The hiring mistakes that wreck mid-market GTM — Emir Atli, HockeyStack

What's the biggest mistake we could start there? What's the biggest mistake you made from coming out of YC to now that you look back and you're like, "I can't believe I thought this made sense to do this?"

Hiring wrong.

[Laughter]

People, welcome back to another episode of the Revenue Reimagine Podcast. We have with us today Amir Atley, who is the co-founder and CEO of HockeyStack, the command center for B2B Revenue teams. And what I love about Amir is the way he frequently posts on LinkedIn about the old way of measuring marketing and attribution—how it doesn't work—along with all sorts of information about HockeyStack's growth in one of, quite frankly, the most transparent ways I've ever seen. Recently talking about how HockeyStack killed every program that wasn't generating enough pipeline, making pipeline generation a team sport, and that you guys actually set up your first cold outbound program. So excited to dig into everything y'all are doing, the success that you've had, and just what is wrong with go-to-market and how y'all are fixing it, man. Thanks for joining the show.

Of course, I'm really excited. Welcome to the show, Amir.

So tell the audience first: why the name HockeyStack? Like, what was the name based off of? Why'd you call it HockeyStack?

Yeah, so it's coming from the hockey stick growth curve. Basically, if we help companies get to that—if you're already there, we help you continue doing the same thing.

So as a follow-up question on that: one of the things that you guys are doing a lot is really driving Revenue Operations insights from marketing attribution. What's happening with the attribution side? Why is it so difficult to figure out what attribution is, where it is in the RevOps stack, like how to get a hold of that, and how are you guys looking at that from a challenge problem perspective and the value you guys are adding with HockeyStack?

Yeah, so the biggest problem is: if you think about it, we mainly work with mid-market and Enterprise—so like 500 employees to thousands of employees, public companies. If you look at that tech stack, which I'm sure you're familiar with, there's a Salesforce, there's a marketing automation platform, there are at least four or five different advertising platforms, there's a website, there's a data warehouse, and all of these platforms are tracking couple pieces of the buyer journey. So the CRM has deal information, rep data, opportunities, and all that. Marketing automation platform has the email marketing campaigns, forms, and all of that. Website has all of the website data. Data warehouse—if this is a PLG company, it has trial data, or if it's like a large Enterprise, they store revenue data in a data warehouse. So all of these data platforms have one piece or a couple pieces of the buyer journey, and they track that data in the way that they want. So Marketer tracks email marketing campaigns in the way that they have built ten years ago with their own API. Salesforce has this twenty-year-old API and they track it in their own way. And a website—every company has a different website with different structures. So it is really hard to bring all the data points together with all these different APIs and tracking systems and complete the buyer journey in a way that would make sense.

So what we built is one single API to track all the buyer journeys and complete the picture from these different platforms and cleaning and polishing the data from different platforms in one single place. Another problem is every single company has masses of data and they don't have time to clean the data, so we clean the data for them. So that's why. And then the other part is, especially as the company grows—especially in mid-market and Enterprise—what attribution means is different, and it's changing over time. So I advise companies to look at the definition every two quarters for customers so that you can keep people in the company aligned.

So I have a love and hate relationship with what they're building essentially. Because on one hand, you help companies generate more pipeline because they know what to do. But on the other hand, it's affecting people's compensation. Because if you think about it, I'm telling people attribution doesn't mean finding a source. But if you tell reps—SDRs, for example—you need to source deals and it's going to be sixty percent of your compensation, it's going to be your salary, it's going to be your family's future, then you need to make sure that you compensate them fairly, which then equals being a source for a deal. So it's like really complicated. It's different from company to company. But again, one part is the technology problem, the other part is how we think about attribution as a company.

Yeah, so I've never worked someplace that gets attribution right. And I, for a short time, worked someplace that was trying to solve this problem—no longer exists. And talking about attribution and how to properly determine, you know, where things are attributed—whether it be first touch, last touch, et cetera—when you look at that, typically what I found is your marketing leaders have their opinion, your sales leaders have their opinion. Right? If my salesperson spoke to them, you know, if my salesperson did outbound to them, Amir, it doesn't matter how many things you've sent them, right? My salesperson should get credit for that. And marketing tends to flip-flop that where "well, we started that conversation." How in depth do you guys get with advising you know what it should be versus systematically—let's segment it out based on the percentage of touches, et cetera?

