Latest / Pre-Sales Pathways / Gavin Guinane, Head of Solutions Engineering (EMEA) at Glean

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Gavin Guinane, Head of Solutions Engineering (EMEA) at Glean · Pre-Sales Pathways

• Chris: Hey Gavin. Good to see you. Thanks for joining us on the show. Gavin Guinane: Thanks, Chris. Good to see you again. Chris: Likewise. I saw you had the Glean Go conference last week and you had Joel from Ericsson in the on the keynote. I know he was one of your customers at Glean. You must have been delighted with that. Gavin Guinane: Yeah, I was super super exciting to see him and and many other of our customers from Mia going over to the States and hearing how they're getting on deploying and getting value from Glean. Chris: Amazing. Yeah, it was a qu quite lineup. I was looking at all the different guests, so many different guests for a for a conference like that. So really good. Gavin Guinane: Yeah. Yeah. And the other kind of takeaway I I guess also, Chris, is that these are really smart companies who have built great products themselves and using Glean is a great validation of what we do as a company and yeah, it was great to see them. Chris: Amazing. So speaking of Glean, before you were at Glean, you were at Salesforce for almost twelve years. Salesforce is, you know, large traditional software vendor and you did a range of roles there, senior IC, ultimately though leading a team. Talk us through what prompted you to make the move from that sort of company, that sort of role, to then starting as a an IC, the founding SC within the region at least at at Glean. Gavin Guinane: Well, I I think first of all, Salesforce was a great experience, terrific company, great culture. I met some really, really great people there and and some enduring relationships since that time. but I guess when I joined Salesforce, Chris, it was a technology company first and foremost, and it kind of morphed into a wonderful sales machine, probably more into a marketing kind of a engine towards the end of it. And and I then you know, in parallel became a a a manager, a a leader of of of you know industry architects at the time. And I got a little bit kind of disconnected from the technology. and I think if you know for anybody watching the the the the podcasts that that you produce, if you have a you know a a yearning to know more about the technology and if you're a curious person, what you can you can satiate some of that curiosity being a people leader. Ultimately I think we're were biased towards the technology side. And I personally found that I was I was increasingly disconnected from the technology and the solutions. And also by extension, Chris, the customers, you know, I mean, ultimately the currency of a good SE or a consultant for that matter is or AE. is is your relationship with customers, who's on WhatsApp, who knows you, who could you pick up the phone and ask for ask about a reference, etcetera. And I I guess I was increasingly disconnected from that. And I decided to, yeah, I guess June twenty three. you know, I I guess I didn't really have a plan. And that's okay too, right? Does not, you know, I didn't have a direct, you know, plan where I left Salesforce. Took a few months off, painted the house, and I got reached out to by a former colleague of mine who worked at Salesforce, somebody you and I know well. He said, look, I'm start starting this thing in a Mia called Glean. Let's give it a give it a spin. And I I investigated it, liked what it was doing, liked the background of company. yeah, and it's been it's been three years in to be to be an IC again initially when I started Chris. So so you have to be the kind of person who's comfortable letting go some of that, you know, workday hierarchy you may have learned to to get used to and, you know, Expense accounts and and see, you know, see if you can test yourself again as an IC. But the great thing was I'm immersed back in technology, back with like deals and opportunities and ultimately customers and salespeople. So so it's been a it's been a fun a fun journey. But just just to finish that point, just to r re-emphasize that, it's okay not to know what the next thing is, you know, in our careers, right? It's such a noisy market, and you might look at LinkedIn and get FOMO or you get anxious about something going on. That's okay, right? you know, everyone's kind of guessing and feeling their way around this this industry at the moment. Whereas when I joined the in info we call infotech back in the black and white days, you had a pretty much defined career path. That's all like long gone. It's it's it's it's very fluid and it's okay not to have all the answers when you leave these big big companies. But there are some days I wake up in the morning and wish I was back in Salesforce in that three year time, right? There's there's comfort in the big mothership and the the the the very comfortable world, but but that's that's a fleeting a fleeting thing. Chris: Yeah, interesting. And and you mentioned wanting to get closer to the technology. I mean, I guess you could have moved back into a an IC role at Salesforce. Was there anything that motivated you specifically to go to a a sort of start up or scale up? 