Listen on YouTube // Apple // Spotify

Thank you to our sponsor partner:

Outbound sales today is still built around manual work: writing emails, building lists, and managing sequences across disconnected tools.

Nooks is breaking the mold. With their AI Sequencing product, Nooks is an agent workspace where AI works alongside reps, helping them understand accounts, prioritize the right prospects, and generate context-rich outreach based on actual first-party interactions.

No more wasting time in multiple tools – it’s one unified workspace for all your outbound channels. Arm your sales team with intelligent outbound. Learn more at https://www.nooks.ai/gtmfund

Who you’ll learn from

Legora went from $3.5M to over $100M in revenue in about a year, the fastest any company has ever scaled a direct-sales motion from zero to $100M. Then, they doubled it in less than 6 months and just hit $200M ARR!

Patrick Forquer spent 7 years at Braze, from the early days through IPO, before joining Legora (a vertical legal-AI company backed by Benchmark and Redpoint) at $3.5M in revenue. He shares the scaling journey. He also gets tactical on the 3 things he looks for before joining a company, why speed-to-value is the #1 leading indicator of revenue performance, the pilot that lets customers keep everything they build even if they walk, how he structures forward-deploy across legal engineers and traditional FDEs, the Jude Law and Aaron Judge campaigns and whether they paid off, the “8 Mile” objection-handling play, and the shift to consumption pricing.

What you’ll learn:

  • The 3 criteria Patrick uses before joining any company (founder, product, investors)
  • Why speed and quality of implementation is the #1 leading indicator of revenue, and why teams over-index on sales and under-index on onboarding
  • The pilot design that hands customers the IP, integrations, and workflows to keep (even if they don’t buy)
  • How to structure forward-deploy: legal engineers for use-case design, FDEs for enterprise integration
  • Why he hires roughly 2 post-sale people for every 1 pre-sale
  • The Jude Law and Aaron Judge brand campaigns: the real ROI case for B2B brand spend
  • The “8 Mile” framework: disarming competitive objections by naming the competitor’s move first
  • How he screens for real AI fluency in interviews (and why “I summarized my Gong calls” fails)
  • Moving the top product to consumption pricing, and what it did to the metrics
  • Advice for operators on the fence about joining an AI-native company: bet on yourself, the window won’t last

Episode highlights

1:08 – Welcome, and leaving a seven-year Braze run for Legora at $3.5M

1:40 – The 3 criteria: founder, product, investors

4:30 – How to assess a founder, and marrying technical chops with vertical expertise

6:40 – Advice for operators weighing the jump to an AI-native company

9:10 – The early days: first US pipeline, and an office in a Brooklyn apartment

12:00 – From $3.5M to over $100M: the fastest-ever scaling

13:10 – The 2 biggest GTM unlocks: customer obsession and the pilot experience

15:30 – Hiring 2-to-1 post-sale, and forward-deploy structure

18:30 – Why time-to-value is the #1 leading indicator of revenue

21:00 – How to think about forward-deployed engineers for your own product

24:00 – The pilot design: let customers keep what they build

30:00 – The near-death stuff: a full sales tech-stack overhaul mid-scale

32:30 – The Jude Law brand campaign, and whether it was worth it

36:00 – The Aaron Judge and Yankees partnership

38:30 – Measuring brand ROI: pipeline and a brand index

47:00 – What a great AE at Legora does differently

50:00 – Screening for AI fluency: 101 vs. 301-level

52:00 – Handling competitive objections, and the “8 Mile” framework

61:00 – Where to find Patrick

Key takeaways

1. Three filters before you join, and the case for jumping to AI-native.
Before taking a role, Patrick evaluates, in order: the founder, the product, and the investors. On Max Junestrand, he saw unmistakable “founder juice” – a clear vision, extreme competitiveness, and the humility to hire lawyers around his own engineering strength. On the product, seeing Legora (then called Leah) was his “this is what enterprise AI can look like” moment, and who was backing it (Benchmark and Redpoint) gave him confidence.

His advice to operators sitting in comfortable legacy-SaaS roles is that the blocker is fear of not repeating past success, and the window to build generational AI-native companies at this speed won’t last forever. His tell for when to move: “If you’re feeling really comfortable, it’s probably time to go.”

2. Implementation speed is the #1 leading indicator of revenue.
Patrick’s strongest tactical claim: it doesn’t matter how good your sales cycle, product, or CS team is, if you don’t get customers into the product with proper enablement quickly and at a high level, nothing else matters. He says people tend to over-index on sales and support while under-investing in the critical “mesh period” between the two. Legora gets customers to initial value in weeks, not months, compared with the 6-month enterprise deployments he saw at Braze. The approach is a crawl-walk-run adoption curve: start with simple use cases that drive fast ROI, then move into more complex workflows.He hires roughly 2 post-sale people for every 1 pre-sale to make this real.

3. Design the pilot around the customer keeping everything, even if they walk.
Legora is usually the first tool of its kind inside a law firm, so every deal starts with teaching the category, and almost nobody buys without trying first. Their pilot gives the firm the IP, integrations, and workflow docs to keep, converted or not. Worst case, the firm learned to use AI on someone else’s dime. An investor told him it’s the most tactical thing they do. It’s also the opposite of a normal pilot, where the license dies with the contract. Forward-deploy runs on two tracks: legal engineers, who are AI-forward attorneys getting a firm’s templates and drafting style into the product, and FDEs, who wire it in through APIs and MCP servers. Don’t copy Palantir, he says. Look at your own product data, find who gets the most value, work backward from there.

4. Brand bets (Jude Law, Aaron Judge) are worth it when nobody knows who you are.
Legora ran a campaign with Jude Law and more recently partnered with Aaron Judge and the Yankees. Patrick doesn’t hedge on it. Win rates and pilot conversion were already high. The problem was all the deals they never got invited to, especially in the US. The campaigns fixed that specific gap. He waves off the “distracted by flashy campaigns” critique, since the marketing team runs them while everyone else executes, and measures two ways: a brand-awareness index and top-of-funnel pipeline. Both delivered.

5. Hire for AI fluency and high slope, and screen hard for it.
A great AE at Legora sells on value, ramps quickly, and keeps pace with a product that changes every month. In traditional SaaS you learn the demo once a year. Everyone there runs always-on automations, Patrick included. He uses a case interview that makes candidates show their work, and a couple of follow-ups sort people fast. “I summarized my Gong calls” is 101. “I did MEDDIC automation” is 101. He’s looking for 301. The bar he describes: a recorded meeting updates the account plan, the Slack channel, and the Salesforce opp on its own, no copy-paste, so the rep spends that time being strategic instead of outsourcing their thinking.

Patrick Faucher

Sophie Buonassisi (Host)

The GTMnow Newsletter (by GTMfund)
GTMnow merges go-to-market strategy, venture capital and media.
Build, scale and invest with the best minds in tech.

The media brand of VC firm, GTMfund – sharing the how and who behind company growth.

GTMnow

The GTMnow Podcast – subscribe to support

It would mean the world to us if you subscribe to the show on your platform of choice. This helps support our growth, which in turn helps us continuously bring on bigger guests and deliver the content that you want to hear most.

Subscribe on YouTube

Subscribe on Apple

Subscribe on Spotify

The GTMnow Podcast shares how the best in tech build, scale and invest.

