Benjamin Encz

Ashby Culture

When the Ashby team met for the first time, we took a moment to reflect on and codify the attributes we value most in those we hire, and on the operating principles that guide our work. We'd like to share that with you here.

Ashby’s Operating Principles

aronow.io

Assured is a claims automation insurtech backed by leading Silicon Valley investors.

Assured

Astronomer

Attentive

Aurora Solar

Aven

Our camps give kids both a place to start and plenty of room to grow outdoors as they build skills in a wide range adventure sports, including mountain biking, hiking, kayaking, rock climbing and paddling.

Avid4 Adventure

Benchling

iPaaS integration platform with a worldwide reach

Boomi

Boulevard

Brightline brings virtual behavioral and mental health care to kids and teens, with a focus on also supporting families. 

Brightline

The Browser Company

Calm

Census

Character.AI

Clay

Clever

CloudTrucks

Coder is a remote infrastructure development platform that makes working with code easier than ever. Coder enables everyone from industry rookies to experts to develop code faster than ever before, using templatized starting points and ultra-secure workspaces.

Coder

Cognition Labs

Cohere

Cointracker

Color

Convictional uses technology to make logistics easier for retailers and their suppliers by automating supplier integration, onboarding, and merchandising.

Convictional

Costanoa Ventures

Enterprise-grade accounting, audit, and tax software for your digital assets

Cryptio

Decimal

Deel is payroll for modern business. No matter where you're hiring, Deel helps customers run payroll, supporting 150+ countries with hundreds of worldwide experts. Deel helps their customers know that hiring, paying, and managing stayed compliant and easy in their all-in-one platform.

Deel

Deepnote

Deliveroo

Docker

Dune

Duolingo

EightSleep is more than a mattress company - it's a suite of products devoted to sleep fitness. Their goal is to make sure that your sleep is as high-performing as you are, helping you meet and exceed the bar for excellence in your waking life. Athletes and scientists alike love their range of highly customizable sleep tech because it helps them live healthier.

EightSleep

ElevenLabs

Flock Safety

Form Energy

Format One

FullStory is an insight platform that aims to create a more perfect web experience by capturing website data to give clients like GNC, Carvana, and Lowe’s greater insight into how users access their websites.

FullStory

Galileo

Gorgias

Granola

GrowthAssistant

HackerOne

Help Scout

Infinite Lambda

Ironclad

January transforms the lives of borrowers by bringing humanity to consumer finance. Their data-driven products empower financial institutions to streamline collections, providing borrowers with straightforward and compassionate solutions to regain financial stability and control over their lives. 

January

Juni

Kustomer

Leapsome

Lemonade

Linear

Linktree

Machinify

Marqeta is a modern card issuing platform dedicated to empowering innovators to launch their products to the world. They have over a decade of experience as a trusted, high-tech solution for builders who need simple, scalable payment solutions.

Marqeta

Mastodon

Mercury

Metaview

Modern Treasury

Monte Carlo is a Series D data observability company helping its customers accelerate the adoption of data to eliminate downtime. 

Monte Carlo

Multiverse

Notion is the go-to for notes, tasks, wikis, and databases, blending everyday work apps into one. It serves as an all-in-one workspace for note-taking, task management, and project management. 

Notion

Compensation software that offers 5,000+ companies clarity for every pay decision.

OpenComp

Opendoor

Plato

PostHog

PostHog is an open source analytics platform. Their product is used by product, engineering, and marketing teams to understand user behavior, including product analytics, session recording, user paths, a/b testing, heatmaps, and more. The suite, founded through Y Combinator in 2020, has since been installed by over 10,000 companies.

Pragma Platform

ProAmpac

Pulley

QFinds

Quora

Ramp

Readme

Recruiting Pundit

Reddit

Replit

Resend

Retool

peer network for senior in-house resourcing leaders

RL100

Scratchpad

With over 2k clients and 20+ years of experience, Sequoia Consulting Group  is a services, tech, advisory business that provides clients with a platform for rich analytics.

Sequoia

Shelby Wolpa Consulting

Shopify

Sift

Snowflake

Snyk

Solana Foundation

Sourcegraph

Stytch

Substack

Supabase

Superhuman

Syfon

Talentful

Democratizing stocks trading across Europe

Trading 212

Treasury Prime

Abhik Pramanik

Kyra ran our first holiday book exchange, and it's been a hit with the team (to the point people mentioned it in our 1:1s). I added some photos from our recent meetups.


How we use efficient and deliberate communication at Ashby to keep Slack notifications and meetings to a minimum, focus 36h out of a 40h week, and have fun along the way 😀.


How Thoughtful Communication Makes Us Unreasonably Productive

Engineering Updates

Recruiting Articles

Product Updates

At Ashby, we don't have a long-term product roadmap. We've decided to take this approach for a number of reasons. In this post, we'll outline these reasons and our broader product philosophy.

