Dan Cook is President and CEO of PDQ, the device management and IT automation company behind PDQ Connect, PDQ Deploy, PDQ Inventory and PDQ Detect. He began his career at Piper Jaffray, a middle-market investment bank in San Francisco, then spent three years at Polaris Venture Partners in Boston sourcing growth-stage technology investments. After an MBA from Harvard Business School he joined Lucid Software, where he built the revenue organization from scratch and served as Chief Revenue Officer as the company scaled past $150 million in ARR. He joined PDQ in 2020, when the bootstrapped, founder-run business was doing roughly $20 million in revenue with 15,000 customers, and has since grown it past $100 million in revenue profitably, completed four tuck-in acquisitions, and taken on a significant investment from Berkshire Partners.
“He said, "Well, you like to talk." And so it was a very low bar for qualifying to be a salesperson at Lucid at that time.”
“I hit mute on the phone. I pretend to calculate a number and I just make up, "Well, how about 300 licenses?"”
“Is sales actually going to be accretive to growth? Or when you add a sales professional, are they just going to cannibalize the PLG motion?”
“I'm really grateful for this shadow IT movement because it's basically helped build my career.”
“You have to have a key thesis in mind of why the sales rep should engage with a lead that was otherwise coming to you.”
“They called it a ghost book. So imagine you have five reps to start or four reps or whatever. They would create a fifth kind of a book where they would not let a rep touch it.”
“The road is littered with SaaS companies that PLG'd in, added sales reps, the sales reps got paid commission, cannibalized what was already going to happen and all you did was add cost to your P&L.”
“We tried to target a 4x payback on the sales rep in their first year.”