GTM 140: How Microsoft Scaled from $600M to $5B: The Enterprise Playbook with Hayden Stafford

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Hayden Stafford is the President and Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) at Seismic, where he oversees the global go-to-market (GTM) organization, including pre-sales, sales, customer success, services, partners, and more. Prior to joining Seismic, he served as President of Global Field Operations at Pegasystems. Before that, Hayden was Corporate Vice President at Microsoft, leading Global Business Applications (Microsoft Dynamics 365) for six years. Earlier in his career, he was an SVP at Salesforce and spent nearly a decade at IBM, ultimately serving as VP and Managing Director on Wall Street.

Discussed in this Episode:

What Satya Nadella taught Hayden about culture, clarity, and transformation at Microsoft.
The exact playbook to move from SMB to enterprise—including partner enablement, segmentation, and incentive design.
Why retention isn’t just a CS metric—and how to build a sales team that cares about it.
How to win in vertical SaaS, from breaking into financial services to owning the category.
What it takes to close a $600M+ deal in the middle of a financial crisis.

If you missed GTM 139, check it out here: AI Agents Are Changing Everything — Microsoft’s VP of AI Agents on the New Era of Work and Software | Ray Smith

Highlights:

05:19 — How Satya Nadella sold his internal vision and rebuilt Microsoft’s culture from the ground up

13:13 — The partnership blueprint: how to scale with partners, not just transact with them

28:18 — Going deep in verticals: why Seismic dominated financial services while others avoided it

34:44 — How Hayden closed a $600M+ deal with Merrill Lynch after the 2008 crash

42:40 — Why retention should be part of your sales comp—and how to make it work

49:15 — The “Value Continuum”: a framework for aligning sales, services, and CS around business outcomes

Guest Speaker Links (Hayden Stafford):

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/haydenestafford/
Seismic: https://seismic.com/

Host Speaker Links (Scott Barker):

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ssbarker/
Newsletter: https://thegtmnewsletter.substack.com/

Where to find GTMnow (GTMfund’s media brand):

Website
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Twitter / X
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The GTM Podcast (on all major directories)

The GTM Podcast
The GTM Podcast is a weekly podcast hosted by Scott Barker, GTMfund Partner, featuring interviews with the top 1% GTM executives, VCs, and founders. Conversations reveal the unshared details behind how they have grown companies, and the go-to-market strategies responsible for shaping that growth.

GTM 140 Episode Transcript

Hayden Stafford:Partnership’s just not about making money. It’s about growing together. We’ll help you scale, you help us scale.

That’s what I learned at Microsoft is build together. Don’t just be transactional.

Scott Barker: I wanna take you back to your time at Microsoft because you oversaw this incredible shift that resulted in growing from $600 million to $5 billion in six years.

Hayden Stafford: It was a big jump for me.

Scott Barker: What was it like working directly under Satya?

Hayden Stafford: I’m gonna just be completely blunt. I love the guy.

My biggest regret leaving the company, honestly, was Scott leaving that kind of leadership that sets the tone.

We have a strong belief that you can’t grow if you are shrinking. The revenue leader needs to have an overwhelming amount of focus on retention.

Clarity, empowerment, and accountability can drive very good things.

Scott Barker: Hello and welcome back to the GTM podcast. Appreciate y’all hanging out with us for the next hour. Uh, I’ve got a fantastic guest lined up today. Super excited for this one. I am joined by Hayden Stafford. Hayden, welcome.

Hayden Stafford: Thank you, Scott. Delighted to be here. Fresh, fresh off the heels of our SKO, which concluded yesterday down in Dallas. Glad to be

Scott Barker: Hell yeah. Hell yeah. Yeah. You’ve been a busy man. You went through QBR season and then you’ve got, you know, board meetings happening. Just had your SKO appreciate you taking the hour amongst all the crazy travels.

Hayden Stafford: My pleasure, man. Yeah, three weeks of going, going, going days are full. Now it’s time to get back to the real job.

Scott Barker: Yeah, I love it. I love it. How did the SKO go? You left feeling, feeling energized, people pumped.

Hayden Stafford: Yeah. Oh, it was incredible. It was, um, you know, last year we took a little pause and did it virtually, uh, first virtual one in, since Covid. And it just, just doesn’t, doesn’t pass, you know, it doesn’t get the energy up. We were down in Dallas. And it was Dallas, Texas, Western themed cowboys. So it was, uh, a little over the top with the cowboy stuff.

Um, it’s great getting us together, uh, all centering on the, uh, core priorities and also having some fun, having fun together. Loved it

Scott Barker: Yeah. I feel like sks are one of those things that it’s just impossible to duplicate in the digital environment. You know? It’s just, it’s asking a lot of people, right? You’re like, Hey, we’ve got. Usually like eight hours of content, things to consume, things to digest. We wanna collaborate and like, you know, you’re sitting in your home office or, or remote and it’s just tough to stay, uh, engaged in a, a

Hayden Stafford: You get, you have distractions. You know, you, you might, you might be multitasking. The other thing is just. The moments when you’re not in the class and seeing the, the services team hanging out with the sales team, the product folks hanging out with the CS folks, those bond bond bridges that become very vital in day-to-day work.

So yeah, they have to be in person.

