Building the Machine & Guarding the Culture with Christian Gerron

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. Welcome to this episode of the CRO Spotlight Podcast. This is Warren Zenna, the founder of the Sierra Collective, and lots going on here. Really excited about a number of things we're working on. We just had another great New York City event. I got one coming up in Chicago on November 19, so I really would love it if everybody could come. Anyone in the Chicago area that wants to be part of one of these events, just throw me a note, LinkedIn or email me and I'll get you involved. Today I want to talk about programmatic advertising and marketing. Christian Garan is the Chief revenue officer of StackAdapt and he has to be on the show because I think that they've got a great offering and I thought it would be a really good opportunity to speak to him because looks like Christian isn't really in a great position there and he's set up pretty well. It's a good example of an organization that's implemented the Chief Revenue officer role properly. So we had a really great conversation. I think you'll enjoy it. So stay tuned. Okay. Christian, I really appreciate you being here. You know, if, you know, maybe you saw the core of my background is in ad tech. You know, I, I was at Publicis for four years. I was one of the. Ran one of the groups at Havas. So I'm very familiar with your company and, and what you guys do, so we can have a pretty detailed conversation. But thanks for being here.

Yeah, no, excited to be here. It's a, it's a fun space. I've been digital media for a long time, so it's, it's a fun and always evolving space. And I think advertising is one of those industries that has a lot of durability. It's been around forever, just kind of changes and shapes the way it looks. But I think you're going to need it going forward forever.

No question. I mean, it's actually, it's to talk about that, you know, because you know, I've been out of it for a while. I, I left. I think my, my last tour of duty in that space was in 2018. This is like almost like when Lincoln was president, you know. So I mean, I'm just curious like how the industry is changing now that aside from the obvious stuff that's going on in terms of moving things around and larger organizations taking over bigger pieces of the pie and all the other things like that, but even with AI, I'm just kind of curious, how are you guys moving towards adapting to that, particularly when you're looking at the trade desk and Google and Amazon trying to drag everything into the fray. What's the strategy that Stack Adapt is using to maintain a footing on the marketplace?

Yeah, I think if you, if you look at, to your point, it's evolved a ton and the. As a result of that, you're probably familiar with like the Lumascape slides that show all the players and intermediaries and that, that thing just continues to grow. I mean there's over 15,000 players in the game, which makes it really, really hard. Right. If you're a marketer, end of the day, the simple thing you're trying to do as marketers grow business, right, Acquire new customers, get more out of your existing customers and it's, I think with, with good intention, the industry has built a lot of new capabilities, but that fragmentation is real. And if you're a marketer, like it's huge. Yeah, yeah. Staying on top of it's really, really tough. And the amount of, level of effort you have to start to expend to get the ROI you want starts to change. Just the complexity and the amount of education that you need to have in capacity just to understand all the different platforms. And what you're trying to do gets, gets pretty tricky and really focus on how do you start to reduce that level of effort for the marketer while increasing that roi. How do you make it easier for them to do that? And we think more about the operating system we're building, why a lot of people think of us as a dsp. We're more than that. What we do, we've really started to bring, even this last year announced how we do bring kind of your owned media through Martech, your email channels, direct mail, your first party data integrations and programmatic and bring those things together with measurement, with insights, with intelligence, so that it just starts to increase performance most importantly, but with a lower level of effort to do that, lower cognitive load. And how do you scale those things in A way where you're not trying to live across multiple different ecosystems and can do that all within our platform to a large degree. I think that the challenge you have, as you think about for the few decades I've been in it, you went from direct buying with publishers one to one, to your ESPN or Yahoos, your MSNS or whatever. Then you kind of went to the ad networks that had some aggregation and then you went to Programmatic or the early stages of Programmatic, which you start to simplify some of that buying ecosystem. But then all these walled gardens started to appear again of these behemoth players that have very large audiences and the fracturing almost came back again and then curation. So it goes through these ups and downs in the cycle of where you create benefit for the marketer and then you create new complexity. And we're really trying to remove a lot of that complexity for the marketer to go into one platform, leverage their investment and their first party data to get more out of it. How do you get more intelligence out of each of your customers, what they're doing to your prospective customers, how do you find them in the right place, how do you make sure you deliver that right message at the right time? Then how do you measure it back? Because there's, there's the digital footprints, but there's the physical footprints as well in the different verticals. It's also different whether you're in healthcare versus, you know, a B2B segment, very long cycles. It's a whole different way to measure. So you have to make sure you build. We're trying to be focused on is depth and breadth, meaning don't just have kind of a one size fits all, but have really point solutions for healthcare, for travel, for example, if you're a travel dmo, you care about the impact you're having in your community. So how do you measure the spend coming into your community? Through credit card transactions and other things to know like is that marketing really working? Are you bringing new customers, new travelers into your market? Are you benefiting all those that you serve in that community? So each solution gets quite different. But we're trying to invest to make sure we have those point solutions within the platform.

Makes sense. And it's an increasingly cutthroat space. So as a chief revenue officer, a couple of things I want to get into with you is one is just your bit of your background, like how you evolved into the CRO role and how the role is being deployed at Stack Adapt. Like what, what is the scope of your role and then lastly, at least for the segment of the conversation is also where are the go to market challenges and opportunities that you're seeing right now? How are you actually deploying go to market solutions to accommodate for some of the things that you just mentioned?

To me, yeah, I think the, to me the way I think of the CRO role is it's, it's not a super seller role, it's an operator role. I think there's different flavors of CROs at different companies and titles, you know, can be what they will, but you're really trying to build the machine to go faster and bring all those components together. And my background maybe just to kind of touch on that as yesterday I got here is I actually started my career in finance and not sales, which was kind of the atypical move that going from finance to sales is a story.

