will qualify those leads and introduce them to the consulting team. Yeah, definitely. I think some of the things that we're doing with the platform are going to help with that, such as the free view only users. And maybe there's now going to be a team who is using Monday and they invite their director in as a viewer. Right. Now this person is already exposed to Monday. So there's different things we're trying to do to increase the exposure and the virality within a company. Yeah, that's one feature that was very non-intuitive for us as a company. So we're now launching a new feature where we allow you to invite people, which you're not going to pay for them, to view data from Monday. And our approach behind it was we might lose some revenue because up until now everybody invited you had to pay for. But we think that in the long run you're going to invite more people from the organization. You're going to invite more managers, maybe even the CEO of the company. They will be exposed to Monday. And in the long run, we'll get more value. Our customers will get more value and we'll get more value from that. People will be more exposed. Increase adoption. Yeah, it's going to increase adoption in the long run. So we measure everything in Monday, right? We're a very data-driven company. Is it true there's more

Are there more dashboards in the company than employees? It's a good ratio. Let's put it this way. And I don't know exactly how much. No, and every now and then we ramp up the screens and then there are definitely more screens than people. My question to you is, have you changed your KPIs since you changed the name of the department, the team? Yes, we have. We really want to show our contribution as a consulting team over the no-touch funnel that the marketing team is doing an amazing job of. We have thousands of signups every day and they convert on their own. So we have to show how are we contributing to this? What is our delta or the way that we're improving the leads over what would happen on a no-touch funnel? So we see that traditionally accounts that sign up on their own, they're typically never in the realm of 50 users, 100, 200 users. So our KPIs now as a consulting group, we only get credit on deals that we close of 50 users or more. That's the bare minimum. It doesn't even show up on our dashboards otherwise. So that's one of the KPIs we changed. Another KPI we changed to more align ourselves with the company goals is that we measure ourselves on added ARR, annual recurring revenue, as opposed to collection. What's the rationale behind that? So the rationale is to tie our KPIs with that of the company. We just need a way to standardize things. The problem when you're tracking things due to collection, you have a completely different success metric whether you upgrade someone in the beginning of their trial or when they're a week away from their renewal, right? Because there's a balance carryover in their account. It just gets really complex and you're not comparing apples to apples, whereas if you're looking at added ARR, you're really looking at what's the contribution you made on this account irrespective of where they are in their renewal process. So I want to touch about this one because I think it's a bit sensitive. We changed the KPI that only deals about 50 users are counted for everybody in the team. But think about it. You touch people, you upgrade accounts from 10 people to 20 or from 20 to 40 and you don't get credit for it. Like you do a lot of good job, but you don't get credit. And I mean, one of the reasons that we've done it is because we knew that organically accounts usually grow to 25, it might happen. And we wanted to measure what is the impact of the sales teams. And we saw that accounts never scaled over 25 users without a human touch. So for us as a company, it was a very good thing because then we knew exactly what was the contribution of the sales team. But trying to figure out, like, how is it for you guys? Like going through this journey with the account, not getting credit for the beginning. Not only that, I'll add to it. You talk all the time about how we are all the time giving value to our customers. And then here, what if the value that is right for a certain company is a 25 people account? And then you know that you need a 50 people one to get whatever. By the way, you don't get commission. So why does it matter if it's counted or not? So that's another thing that you need to explain later. How are you guys measured in the end of the day? But first, this question of what do you do with that? So let me tackle the two questions separately. This was actually really hard on the team, right? Like there's people all of a sudden, there's accounts you've been working on for a long time and you're used to, you know, like back in the day when we were selling five user subscriptions, 10 users, like we would close a 25 users subscription. This is a big deal. And all of a sudden, no one's getting credit for it, right? So it was a bit disheartening in the beginning. You know, there's people who are used to closing 15, 20, 25 deals in a month, right? And all of a sudden, now they're closing two of 50 or more users. And it was really hard. Like people who, you know, the ranking on the dashboards of the team kind of shifted around. Even the energy, I mean, closing a deal almost every day is a very specific mindset and there are so many quick wins that you can celebrate and all of a sudden it might be days without. It was a really hard time, I think, like in the direction of the team. There was a lot of like internal discussions and people going off to the side and how do we do this and this? Whispering around and I don't know if I like this new idea, but I think it's something that came from like the top down and we do see the rationale behind it. And again, it's a mindset. Like if 100 user subscription seems like a big deal, then it is. But if it seems like it's not a big deal, right, then it's not. And once you do start getting those wins, you realize that like we do have a team that's capable of selling a solution like this.