Visit gtmnow.com for more episodes, The GTMnow Newsletter editions, and other content.

GTMnow is run by GTMfund, an early-stage venture firm made up of 350+ go-to-market executives from the fastest-growing companies.

GTM 208 Full Episode Transcript

00:00 – 00:04

Patrick Faucher: We were the fastest company ever with the direct sales motion from 0 to 100 million.

00:04 – 00:21

Sophie Buonassisi: It took 18 months to grow from 1 million to 100 million annual recurring revenue. AR. It took them less than six months to double. It just hit 200 million. AR what did you see in Liguria at $3.5 million that made that dream with restarting.

00:21 – 00:27

Patrick Faucher: You know, when I saw the product, it was that. Moment for me. It was like, oh, this is what enterprise AI can look like.

00:27 – 00:33

Sophie Buonassisi: Patrick Faucher of Liguria can’t imagine how many times that song plays in the office.

00:33 – 00:38

Patrick Faucher: Yeah, but Eminem here, a lot of ABBA to a lot of ABBA. You know, we love Swedish pop stars.

00:38 – 00:42

Sophie Buonassisi: Eminem and ABBA is quite the mix.

00:42 – 00:49

Sophie Buonassisi: How did you land on this pilot? Like, was it hard to figure out were there any kind of trial and errors along the way?

00:49 – 01:08

Patrick Faucher: The AI models have developed so much in the past few years, as has the product today, versus a six months ago versus 12 months ago versus, you know, 24 months ago. It’s dramatically different. It’s the first thing is we have to have a really high level of enablement education for our own teams because we ship major features like every few weeks.

01:08 – 01:29

Sophie Buonassisi: There’s usually some kind of near-death experiences or kind of the learnings along the way. Take us behind the scenes into some of those moments.

01:29 – 01:31

Sophie Buonassisi: Welcome to GTM now.

01:31 – 01:33

Patrick Faucher: Hey, Sophie, thanks so much for having me.

01:33 – 01:40

Sophie Buonassisi: Yes, very excited to chat to have you here. I know you’re jumping on a plane to Japan tomorrow, so thank you for taking the time.

01:40 – 01:42

Patrick Faucher: Now, of course.

01:42 – 01:59

Sophie Buonassisi: Now, you spent seven years at brace from the early days all the way through to the IPO. So you’d already done the full kind of braze arc. What did you see in Lagos at $3.5 million that made that journey worth restarting?

01:59 – 02:19

Patrick Faucher: Well, you know, whenever I’m looking at at a new opportunity, I tend to look at three, three things. And the first thing is, you know, who’s your boss going to be? Who’s the founder? You know who’s that leader. And you know, I always say with Max, he’s an alien sent from the future to sell legal AI. And, you know, he’s he’s got that charisma.

02:19 – 02:38

Patrick Faucher: He’s got that energy and the presence, but also the vision for the company. So he and I really hit it off right out of the gate. The second thing I look for is a product that I can really get excited about, that I think solves a big problem. And when I saw it was called Leah at the time, you know, when I saw Leah, now the product, it was that.

02:38 – 02:55

Patrick Faucher: Moment for me. It was like, oh, this is what enterprise AI can look like. And I got really excited about what they were building and the sort of application layer for, for lawyers specifically. When I when I saw the product, I’m very excited about the capability set even. You know, this was, you know, two years ago at this point.

02:55 – 03:11

Patrick Faucher: And the third thing I looked at is who are the investors? Like who’s supporting the business, who’s backing it. And we’ve got, you know, Jay ten from benchmark and Jacob and Logan from Red point had led the series A and so had a tremendous amount of confidence. And the investor said and a ton of support from them as well.

03:11 – 03:15

Patrick Faucher: So all those three things coming together, I got very excited about the opportunity really quickly.

03:15 – 03:36

Sophie Buonassisi: Very cool. Super interesting how you’re thinking about the three points. And speaking of the last point, investors. You know, interview Jason, who led your seed at benchmark. And he told me that when he met Max of super early days, also a couple years ago, and the company was five people still in wiki, they hadn’t even done Demo Day yet, and he didn’t have a legal background.

03:36 – 03:53

Sophie Buonassisi: But one of the things that sold in on Max’s vision was the intelligence layer, the bet that he had, that the intelligence layer was about to get a lot smarter, and that the right to build for lawyers was to actually ride that curve. And at the time, this is like a couple of years ago. Right? That was quite a unique insight.

03:53 – 04:17

Sophie Buonassisi: Of course, then you and the team executed beautifully against it, but you still have to make that early bet in a founder. And for Tatton, who’s betting on somebody that didn’t have a legal background to run a legal company and for yourself as an operator, same thing. So when you saw Max for the first time, which is that first point that you mentioned the founder itself, like, what about him in particular or what what advice would you have for other people assessing founders? How do you know that founder is the right founder for the business that can take it the distance?

04:21 – 04:39

Patrick Faucher: Well, I think one of the advantages I had was that, like you mentioned, having worked at Bray’s, I got to work for Bill Magnusson and Jon Hyman for for seven years. And, you know, they’re incredible leaders. And I learned so much from them during during that period. So I sort of had a vision of what, what good looks like.

04:39 – 05:00

Patrick Faucher: And obviously Max is a different guy than than Bill and Jon. But, you know, that sort of founder, Juice and Energy was something that it sort of, you know, you know, when you see it type of thing. So there’s that, there’s that angle to it. But also when you think more generally about, you know, vertical application layer companies like, like there’s always this blend of deep technical chops.

05:01 – 05:26

Patrick Faucher: So like vertical subject matter expertise. And you’ve got to marry those two things together. And when I saw from Max was a very clear vision and extreme competitiveness and energy to like solve the problems for, for solve problems for lawyers specifically. So even though he wasn’t a lawyer, he, he had a vision for sort of the product and the engineering side of the house that was really compelling.

05:26 – 05:43

Patrick Faucher: And he was humble enough to know that we need to work collaboratively with our customers, but also hire a bunch of lawyers to work with us so that we can marry that deep level of subject matter expertise with deep level product chops. And when those two things come together, you know good things can happen at the application layer from a vertical perspective.

05:43 – 06:03

Patrick Faucher: So what I saw from Max was just, you know, he was very humble. Like you say, he was not a lawyer, didn’t come from a legal background, but he knew that we were embedded with, you know, some of the biggest firms in the world. He knew that if we could build for those firms and be collaborative with them and then bring in our own lawyers to sort of help guide that process, that that would be a good combination.

06:03 – 06:04

Patrick Faucher: And that’s proven to be the case.

06:04 – 06:20

Sophie Buonassisi: I love it, that’s fantastic. And that note, when you see it is something that we certainly feel on the investing side to a GTM fund. It’s it’s hard to explain. There’s certainly quantitative aspect to it and measurement that there’s also this qualitative layer that that is hard to define and pinpoint. But you know.

06:20 – 06:22

Patrick Faucher: 100%.

06:22 – 06:39

Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah. And so you made the jump to La Guerra AI native company. A lot of other operators are in this position where they’re making the jump from an existing company or from a fractional position, whatever position they’re in right now to build AI native. We see it happen all the time now, but there’s a lot of people saw on the fence.

06:39 – 06:46

Sophie Buonassisi: What advice would you give to operators who are similarly looking to assess making that jump to an AI native company, just like you did?