Were you a cfo?

No, I was an analyst. Early in my career I was at Microsoft as a financial analyst supporting the ad revenue organization and learning a lot about the business, learning around the operational metrics to run a business. And so it gave me a lot of great education on what are those things that executives look at how a business runs and also a lot of data and analytics skills. So when I first became a seller, especially in the early days when I was selling search and other things like they use that data to talk to customers about how to get better ROI and understand it better because the data part was missing in the early parts of the advertising game. It was always about reach and frequency and other pieces really try to showing back attribution metrics. And so I started my career in finance and after a long and persistent push with some of my sales leaders I supported, they gave me the chance to become a seller and worked my fruit through that. Sold in SMB, sold in mid market, sold to enterprise brands like Nike and Procter and Gamble and some of the big agencies. And then actually I went back after I helped build out our first inside sales and mid market team, I went back to an operator role and I ran US ad operations at Microsoft where I got to learn a lot about organizational design, you know, doing the all the fun mid year reviews and QBRs that the Microsoft way and kind of that operational rigor that you needed in your business to run it and how to make those decisions for headcount investments, etc. And then it went back into sales leadership again and worked in a variety of those different capacities at Microsoft before actually switching industries, leaving media for a bit and going into the travel space where it was for about seven years. And I spent time actually completely out of the ad business for a while building technology partnerships for the Marriotts and the Deltas, Amex Chase bank, building their travel websites, their loyalty programs and also ran publisher media. You know in the end there in the affiliate business before it came to stack it up. But I'd share that because all those things, I was even running product in Ninja at a point there. It gave me a lot of experiences wearing a lot of different hats. And how do you bring the whole business together to make it go faster? And I think that's really, you know the, the job of the chief revenue off chief revenue officer is how do you, how do you build the machine to go faster? It's the revenue Org is a connected ecosystem. It has sales, it has services, it has data analytics, compensation, bi rev ops, you know, customer service. All those different pieces, how do you bring that together to work more efficiently and at snack adapt my role overseeing over 800 people this next year, that includes all sales motions. And we're segmented by different parts of the market. We're going after all client service, motions, analytics, bi compensation, deal desk, the enablement teams, kind of the whole thing. The only thing that doesn't directly roll into my organization is marketing is a partner organization that we work with. So it allows me to kind of oversee the whole thing and make sure that we can make those right trade off decisions quickly as you build the business and not have the risk of silos of, you know, protectionism and things to go at the wrong speed. But really we've built this to go as fast as we can.

Amazing. So a couple of questions about this.

This is cool.

So you know, you went from finance and it sounds to me like you wanted to be in sales. Was it because you wanted to make more money? Like what was the attractive thing about being a salesperson?

Yeah, there is a couple things. What I think I've enjoyed most about sales is just being a curious kind of first like you get to learn about a lot of different business models because as a seller, if you want to be effective, you need to understand what drives each of those businesses. So you get more well rounded quickly. As I think as a business leader and operator. And I said what does it take to make Nike tick versus Procter and Gamble versus an SMB brand? Right. What are those things they're trying to drive? So you get to learn about a lot of different businesses. I think that's the part I've always loved the most. I also love the facts. You Know your impact's pretty black and white, it's pretty tangible. Are you, are you being effective or not? Not that other roles don't, but they're, they're probably sometimes harder to show the tangibility.

Definitely easier to measure success.

Yeah. Easier to measure, right? Versus yeah. When I was in finance, right, it was always this, the seller's like can you just go back and lower my quota, increase my tme for me please. Right. You'd work your, your butt off to do those things. But sometimes more thankless on any given day. But I learned a lot in that. So think what drove me to sales was that curiosity, learning about the businesses and being close to the customer, like what actually matters to them. You learn a lot when you're in an internal org. Understanding what makes the customer takes hard. And I think no matter what role you ever go back into, even if you're not in a customer facing role, you can be more effective in those roles by actually understanding the customers that you serve and what it takes to make them more effective in how you deliver for them. So I've enjoyed that. Obviously it's great if you're successful, you might make a little bit more compensation. But I've moved in and out of sales roles multiple times and that's not always the driver for me.

What is the driver for you?

It's being able to run fast and have ownership on something that I can drive impact on. I think one of the reasons I left big corporate after a couple of decades in it is I spent an inordinate amount of time on things that didn't drive real business impact. And you know, I'm kind of an all in or all out guy. And if I can't, like if I got parachutes in my back and blocks in my feet to try to get the job done. You know, there was times where you know, running 150 million plus Opex and multi billion P and L and it's like I gotta ask permission to have a three thousand dollar pay raise for somebody like fire me if I'm not doing the job, not delivering, but make sure I have the empowerment to be successful in the role that the company's asked of me. And I think for me what really drives me is people that have amazing will and conviction and that contagious positivity which I found in just spades and sack. And that's what really drove me in here in the first place that want to go win and want to serve their customers and not be. I think complacency kills and that probably kills me as most soul sucking. So being in an environment where there's just amazing amount of bold ambition to go get what's next and to run like heck going after it and not being afraid to go make big bold decisions on those things.