## The problem with long-term roadmaps

While many companies publish 12+ month roadmaps, providing a sense of visibility of what is to come, they very often miss deadlines or kill features altogether, leaving their customers disappointed. Oftentimes, customers will also put off investment in additional tools (or hold out switching vendors) because they are expecting the promised functionality to be released on time. When that does not happen, they are stuck with a solution that does not meet their business needs.

Even if vendors deliver on all of their commitments on their long-term roadmap in time (something I personally have not seen in the past), this approach to product development still has a major issue: It is unclear if what was put on the roadmap 9-12 months ago is still the most pressing issue for customers.

I'm writing this in 2024, and if we look back at the last four years in the recruiting industry, the above point should be clear. The problems TA teams faced were wildly different every 6-9 months. On top of that, we witnessed a step-function improvement in AI capabilities that significantly changed the kind of functionality vendors could deliver.

## Why are long-term roadmaps so common?

There are a number of good reasons long-term roadmaps are used so frequently, despite their downsides.

[Enterprise customers](https://www.ashbyhq.com/blog/culture/series-c#expanding-into-enterprise-while-keeping-startups-front-&-center), understandably, want to know how the vendors they bet on will evolve over the coming years. But because long-term roadmaps are so often missed, we believe they mostly bring a misleading sense of comfort.

Vendors often feel the need to resort to long-term roadmaps because customers are pointing to significant gaps in their products. The vendor may not be able to address these issues quickly enough, so these "complaints" are turned into functionality that is added to the promised roadmap to buy time to solve them. Such vendors will also often use the allure of the future roadmap to help close deals despite missing product functionality.

## Ashby's Approach

**First and foremost, we're focused on product velocity**. We think that how often we ship *meaningful* product improvements is one of the most important metrics to track. It leads to fewer gaps in the product and, as a result, reduces the need to make forward-looking promises.

**Second, we make commitments to invest in specific product areas (instead of individual features)**. We've staffed all of our core product areas, Core ATS, Scheduling, CRM, Analytics, Enterprise, and Usability (and now AI), to ensure they receive ongoing improvements over time. This should give you an idea of what to plan for, as you don't need to worry that a specific product area will stagnate.

**Lastly, we have priorities within each of these product areas**. This is where we get to the exciting part — what do we pick to build and how? There are three main inputs to that:

1. Customer feedback (we look at both the impact of the potential change and the quantity of the request)
2. Our long-term product vision for each of these product areas
3. Changes in the market (e.g., [new legislation around Salary Transparency](https://www.ashbyhq.com/product-updates/pay-transparency-feature-announcment))

We are constantly reviewing the above, and it drives how we pick the next set of projects within each product area.

This means at any given point in time, we'll have several product updates that we know will be released in the next 1-3 months. At the same time, we're constantly evaluating what should come next based on your input.

For individual feature requests, this means they either have an ETA in the next 1-3 months or no ETA. No ETA certainly does not mean we won't ship an update for this request; it simply means we have not committed to it yet because we haven't started work on it yet. So, we're keeping it in the backlog as a candidate to be prioritized when the next set of projects in the relevant product area are completed.

There's one more benefit to this approach that is worth calling out: In addition to our ongoing major releases, we also ship dozens of smaller but impactful improvements that never make it onto the formal roadmap (which also means they don't have a public timeline). Vendors that cram their entire Engineering schedule with pre-planned releases lose the ability to invest in iterative and ongoing polish. Often, these smaller improvements have the strongest impact on day-to-day users of a product (and they come as a surprise and delight moments for our users).

## Interfacing with our CS & Product teams

We view all of our customers who provide material customer feedback as design partners. While we don't have a formal program today, our CS team works very closely with customers to understand their unique needs and how some of them should translate into future product improvements. They are always in sync with the product team and will often loop in individual Product Managers to connect with customers directly on individual product areas.

## Never say never

We may not keep this approach to long-term roadmaps forever. We continuously evaluate how to evolve our product development practice (once again, based on your feedback!).

But for now, we believe strongly that focusing on product velocity, [close partnership with customers](https://www.ashbyhq.com/blog/culture/series-c#investment-in-customer-success), agility in our roadmap, and not overpromising but rather surprising and delighting are the right way to go.

Ashby's perspective on product roadmaps and why we focused on product velocity instead.

Why Ashby Focuses on Product Velocity Over Long-Term Roadmaps

As a founder it is most enjoyable to fundraise when you’re trying to accelerate something that is already going really well. We’ve been fortunate to be in that position since our public launch in September 2022. Today I’m excited to announce our $30M Series C.

We had planned this round for later in the year, but were presented with strong offers earlier than expected that provided a healthy up-round from our Series B.

Of course we’re very excited. Of course we’ll continue to invest in Product and Engineering. Of course we’ll also continue to scale our Customer Success teams and Go-To-Market motion. But my goal with this post is to go a bit beyond a regular financing announcement and provide a bit more visibility into where we’re at and what’s next at Ashby. 

## Starting with a Thank You

Before we get into details, I want to start with a huge thank you to our customers. It goes without saying that we would not be here without you. Many of you have been early believers in what we’re doing. Virtually all of you have continued to shape Ashby’s product over the recent years by being highly engaged users sharing incredibly valuable feedback.

