Do Customer-Centric RevOps Leaders Make Better CROs?

The CRO Spotlight Podcast Profire Production hi, I'm Warren Zenna, founder and CEO of the CRO Collective, and welcome to the CRO Spotlight Podcast. This podcast is for Chief revenue officers, aspiring CROs and CEOs who are looking to hire or support a CRO to succeed. So join me and my expert guests as we debate, discuss and tackle today's complex revenue growth challenges and provide practical insights to help CRO succeed in the role. We're really excited to have you with us. Let's get to it. Okay. And welcome to this episode of the Sierra Spotlight Podcast. This is Warren Zenna, the founder and CEO of the CRO Collective. And you know, it's been a while. I know that. I just released a couple of episodes. You'll see one from Steve Schmidt that just came out today, and then Rosalind Santa Elena should be releasing next week. That's a great conversation. And I just wanted to say a couple things because it's been a while since I've had an episode. But one of the things that I'm seeing now that I find it really interesting is how many Chief Revenue Officers don't own marketing. It's really interesting. What happens is I'm speaking to a lot of Chief Revenue officers and as you probably all from hearing this, a lot, a lot of them own sales, right? Only maybe they're given customer success to some degree. Some own it, but very few own marketing. And it's like the last frontier, you know, they can't seem to grab. And I have a lot of thoughts on this. I'll probably get into this a lot with my great guest today. But it's a really interesting topic. It has to do a lot to do with, I would call it like a traffic jam that's happening at the C Suite. That is companies aren't really thinking this through. And also it's also because there's not a lot of strategic thinking related to C Suite leadership and how it implicates itself. When companies grow and you end up in a situation where you have a CMO and then a CRO and you sort of let them duke it out and that never ends up winning, good for anybody.

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Really excited today to have our guest, Jackie Rousseau Anderson. So Jackie is the CRO of BlueConic. It's a data company. We'll talk a bit about that business. But the reason I wanted to talk to Jackie, she has such a great background and she's a Chief Revenue officer. And it's a really great story. So she was a partner at a company called Scale House. She helped data analytics companies Scale. There's. And before that, she was a Chief Client Officer at Simmons. Right. Where. Where she kind of spearheaded its client first strategy and she directed all the sales and client services and then led the customer research business. And she helped transition Simmons from like an experienced experience sub brand to a standalone private equity company. That's, that's a, that's a big thing. I want to talk about that. She was at Forrester Research for a while and J.D. power and Associates. So she's done a lot of really great roles at some really big brands. She speaks a lot. Her expertise has been cited in the Times and the Journal. She's also a member of Chief, and she does a lot of work in relation to national association of Women and Sales Professionals, et cetera. So without further ado, I just want to introduce Jackie. Jackie, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me, Warren. Excited to be here.

Great. So I'd love you to expound a little bit on your background because I peppered it with some things. But, you know, one of the things that the audience really likes to hear about is how somebody becomes a Chief Revenue Officer and even what that role has manifested for you, specifically what Chief Revenue Officer looks like in your world. So I'd love to hear more about that.

Yeah, that's a great question. What Chief Revenue Officer has manifested for me some days is kind of an identity crisis, if we're, if we're being honest. So we'll get into that. But before I took this role back in January, I was a Chief Customer Officer here at Blueconic. So I was overseeing everything that happened post sale with our customers. So from onboarding and implementation into our ongoing engagements with them, partnerships, training, enablement, all touch points across the customer journey. And my background before this has been really at the intersection of data analytics products with a commercial bent. So if we're being honest, I never expected to get to a CRO path. That was never something I set out to do. I didn't go to business school or anything. My degrees are actually in research analytics methods. I pictured being in the back of the house someday. Then as I got into scenarios and got exposed to different roles, I realized that I had a passion for just the business strategy of what we do, how we do, and doing it in a scalable way. So that kind of has led me to the CRO role. And I say an identity crisis because it's interesting. When you're a chief customer officer, a lot of people want to talk to you because they want to know, what are other customers doing, how can we help them, which are the conversations I love to have. And. And then you flip over to the CRO title and suddenly everyone assumes that you're in the room because you want to find more money or you're having a tough conversation and you're going to try to add another line item into their contract or something. So I'm not going to lie. I still think about things the same way and want to help our customers be transformational in what they're trying to do in their businesses. But there are some days where I'm like, oh, wait, you don't, you know, I'm like, oh, I'll have that conversation with the customer. I'll come in and do that presentation. And somebody's like, well, they kind of want to talk to somebody who, you know, fill in the blank. I'm like, well, I am that person. I just have this revenue that has somehow become a dirty word in a lot of instances.

