Sales and Spreadsheets: Jamie Garverick

For Jamie Garverick, a Harbert degree in finance proved to be an excellent background for a career in sales, especially for high-ticket items. Garverick, chief revenue officer at Fullstory, a digital experience analytics firm in Atlanta, says “The ability to know your way around the spreadsheet is really, really important.”

Transcript

Audio:

Welcome to the Harbert College of Business podcast with your hosts, Sarah Gascon and Currie Dyess.

Today's guest is Jamie Garverick, chief Revenue Officer at FullStory, a digital experience analytics company in Atlanta. He is a 1996 Harbert Finance graduate.

Sarah Gascon:

Jamie Garverick, War Eagle, and welcome to the show. It's a pleasure to have you on today.

Jamie Garverick:

Yeah, War Eagle. Thanks for having me.

Currie Dyess:

Now. We're so happy. Thank you so much.

Jamie, when you're coming to Auburn, your ties to the College of Business were a little atypical.

Can you tell us how you ended up here? Why you chose finance? And then how you found yourself at a giant such as Oracle?

Jamie Garverick:

Yeah, great question.

So I actually grew up in a town relatively close to Columbus, Ohio. To call it a suburb, it would be a stretch. And so half my high school went to Ohio State, including my twin sister.

And so I wanted to do something different and I wanted to get away from the Midwest gray skies and rainy snowy winters and go somewhere different. And so Auburn was very different, especially back in the early nineties. It was very different than what it is today.

But fortunately forged a lot of great relationships with different friends there in Auburn and fell in love with the place and still remain in contact with these friends today.

In terms of school business, my father is an accounting professor, and so he taught at various universities one semester a year. And then he had a sort of side business that was his primary income for the other semester.

And so I sort of grew up around an accounting professor, and so believe it or not, we talked about accounting, finance things at the dinner table. And so it was just a topic, a thing that I was familiar with and enjoyed. And I think maybe genetically I was predisposed to it.

And so that's how I sort of leaned toward the business school. Initially, I did start in the accounting program and I just didn't fall in love with accounting as much as I did with finance. And so sort of pivoted into the finance major halfway through my tenure there at Auburn.

Currie Dyess:

And you studied finance, but then went right into sales. That's not usually the path. I feel like maybe two different personality types there. How'd you find yourself doing that?

Jamie Garverick:

One of my college roommate's mom's good friend, that was a senior executive at Oracle. And of course in 1996, Oracle wasn't a household name. It was a much smaller company than what it is today.

So I didn't know. I didn't know. But there was an opportunity to go interview for that role, or interview rather for a sales training program that they had. And so went and interviewed.

It was kind of interesting because they put us in the conference room with a bunch of other candidates. And so you were introducing yourself to different candidates. And the candidates were computer science, UC Berkeley; computer Science, Carnegie Mellon; computer Science, MIT. I was like, Auburn Finance.

I sort of felt like, "I think I'm in the wrong room, but this will be good practice."

So then I really was fortunate in the sense that one of the hiring managers, was an Auburn grad, he's since retired to Auburn, and I think he could probably pick up on the fact that maybe I felt like I was a little uncomfortable. And he was pretty convincing in terms of like, "Hey, this is a great career. You don't have to be a computer science major. We'll train you. We'll help you figure it out. We think you'd do a great job here."

And so I came on board. I trusted him, I came on board. And I was at Oracle for seven, eight years and learned a ton from him and others there. And I've been in the industry for 27 or 28 years.

Sarah Gascon:

Finance, finance are usually more introverts and Jamie, sales and way more of an extrovert. At least you seem like you're more of an extrovert.

Jamie Garverick:

Yeah, I tell you what, it's actually not. I would argue finance background's actually a really good background for sales, especially for when you're selling expensive ticket items. Because we're selling software that's between 50 grand and millions of dollars.

And so anytime you're selling big ticket items, you got to have, to be able to justify it with dollars and cents. And so the ability to understand return on investment, the ability to create a business case, the ability to understand IRR, net present value, the ability to do the math, the ability to know your way around the spreadsheet is really, really important. So those are skills I learned at Auburn that I think probably, certainly helped me, in terms of that career, that might be things that you sort of wouldn't think would be really helpful.