'cause that's that's that's a very different proposition, right? And also going from more of an established SaaS company to a an AI native company. Gavin Guinane: Yeah, it's a great question. I I thought about that. because you you know, closing a door in Salesforce is you know, that's that's that's tricky, right? It's a great company, like I said earlier, great perks, great comp, all those things you think that are important at the time. but as you're getting old like like me, it's less important as you as you as you get older, right? I just didn't find the technology as interesting, as what was happening outside Chris. And I thought I'm gonna invest my time, the blood, sweat and tears of reshaping my mind, you know, there's a famous quote by I think it was Wendell Holmes that said, you know, you know you know, I think something I've edit this out, but but you know, and a brain never comes back to its original dimensions once it's stretched by a new idea. You know, once you've done that kind of mental gymnastics in your mind to absorb this new tech, you wanna make sure that's that's worth it And gives you scale in the rest of your career. And I just I get it didn't feel that way at the time in Salesforce. because they'd grown very much through acquisition. The acquisitions weren't that exciting to me, sta slack, notwithstanding, by the to take it to Chris: Yeah. Gavin Guinane: me. But I thought just what was happening outside of Sales, and I I got a real shock when I left Salesforce. The industry outside of the ecosystem didn't really have much interest in my skills. Chris: Okay. Gavin Guinane: It's just because it was very monolithic. It was the Salesforce, the gravitational full of s pull of Salesforce was so strong that I wanted to break out of that ecosystem. The rest of the world didn't care so much. And I I didn't realize this while I was in Salesforce, Chris, that the hyperscalers, that whole world just came and and blossomed. And in Salesforce, I was kind of in this ecosystem and I kind of ignored like they were just endpoints in a web service call, or they were like something out there through middleware. But now when I went outside of that Salesforce ecosystem, it was like, holy these these guys have done so much while I was twelve years I almost had a slave, but you know, twelve years in Salesforce. Chris: Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting because a lot of people talk about Salesforce, particularly on the go to market side, is like that's such a iconic company to go to to learn how to do sales, but your experience coming out of that was actually it can be a bit of a bubble. I mean, looking forward to n now your role in Glean and you're now managing or leading the team in in AMEA, how is the sort of profile changed of the type of S E you would look for? like is an SE at Glean very different to the type of SE you would have seen hired at Salesforce? Gavin Guinane: Yeah, they'd need to be comfortable not being the centre of the universe, as it were. you know, almost as as Copernicus once said, right, challenge the kind of the gravitational order of things. they need to be comfortable working in hyperscalers, right, outside of a c kind of a your platform because our product is transversal, it consumes data and signals from all different data sources in a customer, right? We ingest all unstructured, structured content. We do it either through indexing or through federation. And that can be on GCP or AWS. And you're dealing with like networking skills, cyber, risk, I mean keeping security InfoSec teams and CISOs comfortable with Glean, Chris, is probably the most important skill you'll you'll you'll be you'll be required to demonstrate at Glean. Demoing skills like in the in the kind of classic SAS SE world, Nice, but not the most important thing I look for. You know, presentation skills, nice. You know, I want to make sure they're at least kind of C plus B quality, but in Salesforce the bar was much higher. You would be really slick, really smooth. Some of the gym some of the demo folks I s I I learned from in Salesforce were just like like radio disc jockeys. They were just so smooth. They knew the next album coming on. They knew the history of the the new singer. I mean literally three or four tracks down the the playlist and and I was not able to kind of do that at the same speed. So so I learned I learned a lot about what excellence looks like from a sales perspective, as you said. Most of an SE perspective, there's some really good folks. But I just don't feel that kind of skill set is what Glean is is looking for at the moment. In an applied AI kind of a native AI space, I think it's little bit different. And and in parallel to that or with that, if you like, the AE skill set has also shifted a bit to the right in the sense of becoming I hate to use the buzzwords, but the account engineer in some senses. You know, that in Chris: Mm-hmm. Gavin Guinane: a classical kind of a spin or a a medpick kind of a process of selling, you would normally get an SE assigned in the days when you and I were bag carriers early in the deal cycle to help on qualification, maybe do a bit of early disco. In Glean, we operate at scale, and we're never going to have as many SEs in a GTM as I would have had in Salesforce. You have be very deliberate in in a assigning SEs to deals in in a glean that maybe could be a little bit less structured in Salesforce because you had more resource simply, right? And also, you know, in in the CRM world, Chris, everyone kind of knew what they were talking to Salesforce about. It was probably customer care, sales, Slack, whatever it might be. But in the AI space, everyone's everyone in the market is trying to get their head around where AI can fit in their business. So so you really have to be careful about where you just You avoid science projects and you get to