Scott Barker: Agreed. Agreed. I often say it, but I think I learned everything throughout my career. Not in like the actual training and enablement that the companies I was a part of set me up with, but I learned from just watching and like osmosis and those little interactions that you see and here and those little anecdotes are, are so important. But super quickly, always love to give the listeners, uh, a quick bio. So, Hayden Stafford is currently the President and Chief Revenue Officer at Seismic. I’m sure many, many folks listening to this are either seismic customers or very well aware of seismic. Um, we’ve been huge fans and, and.

Partners back in the outreach days. And, I’m a, I’m a big fan and you oversee all global go to market. So that includes pre-sales, sales, customer success services, partners, basically everything, there. And, you know, you’ve had a hell of a career, you know, over the last 20 plus years, working at the helm of really what I would consider the world’s leading technology brands.

So. Prior to joining, seismic served as the President of Global Field Operations at Pega Systems. Before that was the corporate Vice President at Microsoft leading global business applications, specifically around Microsoft Dynamics. 365. I spent six years there, I believe it was. Then prior to Microsoft, spent a stint as a SVP at Salesforce, and then a decade, uh, at IBM, eventually departing as the VP and managing director on Wall Street.

So yeah, we’ve, we’ve got the right guy to talk through. All things go to market, uh, that’s for sure. And I guess we’ll just get right into it. Like there’s so many angles that I think we could take this conversation, but, We’ve been able to have a few conversations and, and one of the things that really stuck out to me in our conversations was your experience expanding from like an SMB mid-market motion to the enterprise.

And I wanna take you back to your time at Microsoft because you oversaw this. Incredible shift that resulted in growing from 600 million to 5 billion in six years. And I wanna say that one more time for the listeners growing from 600 million to 5 billion in six years, which is insane. and that also equated to a shift from.

85% of your customers being SMB and mid-market to at the end of that six years, it was 75%, uh, enterprise. Um, I mean, that’s incredible. Walk me through that time period, set the stage a little bit, um, of when you were tasked with this, uh, big, leading the charge at, uh, Microsoft.

How Satya Nadella sold his internal vision and rebuilt Microsoft’s culture from the ground up

Hayden Stafford: Yeah, it’s uh, you encapsulate it pretty well. It was, I think it was closer to seven 50 ish million, but you know, who’s counting a hundred million or

Scott Barker: Couple million here or there? A couple hundred million here or there. You know,

Hayden Stafford: And

Scott Barker: The bucket.

Hayden Stafford: A rounding error all at Microsoft. I was at Salesforce and I got a call for an opportunity to move from Salesforce to Microsoft.

And, you know, Microsoft Dynamics was a distant, distant third, fourth, fifth. Um, and I wasn’t particularly interested, uh, but when I had the chance to meet Satya and other folks and he was. Just beginning his CEO career, uh, at, at Microsoft, I heard what the plan was. Um, the goal was to bring all of those assets of Azure Modern Workplace, the business application side together, build a really powerful data set, um, all within that common data platform on Azure.

And, um, I made the jump. It was just coming out of the doldrum years under a bomber. The stock hadn’t moved much. Microsoft was really seen as kind of yesterday’s technology company, so it was a big jump for me. Um, but it was the people I met in Satya’s Vision that got me. The company was very SMB Mid-Market, uh, dynamics had bought a company called Great Plains, uh, which is, uh, like an ERP business.

Um, uh, big politician now that everyone probably knows, was the founder of it. Um, and, uh, we bought that company and, uh, we also bought another small company out of Europe for ERP, and it was almost all channel, in fact, probably safe to say, 90% through channel. And the Microsoft sellers, they were really there for connecting, helping with the paperwork, how to process things through the complicated backend in Microsoft.

It was low end ERP and low end CRM on premise too. That’s the other thing, Scott. It was, I think, a hundred percent on premise when I joined there. And if not, it was a small fraction of cloud and I was brought in to, to lead the, when I first joined it was to, uh, to lead the enterprise. Part of dynamics, which there was none.

And, uh, we set out on that journey to do exactly what you said, which was to get more balance between enterprise and kind of down market. Um, get more direct sales and become far more important to the core strategy of Microsoft. And six and a half years later that happened. So that’s the backdrop.

That’s the backdrop of what

Scott Barker: Cool. I gotta ask, what was it like working directly under Satya? Like, you know, you could make a strong argument that he’s. One of the greatest, you know, turnaround CEOs of our, our generation. Was it obvious from the get go that, Hey, this guy’s just special, he has a vision. Um, I would love to hear some of your interactions with him.

Hayden Stafford: Uh, thanks for asking that question. Didn’t, didn’t know you were gonna ask that, but I’m gonna just be completely blunt. I love the guy. Um, you know, when I met him, uh, everything you hear about him, read about him, what you think it’s true. I had a lot of interactions. He was brand new. He was a brand, brand new CEO.

Little known fact. He actually had run dynamics. So he had a real tight, sweet spot in, uh, soft spot in his heart for business applications. Um, I worked, uh, for Judson Altoff, um, who reported to Satya. Had a lot of exposure to the board, even with Bill Gates and others. Um, super humble, really inquisitive.

Technically deep, deep, deep, but also business deep. Um, and just. You’re a little thrown off balance by him because of his, his skillset, his acumen, but also he, he did can disarm you quite, uh, quite well to get the most out of you. He’s a wonderful leader. Um, my biggest regret leaving the company, honestly, Scott was leaving from, you know, that kind of leadership that sets the tone.