So, so much I want to unpack there. It's so great. I love it. A couple. One I want to point out, maybe we can get into a bit, is the fact that in one of the reasons, aside from some of the obvious ones, but one of the important reasons I wanted to do this with you is because you got to the path of Chief Revenue Officer, but you didn't get there through sales.

Right.

And that's unusual. So that's. That's interesting to me because I think there's a trending on that right now. We can get into that a bit because there's sort of like, we can talk about this idea of the sort of sales LED CRO and the data or operations LED CRO, and they're both like different sort of, you know, creatures. Right. But it's an interesting thing. The second thing was that you said something that really I want to get into right now, and I didn't think about it as much until you said it, which is it's not just the way your Company perceives the word revenue, but it's the way customers and clients perceive revenue. And now what's happened as a result of this confusion around the role? You're having an identity crisis where people think you're looking for money because the entire industry has been trained to think chief revenue officer, someone who just does sales. So how do you manage that? So you're in a room and, you know. Or maybe a better question would be not only how do you manage it, but what would your advice be to help someone else manage it when they see that possibly happening down the road? That can help maybe mitigate some of that perception.

Yeah. So I think about it in the same way that I think about sales, which is another seemingly dirty word, especially in the SaaS business. You know, everybody just assumes a. That you're trying to. And this is a broad generalization. Right. But that salespeople are trying to wheel and deal and, you know, especially in the SaaS world. Right. I'm putting a contract in front of you. There must be some hidden gotcha. Either, you know, you're gonna corner me into an agreement that actually ends up overcharging me a whole bunch and you can't wait to hit send on that invoice for overages, or it's not gonna perform the way that you're describing it to me. So from a sales perspective, I think that that's kind of the core cornerstone that at least I'm trying to really unpack and bring back. So we talk a lot about EPE and Gluconic. So it's expertise, partnership, and empathy. And that's how we show up to our customers, but it's also how we show up to our prospects. So I think it really is just showing up every day and proving and building that trust with our customers and prospects that says this isn't a shtick. I'm not trying to be the friendly person who gained some trust and then, you know, pardon the language, but screws you on the back end. This is really how we operate here. And so it is just showing up in a very authentic way and letting customers know this is how we operate and holding the teams to the same accountability. Because whatever experience somebody's going to have with a sales rep is how they're going to categorize you or a customer success manager or whoever, they're going to remember that experience. And the adage of, you know, you remember more how somebody makes you feel. That's what your reps are doing. It's not a magic wand approach. But I think it has to start with how you structure and the expectations you set for your team when it comes to commercial interactions and then doing the same as a revenue leader. When I come into a room, I need to show up, I need to be on top of my game. I need to prove that I'm there to truly help our prospects and customers be successful. That means being able to talk to them about the use cases that are working or not working within our tool, being honest about what we can or can't help them with, and just being that leader who shows up with EPE every day in every interaction. And that begins to really kind of change the sentiment and also recognizing that no matter how many times I show up that way, the team shows up that way. Unfortunately, there are people that have had such bad experiences or have such a stigma associated with sales and revenue that they're going to assume things and then I can't change their framework. So all I can do is help them be successful in their role and hopefully eventually we kind of turn that. So I think, I truly think it's a fundamental challenge. And what I've noticed, especially a lot of your guests are in the same mindset when it comes to revenue, is that revenue is the byproduct of making your customers successful. So we talk about, in customer success, the job was to make customers successful every day, full stop. That's what your job is. And so if we are committed to that vision from day one in the sales journey of understanding first, what is it that my customers need in order to be successful? Does our tool help them do that? How do we do that? Structuring an agreement that's mutually beneficial to get them there and then making sure that we help them execute on it, then that should speak for itself. And then the revenue will come naturally because you're helping them be successful. And that just kind of works itself out.

It's certainly music to my ears, you know, I mean, I love that, that philosophy and it's one that I'm kind of pushing more. I put the customer at the center of the revenue engine, not dollars. Yeah, it's very difficult for PE and VC organizations to get their arms around that because that's what they're looking at. They're looking at dollars, you know, but you know, you and I obviously are like minded here and I think a lot of people understand that a happy customer equals dollars. Right. So that's the goal. I, I think it seems to make sense. The problem I think is Chief Revenue Officers are usually led by pipeline growth, new client, acquisition, growth, right. Deal closes, which those are obviously critically important components of a revenue engine operation. Healthy one. But no one. I don't know, maybe they can, I don't know, maybe not successfully, but they can maybe argue the wisdom of making the customer experience the first thing you think about. As a matter of fact, I think customer experience should be a place where sales and marketing get most of their insights in terms of how they should speak to new prospects. Right. Because an existing customer is going to give me all the information I need to make sure that I can replicate that experience through the sales process. Because when someone comes into the funnel, they're a customer, essentially. Right. Y so a couple things I want to ask you about this. So it's great that you have this thought and that you also come from a non sales background and here you are, your chief revenue officer. So walk me through what the process was like at your company that the decision was made to make you a chief revenue officer. Like how did that, what was the nexus of that decision? What was the thinking behind it? Like why did we decide to make Jackie have this title? And what was the, what were the objectives associated with that change and why? Like what were the, what were the business decisions around that? I'm curious.

