How Misaligned Software Metrics Ruined B2B Sales and How to Fix It with MK Marsden

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. So why don't you let everybody know who MK Marsden is. Who are you and, uh, what do you do and what is it that you're up to right now and what are you trying to accomplish within the area that you operate?

Yeah, cool. Thanks for this. Um, so I started my career in sales and marketing, but I went to school wanting to be a vet and ended up in computer science. Okay. So, you know, we can talk about that some other day. Let's do it. But, uh, really what I've always been focused on is how do we use technology to better serve customers? Go to the customer, figure out what their business problem is, help them out, use tech, take care of your employees next because they're the interface to your customer. So I started in IT software, built a couple of companies there. I got to be part of the leadership of a big, big company, Novell, the precursor to the internet. Then I went into MarTech. I was like, let's see how people use all these tools we create. And I created transactional email because it was like, hey, if we know what you just ordered and we know where we're shipping it, we could sell you more stuff and take better care of you. We could use password reset. As a marketing channel. So kind of created all of that, sold that to Axiom, had a great run there. And then I started looking at it and realized right before COVID buying and selling in B2B was getting super complicated. And with digital marketing, buyers knew everything about the sellers and were starting to make decisions without talking to the salespeople. Then boom, we get hit with COVID and suddenly buying changes completely. Procurement is no longer in charge. People are working from home. People are new to companies. They don't even know what their buying process is. And sellers are really in trouble. So the last 3 years, 80% of sales reps have missed quota. Now, you talk about this. Yeah. I think salespeople are just canaries in the coal mine of what you've been talking about. Is your business and is your growth sales-enabled? Are you CRO-ready? Are you— so all the CEOs are running around and saying, we want growth, we want growth. But they don't know what that means and what to invest in and what technologies they need to actually achieve that. So last year I created, um, a platform, a sales intelligence platform that reads everything about the seller's account to show them what's going on in real time in that account so they can navigate it properly, sell to the right people at the right time, or not sell to them because they're not buying, or not sell it to them because it doesn't fit with their business problem or their tech stack. So we launched Sales Sleuth in March, and we've got sellers selling, and they're no longer flying blind. They can see what's going on in each account.

So that's what I'm up— okay, I got you, I got it. So, um, let's dig into that a bit. Interesting. So, okay, I agree that, uh, buyers are I wouldn't say smarter than they used to. That's not necessarily the case. I think they're more— they have more access to data, so they're more, let's say, more informed, I guess. I don't even know the right word. Um, or they're more, you know, they could diagnose things long before they ever have to get onto a call or anything with a salesperson. And in fact, I think they want to more now. Like, it's not just like, oh, I can, I just— I want to because I don't want to talk to anybody. I think people are overwhelmed with too many different ways they can be communicated with. I mean, every time you buy anything, you start getting emails from whoever you buy. It doesn't matter if it's soap or butter, you know, you get emails from them. It's insane.

So it's almost—

people are almost reluctant to ever buy anything from a direct website anymore. I'd rather go to Amazon because I know I'm not going to get emails about everything. And that's killing people's businesses. I find it amazing that people don't understand this. Like, why would you put something on an email list, you know, like that thing you get every time you want to buy something is like, you know, give us your email, save 15%.

I don't—

yes, I'd give you 15% more just to not you send me emails because I know that's what's going to happen. So to me, I just don't get it. Like, I'm very perplexed by the mentality behind these sort of things and that no one's figured it out. And I think mainly, I suspect, it's either A, it's just laziness, like it's what we always do is just leave it running, or the other part of it is also What else are we going to do? Like, we have no other way to talk to people because no one wants to talk to us. So this is the only way we can get people in our database. It's kind of crazy, but I think there's definitely sort of a desperation. And I think this relationship between the buyer and the seller has created a chasm for only a certain segment though of salespeople, because what you and I are talking about right now, a salesperson wouldn't even be involved. It would be like a product-led thing where I'm just dealing with a machine and I'm determining how do I interact with it. But if a person gets involved, now the problem I'm seeing— I can tell you for me, if I'm looking at like a software solution, I'm probably first talking to a robot. Mhm. Then the robot passes it over to probably some, let's call it like an SDR person who's can flag that this person's qualified because this human being wrote back and said they want to talk. So that SDR gets on the phone with me and then maybe they do some research on me and they find, oh, this is a big fish, let's bring on somebody else too. So there's two people on the phone and I'm like, who— I just want to talk to— I thought I was talking to Steve, you know, who's Bob, you know. And then I'm already like thinking, okay, so now I'm in a funnel and I don't want to be in a funnel. I'm not interested in being in a funnel. I want to be— whether I want to buy this or not. The whole thing is completely broken because companies need to measure every single thing to make sure that it's this, that. But then look, on the other side of the equation, I get it. I know what it's like. I mean, if I'm deploying people and I want them to build a pipeline, I do want them only to be talking to people who really want to buy something. And I really do want them to qualify people. So there's this battle between measurement and impact and efficiency. And then the other side is the customer. I don't really know how the wrangling of this is, and I would be interested in your point of view on what can be done about this because I think we're at a point where it's reaching critical mass.