And remember it was a very siloed organization that competed against one another. Stack ranking in terms of, performance management and assessment. He changed it into one Microsoft teaming across solution areas and getting the most out of the team, and look what’s happened. So yeah, it was a great experience.

And what he said back then about his plans for dynamics played out perfectly. It was the tip of the spear. It has the customer data, the interaction data that can feed the backend system. Back then it was ML machine learning and. Rudimentary AI to, then be able to extend its extensibility that you can bring to other apps.

And with the advent of power apps and other low-code apps to, to pull off that common data platform, it’s exactly where they’re at right now.

Scott Barker: What was, I guess your biggest learning about leadership, watching Satya do his thing.

Hayden Stafford: The culture was, I, you know, I don’t want to belittle the old Microsoft, but it was, it was kind of toxic. And then if you look at the stock, it was stagnant for 10 years and look at it since then. When I joined, I think it was at 31 Bucks a share, and it had been there for a decade. It was a lost decade in terms of, um, equity value, you know, the return for shareholders.

And what he did was he brought energy. Through a vision, consistently communicated it. It’s really where I learned the idea that clarity, empowerment, and accountability can drive very good things. Um, good communicator, focused on the teams coming together. One plus one is three. And, um, not taking, you know.

The old way, uh, not allowing that to, to get in the way he broke down walls. He demanded more of people. He listened. That was another big thing. A lot of listening. You went to, I went to his leadership team meetings. They were, every Friday he did his leadership team meeting. So he and his direct reports, um, every week, every Friday for I think it was six hours, seven hours.

Um, and he, they’d bring in different parts of the business for updates, and it was about listening. It wasn’t to beat you up, it wasn’t to do an inspection, though there was some inspection. It was to listen and learn about the business. And I think that was the big piece, Scott was um, was that for sure.

The partnership blueprint: how to scale with partners, not just transact with them

Scott Barker: Yeah. I love that. Thank you for, for sharing. Okay, so you joined Microsoft, you’re bought into this vision, but now you’re, you’re faced with a pretty big task and, you know, you’re, you’re going to build out this enterprise motion that doesn’t really exist or exists on a smaller scale. There’s no proven playbook.

You don’t have a ton of, you know, customers you can point to yet. Um, and I think. A lot of our listeners, um, can probably, um, relate to that. You know, they might be in the same thing, you know, where we gotta move up market. Our board says we have to move up market, so we’re gonna hire this enterprise person that’s gonna solve all our problems.

What was like step one, two, and three when you just get into the organization and you have this monumental task ahead of you?

Hayden Stafford: Step one was to take a little bit, make more control with the partners. it was an ex, as I said earlier, an extremely partner led business and I love working with partners. Um. They’re integral to the company, but they can’t run the business. They were the interface to customers, Microsoft sellers, and they’re some of the best in the world.

Um, many of ’em are still there. Others have moved on to great things, but they were a little bit more in the back office. They were a little bit more kind of on the transactional processing side. It was more in the front with them as the face of Microsoft Dynamics. And, um, having a point of view about Dynamics plus the other Microsoft products.

So, the one Microsoft from Satya. Um, what can that do for you now? Dynamics on Azure with integration with the office or, uh, modern workplace and being able to do CRM things within your outlook or vice versa? Um, that was the first piece because most of our partners, they were partners that just did ERP, they did great planes or NAV, um, it was.

Let’s sell the holistic story. Then it was also demanding more of our products, voice of customer, voice of field, and bringing that feedback back into the product team. Because remember partners, they just love to do the implementations and get more hours for bespoke coding and um, you know, one-off development.

And we were like, no, um, let’s get the engineering product teams involved, get that voice of all the gaps, the things that. They were building one off with the customers through the partners and getting it built into the product. So the second piece to that, Scott, was a really tight partnership with the product team.

I’d consider the, the, the product leader. His name was James Phillips. A huge partner of mine, deeply involved with customers and partners. Um, and he became kind of an extension of the sales team. The third piece was tight, tight alignment with marketing. We had to cast a new message. We had to drive new positioning.

At the time, the head of marketing was, um, Alyssa Taylor. And, uh, she, myself and James came together and, uh, really started to, to put the engine behind this, this shift of listening to customers, improving the product and working with partners to get a more holistic solution. So that was, uh, that’s where we started.

Can’t do it alone at a company that size or even in a small company. You can’t do it alone. Those, the different parts of the organization have to act as one.

Scott Barker: Yeah. I’m hearing like you almost went in and sold the partners first, like before going to the customers, like, we need to get the partners on board with this new vision. And then we need to go and get fully aligned with the product, and then we need to make sure that we’re in lockstep with marketing so we can showcase this, this new vision, both to customers and to, to partners.

Hayden Stafford: And, and, and analysts, you know, analysts who influenced the buying process as well. And we did that, you know, together with marketing and product. One last thing we also did was we started playing with pricing and the incentives that we did with partners. Um, there was just so much money going to the partners ’cause they would source and close the lion’s share of opportunities and, um.

We started to change some of that, those incentives and put the money back into hiring direct sellers. Um, so we started building our direct field force. And over those years, Scott, it grew and grew and grew. Um, and then we could do segmentation and, the first two years, so for, uh, like 2014 to 16 was all those mechanics, all those foundational things.

Scott Barker: When did you coach your sellers to, I guess, like insert themselves into a, a channel or partner led deal? Would you try and get in as early as possible? Was it different? For different partners or how would you think about that relationship?