You’ve also simply been a huge joy to work alongside. For many of you the last few years have not been easy; that makes your partnership with us even more meaningful.

Next, I want to thank the entire Ashby team. You all have delivered exceptional and consistent execution over the last two years. I frequently get notes from customers and other founders about how much we’ve accomplished with a relatively small team. Your work has let us achieve outlier performance in a challenging market.

## Picking a Partner for this Round

We were fortunate to receive multiple competitive term sheets. In the end, we decided to go with Lachy Groom, who also led our seed round and has a deep understanding of how we operate, which is nicely summed up in this message I received when he extended his offer:

![](/images/lachy-text.png)

We’re excited by this vote of confidence. Other existing investors including Elad Gil, F-Prime, and Y Combinator joined this round as well.

Lachy’s note also gives you a sense of what comes next: a continued focus on strong, consistent execution.

Raising money, in and of itself, is by no means a guarantor of future success. We’ll take this moment to reflect on the progress we’ve made in the 19 months since we publicly launched, but then we’re quickly getting back to work.

While we have grown revenue >6x since our Series B and we’re now serving over 1,300 customers (a count that’s quickly growing). We are by no means complacent. 

There remains a lot left to be done and there’s still a huge gap between what we offer today and our ultimate ambition of building truly exceptional software for the talent community.

## Our Opportunity & Ambition

We started working on Ashby in late 2018 with the key insight that the work talent teams were doing had changed drastically from the ~2010s (you can read more about our story [here](https://www.ashbyhq.com/story)).

Recruiting Operations was becoming an increasingly common function. Data was being used to inform more and more decisions. Talent teams were buying a lot of additional tools to plug gaps that had opened up between the prior generation of recruiting software and where TA teams were headed.

At that time, both Abhik and I were very involved in hiring and embedded ourselves with our recruiting teams. We quickly found ourselves thinking: modern TA teams deserve better and more powerful software.

Today, we’ve accomplished a good amount of our “v1 vision.” We have enabled TA teams to use a single, powerful product to run their entire recruiting process across candidate CRM, ATS, and scheduling automation. And we’ve helped TA teams become more data-driven with our uniquely powerful recruiting analytics functionality.

But there’s a lot more to do. Advancements in AI allow a whole set of new functionality that wasn’t thinkable a couple years ago. You’ve seen early versions of this in the Ashby product but there’s a lot more to come. 

Beyond AI, we’re still just scratching the surface of what’s possible when bringing all key TA workflows into a single tool that’s built on a single technology platform. In many areas of the product we’re now spending more energy on “polish and delight.” That means we’ll make many of our most powerful features more accessible and ensure that Ashby continues to do more for you.

The following has been on our [careers page](https://www.ashbyhq.com/careers) since the day we started Ashby and you can think of it as one of our guiding principles:

*We are continuously disappointed by the state of software products today —software should be more intelligent, powerful, and do much more for us. Today, most business software is still a simple database with few delightful and truly helpful features.*

While we’re excited about our progress to date, this “north star” keeps us focused on all the ways in which we want to improve Ashby in the coming months and years.

## Investment in Customer Success

We also understand that your experience with Ashby goes well beyond the product we offer. From day one, we’ve invested deeply in Customer Success and many of you have shared with us how much of an impact that has had on your experience with Ashby.

Excellent customer success is notoriously hard to scale. We’re committed to spending the time, energy, and money to make it happen. We’ve made a number of key hires across our Success teams in the last few months, including our new Head of Support, [Allie Hurley](https://www.linkedin.com/in/allie-hurley-75557b89/). She most recently led Support at ClickUp and will help us expand our support team and further improve our product documentation and self-service capabilities.

## Expanding into Enterprise While Keeping Startups Front & Center

Since our Series B, we’ve extended our reach into the Enterprise segment and we’re now working with some of the largest and fastest growing technology companies (many of which we can’t name just yet!). We’ve made deep product investments here, including our unique [integration with Workday](https://www.ashbyhq.com/customers/aurora-solar). We believe that our focus on customizability and automation makes us a unique fit for [Enterprise companies](https://www.ashbyhq.com/enterprise) that are scaling out of legacy solutions.

While not easy, at the same time we are keeping [early stage startups](https://www.ashbyhq.com/startups) front and center as we continue to improve Ashby. We believe that startups keep us honest in our pursuit of providing best-in-class UX. Startups also serve as a strong foundation for future growth as breakout companies start and scale on Ashby. Rather than the status quo of scaling out of an ATS, our promise to startups is a robust system that scales with them, ensuring they can put talent front and center from day one. 

## Join us - We’re Hiring!

Of course we’re continuing to ([thoughtfully](https://www.ashbyhq.com/blog/culture/ashbys-operating-principles#5---be-frustratingly-patient-about-hiring)) grow our own team. No fundraising announcement would be complete without a shout out to our [open roles](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/ashby). We also continuously hire for roles that you may not see posted right now. If you want to be considered for these roles as they open, you can join our [talent community](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/Ashby/form/ashby-talent-community) which we review whenever we open and post new roles.