Sarah Gascon:

Yeah. Yeah, that's good that you took those pieces and applied them to the sales position.

Can you quickly tell our listeners a little bit about FullStory and what problems you solve?

Jamie Garverick:

Yeah, absolutely.

So FullStory is a software company headquartered here in Atlanta, Georgia. It was founded by a couple folks who sold a company Google, before Google went public. They started up the Google Atlanta engineering office and built out some great technology for Google. And then determined after their, I think maybe six, seven years at Google, that they wanted to go do something new.

They came across a problem that they were having, which was they would build software products, and it was really hard to understand how people were using them. Are they using the features as intended? Are they encountering bugs or issues?

And so one of the particular engineers, who's just absolutely brilliant, built a product that would look at how users would navigate those software products. And so they looked at that and they're like, "Wow, what if we could do this for websites? What if we could do from mobile apps?"

I imagine name your large retailer, or your large financial services company, or Telco, mean variety of industries who have websites. Quick serve restaurants, for example, would love to understand when someone logs onto that website, what are they doing? Are they experiencing any confusion, frustration? Are they clicking on a link that doesn't work?

And then how do you report on some of that friction in the user experience back to the right people to go fix it quickly?

And so that's what they did. So they built out a piece of technology that does just that.

We've got over 3000 customers today. They range from Chipotle. So if you've ever ordered food through the website or the mobile app for Chipotle, our software is tracking all that stuff. So we know, we don't track your personal information in a creepy way. We just know that there's a user, and we're seeing the user hit on a link that doesn't work. Or we're seeing a user move their mouse around and they can't find a particular button. We collect all that information in order to help them make the user experience better.

So yeah, company's 10 years old. Investors are Google, Salesforce, Dell, Kleiner Perkins, privately held company, growing at a pretty big clip, joined there about four years ago.

Currie Dyess:

That seems like an overwhelming amount of data. You're not just collecting information on who is doing it, but everything that's occurring during that interaction.

How does FullStory analyze the data? How do you process it? I mean, you're talking about billions of data points, right?

Jamie Garverick:

Yeah, absolutely. A lot of data. And so, as you might suspect, Google Engineers built our product on the Google Cloud platform. And so there's a lot of tools within that Google Cloud platform that help us collect, analyze, index, instrument, make sense of all the data, because it is a large amount of data. And that's part of the secret sauce of what we've built.

And we serve it up in a way that people can interpret it. So meaning we serve it up in terms of dashboards and alerts and customer journeys, all in a very visual way that people can really understand what's happening, or how their users are experiencing that website, mobile app.

Currie Dyess:

Who's FullStory's competitors? And how do you stay ahead of them?

Jamie Garverick:

There are a lot of competitors in this space. Interesting about FullStory is we serve a bunch of different markets. And so from the very smallest of companies all the way to the large Fortune 50 around the world in multiple industries. So it ranges from a two-person startup that you'd never heard of before, all the way up to Mercedes, Porsche, Hilton, Peloton, Netflix, parts of Amazon, not the Amazon website itself, but different acquisitions that they've done, Chipotle, Papa John's, et cetera, et cetera.

There are different competitors in the space that sort of specialize in different parts of the market, whether they just specialize in the S&B, or they specialize in enterprise. And so there's different challenging, competing challenges there.

The thing that we did, which was really brilliant, on behalf of the engineers that created the product and had the foresight for this is, and I don't know if this will translate or make a ton of sense to some of the listeners here, but I'll try to explain it in a way that does. Our software automatically instruments the entire website or mobile app on implementation.

And so it's literally just a JavaScript. You copy and paste it to the header of the website, you go through a security process because we want to make sure we're not collecting personal identiful information, PII, or PCI, which is credit card number, that kind of stuff. There's a bunch of stuff that you don't want to track, that we don't track, and the customer doesn't track either. So you go through that process, and once you do that, it automatically instruments everything.

And what I mean by that is, it automatically will tag every button, every link, every image on that website. And so then when users log into the website, whatever they're doing, we're automatically tracking, with the exception of the stuff that we decide we're not going to track.