Hayden Stafford: I think that’s a great question. Um, I think about that the same way I think about like right now at my company Seismic. Traditionally, sellers will sell and then they’ll hand it to services, be it a partner or your own internal services, and then they hand it to their C to the CSMs. That is a lot of handoffs.

Kind of the telephone game, right? The story starts to change. When you’re working with partners, you wanna be in as early as possible so that you can shape the narrative. And, um, you know, the best sellers do a lot of active listening, um, do a lot of consultative selling. part of my career that you didn’t cover up front was I started six years at Ernst and Young as a consultant.

and by, instead of going in with, I’ve got a hammer for your nail. Um, instead we’re gonna go and build this thing with our hands from the grounds up. We’re gonna shape the solution together. Focus on the outcomes, the value you’re gonna get out of it, ’cause through the channel, nothing against them, but they were very product driven.

The concept of solution? No, because they weren’t incentivized, they weren’t paid and they didn’t have knowledge of the rest of the Microsoft products. Most of ’em were very specific, either ERP or CRM partners. So the broadness of their view, we, we had to change that. And if you go look at some of the partners right now in the channel Mo, most of them started as a single product.

One trick ponies. All of them now do all of the CRM capabilities, sales service, marketing, they do most of the ERP and now that most of ’em are doing other, other solution areas. So for me, it was getting in super early so there aren’t handoffs where things can go wrong. It is just the same as if you are not using partners and you’re doing it internally within your own organization, bring the teams together early.

Scott Barker: yeah, yeah. What in those days made and, and there might be some timeless learnings here, but like what made a good channel partner? I think part of the struggle with channels or partnerships is, you know, you can go out and sign all these net new great partners and it looks like there’s forward momentum, but, you know, sometimes the vast majority is driven by, let’s say the top 20%.

And you need to be spending the bulk of your time with them, enabling them, making sure they’re successful, and not getting caught in this wheel of just signing new partners and then never actually seeing, uh, that turn into, you know, revenue.

Hayden Stafford: You said an important word, and it’s kind of why I came to Seismic, but a lot of people sign partners and they get ’em on the system. They bring ’em into whatever tiering or program. Very little time spent on enabling them, like bringing ’em through the culture. Like not only the product capabilities, but what you are trying to do as a business.

How, what are the best practices in a delivery methodology that you want? If you want a methodology that is steeped in business outcomes, it needs to start during the implementation. And if they’re not skilled in it, it’s not gonna happen. So enabling them. The other big thing was extreme expertise. We went after partners that weren’t generalists.

If we’re gonna use partners for part of our channel, which we did. it, you know, early on we needed to pick partners that were experts in retail, as an example for some of our ERP stuff. and we could train them and coach them on the nuances of the product and the solution set. Um, so that was really important.

It was their domain expertise, extreme expertise. It was enabling them to do what we wanted. And then the last thing we put time into the partnership was just not about making money. It’s about growing together. We’ll help you scale, you help us scale. Uh, so a lot of focus on mutual development and mutual success.

Scott Barker: Yeah, I love that. The next question I had was, you know. You’ve obviously seen tremendous success, uh, recently in the role at Seismic, and I think you’ve seen, uh, a similar shift that you saw at Microsoft from, you know, SMB mid-market to being able to, you know, really enable big enterprise growth.

I think I saw you have, you know, 85 customers now that are above a million a RR, which is incredible.

Hayden Stafford: Pretty incredible for a company our size. Yeah, it’s a

Scott Barker: It is, it is. and it’s a really healthy sign. What parts of the Microsoft Playbook have you taken into your role at Seismic? Do channels and, and partners still play a big role in your success at Seismic?

Hayden Stafford: Huge, huge. We’ve always understood partners here and that they’re important. I don’t think we really ever understood how they’re important. Um, you know, to get a partner to work with you, you’ve gotta do things that make them successful. It can’t be just about making us successful. So we really started to shift to, um, for instance, Microsoft.

They’re a great partner of ours. We work with them. The way they measure their success is. Azure and how much consumption you’re driving there and transacting through their marketplaces. If it’s just working together, we do a deal and that doesn’t do anything for them. But when you’re running it through, uh, a financial mechanism such as their marketplace, they’re able to recognize the benefit that drives their business.

So understanding the benefit, um, to both sides and making sure both sides are getting mutual, um, lift. The second piece was developing with your partners. If you’re just transactional deal making, co-selling partners, again, that’s, everybody has those. But when you can start doing development together, you’re starting to build a product that drives their product and drives our product, amazing things happen.

As a matter of fact, not to do a plug, Scott, um, Salesforce has always been a good co-selling partner. They realize benefits from us through royalty fees and whatnot. but when we started to develop products together around their agent force as an example, which they just launched back at Dreamforce, where the teams, the product teams work together, built use cases within workflows that sellers use.

There was just a press release last night, or the night before March, fifth or sixth of what we’re doing with them, and there are just really natural workflows within the Salesforce that calls into, uh, seismic and brings real time answers, real time insights for sellers, sales managers, CROs, executive leaders, and the enablement and ops team.

How about that you’re working in your partners, in their application, providing multi persona use cases, driving consumption there, and doing the same within our product. That’s what I learned at Microsoft is built together. Don’t just be transactional development. I mean, uh, implementation partners or co-sell.

So multifaceted relationships with partners has to be a mindset for any revenue leader, SMB, mid-market or enterprise.