Thank you so much again for listening to the Zero Spotlight podcast. This podcast is an important plank in the Zero collective communication strategy and we're really thrilled to have such great guests on here. So listening and sharing the podcast with other people is really vital because we we want to get as many people listening to this great stuff as possible. A couple things to note if you're a aspiring CRO or a recently hired CRO or even a old salty CRO and you're looking to either become a Chief Revenue Officer or improve your chops and gain some more insights and improve your competencies as a Chief Revenue Officer, we offer the CRO accelerator course. It's five years now. It's the first CRO focused course that was out there. It's a 15 week course that is populated by aspiring Chief revenue officers and CROs. We're pretty selective in terms of who can be a member of the CRO Accelerator course. It's people who are probably like more like ready to be a CRO right now. They have number of years under their belt as a revenue leader, whether it be a sales leader or a marketing leader, or even rev ops leader. And they either want to move into the C suite or they're CROs that want to just make sure that they winning the role. So if you are interested in being a member of the next cohort, please just write me a note on LinkedIn, just DM me CRO accelerator and we'll set up a time to talk and then I can send you more information, give you a brochure. Of course. So again, CRO Accelerator Course. 15 week program for aspiring and newly hired CROs. Take advantage of it. It's been great and you'll see some more information about it on the website. Thanks. Yeah, you know, it's interesting because I made a post about this about three or four months ago. I work with, I don't know, hundreds of CROs now. I work with them very closely. Some of them whom are getting into their first roles or like yourself, who've had many. And you know what I was saying is that surprisingly I ask every CRO that I work with like why they want this job because it's kind of nuts, you know. Yeah, it's busy and you know, they never say money. I never Heard one say, oh, I want to make more money. They all say exactly what you did. They're saying, you know, I'm at a point right now where I know what needs to be done and I want the authority to do it because I'm tired of being at the effect of decisions that don't make any sense. And I think it's the sort of silo disease that happens with organizations is, you know, when organizations are not in my opinion, mature enough or don't have the awareness enough to bring on a CRO and the capacity that you're describing, which I, you know, advocate for, obviously my business, they end up with just a bunch of different organizations in one organization and everybody feels they're stuck in a silo and it's a soul sucking, difficult way to work when you know, you're in a marketing org or a sales org or whatever it might be and you're just at the effect of a committee that really isn't really a machine. And I think the machinery building is a unique skill. I mean you need people who know how to do a lot of different things. You know, people are good. CROs have a very unique skill stack and I think it's changing. That's why I asked the questions before because I'm noticing a lot more people come out of become CROs from different avenues than before. Even like four or five years ago when I started this business, every CRO is a salesperson, everyone. I mean they didn't do anything else, they just ran sales organizations. But I'm seeing more people like yourself that have finance skills, which doesn't surprise me at all. I think would be very attractive to hire a chief revenue officer that ran finance because the obvious analytical brain that that must require number one and number two is just having business acumen around how money is spent. And you know, PNLs, it brings a whole different way in which looking not just at financial data, but data itself, just how do we deploy things and what works, what doesn't work. So I could see why, you know, you'd make a good, well rounded person for this and you know, good for your company for being able to know how to give you what I call the authority, autonomy, resources and Runway to do the job properly. That's what you want, you know, and the right person with those powers can do amazing things. But I don't see it a lot. So why do you think it is to that point that stack adapt sort of understands this and deployed you properly. What makes your organization unique in the respect that Most frankly, companies I work with don't deploy their CROs this way. They're keeping them sort of relegated to a silo.

Yeah, it's a, it's a good question. And you know, I don't know if it's because we're founder led and the growth, you know, bold ambitions we have, but you know they probably had, they probably have a lot of mental models on what it should be from other places. You know, as they grew up and built this company here largely for most of their career, I think they saw that their goal was how do you make the revenue organization as effective with customers as fast as possible. And we're ones where we try to decentralize things. We don't want a huge C suite of people. You know, like we don't want politics. Like we, we have a ton of values that we want to make sure don't interject into the space. And when we hire it's really important. Like every hire I make you have to have obviously amazing functional competency but really try to sniff out those politics players because they really exist and it's are you all in? I don't care if my team is 20 people or 2,000 people. What's the job needing me to get done? And I think that they know that the revenue organization is this connected ecosystem of sales and client services and the enablement, all that working together and what's the benefit of breaking it apart? It's just more for the CEO or somebody else to manage and the more, you know, connective tissue for them to have to gain. Like I, I can deflect a lot of that, I don't want to call it noise but just like focus for our CEO to let them focus on things that matter more to the company. Right. We always ask ourselves like what's going to help make the book go faster if something's slowing it down? Like why, why interject it into the machine constantly look for ways to take out friction. And I think I was one of the first external hires in our leadership group and I think they wanted to find something, they could bring it in and stitch it all together and have that operational know how and not just again if I got to be in the room selling, I'm, we've got the wrong model.

Right.

And I love to do that and be part of the team. But it's my job is really about how do I build the organizational design and bring in the right talent and have the right focus areas for what we do to make sure I can remove that friction. In the sales system. If I'm in the, in the room every day, like I'm probably not enabling the org to move fast enough. Like that's where I need to spend most of my time.

Gotcha. So I'm curious now like given that fact that you've been given the keys to the engine and you're building it based on my very under deep understanding of the industry that you're in and how mercurial it is and how much it's moving, what are some of the go to market strategies that you're deploying to make sure what kind of changes, what's working, what's not, you know, about what you're doing right now to make sure that you maintain market share in such a cutthroat and frankly, if you probably would agree, commoditized space. Right. Where there's, you know, the differentiators between a lot of the different options for what you do are not that different. You know, sometimes it's just name branding. I just rather work with the trade desk. I like I'd rather work with Google because I already have a Google know relationship. What's the, what are you, what are you doing to keep yourselves competitive more on a operational perspective that you know you've done that work across your organization right now?

Yeah, it's good. I mean we always try to look customer backwards in terms of what's the job to get done. Like what problem do you have to go and solve. And it does vary in the ad tech space the way you service an enterprise customer versus a mid market customer or an agency versus a brand or even internationally. It's varies a lot. Like you going to Japan is very different than what you do in the US for example. And so we're, I'm really trying to make sure when I got here we've done a lot, I would say a pretty big remodel of, of the house and how it was set up. Like literally day one when I got here, we had over 100 reps in the US they could all call New York if they wanted to. Right. And that's probably what they're going to go do where the, where the money.