06:46 – 07:06

Patrick Faucher: Look, it’s hard and it’s everything always seemed. You know, it seems smart in in retrospect. But, you know, I gave this sort of the three criteria of what I look for in a company. But most of the people that I talked to who are still at sort of quote unquote, traditional SaaS companies who are thinking about making the move, there’s there’s different reasons people stay.

07:06 – 07:29

Patrick Faucher: Some of it is, you know, familiarity with the leadership team and the company. Some of it is, you know. Oh, well, the you know, there’s some comp questions or, you know, everyone’s afraid to walk away from that next big commission check or things like that. But to me, we’re in a really unique time in history where these companies are getting built at a speed and scale that we’ve never seen before.

07:29 – 07:51

Patrick Faucher: The opportunities out there are so exciting and there’s so much happening, not just in legal AI and sort of AI more generally at the application layer across many different verticals. And to a certain extent, you’ve got to just bet on yourself and make the move. I think the biggest blocker for most people is their own sort of fear that they won’t be as successful as they have been in their current role.

07:52 – 08:12

Patrick Faucher: And you’ve really got to have confidence in yourself, have belief that, you know, you can translate into this new world, but also, you know, the the window for building these generational companies at the speed and scale that we’re doing. I don’t think it’s going to last forever. So I would just encourage everyone to obviously be judicious in your decision making.

08:12 – 08:32

Patrick Faucher: I gave some of the criteria that I use, but at the end of the day, you’ve got to you’ve got to make the leap, got to make it happen. So, you know, have have faith in yourself that you can go in and build in this new environment because it is materially different building in these sort of high hypergrowth AI native companies as compared to sort of more legacy SaaS.

08:32 – 08:48

Patrick Faucher: And there’s going to be a skill set that gets developed here over the next few years for these types of companies. That’s going to be unique and differentiated from other skill sets. And there’s a there’s a really exciting opportunity to go build that. And that’s what I’ve been doing, and that’s what a bunch of my peers have been doing.

08:48 – 09:07

Patrick Faucher: And honestly, having us like having a blast, learning a ton, trying a bunch of different things that maybe I hadn’t done previously. But it’s always, you know, it’s always a good learning experience. And I always say, like, unless you’re learning and challenging your role, you know, it’s probably trying time to look for something else. If you’re feeling really comfortable, you know, it’s probably time to go.

09:07 – 09:26

Sophie Buonassisi: Great advice. I like that if you’re feeling comfortable, it’s time to go. Take us to the early days of lager like day one. You know, the company is basic Apple time zones away. There’s, you know, no US based team. Where did the very first US pipeline come from? Like, what was it like in those early days?

09:27 – 09:47

Patrick Faucher: It was really fun, honestly. And it was it was, you know, building the plane while you’re flying it, literally. So while I was coming on board and in the background, I was able to, recruit a colleague of mine, Evan, who had been, you know, working in the space and had been looking for a new opportunity. So he and I actually started on the same day.

09:47 – 10:07

Patrick Faucher: So I was able to hire someone before I even even started, which is always good. But yeah, you know, a lot of the a lot of the deals in pipeline is sort of originated from Max. And, you know, Robin and our team in Europe working on, on US opportunities. So they had been sort of passively ramping up the US pipeline in the background.

10:07 – 10:26

Patrick Faucher: And then obviously when we came in, there was a couple of opportunities in flight. But the nice thing with selling to, you know, vertical application layer and selling into law firms, as you know, who the law firms are and you know who the corporate legal departments are, it’s a you don’t have to go looking for your ICP. You know, it’s pretty simple right there, right there.

10:26 – 11:00

Patrick Faucher: And so we took a we took over some of the deals that the r r that Max and the team out of Europe had sort of gotten going from Stockholm. And then, you know, we’re able to sort of, you know, start our own PG. We did a bunch of events, a bunch of marketing campaigns. We did every conference, every dinner, every legal tech meetup, you know, taking a ton of calls, taking a taking a ton of demos in the early days, just having myself and, you know, with some support from our team and Stockholm and we got going that way and then slowly over time, you know, hired out the initial team sales folks post sales implementation support, legal engineering. We hired rev ops. So we hired really quickly and we got to scale, you know, very, very fast within the first quarter. And then from there, you know, got an office, you know, stops working out of my apartment, got a proper office and got the team together.

11:17 – 11:20

Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah, yeah, I heard the first office was your apartment in Brooklyn.

11:20 – 11:38

Patrick Faucher: Yes. Yes, very, very, very prestigious office. My my home office there with my, my my son, you know, doing a snack duty for me while between calls. So it was, it was a very important come a long way to this beautiful office we’re now in, in Union Square. So that’s that’s been fun to see.

11:38 – 11:50

Sophie Buonassisi: Now that is fantastic. And help us define you scaled really fast. You mentioned you know you joined at. Correct me if I’m mistaken, but around 3.5 million in revenue. And then what are we at today?

11:50 – 12:10

Patrick Faucher: Well we’re we’re well over 100 million today. We have some announcements coming on on revenue numbers very, very soon. So we’ve we were the fastest company ever with the direct sales motion from 0 to 100 million. So that first year we exited, last year 70 million. We had seven. We had 100 million at the beginning of of this year.

12:10 – 12:13

Patrick Faucher: And we have a couple more big milestones coming up that we’re very excited about.

12:13 – 12:36

Sophie Buonassisi: Very exciting. And that is astronomical growth. UCL for 3.5 million to over 100 million AR extremely quickly. So you can get the title of fastest growing. What were kind of the key, maybe the two biggest go to market strategy decisions and unlocks that you’d say now, in hindsight, were largely responsible for that growth.

12:36 – 12:56

Patrick Faucher: In general. We come to every everything we do with a high degree of customer obsession. Right? And so when people ask me what’s our secret sauce? Or how are we doing things differently? I think everything we’re doing is like extreme focus on delivering value for for our customers. So how does that manifest itself and to go to Market motion?

12:56 – 13:17

Patrick Faucher: Well, you know, first thing that that we really did was how do we level up, continually level up like our pilot experience. So with, you know, a lot of AI companies like, like Lagonda, you know, we’re in a category creation moment. We’re not we’re you know, obviously we have some competitors in the space and we do, you know, replace competitors, you know, at times.

13:17 – 13:37

Patrick Faucher: But most of the time when we’re selling a deal, it’s we’re the first sort of product of that kind at the law firm or at the company. And so when you’re in a category creator, you’re doing a lot of education on what what the requirements are, what good looks like, how do we think about adoption and impact our business assessment and all these different things?

13:37 – 13:59

Patrick Faucher: So for us, that starts with the pilot experience, because all of the firms that have bought us and all of the the corporate legal departments that have become customers, you know, they many, most of them have tried before they buy. And so how do we deliver a sort of a really elite pilot experience focused on delivering value, focus on education, adoption and finding those use cases?

13:59 – 14:20

Patrick Faucher: They’re going to be a material business unlock for our customers. And we find if we really focus on that and focus on execution, you know, being highly responsive, be prepared. You know, do what you say you do when you’re going to do it. That pilot experience is absolutely critical. The other area where we look at is actually I hired 2 to 1 post-sale to presale.