## Thank you again!

If you made it this far: Thanks a lot for your interest in Ashby, whether you’re a customer, prospect, candidate, or partner. If you like to stay in touch with updates we recommend following our [LinkedIn page](https://www.linkedin.com/company/ashbyhq/).

Onward, upward and back to work! 📈

This post goes a bit beyond a regular financing announcement and provide a bit more visibility into where Ashby is at and what’s next for the company.


Announcing Ashby’s $30M Series C - Doing More of What We Already Do, Just Faster and Better

Jack Hanratty

I’ve been extremely fortunate to have spent the majority of my career being an early GTM hire for U.S. based SaaS Companies with strong presence here in the EMEA region, most notably at LinkedIn and Asana. Both of these companies went on to support thousands of customers across the region in a manner that’s already taking shape here at Ashby.

At both LinkedIn and Asana, the following was true:

1. **Disruptive Technology**: They had a strong belief (validated by thousands of early customers) that the technology was transforming a space that hadn’t seen innovation either ever or in quite some time.
2. **Early Global Success**: EMEA was already seeing strong, organic success with hundreds of successful customers and a local community raving about the power of the product.
3. **Purposeful Culture**: As known to many outside their doors now, LinkedIn & Asana deeply invested in building a culture with a particular emphasis on hiring while enabling talented people to best support their customers in the region. 
4. **Clear Market Opportunity**: EMEA was seen as a key market to unlock in order to drive sustainable growth, whilst thoughtfully acknowledging the local nuances. 

When joining such companies early, it’s not always clear which of these elements are already in play — or if they will ever be. When the opportunity to join Ashby was presented, I became more and more excited as each of the four criteria listed above became apparent through the hiring process. I’m thrilled to have joined and hear similar excitement from the EMEA community we have using the product already. 

For me, joining Ashby represents more than just a career move. It’s also a

* commitment to being a part of a company that is shaping the future of Talent Tech
* statement that Ashby is determined to support talent and people team’s across the EMEA region

## Working for the first company to prioritize me as a hiring manager

I was first introduced to Ashby in 2023 when we became a customer at a previous company. As a hiring manager for over 10 years, I was disappointed that Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS’s) hadn’t evolved in line with other tech. I had already seen the evolution of sales tech firsthand, yet it was still taking me far too long to find and engage with talent. I struggled to align internal stakeholders and make data-informed decisions at the speed needed to maintain sales momentum. That changed once I started using Ashby. 

As a GTM leader, talent has always been my number one operating priority. Every second that my requisition is not filled it costs me and my business money. The speed at which I can fill that seat matters. However, the cost of filling that seat incorrectly is far more costly. Combine that with an economy that is focusing us on efficient growth and suddenly both speed and [Quality of Hire](https://www.ashbyhq.com/product-updates/quality-of-hire-surveys) matter more than ever. I strongly believe that Ashby has built an [All-in-One](https://www.ashbyhq.com/growth) solution that can help teams best achieve that.

## My role as Head of GTM, EMEA

Working from my home here in Dublin, I am thrilled to be:

* **Leading our sales efforts in EMEA** by hiring a diverse, international team and driving collaboration across our EMEA GTM business to ensure our prospects and customers are as well served as possible.
* **Engaging and partnering with the Talent/People community** to understand what Talent Technology should look like in EMEA now and for the next 10 years.
* **Elevate the talent profession across EMEA** by providing talent teams with the best data and technology to do your best hiring — something I’m excited to make use of soon.  

If you’re among the impressive EMEA companies using Ashby, attending our community dinners in EMEA, or have simply been following the journey so far — please get in touch.

Jack

P.S. [Request a demo here](https://www.ashbyhq.com/request-demo). ;)

Seasoned EMEA sales leader Jack Hanratty shares his excitement for Ashby and what he'll be prioritizing in his new role. 

A Letter from Jack Hanratty on Joining Ashby

Kat Fergerson

I watched Ashby come onto the HR tech scene out of nowhere. It was 2022, the market was starting to withdraw from hiring — and bam! Ashby hit the scene with momentum. They were: 

* thoughtful about culture (see [Thoughtful Communication](https://www.ashbyhq.com/blog/culture/thoughtful-communication) practices and using [Operating Principles](https://www.ashbyhq.com/blog/culture/ashbys-operating-principles) instead of values)
* had a highly differentiated product
* had a vision and founding story that resonated
* genuine brand fans

As head of marketing for a DEI tech company at the time, I watched them gain traction in the marketplace. We soon had overlapping customers, and it made sense to explore a more strategic partnership. Our meet cute: Transform 2023 (shout out to Samara Jaffe and team!). We strategized on integrations, mapped out event opportunities, and have been close partners ever since.

When the opportunity came up to work together more directly, it was an easy yes. Soon after, I joined as Head of Partnerships. 

While I have a relatively unconventional partnerships background as a previous head of marketing, I’ve worked with some of the best brands in the world to launch and scale their programs. And that’s the exciting opportunity here. From launching new revenue streams through digital innovation at adidas, to building Bird’s partner ecosystem marketing programs, to scaling Mathison’s Equity Index, I feel uniquely positioned for this new opportunity with Ashby.