Of course, if I could call New York, I will call New York.

Yeah. Without any segmentation principles or focus, you're not going to build an efficient growth machine for the long term. And one of the first things we had to do is just think about how do we want to segment our business to go after the market and then what types of go to market deployment do you need to have behind that and where we built our business we've seen tremendous success and continuing to grow in the mid market segment. It was in the programmatic space, probably the most underserved program of the market. And if you think about, you know, the, the big players, the, the Microsoft Amazons, the Googles, the trade desk, the Yahoos, etc, like they weren't focusing in that segment. And if you think about the on the customer side, if you're an agency holding company, you have armies of programmatic teams and buyers or if you're a very large enterprise brand that are building this stuff, if you're an independent agency of 30, 40, 50 people, you're trying to run social, you're trying to run search, trying to run programmatic, you're trying to run linear. Like you're trying to do a lot with very limited resource. And their knowledge base of all those sometimes was very surface level and especially programmatic. And what they really needed was just help and support. Like how do you, how do we do this? And you know, there's two ways obviously we want to close that. One is a platform that really delivers. Most importantly, you can have the best service team in the world, but if your platform doesn't deliver, it's kind of irrelevant. But build best in class technology and innovation that is really customer driven. You know, we have customer advisory boards, we're putting product teams that are meeting with their clients all the time. And we build so much of a roadmap based on customer feedback and the gaps they have. But then we wrap that with a really good go to market sales motion which is not just the seller but the account manager, the data and analytics. We have a creative studio team in house. I mean a lot of, a lot of these agencies are brands. When they're not the big brands. They would love to run CTV or digital at home, but they don't have the resources to do it. Like let's close, okay, let's close that gap. They don't know how to trade programmatically. Let us do it for you. We can do a managed service for you. So there was things that we tried to look at what are those customer needs? And we solved those very well and continue to grow on it. And then it was like that next double click in which is I'm a healthcare customer versus a travel versus a B2B. Let's make sure we can give you a solution that works for you. I think what we found is they were able to grow and retain their clients better as agencies which just Made them more successful as companies and made them want to lean into our partnership more. We've literally had many agency partners come to us say you helped build my business or saved my business, like which is an amazing thing to hear, you know, in, in this space here is trying to figure out, you know, purpose. But you like you do really serve a purpose to grow. This versus enterprise is a very different motion. You know, the, the way you entertain, the way you engage the legal process, the contracting process, much more complex, a much longer sales cycle. So we want to make sure you have the right kinds of sellers on that motion. Global agency development teams that are working with the heads of investment at those companies. Very, very different sales motions, you know that. And then we even have kind of more say inside sales into brand direct motions as well. What you asked like what wasn't working? I would say there's, there's a, a few things. You know, one is as our business has grown, we've been growing tremendously as a, as an AE or account executives book continues to get bigger. Their, you know, so called existing business, their focus just always goes to that naturally and their muscle to go close new business can either atrophy or just get distracted. And sometimes you have sellers are different profiles. You have some sellers that are good at new business and some that are good at, you know, existing. You kind of have the hunters and farmers, you know, some can do both. But what I found, you know, managing thousands of sellers over time is you sometimes have specialists in that like people that love the chase and love to hunt and those that love to grow. And we're actually segmenting our teams a little bit more that regard to make sure you can because as a company we have both objectives. Grow your established customer base, but go acquire more logos. And what we're finding, you know, you can try to change incentives all you want, but the mix makes it hard. You have to have dedicated motions in some of those things. So at different levels we, we are segmenting differently around those things. You got to change the comp plans for all that. You have to think about your enablement strategy for each of those differently. You got to think about your marketing motions for each of those things. The way we go to market with enterprise, you know, and showing up to can or something is very different than how we host our own private events with the mid market kind of customers. So there's, there's a lot that we have to change in those and I think that that was probably what was not working enough and there's no Segmentation I got here as I've moved everybody. The first thing we did in the mid market was we regionalized. You know that at the agency level you're still kind of a generalist versus a specialist vertical selling motion. And what we saw, you know, just after two years of doing that, our 15 small estates grew like 500% because guess what, when you put somebody with a purpose to just go open that state, they figure out how to do it. If you let them have too much choice for the job to be done, they'll go to the lowest hanging fruit. So by creating focus on the job to be done, we're actually accelerating results. And then as we go into brand, we know that you can be more effective when you're talking to a brand if you really know they're vertical. Really, you know really well because you're going to sell the right solution. So like put that as a job to be get done. If you're in the E commerce team, go sell E commerce and retail. Don't try to fill up your brain with the travel solutions, the healthcare solutions. Although it's the cognitive overload is too much so that, you know, wasn't working. And, and probably the other really big change we've had to make since I got here is I had to, I had to reset my leadership team which is always tough decisions. I got rid of a lot of great will and great people at stack it up, which is what, why we all love working here. But as you grow really fast, you got to make sure the readiness level is there for everybody at the right time. And worst thing you can do is put somebody in a role where they're not ready to go forward because it's not good for them or good for the business. And so we, we have mixed some moves there and I've rebuilt the leadership team and then we've brought in a lot of great talent to complement our existing talent. And you can see the impact on that quite quickly when you bring in the right people. So talent development is probably always the number one thing in my mind in talent attraction because without that it's going to be really hard to go execute in what you want to go do.