We have a product that's a good fit for organizations to use in a larger scale. And we've been scaling up month after month. You can see the amount of deals that we close, 50 plus users, we of course have a dashboard for this. And it's like a 45 degree angle. So that's one thing. Now, the other thing, what do we do with accounts we get that more than, it's not a good fit for them to have 50 users on the subscription. So this is probably going to be an account that we don't work with. This is something that we nail in the discovery call that we do in the beginning. We understand what they're looking for, who are the potential departments. We try to get them to see the bigger picture and how other departments can be using it. But if we're not aligned in there, then thank you, enjoy your trial. We're here for any support you have. We have an amazing CS team that's going to support them. We have materials online. But this isn't going to be an account that the consulting group specifically focuses on. Also, with the way that we're scoring leads, we used to take accounts of any size company. It was kind of like based on the amount of engagement they're doing in the platform during their trial, the number of users on the trial. But now we have minimums. So we're only even dealing with leads in our consulting team of employees of 100 plus. The enterprise team is only dealing with leads they get of companies that have a minimum 1,500 employees. So I actually want to circle back to what we spoke about with MQLs. Because I think this is really interesting. What is MQL? MQL is a marketing qualified lead. It's a good fit for the product. So I've never been in a company where the net casted of what an MQL is is so wide. It's really crazy. Because typically you have a product or a service and there's a niche that you cater to. But due to the flexibility of the platform and how you can customize it, it's relevant for any type of team. So if there is a company of 100 plus employees, there's going to be 50 people in the organization where the platform is a good fit for them. It was funny. Mitch mentioned that it was a top to bottom decision in the company to make this change. And we talked about that this change happened in August of last year. And it was actually after a board meeting that I remember. We had a board meeting in New York. And we presented slides about the sales team. And all the graphs were going up. And the sales team was doing fine. But I remember that both Roy and I were uncomfortable about this. Because we had a big issue about contribution. And I remember a conversation we had with the board. And they said, look, it's looking good. You guys are scaling. Are you going to scale next year? Are you going to double the sales team? And we said, yeah, we think so. And it really touched me at that point. We didn't discuss this in the board. But afterwards, Roy and I sat down with Yoni, our head of sales. And it's that thing that was in our back of our minds all the time. We weren't sure about the contribution, closing all those small deals. I mean, it gave value to our users. But it wasn't for sure. We couldn't put our finger exactly what was the value that we added. And we thought to ourselves, how are we going to work around this? How are we going to fix this? And eventually, it sounds very intuitive. But we said, one thing we know for sure. Big accounts, we don't close big accounts without a person involved. It didn't happen before. We didn't have accounts over 25 or 50. So let's just do that. I mean, we know they want to use the system. We know they can. We know that they're going to get value if you're going to help them. And initially, we thought, OK, so it will be a process. And we'll shift the team. And then we literally said, we believe in that. The team is super smart. They're going to understand it. They're going to adopt. We trust them. Let's do it tomorrow. We've got nothing to lose. And this is what happened. We changed it over a course of a week. And I'm so glad we've done it because the thing I want to do the most now is to triple the sales team because I know the benefit. I know the value that they add. And it's one of those things that it's really easy to ignore but that we tackled. And I'm so proud of and I'm so certain in the way that we're moving forward with the sales team right now. Yeah, he's actually not exaggerating at all in the speed that we made the change. I was in our New York office in July helping.

