Building a Marketplace of Expertise for a World of Complacency with Julia Nimchinski

The CRO Spotlight Podcast, powered by the Growth firm Production. 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, everybody, and welcome to this episode of the CRO Spotlight Podcast. This is Warren Zinn. I'm the founder and CEO of the CRO Collective, and I'm really excited today because I have a really special guest here, someone whom I have a lot of interaction with. I've had some opportunities to participate in her platforms or products and, you know, endlessly fascinating and brilliant person. So, Julia, welcome to the show. Julia Namczynski, the founder of Hype Cycle and the Hard Skill Exchange and other things, and just want to appreciate your time and I'm really looking forward to this conversation.

Thank you so much for so, I.

Mean, as you've heard me on other appearances and such, you know, I have a very, very, very strict philosophy around this. It's the premise of my entire business is, is that, you know, look, sales is critically important. No, no one doubts that. That's obviously the lifeblood of a business. But left to operate on its own, it can consume a business. It eats it alive. It's not good. You know, it needs to be balanced. That marketing is equally as important as, of course, as customer successes. But it's the integration of them through all three of them that makes everything really work. And companies that are really successful sort of have a really great process for data driven, metrics driven, process driven, systems driven, organizationally driven, culturally driven integration between those three. And there's only one person that should do it. It should be either the CEO, the early stages, or the CRO at the later stages. In the later stage, I mean, you know, 20 million plus, when a company's really got a lot of complexity and you need that coordination. And so that's sort of the premise. And I think that the thing I'm trying to olve is most CROs are initially they come out of sales, not all, but most. And then that's what they do. They have a different title, but they just run Sales, you know, and it creates all sorts of problems. That's what I think.

Just like SDRs become go to market leaders.

Yeah, I mean, look, marketing is a weird animal today. It's changed into so many things. It's become this sort of science and art. You know, if we're Talking in the B2B space exclusively, it's almost all science and it shouldn't be, you know, and I think we've sort of tossed thought leadership, you know, and positioning in over the side of the cliff, you know, and that comes at a big price, particularly if you're in a commoditized space. The only way you have a difference is if you have a point of view and you have something, a philosophical point of view that you want to promote in the marketplace and you have maybe a methodology or an approach to what you're doing. Without that, you're just selling widget wear. You know, you and I are lucky. You know, we both have very specific sort of things we're doing that are different. And so it's baked into the proposition that we're doing make it easier for us. But someone who sells, you know, programmatic tech, I mean there's 80 different people they can buy from. So what's the way you make differentiated? But what, by buying better programmatic advertising or by selling more? I don't think that's the right way to go.

Couldn't agree more. I think that generally the major industry problem that I'm seeing now is that kind of over indexing on the functional responsibilities and functions and part of it is sales and product. So there are almost two camps on one side you have, you know, product led everything. Future is product. And obviously, you know, diminishment of the sales element within any company. And on the, on the flip side of it, obviously sales driven organization. We just had this discussion last week on CXL games and one CEO, actually CEO of Appster mentioned that, you know, every CEO should be extremely commercially focused and basically the chief sales officer of a company. And Warren, I so strongly disagree with this. I couldn't disagree with this even more and that's why I find your book extremely valuable. And I do believe that a chief sales officer is the Croatian. And specifically what makes him the chief sales officer is this united vision of every functional department and understanding of the idea of a company. And what we do forget about is the idea that creates company. So you know, like in B2C it's really obvious. Like I don't know, take Mercedes, it's marketing driven. Yeah, like there's, and it should be definitely, there is always an idea that creates something, but then you forget about it and then you start to over index on sales or over index on product. But at the end of the day, you know, a product without idea, it's just a toothbrush.

