Behind the Flame: Pierson Mayhew

Welcome to Behind the Flame, a series created to showcase our incidentios.

Meet Pierson Mayhew, an Enterprise/ Strategic Account Executive here at incident.io.

Q: What is it like being part of the EMEA go-to-market team?

It's been a blast. It's a growing but mighty team, and there's a huge amount of energy. Very collaborative and a lot of fun.

Q: What does a typical day look like for you?

It's constantly varied. It could be going to Heathrow and hopping on a plane to visit clients on-site, or it could be a pipeline-heavy day where the whole team gets together to make cold calls and it gets really competitive. More or less, it operates around collaborating with different parts of the business and developing quite strategic sales plays. A mix of prepping for big prospect or client meetings all the way through to executing calls on a daily basis.

Q: What is something you're proud to have worked on?

It's easy to talk about the great deals. But one of the proudest things for me has been helping establish our Go-To-Market strategy in EMEA in a more methodological way. I joined when the Enterprise team was very small, both here and globally, and being able to draw on experience from previous roles to help develop and onboard new reps has been something I'm genuinely proud of.

Q: What are you most looking forward to with incident.io this year and beyond?

I'd be lying if I said I wasn't most excited about AI SRE coming to market. I think it's going to be the most profound step forward, not only for this company but in the incident management space, probably over the last ten years. I don't know if the market is fully ready for what we're going to bring. But being on the ground floor of that, having those first conversations with customers and prospects who are genuinely anticipating it, is going to be really exciting.

Q: What does collaboration look like on your team?

In the more Strategic and Enterprise deals we work on, one of our core values is Win Together, and I don't think I fully appreciated how important that was before I joined. There's not a deal I've worked on that hasn't had contributions from every part of the business. Not just Legal, Finance, and Customer Success, but actual engineers who are on calls with me, working with customers, feeding back what they're hearing in the market. Every deal has a Slack channel with our founders in it. Everyone is marching together to help win business, close deals, and make customers' lives better.

Q: What has working at incident.io taught you the most since you started?

Being a Slack-driven product has completely flipped my paradigm. Previously I did everything over phone and email. Learning to engage with clients and prospects directly in Slack has changed how I operate and how I communicate. It's been a catalyst for building relationships faster, moving as an organisation, and engaging with prospects on a whole other level. That also spills into how we operate internally: everything is done publicly, nothing in DMs. Everyone has visibility on what we're working on. It drives accountability and better communication.

Q: What was something that surprised you when you joined?

Purely the speed at which this business operates. Not just the sales pace, but the engineering pace too. I've never seen a company roll out updates, new products, and new features as quickly as incident.io does. Previous companies I worked at would have a monthly town hall because that was the cadence at which the business operated. Here, we do it weekly because so much is happening. That energy carries into everything the sales team does.

Q: How does the team celebrate wins?

We might have the smallest gong I've ever seen to celebrate new deals. We are actively addressing this in our OKRs. But in all seriousness, everyone genuinely wants to see each other succeed. There's no 'I want to do better than my colleagues.' Everyone is proud and happy for each other, whether that's booking a meeting with an exciting new company or closing a big deal. We come together, pat each other on the back, learn from what went well, and figure out how to apply it next time.

Q: What is the value that most resonates with you?

Make it Magic, hands down. A lot of companies talk about things like unreasonable hospitality or making things special for customers. But I don't think I've seen a higher bar set than at incident.io. Whether it's the Christmas gifts we send our customers, the one-to-one experiences we create through our Customer Success and Marketing teams, or the fact that we genuinely have the best corporate swag on the market. People notice those things. They're making a real difference in how the market sees us.

Q: What does FFOTM mean to you?

It can mean a lot of different things depending on the month. Sometimes it's a proper day off, get out of the house, do something different while your friends are still in the office. Sometimes it's a quiet day to finally catch up on things you've pushed aside for a little too long. Either way, it's me time, recharge time. A way to refill the cup so I can perform better the following week.

Q: What would your former self be most surprised to know about your job now?

That nine months in, you're already seen as one of the most tenured reps in the region. I'm still learning so much, still feel very new in a lot of ways. But the growth we've experienced has meant onboarding a lot of new reps, and those people look to me for guidance. It wasn't something I was expecting when I joined, but it's something I'm proud of. I'm very happy to give my time to those people and hopefully help them ramp a little faster.

Q: What is one piece of advice you would give yourself on your first day?

Spend as much time with the engineers as possible. We can get very siloed in our own teams, but our engineers build a product that they themselves use every day. They understand who we're selling to in a way that no one else does. I could talk to salespeople for hours and they wouldn't give me half the insight an engineer would. Since spending significantly more time with those people, I've up-levelled more than I did in my entire first couple of months.

Q: Why shouldn't you work at incident.io?

If you don't want to roll up your sleeves, get your hands dirty, and be comfortable going a bit over your skis, it's probably not the right place for you. But for those people who really thrive in that kind of environment, you'll absolutely love it.

Q: What made you say yes to incident.io?

There were a few reasons. First and foremost: the product-market fit, genuinely solving a problem that engineers deal with every day. But I'd also really wanted to join a company going through a rapid growth phase. And if I'm being honest, I think I was falling out of love with sales at a certain point in previous roles. Coming here, being part of somewhere with this kind of tangible energy around it, has made me double down on my efforts and genuinely enjoy showing up to work every day.

Q: What advice would you give to candidates interviewing with us?

Really understand incident.io's core values as a business, because we truly hire on them and we truly live by them every day. If you can exemplify how you map back to those values, and how you demonstrate them in your day-to-day life, it'll be a no-brainer.