specific measurable outcomes, which we can come to later on in the conversation. Chris: Yeah, interesting. So so more technical, more conversations around security, shifting away from the demo side of things. I I'm interested on the the demo point in particular, because this is a s hot topic, I'd say, within the industry of like you said, SEs for for years have been trained to do the discovery and then ultimately leading up to a big demo that wins a big contract with the customer. But that's sort of changing now. you know, a lot of that arguably is down to consumption based pricing, but Why do you feel the demoing skills are sort of less important within the context of Glean? What's behind that? Gavin Guinane: It's because the a very important element of the buying signals for our or buying sequence for our customer is the validation, right? Like a stage four or stage five in a deal cycle. and in my previous lives, you could probably do a pilot using or maybe do a demo with like very tailored demo, et cetera. using dummy data, dummy accounts, dummy customers calling in about a broken widget and how the agent fixes them, et cetera. So it was it was It's quite conceptual and a little bit, if I can say tongue in cheek, also how you do demos. We had a famous persona in Salesforce called Lauren Boyle. And Lauren was like the always the call center agent and the the the CRM user in in sales. but in this world, a lot of what we're doing is is trying to bring insights from the knowledge that companies have. That kind of we're creating a context layer in the enterprise architecture effectively, and that requires real data. production data on a production environment with production networking and production security and also Chris consequently production anxiety around well who what are they doing with my data and is this a POC or a deploy a live deployment? And in in reality, when Glean is doing a pilot, it's really a production deployment. But we can't call it production otherwise we'd be bit upset at some salespeople, but that's the reality what we're doing. And One of the things I learned in my career early on is that when I'm looking for skills or or or SEs in Glean, I like to get folks who've had some post-sales experience, be it as a a TAM or a consultant, because they've seen projects being deployed. Otherwise, you have SEs coming in who just do demos and throw stuff across the wall, hope that it sticks. so that's the biggest the biggest shift. The the validation event is probably the biggest change at Glean from Salesforce. It's it's pilots, live data. Very tangible outcomes, very focused on measurement of the current state versus the future state, sticking to to use cases that are going to add some some value when there's a wall of use cases coming at you that could be interesting, but will they be measurable in a six to eight week validation timeline? That's the real kind of challenge. And and you might annoy some customers or prospects, Chris, by saying no to a pilot or no to a use case, but ultimately we're not here. We're not here as a charity. We have to make sure whatever we're doing is is is is valued and valuable. Chris: Yeah, interesting. Yeah, so you know, you were saying that it's so data dependent, right, which is a common theme across AI, that customers want to see not just a demo of the solution, but they want to get their hands on the solution with their data to validate it would it would really work. And so SEs are increasingly having to take on post sales work, effectively to do a production production pilot. You you mentioned early on around the impact that has for the rest of the account team and things shifting right. I'd love to hear a bit. more about that, how you see the that that sort of dynamic in the customer's I guess increasing burden of proof, what what that means for the broader account team and those different roles. Gavin Guinane: Well, it can mean that from an account executive perspective, you're expected to do more than you probably would traditionally have been expected to do in a classic SaaS motion. And this is not to, you know, besmirch SAS, but the market has shifted a a little bit. Meaning that you're you as an A you're probably going to take a deal further in the pipeline in terms of qualification and disco before you get some pre-sale support. and that's just the way it is. Partly because of the scale, partly because of, you know, we're doing validation events like pilots and we're a bit too busy for stuff. But so that's the first thing that would happen. And also I think at at a at a a technical level, the account executives who have a conceptual grasp of what's going on in AI, the folks who are hungry and who are AI native, they're the ones I see doing really well at at Clean because they they're using AI in their daily jobs. When you ask them, for example, if you have an an a an AE and they're doing a presentation to you, I often ask them to close out the presentation and show me the agent they use to build the deck. And if the if if they have to log into something like like ChatGPT or Claude or Glean, that's not an AI native interaction. You know, it should just be always there as an assistant or as something you've always got running with you. And I don't want you to be a an you know an AI jockey for everything in life, but it shouldn't be like an afterthought. It should just be I get an email or I ask my my assistant to kind of summarize things for me. and then the question gets interesting about well, what do you do if you if you could be 10x