…with the new team there. And I was there for 10 days. So the team weekly meeting that we had that I did remotely from New York is when the change was announced. I come back less than a week later and we're already getting the ball rolling on it. And it's hard. It's hard when you have a whole team that's used to doing something a certain way and you're growing. You're hitting what the KPIs you've been given are month after month. I think this is a really good point. As Ehan said and as you are now mentioning again, it's not like there was a problem with the KPIs. It's not like there was something super clear to everyone that wasn't working, which is why this shift is… It's easier to shift when everyone understands that something isn't working, that something is broken. This wasn't the case. It wasn't the case because everything seemed to be working. And we did even do tests to see what our contribution was, even on these smaller deals. We had two reps called Mushon and Mushit. They're not actually real people, but basically there were ways for us to test what our contribution was. So the way this would work, we have our team and they're getting the leads on a round robin, like being distributed on a daily basis. And some people could say, well, you guys were getting the cherry-picked leads. You were getting the best leads anyway, and these guys probably would have converted on their own without you. So what we did is we took these two fake reps and they were also getting these leads distributed. The only difference is they didn't do anything with the lead. No one was actually contacting them. No one was working on it. So this was a way of taking, I guess some people would call the best leads that were going to sales and then still being able to measure what is our contribution over what Mushon and Mushit are doing. Are we closing more deals? Are we doing a larger deal size? Is the churn rate lower? So these were things that we tested. And this is one of the, going back to Yoni, the head of sales, implementing this, I was just kind of mind blown. We're actually not sacrificing our best leads, but we're really doing an accurate test to see how we're actually contributing to the situation and not just saying we're collecting all the best leads and just closing everything. And maybe some of them would have bought on their own, but we really needed a way to prove this. And what did you see? So what we saw is the deal size that we were closing over Mushon and Mushit was a larger average deal size. I believe the churn rate was significantly lower. I think you probably know more about the actual data. And I think this is a big point. I remember that period and we tried that. But first of all, the results weren't significant. I mean, some months Mushon did better than others and some months he did better than some of the sales, some of the people in the sales team. And I remember Yoni going and saying, I'm not sure. And it did all those complex formulas in Excel. It's one of those things that you feel in your heart. You're not in the right place. You try to optimize for the wrong thing. It just feels wrong. And at the end of the day, it was hard to A-B test because we thought about maybe we'll change how we split the leads, but then we need three or four months for Mushon and Mushit to process the new leads. And everything felt so wrong that it's one of those cases where you feel something is fundamentally wrong in the way you think and the way you try to solve the problem. I feel it all the time in product sessions, for example, when you try to work around a product issue and you feel stuck everywhere you go. It's a good sign that you're not looking at it the right way. Yeah, exactly. Change your perspective first. It was one of those scenarios. I mean, it's one of those things that a company can go for four or five years without noticing. One of the things that I like about our company and our culture is that we always try to dig into the truth. And I think it was one of those cases. And another kind of value is that once we find another truth is to change it now. And I think it kind of represents both of those cases. And I'm so proud of the team adopting so fast. Listen, I mean, it's even a different skill set to do like transactional sales as opposed to consulting. It's different people. We knew that this change is going to be painful in a way, but still we knew that it's the right thing for the company. Did we lose people in this process? No. Yeah, but I would say that some people that used to be on the top of the chart, it changed. The order is definitely changed. We had to retrain the people in the team. Yeah, so this is, again, like the position that I came into, the sales trainer. It wasn't just…

to assist in the onboarding of new employees, but it's doing a complete retraining of everyone who's been on the team for almost a year, changing the way they do things, changing the processes, changing the way our CRM works and how we manage accounts, changing the way we talk to customers. At the end of the day, if you're gonna be spending hours with the customer and understanding their process and giving them a demo of the platform, doesn't it make sense to do that with someone who has the potential to buy a plan of 100 users as opposed to someone who you know from the get-go is only gonna potentially buy five? Same amount of time. But yeah, in the process, we created a lot of learning materials and sessions that I do with the team, ways to just make this pivot from transactional sales to a consultative value-based approach. How was it for people to, I mean, I'm trying to imagine how it's like to be first on any kind of list and then