Yeah, so what you were saying at the beginning and the kind of the opening of the podcast is spot on to what I've seen in a lot of trends, which is companies not being strategic in how they're thinking about the C suite structure. And so you have this mix, especially in scaling companies of legacy C titles that maybe were there because somebody fell, we reached a certain level of growth and we needed to put in a CMO or we needed a chief operating officer, whatever it is. And so you have these C suite titles that don't necessarily align to the actual strategy and future strategy of the business. So that's one piece. And I would say importantly, our business and our leaders at the time were on the opposite side of that scale and they were being very strategic about what the company needed. So before this move we had a new business sales team and BDRs at one point reported in a new business team. Then they kind of moved over to marketing. And then under customer success, I own the number relative to account management. So renewals and upsell cross sell that motion as well as all the engagements that we were doing with partners and what the leaders at the time. So our CEO is Cory Munchbach and our outgoing CEO and co founder was Bart Halbron. And they said you know, a lot of the same things that you were just talking about where customers aren't customers after they sign the contract. Customers are everybody that we touch in the initial conversation on. So we need to really be thinking about how we engage and serve them from day one, but also how we structure agreements that are healthy for the business, both from an initial perspective and also from an expansion perspective and, and roll out the products and services that actually meet needs. You made a great point. Right. If you don't have any idea what your customers are doing with your platform, your tool, your service, whatever it is, or what they need from changing market trends, actual usage, whatever, how are you going to introduce new products and services that help drive revenue if you have a disconnect, right. Then I can throw out all the products, I can in, you know, slice and dice my platform and put a whole bunch of like tack on options. But if they don't actually address anybody's challenges or needs, that's such a clueless approach to trying to scale the business. So luckily Corey and Bart said no. You know, we kind of recognize that from both a CX perspective and also a business health and growth perspective, we need one person that kind of is under the spotlight and you know, we have our thumb on that part of the business and they are responsible for making sure that thing. Now it's a very cross functional role. Right. I'm collaborating super closely with the marketing team, with the CS team partner, I mean everybody. But at the end of the day, right when somebody's looking at, okay, where are we against revenue goals? I have to be able to speak to why things are the way they are and what we're doing about it.

It's great. So you, you had the benefit. By the way, if I had a man asking you what, at what stage were you at when that decision was made, if you don't mind, like from a revenue ARR. Like what was your revenue level at the, at the point that your two very wise CEOs decided to make this decision?

I don't know if I'm allowed to say exactly, but under 50, roughly. We were under 50. Yep.

Fine. That's, that's great. That's, that's very common. I'm thinking that was probably the case and I asked that question and I appreciate, you know, you can't be specific, but your answer is exactly what I wanted to hear, is that, you know, what we're seeing, and I suspect you agree with this is what happens with companies is I look at it like they, okay, so I can make personal on this. We just bought a house. And, you know, when you buy a house, particularly like an old house, you know, you sort of have to make it your own house, right? And so there's things you have to do and invest in in stages, right? There's the things you need when you first move in, and then there's the things you're going to want to have later. And there's also other conditions. It's, you know, things we can do quicker and things that we can afford now and then things that we can do later. And then there's also the time that is required to do these things, right? There's a lot of factors that go into it. And building a home or renovating a home is very much like a company in that you have to do things at the right time, right in the stage. And I think that similarly to kind of keep the analogy, is if I know that there's like a longer stage, bigger renovation that I need to do that's going to have impact on a lot of other things, then it should have an impact on the decisions I make today, right? So I'm thinking ahead and I'm planning it out, but when ends up happening, happening a lot. And I could see how this can happen in my situation is you sort of end up with the kitchen that you built as opposed to the kitchen that you want. Because now you're sort of stuck with the kitchen that you built, right? And, you know, you sort of get comfortable with it, like, all right, you know, it doesn't have the island in the middle, and the refrigerator could be bigger. And I don't like, whatever, but you know, what, the cost and time associated with the disruption associated with making the kitchen that we want, we're just going to have to live with one we have. And companies chug along with the kitchen that they have, and eventually that kitchen, it doesn't work anymore. It can't produce enough food for the amount of mouths it needs to feed. And then they come into a really bad problem. And so the companies that I see succeed really well understand that those things are sort of an inevitability in the way companies grow. But they're smart at being able to make decisions to pivot out of those things and make the right decisions, and they, most of them don't. What ends up happening is things like we talked about at the beginning of this, which is, you know, it does make sense at this point to have somebody oversee the entire revenue function, because that just makes sense. The level of Complexity that we've reached at the company right now requires more integration and alignment and it needs somebody to oversee it. But Steve and Bob, or, you know, Jackie and Mary are going to fight because one owns sales and one owns marketing. And I just don't know who's going to win that battle. And I'm not getting in the middle of it. So I'm going to let them figure it out. And they don't figure it out. What they do is they come up with some sort of deal or structure that accommodates both of their respective survival requirements and you end up with half a kitchen. You know, and I think great leaders just say, look, I don't care about those things. I need my customers happy. And this particular structure or arrangement is going to get the best outcome. And I'm just going to have to make some big bold decisions to make that happen. And the ones that do and know what they're doing succeed. It's painful, it's not easy, but you get there and your company seems to have figured out a way to advance you. They found the right person who knows how to do this, had the right skill sets and they put you in a position to do this. So what were some of the disruptions and things that had to be managed to move you from that position into the, from the position you had to the position that you're in? Like, I love my, my audience loves to hear these transition stories because they're going through this stuff, they're trying to figure out like, how do I move into the role with all the disruptions that occur. Kind of almost related to that renovation analogy that I gave you before. Love to hear about that.