Scott Barker: I think, uh, something you said there that stuck out was. This idea that you’re now working with, you know, Salesforce and, and recently it’s, it’s kind of taken off. And I think part of the reason for that, and I think the best partners align themselves with the other partners, like number one initiative.

And if you look at Salesforce right now and what they’re pushing and their marketing, it’s like age force. Age force, age enforce, and. I look at it similar to your career. If you go into an organization, you wanna be tied to the number one objective of that organization, and that’s how you’re gonna grow your career.

Similarly, with partnerships, if you understand deeply what all of their resources, time and energy are going and the outcomes they’re trying to drive, and you can be that kind of linchpin, um, that’s when they’re gonna stand up and, and really take notice.

Hayden Stafford: You are, um, and you, we can take that away from partners and move it to just selling whatever anyone’s selling. Um, if you are not aligned to an outcome that that board is measuring that outcome, that customer on or. What that CEO is compensated on, or what the CRO is metriced on. If your products cannot tie to a lift, whether it’s, you know, operational improvement, financial improvement, growth, cost takeout tied to the outcomes, you’re gonna have a real hard time selling that, particularly in a tight macro environment like this.

So I think you, you just did a natural bridge of. What’s important with partnerships, but also what’s important in sales. Now that may seem obvious, but one of the things I think Seismic did, not do as well a few years ago was, I’m gonna sell you this solution and I’m gonna measure the impact that it’s having on the growth agenda that the leadership team has.

So if I’m selling it to you and your biggest focus is new customer acquisition. Our positioning, our solution better address new customer acquisition or else you won’t get that wallet share.

Scott Barker: totally. Yeah. If you, uh, don’t tie yourself to that, you, you go into what I call the, the nice to have graveyard, which is a scary place to be that, uh, a lot of folks are sitting in right now. so one of the other things that I’ve always really respected about, about Seismic and I, I think it’s one of the secret sauce of, of, of your growth.

And I would love your view on this, ’cause I’m just an outsider and a fan, but you’ve done a really fantastic job, kind of verticalizing your go-to market approach. Like I remember, you know, back in the outreach days when we would partner on deals like you were in every. The financial services deal that was out there, we didn’t do well in that.

Going deep in verticals: why Seismic dominated financial services while others avoided it.

But you had cracked this code, um, in these kind of almost unsexy verticals that a lot of, you know, software companies struggled to do. And my understanding is that it was pretty intentional. And you built totally different systems, processes, even teams to go and, um. Gain expertise, trust in these, uh, verticals.

What do you think about that? How has that evolved and is that a fair, a fair statement?

Hayden Stafford: Um, thank you for asking and, and kind of giving me a chance to, to be proud and, uh, brag a little bit about the company, but you’re spot on. We didn’t start in a sexy space. You know, investment banks, big retail banks, corporate banking, it was asset management. Our founder, Doug Winter and, um, some of his partners saw a problem around automation of fact sheets and pitch decks.

So like when a team would come and try and sell you something, it’s all the facts about that asset, who they are, what they do, or an investment banker around, um, you know, selling you a pitch on taking you public or whatever. And it was getting all those documents compliant, accurate, and done quickly in an automated fashion.

And in doing so, and focusing on that industry and what’s important to them. And for them it was a compliant speed. With their kind of sales collateral. We took the asset management space. Today, uh, 42% of our business is banking. Uh, our anchor is asset management, but that moved into corporate banking, business banking, investment banking.

Now, you know, nine of the top banks in the world are very material customers of ours, 24 of the top 25 asset managers are material customers of ours. Eight of the top 10 wealth, uh, management companies are customers of ours. Uh, we have nearly 500 financial services companies globally that power our business.

It may not be sexy. It’s very hard to get into, but it’s driving real value ’cause we focus on the things that are most important to them. Risk and compliance, and being a partner that can meet those needs. From there, um, Scott, we moved into other areas. We moved into technology and manufacturing, and today we just, uh, we did a press release earlier this week around some of the momentum we have, but really good strength in the technology industry, manufacturing, and as I said, banking.

Um, and we built different teams for these different industries and it allowed us to go deep. Remember earlier I talked about extreme expertise. We kind of built our go to market teams that way too.

Scott Barker: Yeah, I love that. And I think that’s something that even smaller, you know, startup companies should really think about at, you know, you certainly have to get a certain, to a certain scale to start parsing out your, your teams. But people now, more than ever, they really wanna talk to experts. You know, I think over the last, you know, eight years, we all got obsessed with, you know, just running the. old motion and you had an AE that’s selling into all these different things. And it’s really hard to be an expert. You can be a product expert, but you can’t be an industry expert. And I think, you know, as tech moats are disappearing a little bit, they want that expert who is gonna be a true consultant in their business.

And I think, uh, if you don’t verticalize teams, it can be tough to do that.

Hayden Stafford: You are absolutely right because a lot of people think with banks, right? It’s. I’m gonna make you big money, or I’m gonna save you big money. That’s the common sales pitch. Um, we’re, we’re gonna have an impact on the top or the bottom line. You walk into Wells Fargo right now, your number one pitch is to be around risk and compliance, keeping them out of SEC jail, right?

Uh,Scott Barker: Yeah.

Hayden Stafford: these, all of these banks think that way. So knowing those nuances of what those regulations are that sit on these banks. Or life sciences or the public sector. Uh, I, I think verticalization is coming back in vogue and if you look at what kind of adds to the multiples of your valuation. In fact, at our SKO, we just had a, a, a pretty, pretty amazing session from a Goldman Sachs banker that covers this software space.