## Why I’m Excited About Ashby: The Hiring Excellence Opportunity

Ashby has an impressive foundation:

**Clear Founding Vision**

[Benji and Abhik’s firsthand experiences](https://www.ashbyhq.com/story) with the limitations of traditional hiring processes and their drive to innovate resonates deeply with me. They've built something that not only addresses their pain points but also elevates the [hiring experience](https://www.ashbyhq.com/blog/recruiting/hiring-excellence-framework) significantly.

**Exceptional Product**

Ashby's product isn't just functional – it’s setting the standard. Its ability to generate genuine enthusiasm from customers is indicative of its value and potential.

**Commitment to Talent Leaders**

Talent leaders are historically underserved and Ashby’s mission addresses that gap. They’re also committed to supporting the wider RecOps community who’ve been hit especially hard by layoffs ([1 in 2 recruiting professionals have been laid off](https://recruitment.com/recommendations/recruiter-layoffs)).

Through the hundreds of conversations I’ve already had with people leaders about how to build inclusive hiring practices, capture accurate reporting, and get a seat at the table for their Talent initiatives, I see a huge opportunity for Ashby to be the platform that operationalizes what hiring should be.

## What I’ll Be Focusing On: Partnerships at Ashby

My goal is to build a best-in-class partnership program that accelerates Ashby’s growth and amplifies our impact across the TA community. Partnerships is a gigantic discipline. There are about a hundred different ways I could run with this. To start, I’ll be focused on: 

1. **Making it incredibly easy to recommend Ashby**: This includes providing outsized value to startups in order to become the default ATS recommended by VCs & Accelerators.
2. **Helping experts close (and renew!) business**: This means enabling the growing ecosystem of consultants, recruitment agencies, and fractional talent leaders with the tools, benefits, and resources to be successful Ashby implementers.
3. **Giving our customers access to the tech stack they need**: This includes expanding our integration ecosystem and investing in strategic partnerships.

As I step into this role, I’m excited about the possibilities ahead. A lot of you will likely hear from me in the coming weeks as I look to deepen existing relationships and build new ones in the broader recruiting and talent communities. 

I’d love to hear from you if you're a:

* VC/Accelerator and interested in being part of our VC program
* consultant, recruiting agency, or fractional talent advisor interested in our referral program
* leader in the HR tech space interested in building best-in-class, mutually beneficial technical integrations

I have to give a huge thank you to the team, especially Harriet, Shannon, Lindsay, and Benji, for giving me the opportunity to contribute to an incredible mission and company.

Onwards,

Kat

P.S. LinkedIn connections are welcome!

Why Kat joined, what's exciting her about the opportunity, and how her focus on Partnerships will take shape. 

A Letter from Kat Fergerson on Joining Ashby

Jim Miller

Last week was my first as the VP of People and Talent at Ashby, and I’m humbled to have my first opportunity to lead a People function. The new role comes with input into the product roadmap and the interesting scope of both helping the internal team refine and deploy our hiring excellence framework, and also to help systematise and scale it for Ashby customers. This brings me into a thriving community of recruiters and TA professionals with whom I’m delighted to work.

  

For anybody that knows me – working with cutting edge technology and getting to help build and scale systems and processes is very much my bag of crisps. Needless to say, I’m excited to be here.

  

Usually I would stop here for a well-deserved series of thanks, but first I wanted to expand on why I joined and what I hope to achieve, so here we go. (You’ll find the thanks at the end instead.)

  

## Why I joined

  

As a little bit of context, I started my career like many recruiters – accidentally (thanks to a conversation with [Mike Fetters](https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikefetters/)). I spent 15 years at Google, the last 5 of which involved leading the global online talent channels among other teams. I always wore a systems hat, and highlights of my Google time included helping to architect gHire, their internal ATS, and supporting LinkedIn’s advisory board for EMEA.

  

With Google’s scale and volume, it was easy to form hypotheses on how to test and improve the processes, though we always had to be careful how we implemented them due to the scale of change management required across roughly a hundred countries, and thousands of open requisitions at any one time.

  

Moving to Fullstory was my opportunity to implement what I had always thought would be an optimal recruiting strategy, leading with all the learning I had been gathering from previous roles and my teams’ own learnings. FullStory focused on helping the world have better digital experiences; thousands of companies build better and optimise their products accurately thanks to it. I’m proud of what we achieved, especially in the area of inbound-first hiring strategies.

  

Underpinning the talent side and all this growth and experimentation was Ashby.

  

We initially worked with Ashby’s Analytics product in 2021 – it was the most powerful and easy-to-use tool I had seen in the TA space. For the first time, my team could self-serve just about any data request. Without trying to be everything for everyone it, in so many ways, improved the day-to-day experience of my team. Without overstating, Ashby’s All-in-one is the best recruiting software I have worked with – data-driven, recruiter-built, and efficient, with a responsive support system that has everything I would want in an ATS.