more productive through AI? Like what could you do as a seller or as an S E? Because that's what our customers are asking us. If we if we, you know, and and up to the point where we had this, you know, tokenomics explosion three or four months ago, Chris, people weren't asking those questions as concretely as they are now, because now the CFO is banging on their desk saying, ooh. You've used X or your team has used Y tokens, it's now becoming an expense item. I'm slightly concerned about. Show me the tangible value you've derived from it. And and that's the kind of the the 10X piece. What is what are the other things that the team are doing? Now they have the spare time by virtue of their of their token spend. And if that's an ans an answer, they're just taking wellness or there's they're they're looking at stuff in a in in a wishy washy way, I think that's gonna be a risk for for us in our industry. Chris: Yeah. Interesting. So, you know, increasingly technical, increasingly hands on and with the AI fluency side of things, that's actually something you're testing even AE's for in the interview process. It's not just I'm using some of the tools that my company's provided me, but I'm sort of proactively building with this stuff. Gavin Guinane: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I again th all these skills are kind of net new on top of the classical behaviours and competencies you'd expect anyway, hustle, grit, determination, the will to win, the passion for the mission, all that kind of stuff. But on top of that it's the stuff I've just mentioned, right? So so all that kind of AI native stuff is fine, but if you don't have that kind of the f the the plumbing, the basic, you know, the hustle you need to to to be successful as a seller or as an S E at clean, you know, that's just not gonna be Be good for it for you. Chris: Yeah. Well, you also mentioned the point around sort of tokenomics. And I remember actually when I joined Glean at that time, it was sort of, you know, customers were basically just shoving cash into your hand and wanting to try something with AI because they had a top down mandate to do something. Feels like that has changed a lot now. You know, there's a lot more emphasis on return on investment. And like you said, with horizontal platforms, there are so many different ways you can use these products. So you need to be selective around the use cases you go after. does that sort of increase the importance of qualification either for the S E's or for the A E's? Like I'd love to hear a bit more about that. Gavin Guinane: Yeah, a hundred percent. I mean it it is a source of some frustration. I often feel sometimes that I'm I'm termed the the chief revenue prevention officer at Glean. because an AE brings an opportunity forward, they want to do a pilot, all the buying signs are there. But it's a bit like that story of the the record executive, you know, who who who the AR man they used to call them years ago, Chris, who would review albums with you know with the band in the room. He'd I I there's ten good songs, but I don't hear a single. Because the single used to go to actually promote it on the radio, right? That's what it's a single sells the album, effectively. You know, ten songs may not be sufficient. And I think I hear that a lot. You know, I hear ten great use cases, but not that one seven-figure problem that we're trying to address here. You know, like productivity. Summarizing PowerPoints, yeah, nice, but you know, when the CFO is asking you for an ROI to generate P PowerPoints, it's a sticky you're on a sticky wicket. So if it's like call deflection, useful, it's measurable. Onboarding sellers, useful. First time to pull requests for engineering, useful. But is there like a a real nightmare use case where the CFO is thinking, I'd love to be able to improve the speed of you know, Team X or how long it takes to provide updates to my investors, board deck presentations, or whatever it might be. Try and find some of those things. So I'd often say to the account team, again, I hear ten singles, but or I hear ten songs on the album, but can you go back and try and find me a song that I can I c I can actually put on put on the radio? That's what just requires the hustle. And to go back and work with your champion who Glean uses the command of the message a as our selling methodology, Chris. And which you recall and It's by working with your champions to find perhaps other use cases that are more concrete and again maybe maybe part of that seven figure problem, right? what we're doing here, I mean, all this a these AI projects, they're they're they're seven figure solutions, right? They're expensive. Like you can't keep incinerating money and hoping nobody notices. People now notice. So if we don't find those seven figure problems, these these projects will go nowhere. Chris: Yeah, makes a lot of sense. And it's about finding that one or two big problems that's really gonna make a a difference rather than a laundry list of a hundred use cases that might total the same. Gavin Guinane: Exactly. And then from a from an SE's perspective, how they'll feed into that process, Chris, is they will they will try and discover what's the technical solution underpinning that seven figure problem. Like what are the use what are the data sources? Is it like an ERP system or in in finance, is it a policy administration system that's built in the seventies on a COBOL environment? It it just adds the complexity, but if the value is there, if if the economic buyer on the deal feels