Our competitors have to manually instrument that. And so what happens is our competitors will install their software and then they'll get everyone in the conference room and they'll say, "Hey, what do you want to see?"

And they're like, "Well, we want to see the checkout process." Okay, tag that, tag that, tag that, tag that, tag that. It's pretty intensive. It's a lot of work to do.

And so for us, we do it automatically, which means time the values very fast. It also means that we capture everything. And so what we've seen here from our competitors is, this is classic. This happens a lot. CEO of X, Y, Z companies, wife, husband, friend, neighbor, went to our website and they hit this air bud. What happened? What happens is that CEO forwards an email from his friend, husband, wife, sister, whatever it is, all the way down to the people responsible for the website and mobile app. And then a lot of times they're like, oh, no, we don't know because we did not instrument that part of the site. And so they have to go back to their CEO and say, we don't know.

And then what then happens is the CEO says like, you better know and you better know next time, and we better not be in this position again. And so then a lot of times they'll discover us and they'll discover, Hey, there's a better way to do this, which is everything's instrumented. Everything's tagged. You have visibility and everything, and you don't have to have someone constantly maintain this stuff because websites, mobile apps, as y'all know, they change a lot. And so with our competitors, as they change, someone's got to have the foresight to go in there and tag all this stuff. And if they don't, then they don't have full visibility into it, hence the name of the company. FullStory.

Sarah Gascon:

So you were able to build FullStory on Google Cloud, is that correct?

Jamie Garverick:

That's correct.

Sarah Gascon:

And how did that occur? Why was that integration into Google Cloud so important?

Jamie Garverick:

The Google Cloud platform provides a set of technology and services that helps you build stuff quickly, and there's a number of different companies that do this. So Microsoft has what they call Azure. Amazon has what they call AWS. And so prior to these types of these companies and services, what happened is someone would buy a server and they would put it in their office or in a data center somewhere, and then they would manually go create software and they'd have to go buy an Oracle database and different technology and sort of piece it all together, which is time consuming, expensive. You got to maintain it. And so there are companies like Google that do this for you, which is from a maintenance perspective, from a performance security, it's all built in. It just really accelerates our ability to go build product. Now, our engineers selected Google Cloud because they came from Google, they were extremely familiar with the Google Cloud platform, how it worked. And so that helped them build out full story faster than they probably could on other platforms.

Currie Dyess:

And Jamie, let's back it up just a little bit. Whenever you got hired at Oracle, you said that the hiring manager was an Auburn grad, and we know that networking is vitally important to people's folks career, especially in the sales industry. Can you just talk to us about your networking experiences and why it's so important for young folks, especially these Harbert College of Business students to do a good job networking?

Jamie Garverick:

It's really, really important. I think it's become increasingly more difficult. I think in this new world where you have a lot of people working from home. I've got a number of folks that are earlier in their career that I try to share my wisdom with them. And one of the things I talk about is make sure you're developing a network. Gosh, just this week I've probably talked to three or four different people that I used to work with and we're just exchanging ideas and thoughts and advice on various topics, but the network is so, so important. I'll tell you a pretty quick story that ties into Auburn. So the gentleman that I referred to earlier that hired me at Oracle when we were working together at Oracle, there's a particular person there by the name of Ken. And Ken had a big career at Oracle and then went on to work at SAP for a number of years in a pretty senior position at SAP.

While at my previous company, we were in the process of trying to sell to SAP, and I quickly figured out through LinkedIn, wow, Ken works at SAP. Ken has the title position of someone who I think would benefit from our software. It's been a while since I've talked to Ken, so I don't know if he remembered me, respond to me. So I reached out to our Auburn friend, Mark. Mark's like, yeah, I know Ken. We talk all the time. Let me get you reacquainted. So he got me reacquainted with Ken. And then I'll fast-forward the story here. I'll try to fast-forward the story. Ken evaluated our software, purchased it, and it was north of 10 million deal for us, which was a significant transaction for my previous company, deployed the software. They got a lot of value out of it. Ken, at the time, reported to the now CEO of SAP.