14:20 – 14:58

Patrick Faucher: So we are we are heavily, heavily focused on implementation change management and then ongoing transformation. And that’s something that we want to level that up every month, every quarter, everything that we do with the customer, we want to focus on delivering impact, delivering value, helping our customers stay ahead of the latest trends in AI. You know, we have access to all of the latest and greatest models through, but what we can do as a product is so dramatically impactful on the businesses we work with, but everything has to be tailored to how they like to do things like draft, how they do things like legal research, their templates, their style.

14:58 – 15:22

Patrick Faucher: And so it’s about taking the foundation layer of the product and then using our skills, templates, etc. to sort of customize the experience, to bring together all the knowledge at the firm into a way that makes the biggest impact. So the focus on implementation, change management and ongoing transformation has been absolutely critical because, you know, the technology works, but unless people are going to go actually implement and use it in a meaningful way, then we’re all wasting our time.

15:22 – 15:32

Patrick Faucher: And all the all the, our growth doesn’t matter unless we absolutely focus on, you know, that that relationship on ongoing and transformations super critical.

15:32 – 15:48

Sophie Buonassisi: Super interesting. Let’s dig into that a little bit more because I mean a role that’s continuing to grow in popularity is the Ford deployed engineer, which really helps that post sales process. And you mentioned 2 to 1 ratio. How do you overall structure your deployed resources. At La Guerra.

15:48 – 16:12

Patrick Faucher: We have two different flavors of four forward deployed. Firstly is of course we have our team of legal engineers and our legal engineers are super well known in the market for being extremely high caliber. These are, you know, attorneys who are AI forward, who have different specialty areas. So we have funds, attorneys, we have a attorneys, we have commercial, you know, in-house attorneys and everything in between litigation, you name it.

16:13 – 16:44

Patrick Faucher: And so what our legal engineers do is they help our clients, as I mentioned previously, tailor the environment to codify all of their sort of knowledge, documents, context, drafting style, etc., into, into. And that’s a that’s an extremely critical part of our work with our customers is how do we make sure that the environment is designed exactly for how you like to work and the type of project and customer matters and deals that you’re you’re working on.

16:44 – 17:00

Patrick Faucher: So our legal engineers will forward deploy and go sit very often with especially with the big law firms and big corporate legal departments, they’ll want our folks to come in and spend a ton of time, you know, helping get everything set up from a workflow perspective, making sure the outputs are what they want, etc.. So that’s one end goal.

17:00 – 17:38

Patrick Faucher: And then, of course, yeah, we have, you know, more traditional for deploy engineer engineers who can go, you know, help, you know, connect into the rest of the enterprise ecosystem through things like APIs and MCP servers. So there’s there’s different ways that you do it. But the forward deploy engineering work is heavily informed by the use case design that our legal engineers do like this is a workflow to do X in order to achieve this workflow and do it at a really high level, we need to connect with system Y, and those two teams can then go work together on building out what what good looks like from a from an implementation perspective.

17:38 – 17:42

Sophie Buonassisi: Understood. And how long does that process post sales occur for?

17:42 – 18:02

Patrick Faucher: Well, we get to time to values very quick. I mean, you know, relative to other solutions or even, you know, going back to my experience with, with braze like brazen limitations, there’s a ton of data migration work. There’s a ton of you have to set up, you know, IFPI warming, and you have to, you know, register the push tokens with Apple and Google, all these different things.

18:02 – 18:22

Patrick Faucher: It would take like six months to get a big enterprise deployment going with our with our stuff. I mean, because we do so much during the pilots and the, the sort of technical configuration is very quick. You know, our general implementation of like when can you start using it’s like you can start using Agora from the day one of the contract.

18:22 – 18:45

Patrick Faucher: But the longer implementation of like how do we build the more complex workflows, how do we there’s a complexity curve that sort of comes with the adoption framework. So you might as a crawl, walk, run, right. You might start with something simple today. And then we build into sort of the more deeper complex use cases over time. But it doesn’t take long to really see, you know, time to value is very quick.

18:45 – 19:06

Patrick Faucher: It’s weeks, not months. And then, you know, over time our focus is we’re going to start with the crawl use cases. And then we’ll go walk run, you know, over the next coming months. So we get to an initial ROI very quickly. And then we move up the complexity curve over the next couple of months and then focus on that ongoing transformation, documentation, etc..

19:06 – 19:15

Sophie Buonassisi: And time to value this, a really important metric. How do you think that other founders, other operators should think about that metric specifically in their process?

19:15 – 19:39

Patrick Faucher: When I talk to founders or other folks who do what I do, I, I do think that there’s a general lack of focus on on implementation. The speed and quality of the implementation is the number one leading indicator for in our performance of any business. It doesn’t matter how good your cell cycle is, it doesn’t matter how good the product or the customer success engagement team are.

19:39 – 20:07

Patrick Faucher: If if you do not get people into the product with appropriate enablement and guidance really quickly and at a really high level, it doesn’t matter what you do. So in general, I think people over index on sales and, you know, support and under index in that very critical mesh period between the two and and doing that at an elite level, it’s different for every product in every industry.

20:07 – 20:27

Patrick Faucher: And there’s different things that you you know, how we do things here is different that you might have to do things in our company, but in general, like finding the golden path there and focusing on, you know, getting to value as quickly as possible, documenting that, sharing that information, etc., like up and broadly within an organization is is incredibly important.

20:27 – 20:29

Patrick Faucher: And it’s something I don’t think people spend enough time focusing on.

20:29 – 20:53

Sophie Buonassisi: Super interesting. And then the for deployed part, you know, you you invest it on 2 to 1 post sales kind of ratio in the forward deployed sense. How should other people think about forward deployed. Because what we hear at least is a lot of people are interested, a lot of people are deploying these kind of resources, but it’s so variable because every customer experience can be extremely different based on their use cases.

20:53 – 21:05

Sophie Buonassisi: How should people be thinking about is it right for them to bring on forward deployed engineers, and if so, like what is that calculation look like? Because there’s so much variability of what customers want.

21:06 – 21:33

Patrick Faucher: For deploy a term that gets thrown around a lot. Right. And and it means different things to different companies. I mean, obviously everyone’s sort of, you know, looking at the Palantir model and thinking that they need to do their version of the Palantir model. But like I said, actually, for us, it’s less around. It’s not that the for deploy engineering work isn’t critical like it is, but it also has more to do with, like the education piece that’s being done with our with our legal engineers.

21:33 – 21:56

Patrick Faucher: You can’t get to the more complex like workflows and use cases unless you start with the the foundations. And so when I talk to other folks who work in other sort of vertical application layer companies, everyone is a different point of view on like what Ford Deploy looks like. To me, it’s more around how do you find the best and highest use of your product?

21:56 – 22:20

Patrick Faucher: What’s the path to that? Everyone knows, like the metrics for their own product of like, well, if they do these three things or if they use these, these three products, we know that, you know, they’ll start using the product or the tool on a daily, weekly active basis. So mostly it’s around like understanding the data from your own product of like who are your best users, who’s getting the most value out of your tool?

22:20 – 22:41

Patrick Faucher: What are they doing that’s leading to to that? Like how are you capturing those things like NPS or other feedback loops? And then what do you need to do from a services perspective to get people to that to that point? And for some products, that’s pretty easy. And there’s a lot of like plug type motions you can put in place in the product to help guide users to those specific behaviors.