Yeah, first of all, great analogy. I think that's spot on. And second, I mean, disruptions are core and never ending in a scale up or a startup really any part of the business in these days. So I think before even addressing the specifics of this situation, it's making sure that as a leader, as a CEO, you've put together your C team with smart, flexible people who are skilled but also are there to make the business successful. And I think that's where a lot of those trade offs can happen. So I mean, to be completely transparent, when Corian Bart first approached me about moving into the CRO position, I was a little hesitant. Right. Like I said, I'd never had a career path set on being a CRO and I'd been in the CCO role for about a year and we had made a ton of great progress. I loved my team I was super proud of the work that we were doing. I loved being in the trenches with customers. And I also felt that we still had quite a bit of work to do, right. To kind of get to the vision of where I had seen us going when I agreed to take the CCO role. And so there's a reflection point that comes is like, oh, like, I see why the business needs this, but also it's hard, right? It's Molly Graham's letting go of your legos across the scaling. And like, all right, I. Gosh, Yep, I gotta give. I gotta give away this Lego. But it was hard. And so I did soul searching. I had lots of conversations, and I guess I don't know if it's, you know, a personality flaw or strength, I guess, depending on the day. I'm committed to making the company and everybody in the organization. We call ourselves the Blue Crew, and I adore every person in our Blue Crew. So I knew that this was the right move to make to set the company up for success. So I moved over and it was a little bit, you know, it wasn't like, great. Everything on day one, when I move into the revenue organization is, you know, I cut cords. Everything that was on my brain and I was doing moved off to somebody else's plate. We kind of defined a transition period and we said, okay, for the first three months, here's what I'm going to begin to transition off to other people in the organization. Maybe here's some of the priorities that we're just going to have to let go of. And then here's the way I'm going to start to get ramped up and figure out what's going on over here. And I was clear, and we were clear with our board, too, that we really needed the first half of the year to fully reset and understand what we were doing as part of the organization. But especially during the first 90 days, I needed to get into the weeds of how things were operating, what was going on, all of the pieces of the puzzle, to understand what was there and what wasn't there. And doing that and also trying to again, let go of the legos that I had on the customer org side, but also support the team because I didn't want to walk away from my leaders on that side of the organization and kind of leave them to feel like they were hanging. So it wasn't clean, but it was a lot of communication. And then to circle back to my initial point, that's when having those leaders and hiring fantastic people from the Director level on up is so critical because if you have the right people in all of those roles, they're going to jump in, they're going to help out, they're going to flag things that might fall through the cracks and, and then you just kind of triage them as, as you go.

It's great. Sounds like what, what you're saying, it's really helpful is a populating your leadership team with people whom have a flexible relationship to leadership. They're just willing to do what it takes to make the business work and as opposed to being territorial like holding their piece of the pie or whatever it is. And that's hard. It's really hard. Right. That's a competency. That's like finding people whom from day one know that I may call upon you. You know, it's like the Godfather. I may call upon you one day to, you know, do something, but you know, it's in the best interest of the business. And you know, of course I'll, I want your feedback and your input to check if I'm right or not. But if it's required, everybody needs to sort of figure out that their places might switch around here. But it's in the best interest of the business. Right. That's one thing. And the second thing you said too is, you know, kind of preparing for, and this is somewhat self serving here, but you're speaking to what I refer to and you maybe know from listening to me the CRO readiness part of the whole thing, which is making your company ready for achieved revenue. That's really what we're talking about right now, right. Where we're creating a new position that's going to have a like cross functional oversight. It's very disruptive. So you mentioned something that I think is really important. I'd love to find out more about this because this is the area that we're looking to help people is getting ready for the chief revenue officer. And we put this person, you put Jackie in this job and you said it very articulately. Now you gotta like, like learn things. You gotta learn like what's going on. You gotta have access to stuff and you have to be able to assess it and you know, know what it is and then be able to optimize it or figure out how much of it is not good or what's bad. And it's mostly data and. Right. So you know, how did you do that?