not being first anymore. And I can see how in more cases than not, people would let their ego sort of take over and say, hey, maybe this new thing isn't for me. How did we avoid that? It's hard. I think a lot of it has to do with empathy from the team leaders and from the head of sales, letting people know, listen, guys, we know we're going through a crazy change right now. It's gonna be drastic. We're not sure if this is the right direction or it's not. We really, in our gut, think it is, but we know that it's a complete shift. So there was, although we moved super fast, there was a bit of patience. Like we have a ramp-up period in the quotas we had for this, like for the new KPIs we're working on. And there was a lot of support around it, training, simulations. Yeah, a lot of things to assist in it. I think another thing which we ignore, but I think it's super significant, I'm taking you back to what we discussed in the beginning of this conversation about the no commission. I mean, the fact that we didn't have commission enabled this change. Because if we had commission and people used to earn a certain amount of salary, this change was super painful. But because they knew that their salary won't be hurted by this change and it's best for the company, that would enable this change. And one of the things that we thought about when we said we don't want a commission-based sales team was that, to make changes, do what's best for the company as opposed to doing what's best for me to earn the same salary I used to earn. So it gives us much more flexibility. And again, it's signaling to everybody in the team that the goal of the company is more important and we'll compensate that in the base salary that we give them. And also, I think a lot of people on the team, they want the change. They know that it's good for them in their career as consultants, as sales professionals. This is the way of doing enterprise sales. You have to really dig deep into the customer and what their needs are and whether it serves them here for a while or whether it serves them whatever's next in their career. This is amazing skill sets to have as someone in this profession. So I think everyone kind of rallied behind it and we're super looking forward to the different trainings we had and how to do it, how to make that mind shift, how to do this new kind of sales that leads to closing deals with big logos and these longer processes. So people wanted it, they were hungry for it. But yeah, it was a transition. Different incentives, I guess. Yeah, but I want to say that in the first two months, I remember Yoni walking around the office so stressful because one of the things that happened was that the sales cycle became much longer and it took time for us to see the fruits of this change. Now we're talking from a retrospective of it's work and we're proud of it, but it was a big gamble, a big risk that we took and it took a lot of patience. It was a big risk, although it wasn't that big because again, if I think about the potential and the scale, what you could have lost in comparison with what you can gain here, it's just a clear moment that you have to do it now. Later on, it would have been much more costly. Think about, even think about the next board meeting. The easiest thing for me to do is to show them this graph going up, keeping the same method, showing them that everything is fine and we took the risk of going to the next board meeting and said, oh, you remember that graph from the previous board meeting? Forget about it. Yeah, now it's zero. We didn't succeed.

The change, we took a huge risk and we collapsed everything we built with the sales team. I mean, it's always easier to kind of keep the same course. And it was a risk. But again, in the short term. Yeah. All I'm saying, it's not easy. You know, it's not easy. The easiest is to keep the same course. And the hard thing is to actually make a change. And again, we're talking about a successful change. Could have been the other way around. Yeah, it could have been. What is still challenging about it, Mitch? There's internal and external challenges. I mean, internally, we're growing like super fast in both offices, right? So there's a lot that's involved with that. It's just supporting like a scaling of the speed. Like, how do you find this much talent who is really going to be qualified for the position? How do you find this type of talent who wants to take a quote unquote sales job without commission? And how do you give them the resources that they need to be successful? Whether this is the training, the support. So that's like internally, like super fast growth. By the way, how do we promote this hiring? Do we call that a consulting team or do we say it's a sales position when we look for someone new? That would be more of a question for HR. I believe it's like account executives or it might be. I'm not sure how it's like listed. How early in the process do we tell candidates that there is no commission? I imagine it's like one of the in the first interview or maybe in the screening call. Yeah, in the screening call that we do with HR. So from the very first moment. So that's that's the internal challenge. It's like supporting such a rapid growth externally. By the way, do you do it for both the Israeli and the New York office? Me personally? Yeah. Yes, right now. Because you're doing training. Yeah, so right now it is all under myself, which is it's hectic. But is it going to change? I hope so, because I'm only one person. So I think what makes the most sense, like just based on the amount of work that is required in it, like would be to have someone on the ground in the New York office doing