PODCAST 166: Announcing Pavilion with Sam Jacobs

If you missed episode 165 check it out here: How to Transition into Tech Sales from a Non-SAAS Background with Lee Berkman

 

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Show Agenda and Timestamps

  1. Show Introduction [00:10]
  2. Announcing Pavilion [3:57]
  3. The origin story of Revenue Collective [7:00]
  4. No antagonists, only self-actualization [16:07]
  5. The long-term vision for Pavilion [21:19]
  6. Dos and don’ts for community building [37:31]
  7. Sam’s Corner [44:30]

Show Introduction [00:10]

Sam Jacobs: Hey everybody, it’s Sam Jacobs. Welcome to the Sales Hacker podcast. Today is a unique show and it’s a unique show because I’m the guest. Max Altschuler, my good friend, the founder of Sales Hacker, is the person who interviews me. And we talk about the announcements that we have today… first and foremost of which is that my company Revenue Collective is becoming a new company, it’s called Pavilion. We talk about what that means and why.

Before we get there we want to thank our sponsors.

We have three sponsors. The first is Outreach, a longtime sponsor of this podcast. They just launched a new way to learn Outreach, and Outreach is the place to learn how Outreach does outreach. Head to Outreach.io to see what they’ve got going on.

The podcast is also sponsored by my company Pavilion, formerly Revenue Collective. Pavilion is the key to getting more out of your career. Our private membership connects you with a network of thousands of like-minded peers and resources, where you can tap into leadership opportunities, training, mentorship, and other services made for high-growth leaders like you. Unlock your professional potential with the Pavilion membership. Go to joinpavilion.com.

And finally LinkedIn. Today’s virtual selling environment demands a new kind of approach, one that prioritizes the buyer above all else. Find new ways to connect with your buyers virtually with LinkedIn Sales Navigator. You can learn more or request a free demo at business.linkedin.com/sales-solutions.

Without further ado, let’s listen to my conversation with Max Altschuler.

Announcing Pavilion [3:57]

Sam Jacobs: I’m the guest because we’ve got some big announcements at my company. I finagled through a complex negotiation with you and the team at Sales Hacker, an opportunity where I could basically be the guest for once and not just be the interviewer.

Max Altschuler: I love it. So let’s not keep people waiting, what are we announcing?

Sam Jacobs: All right, so we’re announcing a lot. The first is that as of today, June 22nd, the company Revenue Collective will no longer be called Revenue Collective; instead, we will be called Pavilion. As a consequence of being called Pavilion, we are expanding our original mission, which was to help our members who were our sales, marketing, and customer success executives, meaning revenue members, revenue people, help those people unlock and achieve their professional potential. We’re now going to do that for essentially any operating professional. Any person at a company that wants to achieve their career goals, we want to enable them to do that. And so with Pavilion, we’re also announcing a new finance Pavilion, a sales Pavilion, and marketing Pavilion, and we will have pavilions for every functional area.

As part of that, we’re announcing the acquisition of two communities to enhance the Pavilion membership. One of them is a community called FinOps focused on finance and operations professionals. The other is a community that will power our new Pavilion focused on people in their first five years of work. So we’re actually acquiring SDRDefenders and the five co-founders there, and they are going to serve as the atomic unit from which our new Pavilion analyst community emerges. So Pavilion’s going to have three layers of seniority. There’s going to be an analyst community for people in their first five years of work, an associate community for people from five years to VP, and an executive community for people that are VP and above. We are also announcing that we’ve officially crossed 5,000 members.

The origin story of Revenue Collective [7:00]

Max Altschuler: That is a lot, congratulations. I also want to backtrack. I want to go way back to the beginning, how did the Revenue Collective get started?

Sam Jacobs: How did that all get started? It really got started at Livestream and Axial. So this is like I guess 2013, 2014, you were there, Adam Lehmann was there, Kayti Sullivan from Yelp was there, Brian Makowski was there. Basically, I started putting dinners together for sales leaders in New York, really to get to know each other, and then also because we were all encountering different challenges and obstacles in the course of doing our jobs. I thought that we needed to learn from each other. I really started it as a means of bringing people together, just in New York. We gave it a name in 2016, that’s when we officially called it the New York Revenue Collective.

The one thing I will say that’s not different is our values. And the talking point that I’m using recently, which I believe to be honest, in a world where you work for a software business, the technology are lines of code and that’s the tech. The technology are our values. And I don’t mean that just to be cheeky, I mean that to be sincere. The thing that has been consistent since 2013 and 2014 is really the spirit of what we’re trying to do, which is it’s not community for its own sake, it’s community to help and support specific human beings achieve their career objectives, to help people get where they want to go in their life. And I can articulate in greater detail the specific values, but those values have been the same and they are still the same. And what’s amazing is that today with 5,000 members, when people join Pavilion used to be Revenue Collective, they always comment on how helpful and supportive all the other members are. I think it’s hard to compete against those specific values because we believe them with so much transparency and credibility and authenticity.