And he was talking about valuations, multiples of valuations, and the vertical nature. is becoming more and more of a driver of attractive companies from a valuation standpoint, and I, and I buy into it. When you can own an industry, it’s pretty hard for competitors to get in. So we’re in a very good spot where we are with FS, our competitors mostly aren’t there.

Uh, so it’s, I advise any company that’s getting going. To think about how they can really provide something to one industry and be truly differentiated, and then grow from there. That’s what we did. We started in banking. Actually, we just, during my SKO I talked about 10 years ago, 70, 80, 90% of our revenue came from banking.

Now it’s, as I said, about 40.

Scott Barker: Mm-hmm.

Hayden Stafford: It’s gone down because we’ve moved into other areas, so that’s a good thing.

Scott Barker: Yeah, I mean from a venture standpoint, and you know, where I’m spending a lot of our time at, at GTM Fund is exactly that. In, in people that are building hyper-specific, usually AI applications for kind of a, a forgotten about huge part of the economy. And, you know, there’s just so much opportunity and I think if you’re a founder listening to this, like I think you.

You know, when Seismic started and you almost like intentionally choose a really hard part of the economy that has all this compliance and risk, and, and you go, and if you can nail that, well, the other ones become pretty easy. Uh, so pick like, you know, everyone wants to pick the low hanging fruit, but sometimes, you know, battling it out in these certain parts of the economy that are not as competitive.

If you can win it, you know, it’ll pay dividends for, for years and years.

Hayden Stafford: Hundred percent. I agree.

How Hayden closed a $600M+ deal with Merrill Lynch after the 2008 crash

Scott Barker: Well, that’s a pretty good natural segue we’re talking about. We’re talking about banks and financial institutions, and, I know you have this pretty incredible story, which I would love for you to share with the audience, where you close nearly a billion dollar deal. This is when you’re at IBM, and it’s with Merrill Lynch, and I won’t steal the, the punchline, but it happens to be during a pretty dicey time period. Why don’t you walk us through what was going on at that time?

Hayden Stafford: I feel like I’m showing off here a little bit flexing, but I think there’s some really great lessons out of it. and whether you’re selling a billion or you’re selling a hundred thousand, I. It’s equally applicable. Um, you’re absolutely right. I remember the day clearly, it was September 14th, it was around 6:00 PM and I was at a Browns, Cleveland Browns versus Steelers game, and my phone started blowing up and it was just bing, bing, bing.

And it was, I was, I believe it was a blackberry back then. That’s how dated this is. That was when all the banks, the financial crisis hit. All the banks were collapsing. Merrill Lynch went under and went to Bank of America. Lehman went under and IG et cetera. Rewind a little bit for the prior year, year and a half.

Our tech services consulting group at IBM was structuring a major outsourcing contract with Merrill, and it was to outsource all their back office operations. Everything from server management, uh, network, um, side support. The actual desk side itself, the phone and everything. And it was, it was around a billion dollars.

And we were closing that deal on that Monday the 15th.

Scott Barker: Oh my God.

Hayden Stafford: Monday the 15th. The CFO, Mark Lockridge was our sponsor. Just quick helicopter flight down from Monk. He was gonna fly down and we were gonna sign the deal at the end of, uh, the day, Monday the 15th. And here I’m finding out that Merrill Lynch no longer exists as a company.

On Sunday at six o’clock, my heart sank. I felt sick to my stomach. The team was freaking out. And we thought we lost it. It was gone

Scott Barker: Christ.

Hayden Stafford: weeks, four weeks later. It was about a month later. We signed the deal, it was not a billion. Um, it was I think 600, 6, 80, um, it’s $608 million. Um, and it, because we shrunk a little bit of the size, they descoped it, but we ended up signing it.

I mean, you wanna talk about any reason to back out of the contract the reason why it happened? Two things. I talked earlier about selling the outcome, the vision. The business case was so strong, it was so airtight. It was built by the customer with us, so we both played a part in the business. Case number two, our relationships were with the head of Merrill Lynch, the CIO.

We had covered the CEO, Sam Palm Mazano and their CEO had connected and we had ubiquitous support. What we didn’t know at the time when Merrill was kind of going under was it was a major strategic asset for Bank of America. Um, it was gonna become a key part of their business as it is now.

And when we brought them in that they were so pleased with the business case, the leaders were saying, this is something we need Descoped a little bit, but it still. A pretty good deal and something I very much still remember today. So the lesson is multi-level selling, uh, engagement with all the key decision makers, stakeholders and influencers.

Not just the person who owns back office support for that one division and a bulletproof business case, a value prop, uh, whatever the case may be, TCO. But I think TCO is underselling it. Build that, but don’t build it on your own. Build it with your customer, with their data, as well as your own data, your benchmarking data.

And we got it done buddy. It was awesome. In Kind of gives me goosebumps today.

Scott Barker: I bet, I bet that football game wasn’t, uh, quite as enjoyable as, uh, you had hoped. After that, that phone call, did you make it to the end of the game?

Hayden Stafford: I made it to the end of the game. I was in the concourse a lot, but you know, back then the Browns weren’t so good. I’m a Cleveland Browns fan.