Yeah, so it's different from segment to segment. For Enterprise, they usually come with a predefined way of doing it. So they say, "Like, we are compensating people based on this," and we bring it into HockeyStack. So it's like one part is compensation and the other part is generic pipeline. Usually we start from the generic pipeline piece: how can we generate more pipeline for you using the data that you already have? And then the compensation piece, we usually don't touch that part because it's really specific for the company.

For mid-market, usually if a company is smaller—like, I don't know, five hundred, six hundred employees—then there's more. They usually come to us asking more of these questions, and then we get more involved. But like my preference would be staying away from that conversation because, as you know, it's a double-edged sword. You can do well for a company and then still you can get punished for it. I think the best way is literally as a manager, as a leader, you need to keep the team happy. And to do that, you basically need to ask them: do you think you're compensated fairly for marketing and sales? If there's a problem, why? And then you can get to the bottom of it.

Dale, do I compensate you fairly?

No, never. Does not enough money to put up with me on a daily basis?

Is there?

So Amir, when should people really be thinking about this attribution, the RevOps, the control center? You know, what's the size company? What's where does it make sense to implement something like HockeyStack? Because I think a lot of people are saying yeah, this totally makes sense, but I have like eight hundred other things that I'm trying to manage and control. What size would that be for them?

I think it depends on the lead volume. So if you have like ten leads a month, then you can ask them where they found out about you. If you have one hundred leads, then you need the system. If you have a thousand leads, you need it tomorrow.

So it depends on that. And then two, we mainly work with companies who have more than two hundred employees. That's usually a good segment. We need like a marketing ops team. So if you have a marketing ops team, have like a couple platforms that you advertise on or like use for marketing and sales, and if you have more than like ten thousand or close to ten thousand visitors a month, then it's like a good place to start.

If you're a startup, I would advise you to use just first touch and last touch using Salesforce or something like that and spreadsheets. That would be a good way to start, and you don't need to worry about attribution.

I want to shift gears a little bit because y'all's growth has been nothing short of amazing. You know, you started like everyone, right? You're out of YC with little revenue, and what you guys have done is impressive. I obviously follow all of you on LinkedIn, and I love how you're building in public and being totally transparent. But like, where I'd love to know: what's the biggest mistake we could start there? What's the biggest mistake you made from coming out of YC to now that you look back and you're like, "I can't believe I thought this made sense to do this?"

Hiring wrong people.

Hiring wrong people. Probably wasted six months on two people. Hiring two wrong people, wasted two, six months of our life, and it is such a big—so like, I'm sure you know this as well, like being a leader, especially a founder, that is such a hard job. And it's like, the hard work is not—I mean, working hard is hard. Working hard is physically hard, mentally hard. But managing people and working with people and hiring wrong people and just seeing the impact of it on a broader team and then needing to fire people, that is like mentally really hard, emotionally really draining. So I would say hiring wrong people is the biggest mistake. Other than that, go-to-market side, I think the biggest mistake that we did in go-to-market—so our growth kind of happened unexpectedly. So we graduated from my last year, right after the seed raise.

Nine months after that, a serious day—serious day—we didn't, we were profitable and all that. One of our investors preempted us, and it was the right time. Everything happened so fast. Something, things just required more thought, and we didn't have time to do that because everything was like on fire all the time, and we were trying to keep up with momentum.

So one biggest, one big mistake that we are trying to make better right now is two things: treating Enterprise and mid-market and SMB all the same in sales process. One big mistake. Second big mistake that we have been doing the last couple months because we just started up on is trading up on and bond the same.

So if we dig deeper into that—Enterprise, SMB, mid-market—we have three segments. And because of this, by the way, we closed SMB all together for a couple months because we thought, "Let's treat mid-market and Enterprise differently first, then we can open up SMB," which we're opening up right now again because we're at a better point.

So Enterprise, especially six-figure deals—it depends on like how we treat Enterprise, how we define Enterprise. For us, it's anything after 120k in deal size. So these deals require much more attention and more time, more prep, more personalization in the sales processes, more stakeholders. And I've made the mistake of treating them the same and not hiring people at the right time, and that was a really big mistake.

Fortunately, we were able to recover from that really fast. We didn't lose a lot of deals, but we were at the point where we were starting to lose deals because of this. So if you treat SMB, mid-market, all the same, then you end up in a position where you don't have enough time. Your reps don't have enough time to treat them differently, and you don't have the resources to treat them differently.