the value is tangible and measurable, then we should consider in a in a validation of it like a pilot building it. or building a version of it that makes the customer comfortable that if we expand from here it's it's feasible and tangible. So so that's the kind of shift back to your question earlier about the the classic SaaS SE to Glean or native AI SEs. We ha my team have to kind of be comfortable doing those kind of almost production deployments for kind of tricky stuff increasingly as we get on. And and as you'll know with most on premise data sources or legacy green screen applications, there's really tight security, Faraday caging, air gapping around those things and that requires you as an S E to be like a networking specialist on occasion where you you can solve these things yourself. Chris: Yeah. So it sounds like on top of the skills that SEs were already expected to have, there's a lot more around the breadth of technology, networking, like you said, getting increasingly hands on, increasing that burden of of of of proof and sort of more of the traditional post sales skills with the customer. Is is there anything else you would sort of have in mind for those more maybe traditional SEs from from a company like Salesforce as they think to sort of i eyeing up a role at a company like Lean? Gavin Guinane: I'm gonna start like I'm contradicting myself to a to a small extent here, Chris, but I wouldn't want you to get the impression that what the Salesforce, for example, or ServiceNow or whatever SE's legacy SaaS SEs have isn't isn't all positive. They can they can bring some terrific insights to a glean type environment around having an account POV point of view that's super sharp. they will have a pretty good value-based narrative anyway, again, and presenting it in a way that r that resonates with the audience. but I I think the key thing that I would I would look at if I was an IC at Salesforce, for example, S E looking to move into this space is just to immerse yourself in the the and be comfortable with the fact that it is potentially overwhelming compared to the old world. Right? We can do this pilot for six weeks and you've you've done a few of them with me over the years in that six week window. The world changes every week. I mean, on a on a Sunday night, the CFO who's your economic buyer might s w see some article on LinkedIn or TechCrunch about some rogue LM on Hugging Face. It's happened, right? Or a new Chinese model or open weight model that's challenging. So all that stuff happens and you you it's not a comfortable six-week pilot. So much can happen. So I would say be comfortable in that world that it's chaotic. but but also be comfortable in the fact that if if you win the deal or prove the value, the feeling that you get by doing it without the resources that you've had in the previous world makes the success that bit sweeter. Chris: Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting you talk about the pace of change 'cause I've heard even directly from people working at the AI labs building these models that they struggle to keep up with the with the pace of change. And like you said, if you're doing a pilot for six weeks, a lot can change in that in that period. Gavin Guinane: Can I and I think, you know, just on that, well, oftentimes we're in the middle of it, you think, God, is you know, wh why is it so hard? Why is why are customers' expectations over here and the industry changing so quickly over here and it's so tough? They're all in the same business. I mean, I talked to colleagues of mine at Anthropic or OpenAI or Mistral. I mean, it's just nobody has it cracked. You know, we're just so from a an SE profile perspective, Chris, you have to be comfortable, you know, not having all the answers. Whereas Maybe when I was in Salesforce, you kind of were paid to be to suffer the consequence or at least the curse of the expert, you know, to be the expert on CRM, to know how the sharing models work to know how Heroku worked or whatever it might might have been or the platform. Now you have to be kind of comfortable not having all the answers and maybe, you know, learning as we go together. And I think that co creation of the outcomes in a pilot is something that, you know, you have to be happy to do. Because you know, you're gonna join a call stage one, stage two in a deal in Glean with a head of AI, who's been doing AI for like fifteen years, you know, before you could spell AI, right? And you gotta be humble because they've probably tried to build Glean or build something similarly. So if you give them too much of a sales pitch without the details of how it works and how the industry or competitors work, you're gonna get exposed really, really quickly. So, yeah, just that's the kind of profile you need to be. Chris: Yeah. And speaking of which you you sort of mentioned some of the traits that you would look for in SCs that you're hiring for. But I'm interested to know across your own career, right? You've had amazing success at lots of different companies, Salesforce most recently, Glean. Are there sort of one or two traits that you would attribute that success to? Gavin Guinane: Again, using the word success advisedly, Chris, right? just look at my beard. I would say it's an old fashioned one, just try get on with people, you know, try try and find some common ground. and I again going back to my prejudice on hiring SEs who have worked in a pre sale or in in a in a post sales world in consulting. You know, I I have made in post sales, I have been in meetings