  

While tools don’t shape the culture of a team, I believe they are either the enabler or barrier to realising the culture the team is trying to build. Ashby enabled us to start to realise the process excellence we knew the team was capable of – and the result was a focus on a more representative, higher quality way of hiring.

  

Suffice to say: I’m a fan. Ashby is a tool I’m genuinely so humbled and excited to get to help support now.

  

## Finding cultural excellence

  

One of the most significant reasons I joined the team was the people. After working at organisations like Google and Fullstory with so many smart, hard working, and passionate people, culture is always a critical consideration for me.

  

Working with [Benji](https://www.linkedin.com/in/benjaminencz/), [Abhik](https://www.linkedin.com/in/abhikpramanik/) and [Kyra](https://www.linkedin.com/in/kyra-vargas-739b03b1/) as a customer over the past 2 years has always been such a pleasure. They always listened to what our teams needed and helped us build the new dashboards, ship new features, and operate as a partner instead of a vendor. It’s the people that make a company what it is, and I truly believe that these people are making Ashby into the next greatest tool in recruiting.

  

## An honest reflection on the TA space today

  

While I’m so happy to be at Ashby I wanted to take a moment to acknowledge that it wasn’t a seamless journey into this role. It’s damn tough out there right now. The realities of the macroeconomic environment is that many great people in TA are without a role and are on the job market.

  

My manager and I had an honest conversation in January about this potential reality before I went out on paternity leave for my son, Eric, and so over my paternity leave I applied for hundreds of jobs. 2 months in, I plucked up the courage to pitch myself to Benji. It took many hours of calls with many people around the team before we decided it was a good match, and the business needed someone with my skills and experience.

  

All to say, it is hard, I know it is hard, but keep knocking on doors, get creative, and one will open – I’m also always open to chat if you want to connect.

  

## What’s next

  

You’re going to hear a lot from me in helping the Ashby team and product to continue to scale. If you have any suggestions or want a soundboard anything TA – reach out.

  

I want to thank the incredible team at Fullstory for an amazing 2 years and the opportunity to lead their talent function, and then thank [Ian](https://www.linkedin.com/in/isharp/), [Eric](https://www.linkedin.com/in/ericthomas99/), [Kristina](https://www.linkedin.com/in/kristina-graci-deluna-a0b335/), [Darcy](https://www.linkedin.com/in/darcy-casarella-39300a1/), [Peter](https://www.linkedin.com/in/peterclarkee/), [Dan](https://www.linkedin.com/in/dkagdis/), [Ashley](https://www.linkedin.com/in/ashley-dutra-2944301b/), [Lena McAfee](https://www.linkedin.com/in/lena-mcafee/), [Luke Anderton](https://www.linkedin.com/in/lukeanderton/), [Greg Garrison](https://www.linkedin.com/in/gdgarrison/), and, of course, [Gabby](https://www.linkedin.com/in/gabrielle-sirner-cohen-1896015/) & [Scott](https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottmvoigt/) at FullStory for their incredible support and advice on job search journey I’ve had.
I’d also like to thank you for reading! I’m looking forward to saying more soon.

Jim
    
P.S. [Request an Ashby demo!](https://www.ashbyhq.com/request-demo)

Ashby welcomes the incomparable Jim Miller as our new VP of People & Talent -- here's his thoughts on joining the team.

A Letter from Jim Miller on Joining Ashby

Mike Clapson

At many organizations the definition of a top performer in a sales team can be somewhat ambiguous. While sales performance tends to be measurable in terms of closed deals and revenue contribution, there are other meaningful measures that lead to sales excellence. This post aims to demystify how we think about sales performance, and ultimately excellence on the sales team at Ashby.

First off, it’s helpful to think of sales performance as a two-layer system. Layer one is foundational and consists of raw attributes and characteristics that most great salespeople possess. These attributes tend to be innate or habits learned early in one’s life and career. In this foundational layer, you could score highly in any of the criteria even if you haven’t done sales. Conversely, since these tend to be personality traits and values, they tend to be a bit more static in nature, and so primarily need to be assessed during the hiring process. That said, it is up to the individual how quickly and how meaningfully they might improve their foundational abilities to improve as a seller.

Layer two of the system is built upon that foundation and consists of the functional skills and abilities that great sellers have developed over time. In this functional layer, skills are honed over many years, and the best sellers pursue continuous improvement decades into their sales career. In this layer, it’s extremely uncommon that someone would be great at any, never mind all, of the key functional areas of sales without both the practice of experience and a growth mindset.

![the sales excellence model](/images/sales-excellence-chart.png)

## Layer 1: Foundation

### Theme 1: Diligence (Work Ethic, Grit, Persistence)

Sales is a numbers game. You can literally out-work other sellers to produce greater results. If you’re smart and lazy, don’t go into sales! There are other professions much better suited to that profile.

Diligence means continuously prospecting when you’ve got a good pipeline. It means thoughtfully drafting and sending same-day follow-up emails after doing six demos in one day. It means proofreading an important email one more time before clicking send.