How do you know? Have you gotten to the point yet now where you have a good sort of codified type of competencies you're looking for and the profiles, what's the way that you analyze bringing people on? Because I know how hard it is to have to remove people from the roster when they've been around for a while and I Understand you have to, but then you don't want to go through that again. So you want to make sure that you're bringing on people and you have a process to determine as best as you can that they're the right fit. What's, what's the way that you identify new people and what's the diagnostic you use to determine that they're a good fit for the organization?

Yeah, it's, it obviously varies by role, like a leader versus an ae, right? If you're talking to an ae, are they a hunter or are they going to be a farmer? Because if they're a hunter, you're really trying to look at their, their grit and resilience and test like how have they broken through when they've gotten a rejection, you know, multiple times? How do they find a way to differentiate themselves from the 500 other sellers showing up at the door every day to get the customer to lean in and want to have that conversation so, you know, try to probe them. How do they have that curiosity and instinct in ways to, you know, push through it? Do they know how to make deals bigger? They know how to do the discovery the right way? Do they know how to prospect all those kind of, I would say, table stakes things as you go up. Like you know, when I hire in VPs and above, I look at a couple things like one, trying to test for their business acumen in how they think about their go to market strategy, how they think about the competition, how they think about differentiation. Where have they designed and brought new organizations to light? Where have they worked collaboratively with product teams to bring new product to market that either something they identified or was customer driven? Like do they know how to go work cross functionally? Do they know how to work with marketing to have the right events in messaging to the, to the customer? Do they know how to build enablement programs that, how to scale to identify where the needs are within that enable them? Do they have experience doing large scale change transformation? Do they know like what does it mean when you're making really big organizational design changes or standing up new teams? What is their go to market motion? Do they have the right prioritization on how they go and build and their kind of playbook for setting up a new team? And I'll go through, you know, a bunch of questions with them on that stuff. Operational rigor and the, the rhythm of business. I'll really quiz them on like walk me through a week, a month, a quarter, like how you're running your business, what are the checkpoints how are you holding accountability with the teams? How are you making sure you have the right leading indicators early to know, you know what's on track, what's going well that you like know when to double down and when did you do that or where would you have those signals that things were maybe going sideways and did you iterate or know when to pull the eject button equally as well like when to say stop. So you know, I think for each of those roles is trying to make sure you, you're curated to those things and how do you validate that their true knowledge base and those competencies too. Just leadership and how they show up. You know I always try to throw in a few questions sometimes too to see like what may show up in those answers they give you around, you know, perceptions of them, their strengths, but also misperceptions of individuals because sometimes you learn something interesting in there about their personalities. And as mentioned earlier to me, what our, our magic at Stack it up is our culture right now and is a sense of, of complete buy in to what we're doing and not letting the politics enter the space and try to like snip out who might bring that to the table and who might not know. It's, it's a, it's a, a culture of humility and no egos is what we really try to push. And ad tech, there's plenty of those to go around and we want to make sure that we have this. One of our values is we win together, we act like underdogs. You know, those are things that do really matter and how we show up and there is zero space even with my own teams. Like this is important. Within revenue when you have multiple sales channels, there's shades of gray between or segments between enterprise and what's mid market. Right. Like how do you define that? There's ways you try to but sellers are going to try to find dollars and you see this butting of heads. And I've been in many organizations where the biggest competition is inside your walls versus outside your walls. And you know my, I always tell my leaders like you, you have to think about what is best for the customer and for the company and be ready to like if you can't defend the decision you want to make to our board, like why are you bringing it to me? Like think through what you're trying to do. And usually the driver of most of those conflicts is who's getting the commission check in which quarter. Which is super short sighted.

Yep.

I can fix commission checks and revenue like you know, fairness very easily. But what is. My team knows I have a zero tolerance policy for infighting and channel conflict. Like, figure it out or somebody's going to be out, right? Like, and this day, like, they're going in on pitches together, you know, and working things. And, like, the friendship and camaraderie that that's created. And the sense of trust between our team is like, I would have everybody over my leadership team for dinner and just enjoy it as a good time, even if I wasn't working there anymore. And I. I don't think I've had that in other places where there is always somebody empire building or, like, got a hidden agenda. And we just. We're pushing that stuff out. And it matters because you can go so much faster when you have trust and you can have open conversations. Like, we'll debate. Like, no, no doubt about that. But in a really productive way, you know, where nobody's holding back in a. It's. It's more of a positive debate.

Thanks again for listening to the Ciro Spotlight Podcast. We're excited about all the great guests we have, and more importantly, we're excited mostly about you for being avid listeners and supporting the work that we do here. Feel free please to share the Sierra Spotlight Podcast with any of your colleagues. We just think there's a great wealth of information here, and we want to get the word out to as many people as possible. And your support of the show is really appreciated. I wanted to share information about a program that we offer called the CRO Masters Council. The CRO Masters Council is a bimonthly group of six seasoned Chief Revenue Officers who are looking for a Chief Revenue Officer Board of Directors, so to speak, that they could share what's going on with them, collaborate with ideas, get some feedback on what's going on in their current role. And these are great conversations. I facilitate them. The CRO Masters Councils, again, they're twice a month and they last for at least six months to a year. So if you're interested in having your own CRO suite, your own Board of Directors of Chief Revenue Officers, it's a private, confidential conversation that we have. It's infinitely useful. Imagine having a room full of other Chief Revenue Officers you can talk to and say, hey, I'm working on this. Or have you guys figured that out? Or, I'm having this issue right now with my business or my results. These are just invaluable conversations with Chief Revenue Officers. Chief Revenue Officers have a very, very unique role. It's a very lonely job and only other CROs understand what you're going through. So that's why we created this program. So if you're interested in being a member of the next CRO Masters Council, which we have a number of them being put together right now, just go to my LinkedIn and DM me masters or Masters Council and I'll follow up with you and set up a call or send you some more information about it. Looking forward to seeing you there and thank you. Great. So I'm curious about something. What do you find is more of an indicator of success for you? I know it's kind of a broad question, but it's something that comes up a lot. Is industry expertise or just general competencies?