where I've told customers stuff and they've cried. and that's usually where I've let them down and I've made commitments that they have obviously taken and committed internally and I wasn't able to deliver on those things and that does not leave you. Ever. And I think if you come into a pre sales environment with that thinking about, you know, I could it's not about features and functions. I'd like to meet this person at a glean go in one year's time or two years' time or an event and be able to shake their hand and look them kinda square in the eye saying we've we did something pretty good together. Right. So that That's more of a human thing. because the world is so small, man. I mean, you and I are talking here, we work together, we all work with each other. We the market is very small, really. You know, same names pop up when I when I put a job advertisement out there or I speak with colleagues. So just look after your reputation, you know, look after your network. As I said, the reason I got the job in Glean was my network, right? I would say also when you're building things like Glean, there's a famous George Bernard Shaw. play called Pygmalion. And I often use that as an example of if My Fair Lady, for those of you who like movies, was based on it. But people sometimes in our business can fall in love with what they're creating. And that becomes the the the the the object and subject. fall in love with the outcome. Like who's gonna benefit? Qui bono from what you're doing. It's really important to remember it's not about the tech, not about like being at a bar on a Friday night and saying, I'm building an AI solution. It's like yeah that that kind of ship has sailed in the last three years. FOMO is is is less of a driver. It's like, well, what outcomes are you seeing from what you're doing? So so really back to that kind of fall in love with the problem, not the solution, kind of a mentality, which I think is important. And the final thing I would say is ask for two, I'll give you three free of charge. Look after your health. Look after your health. All right. You'll need to spend time dedicating to your health, your mental and physical health. Like I said, it's it's an overwhelming industry right now. Maybe not as much fun as it was when I was here, when I started like 30 years ago, because we're all, you know. we were we were we were you know trying something really kind of interesting and no one knew what, you know, client server and Java and Internet was going to do. the market's expect expectations are quite high and I think you need to just take time out for yourself to to remind yourself why you're doing it. Right. So look after your health is what I would say. Chris: Yeah, that's a really good point, particularly as you have with the the pace of change. I I wanted to drill into the point that you had around falling in love with the outcome or the problem the customer's trying to solve, because that feels so relevant now. I look on LinkedIn and I look through my feed and it's absolutely full of announcements about all these crazy things that the latest model can do. And it feels like there's that's a world apart from some customers, particularly, you know, here we're based in in Europe, right? There aren't that many tech companies. They're not thinking of things like that. Ultimately, these are more traditional companies with problems that they need to solve. And there seems to be a disconnect between that narrative of you know, one is very much about the models and their capabilities and the other is thinking about problems to solve. Gavin Guinane: Yeah. Yeah. And I think a lot of that is is is is being quiet in in in meetings, Chris. Right? When you're in when you're doing discovery, we have this tendency to have all the answers, again, the curse of the expert. But it's like if you just let some air into the room and let the customer tell you in the awkward silences, you know what the real problem here is. It could be as basic as I can't find stuff, right? Or I can never find this or I can't seem to access that. And I think we're often maybe over-engineering some of our solutions in the short term that will benefit in the future. But in the short term, if we listen and let the customer tell us what the problem is, I think that's really important, you know. So from an SE's behavior perspective, and you were you were excellent at this by the way, in in my time working with you. Just being quiet in meetings and and being being comfortable making others uncomfortable. I it sounds it sounds awful, but it's one of those and now my technical guy will tell us how to solve that problem with three clicks of the mouse. It's like actually no, I won't really, because I wanna I'm gonna click into the the point that you made. That's really, really important right now as SEs, that we're we're challenging the customers, about why they think this meeting with Glean or OpenAI or Anthropic is taking place. Well I was told I should be here because we should be AI native. Yeah, but let's talk about specifically the the the whys and who's benefiting. So so that's something we have to be from a personality perspective, Chris, comfortable not having all the answers and be again being quiet in the meetings and and waiting to to understand before we proffer any advice. yeah that's that's challeng especially when you have account executives who are edgy, driven, you know, being inspected as they have to be, and that's all super, right? We all love our our our sellers. but they have to be comfortable with how