22:42 – 23:14

Patrick Faucher: Others, they’re more enterprise. It’s more it’s more bespoke. And you have to do more, you know, with people basically, as opposed to doing more in G. But understanding what the metrics are that you’re trying to get to from a product perspective of, like, we want people to do these things in the product, and we know that they do these things in the first, you know, 24 hours or a week or whatever that they’re going to have, like x percent, you know, uplift and adoption metrics, use your own data to make your own decisions and then decide, are you going to push people up the curve with the product of the curve with people?

23:14 – 23:34

Patrick Faucher: What’s the interoperability between those two things? What is good look like? And then you build, you work backwards from there. Again, it all starts with the customer. And like how their usage patterns, how the usage behavior sort of tracks. And then you’re just going to build the services model around, like getting folks to adopt the parts of the platform that deliver the most value for the customer.

23:34 – 23:55

Sophie Buonassisi: Super tactical. Thank you for that breakdown. And your pilots are truly fascinating. You know, talk to and he called them or at least the the pilot design. Jason called the pilot design the most tactical thing that does because he said whatever the customer builds during the pilot, that the IP, the integrations, that workload documentation, it’s theirs to keep.

23:55 – 24:16

Sophie Buonassisi: So if they walk fine, they’ve learned to use AI, which is a plus. It’s kind of the opposite of a traditional pilot for a lot of companies, because typically a company will switch the license off the second the contract evaporates or anything like that. So it’s quite a customer forward pilot that you have where you really are looking out for.

24:16 – 24:25

Sophie Buonassisi: Like you said, the customer, how did you land on this pilot? Like was it hard to figure out were there any kind of trial and errors along the way?

24:25 – 24:57

Patrick Faucher: We haven’t done everything perfectly. And, you know, we take feedback really, really well from, from our customers. And but it does come from like that, that point of view of like customer obsession but also customer education. Because like I said, we’re usually the first product of our kind, like going into these, these accounts and generally like the AI models have developed so much in the past few years, as has the product like the product today versus six months ago versus 12 months ago versus, you know, 24 months ago.

24:57 – 25:19

Patrick Faucher: It’s dramatically different. So the first thing is we have to have a really high level of enablement education for our own teams because we ship major features like every few weeks. So one thing that people notice when they do a pilot with us, let’s say they do a 2 or 4 week pilot, you know, they’re going to see a new feature release of some like very exciting functionality come into the product like during that period.

25:19 – 25:53

Patrick Faucher: And so then we have to go show them, like to do use case discovery around like those new features and capabilities. And how does that impact the outcomes that we’re trying to deliver. But for me it’s more around the education customer obsession. Everything comes back to are we prepared for every conversation to go in and show our customers something that’s going to make a big impact on their business, really help them deliver for their customers internally and externally, and do something where they’re going to want to build that muscle memory around an initial set of use cases, and then work collaboratively with us to do more.

25:54 – 26:15

Patrick Faucher: And we’re always pushing ourselves and our customers of like, how can we do more, deliver more because we know if we’re delivering for them, then they’re delivering for their clients. So it’s a really basic premise. It’s not that sexy, but we want to help our customers win. And the first thing is like from a cultural perspective, when you join, we make that very clear.

26:15 – 26:33

Patrick Faucher: Our cultural standards are LFD, lean and fight for excellence and grow together, and in particular on the on the the lean in perspective. We really want to lean in with our customers and we want to fight for excellence and our delivery model. And so we don’t get that right. Our customers definitely let us know, you know, lawyers, they’re not shy.

26:33 – 26:52

Patrick Faucher: They’ll let you know if you’re doing a good job, not a good job. And so we always take that feedback loop. And we have changed our pilot process. Now has developed so much. We have so much more data. We have so many more strategic ways in which we can uncover value for our customers. And we’ve really, really taken that to heart.

26:52 – 26:54

Patrick Faucher: And we have an amazing team focused on that every day.

26:54 – 27:13

Sophie Buonassisi: That’s incredible. Well, I would say the meaning of your LFG acronym is a little bit different than my mind jumped to initially when you said it, but I love the meaning and the more data you have from the forward deployed side, right? The the more you can inform that process. That completely makes sense now. You went a crazy scaling journey.

27:13 – 27:34

Sophie Buonassisi: We talked a lot about the good things that you did or on the pilots the for deployed side. All of these go to market moves and plays that you did that helped unlock that growth. Tell us kind of the the underside. Because usually when you have that kind of growth, particularly that explosive growth, there’s usually some kind of near-death experiences or kind of the learnings along the way.

27:34 – 27:37

Sophie Buonassisi: Take us behind the scenes into some of those moments.

27:37 – 27:54

Patrick Faucher: You know, one of the people always ask me like, what’s breaking, you know, and or like, what did you what have you learned or what what’s been super hard? I think for us it’s more basic stuff around, you know, at the end of last year, for example, we did a basically a full sales go to market tech stack overhaul, right?

27:54 – 28:18

Patrick Faucher: We implemented Salesforce, we implemented we implemented a bunch of new AI systems and other things that we were using new like operating model. And so anytime you’re going through anyone who’s ever been on a CRM migration as an example or any type of technology change, and as we were just talking about, you know, there’s always bumps in the road and things that, you know, operational effectiveness.

28:18 – 28:37

Patrick Faucher: How do we do things like pipeline hygiene in the right way, forecast consistency, all that stuff? We’ve had to really elevate and evolve. And, you know, when I started we had very low, you know, very low adoption of like our CRM. And we weren’t really you know, our tech stack wasn’t all speaking together. We didn’t have enough automation going.

28:38 – 28:53

Patrick Faucher: And so as we were scaling that was causing that, you know, cause a lot of enablement, change management issues the way we’ve, you know, we’ve mostly gotten through it. But there was definitely some bumps in the road as we sort of evolved our reporting structure, operating model, sales tech stack and all that stuff.

28:53 – 29:14

Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah, yeah, I mean inevitable with that kind of growth too, I’m sure. Definitely. And let’s talk a little bit about from the the scaling journey your brand plays, because you’ve had some really interesting ones, especially one recently. But let’s start with the first, I would say Big Splash, which was, you know, ran a brand campaign with Jude Law.

29:14 – 29:23

Sophie Buonassisi: And many companies are considering running these big kind of brand campaigns. So for anyone considering, like, was this Jude Law campaign worth it for you?

29:23 – 29:23

Patrick Faucher: How did.

29:24 – 29:26

Sophie Buonassisi: How come?

29:26 – 29:46

Patrick Faucher: Well, look, anytime you do a brand campaign, I’ll just say this. Like, everyone’s worried that what if, like someone does and, you know, not everyone like the the Jude Law campaign, it did about 100%. But the biggest issue that we had was people didn’t know who we were in particular in the States are win rates. Our funnel is is all extremely high.

29:46 – 30:09

Patrick Faucher: And so for us, it’s just can we get into a pilot. And when we get into a pilot our conversion rates are incredibly high. And for us we just there was too many deals where we just weren’t playing because people didn’t know who we are. And I can tell you that our brand recognition, our top of funnel, our ability to get into deals we wouldn’t have been into otherwise, like all of that came from from the Jude Law campaign.