Yeah.

What was the methodology and the process that you took to become smarter about what was really going on that allowed you to Then be able to be ready to start implementing whatever you wanted. How did you do that?

Yeah, so luckily we had a ton of reporting and data in the organization already. And as you know from my background, data and analytics is my happy place. So what I did was kind of do a debrief with the kind of team on okay, where are things? What are we doing? And then I basically created a research plan and I said, okay, here's all the things that I would want to be able to look at from new business rates, conversions, what's our MQL to SQL to SAL conversion rates, what's the timing, what does it look like across reps, verticals, industries, every single thing. And basically created a laundry list of reports that I would need to see, worked with the business ops team and also had to work with them because the way that I wanted to look at data and some of the reports that I wanted to look at weren't necessarily how management had been looking at them before. So we had a ton of reports which were really helpful, but they weren't all through the lens of how I would want to look at the business. So I kind of had to take a step back. And it's like, I know we have a lot of historical data, but I want to look at it in this way because I need to answer these business questions. So it literally created a sheet of here's what I'm trying to solve for and here are the ways that I need to look at the data in order to get to that. And then I spent weeks in spreadsheets and analytics just going through it and then work to create a bottoms up plan for the business for our 2023 budget that I felt was actually reliable and that I could stand behind. And that whole process helped me figure out like, okay, here's the gaps that we have, here's where we have, you know, maybe a bunch of renewals coming up. So we have an opportunity over here in this particular part of the business. But you know, maybe we aren't running as many events this year because of marketing spend. So how impact that whole conversion cycle and play all the way through. So it really was a data and analytics led initiative and then conversations across marketing with the CEO, with everybody to say, okay, here's how I'm thinking about things. How does this jive with what you're doing? And back to the CMO perspective, I mean we very much had to be in sync because their goals about creating the pipeline that is going to feed this plan, we had to be thinking about the numbers in the same way we had to be speaking the same language. And I work with a fantastic cmo. I don't even want to say his name because then somebody might try to reach out and grab him. But he's done this a couple of times. He's phenomenal to work with. And you know, we came to an agreement of what we were looking at and dealing with. And we just stay in lockstep on making sure that both the assumptions that we built into that initial plan are holding. And then if something changes, then we need to make adjustments and understand, like is that a me adjustment because now I need to condense my conversion rates on the back end of the deal or is that a you assumption and impact? Because actually it's taking things longer to get through from stage one to stage two. How are we going to impact that? And it's a constant trade off and back and forth to make sure that we're still narrowing in on the same end targets.

Really great. So you didn't need any third party help. You did this all yourselves. It was all your own internal methodologies and stuff. You utilized your own internal resources to do this analysis, right?

Yeah, and we have. So we started a partnership with Vista Equity Partners back in January of last year. So luckily we have them as a partner too to kind of check it on and they have some great benchmarks that we can use around. You know, how do our conversion rates look compared to others in the business? So, or you know, what are the profiles of successful reps that they're seeing across other businesses? They have kind of frameworks and screenings that we can use. But if you don't have those skill sets in house. Right. Then you absolutely should look for partners that you trust. And I think also be realistic about the CRO that you are thinking about bringing in, which is relative to your CEO and the other parts of your leadership team. So if you have a CEO super commercially focused and maybe has a penchant for sales, then you might need a different profile of a CRO. If you don't have somebody who is as commercially strong, maybe your CRO needs to be more commercially focused. So I think that's important too is just to be brutally honest, which not everybody is good at. Right. Of understanding what your own strengths are and weaknesses as a leader. But also within the organization, if you don't have a great biz ops team or you know, you don't have the in house data, then you need somebody else to kind of help you figure that out and be A resource. And I think sometimes people shy away from that because they don't want to maybe admit the parts of their business that aren't as far along structurally as they should be. And so they shy away from so much easier to work with consultants or anybody. If you're true about what you have to work with and what you have.