Christian Klein is a German gentleman, and Ken and Christian were the exec sponsors for our software, meaning that they were the ones who signed off on the budget. They're the ones that were helping us make sure that we delivered the software and that SAP got value out of it. Fast forward a year after that, our second sort of core piece of software, they purchased almost identical, same process, almost identical, same amount investment. And so SAP became a really large customer of... This is my previous company, CallidusCloud became a big customer of ours, and they got a ton of value out of it, and so much that they're then president approached us and said, Hey, we'd like to talk to your CEO. And so that was the first step in the process to where they acquired Callidus. So CallidusCloud was a publicly traded company.

SAP acquired us in April of 2018 for two and a half billion. And honestly without me getting hired at Oracle by an Auburn grad who was a great mentor and him helping me get reacquainted with someone at Oracle that I'd worked with, but not so closely that I felt comfortable calling him out of the blue without that, yeah, there's certainly no way that this company would've gotten acquired by SAP. So I think that's a kind of pretty cool story that emphasizes the need for your network.

Sarah Gascon:

Can you tell us what does it look like to build a go-to market strategy?

Jamie Garverick:

There's a lot to it. So the thing that you really want to first think about is your ideal customer profile. And so you'll hear this referred to as ICP a lot of times and said that basically is, Hey, we built this piece of technology. Who do we think will benefit the most from it? Who will get the most value out of it? And the who is typically could be, what size companies? Are we going after small companies, mid-size companies, large companies. And then you can also look at industries. Are we going after retailers? Are we going after manufacturing companies, fin services? And it can be a combination of those things. And so you got to really figure out who benefits the most. And then you kind of prioritize industries, types of customers, maybe segment in terms of size, and you focus on that first.

And certainly other companies can benefit from your software and you can sell to those different types of companies. But largely, you want to focus on that. So once you define that, the next step is who within those companies benefit the most? And so these are typically positions, titles, people responsibility. And so for full story, the what's called persona, which is the person that benefits the most from full story, is someone in product. And that's kind of a somewhat fancy title for the people who are responsible for building products, meaning software, websites, mobile apps, engineers as well benefit. And so those are the primary personas. So once you define that and understand that, then you got to get really the three components of go-to-market organized around that. And so those three components are marketing. And so generally speaking, how do you market to those industries that you're prioritizing those personas?

How do you create the messaging and positioning so we can our best articulate to them the value that we provide the app sales, right? So sales and marketing are tightly integrated or they should be tightly integrated. And so you've got to go hire salespeople, you got to go put them in the right markets, you got to give them territories that are aligned to the companies you've prioritized, personas, you prioritize, you got to equip them with the messaging, the positioning, the enablement, the training to be able to go best position your product for those, for that ICP.

And then the third part of the go-to-market is really customer experience, or because customer success support. People have different names for it, but once you have a customer, and this is really, really important in the software as a service business. So SAS where you're selling annual subscriptions and these annual subscriptions can be canceled, you don't want them to cancel, that's a bad thing. And so you want to make sure that your customer success group is aligned to best deliver value, so much value that those customers cannot afford to cancel. And so that's a long-winded response. There's lots of different sub bullet points to all this, but that's a long-winded response about creating a go-to-market strategy.

Currie Dyess:

So Jamie, you oversee the global sales team, you're responsible for a lot of people, a lot of people's success, not just with you, but if they do move on in the future to go somewhere else. Can you unpack a little bit of your leadership philosophy as something we're really fascinated by? And you're clearly very successful at that.

Jamie Garverick:

There's three things that I continue to tell our team that I believe in. And it's part of a partnership between sales leadership and our individual contributors, which are the folks that are out in the field doing the hard work in terms of selling, positioning our software. So there's three things we talk about now, one's very sales centric, and I'll start off that way, which is we want them to make an unlimited amount of money, make a lot of money, and we want them to feel rewarded and recognized. And so sales is a hard job. There's a lot of stress involved, at least in the software industry half your income is at risk, meaning we pay you a base salary, the other half you got to go earn by selling software. So that's a lot of stress. And so we want to make sure that when folks are successful, that we recognize them, that they're rewarded, that they've got rich compensation plans.