Yeah, we, we do debate this one a lot, especially as we go from new sellers.

And I know, I know your space, it's pretty nuanced. You know, you want people to know. You know, there's a lot of like detail to it. See, I don't want to say that I would necessarily expect anybody to completely issue industry expertise, but I've seen a lot of instances where you'll bring people in from some completely different place and they just have the right qualities and they make it work and they become superstars. And sometimes we over hire people that come from our space and they're not that good. You know, for example, if I worked at Amazon or Google, I mean I'm going to sit there all day and field deals. I mean it's not that difficult to succeed there, you know, so it's not an indicator of anything. And in many cases too, you know, we, we have this happen a lot in our side. I happen to have an agency. And you know, we find that when our clients bring in people that they hired from, you know, Salesforce or some big company that they tend to not be very good at what they do because they enjoyed an environment where they just sat around and they made money all day long. It's usually the people that had suffer through things and like you and I had a sweat equity do things. They're the ones who are adaptable and they can bring those competencies anywhere. And it's a conversation I have a lot with my clients. But whether or not they're missing out on talent because they need people that came from, you know, Google or another one of your other ad tech competitors or even the space in general.

Yeah, it's a, it's a really good question in the sense that to me it's, I always make sure they have the right values first, like functional Competency if you don't show up and operate the right way. Like, I know some really great sellers and I actually saw this in my team years ago that created a toxic environment around them and the whole, that whole pod like kind of shut down. Poison that individual left.

It was.

And this was back when I was in office, you know, years and years ago. Like you just saw the whole corner of that building like it changed night. And I was like, wow, absolutely. This person was beating quota every period. We thought they were the best seller, but they were really dragging down the team. So like, you got to make sure that's not there. You know, depending on functional competency, I would say it depends on the maturity of the team and where you need to go fast and like how the size and scale of team. Because even digital advertising experience is not programmatic experience. Like, we have many digital sellers that have come to us from some of the walled gardens that could be on the social side. And it's a steep learning curve to like go in and talk shop, you know, with programmatics. So it kind of depends on who's your customer and what level of depth of knowledge does that specific role need to have in programmatic and their buyers and how sophisticated are they versus others yourselves. You might be able to come in with less, you know, programmatic competency, but you have digital and you can talk the talk and you can, you can dive in and learn pretty quick. Program is not rocket science, but it's complex to like learn the vernacular of it. So we what we have on the seller side, you know, if you go into like a hunter role where they not can maybe be the ones growing and in the account day to day after it gets closed. I've seen some that come from out of industry that have actually learned and ramped. They know how to get people on the phone, they know how to get to those first meetings. But if they had to go grow and ramp, it would probably be more concerning. If you're somebody that's going to be on a really critical account, like that knowledge base is going to be more important. So I would say it's a mix. And then you got to feel like what kind of fast start you need in that team? Like, we have some teams we're building right now. We need fast starts. We need people that have the right Rolodex and they know how to talk shop. Day one, it can go in and do it. I think as you look though, even outside of revenue in particular, whether it's a rev ops team, an Enablement team, a finance team, a marketing team, the digital or kind of functional competency is a little bit less important and mastery of your craft is more important. Like, you know, our CMO for example, doesn't come from the digital space, but as a cmo, he's familiar with it because he's had to buy marketing. But he really knows how to be creative and scrappy and like how to create impact to customer events and how to talk to customers. And so I think it's less important there at even the senior leadership levels. I would say it becomes a little bit less important there because you're trying to figure out how do you build the operational machinery to work together, move fast and you can spot trends in your playbooks to work and see how is the organization working together. So if the seller and service, it does sort of depend on the job to get done, the sophistication of which segment you're selling into and then how many other people on that team have that expertise. And if you have a strong team that's got a lot of it, but this person brings in a new kind of expertise, like let's just say it was B2B. Like maybe you weren't selling programmatic, but you were selling B2B solutions into marketers. Well, you probably actually know some things that the rest of this team doesn't know and so can it be complimentary? So I try to have a mix, you know, and it really depends on where that team is at. But if you get, if you have too many of one or the other, you probably create some gaps and less synergy.

Yep, it's great. I tend to believe that great people who work at companies come with a core set of competencies that are sort of immutably across whatever they do, they bring it and then you teach them the business on top of those things, but the other side around, it doesn't work. You need those, need those core competencies just as an inherent part of their nature. And then you can just teach them how to do your business right?

I think that's right. We saw like in a Riv ops team we completely rebuilt and most of those didn't come from the industry. But they're really good analytical minds. They're very curious. They can start to connect dots and ask questions and then they can learn the business, you know, quickly. And for those roles, like you don't need to know how a travel solution works in programmatic, you need to understand the go to market motion at a very high level in what that job is to get done for those sellers and start to look at metrics the right way so they get. It varies by role.

So we're getting close to time. I want to make sure I address an important couple of questions for you. Yeah, so two, two things you can just kind of lump them together. One is for listeners. What would you advise chief revenue officers who are taking the job for the first time right now and the sort of things they should be thinking about. And the second part is if a company is looking to hire one, what should they be thinking about right now?

