Between Two Hires with Special Guest David Cook

David Cook. Good to see you, my friend. How you doing? Tom Wilkinson. Great to see you. Yep. It’s been a while. It has been a while. Starting with supporting your search, finding you the role with Samsara. How’s everything been since 2017? You

know, it’s been a wild ride. And first I’d like to say is thanks for placing me.

My whole journey started with you reaching out, you and your team. And six and a half years later, here I am at Samsara. I started October, 2017 as the first, we call them ADR, but first SDR manager. We’re about 15 million in revenue. I was employee 220. Fast forward to today,

we’re a public company. IOT is the ticker. Over 3000 employees, global company. And profitable company. And we have 200 plus ADRs. It’s been an absolutely incredible ride, which was all kind of sparked from that initial engagement. I’ve got to watch us grow from being literally one office in San Francisco with me being the first manager to international growth, going through COVID, moving to work from home.

Starting to come back a little bit from work from home and yeah, it’s been a wild ride and thanks for, thanks for putting me on that journey.

My pleasure. It’s great to have seen you thrive along the way, but what a ticker as well. I love that.

Good ticker. I had three kids along the way in there somewhere and got married and all this kind of stuff.

And yeah, it’s been, it’s been a good ride.

Amazing. Well, let’s get into it. So you talked, you know, just in that kind of brief synopsis about some of the numbers. But let’s dig deeper on that. So how many people have you hired in total now?

I’ve hired around or been involved in the hiring process and around 750 people at Samsara and my previous company, with Samsara being the 99 percent of the people that I’ve hired. And so mostly SDRs in all different roles in regions, whether it be inbound, outbound, enterprise, scaled up and grown a pretty large team in Mexico. Recently scaled up and grew a team in Canada.

Lots of ADRs within the United States, and then also a me as well.

Very cool. So with 750 as the tally, that’s an impressive feat along the way. Maybe you could talk to some of the- maybe your best and possibly the worst hiring surprises.

Sure, I love I love this question. And so the 1st thing I’ll say is, even doing that many interviews, I frequently don’t get things right.

And so I can be quite surprised. And in 2018 we had a woman come through and she had been a consultant and didn’t really have any sales experience. And I was a no on the panel and she came in and she started as an SDR supporting our Mexico team. Fast forward almost, you know, almost six years later,

she’s an enterprise AE here. She’s absolutely crushing it. I went back one day and I’m like, how was I on that panel? I got it wrong. I was a no, I had put like, hey, she doesn’t have sales experience and miss some of those other intangibles. And so that was, I’d say, you know, one of the best experiences that I’ve had.

And I can think of a few, there’s several other stories that are very similar to those. One of the worst experiences I’ve had, there’s been a few, and usually it’s been around like, hey, I think I know better than the hiring team. And so I can think of an example of hiring an ADR where a couple of the other managers, this was early in my tenure,

we’re no on the panel and what I did is I was kind of like, hey, this person has great experience and here’s what happened with our conversation. And this person is going to crush it. And the reality is, I didn’t listen to all the feedback and that person, I think, made it 3 months in the role and stop showing up to the office and all those other kinds of things.

And so the moral of the story is, even with that experience, I’m not always right, but I try and take some learnings from that and not make the same mistakes.

I think it’s a great point. The age old adage of how do you have the experience to gain the experience to be good in something that doesn’t have to have sales experience in your pedigree necessarily to be able to come in.

And before I think it’s then about some of the other aspects and how you rank those in your decision making process. Great, great example.

Sure. I think for me today, one of the things that’s most important is coachability. You know, is this someone who will come in and be willing to learn and be willing to take tough feedback and say, okay, thank you for that feedback.

I want to get better and I’m gonna apply that. I think no matter what someone’s experience is, if they come in and they think they know everything, even if they have really good experience, in my experience, that can be really tough. I also think that for SDRs specifically, someone who’s willing to come in and

they have that fire in the belly, as Lars Nielsen would say, you know, they have that it. They have that energy. And to me, sometimes you know that within the first minute of the interview and, you know, you need to go through all the questions and do all your diligence, but do they have it?

And I think doing enough of those interviews, you start to really, you know, be able to identify that and what that turns into when someone’s in the role is, they have ownership and right out here on the floor in our office, we have a bunch of AEs out there. They’re mid market AEs or, you know, there’s some commercial AEs.

They were people that we hired who generally had it and they’re out here now, they’re out there grinding, they’re still making cold calls as mid market AEs. And so that’s another important aspect.

Must be great for you to be able to see through the SDR org, the individuals that go on to get promoted into AE, mid market, and following up into enterprise, seeing them on that journey, starting with you as that sort of first call.

It’s so much fun. We were going to SKO last year and I remember going on a winter circle trip to Miami last year as well. And I’m sitting on the airplane and all these people are walking by me and SFO, “Hey, David, Hey, David, Hey, David”. And I’m like, you know, this person was an ADR and now they’re a mid market AE going at winter, you know, president’s club.