To do, that's so true. So I like what you said before, it's really important is there's a, like, almost like a leadership profile of the people who are in place, and they have strengths that need to be reflective of. The type of CRO that you bring on has to be the right fit, you know, because I think the initial feeling is in a blank slate is that you're going to hire some really commercially brilliant CRO, which obviously makes sense because that's their role. But you're right, if you have a CEO who's really strong there, you probably need someone who's a little bit more analytical to fill that slot up. I mean, I'm not like you. You and I are opposites. I. I'm less the analytics and data person. I'm more the, you know, business leader, you know, vision person. And so, you know, I know, like, I think the key is here, and we're sort of, right now, you and I are speaking to, like, let's say two different people in this one part of this conversation that is CEOs looking for chief Revenue officers and people who want to become Chief Revenue officers are two key constituents that are following this podcast. On the CEO side, it's know thyself what type of CRO is going to complement your leadership style best? And to your point, be honest about that. Like, what really is it? Like, what are you not good at and what are you good at? And be willing to be really succinct about that, because if your ego takes over and you're not willing to be succinct, you're probably going to bring in somebody that isn't a fit, and that's not good. And then the second thing is, if you are a CRO and I tell this, you want to become, and I tell this to my clients all the time, is understand the profile of the leadership team that you're going to be plugged into and make sure that your skill set stack is a fit for the company that you're going into and there's no duplication or redundancy or conflict, right? Because if your superpower is going to be in any way impeded by somebody else's desire to want to use that. You're not going to be useful there, you know. So I guess that's sort of. I want to go with the next part of this conversation is what would your. And we kind of did it already, but maybe expound on it. What's your advice to two people that the CEO looking to hire a Chief Revenue officer, let's just say for the scenario sake they're at the same kind of, well, you know, 20, 30 million in revenues and they're ready to make that sort of jump to that more scalable and aligned organization. What are the key ways, key criteria or methodologies or ways you should be thinking about how to bring on a Chief Revenue officer for CEO.

Yeah. So for a CEO, I would say what we were talking about being, you know, brutally honest about yourself as a CEO and the rest of your leadership team in what's truly missing. So why is it that you need a CRO and what do you hope to get out of that role? I think that one that is crystal clear and then from there you can kind of create a profile of what you think that person should bring to the table and be like, the second thing I would recommend is, you know, ensuring that you are really thinking about a CRO and not an SVP of sales. Because you know, back to one of your first comments, right? There's a lot of mix up and what is a CRO really? And you don't need a CRO if you need an SVP of sales. There's two different things. So you could be transparent with somebody coming in and say, listen, I'm trying to fill this SVP of sales right now. I need to get the sales house in order and then I want to pass this to a CRO. Or you need to make sure that you've structured for, you know, that VP level of leadership across your teams and allow the CRO to really focus on the business of driving and owning the revenue strategy for the company. And then also I think for a lot of, you know, maybe founder led or earlier stage companies being realistic on the readiness to take feedback from the CRO, right? Like do you want the CRO just to say you have the CRO or are you open to them telling you that you need to change the go to market strategy or that you need to make changes to whatever, you know, software, service, product you're selling? Are you ready to give up the pricing method that you, you know, cried in a back room building, you know, some late night when you were building up the business all of those like more intangible readiness factors that as a CEO, especially if you're a founder CEO, you need to like get real honest with yourself how many of those Legos you're, you're willing to let go of.

Really great. Thank you. So now I'm a CRO or I'm aspiring one, let's say I'm SVP of Sales and I'm tired of it. I'm ready to get take on your role. I want to own the whole thing. In your view, what's the way that someone should approach the that role? What's the right way? A someone who's running a sales organization, which frankly, and I know you and I probably would agree this is not necessarily a good thing. But 90% of the people that become zeros are from sales, right? And I think we agree that's probably not the best thing. You're proving clearly that it might not be. But what would a head of marketing or head of sales who wants to be a CRO be thinking about as they approach the marketplace to become a Chief Revenue officer?

I think doing the same kind of self assessment on what are your strengths and weaknesses. So what is it about this mythical CRO role that you think is going to fulfill you in a way that your job isn't? And then you set it best, right? Making sure that you vet the opportunities that you're going after, that they align with that because you know, especially if you're somebody who's coming up in your ranks and trying to make it into the C suite, if you take, if you move from, you know, some other role into the CEO role, and let's say you were an SVP of sales and the particular CEO that you're going to work with wants a more analytical and maybe operational CRO. If your superpower and your magical ability is to be phenomenal in closing deals and structuring a new business team or doing whatever, and that's not fulfilling what the CEO wants, you're going to feel like you're failing as a CRO. But what is actually going on is you're failing in that particular expectation of the CRO profile for that particular CEO. And you know, especially for women. You know, I've coached so many women who are trying to kind of make their way up in different organizations and, and I have to constantly remind them that it's not that you failed being the thing, right. Whatever it is, it's that that wasn't the role for you in that context. That doesn't mean you can't be A great SVP of sales somewhere else, a CRO, whatever you're trying to be. But you kind of have to be realistic about how much of that was your skill set for the role versus your skillset compared to the expectations of that particular role profile. And that's a big, big difference. That can sometimes send people spinning quite honestly for a while.