Yeah, I agree with you. So I think where we made the mistake is when we made things cheap. See, cheap lets people do crappy work. So we made email cheap. So we started doing crappy emails. Remember when you used to like, you know, print 4-color brochures and you had post-its attached to it and like you knew who you were mailing to, like it mattered, right? Now it doesn't matter. Now it doesn't matter. A robot can send noise out all day long for 0.001 penny on it. And, and so that's what brands are doing. That's what companies are doing. What I always say to my customers is, when was the last time you opened an email from someone you didn't know or took a phone call on a number you didn't recognize? Okay, well, if you're not doing it, why do you think they will?

Yep.

Right? So like, stop. My first request is everybody just like stop the noise so we can actually like see what's going on. You and I have done a couple of things together that I think are significant. I don't think we, I don't think we have the answer, Warren. I think we're working together, you and I and others to come up with the answer. But I think like your CRO roundtables, I think are a really important part. I think education. Look, some people think marketing is SEO. No, SEO is SEO. Marketing is a much larger discipline and sales isn't marketing. Sales signals are different than marketing signals. Like, We've just thrown everything into this ratatouille. Yeah. We both did roundtables with Mike Filato where we bring people together and we talk about what's working, what's not working. Discovery is still critical to causing connection and being able to figure out if you're going to work together or not work together, if it makes any sense. So yes, you as a buyer can sit there and read everything. But if you don't talk to a human being on the other side, you can't really figure out how this is going to fit, how it's going into your org, who else needs to be involved in the decisioning, right? And, and what we're seeing is in all this chaos, 70% of the time, the decision is No decision. So I don't know from a tech standpoint precisely what we have to do. My approach was, since the buyer knows everything about the seller, let me at least tell the seller everything about the buyer. Okay, so now we've gotten— the intelligence gap is covered. We're on an equal playing field. So that when you do get the first phone call, it's not to the SDR and it's not hi, howdy, right? It's like, hey, I know that you've got an RFP for this and I know you're the influencer and you've got these other people, so you can treat the person with respect. You've got context for the phone call. Now you can engage in a person-to-person way around solving. So that's, you know, the part that we focused on. We also talk to our customers about talking to their customers. They sell them a solution. The customer's using 10%. Help them use some other portion. Help them use 40, 50, 60%. Sell them into the white space. Companies are filled with agencies. They got too many people, too many platforms. I got an app. For every function I do, we can't operate efficiently that way. So go in, solve a bigger portion of the problem, integrate with what they already have. But for me, like, knowledge and insights was critical to the first step of being able to create an intelligent relationship between buyer and seller.

Hey everyone.

Warren Zenna, thank you again for listening.

Get great comments across LinkedIn and other channels about the show, and it's really gratifying to see that we're having an impact on you. Another thing I wanted to let everybody know is that we also produce events. About 2 and a half years ago, we started these CRO roundtables predicated on the idea that, well, two premises. One is CROs are looking for other CROs to talk to.

Which is really true.

It's a very lonely job. How do we get a bunch of CROs in a room where they're not being, let's say, disintermediated by panel discussions and sponsorship events and demos and stuff, and really give them a chance to talk to each other? So we created a roundtable event that is essentially that. It's a 3.5, 4-hour discussion between between 20 and 30 chief revenue officers, and these are amazing events. The format took off, people love them, and I get requests all the time as to when is your next CRO event.