Scott Barker: I am a Steelers fan, weirdly enough, a Canadian Steelers fan. Makes no sense. Yeah, my dad was a Steelers fan, so I just grew up and adopted it ’cause we don’t have any NFL team, so became a Pittsburgh Steelers

Hayden Stafford: Oh, that’s awesome. Well, we’ll have to have a conversation over that later. What I do remember is I lost the deal, at least on that day, and the Browns lost the game, so.

Scott Barker: Double whammy. That’s awesome. Did you, because sometimes in these like crisis situations, and this is like one of the bigger ones I’ve ever heard is, did you have to go, was there all of a sudden a bunch of different stakeholders that you had to like to resell this vision to? Did they bring in like Bank of America execs and like, did you have to kind of like resell this business case all over again?

Hayden Stafford: y yeah, we did. We did. you know, it was kind of a distressed asset of course, and that’s why the bank was buying it. The good news was, uh. That account team, so the account team on Bank of America, what do they have? Great relationships across the board and relationships aren’t built just around the deal or a crisis or an escalation.

Great relationships are built where, you know what their kids did last weekend and they want to go out for dinner and, you know. There’s just so many great relationships and the ones we had, it was, it was a, a great marriage together because we were able to, to get to the core of a big need at a time when they were more focused on the integration than anything else.

And that was our biggie. We were like, you’re integrating, you’re not thinking about how to drive efficiency over here. Let us take that and keep working on the integration. Um, and because of those relationships in that compelling case. We got it done.

Scott Barker: Yeah, I love it. It’s almost full circle. You, you, again, even in that time of crisis, were able to align with the huge objective, uh, which was this integration between the two organizations, and you were able to tweak kind of the value you provided and tie it to that,

Hayden Stafford: It’s funny how these things keep repeating themselves, right?

Scott Barker: Yeah,

Hayden Stafford: very lucky or very intent.

Scott Barker: Yeah. Totally. Totally. I love it. Um, well man, thank you for sharing this, uh, that story. And this has been, this is awesome. I could, uh, probably pick your brain for a couple more hours, but, uh, I just have two, two final questions and, uh, they are intentionally vague, so you can take ’em anywhere you want. Um, first question is, what is one widely held belief that revenue leaders, uh, believe to be true today that you think is bullshit or no longer serving us?

Why retention should be part of your sales comp—and how to make it work

Hayden Stafford: I’ll tell you what it is. Um, I feel pretty strongly about it. In fact, it’s one of our priorities at Seismic that we had plastered all over the of our PowerPoint slides at SKO this week.

You typically think of growth, growth, growth. Sellers, sellers take the hill, charge and win. We have a strong belief that you can’t grow if you are shrinking. Um, and it is my belief that the revenue leader needs to have an overwhelming amount of focus on retention. And not just sales and growth. So that means a very strong foundation, not only the team, but incentives, messaging that’s tied around retention yet.

So therefore, the kind of bullshit thing is that sellers only sell. I don’t believe that. I think you do have CSMs. You do have a strong services team. The really good sellers will stay committed and be involved long after the deal is signed. But, um, if you can build some, some stuff into your sales plan, which we have done, uh, where there is incentive for them to ensure that what they sell, I.

Retains and grows. It’s a very good thing. It makes the seller’s job easier, it makes the company’s ability to grow easier. So that is my, my point is sellers don’t just sell, uh, everybody owns retention in the company, including your sales team. Um, second piece to that, I think that might be bullshit if I’ve heard a lot of people say selling is equal parts art and science.

The art is relationship building and be approachable. Be there for your customer, check in with them, ask how things are going. Absolutely critical. Customers always buy based on people, number one. Um, but I think that that piece is actually quite small in terms of the outcome of the success

science, the, the science of selling is incredibly important.

So if I were to give any advice to someone starting a company or looking to enter new markets, I think about, uh, like, uh, your sales process, your sales methodology. Yep. You need ’em. They’re big. But what is your win formula and what are the things that need to happen. The meets minimum two or three things in each sales stage that must happen.

Instrument it, automate it. Um, and you know. Inspect what you expect around that win formula, an anchor on it. Um, selling is a, it is a bit formulaic and a lot of sales teams skip some of the things that are critically important. You mentioned outreach. They’re onto something there with the, you know, the sequencing and the formula of engagement.

It’s equally applicable down market as it is up market. So the second thing I would say there, Scott, is. It is a mixture of art and science, but really make sure you dial up the science part. Uh, a a well ran growing sales team is one that is dialed in and measurable right down to the 10th or hundredth of a decimal point around the, the metrics that matter.

Makes sense. Does that make sense?

Scott Barker: Yeah, it does, for sure. Absolutely. And I, I wanted to touch quickly on your first point ’cause I, I strongly agree with it. It’s also just more rewarding as a seller too. Track the success of a customer longer and see the impact that you have on their organization. Build real relationships, like those are the things you’re also gonna take with you to your next role or into your next, you know, whatever it may be.

It’s like building those real foundations. Um, can you walk through some of the incentive structures that you have? Adapted to make sure that people are focused, not just on closing, but ensuring long-term success. ’cause I think a lot of people are trying to figure this out right now.

Hayden Stafford: Yeah, I, I don’t know if we got it right and we made a big move, um, recently, uh, to really put the emphasis here. First of all, I think this is mostly really applicable to mid-market and enterprise. It can apply down market, down market velocity, selling it, it’s. It’s hard because of the volume and the speed, but for that segment where you’ve got customers that you know are gonna grow or you know that there’s big upside in this is applicable, do your best to get, I, I’m a big believer in these two things I talk about all the time.