And we do different things to also sort of non-monetary incentives. So for example, we just got back from our incentive club trip, which was in Riviera Maya just south of Cancun, that was what, three weeks ago. And so for our top folks, you know, can earn a trip. And so that was one of the things that we're really a big believer on is recognition and compensation. The second thing is learning and development. We believe that you're either getting better or you're getting worse. You're not staying the same. And so every day, every week you got to work on your craft to get better. We provide resources. So these are experienced sales professionals and sales leaders that will specialize in sales enablement and training. So we got constant continued education to support these folks. We have a number of different tools that we use to help us understand how well folks are improving their craft.

And then sales leadership is very involved in terms of coaching development as well. And so the thing we tell folks is in our industry, maybe unlike, certainly my parents were, you went to go work for IBM day one, and then you retired 35 years later, those days are sort of over. And so we're realist about this. And so we say, Hey, look, we want to make sure you're in a position for your next step, that you're over prepared. Your next step may be at FullStory. We'd love to be a FullStory, but it could be somewhere else.

And we want to make sure that you feel over prepared for that next step. And that's part of our commitment to you in terms of learning development. And then the last part is just the journey and enjoying the journey. Some of my closest friends or people I worked with, in fact, the guy that I talked to you yesterday, we were catching up and exchanging ideas and commiserating a little bit too, but my wife and I are going to his daughter's wedding here this summer.

And so it's just these relationships matter. It matters who you work with. And it's certainly, I think if you're in a position where you're working with people you don't enjoy being with, you probably should go somewhere else. So enjoy the journey, enjoy the process, realize that there's going to be ups and downs, but develop that network, as I talked about earlier, develop those relationships because these are folks that end up being good friends and you end up getting an opportunity to experience a lot of fun together.

Sarah Gascon:

Definitely a lot of changes have occurred in your career and even in technology. So how has AI changed to landscape?

Jamie Garverick:

Yeah, AI is a hot topic, very hot topic. By the way, so for the listeners out there, and actually we prepared for this, I don't think we got a chance to talk about this. There's a podcast that I'm a big, big fan of called ALL-IN,

Sarah Gascon:

Okay.

Jamie Garverick:

I don't know if you've heard of ALL-IN. So A-L-L, and then I-N, in case my pronunciation's not coming over. ALL-IN it's super fascinating. Some really brilliant folks from the technology industry, probably a third technology, there's a little bit of politics there, but they do a pretty good job of being balanced across the politics and sort of current events and news and stuff. It's a really, really interesting one. I bring that up because I've listened to it, I listened to it a lot, and they've done a pretty good job of unpacking AI, what it means and where they see it going. So AI's very, very new, as you probably know. ChatGTP has made AI, it's helped open up AI and the possibilities of AI I think, to the masses, if you haven't used chat GTP, you should log on and go play around with it.

It's pretty amazing stuff. And so I think because of that, every software company's like, oh my gosh, how can we leverage AI to make our product better? How can we leverage AI to deliver better service, deliver more value to our customers? And so there's all kinds of opportunities. I mean, for me, AI, much like you saw, there's a couple different technology paradigm shifts. So you had cloud computing, which is a big one, and that accelerated a ton of growth both for software companies, but also accelerated a ton of efficiencies for every company in the world. Then you had mobile, same sort of same thing. And I think the next big one is AI, and it's kind of here, but it's new. And so for me, AI is really just going to make things more efficient. And so there's use cases for call centers, there's use cases for e-commerce, there's use cases for just about everything you can think about.

That'll just make things more efficient. So in other words, I know this is a good example, and I'm sure the Auburn professors are struggling with this, but you're going to write a term paper, and let's say that it normally would take you three weeks to write a term paper. With AI you can probably write it in a couple of hours. Yeah, it's a couple of hours. That might be an exaggeration.

You can probably get your first draft out in a couple hours and you can fine tune it and you can probably have it done that day. And so it's just going to accelerate everything. For FullStory, we are in the analytics business, we analyze websites and mobile apps and user behavior, and I think there's a big opportunity for us to make recommendations and advice using AI. So today, this is true of any analytic system, not just full story or what other data you're analyzing, but you log into something and then you got to have a smart operator behind the wheel to going to make sense of the data and to know the right question is to ask that will drive value.