And one thing that I learned—this is from Mark Cuban, who has been my adviser from the very beginning. Just spoke with him this morning. Yeah, he told me, so I was telling him like, "I think we need to do Enterprise and all that," and he told me that Enterprise is a company sport, not a team sport. So you cannot just change the sales process to get into Enterprise. You need to change the customer success process. You need to change sales process. You need to treat them more differently in marketing. You literally need everything to be different for Enterprise.

So then the next week, next mistake was we changed sales process for Enterprise. We didn't change anything else. Then we failed again. Then at some point, we were able to change everything at the same time. We had marketing that speaks to Enterprise. We had customer success process that speaks to and handles this Enterprise. Then we changed the sales process, and everything fit into the criteria. And then right now we are really successful in Enterprise because the product also works so well on Enterprise, which is like, it's more difficult to change the product in any other process.

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Amir, so as you're growing, like what's the next evolution inside of like attribution? What are some of the trickiest pieces that you guys are running into? So you're going Enterprise, so the product's working. I think it gets a lot trickier when you're starting to sell to Enterprise because things start breaking a little bit. But what are customers really struggling with when it comes to attribution today? Besides data in different places—is it from the channel, is it from direct? Like, what are the challenges with attribution that you guys are seeing?

Yeah, so there are technological challenges and then there are perception challenges. Technological challenges: most teams rely on first touch or last touch. Which means you see two touch points and a buyer journey with hundreds of touch points. Two, most teams just rely on Salesforce campaigns, and most things are not Salesforce campaigns. And then three, most teams rely on—because they rely on Salesforce campaigns—they're only able to see the data that sales people put into Salesforce.

Then perception challenges: attribution literally means attributing something to something else—like dollars to a source, dollars to a touch point. So because of that, people think, "Oh, it's just a way for me to justify my spend, justify my work." When they look, sometimes sales is reaching out and marketing's already reached out three or four times, and they've opened those emails or they've taken a look at whatever you're sending in the newsletter. And the sales person may have just called them at the right time or sent an email at the right place. But really, it was marketing that kind of like started that process. Like, how do you connect those dots together?

Yeah, so do you mean like technologically or perception-wise?

From a combination. I think a little bit of both. From the technology side, but also from the perception side, because they probably work together.

Yeah, from the perception side, for example, for us for our op-band, we do it based on like, if you're asking about compensation and all that, we are doing it based on meaningful engagement from sales. So if there's a meaningful engagement—like, I don't know, they spoke on the phone, there's an email reply, or anything like that—we compensate our STRs once the deal comes through. And we have a lookback window. For example, for us, especially if you have a good brand, this happens a lot.

So an STR speaks to a CMO on the phone. The CMO says, "Okay, I'm good, I'm good right now. I heard about HockeyStack. I don't have the need today, but if something comes up I will reach out." Then the same CMO comes in and contacts sales on our website 45 days later. Then we're able to see there's a meaningful engagement. They've heard about HockeyStack, but they also talked to someone on the phone for 15 minutes. Then we compensate them as well because it's in lookback window. And we have a long sales cycle, so 45 to 90 days is a fair lookback window.

Technologically, we again have one single API for all the data points, so we're able to match all the data points based on the domain. So HockeyStack, one single account, and under the buyer journey we can see sales touch points, marketing touch points, offline touch points, and then we turn all of those data points into dashboards where you can see aggregately how deals or like how accounts engage with your brand.

I feel like there's so many people who don't look at it with such a holistic view. I love the lookback period. I think that's something that I don't typically hear, and I think that's the best way to make it fair because often times, to your point, there is someone—you know, the SDR or full-cycle AE, if that's the case—will reach out to. And you know, then they do come back. But speaking of that, so SDRs or SDRs versus full-cycle AEs. I know you posted about this a while ago. I think I engaged with your post. Polarizing topic—tell me your thoughts on SDRs versus full-cycle AEs. Which is right? Or both?

I think it's yours. That's tell me more.

That's my take. Why? I've tried this multiple times. Whenever I think, there's like two things. One is I always prefer like deal engagement over self-sourcing. Sure, like if I have two hours, if I can push two deals to procurement versus self-source one deal, I would choose the former because I can push them and then close them and then get more money. So like there's an incentive misalignment. And then you can also compensate them, but there's no way you can compensate for one self-sourced deal versus one closed deal.

So that is that. And then two is again, I think there's a balance. I think there's value in keeping reps focused on the deals but also keeping their muscle like self-sourcing—keeping that muscle sharp is important. I think you can do like, I don't know, every Friday, every rep will prospect for two hours and then self-source one or two deals a month. I think there's value in that.