So look, you and I, I know we're aligned on this. I don't doubt it. And what's happened is, you know, this, right, the, I, look, I don't want to, I'm out of finger pointer, you know, but I think what's happened more, look, everything's economically driven, end of the day, right? And so if you look at that, if you follow the money, you look at the investment community over the last 20 years, you know, they found gold in, you know, spreading their money across a bunch of product driven companies and maybe two or two or three of them turn into unicorns. They make all their money back on the, you know, 50 or so that they invested in. And that model has been prominent for so long that it's created this sort of, like you said, focus on product and sales almost exclusively to make companies run. And it comes at the cost. My concern is it comes at the cost of customers. Customers are the last thing people think about. You know, they're not customer driven organizations. They're really made to try and get subscribers, right? And a subscriber is not a customer. Subscriber is a transaction between like credit card and your company. That's, that's it. And you know, I saw the great TV show the, you know, Super Pumped, which was really well done. You know, it was a perfect example of how they inflated this whole product to try and make it economical for everybody involved to get as many people to use it as possible. They became addicted to it. And then when the reality hit and you know, the drivers couldn't afford to do this anymore and people couldn't afford to pay for it anymore, they were like, who gives a shit? You know, we got our billion dollars, screw you, you know, take a cab. And literally that's what it's like now, you know, and it's unbelievable to me. The people that were loyal to these companies and this product and they fell in love with it, were really sold a bill of goods, frankly, because they didn't realize that investors were paying for their rides and the drivers didn't realize that investors were paying for their, their services. That's insanity. But that's the way it works. A lot of people got rich off of that. And I do think that there is a model for this. And it's driven this sort of dynamic that's resulted in sales sort of eating its young. You know, I'll be a bit, maybe contrarian, if you don't mind a bit here. Okay, So I look at the SDR model, for example, and the SDR role. The entire SDR industry that's been created now is an offshoot of this. I mean, they only created this position to accommodate a hyperbolic need for growth. And the fact is that most SDR organizations are doing what marketing is supposed to do. And not only that, but they're creating really shitty salespeople. I mean, I don't know, I'm an old fart, you know, so I mean, I sold. I had to do it all. I had to do all my research and make the cold calls and get people on the phone and then consult them and then close the deal. That's all. All my, you know, gears did that. And now we see this group of people that get meetings. For me, it's insanity. You know, I mean, if I were to hire any of these senior level salespeople from these companies, they don't come to the job equipped to do that whole job. And so you need a sales support organization to make these people be able to work. And that to me is it's insanity. And so, you know, I know that, you know, and I, believe me, I have nothing but respect and love for Justin, but his business is predicated on supporting that industry to do a better job at that. I'm not sure that's a good thing. I'm not sure if you want more people being good at trying to get more meetings all the time because we're cannibalizing our own limited population of buyers right now with too many pieces of technology. And I don't think people care anymore. I don't know how good you are. Doesn't matter in a way because it's only so good you can be. If I'm only going to make 3 or 4, 4% out of all the phone calls or emails I sent, that's not a very high rate of return for a lot of effort. And I just think that the whole thing is sort of reaching its peak and I'm hopeful that maybe it'll kind of collapse and maybe we'll get back to just people maybe thinking a bit more about what product am I putting to market, why am I doing it, what's my customer, how do I formulate a business that's a little bit more based on a real need? And you know, Look, I'd like to think, I think that your company, because I mean, I understand your company very well and I certainly understand my own. You know, we both got into a business to create a niche, to solve a problem that's very specific. It's hard to replicate. And so as a result it's easy for us to kind of go out there and find our audience because we're talking to a very specific thing. I think more businesses are going to evolve like that than ones that are just like general audiences. I think it's harder and harder to do that many. I'm interested in your thoughts on that.

Well, two things. One, in my opinion as the art is just a reflection of what's happening on the top. I was listening to this podcast about HubSpot and I won't name names, but essentially their strategy, their vision for them. Their vision for like X years, 5 years was vision of the company to double their revenue. And I was listening to this and that's like podcast about growth and a lot of tactics and strategies. And I feel that it was positioned from the names of co founders of HubSpot and the Leadership. And it's quite shocking hearing that the vision of a company can be doubling the revenue. And so here we are with SDRs to your point, as the reflection of that. I'm not sure whether or not it will change. And like unless I think that it's just what will happen, probably there will be companies that will be always run, you know, with this philosophy in mind and different companies that will be more customer oriented, ideas driven and the real visionaries. What do you think?