it and someone here in Israel doing it. Because it is like if you want people to succeed and you want them to be able to ramp up like that quickly, you know, it does take someone kind of like working hands on with them, like intensively, like the first two weeks on the job. A couple months back when I was actually in the New York office, like back in July. It's more than a couple of months back. Half a year back. Yeah, I guess the time flies. Roy and Iran were both in the New York office. And I don't remember who asked, but someone asked me like, what are the biggest worries you have as the company scales? And they didn't mention anything about revenue or about customers or the product. Like I remember specifically them saying like preserving the company culture. Like how do you do that over a big ocean in the middle, different time zones when you need to find like this much talent in a short period of time? Because we do have something like really unique here. I think anyone that visits the office here like immediately sees it. It's like a fun place to work. It's cool energy. It's like it's really amazing. So I mean, I think that's a big challenge. So one of the ways that we attempt to mitigate this is we have an exchange program. So people who are in the New York office, we fly them to the Tel Aviv office for one month. I'm sorry, for one week or two weeks. And just by being here, they sort of like absorb what it really means to be part of Monday.com. Like what are the values we have here? How do we work with each other? How do we collaborate with each other? So I think that's like really important and sort of preserving the core identity. Yeah, and I think it's the ROI we see on that is insane. And we do it not only with the consulting group, but also with the customer success and everybody else. And we fly people from Tel Aviv to New York and from New York to Tel Aviv. And I think one of the biggest things that we feel on both directions is people come pumped. Also from Tel Aviv to New York. You know, once you get to know the people that you work with and you see their faces and you have a conversation with them, the benefit is insane. I don't know how it's going to work as we scale because it's going to be a lot of people that we hire. Very soon. We need the airline, yeah. A Monday airline. I like it too. Careful what you wish for. We'll give like a… Ideas, yeah.

But definitely we need to keep it at some scale. And those visits are amazing. What are the external challenges you see? So the external challenges are how you get these, how you can scale inside of the companies, right? Like how you get these introductions from a happy team lead using the platform and how you turn that champion into a Monday.com ambassador on the inside, right? Like how do you incentivize them or how do you work with them to make the case internally to introduce you to another team or to introduce you to their director? So these are, you know, this is one of the major external challenges. And then as we grow and we really want to like reach like the C-level in companies, like they have unique requirements, whether it's reporting, whether it's user-based permissions. And these are things that we're working on with the product team to achieve. Mitch, to finalize the conversation, if someone's listening right now and they are going with their team through some big change, what can you give them from your experience as an advice? So I think the main advice is to hang in there, right? Like you're never going to have enough time in the day to do all the things that you think you need to do. So prioritize like what in the change is most important. Make sure it's a change that you like really believe in. Set the path for that. Whether this is, you need to have like short-term, medium and long-term goals to make sure you're on the right path and surrounding yourself with the right people, like making sure that you believe in the people who are a part of this change. I think it's always like if you are going to make the change, like make sure it unites with the more high-level goals of the company so that all the departments are like in sync and rallying together like behind whatever goals you're trying to achieve. Ran, do you want to say anything else? Yeah. I mean, for me, this change was pivotal. First of all, I feel a huge weight is lifted off my shoulders because, you know, a few months back, we weren't sure the sales team, you know, how it's going to scale, what's the actual contribution. And now all I want is to scale it. I want to triple it because I'm so happy with what they're doing. I'm so confident in the value that they bring to our customers and to the company. And it's one of those things that, you know, it might sound small, you know, it might even sound intuitive now, the change that we've made, but it's been a process. And I think one of the most important things that I always try to keep in mind is that change is constant in the company, not only in sales, everywhere, in R&D, in product, in CS. And it's very important to build a culture that enables such changes. I would say that you can do the same thing in scale and you must change all the time. And I think, you know, looking back at why we chose no commission, why we chose those specific people and create a specific culture in sales was to enable such changes. So for me, the biggest point is try to build a culture to support changes because changes are required in order to scale and succeed. Mitch, thank you so much for joining us today. It's been a pleasure. Happy to have done it. Thank you, Ran. Thank you, Leo. Thank you, everyone, for listening. Bye. Start up for start up for start up.