Yeah, I think, you know, if for the one that, that for somebody going into the role again I always say talents first. You know, you got to have a, you got to set up the right functional design to go to market based on the customer needs and what you capture. Make sure you've organized the team. I think some people often try to organize around people versus organize around the needs of the business and the needs of the customer. And I always like I actually recommended firing myself in a previous job because I saw the org changing a certain window to my boss. Like I think my team should fold in and you have to be willing to say that and say like what's best for the business. Be willing to fire yourself and if you're good, you'll always find a home. And I did but we actually ended up folding my old mid market organization into the enterprise function just because the way that the job was was evolving. But my point there's like always think from a blank sheet of paper. Like don't let old mental models lock you or don't. If you design around an individual, individuals aren't going to say if you ever then you have a bigger thing to overhaul here. Make sure you have the right talent in each of those seats. Like is the most important. And I'm sure everybody's seen those. When you have the wrong person to roll and you put the right person in, how much faster things get done, how much of your time is saved because you can lean into your leaders. And as a CRO, when you're juggling multiple different functions, like you have to have immense trust in the skill set of your team and empower them to go make decisions every single day. And if you have to over index and over rotate into what they're doing on their job, like the boat's not going faster. Right. So you got to make sure talent I think is, is always first. Right design, right people in the right roles. You know, prioritization is, you know, it kind of sounds Basic. But it's easy when you get a lot of smart people to come up with a lot of ideas. You know, we're just going through this myself. They're planning and it's like, wow, there's so much we want to go do, but what really matters most? And like, what are those sacred programs or projects that like must get done that are really going to have step change growth. Like have a really clear plan of artist, make sure everybody ladders and understands their role in those and help them understand where to say no or like stop doing things. You know, you gotta, you gotta build that stuff out. That operational rigor and excellence as a hero is, is critical. You can't, you can't invest in a, in your business going forward or run it the right way if you are blind to how it's operating underneath. Like, you have to have that great rev ops team and sales ops team deal desk, you know, for commercial models, whatever those components are gonna need for your business so that the machine can go faster. Because if you're not, you're just gonna get slowed down and you can't have these, you know, these functions where the gears get, you know, kind of locked up and you want to have visibility into how the business is executing for today so you can be building for tomorrow. It's like you got to be as a CRO looking quarters and years ahead. Like right now I'm thinking about 2028, you know, planning and what we. Where we want the OR to be. Actually we're just talking right before this call about 2030 and how do we build backwards? Are we moving? Are we moving fast enough and based on where we think we can go and because it's easy to, to just, you know, look to and in front of you and not be, you know, raising your gaze a little bit in front of you. So I think that stuff's clear or key. Making sure your empowerment's clear in the organization is zero. Again, if you want everything to come to you to solve all the problems, go for it. But it's going to make life pretty hard. And so where can you empower decisions within the organization to get done? Where do you have drag? This is actually a big priority for us right now is we've been growing like crazy, you know, hiring and customers with all the best of antennas. You grow like you just create friction in the process. And we're, we're trying to pull apart all the dozens and dozens of step from, you know, initial touch of a prospect to like the end of it. Like why are there so many touch points? Why are we triplicating efforts? Because the amount you want your team focused with the customer and growing the business, not, you know, filling out CPS reports, right? Like that part is real in any organization as you grow. And that means you got to put focus on your tech stack. Something I also learned here when I got here, there was no ownership of the tech stack for sales. People were just buying procurement, you know, things and like none of this stuff was interoperable. Hardly any of the license were being used. People weren't seeing the value in it like what a week. So I actually have a dedicated couple folks that just are exploring the tech stack and AI capabilities in particular on right now to make sure those things interoperable. Because the, the litmus test is a seller should say like there's no way I would have hit my goals if I didn't have the stack supporting me. And I think right now what you sometimes get is like, oh, that feels like another admin issue I got to go do. Or like why do I use it? Or the education is there. It's like your job as a, as a hero is to create enablement and velocity in the Org. And so that tech stack is actually a really critical component that gets overlooked. So you gotta be making sure you know those things are key and you know, maybe like lastly is culture is always key and how you set up that organization because a winning team that is all in is going to win, do better than a team of similar number of people, similar technology if the culture isn't there. And so like we try to spend a lot of time making sure the people that we bring in are going to be additive to that. You know, good vibes are contagious as they say. Like get that going. And we thought we just did our all company meeting in Orlando a month or two ago and like I've never been in it. I've been at tons of big company events and I've never felt anything so real of the energy in that room of people that care. And so that's kind of sometimes our secret sauce is creating care in action. Like if you can do those two things, a lot's going to get done. If you don't really care and you're complacent, you're just going to go slow and if it doesn't get done, don't care. So you have to remove, you have to let that be the bar that others want to lead to. And for those that don't want to, you have to make decisions on where do you remove toxicity in the organization. I think that's super important too. Like, the longer you let that stuff fester, the slower you go. Yep.

You got to be the guardian of the culture.

Yeah, yeah. And it's, everybody creates it. Right. Like, and I have culture club teams that are out there trying to drive it and get the, the real water cooler from the team. So we know what to work on, but we care about like we want to go fix it. We put plans in place of what's not working well. And like, how do we go and fix it, you know, you know, quickly on those things. Don't let it sit there because you know how things can spin up, you know, if you don't let, if you don't tackle it.

And then, okay, so I'm bringing on a new CRO. Maybe the first time, you know, what would you say would be ways that you would want a CEO to be thinking about that role? If they're going to bring you into that organization, what's the right time and what should they be thinking about to ensure that that CRO is successful?