And so I think that AI will basically... Would that work for you? And so you log in rather than say, oh geez, let me go look at my different metrics. Conversions are down. Why are conversions down? Let me go look here. Let me go look there. Well, that doesn't make any sense. That could be an explanation that this stuff goes on for hours and hours and days and days sometimes, right? Rather than all that AI will just say, conversions are down. Here's the top five reasons why we think they're down. Here's the metrics, here's what I would go do, now. It just prioritizes stuff and accelerates all that process for you. And so anyways, it's going to be super exciting to see what's going on. I'd encourage Auburn students who are into analytics to get into AI as well because it's just a huge, huge market and it's going to get bigger and bigger.

Currie Dyess:

Jamie, what advice would you give the Harbert College of Business current students or recent grads?

Jamie Garverick:

I would say a couple of things. So a lot of these folks are getting ready to graduate. You're unfortunately graduating in a tough time and you had nothing to do with that. I was really lucky, and I graduated in a pretty good time.

The people that graduated in, I don't know, call it 2014, 2015, graduated in the best time and there was so much growth and so much opportunity and so much money, and hats off to their luck and graduate at the right time. So you're graduating at the wrong time, which is okay. I would say don't get frustrated. Know that this economic cycle is a cycle. It will get better and there'll be more and more opportunities to open up for you. I would encourage you to try to find a career where you have some passion interest in it. I would also say that I think this is true of every career. It's not a hundred percent fun. The idea of follow your dreams, it's just going to be perfect. There are going to be things that you're going to be asked to do that aren't really fun. That's okay.

It doesn't mean it's not a great career for you, but go find a career or an opportunity that you think you'll enjoy, that you have some interest in, and just go get into it. Know that there's a high probability that you'll discover through that initial job or so that it's not a fit for you. That's okay, too. That is part of the iterative process to getting to where you want to be career wise. And so just be honest with yourself. I mean, I've got people in sales who are fantastic people, they're just not met for sales, they're met for other things. Just like I sort of got lucky. I stumbled in sales and I think I was meant for it, and I've had a lot of success, but I couldn't be an Auburn professor. And so there are people who I think that go into sales who are better equipped at maybe at teaching, maybe at supply chain type jobs, maybe being an operator for a manufacturing plant.

Maybe an extreme was like, maybe you're better off being an airplane pilot for a commercial airliner. I don't know. But just go figure that out. Know that it's part of the process to get you where you want to be. So I guess there's probably a bunch of advice to have in there. Hang in there, economy's going to get better. Roll with the punches. Whatever job you get into, go a hundred percent at it. The thing that I think Auburn taught me that I've used to this day is go outwork. Go outwork your peers. Go outwork your peers. People will notice it, I promise you. You'll feel like they're not noticing it, but people notice it. I know the work ethic about everyone on our team, and I've got about 200 people, and I sort of know who's hustling, who's not hustling, and will get noticed. And it's one of the things I think separates you from others.

Sarah Gascon:

So how can our listeners keep up with your journey and contact you?

Jamie Garverick:

Yeah, absolutely. So I'm on LinkedIn, Jamie Garverick, you can look me up. I think I'm the only Jamie Garverick on the planet, and so it should be pretty easy to find. Connect with me. Happy to provide advice or connect you with folks in my network. If you're out interviewing for different roles and you see them connected to someone, I'm happy to try to help you with that process. My email address is super easy. This is actually something I'm pretty proud of. I don't know why I decided to do this, but I'm really proud and the rest of the Garvericks in the world are not very happy with me.

I own Garverick.com. So my email dress is Jamie, and it's jamie@Garverick.com. And so I've got a number of cousins who were like, oh my gosh, I didn't even think to go to get this, this is something you did when I first got out of college, way back when the internet was just becoming a thing. And so I snagged it up early. I don't know why I thought to go do it, but I'm glad. I'm the owner of garbage.com. I've been the owner of garbage.com for like 20 some years.

Sarah Gascon:

Smart. Well, Jamie, it's been a pleasure. Thank you so much for your time.

Currie Dyess:

Yeah.

Jamie Garverick:

Yeah. Thank you. I've enjoyed it.

Sarah Gascon:

Thank you.

More eagle.

Jamie Garverick:

More Eagle.

Audio:

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