So to that end, I just want to let you all know that we have a number of roundtables coming up over the next year, over the next, like, 2026. I want to share them with you so you can, if they're in your market, you can come. So the next one we're having is going to be in London, actually, in February, February 24th in London. So if you happen to be a chief revenue officer in the UK or even in Europe and you want to come by, you'll be hearing about it more on my website and my— and LinkedIn, but put it on your calendar. And then following that, we're probably going to be doing an event in San Francisco in March. There's going to be one in New York in March. I'm going to do another one in Chicago probably in April. And then I'm going to do an event in Boston I'll do an event in Atlanta. I'm going to do an event in Salt Lake City. I'm going to do an event in Austin, and I'm going to do an event in Los Angeles or the Southern California area. So those dates are to be determined, but they'll be going across all, all next year. And these events are taking on huge momentum. They're the place to be if you're a chief revenue officer and you want to be in a room with no interruptions and have an opportunity to really share with each other in a sort of a private and confidential open discussion about everything that you want to talk about as a chief revenue officer and collaborate with great people. So thank you and thanks for supporting the show and I look forward to seeing you at the events. Yeah, I understood. I would say the complexity around this whole thing is that there's a lot of different types of sales motions, right? Product-led, which is human beings not really involved at all. Maybe it'll escalate at some point if maybe increased number of users on a platform. And I don't even know if we're even doing seats anymore. Now it's more, you know, tokenization and outcome-driven stuff. So that's even— that's a whole different thing. And then the other thing too is, um, you know, if you're selling a service or a software that has a service, like maybe it's like some complex onboarding or, you know, customization protocol that's required once the purchase is made, an integration layer, Yeah, you do have to get people involved, but that's usually now at a point where the customer's already sort of been identified for having that conversation. You're pretty deep into it and you're probably onto something. I'm saying before that, the issue I'm seeing right now, and again, we're talking pretty broadly, are we talking here about selling software? We're talking about selling services. Are we talking about selling products? Like, there's these words are thrown around a lot, but they matter because the way people buy things depends upon what they're buying. So Yeah, I think when you're talking about, I would think this, I think this is the case. If you're talking about salespeople who you're supporting, you don't need them unless there's some complexity to the sale that requires a human discussion, right? You can't just do it over the internet. It means someone has to be spoken to, someone has to understand things. Probably means there's some complexity. Also means there's probably a price barrier, probably expensive. Or enough so that it needs approvals or a certain budgeting permission. So, you know, a salesperson needs to be involved. Maybe there's some complexity to the offering, so there needs some explanation. You need some sort of a sales engineering person involved who can explain things. Might be a competitive thing involved where there's 3 other choices I have and I want to talk to this company, tell me why yours are different, because your marketing materials sort of do it, but I want to ask some questions. But that in order to get to all these points, there needs to be some signal that the seller can indicate that this is someone who not only is a fit, like the ICP normal crap, like, okay, yes, they have the right budget and they have the right job, blah blah. More importantly is that there's a certain, like, real granular specificity around the pain that they have right now and the need they have right now, the urgency they have right now, and their circumstances. Those are difficult things to predict. But what I'm seeing is— and I have a couple of colleagues who are doing this right now, I think I might have mentioned this to you— who are really good at being able to reversing this whole thing and researching databases to determine things where there was a real pain point on the horizon that you could point to. And you can reach out to somebody and point to that pain point and say, look, you know, X is about to happen to your business, and here's the evidence of that. And We could do something about it. And I think this is the future. I think that like the way we're able to now triangulate data across certain verticals, particularly verticalization, you know, around vertically oriented businesses, not horizontally oriented, oriented. You can go like you and I talked about this, right? You go after a specific industry that has a specific set of pain points and a very specific niche and determine like what is the buying, what are the 3 or 4 buying signals within that niche that people make a decision? Like why do they make a change in their this or a change in their that, and then being able to identify that. And I do think we're going to get a great deal more precise in the way that we operate, as opposed to general, which is let's just send emails out to as many people as possible and capture the 20 of them who will say yes. I think those days are coming to an end. And I mean, this is a really big change because if I'm running a pipeline and I need to know that I have this huge TAM and I have all this outbound I just think those things are sort of, like, becoming useless.