I agree with you. I mean I'm certainly not like I'm a positive person, but I wouldn't say I'm an optimist. You know, we're Jews, you know, we're not optimists. But I agree with you. I mean there's always going to be economically driven companies, you know, they call it like that made for advertising businesses, you know, and it's an mfa. It's, it's actually literally like a, like a category, you know, people that open up a website just because they want advertisers and that's, that's, that's an end unto itself. But they're, they're out there and they're always going to be out there. People figure out the moth model of how to drive enough users to a website and monetize them again. People are going to do that. Then there are publishers that actually produce stuff that people want to read and give A about there's an editorial, you know, integrity there. I know there's little of that today. I know that. But you know generally what I'm saying, right? So I agree. I do. I think that however, what I would say is this. And this is where I think I'd like to understand how you think. Like, okay, so let's say that we're both in agreement that yes, there's always going to be this, always a place for these product driven, you know, companies whose objective is to, you know, be a, be a unicorn, which is an insane ambition. But okay, fine, but what do you do? Okay, so let's say like I'm a company that I'm opening my doors today and I say, yeah, I want to double our revenues in five years or whatever the number may be. That's my ambition. And we tell everybody in the company our mission is to become a unicorn. I say it's not the same environment as it was even five years ago to do that anymore. It's just not. So what type of environment is it going to be for companies that have that sort of focus? I don't think they have the same. Like, I sort of think that the heyday is over. It was easier to do something like that four or five years ago than it is right now. It doesn't mean it's not going to continue. But how does that continue in today's environment?

Yeah, I absolutely aligned with you. I read about this case of Airbnb and their story of almost dying during COVID obviously and how they rebuilt the go to market team and generally the operators operations of the company. Extremely inspiring. And essentially the philosophy that they worked with a chief communication officer, marketing officer that was actually reporting to Steve Jobs and it's his methodology in marketing. So they kind of integrated into Airbnb. And the main point is that if your marketing department can't communicate the value of the product and your and vice versa, your product team can't be market driven. Then there's your company is unhealthy. So what they did, they got rid of the product function in its purity. All the designers cheered. And I don't want to, you know, be negative about product or whatever it is, but when I started my career, product marketing 10 years ago, there was no product really or there was a technical kind of project management aspect of things in SaaS, but it wasn't like product, product like it is now. And when you think about it, product marketing should be responsible for what product teams do. They shouldn't be isolated, doesn't make any sense of one simple heuristics really defines the health of the company. How close your marketing department departments, it's to the engineers.

How close are the, how close are the marketing people to the engineers? How close are the sales people to the customer success organization? I see those companies, all those organizations almost living in islands from each other. I've worked at big companies and small ones where they don't even know anybody in customer marketing. I mean they, they send the customer over to that side of the building and they're like done. I did my job and you know, if I'm selling in a transactional product then sure, I guess maybe there's a degree to which, you know, you signed up now you know tech will take care of you. But most companies aren't like that. Most companies have some service layer involved, right? I mean I know there's a lot of these like just sign up and stuff like that. Maybe purely like maybe product driven companies, but there's always some service layer, particularly if there's a large enough revenue cycle. Right. And I think that when you're involved in a sales conversation and you're getting a customer to make a decision that's going to have an impact on their business, they're buying from you as much as they're buying the product. And if you disappear after that point, you've failed to provide the customer with that sort of longer term relationship that they're really looking for because ultimately they're trusting that salesperson. And what I'm saying again to you, I think we're in agreement here is that this new model has sort of made it easier for the salesperson to just kind of step out of the whole situation and not be involved anymore. So I think you're 100% product. I've been talking more about this recently is I think that I clearly I'm making a distinction between the 3, 3 most customer, customer facing parts of the business which is sales, marketing and the customer success organization. Those are the ones that touch the customers the most. But you know, product and the development of the solution is so tied to marketing and if, if that, if they're not having conversations all the time, it's insane to me. That's, that's like I, I think I'm seeing this too much and you could tell too. You know, one thing I make a little note of all the time, a little example. This, it's a small thing but it really is, is true. Like I don't know how many pieces of software you use. I Use a lot. Like I log into my, you know, X platform or a Y platform or my Z platform and you know, when you log in, you know you're not logged in, you have to re log in. And when you go to the interface, the sign up button is huge. You know, it's like this big. And the login button, you need like a, you need. I'm a customer and I can't even find the login button because I'm not important anymore. You know, the engineers and the designers made it clear that they want that interface to be a sales platform, not a customer platform. That's a small thing, but it's across the board, you know, and I think that's indicative of the priorities of a lot of these companies. So anyway, I think we're aligned here. I'd like to hear a little bit more about some things from you because I really. First of all, I want to thank you for doing this. So tell me a bit about all the different products you've been working on lately. I know you have the hard skill exchange, you got the CX games. I know you just came out with a book recently which by the way, thank you for sending it to me. I read it, it's awesome. What are some of the things you're working on? And here's the framework from this conversation. It's not just, I certainly want to hear about your background and all the other stuff, but what is it you're trying to do? Like what's the big picture for you? Why?