30:09 – 30:27

Patrick Faucher: It had overwhelmingly positive feedback. And yeah, it of course wasn’t for everyone. Certain people didn’t like the that’s not the point. People were like, oh, you guys are too distracted by these big campaigns. It’s like, you know, we have a marketing team who’s doing the marketing stuff. Everyone else is focused on delivering, on building and executing for our customers.

30:27 – 30:35

Patrick Faucher: And as long as we’re getting into the opportunities, like that’s all we really wanted and it was 100% worth it. And, you know, I do it again.

30:35 – 30:41

Sophie Buonassisi: How are you kind of thinking about ROI from that? Are you tangibly translating it to revenue or more so top of funnel?

30:41 – 30:52

Patrick Faucher: There’s a couple of different ways. Like we have a brand measurement index and we also have, yeah, top of funnel ROI in terms of the amount of pipeline we generated from that, both of which were incredibly impactful. And we feel good about.

30:53 – 31:07

Sophie Buonassisi: That’s awesome. And now you’ve got a very recent exciting brand announcement with Aaron Judge of the New York Yankees. How do we land on this? Because presumably more people know about La Gora. Now, why did you decide to go big with this big brand campaign now?

31:07 – 31:30

Patrick Faucher: Well, first of all, you know, we’re New York tech company here in the States, like we’re in New York City. We’re really focused on, you know, being the best, the best and biggest tech company here in the city. And if you want to do that, there’s no better partner to work with than the Yankees. And and Aaron Judge obviously also judge, you know, related to legal work.

31:30 – 31:50

Patrick Faucher: In a fun way. But he’s an amazing player. He’s doing things in a really elite level, the the Yankees or the the type of brand that I think we would all aspire to, to have. And so, you know, getting the opportunity to work with the Yankees worker there and judge was a dream. And, you know, like you said, but you say that we’re really well known now, but we’re not as well known as we want to be.

31:50 – 32:09

Patrick Faucher: We have really high goals. We have really high standards for expectations around our awareness. And we, you know, we weren’t there yet and there’s no better partner to work with on something like that than, than the Yankees. And so we were super thrilled to do that campaign. I thought it came out incredibly well. Our partnership with the Yankees has been amazing.

32:09 – 32:27

Patrick Faucher: It’s really fun. I got a I have a seven year old son who plays baseball. And when we watch the Yankees game to see the sign. You know, it’s super, super cool. And we’ve seen great results and great feedback from from that as well. So we feel amazing about the results that we’re seeing there. And you know, again, would definitely do it again.

32:28 – 32:33

Sophie Buonassisi: Super cool. And and how special to be able to bring your seven year old to the game to and see look out there.

32:33 – 32:43

Patrick Faucher: He thinks I know Aaron Judge is the only problem with that campaign. He’s like, oh, you work with Aaron Judge? I’m like, well, I haven’t met him, but maybe one day. But we.

32:43 – 32:45

Sophie Buonassisi: Need a we need to sign Jersey for yourself.

32:45 – 32:55

Patrick Faucher: I know I gotta, I gotta figure that out. I gotta talk to our marketing team and figure that out. But but overall, it’s been great. They’ve been an amazing partner. And, so we’re we’re thrilled with it.

32:55 – 33:12

Sophie Buonassisi: Amazing. And when you are signing these big kind of brand campaigns, whether it was the first one, this one, are you anticipating a certain ROI ex on that like from the Do law for example, based on the results of that. Do you have a from this one?

33:12 – 33:24

Patrick Faucher: Yeah, we have goals for for all the brand campaigns we do. We have goals around top of funnel, our brand awareness index and things like that. And they’ve all delivered. So we’ve we’ve been we’ve felt really strongly about the outcomes. And it’s been.

33:24 – 33:25

Sophie Buonassisi: Are you able to share any numbers.

33:25 – 33:26

Patrick Faucher: I’m not.

33:26 – 33:28

Sophie Buonassisi: No that’s fair. Totally fair.

33:28 – 33:30

Patrick Faucher: They’ve been really good. Yes.

33:30 – 33:32

Sophie Buonassisi: Good. Yes. That’s what we need.

33:33 – 33:47

Patrick Faucher: We have well we have some stuff to share publicly. We will. But I can just tell you that it’s been great. And from a sales perspective, again, all we want is we want the opportunity to go, to go big and get into the rooms that we’re not in. And we’ve been been able to do that.

33:47 – 33:51

Sophie Buonassisi: Incredible. Well, for anyone watching the Yankees games, you’ll see lager out there.

33:52 – 33:52

Patrick Faucher: Yeah. Go, Yankees.

33:52 – 34:06

Sophie Buonassisi: Go, Yankees. All right, Pat, let’s talk specifically about vertical go to market because you’ve run vertical go to market multiple times. Like what is your biggest piece of advice to operators and founders that are building in vertical specifically?

34:06 – 34:28

Patrick Faucher: There’s probably two things that I would that would index on. One is everyone has a different perspective on how much experience you need in a particular vertical to be effective in that, in that vertical meeting, like, are you a lawyer or have you worked in legal tech for a long time? And what’s the right mix of, you know, legal tech slash lawyers versus, you know, sort of general tech technologists?

34:28 – 34:55

Patrick Faucher: And for us, it’s it’s about marrying the two together in a really effective way. Because, you know, we have our biggest team within my organization is our legal engineering team, as I mentioned. They’re hyper focused on educating our customers and helping our clients adopt AI into their sort of internal workflows and building really cool, you know, a long horizon task that that is increasingly completing work on behalf of our of our customers.

34:56 – 35:24

Patrick Faucher: So we have our legal engineering team, but we also have, you know, our sales folks. We also have post-sale support, ongoing customer engagement, implementation, change management. Not everyone can have a legal background. And so mostly that index is towards enablement. Right. So we have a lot of folks who join with like deep deep legal and legal tech expertise who we then have to go teach about, you know, maybe do some education on AI or technology or implementation change management.

35:24 – 35:46

Patrick Faucher: And then we have folks who really go deep on sales implementation, change management, AI transformation, things like that, who maybe no less around about, you know, like how a law firm operates or how a corporate legal team operates. And so we do a lot of enablement education on on that. And so there’s this sort of like bidirectional enablement program that you have to have depending on sort of where you’re indexing.

35:46 – 36:08

Patrick Faucher: But we hire folks who have a really high slope, who are super intelligent, who are going to work their butts off to, you know, get up to speed on wherever they might have, you know, gaps. And and it’s about the the marriage of deep subject matter expertise with sort of like the operational excellence that comes with people that know how to run technology companies and bringing those two things together.

36:09 – 36:29

Patrick Faucher: And we found the right balance there. So, so finding the right balance in marriage there is super critical. And a lot of it comes down to enable an education of like how you bring people into the business so you can hire people who fit in with like the cultural values that you have, but also can go execute at a high level credibly in the market with, you know, with our customers.

36:29 – 36:50

Sophie Buonassisi: That is by far one of the most common questions that actually comes up, at least from the investment side for early stage vertical companies is who do you look to hire someone with relevant sales depth and experience, or someone with domain expertise? And it sounds like you’ve struck quite the ratio. What about the early days? For any founders that are building in the vertical space?

36:50 – 36:55

Sophie Buonassisi: Should they think about that first hire being domain expertise or sales expertise?