And this person they’re an enterprise AE. And to me, there’s been hundreds of those people out of those 750. And to me, like the greatest joy of this job as an SDR leader is to have a company that has that path to SMB, AE, and then onto mid market and onto enterprise. And it’s the single most thing that I love the most about this job and why I love SDR leadership.

Yeah. Well, I feel good about that. Career maker, if you will. Love it. Let’s talk about some of your recruiting tactics. What’s your secret weapon for sourcing top talent?

Sure. My, my secret weapon for sourcing top talent is sales programs within universities across the United States and even Canada.

And so this is something we’ve been hiring, you know, university grads since I got here, even before I got here over seven years ago, but have really formalized it a bit more. And over the past five years, sales programs have really popped up across the country. Arizona state has 350 plus students in their sales program.

Cal Poly is a secret hidden gem that some people may or may not know about. We’ve had a relationship with Cal Poly. It’s just an incredible school to recruit people from learn by doing. My three little kids have Cal Poly shirts on now. And there’s also sales competitions that are global.

There’s NCSC, which is out of Kennesaw, Georgia. There’s NISC, which I believe is down in Orlando. And students from all over the country in the world that are on sales teams come and compete in these, and they get taught, you know, sales methodologies and how to compete and all that type of stuff.

And so for me that’s kind of some secret sauce. We, of course, you know, recruit experienced people as well. But that’s one of the areas where I go to some of these competitions and Samsara might be the only tech company that there’s some other different type of companies. And to me, that’s a nugget.

So for those out there who recruit SDRs and early in career, you know, go find out where your local university is that has a sales program and get involved. We’ve placed a bunch of Cal Poly

folks along the way. What is it about Cal Poly? What’s in the water there?

My sense is, and I’ve talked to tens of people about this, is my understanding, and I didn’t go to Cal Poly, is that learn by doing is the motto, and you choose a major.

And you have to stick to that major. And if you change that major, my understanding is it’s pretty hard. You might have to spend another year at school. And my sense, there’s a lot of practical application and they work through things and they learn by doing, and when they come into the workforce they’re able to apply that and work through hard situations.

And in my career, like there’s going to be a lot of hard situations and how do those students or those employees, handle that pressure. And I think the Cal Poly students do well. There’s some other schools that do excellent as well, but I’ve never seen anything like it, honestly.

Yeah. With that many folks you’ve had a hand in hiring, inevitably a lot of interviews behind that. I’m curious, your weirdest interviews moment that you can think of.

There’s been a few, I had a re interview pretty recently and within that interview, like, we try and go the full time through the interview. And we have some questions that we ask everyone to be fair. But sometimes there’s a situation interview where you both kind of figure out like, hey,

this probably isn’t going to work. And I had one of those scenarios in a Zoom interview within the last couple of months, and it was after about eight minutes, it was pretty clear that the candidate was done. And I said, well, you know, do you have any questions or do you have any more questions? And they were being really polite.

But long story short, that, that ended up and, you know, ending a 30 minute interview after eight minutes. And so that was pretty weird, you know. Pretty quick. Yeah. It was kind of like, it’s not you, it’s me. And we’re both kind of doing that. At least you both agreed. Within

that, do you have a secret or unconventional interview question or tactic?

It’s a good question. I know some of my peers here have a question they love of, you know, if you’re not here in six months, what went wrong? And I incorporate that one once in a while. I don’t think that this one is unconventional. But I always ask it no matter the interview. You know, we go through everyone’s strengths and all that.

I said, well, could you give me an example of something that you’re not that great at you’re working on? And even though that’s an kind of an old school question, you know, I’m just really looking to see like is this person self aware? And really like, how can they expand on that? Because that’s such an important thing in my time.

So I don’t have like a gotcha gotcha question, but I do incorporate that in all my interviews.

Nice. To round up then, just curious what the most important piece of wisdom on hiring you wish you had known earlier is.

I think that the most important piece of wisdom that I’ve learned in hiring is not to drop the bar and to really keep that hiring bar, you know, high and to understand what that looks like for your company. You know, what do you need at that time? What are the skills? What are the characteristics and have a clear process around that.

Part of that for me is listening to other people on the team and really getting all that feedback while making the decision. And the last piece of that is, no matter how many interviews I do, I still make mistakes and I get things wrong. So really learning from those mistakes that I make and just trying to get better and working on interviewing.

I think for me, it’s been the greatest joy as a leader is like finding these awesome, awesome people, bringing them into the business. And then, you know, watching them grow.

You’re a formidable leader. Not many that come up on the- all important question, are you hiring at the moment? And should reach out to you?

We’re absolutely hiring. We’re hiring SDRs in Phoenix area. We’re hiring SDRs in Atlanta. We’re hiring SDRs in Toronto, and then we’re hiring an MEA in Mexico city as well. So if you’re an SDR and you’re out there, you can reach out to me on LinkedIn. I’ll answer, you know, if you call me on the phone, I’ll pick that up too.

So yeah, feel free to reach out. We’re hiring.

Vouching for a career under David and certainly at Samsara very much. Appreciate the viewpoints today, mate. Thank you very much. Thanks, Tom. Thanks for all your help. Cheers, mate. Cheers.