Max Altschuler: When you start to see now in this remote world that we’re in, this kind of like the transient world that we’re in, where people work for startups for two or three years at milestones. And then, especially as a sales leader, a marketing leader or whatnot, they get turned out for the person that can take it from the next stage, and you kind of hand the baton off. You have to make sure that you’re able to negotiate the right things in your packages when you go to work for a company and you’ve been a champion for executives versus, founders or VCs. You’ve kind of figured out a way to scale yourself over the different phases of the business.

Sam Jacobs: Thank you. To the point of like you said, in many ways, the joke that I make to my wife is, Pavilion is Sam as a service. It’s all of the things that I believe trying to be placed into a recurring revenue business which of course, I’m also a huge believer in. This isn’t for me about elevating a specific profession. It’s about helping individual human beings. And that’s why from the beginning, it was always it’s not about a theoretical construct of what a salesperson might be. That’s the thing that gets me out of bed in the morning is not, again, it’s not community for its own sake because the word gets tossed around so much these days. There’s a point to it. I call it community-powered products and services, and the products and services are all designed with a very specific goal in mind, which is to help you as a human being, get where you want to go in your life.

No antagonists, only self-actualization [16:07]

Max Altschuler: You had a really good story and created a movement I think. You were the protagonist and the antagonist was the founders who could kick you out at any second and have no risk whatsoever and got the majority of the equity or the VCs who own the majority of that company. But what about the executive who put their kind of life and career on the line to go work for a company only to be fired in nine months or something like that? Now it’s great to see you going through not only those three tiers, but into the different functions across the board. What do you call it, is it non-code roles? Do you have a name for those functions?

Sam Jacobs: For me, we’re going to go into every function where there are community leaders that want to build community in support of people achieving their career goals. So we’re going to have a product Pavilion, we’re going to have an engineering Pavilion, we’re going to have a CEO Pavilion. That sort of speaks to part of the evolution, which is that I did start off in kind of like this us versus them mentality, and the concept of a collective for me, it evokes insularity in a way it’s like us against them. I’ve shifted personally and become, hopefully, less antagonistic. And so now it’s less about there being an enemy. The brand is about personal actualization, it’s about helping whoever you are achieve whatever you’re trying to achieve and making sure that you have as many resources as possible to get there.

The real point is that there are no antagonists and that everybody’s going to be treated equally and that they may not be the antagonist, but they’re also not the protagonist. This is not a story built around founders or built around investors, it’s built around all of us as human beings coming together. The point of Pavilion is that we’re coming together because we believe in the essence of a certain way of doing business, and that way of doing business is not transactional. The whole point of what we’re trying to do and the reason that we think there can be multiple pavilions is because the core concept that was Revenue Collective isn’t about us versus them. It’s about this idea that if you help other people and you have a long-term view on what that means, and you don’t treat them as transactionally, you give before you get, you look to support.

The long-term vision for Pavilion [21:19]

Max Altschuler: I like your sentiment there around how this has morphed over time. It’s interesting to see the phases of Revenue Collective and now Pavilion. Tell us where it’s going. What’s the long-term vision for the organization?

Sam Jacobs: So the world that I envision is a world that is not 800 million people or a billion people, or 5 billion people, all on one platform. It might be only a million people or 2 million people or 10 million people. So a fraction of these, the largest kind of consumer social platforms that are out there, but everybody on these platforms will have done something different because they will be paying. And as a consequence of them paying, they will be customers of this platform, which is Pavilion. And as a consequence of being a customer and not just an audience or a user, they will experience a different level of service and engagement than they really have ever experienced around the concept of helping them achieve their professional goals.

We take the money that people pay to dues, and we reinvest it back into tools and services that they can use to help them get where they want to go. So the core will be to treat as many people as want to join and are qualified to join as customers and treat them amazingly well. And then the second part of it is those values that I talked about. So this is a world where, hey, we want your money, we do want you to be a paying customer, but also all of the people that are members of this thing, this Pavilion, this big global Pavilion will all have agreed to abide by our code of conduct.

That code of conduct, as I mentioned, is basically three important tenets.

  • The first is that you believe that in order to get something, you need to give something first.
  • The second is that as a consequence of that, this great power that we’re all going to be good to each other means that we’re not going to spam each other. No direct solicitation, no unwanted selling.
  • The third is as a consequence of all of that because we’ve agreed to that, you do have to be responsive. It means something when another Pavilion member reaches out to you.

Those three values all baked into the community, in addition to the products and services that we build mean that there’s a different world that’s possible. A different world where work is done differently where yes, it’s not 800 million people, but a million people is still a lot of people. And so in New York, we’ve got close to 1000 members now that are members just in sales and marketing and CS. So let’s say it’s 5,000 people, it’s 10,000 people. So you know, Max, that anywhere you go you’re in Austin, you’re in Seattle, you’re in New York, you’re in Bangladesh, you’re in Dublin, it doesn’t matter. You’re in Stockholm, you’re in Singapore, you’re in Sydney, you’re in Tokyo, wherever you put your feet down, there’s a group of people all of whom have put their hands in and said, “We’re going to help you, we’re going to support you. Just let us know if you need anything.”