It's so, so astute and you're so right. And you have to find the right partner. Right? I mean, it's like any long term committed relationship, right? I mean, yeah, you know, some people have two marriages, one ended horribly, the other one is massively successful. So obviously it was, you know, you need to find the right partner to fulfill on the way in which you were able to participate in that particular relationship. And you're right. You know, the main thing I see happen with Chief Revenue Officers who don't make it is they come out thinking like, you know, well, not only they think it was their fault, but the CEO always blames them too. Oh, it was the wrong person. God, I can't believe I hired this idiot. It was like, no, the person was actually incredibly qualified. Just wasn't right for your company. And you didn't know that you did a bad job of assessing the person properly because you took a great candidate and put them into a non winning situation and then you kick them out and blame them for it. And you know, this is a very common thing. And so what happens is people come out of these CRO jobs like they're all beaten up and they don't want to take the next one because they look back at the experience, they're like, why would I want to do that again? It's like, well, look, you just picked the wrong partner. What did you learn? What did you learn from that engagement that you could bring to the next opportunity? There's probably 10 additional questions that you have now that you should ask that you could take from that experience and you'll probably get a lot better opportunities, right? It's no like, like dating, you know, I mean, you just figure out how to like vet things better. And I think that, you know, what I try to tell my CEO clients is it's not about finding the perfect candidate. It's about being the company that's ready for one. And the reality is, if you're not, no one's coming in here to fix you. It doesn't work that way. You've got to be ready. You got to know what you're looking for. You got to have the right understanding of your environment and you got to know how to find a person that's a good fit and make that person win. And I'll repeat some things I say you have to have, you have to be able to willing to give the CRO the autonomy, the authority and the Runway and the resources to succeed.

Yep.

And if they have those four things, those things don't just come because it's magic. They come because they're a fit and that those things can, you can afford to give them to that person without concern that it'll knock the ship over, you know. And when you put a stressor on a CEO that says you have to give the person these things, they're going to vet them a lot differently than if they don't have to give them those things. So it's almost like you up the level of commitment level that they have to take and it forces them to be a lot more scrutinizing of the kind of person they are. A lot of times, unfortunately, these jobs, they, they try to fill them as quickly as possible, you know, and they make some very superficial decisions. Oh, he had a job at the other company that I like so much or our competitor like them. You know, it's not the right reason to hire somebody. I mean, it might be, but you know, no. How about just doing a competency assessment of your organization and match it up? That's a tough thing. So I think CROs need to be a lot more battle worthy than CEOs do because they're the ones going into the buzzsaw. So anyway, I love, love this topic. So I want to kind of float here. So what I want to before we close up is I know when you and I spoke pre the pre conversation is I know there are a couple of things that you're particularly passionate about in the role that you have. And I want to make sure that I have an opportunity to address those so you can get a chance to talk about them. What would be like a topic that hasn't been touched on in this conversation yet that you just would love to expound on a little bit that you feel is important to you?

I think one what we were talking about with epe, so the expertise, partnership and empathy that we bring to all of our interactions as a way to really reframe sales, you know, I mean, CROs are kind of like CMOs, right? I think the last data I heard was, you know, the average CRO is in seat for about 18 months. So it's about that. Yeah, I just hope that, you know, if I'm granted 18 months if I'm granted more than that, that when I leave, at least sales won't have, you know, maybe such the stigma as it does sometimes today. Like, I want to leave the industry a better place where customers feel like they can truly be honest about what they need and feel like the providers that they're collaborating with are there to help them get that done. And, you know, that goes back to not just having a different profile. I will never be, you know, the maybe typical salesperson who walks in and is, you know, chatting up the whole room and, you know, trying to cut deals here and there. But what I will do is listen and ask really maybe more qualitatively research driven questions to a customer about what is it that they're trying to achieve. Because especially so our space and customer data platforms, it's a transformational technology. So, you know, you're going through a major SaaS implementation. And the more honest, open and transparent our customers are with us during the sales process, the better we can devise solutions for them on the back end. But if there's no trust up front, then you get through the sales process and a customer is like, oh, but I forgot to tell you that we actually need to connect these three other marketing systems. And I also forgot that one of those contracts is going to expire in three months. And so everything has to be connected before that happens. And so then our teams have to react and they're super frustrated because you've got to condense like a four month project into six weeks. And the customer is super frustrated because they're like, why can't you do what I asked? And it's like the whole myth is perpetuated again. It's like, well, because as salespeople we're saying, well, you weren't transparent with us. And they're saying, you know, that's because you sold me something that wasn't what I expected. And so again, if, if it's six months, 18 months, if it's five years, I just, I want people to say that sales, chief revenue officer, whatever, could be a career for me because I'm passionate about helping customers. So that's one of the things that I'm super passionate about. And also making sure that, you know, access to revenue roles and, you know, especially new business sales roles where there's a lot of upside if you do well, that shouldn't be limited to a certain type of typical profile. And like I said, I certainly never imagined myself in any kind of sales role growing up. And I feel like there are a lot of people. There's one woman that I mentored who was similar. She's like, I don't have a sales profile. And I was like, well, can you do these five things? And she's like, yeah, I love those. I'm like, great, you are going to be a phenomenal salesperson. I'm like, let's just talk about how you put this into action. So I think that that's important and I think it's really important that we introduce that to people, especially, you know, non traditional profiles earlier in their careers to give them a shot and an exposure to that.

