The Power of Codification in Building a Sales Organization, with Luke Rogers VP of Sales at Instabase
We’re excited to spotlight Luke Rogers, the VP of Sales at Instabase. In this spotlight, we’ll highlight Luke’s approach to building entrepreneurial, data-driven teams, his personal journey in tech, and codifying the customer engagement process. In conjunction with this post, you can also learn more about Luke in his recently released podcast with SalesHacker.
About Luke: Luke founded his first company at age 15 and has dedicated his career to teaching sales as a science. He is a passionate believer that experience is the least important quality when building an elite GTM team and that the world of tech sales must become a more diverse place, through empowering and recruiting new voices into sales. His degree in artificial intelligence & cybernetics combined with over a decade of enterprise sales experience has equipped him with a rich technical and business skill set. Prior to joining Instabase, Luke joined AppDynamics which grew from $100M to a $3.7bn sale to Cisco in just 4 years.
What’s a significant personal milestone that shaped your leadership approach?
Luke: My journey started 18 years ago when I was in high school in the north of England. I desperately wanted to go to university, but I didn’t have the means to pay for schooling. With my limited tech talent at the time and sheer determination, I started a company. The business experienced such explosive growth that I left home at fifteen years old to keep up with demand. Developing the business while completing high school, took a tremendous amount of effort, but it paid off in more ways than I could have imagined. The business paid for my university education and, more importantly, I learned lessons in entrepreneurship that changed my life. The key lesson was: entrepreneurship isn’t much about tech or business. Entrepreneurship is about people. People are everything.
What’s your philosophy in building effective teams and organizations?
Luke: Being part of several hyper growth technology companies, there are three philosophies that have formed the foundation for how I run and grow teams. First, hire and promote leaders who are selfless and are motivated by teaching before selling. Second, experience is the least important trait to hire for in order to create elite, diverse teams. Finally, specific to sales, sales is a science and everything can be thought and taught as a process.
What’s your codified approach to customer engagements?
Luke: My vision for customer engagement at Instabase is to codify every element of the process into a formula, so that there is deep alignment with customer goals, value realization and product adoption. This approach is the cornerstone of our employee training, so that we can coach any individual regardless of experience. The goal of this consistent, consultative, and creative engagement model is to challenge the thinking of every organization we touch. In partnership with our champions, we will harness the power of true invention to automate the most strategic and critical parts of our customers’ operations.
What makes you excited about where Instabase is heading?
Luke: It is rare to join a generational company, one that will create and own a new market, and is so groundbreaking that many will struggle to understand it. Our solution is a platform consisting of groundbreaking, highly extensible, and configurable tools that can be easily and rapidly assembled to solve an infinite number of complex data-based use cases. These building blocks enable you to, in just a few hours, build some of the most complex business productivity applications in the world. In a few short years, we will have worked with our customers to create a vast ecosystem of applications for the business world that rivals the consumer app store experience we have grown so accustomed to. Today, we are enabling best-in-class document understanding using this powerful technology. Eventually, Instabase will become the default modern operating system for the enterprise.
To learn more about Luke’s approach to building teams and his learnings through his career in technology, check out the full podcast recording here.
Excited to learn more about Instabase? We’re hiring across the board globally and would love to hear from you. Learn more about our roles here.
