Warren Zenna talks with Dayna Williams, CXO of the Myers Briggs company, about how revenue leaders balance hitting quarterly targets against building something that lasts. They dig into the tension between immediate pressure and sustainable growth.
Hi, I'm Warren Zenna, founder and CEO of the CRO Collective and welcome to the CRO Spotlight podcast. This show is focused exclusively on the success of Chief Revenue Officers. Each week we have an open, frank and freeform conversation with top experts in the revenue space about the CRO role and its critical impact on B2B businesses. This podcast is the place to be for CROs, sales and marketing leaders who aspire to become CROs and founders who are looking to appoint a CRO or want to support their CRO to succeed. Thanks for listening. Now let's go mix it up. Hello and welcome to this episode of the CRO Spotlight Podcast. This is Warren Zen. I'm the founder of the CRO Collective and I'm very excited today to welcome our guest, Dana Williams. Dana is the author of the Diligence Fix and she is currently the CXO of the Myers Briggs company. And Dana and I met at a conference and she co co led with me the CRO of the Year awards. And we just talking and talking and talking and it was amazing. Like I listening to her book thesis, I'm like, oh my God, this is like amazing. It's like exactly what I'm talking about. And whenever I meet anybody that has similar, if not, you know, exact philosophy as I do, I'm like, I almost like want to hug them, you know, because there's not many. And so I really, it's great. So Dana, welcome and really thanks for being here today. So I want to talk a bit about not only the book you wrote, but more the reasoning behind it. Right. The philosophy behind it. Because as you and I decided to do this together is because we realized, wow, we think as long we think alike here, you know, and your book is really evokes a lot of what I'm trying to say in my work. So if you don't mind, please, just a little background on yourself, you know, how you ended up at Myers Briggs, what you're doing beforehand and what inspired you to advocate the philosophy that you do and what prompted this. And a little bit more about the work that you're doing from your authorship perspective.
Sure, yeah. So for 20 years I had amazing access to CEOs, CROs, VPs of sales, and it was always under the guise of there's a problem in our organization and the right fix for us is training. And so I was really brought in to unpack. Well, what are those challenges and what do you want people to do better as a result of this training? But I was very curious and I Couldn't stop there. And so I always really dug into root cause issues and I had stacks and stacks of notebooks. After two decades of these conversations and, and I'm somebody who recognizes patterns and during 2020 we all had a little extra time on our hands and so I cracked those notebooks back open and I was really curious to understand what did these situations have in common. Whether it was a startup, whether it was a Fortune 1000, whether it was anything in between. What caused these business leaders to reach out and express their issues and concerns and seek training. I was also coming off of my own internal leadership role at a company called Caliper. And it was a 30 year old independent company. We prepped it for sale, it sold prematurely and once again I had, you know, some time on my hands. And while I was reflecting back and there was some wins to savor there, I also asked myself, why was it so hard? Why was slogging our way through selling and solutioning, why was it so hard? So I put it all together. I wrote a first draft. It was a bit of a rant. And then two more drafts really I think came up with what the philosophy was and that the bottom line was when striving for revenue, quarter after quarter, year after year becomes the way you do business. If you do not do the infrastructure building that's required to have a stable, growth ready, fully aligned organization, you will see see cracks in your operational structure and those cracks will eventually give way and it won't be pretty.
Yep. Well, I obviously agree completely and I like the way that you put it. You know, I think we're calling same thing with a different term. You're referring to the sort of endless and almost mindless pursuit of revenue, top line revenue as like the kind of day to day. It's almost like a shark. Right. Never stops eating. Right.
Yeah.
And I do see a lot of, particularly the SaaS industry has created this sort of monster. Right. This is a. These are companies whose revenue models are such that they need to do that to fulfill on the ways in which they've evaluated the. The business model. Right. Is we have to get a certain amount of customers in the door on a regular basis or else we won't hit the numbers that we projected, which I know you and I both agree are probably a lot of them are phantoms anyway. But it's like I look at it as a short termism. It's like I'm looking at the world from a. It's not even quarterly. I think it used to be quarterly. Now it's like almost monthly, maybe even weekly. Much, much the same way that we've changed the way that people look at the stock market. Right. I mean, I think that if you look back 25 years ago, I'll probably go back far. You know, people looked at the stock market in very large, almost, you know, geological shifts, you know, whereas now it's like every minute of the day the market shifts. And you know, it's almost like. I remember that great funny scene from Airplane when the news changes and this. Reporters have to run back and forth from each phone booth to make the phone calls to their offices to try and get on top of the story. And it's like they're just running frantically back and forth, trying to keep on top of a moving thing that, you know, it's preposterous because they're never going to really be on top of anything. And I think that that's sort of the way that I view companies. And you're. We're. We obviously also agree that, that not only is that a kind of a mindless pursuit in, in a lot of ways I think it creates burnout. You know, it also, it, it takes the focus off of the purpose of the company, which is like, what are we trying to serve here? What are we trying to accomplish for our clients and our customers? And lastly is it also ignores critically important aspects of the business that need to be in place for those things to work anyway. It's sort of a weirdly kind of a myopically self destruction.