Yeah, I think it depends on scale of the organization because I think a lot of CROs are sales leaders or VPs. Sales. And I always. Actually one of the things I pushed my team is none of you are sales leaders. You're all business leaders. What that means is you have to think horizontally and not be selfish about just what your team's doing, but how you impact either. So find somebody that is a true business leader, not a super seller that thinks about systems and organizational design in that cross functional work. It's like as soon as people start saying like that was marketing's problem or that was product's problem, like things are broken, like we all collectively own it and you need to be in it and have those relationships. I mean I spend a ton of my time with marketing, with legal, all those things. Like, I don't. As leaders, all those problems are your problems. Right. Like they, it's not somebody else's problem. There collectively are things to go solve and that's what you. As leaders. And so I think you got to make sure you, you find somebody that has ideally some diversity of maybe experiences in their career that has had to solve and look at these problems from different angles and be parts of them and has walked in the shoes of other functional roles. They accept and have empathy of, you know, what those folks are going through, but can also bring together the, the collective, you know, thread through all that, but give them empowerment Let them run it. Like if you start to silo out the the parts of the business, it's just going to go slower and you're going to have to spend time trying to do too much alignment across cross functional peers. And if you have a good org like I think you can still do that but that's harder to find sometimes than, than if you just put the accountability within the CRO. Like sometimes marketing in some orgs can sit in this function. I actually don't think at least for our company it's the right thing. We have a very talented marketing team but I have very tight alignment with our new cmo what we do and when I got here that probably wasn't the case. We had different systems for tracking numbers. They said one thing, we said another. Like you know, this is not working right. Like we got to work together. So I think you got to make sure you find something that does think cross functionally across those things. Has operational, analytical, you know, expertise. Wants to go figure out how to build the go to market machine that moves as fast as possible and thinks about, you know, I'm not thinking about any one deal in my job. Like I love hearing about the great deals and with the great customers but like my job is for how do you accelerate the velocity and quantity of those things and make it easier and then that a customer experience and all those is good. And so I think you just got to really test that CRO is, is more of that operator mentality is in my opinion.

Gotcha. I completely agree. You got to find systems thinkers and you got to build a system and you have to know how to deploy people to do that. I like the idea very much you just said about being a business leader as opposed to a sales leader. That's a really good different context.

It's a different perspective. You have to make decisions that are good for the business and not, I think it's, it's very easy to see unfortunately. Maybe it's you know, feels like selfishness in certain levels of sales because it goes back to like my commission checking my team and as a sales leader.

Well, incentives are everything, right? I mean end of the day it's, it's, it's such a big part of it and we can have a whole longer conversation about compensation plans and that kind of thing near the end of our time. But look, I really appreciate this. This is great and you know, it's always a pleasure to see chief revenue officers who are in the right job and being doing the job properly because you know I wouldn't be in business if everybody were in that situation. But it's, it's great to see because it's an important role and when it's done properly, it makes the biggest difference in the company. So. Thank you. So what's, what are some ways people you're looking for, who are you looking to speak to, what kind of people are trying to connect with and how can they find you?

You know, I would say LinkedIn, but it's getting so backed up. I'm being probably not as good on LinkedIn responses as I would like, but I'm always, you know, open. They can, they can debate if I put my email in a podcast or not. That could be dangerous. Sure.

Call it.

With all those tools out there these days, it's pretty easy to find info.

It's.

But it's, it's Christian Jaron at Stack and Apprehat. If I can help. You know, I think really the, the connection points that are important, music and talent. Like, I'm spending most of my time identifying and trying to attract, you know, good talent. So I spend a lot of time interviewing right now because we are, we're going to grow another couple hundred people on my team in the next 12 months. So how do I get the right leaders that can come in? And, and the good thing, I would say is because we've been growing and, you know, I think maybe some of our competitors are, are having some more difficult times. There's a lot of folks at the door, which is an amazing privilege to have. And so we want to do everything we can to bring great talent in, to feel what we feel every day and be part of that journey, you know, and for our customers, you know, that we're looking for out there, I hope that they will find what our others have found as they engage with us. I think we were an unknown entity, you know, to many when they, when they called me up for the job, I never heard of the company, to be honest, and I was like, the last thing the world needs is another dsp. I don't know, right? But I fell in love with the magic of, of the innovation and the culture and where I was in my career. What mattered to me at this stage was about execution and about bold vision, about building great tech and going really quickly. And I think that's what you'll find here. And we want people that want to contribute to that culture positively and, you know, so doors are open and hopefully our customers will see that too. We just did one of our big customer events in Nashville last year and it was probably the most rewarding thing I've seen from my customers is we had a bunch, probably had 30% prospects in the room. My best sellers in the room those three days were my existing or our existing customers. They were like, you don't work with them, you're crazy. And like if you turn your customers.

Into salespeople, then you're, you have a successful business. I tell, matter of fact, I tell all my clients. You're goal is to build a success team such that your customers become your sellers. That that's the goal. If you can do that, then you're, you got a good business going. That's great.

Yeah. And that was really fun to watch and it's a testament to the great work or you know, the team, just Dakota on the sales teams, others to build that relationship and rapport with them and that trust. And that's what we got to keep going as we grow. Like that's the most important thing is as you get bigger, it always gets harder. But maintaining that culture, how we operate is like priority number one for me. And if we do that, good things will happen.

Well, thank you again this great conversation. Really appreciate your time and your expertise and I look forward to seeing you out there in the field. I have so many friends in this space who we both know, I'm sure a lot of them, so. But thanks, I really appreciate. It was good to meet you and I hope to see you like at some, you know, programmatic IO event or something like that at some point.

That'd be great, Warner. Hey, appreciate the time. It's always good. I listen to your show and it's fun to be a part of it. So thank you for having the opportunity to host me today.

100%. I'll speak to you again. Thank you so much. Thanks, Warren.

Take care.

Thank you for listening to the CRO Spotlight podcast. The CRO Collective's mission is to help CROs succeed and help founders and CEOs build CRO Ready organizations. You can find out more information about our services at the crocollective. Com. That's thecrocollective. Com and we look forward to having you join us next time.