Recruiting the Right People and Selling Real Differentiation with Brad Scott, VP of Worldwide Sales at Glean

Everyone's interested in AI now. They all want to take a look under the hood. So what does that mean for your organization if you're actually going to go in and do that? But what does it actually mean for a company to be able to come in and provide an AI transformation to an organization if they actually are an AI native versus somebody that's got it bolted on? And those can be two pretty different stories.

welcome to the revenue builders podcast a weekly show featuring b2b sales leaders and executives hosted by five-time cro john mcmahon and force management co-founder john kaplan the show takes guests in the barrel behind the scenes with the people who've been there done that and seen the results revenue builders covers best practices for scaling and growing your business while sharing the pitfalls to avoid

Our guest today is Brad Scott, VP of Worldwide Sales at Glean. Brad's built sales organizations at three very different stages of growth. Snowflake, during its historic scale-up, Beza, from a much earlier stage, and now Glean, which he's scaling through explosive growth, running an organization of 350-plus people. This conversation goes deep on what actually separates great sales organizations from average ones, starting with people and recruiting. The question Brad asks to find out

who

someone really is and how he builds trust and self-awareness into his hiring process. We also get into how he keeps his team focused on fundamentals, process, training, execution, while everything around them, the market, the messaging, the product is changing every 90 days in this AI cycle. Here's our conversation with Brad Scott. So Brad, you've had a really rare vantage point snowflake during its historic scale up, Vesa building something from a much earlier stage and now Glean, which is experiencing explosive growth. So you've had a wonderful vantage point to answer this first kind of Uber question. What separates the best sales organizations you've been a part of and the average ones?

It's a great question, John. I think for me, the thing that strikes me early when I walk into a sales organization and tends to be the through line, at least at the great ones I've been a part of, is the people. I think very early you can tell and you're struck by people. the quality and caliber of the people you're surrounded with, not only in the other AE seats, the sales leaders, the SEs, and that extends to then the product teams and the leadership of those companies that I think is why recruiting in our business is so important is if you can go grab great transformative talent, you can create a, you know, assuming you've got a great product, you can create a great sales organization. But if you've got great people, that to me is the biggest separator differentiator.

a little deeper on the people part. What are some of those themes on those great people, some characteristics that you actually have built into your recruiting operating rhythm?

Yeah, I think one, the best are typically, in my experience, incredibly intellectually curious, right? So they're intellectually curious about their teammates, the way the organization runs, pushing the product team to build better