Unfortunately, there is no substitute for the consistency of doing high quality work in sales. Quite often a grinder is the most consistent top performer, outperforming an intellectual.

### Theme 2: Intelligence (Curiosity, Learning, Adaptability)

Great salespeople are smart and insatiably curious. They love learning new things and embrace the unknown. After all, you have to love learning about companies and their problems and creatively positioning your solution to meet their specific needs. Excellence in this area means expressing genuine interest in new topic areas and new initiatives. It also means that you’re a self-starter that will actively seek out the information you require rather than wait for it to be perfectly served up to you. A great rep frequently develops new domain expertise and uses that to build credibility with their buyers.

Selling is a dynamic process; as we learn more, we must be willing to try new things. Markets also shift and we must adjust with the market. Great salespeople are highly adaptable. They enjoy refining and adjusting their approach to maximize their impact.

Because the great salesperson is intelligent, they learn new material quickly, and consistently pick up on new details and nuance from customer conversations. They also prioritize revenue-generating activities by identifying which accounts and activities are high-yield, and focus on those.

### Theme 3: Communication (Listening, Clarity, Energy)

A core competency of every great seller is that they are exceptional in their communication skills. They are incredibly precise with their words and can distill a complex idea down to its essence to convey rich meaning in a few words. The ability to bring clarity to a conversation helps create understanding and alignment.

Great sellers are equally strong at asking questions and listening. They ask questions like a surgeon uses a scalpel—adeptly. Listening is a strength of sellers because they’re genuinely curious about what the other person’s perspective is, and they understand that by listening they can learn, and use that information later. The best sellers are often more excellent listeners than skilled speakers. Buyers tend to highly rate sales conversations in which they spoke much more than the salesperson. In my experience this is most often achieved by salespeople who are precise and effective communicators.

### Theme 4: Empathy (Understanding, Tailoring, Solution-seeking)

Perhaps adjacent to curiosity is empathy. Empathy is the capacity to understand what another person is experiencing from their frame of reference. It’s the capacity to place oneself in another's position. Exceptional sales people aim to understand the nuances of their customer’s context because, by gathering a full understanding, they can better craft or position their solution for that specific customer.

An excellent sales rep can uncover the relevant facts and tailor their solution to address the buyer’s most pressing priorities. To do this, they are skilled at working in teams, especially with internal stakeholders to seek out or create new solutions for the customer if the organization can provide it. They can navigate complex situations to identify mutually agreeable options.

## Layer 2: Functional

I’ve broken down this second layer into two component areas:

1. Territory Development
2. Deal Management

These two areas within the functional layer form the basis of what all great salespeople consistently do well: finding and closing deals.

Top salespeople take all of their fundamental attributes and values and develop those over time into the following functional skills:

## 2A: Territory Development

### Pillar 1: Territory Planning

All great reps create a plan of attack for their territory. This is true whether they own five Fortune 100 accounts and need to whitespace the myriad product offerings and services those accounts own or whether they have a geographic territory that has over 10,000 companies in it. All great reps take the time to analyze and prioritize their territory.

The territory planning process typically takes place infrequently (usually annually) and involves analyzing all available data to:

1. Rank and prioritize accounts
2. Identify specific plays or “bets” to place early
3. Create a coverage model and action plan for remainder

A rep without a plan, or a rep not following their territory plan, will chase shiny new leads rather than focusing on the accounts with the highest potential and propensity. Reps who build and follow a territory plan outperform because their conviction and focus drive results where the scale of those results can be meaningful.

### Pillar 2: Pipeline Generation Activities

With a plan in place, top reps start putting the wheels in motion quickly and do so consistently. They only focus on what they can control—the inputs—and trust that the results will come.

Great reps are innately persistent in their pursuit of pipeline. They combine their acumen, creativity and diligence to create new campaigns and approaches and then adapt and iterate based on changing market conditions.

Top reps strike a balance between highly personalized outreach to their top accounts and tailored but programmatic outreach to Tier 2 or 3 accounts. If partnered with an Associate or BDR, a top AE will create clarity for ownership and activity accountability.

An excellent salesperson enjoys the hunt and loves nothing more than creating new deals to fill the top of the funnel. The reps that overachieve goals most consistently are always the ones who are great at filling the top of the funnel and don’t primarily rely on other sources of leads such as inbound and partners.

## 2B: Deal Management

### Pillar 3: Discovery

Top reps show up to every call with an informed perspective on their solution and the account. They don’t use discovery as a substitute for preparation—a cardinal sales sin. Instead, excellent salespeople will often present or discuss a bit of their perspective on the market first, to rapidly build credibility. Then, with the implicit permission earned, they’ll ask a handful of questions with surgical precision.

Many sales reps ask lots of questions because they've been taught that more discovery = better. That's wrong. You want to get as much useful information in as few questions as possible. Instead, as the deal progresses, ask more questions based on the context of the current discussion. Discovery is not a first call, but rather a theme carried on throughout the entire deal.

Top reps also understand that an effective sales motion is about a consistently mutual exchange of information (and power) and they use questions as a tool to reframe the evaluation, or to engage additional stakeholders. (“What reports are most important to your VP of Engineering or CTO?”)