Yeah. Oh God. It's hard to answer this without giving a little bit of a background. So I spent my career in marketing, Salesforce ecosystem and B2B marketing. I've been a CMO. It's, it's problematic in that it's almost like a complementary function, but it's never the forward thinking and driving function in terms of growth and general vision and unfortunately direction. But when you start interacting with sellers, with sales leaders, you almost feel this dismissiveness to marketing but at the same time the incentives and I don't want him to get in that route. But what we demand from marketers is, you know, creating beautiful booths, investing money into, you know, the most ROI friendly conferences, events, now communities and I guess just you know, creating decks and all of the materials that's to support sales team and revenue driving movements. Right. And the problem here, Warren, is that among the obvious ones is that marketers never understood sales. It's quite a big statement, but you can't understand sales without actually doing it. And you can't understand marketing without doing it and a lot of other disciplines. And there were a lot of methodologies that were invented before me and you were, you know, if people wanted to become CEOs, they would literally go to some kind of bootcamps and role play being CEOs for a couple of days and 17 days or something like it's the most common methodology. And then you feel what it actually means to be a CEO, to be a revenue leader or whatever function. So we kind of simulated this experience with GTM games initially and that created the first project, the CXO community that you're referring to, where in the intersection of skills we found a ton of innovation and where by actually just walking in a mile in the opposite skill set in the shoes of a marketer, seller, product person, you could actually understand their world and just use some of the elements and ideas to be more productive in yours. Now it all evolved to CXL games, CXL debates, CXL's functions and we really serve CXOs. We want to create an experience where CXOs feel safe, where they innovate. Mostly what we're seeing is that they are all integrative thinkers and that the simple idea of a CXO debate is you post two ideas and you'll be doing it next month. And by like some people miss it, especially the audience sometimes. But we definitely don't want to create polarity for the sake of pr. The purpose of that is to actually push the envelope further and to land on a new truth as a result of that hour spend.

Yep, that makes sense. I think it's great. I think what you guys are doing is really unique and really great and there's a lot of learning there. And I think you're right. I think trying to jar people out of their silos is really hard, you know, so that's really cool. So now you've got the CXO games, which I understand is a format for thought leadership and exchange of ideas for the purposes of sort of maybe insights that come out of it. And the other thing is the hard skills exchange which walk me through that product.

Yeah, it's in progress. And the vision there is really innovation of and the next steps from for our communities where community shouldn't be a slack chat anymore and we really should reconsider the way we interact with each other and the way we are monetizing our time and expertise. The status quo in the industry is mainly driven by influencers. And you know, If I spend 20 years talking about sales and I have all of the credentials to talk about sales. But I was actually in the trenches, an operator 10, 20 years ago. I still coach how to do it and you know, being paid pretty damn well and at the same time brought a ton of innovative, just sales reps, AES, VPs of sales CROs, marketers, customer success people, you name it. Every function cross go to market that are just succeeding in their job but they can't transfer that expertise because there is no environment to do so. And it's almost like this crazy system just like you mentioned with the investors, it's extremely pocketed when it comes to education, B2B education and skill building. So what we're trying to enable and democratize really and filter in a way is to just feature some of the best both succeeding people in the industry in every go to market function and enable them just to share their expertise online in just, you know, the form of a marketplace. I'm sure it will be copied, but here we are.

Yeah, well, you know, it's always the best form of flattery. So I get it. I like it. I agree with you too. I think there's a lot of unlocked knowledge with people that they have no place to share it, that everyone's an entrepreneur. You know, not everyone's going to go to market and say, hey man, I've been doing this for a long time. I could probably teach people how to do this. Most people just sit around and do their job so they have platform, they can go and all of a sudden that their knowledge can be turned into some, you know, necessarily monetized it, but just be able to give it to other people in a format, I think it's brilliant. So that's really, really great. So I like that. What's the bigger game? Is it a focus on changing the business community? Is it a focus on changing knowledge? You know, trying to get a little bit more higher level? Like you and I talked before, I certainly know your goals are not to double your revenues next year. That we know we've already kind of established that's probably not the case. So what would you say it is? What are you trying to accomplish? What's the big picture? Is it more you're exercising your interest because you have a certain passion for something? This is a way for you to kind of like utilize a way to do that or is there some other grander outcome that you're looking to do with this businesses that you're producing?