you work as an SC that you're not just going to give them a demo or give them the answer. You're going to understand more before you start giving them some some answers. So so being comfortable asking dumb questions is something I think I I probably have learned to become I like my SCEs to to feel comfortable asking dumb questions because we haven't got all the answers. That's okay. That's okay. Chris: Yep. Yeah. Yeah. I think particularly as you mentioned, everyone shifting to the right a bit, A's needing to become more technical, getting more hands on with AI, their inclination then is to fall into the trap that SEs historically do of let me show you this latest feature or capability. But like you said, it's like even though we've got all these new sort of traits or requirements for SEs, the the existing ones are still important, right? Doing discovery Gavin Guinane: Huge. Chris: properly, being consultative, turning up with a point of view. Gavin Guinane: Yep, hugely. Even now if I start doing a presentation, I often think about SEs I worked with like really great SEs at Salesforce or before and I think, Will I ever will I ever still get to that level? I'll never get to 'cause there was such a level of excellence set at that time. But definitely right. There's things that you you'll always pick up like like a magpie through your career that you'll you'll always take with you as as you go forward. So all good, you know. Chris: Amazing. Any last thoughts or pieces of advice you'd like to share with the audience? Gavin Guinane: I suppose I would say, you know, the old classic of people buy from people they like, right? I mean, likability is very important. I mean, honesty, trustworthiness, I mentioned, making customers cry, that's not a requirement, but it's just something I learned. you know, like I said earlier, I worked with you before, worked at loads of folks that you know, you have to look after your network. if if you're likable in this crazy AI industry or even technology for that matter. It does go a long way because you know they'll they'll the customer doesn't often know what what they're trying to get out of this thing. But what I what they do know is what you're asking for from a technology perspective, i.e. getting access to their production data, their intellectual property, their intangible assets, makes loads of folks nervous. So when they have to sell on your behalf when you aren't in the room, the least they can do is I'm working with this crazy cra company called Glean. They wanna do this, do that. But I kinda like the guys. They have this kind of a good way about them. They look like they're trustworthy. They have good customer logos. That goes a long way in this world, particularly post-COVID, man, where we're not doing a lot of 3D meetings. It's all through this medium. And I think trying to listen and connect and slow down, you know, one Mississippi, two Mississippi between answers, really important behaviors that we can all benefit from. Before you get into the the knuckle drag and the text and the geeky stuff, that's that's what I would say. Don't You know, I spoke to a young kid yesterday, a mentor and he's doing a start up here in Dublin. And I was asking him, you know, about him, his family. The idea is one of many ideas he'll have in his life, but it's it's the people you want to know ultimately. I mean, the reason I'm doing this podcast is because you and I worked together. I think we liked each other, we saw some commonality. If you were an asshole or I was an asshole, this wouldn't be taking place, right? And and glad glad to say hopefully I've I've I've I've you know, looked after my reputation and tried to be as likable as possible while at the same time being effective. That's really, really important, right, in in our careers. Chris: Yeah, absolutely. And the human relationship side of things is the last bit that AI will touch really, right? I think that's one of the reasons why a lot of people in sales are are quite excited, whereas people in maybe some other professions are a bit more nervous is fundamentally that is something that the AI can't do yet. Gavin Guinane: Yeah, yeah. And also I would I would say on that one, there's certain when you do a presentation or there is a demo of like an AI tool like Glean to to prospects, be be appreciative of the fact that this is not like going from like mainframes to client server to mobile and social. This is like potentially career ending for a lot of co people out there. I've I've I've demonstrated Glean to to legal teams before and Years ago, they giggled at the the answers Glean was giving based upon say 50 contracts that they gave giving me for my demo. They're not laughing anymore. And that's not a comfortable place for the customer or for you, because you're a human being as well, right? So I think just just showing the empathy, the humanity that we need to remind people that there's real people here at the end of the day, and there's a societal question that. you know, I I'm not smart enough to have an answer for, but let's just be at least aware of what's going on in the background and not just be obsessed with the with the pygmalion that we're trying to build here. Chris: Yeah. What a point to end on. It's it's certainly interesting times, a generational shift. But Gavin, thank you so much for for taking the time. It was great catching up as always. Gavin Guinane: I hope that wasn't too heavy, Chris. Okay. Okay. Nice Chris: Not at all. Cheers, Kevin. Gavin Guinane: to see you again, Chris. Chris: Bye bye.