36:55 – 37:18

Patrick Faucher: I think it depends on what you have in house already. Right. So if you’re like, you know, with our founding team being engineers, we really quickly brought in legal folks with deep legal background to sort of help that marriage around, you know, in addition to collaborating with our customers. How do we think about servicing these, these companies? How do we think about educating lawyers in AI and all these different things?

37:18 – 37:39

Patrick Faucher: And you have to have that sort of deep level of engineering expertise, which we then our first tires, like Robin, Moe and others who came in, they came from like a firm background that could sort of help them. Whereas if you’re a founder who’s coming from industry, you might need help on transformation or engineering. Then you’re looking to bring in sort of folks who might specialize in another area.

37:39 – 37:57

Patrick Faucher: So it’s I think it’s about more about finding the balance based on what you have in house today, and then sort of going to market with that sort of joint story of deep subject matter expertise, married with deep technical chops, and we look for folks to sort of index in one of those areas who can slope into the other.

37:57 – 38:04

Sophie Buonassisi: That makes sense. Okay. Brilliant. And do you have a specific ratio that you hold for that balance right now, or does it vary?

38:04 – 38:26

Patrick Faucher: It varies. But I mean, we’re hiring legal engineering is our biggest team will continue outside of engineering. And so our general perspective is if we’ve got deep levels of engineering talent, deep levels of legal engineering, you know, the sales and implementation stuff we tend to hire, you know, for for folks with that background in those areas. And then we overlay that with engineering, illegal engineering talent.

38:26 – 38:30

Patrick Faucher: And that sort of helps us bring together the right mix.

38:30 – 38:43

Sophie Buonassisi: Very cool. And, you know, it takes incredible, incredible operators to scale the velocity that you you did. What does a great AI at look or do that you haven’t really seen at other companies before.

38:43 – 39:05

Patrick Faucher: Well well firstly is they have to have deep sort of value selling framework and understanding of how to deliver value for our customers. Again, going back to that sort of customer obsession, we want folks who are going to be super focused on ramping really quickly, super focused on staying up to date and engaged on the product. Like we can’t hire people that don’t know how to demo.

39:05 – 39:29

Patrick Faucher: We can’t hire people that don’t understand AI or use AI deeply. We screen for how folks are using AI in their go to market strategy. Today, like everyone, including myself, super AI, we use AI all the time across every step of of what we’re doing, and we are increasingly have a very long list of like required automations that are always on with the AI tools that that we use.

39:29 – 40:03

Patrick Faucher: So I need actually people that want to build and do really cool stuff. With AI tools, we give you access to anything that you need access to. We have all the governance frameworks in place, and we want people to go and run and execute at a really high level. So if you start from a perspective of selling value, focusing on the customer, and then you overlay incredibly smart, hard working people that know how to build with AI and are independent and can sort of push the push the ball and push push the speed of what we’re doing is like the other thing is like we had to be so our output per head has to be really high, and we’re in a competitive dynamic where our team has to be better than every other team. It’s our productivity per head, number of opportunities per head. You know what win rates, everything that we’re looking at from a data perspective has to be incredibly high. And we look for, you know, people that are going to come in and build with a really high slope and stay up to speed with the product, because that’s the other thing, you know, traditional SaaS, you go into the annual kickoff, you learn the demo, you learn the, you know, discovery framework, and then maybe you have like a rev on that.

40:35 – 40:54

Patrick Faucher: Like at the midpoint, our product changes dramatically every month. So you’ve got to stay way ahead on the product. You’ve got to be a deep level of product expertise. We can’t hire people that don’t know how to demo, don’t know how to tell our conversation, don’t know how to sort of ramp into legal expertise. Like if you’re like, oh, I’m going to bring in someone else.

40:54 – 41:15

Patrick Faucher: It’s like, no, like you need to know that, right? You have to have the agency. You have to have the responsibility and accountability that you’re going to take complete control of everything that you’re doing with the customer and have a deep level of subject matter expertise. You have really high standards for what we look for. And so people that are used to having other people do do their work for them or, you know, have other people build for them.

41:15 – 41:32

Patrick Faucher: It’s like, no, you got to do that here. But the flip side is you’ll never be busier and never have more opportunities to work on, and you’ll never work with the more talent dense group of people than we have here. Our team is elite. We have, I think we have the best team in the business, and we have a really high standard for excellence.

41:32 – 41:42

Patrick Faucher: So if that’s not and everyone works hard, travels a lot, builds a lot, does a lot on their own. You know, we need you to take that responsibility and agency and ownership. And that’s not for everyone.

41:42 – 41:46

Sophie Buonassisi: How do you screen for AI capabilities in the process?

41:46 – 42:10

Patrick Faucher: A couple of different ways. What we do have a case interview where people are expected to, you know, demonstrate AI acumen through various things we ask them to do in that case. But we also, you know, dig into what they’re doing with AI in the interview process, and you can figure out pretty quickly with some pretty basic question sequences of like, who knows what they’re talking about and who doesn’t.

42:10 – 42:11

Sophie Buonassisi: Interesting. Okay.

42:11 – 42:29

Patrick Faucher: And if it’s just like, oh, like, you know, I made an account plan with AI, it’s like or like I did, like a meeting minute summaries. I like, summarize my like, gong meeting minutes did med pick automation. I’m like, that’s not what we’re looking for. I mean that’s like yeah, pretty basic one on one. There’s a lot of basic one on one stuff happening out there.

42:29 – 42:34

Patrick Faucher: And we want people that are doing two and 301, you know, doctorate.

42:34 – 42:36

Sophie Buonassisi: Of 201301.

42:36 – 43:02

Patrick Faucher: Well, there’s a couple of different ways we, we would look at something more advanced. For example, we have a ramp dashboard that we use to look at a number of different factors as people are ramping into the business. So there’s a bunch of automation we have set up around reporting, you know, number of meetings, meeting quality scoring, things like demo quality scoring, things like discovery, quality scoring, follow up and follow through.

43:02 – 43:29

Patrick Faucher: It’s like, are you doing what you said you’re going to do when you’re going to do it? How are we looking at pipeline progression? And we’ve automated all that with, with AI into a, into a dashboard. So it’s not just like are we looking at this particular call. It’s like we have used AI to bring together a bunch of different metrics into a single pane of glass, where we can then have a multi data point, point of view on, on, on how our reps are doing from a, from a, a ramping perspective.

43:29 – 43:52

Patrick Faucher: And then there’s things that reps are building around like if you, you know, record a meeting, does that meeting automatically get updated into the account plan. Does that update the SOC channel. Does that update the Salesforce opportunity? Do you then have an account brain of like learnings and and account maps to get updated as a as a half of that, you should not have to copy and paste anything.

43:52 – 44:16

Patrick Faucher: As a general rule, you should not have to have handover documents of any kind. As a general rule, all of that should be automated and shared in a way that doesn’t mean you’re taking your brain and giving it over to AI. In fact, it means the opposite. It’s like you’re automating a lot of the rope stuff that you would have had to have done otherwise, and then taking more time to be strategic and thoughtful about how you then approach that account of that opportunity.

44:16 – 44:29

Sophie Buonassisi: Makes sense. A very waterfall approach. Yeah. Well, thank you for those examples and for specifically in a sales process. How do you handle competitive objections? Because the landscape is for everyone just becoming incredibly crowded.