Yeah, all of all the projects are always about go to market, going to market. So there is GTM mag also and mag where it's extremely like we just manually select publications from top operators, CXO operators in the industry. It's evergreen content and illustrators from the Economist just, you know, complement those pieces with art and got an agency also. So a lot of things are going on. But with hard skill exchange is about the idea is just simplifying go to market skill building and bringing it to a whole new level where you can get like, you can be in control when it comes to your own acumen and you can just get exposure more. And like if I got exposure 10 years ago to some platform like this and I could book time with you and ask you questions about, you know, revenue intelligence, about sales, sales strategy, tactics and everything involved in between, it would be way more productive for me than enrolling into just another course. I mean, CRO school. I'm sorry, but you got to CRO school, you're never going to become a CRO and CROs are not doing it. So just this industry is sometimes driven by fashion and driven by seeming a certain way. And generally I think that humanity is like this, right? Like we go to either on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, any platform and we'll see a lot of unhappy people that want to seem, look a certain way via text, via photos. And it's all filtered now, Grammarly edited, perfected. And what we're trying to accomplish is to get rid of the certificates of all of those meaningless statuses and over index on the essence, on your own business acumen, skill, knowledge or just generally level. I don't, I don't know if I'm allowed to say that, but you want to be improving, you know, daily. You want to build your skill and you can do it just by practicing on your customers. Unfortunately, you have to get some mentorship and we're not a robot to be exposed to one person. Why, like, why lose time in, you know, all of those courses? And I mean I'm not just again, I don't want to be negative when it comes to universities and stuff. I have my master's degree and it was insanely helpful. Just help with resilience. But definitely 90% of what I studied I will never remember and never use. And it's just wasted time, a ton of wasted time on my life. So what if back then I could actually build my own agenda and save a lot of money for my parents? Right. And just do my thing?