That's not super important for us because we are fortunately our reps—the AEs—have full calendars, and we have a growing STR team, and our inbound is strong too. So it's not a priority for us. But I know in six or seven months once we grow the team, I want to bring that back. Hopefully it's not too late. But I want to bring that back because I think there's value in seeing how hard STRs work to bring those deals so that they treat them respectfully, all the deals, and also keeping their muscles sharp for self-sourcing because you never know. It may be the size of the deals you guys are going after too. So as you go upmarket and Enterprise, those deals, as you know, get longer to close. You have to negotiate. You have a lot of people in the deal cycle, and so you have to be able to keep that top of funnel full. And I think that makes sense from an SDR perspective.

I think as you go down-market it just depends on what the size is, what the velocity is. But it's interesting because one of the things you said is as you guys are growing, like you may look at it a little bit differently too.

Actually, have more full-cycle or maybe you go after a little bit more mid-market as you go down market a little bit. Maybe those guys are full-cycle. Exactly. So, as we open up SMB, I think we will have that. And for SMB, I have SRS who are going to be promoted to AES really soon who will take over SMB. The best thing—I'm a really, really huge advocate of promoting within. The best thing about that is: if they're high performing and if they're a good AE, at any time they have a block in their calendar or they have a day where there's not many meetings, they can self-source. I feel like that is such a superpower for a company where you have reps or advocates of the company can self-source. You train them as an AE, then you have basically reps who can self-source and close deals and evangelize the company and have been with the company for a couple years. That is, I think, that's a really, really good—not a hack, but something that companies can do really well.

I really like how Todd from Amplify thinks about it. We chat about this a few times. He was talking about like: if you tell reps it would be great for you to self-source your deals, you would never get self-sourced deals because if you give them options—"I would love for you to self-source one or two deals a month"—they would never. It never works. If you say on Fridays, especially if you're in person or like if you have an office where we go at least once a month: "If you say every Friday, we will sit down in a room and everyone of us, including the manager, we will go after our top accounts and self-source deals." I feel like that is a really good culture, a winning mindset to have in your team. Lead by example every single time. Lead by example.

All right, last topic before we wrap it up. I'm going to go with a little polarizing topic. We started before we hit record—I commented on the jacket—so you have very strong feelings about being in office. A lot of companies now are going back to in-office. Amazon recently announced that if you don't go back to the office, you're going to be fired. They said it a little nicer than that, but that's my words. But a lot of tech companies and a lot of individuals—whether that be workers or managers—are very much saying that productive work from home. Talk to me about your views on in-office and why. How do you land it on HockeyStick? Will HockeyStick be an in-office company?

Yeah, we started this in January. We prioritized an office, and it's definitely harder to make work. I think from a hiring perspective, you also have higher costs leading to office, especially in an area like San Francisco or like New York. If you're in San Francisco, it's costly. It's harder to hire people because you need to relocate people or you need to find people in one city. It's definitely have a lot of cons, but I think one thing that I found out, which I didn't expect, is: if you create a culture that people want to go to office for, then you get more out of each person. So you effectively need to hire less people, so that balances off the cost of having an office.

So my highlight from September was two people that I hired recently. After a couple weeks, we were all having beers and they said, "I love working at HockeyStick and coming to the office every morning because I love hanging out with you guys. You're friends and also working for the same goal. We're celebrating our EVs all together." That's like one part. And the other part is the feedback loop. When we were remote, there were like every single day I need feedback on something. Then you shout to someone and they're on the East Coast or they're not in the US. Then they're like having lunch. It's early morning for me, it's afternoon for them. Then you wait for that. And then after that, I'm in a meeting. Then I need to—they need to wait for me. Then it's like six hours after that we jump on a Zoom, talk about it for ten minutes, and we leave. Then it's like six hours of waste of time for every single person every day. Then that adds up to a huge amount of time. In person, I think, is the only way to keep the pace moving.

And from my conversations with a lot of people, all founders especially like larger companies like those with 2,000 employees, especially in the YC community, this is like the number one thing that I hear. Founders are trying to go back to office, but now they have 2,000 employees and there's no way to bring 2,000 employees back to the office. So I think the future is in-person or hybrid. I'm a huge advocate of it. I don't know what do you think about it?

Ah, um, Dale, you want to go first or you want me to go?