44:29 – 44:55

Patrick Faucher: Yeah. I mean, we have a new competitor or some sort of new competitive dynamic every day. And so firstly is like we have an amazing team and enablement team led by Justin. And then we have Claire runs our competitive, our competitive Intel team. So we have some really, really strong talent internally on folks who just are able to react, build and deploy competitive content basically in real time as these things come out.

44:55 – 45:14

Patrick Faucher: This is not something where, you know, X, y, z competitor releases a new feature and then we get the enablement out like the next week, like we need it out like that day. You know, we need it out that day or within 24 hours of that new thing. And so there’s a again, there’s a high degree of, of accountability that we need from the field to, to will produce the content.

45:14 – 45:35

Patrick Faucher: So you have it and we’ll make it available in video content or put out in slack or however we we can, but we need the team to go internalize that because we have different competitors in different markets. There’s different, you know, competitive dynamics and different even within different features. And you’ve got to be able to set traps and handle competitive objections in a really tight way.

45:35 – 45:56

Patrick Faucher: But that changes all the time. So the biggest thing is like we’re really good at producing content and essentially real time as as the market develops and then our field teams have to ingest that and then go, you know, handle that. On the fly in the, in the field. So this is something that I do all the time because I get asked about new stuff that comes out, you know, that same day.

45:56 – 45:58

Patrick Faucher: And you’ve got to have a perspective and point of view.

45:58 – 46:03

Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah. And I think you’ve almost got like an eight mile framework around it, if I’m not mistaken.

46:03 – 46:27

Patrick Faucher: Yeah, yeah. The a mile framework is something that, Harry R us sales leader came up with, but essentially it’s the Eminem model from, from from a mile where, you know, when you get into especially if you’re getting into negotiation around commercials or, you know, late stage legal negotiations and things like that. You know, we we have to be really transparent about, like, this is what we’re going to do.

46:28 – 46:51

Patrick Faucher: This is what our competition is, is going to do. Here’s why that’s different and better, and here’s the impact on you and your business and how how we’re going to partner together. But to me, transparency is always the best medicine. If you if you like, are going into any negotiation, you’ve got to be really clear out about what’s important to you, what’s important to your client, and how you know your competitor is going to act.

46:51 – 47:18

Patrick Faucher: And so if you’re really clear around what they can expect from you and what they’re going to get from you, and then also how the competition is going to play certain things, then it just helps you get ahead of like any FUD or other tactics that we sort of know are coming. And I think it’s always good to just take a very, you know, business like approach that’s very transparent around just laying it all out and then, you know, working collaboratively with your customer to get through the negotiation and get to a good space.

47:18 – 47:31

Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah. So you actually kind of lay out what your competition is going to say to your customer, just transparently. Yeah. I can’t imagine how many times that song plays in the office. Yeah.

47:31 – 47:32

Patrick Faucher: A lot of Eminem here at.

47:32 – 47:35

Sophie Buonassisi: A lot of lager.

47:35 – 47:44

Patrick Faucher: That’s ABA to a lot of ABA. You know, we love Swedish pop stars. So it’s a it’s a diverse mix of of the on the playlist here.

47:44 – 47:58

Sophie Buonassisi: Eminem Innova is quite the mix I love it. Well Pat this has been fantastic. Really appreciate the time. I’ve got a couple last questions for you here. Help me finish these sentences. So first sentence is the thing nobody tells you about. Leadership is.

47:58 – 48:17

Patrick Faucher: The thing no one tells you about. Leadership is that it’s it’s not about you. Right? And I think in particular for you, for new leaders, like you’re used to being sort of the star, right? You’re the you’re the star a, you know, you’re closing all the big deals. You get all the, the slack shout outs every time a big deal closes.

48:17 – 48:37

Patrick Faucher: Then you go to manage a team and no one talks. You know, you’re out of the out of the limelight. You’re out of the out of the out of the out of the fray. Your job as a leader is to make sure that your team is as dialed as possible, is educated on the product, and the company is producing at a really high level, but they’re also progressing in their career.

48:37 – 49:04

Patrick Faucher: They’re hitting their goals, they’re learning and getting better. They’re coming to work and to customer meetings at the right sort of intentionality and attitude and the right culture. You’re working in the right environment. So the thing no one tells you about being a leader is it’s not about you, it’s about your team. If you focus on making your team successful, if you focus on helping your people grow, develop and get better, if you help your team hit their goals, take that next step in their career, or be ready to take that next step, then you’ll be successful as a leader.

49:04 – 49:11

Patrick Faucher: So I don’t think about myself as a leader. I just I obsess about delivering for my team and that’s been a successful formula for me.

49:11 – 49:21

Sophie Buonassisi: Sounds like the same framework you have for customer obsession just transferred over internally. Exactly. Super cool. Okay, next sentence is the most underrated piece of go to market advice is.

49:21 – 49:44

Patrick Faucher: I think it’s around being intentional with what you’re doing. I think a lot of people get into go to market like me. When I was, you know, early in my career, people. Oh, you know, you’re outgoing or you’re, you’re, you know, you should be in sales because X and is that really usually a, a career path that people go in, you know, in university, like where I went to college, it wasn’t like an the, the career framework track or things like that.

49:45 – 50:02

Patrick Faucher: You sort of get into it through these weird reasons and you’re like, oh, I’m just sort of doing this thing. And it’s like, for me, I wish I had been more intentional about treating it like a profession, being a pro like being it being a lead. I want to get better at this. I want to do this step in my career.

50:02 – 50:20

Patrick Faucher: I want to get to this level, do this thing. I want to be able to sell this kind of deal, work for this kind of company. You know, being really thoughtful and structured and intentional with your time is super, super critical because a lot of people get into it sort of haphazardly, and then they just they just think sort of myopically about the next step.

50:20 – 50:34

Patrick Faucher: I’m a want to be an AI. I want to I’m an AI, want to be a director, but not being as thoughtful or intentional around your own development path, your own personal board. Who’s helping you? How are you getting better? What kind of company do you want to work out? What kind of leader do you want to be?

50:34 – 50:55

Patrick Faucher: What kind of a do you want to be? What kind of individual contributor? Like, what’s your superpower? Where do you flex? Right. What are you bad at? What do you need to get better? And I think if more people were more intentional around building their own development plans and taking ownership of their own story, as opposed to just sort of like going through and going into the next thing, the people would be more successful.

50:55 – 51:17

Patrick Faucher: I think it’s the best time ever to be in sales. And, you know, I just encourage everyone to, you know, create your own plan, be super intentional about what you’re doing, and really focus on building strength, on strength where you have a natural ability, and then elevating those things where you’re struggling or need to improve. And then surround yourself with people who are are going to help you along the way.

51:17 – 51:20

Patrick Faucher: If you do that, I think you’ll be, you know, be successful.

51:20 – 51:27

Sophie Buonassisi: Incredible, incredible advice. And, Pat, where can people find you online if they want to follow along with you and with Laguna other than the Yankee Stadium?

51:27 – 51:44

Patrick Faucher: Yeah, yeah. If I’m in a Yankee Stadium. No, just find me on LinkedIn. You know, that’s that’s where I post most often. That’s my only real, you know, social media for for the stuff and, Yeah, LinkedIn. So me a note, say hi. And thanks so much for having me, Sophie.

51:44 – 51:45

Sophie Buonassisi: Absolutely. Thank you.