Yeah, it's great. Thank you. That's awesome. So true. So true. It's Terrific. We do put a lot of stock on titles, diplomas, other things like that. I think the veil is collapsing around a lot of this right now, which is good. But I agree, you need to be in it and you need to have a much more diverse selection of people to kind of poke you and prod you, to get you to understand things. And it has to be useful. Thank you. That's great. I'll tell you a funny story or a funny story. Interesting story, sort of. So it's sort of related to this. So most people don't know this, but, you know, I'm an artist. I went to school for art. You know, I was a visual artist, I was a performing artist. I had these really weird skills when I was a kid. And so I could write and I can draw, I could paint and I could sing. It was really weird. And so I went to school for that because that's sort of what I always did. And I was good at it. And I went to a big university and one night, my roommate and I, this is my sophomore year. I was doing all these studio courses. I was painting and sculpting, all this crap. And this is a funny story. I was in. In my kitchen of my, like my university home, you know, like we were living in this place and my roommate and I, like, you know, when you're in college, you have these stupid conversations. They're purposeless. We were arguing about the difference between dinner and supper. It was a really heated conversation, let me tell you. We were like getting into it, you know, we both had our perspectives, you know. You know, mine was. It was more like an agrarian distinction. You know, you dinner dined and, you know, certain time. And the agrarian was more like, you know, people supped when they were on farms, whatever. It was this big long intellectual conversation. This is 1984. We couldn't get to a conclusion because we both had good points and we needed someone to arbitrate this, you know, important conversation, you know. And right there in every dorm or a room or any place on campus was this called the campus book. You know, it was like a big, huge brown book. I remember this thing. It was massive and it had everything in it. Everything. All the names of every student and all the things. So I. I picked it up and I found the head of linguistics, Professor. And I picked up the phone and I called the guy and he answered the phone. Could you imagine? The guy answers the phone, he says, hello, you know, professor whatchamacallit, you know, I said, professor, my roommate and I are Having a argument about the difference between dinner and supper. We want to know if you can help us arbitrate this important conversation. This guy was thrilled. They probably never got a call like this in his entire life. You know, this is what he lived for, you know? And so the guy settled it for us. He told us. And I was right. You know, I was very happy that I was right. Doesn't matter. It wasn't the point. But this is the reason why I'm telling the stories, because I really. I swear this is true. I had an epiphany. I was like, man, you know. You know, I'm at this school, and I'm, you know, in studio classes, and I could pick up the phone, I can call the head of linguistics and talk to this guy. There's so many brilliant people in this institution that know all these things, and they're brilliant about all these things. And I'm doing this one thing, like, what a stupid way to waste my time on this at this school. So literally the next day, it's a true story. I went down to my. My dean of my school, the art school. His name was Roger Mack. He's now not living anymore. He was an amazing guy. Worked cowboy boots. You had a big mustache. You look like a Sam Elliott, okay? And he was sitting there, and he goes, yeah, tell me what it is you want. And I. I went and I told him the story I just told you. And I said, you know, I can do a lot of things. I think I'm a pretty smart guy. And why is it that you guys set us up in this silos in these institutions? I'm here, My mom's paying us all this money, and I'm painting. And he's like, okay, so what do you want to do? Tell me what you want to do. I said, I don't know what I want to do. I'm here to find that out. All I know is I want to explore, I want to learn. And he said, I'll tell you what I want you to do. He literally said this to me. He goes, I want you to go back to your room or your dorm, and I want you to take out the student curriculum, and I want you to map out your next semester of class. And they have to follow the following criteria. You have to have the. The correct amount of credits to get you through the semester. So you have to meet the credit requirements. And you also have to take a certain number of electives that we require. But everything else, you can do whatever you want. Just pick the Classes you want? I just curious to know what you come up with. I took it really seriously. So I went back to my dorm and I picked out the Graysoft. Now at the time I went to Syracuse and one of the schools at Syracuse University is the Newhouse School of Communications, which is one of the best communication schools in the country, if not the world. And I couldn't get in there because I didn't get in. So I picked a bunch of new house classes. I picked some, you know, bongo drumming. I swear to God I picked that. I picked philosophy, a lot of English, like very advanced writing skills and reading and stuff, and a whole bunch of other things. And I went in there and I showed it to him and he looked at it and you know, very astutely he said, this is all communication stuff. And so he let me actually do that. I actually created my own curriculum and I was able to do that. And he created my, I created my own curriculum and I got into all these schools. I tell the story because I tell young people, you have to figure out what you want. And if you don't know what you want, you got to learn. You got to learn from a lot of different people, got to figure out what, what, what drive jives you, what makes you happy, you know, and don't get constrained by the limitations that are put on you. And I think that sounds to me what I heard from you, you, you kind of intrigued me with your answer is you're trying to do the same thing. You're trying to create a new world where people have access to more stuff, they can do more things, they can figure more stuff out because there's a lot of knowledge out there. We live in a university right now, you know, so I don't know how that hits with you, but that's sort of like reminded me of that story.

You know, it definitely hits home. And if, like, if you want to hear the, you know, high level mission, it's going to be we want to make people think. And I'm incredibly fascinated by the way human mind works and different types of thinking and levels of thinking and just reflecting on my own experience how your thinking enables you to come up with certain ideas, land and certain decisions and you sometimes have to, you know, die and be born again just, just in those transition transitions from one stage to the other. And I'm sure everybody experienced this and you know, it's inevitable necessity. And when it comes to all of those projects or in general like sales methodologies, something that you dealt a lot with it was shocking to me because I started just studying all those Sandler and Spin and Challenger and you name it. And none of the sales methodologies ever began with the product or. And I'm not over indexing on product, I'm not in this religion. Product religion and just saying the product is the most important thing. But how can you begin selling without encountering like and taking into the account like the specificity what you sell. Do you sell a pen? You sell a software? What do you sell? And it just, it was so wild to me and correct me if I'm wrong, but I haven't found any methodology that addresses that yet. So where I'm going with this, if you're a thinker, you, you just have to, to analyze things like this and you have to talk to Warren, talk to somebody, you know, your peer and a lot of other people, and land on your own methodology which is a synthesis of all of those ideas that resonate with you the most in a certain period of time and experiment. And there will never be an answer that like one person is going to present to you like this is the ultimate methodology for sales or for revenue or for marketing. You name it, it doesn't exist. And now we're trying to just, you know, put the slip stick on a pig and go back with AI and ChatGPT and this is the future. I've been told that, hey, you're never going to fundraise if you won't have this AI layer in your platform. I never want to. I don't see the necessity to do it. Can I do it? Of course. Why do it if there's never been like till now a perfect sales process? Nobody created it. It's not scalable. It's always case by case and company by company. Industry, extremely industry, reliable and dependent. How can we AI it?