Excellent sales people also use discovery to qualify out an opportunity. Because they’re ruthless with their allocation of time, they don’t want to work on a deal that will ultimately waste it. If a deal is not viable for any number of reasons, they’ll quickly point the buyer in the direction of a different company. That said, if a little bit of creativity could help them design a unique solution, they’ll vet that out first!

### Pillar 4: Stakeholder Engagement

The rigor of account planning and stakeholder mapping will vary between a salesperson covering Startups and a one covering Fortune 500 accounts, but some amount of account-level planning & research are always required to be well prepared and identify all of the stakeholders. Great reps can quickly gather all of the right information from both public and internal data sources to create a complete view of an account and its stakeholders.

Top reps also consistently re-assess the full set of stakeholders, both influencers and decision makers in their accounts and use the account mapping exercise to create a plan for peer-level engagement. They understand that sales in a team sport and they lead an internal team including senior management as part of their sales campaign to minimize risk for the buying committee.

### Pillar 5: Solution Presentation

Top reps have a voracious appetite for knowledge about their solution, and their buyer’s challenges that drive them towards it. When it comes time to present their solution, the rep can clearly articulate the situation their customers most often find themselves in and logically explain the reasons buyers specifically chose their solution. They’re also quick to point out why you might choose a competing solution if necessary.

A strong rep consistently takes the time to learn about the competition so as to be highly knowledgeable and not at all dismissive of the technology landscape. By being intimately versed in competitive knowledge, the best reps can have a constructive conversation with buyers about differences, and what downstream impacts those might have on a workflow.

Excellent reps will consistently tie the features and capabilities they present to the ways in which users create new value for their business. Great reps do this without overusing the word “value,” which is wildly overused in sales conversations.

### Pillar 6: Project Management

There’s no shortage of research on the increasing size of buying committees. Bigger buying committees makes the task of reaching a consensus decision ever harder for the buyer, never mind the seller. Top sales reps are exceptional project managers. They present a compelling series of steps for the evaluation of their solution and can clearly articulate the need for the right set of stakeholders at each step of the process.

For deals of any materiality strong sales people will continuously share and update the project plan so that no surprises show up at the end and derail the timeline or add unnecessary risk (InfoSec reviewed this, right?)

In the largest deals, the top rep acts as the main coordinator of resources and activities taking place on both sides of the table. They shepherd the process forward and address risks and issues throughout. They see around corners and proactively prevent issues from happening before they arise.

### Pillar 7: Negotiation

Top sellers understand that negotiation doesn’t just take place at the end of an opportunity, once your solution has been selected, but that the entire cycle is an extended negotiation. They’ve refined their ability over the years to negotiate the process of the evaluation such that they tilt it in their favor. They’re very comfortable navigating creative quid pro quo exchanges. (“I’d be happy to fill in your security questionnaire if we can set up our CEO with your VP of People for 20 minutes next week.”)

When it comes to commercial conversations, top reps draw on their desire to create a win-win solution for both parties. They are confident that they’ve established substantial and quantifiable value during the presentation process, so they have a solid platform to stand on.

Excellent sales people seek to understand the specific desires (ie “reduce OpEx this year”), and not just the generalities (ie “lower price”) when negotiating. And they never, ever, negotiate against themselves. (“Here’s a discount you didn’t ask for.”)

While negotiations can sometimes get contentious with each party trying to act in their own best interests, top reps consistently exercise empathy and intellect to seek out mutually beneficial scenarios. They also acknowledge that sales is a team sport, and will negotiate to loop in leadership on both sides to expedite the process as needed.

## Sales Excellence

Being excellent at sales is a combination of foundational characteristics and attributes as well as the execution of complex functional competencies learned over hundreds of sales cycles. We use this framework here at Ashby to discuss both performance and career development.

This model provides a rubric by which salespeople can aim to objectively assess the skills that ultimately lead to their performance. I highly recommend doing a self assessment.

Excellence means always trying to do better and aim higher - and that requires careful quantification of even the most invisible attributes. When it comes to Sales, it's clear to see what makes a great team member - here's why.

Ashby Culture

Why Ashby Focuses on Product Velocity Over Long-Term Roadmaps

Announcing Ashby’s $30M Series C - Doing More of What We Already Do, Just Faster and Better

A Letter from Jack Hanratty on Joining Ashby

A Letter from Kat Fergerson on Joining Ashby

A Letter from Jim Miller on Joining Ashby

Sales Excellence | Approaching Sales As A Quantifiable Skillset For Assessment

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Resources

Company

Developers

Ashby Culture

Why Ashby Focuses on Product Velocity Over Long-Term Roadmaps

Announcing Ashby’s $30M Series C - Doing More of What We Already Do, Just Faster and Better

A Letter from Jack Hanratty on Joining Ashby

A Letter from Kat Fergerson on Joining Ashby

A Letter from Jim Miller on Joining Ashby

Sales Excellence | Approaching Sales As A Quantifiable Skillset For Assessment

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