Functional purity and segment alignment. So the functional purity is. Um, your functions. Cs sales, sales engineers, um, ownership up and down. So you don’t have a lot of ability for standard deviation of strategy and execution, meaning don’t split it up between regions and segment alignment. Perfect alignment as best you can, right.

Breaks at certain points, but. One of the things, when I first walked in here, I said, how many people are responsible for enterprise? An enterprise number? The answer was nine. You, you can’t have that. You have to have one person who owns that kind of enterprise piece. The same goes in CS and everything. The teams are perfectly aligned.

So our, our, our accounts are territories between the different functions are aligned, so then when they’re aligned, you can have one side that the holy grail for any company is net retention. Right. Gross retention is kind of a CS number. Net retention is a CS sales number of services, so basically compensating around net retention.

But the balance of, um, the majority of your comp, where that, is it more on the retention side or on the growth side depends on which role you’re in. So then you find the right balances at 80 20, 70 30. But we, what we did is we played with the pay, the pay lines. Each. So are they accelerating? Uh, like are the multipliers taking off at 30%, 40% attainment?

What happens when they’re at a hundred percent? And we found a formula we believe that works for incentivizing the seller to care about retention, but also get the pay, um, that, that, that they expect in the open market around growth. And the same for CSMs. Um, we give them. An out weighted success around retention, but we also pay them for growth as well.

I think it’s gonna be pretty good. Um, we’ve already seen some really good traction where we experimented with it over the last year. I hope that makes sense.

Scott Barker: It does. Yeah, absolutely. And I think, uh, I’m with you. I think that BET is gonna pay off in a big way. It’s just everyone’s aligned. Like your ascent incentives are aligned with your customer, your team. Like, it just makes sense. And I think we probably should have, uh, implemented that, uh, a long time ago in software was just like the industry standard.

Hayden Stafford: We over focused on sell, sell, sell. Just go get new. Yeah, so agree.

Scott Barker: Yeah. We definitely got drunk on the net with new logos, that’s for sure. Um, and it’s hard to, hard to wean off that, but hopefully we’re, we’re changing. Yeah. Final question. It’s, uh, I call it the silver bullet question. There’s no silver bullets in this game, unfortunately, but, uh, you know, there are things that are actively working.

And the question is, you know, what is one go-to-market tactic or strategy that is working right now at seismic?

The “Value Continuum”: a framework for aligning sales, services, and CS around business outcomes

Hayden Stafford: Ah. Hands down, without a doubt. I call it the value continuum we refer to as the value continuum. Measure the outcome. Measure the outcome. So a lot of companies have business value engineers, business value consultants, they build the business case. The tactic is business value around the outcome for our customers is usually seen as a sales tactic.

Buy from us and you will decrease onboarding by 25%. Cool. It’s aligned with their, uh, what they wanna do when it goes to our services team to go implement or a partner to go implement. What are they measured on? QuickTime to implementation, not running over. You know, all these things that you might have within the SOW to protect the margin of your services business. OW and the approach must be focused on the use cases of our product within the com, uh, within the customer that are aligned to that, you know, ramp time more efficiently. So the setup, the implementation focuses there and the, um, all the implementation approach and use cases that we build with the customer are around that.

And then our CSM who doesn’t just get. The account once the implementation happens, has the instrumentation, the dashboarding, as well as a handshake agreement with the customer that we’re gonna measure during our quarterly reviews. We call them SBRs, strategic Business Reviews. Um, we’re gonna measure it together. We’re not just gonna see that you’re adopting and that consumption is happening. We wanna make sure we’re revisiting, are we seeing an improvement in, in the metrics to which we agreed to when you bought this? It’s the value continuum that is the one tactic that I think is the most important for a business.

Scott Barker: Yeah, I agree. We’re seeing the same thing even with, you know, early stage companies right now. Is that how crucial it is? And I love the way you put it, the value continuum. I think we’re almost getting towards a world in the not so distant future where it’ll be like. Still have like re like not just qbr, where you’re, you’re showcasing these values, like, almost like real time value metrics, like built into everything that we’re using.

I think that’s coming pretty soon. Which is a great, great shift.

Hayden Stafford: I sure, sure. I hope so. It’ll make all of our jobs easier if we can have that transparency of success.

Scott Barker: Totally. Totally. Um, well, Hayden, this has been awesome. Thank you for taking the time. I know you, uh, you got in late last night, but, uh, you’re such a pro. There’s so many good takeaways in this. Um, I imagine some listeners might be like, Hey, I want to go work for this guy. Any, any big roles open at seismic right now?

Hayden Stafford: We do have slowed our pace of hiring. We wanna be measured to, um, keep our, uh, capacity aligned with our demand. But we have a couple senior roles open right now. Um, I, uh, take a look at our website. They’re definitely out there. Um, and we’re always hiring top talent. If you’re good in financial services, uh, excellent customer success.

Great sellers with a great story. And on our services side, our PMO uh, project management is always something that’s very important to us. Um, but yeah, there’s, there’s a couple biggies that are open that are out there. Feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn and, uh, we can connect

Scott Barker: Beautiful. Awesome. Well, thank you again, man. And for all of our listeners, I say it every week, you know, listening’s one thing, executing something totally different. You know, hopefully we gave you some ideas, tips, strategies that you can bring into your own business. And, uh, we’ll see you all next week.

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