Look, I agree those sort of edicts are ridiculous. They sort of drive this myopia. I mean, every time I'm trying to attack AI like you said, for reasons that make no sense, they're just economically driven. Does it matter to the business or not? I don't know. I don't think most of it does, but I get it. I think it's great that you've got such good clarity around this because I think a lot of people seem to be almost overly receptive or susceptible to this sort of temptations that come through the marketplace because they want to be either part of the mix or they want to, to sound smart. You know, God forbid someone should ask me a question in some Cocktail hour or talk about AI and I don't have an opinion about it. I'd feel stupid, which I wouldn't. But my point is, a lot of people might feel that way, so they have to brush up on us. They can contribute to a conversation that may, in fact, make no sense whatsoever. You know, as you could probably tell, I'd rather talk about philosophy, about the way people think. That's what interests me, frankly. You know, really what interests me most. I think it's what sales is. It's just learning how people think and how people decide things, why people do things, what motivates them, why do they want something? What's the meaning?

You know, so it's about the person.

Definitely, it's people.

What I love about your professor and the reason why I remember that case and you spread it up, is because he challenges thinking. And that happens really rarely, starting from the school, university, you know, just our companies, our managers, the authority. They teach us to obey the rules. We do it because that's how it's done. And you have to read it because you have to. And there is the opposite extreme with the Gen Z freedom thinkers.

Yeah. And getting that.

Yeah. The truth is definitely somewhere in the middle. And we definitely have to just be more conscious about what. What we are doing and why we're doing it.

For sure. And I think there's two sides. I appreciate you referencing that story because Roger did two things. Roger challenged my thinking. But what he did was he respected my situation enough to give me an opportunity to do something about it because he had the authority to do so. And, you know, he gave me the platform to turn it into something as opposed to just a complaint, which you could have easily said, get the out of my office, you know. Instead, you know, he said, okay. And, you know, he changed my life. Changed my life. Now, maybe I changed my life maybe because I went to him and I made this claim. I give myself some credit here. I went to him. How many people go to their, you know, dean and say this, I'm an idiot. I do these sort of things, but he did something about it, you know, And I think that's right. I think we have to be on both sides. We have to be willing to go to somebody and say, this is my issue. And then as leaders, we have to be willing to say, okay, I heard you, now let's do something about it. That's. I think that's where movement takes place. And unfortunately, there just aren't enough of us. So, okay, we find each other. It's all good. Maybe we can find, you know, new ones, you know, so, I mean, you and I could probably talk for six hours here and you don't have six hours. So I'd like to just get a sense of, like, what you're looking for right now. Are you looking to get more people to sign up for your platform? Are you looking for people to read your book? Are you looking like, what's the way that you're trying to create more awareness about what you're doing and achieving your mission?

We're looking to drive and create more thinkers in the industry. And if you are a C level and you want to just benchmark your ideas and hear what other C levels are strategizing on and their ideation in a recession. Welcome to Hype Cycle. We're doing monthly events, CXO debates. We're featuring the best sea levels in the industry, like Warren. And yeah, it's raw. It's unscripted, just like this podcast. Very natural. And with hard skill exchange. If you want to get exposed to different tactics and strategies in different go to market disciplines, starting from sales, marketing, product, and just meet with some people, compensate them for their time and ask, you know, any questions that you have about this or other issue. You want to practice cold calling, go and do it. You want to become a CRO? Ask CROs how to get there for skill exchange. And yeah, if you're just a reader. So you can always read my book, Reinventing Virtual Events. And it's not about events.

I understand.

It's. Yeah, it's about go to market just like every project.

Yep. Well, thank you, thank you.

Thank you so much for taking time.

To talk to me.