Yeah, I'll go first. I do—I wouldn't mandate it, but I would also prioritize it. I guess that's the best way I would describe it. I think you can get a lot of things done in person. And I think the hybrid approach probably works best for many people. You know, the big office space now and like, you know, having all the beer and the refrigerator and the, you know, all the things that go around that I think cause distractions as well, instead of just like really getting to work and like actually executing on the things that you need to get done. We like to actually get in front with our clients so that we can actually get a lot more work done when we're in front of people versus like Zoom calls here, Zoom calls there. So I think from a productivity perspective, you could probably get more done quicker when you're together. So I wouldn't mandate it, but I'd prioritize it.

Yeah, yeah, I agree. I think like, we kick off every client with some in-person time. We were—Dale and I were actually just at a client onsite for the past couple days. I think if you can find great talent where you are, even just when Dale and I work together, we get so much more done in person than on Zoom. And even that's even if we have meetings all day long, just being able to look over and be like, "Hey," but I think that cities like San Francisco is a very expensive city to live in right? For the right talent at the right time, I think you make that exception and still require you know some travel to the office and some time in the office. And I think it's very highly dependent on the role.

I don't think, in my personal opinion, like an entry-level SDR probably isn't going to be super successful remote without that camaraderie, that training, that in-office feeding off of one another that they need. If you have a great sales VP that is phenomenal and could really drive your business and lives in Fargo, North Dakota, but you're convinced they're the one, stay in Fargo, North Dakota, but you have to come to the office, you know, once a month. I think it's a balance, but I agree with the prioritization.

Yeah, and then the other thing with that is, sometimes I hear from Canada like, "I don't know, what if I need to go to a doctor? Like, what if I need to run an errand? Do I need to be in office?" Of course not. It's like—I mean, everything is controversial to get engagement, so everything is controversial. But when I say—I think every single company, if you want to grow fast, sometimes it's like if you don't—some companies don't want to grow fast. It's like true. There's other options. Some companies want to be a lifestyle business. They want to grow 2% a month, have a lifestyle that they can balance, which is perfect to find, and you can be remote. But I think my goals, and if you want to grow really, really fast—which I want—and you need to be in person. The people that I hire want to do that as well, so they are willing to relocate, want to come to the office to grow faster. But if that doesn't mean—if you need to run an errand, if you're sick, if you need to go to a doctor, you need to come to an office—I feel like that doesn't mean that. So it's more like a hybrid approach, but that's the catch though, right? Is you're treating people like adults. In office doesn't mean your butt is in the seat every minute from like, if you need to go take the dog to the vet, like do it the same you do at home. Like, just get your work done, but go do what you need to do. We have to trust that we're hiring adults and you're going to manage your time, but when you are working, you're going to be more productive in the office.

Amir, this was insightful to learn more about your insights, HockeyStick's growth, all sorts of good stuff. Before we wrap, we'd love to do some rapid fire with you. The rules are ten words or less. All right, here we go.

Early bird or night owl?

Early bird now. Early bird now is because of kids, because of work.

10:00 a.m. in Eastern time, and it's even late in Europe, so you need to wake up even earlier than that to basically have some sort of time where I can deep work or work out, do something. So I need to wake up early. What time did you get up?

5 right now. You and Dale?

You and Dale. Cool. Um, if you weren't in tech, what other trade or profession would you be in?

If I wasn't in tech, yeah, I always wanted to be a professional athlete. Soccer player.

Soccer. Nice. What is your favorite guilty pleasure snack?

Popcorn flavored or plain? Your favorite?

Oh, butter. Butter flavor. I like it.

What's your most used work emoji in Slack, text, etc.?

Rocket emoji.

All right. Two more. Other than your phone, what's the one tech gadget you can't live without?

I recently got—I don't know if it's tech. I got an eight sleep a month ago. I don't know if you know.

Nice, I do know. I know eight sleep very well. What do you think?

I thought it was overrated, but it's great. Yeah, it's. I had a chance to work with them years ago on a project. The best thing about it is not like the sleep part. I cannot wake up, but I put it in like the hottest mode and vibration. Then you need to wake up because you're sweating.

Yeah, so that is really helpful for me. Nice.

Last one. Let's wrap this up. Dream vacation destination?

Turkey.

Turkey? I just went.

I did it. The one word I use when people ask me how Turkey was—magical. It's one of the coolest places I've ever been in my life.

Amir, thank you so much for joining the show. We appreciate it. We look forward to continuing to watch all of your growth on the sidelines and continuing to see Hockey Stack change the landscape that y'all play in, man. Thank you so much for all the support in this chat. It was wonderful.