It's great. I love it. And I'm in agreement, I think that the sales culture that you speak of, in my opinion, I mean, if you share the opinion, I think it's getting worse. And the reason why I think it's getting worse is because companies have adopted these mass messaging and automation processes, you know, SDR groups and automation platforms. It's just too easy to just spam huge groups of customers or prospects now. And I also think the growth at all costs, sort of cultures that are pervasive in the last five or so years have resulted in deploying these sales strategies that are so counter to customer experiences that it's no wonder people are turned off. You know, and I, I talk about this a lot and a lot of the people in my, you know, universe or ecosystem are very pro SDR groups because they are SDRs. They run them and stuff and I don't want to single them out, but it's, that's, I think it's a symptom of the issue. The SDR group. It's a, it's an outcome of an effort to try and do whatever we can to get as many people inside of a funnel as humanly possible because I think people have lost the focus on, well, how do customers feel about this? I don't know if anybody asked this question. I don't know if they do. And it's incredible to me as a result, and I think you agree 100% with this, is companies that, do they have a great opportunity, I mean, a huge opportunity, because it's refreshing for customers these days Ago, wow, that was a really nice sales conversation I just had with somebody. They give a shit about me. And you know, that's really bizarre. You know, wow, that could make a big difference, right? Because let's face it, a lot of the products and services in the SaaS industry are competing with other ones. There's other platforms that do the same thing. They're just, you know, minor, you know, little differences and stuff. So the differentiators aren't necessarily going to be features. They're going to be more like the way you go to market and the way that you talk to people because people are hiring you at the end of the day. So I just think it's great. Your, your, your passions, your. Your focus on those things are very similar to mine. I mean, I started this business for the same reason. I think that chief Revenue officers are critical because they, they look at the whole thing. They, they move away from the sales function as a single spear that's targeting the market all the time and looking at more the way you surround a customer with the right sort of experience so that you can build value and the organization shares information about that customer. So anyway, I really appreciate that. So how can people get in touch with you and tell us a little bit more about what you're doing and some of the things you're up to? So, you know, if anybody wants to reach out to you. You sound like you coach a lot of people, you mentor a lot of people and talk about a little bit about your business. And let's make sure that you get a little opportunity to get a little bit more, you know, exposure out of this.

Yeah. So LinkedIn, LinkedIn profile. It's Jacky Ra or, you know, find me Jackie Russo Anderson. Jackie blueconic.com. shoot me an email. I'm always happy to chat, especially with folks who are thinking about this path or having questions, want to talk about, you know, building their skills as a consultative seller or if they're already phenomenal consultative sellers and they want to work in an environment where that is appreciated. Just reach out and I would be happy to chat.

Well, great. I learned a couple of things here.

Great.

So thank you. I mean it. I mean, I did. I got one really great insight I got out of this conversation was that the profile of the CEO needs to match the profile of the CRO. And even though I thought about it, it's the way you articulated had me think about it a little bit differently. And I appreciate that. And the other one was really insightful. Is the revenue part of the CRO role doesn't just affect the way people hire them, but it affects the people that they interact with on customer side. They think they're dealing with a sales leader. And that's. That's a really great insight, and it's one that CROs need to be really mindful of is that that perception precedes them, and they have to be responsible for it. They can't just ignore it. They have to understand that that's probably what's going on, and they have to speak to it so they can work through that instead of just, like, being perceived as someone who's going to try and, you know, get a deal. That's a really good insight. So thank you for that and thank you for being here. This is a great conversation. I loved it. And hopefully have a chance to speak again. And thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me.

Yeah, anytime. Happy to come back. Happy to chat. Happy to chat with anybody who needs a support group for CRO Identity Crisis. Reach out. And I would love to connect.

All right, Great. Well, thank you.