Max Altschuler: Tell us about the two communities you’ve already acquired. Is there any more information you can give us in this podcast about the two that you mentioned earlier?

Sam Jacobs: Yeah. We’re building out our Finance Pavilion. We approached this community called FinOps, which is a couple of hundred people that’s run by these two guys, Brian Saplicki and Peter Nesbitt. And again, the pitch that I made just now resonated, it was, yeah, we want that. We don’t have time to do this to make this everything it could be. We constantly are debating whether we should quit our jobs and do it full-time we decided that we’re going to keep our jobs.

We have an aspiration of kind of not cradle to grave, but from your first day of work, as a professional to the day that you retire, we aspire to have a community for you. And we didn’t have one for people early in their careers and of course, a bunch of Revenue Collective members, which is how it all came to be had started SDRDefenders about a year ago. And it was Kyle Coleman and Josh Roth and Nisha Parikh and Nikki Ivey and Tom Boccard, those are the five. So we approached them and I think they’d been waiting for me to approach them, so they were very enthusiastic. So that was amazing.

Dos and don’ts for community building [37:31]

Max Altschuler: I want to end here with a quick lightning round actionable takeaways. Built a 5,000 person paid community, let’s say in three years’ time or so four years. Give me the top one to three things you must do, and the top one to three things you definitely shouldn’t do when building that community and a business like the Revenue Collective and now Pavilion.

Sam Jacobs: Wow. Okay. Actionable takeaways. The first is I believe in paid communities versus free communities. The reason I believe in paid communities because I believe that you need to overinvest in member success. And so one of the points that we pride ourselves on is our member success team is always going to be the biggest team at the company. And we have 35 people and well, over a third of them it’s like are on the member success team and we expect that to always be the case because we always want to amaze and delight our customers who are our members.

Here’s something super actionable, the problem with the free version of Slack is that you can’t change people’s names. And I’m a big believer in kind of hygiene that communities need to be a well-tended garden, they shouldn’t be overgrown. And part of the way that you keep them well-tended is by having naming conventions for how people’s names appear in Slack if you’re using Slack or on a different platform if you’re using a different platform. So we upgraded to the paid version of Slack at the very beginning because I wanted to change how people’s names look so that you couldn’t have like Philly Joe 1792 next to Sam Jacobs NYC. So everybody has their first and last name and their city affiliation, but it’s consistent and it’s well-organized.

You shouldn’t start a community if you don’t know why you’re starting a community or if the point of it is that you feel like you need to be at the center of a group of people and you don’t have values that motivate you beyond that.

The biggest error, again, these are so high level perhaps be annoying, but I think most people, I have this thing called the decision coefficient, which is basically a math problem of a person makes two decisions an hour but is only correct two-thirds of the time, so wrong often. And there’s another person that makes one decision an hour but is right most of the time, 90% accuracy rate. When you compare those people is you realize that the person that’s wrong one-third of the time a lot is correct 1.4 times per hour and the other person is correct 0.9 times per hour, which means that the person that’s wrong more often is correct 50% more often. The way that you win, I think is by being highly iterative and by understanding that most of the time, you’re not going to make a decision that you can’t turn back. That the subject line of the email, the way that you’ve designed whatever the process is,

Max Altschuler: If this decision is a one-way door and we can’t reverse it, then we can take time on it and understanding which one is which so you can move quickly on the ones that you can reverse and slower on the ones you can’t. It’s a great way of thinking about it. Cool, Sam, thank you so much for coming on your show.

Sam Jacobs: Thank you for having me on my show.

Sam’s Corner [44:30]

Sam Jacobs: Thank you, Max. This is Sam’s Corner. Well, I was the guest this time, so I don’t know that I need Sam’s Corner to wrap up all of the things that I just said and rambled on about, but I do want to say thank you to Sales Hacker. I want to say thank you to all of you for listening and supporting both this podcast and Revenue Collective over the years. As hopefully you just heard, we announced that we are now a company called Pavilion. We closed a $25 million dollar financing round led by Elephant Ventures. We crossed 5,000 members. We announced a bunch of new schools that are all included in the membership. We acquired two communities, FinOps and SDRDefenders, and much, much more to come. And there’s probably a few other announcements that I’m forgetting, but those are the big ones. So if you want to learn more, go to joinpavilion.com.

Don’t miss episode #167!

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Of course, we want to thank our sponsors, Pavilion’s one of them.

We also want to thank LinkedIn. Find new ways to connect with your buyers virtually with LinkedIn Sales Navigator. You can learn more or request a free demo at business.linkedin.com/sales-solutions.

As always, we also want to thank Outreach.

Once again, thanks for listening. If you wouldn’t mind giving us a five-star review, I would really appreciate it. If you want to get in touch with me, you can email me sam@revenuecollective.com.

See you next time.

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