Well, I agree with you. I agree with you 100%. So in, in our environment, like, I'm really glad that you're distinguishing this. It's a complex buying environment with a complex selling environment. That's where we focus.

Right?

Okay.

Is there a specific one you— what you're focusing on?

Well, you know, I talked to you, right, over dinner, and we're gonna look at medical device, med tech, and One of the ones that we've been really successful in is when a company is kind of going from charismatic leader sales, $0 to $20 million, $30 million, they get their money. Now they have to convert into a legitimate sales system. We do really, really well there because we get them. They're young, they're smart, they're focused. They don't have the bad habits. And so we can show them And you're right. But what we've found is we can read the signals. The buyers are telling you all day long what they're buying, and they're telling you by who they're hiring on LinkedIn and Glassdoor and with their recruiters and what blogs they're reading, what events they're attending, and what commentary they're writing and what videos they're— we wrote the reader that says, okay, these 184 points and the CEO's statement here and the CFO's statement there combined means they're going to buy these types of things. And then we monitor them. So, oh, here's an RFI that's come out. Oh, they've just attended Adobe Summit. Oh, they're doing this. They're doing that. They're doing this. Oh, they're at this hospital show. All of those signals are out there for me. The buyer's like, hey, these are all the things I'm doing. When you read all that and then bring it down to, am I a fit? That is the old discovery call right there. It's just we've handled it all because it's all in the digital sphere. But yeah, I want to go into, you know, I think the challenge we have in the software industry, and it's where I grew up, is everything is soft, right? I want to go into the people who build the thing, that sell the thing to a person who uses the thing. Right. And that relationship exists. Yeah. Versus this—

Definitely. Yeah.

Right?

Software is a bit soft and fuzzy and it changes too much. And we're in this time right now where nobody wants to make a long-term commitment to any software because it'll change like in 6 months and maybe we'll build it ourselves. It's a really weird time for that. I think if you're in the software business, it's a, it's a weird time to build something.

I think it's—

if you're a small business and you have the ability to become fluent with some of the new tools, you can build something pretty quickly and get it out there. But I think you always have the danger that someone's just going to come and grab it, or that it's going to become another feature in Anthropic's, you know, library, and you can just do it that way. But you're right, I mean, if you're selling complex really like radiology machines and MRI machines. I mean, those things are not going anywhere. I think the data that they produce will be read by these systems, but the process of collecting it is still going to be someone has to get inside of a tube and get, you know, it has to happen that way. It's probably, we're a long way off where someone's going to wave a wand over your body and get that information. I think it's still going to be expensive, complex machinery and hospital groups and physicians and emergency system organizations and, you know, ER groups. I think these, you're always going to be needing really complex things that are coming out of these, these companies. I think those types of, uh, trans— uh, transactions are going to be really important to navigate because there's a relationship there. It's a big purchase. It's complex. There's a lot of wheeling and dealing and negotiating that's going on. There's procurement involved. A lot of different factors, you know, innovations and this, that, and the other thing. So I see those areas where there's always going to be opportunities for sales to become a very important and maintain a very important, you know, component of the process. But they're diminishing. And I think it's interesting to talk about that, you know.

Yeah. And I want to touch on something that you said, right? The small business person can do it themselves. Like, look, you've been at this a long time and you're a—

Too long.

—guy.. And you know how hard it is. It is. So it's really difficult. Joe and Susie Sixpack, God bless them, right? Like, they can't do it themselves. And so they end up, you know, the nephew, or they buy some crappy piece of software, then they're in the noise generation system. And like, I was just booking an appointment, standard dermatology appointment. I got 15 different things. I got to confirm on text. I got to confirm on email. I got to go into the portal. I got to go into the payment portal. I got to— it's like, forget it. Yep. Forget about it. I'm changing facilities. You're making me insane. And I—

yeah, they overcomplicate this stuff. Yeah. I think there's probably going to end up being a bot that you can just send out and say, make this appointment for me. And fill out all the information for me. I don't want to deal with this crap. I, I, I do think that's, that's coming. I do too. I do. I think it has to happen. Either, either people have to lower the barrier to get into, like, these things just too complicated. But if it is complicated, if I can deploy an agent to just make these appointments for me, I would just rather do that. And I think that sounds like it's probably more likely going to be the case, that things are not going to be bureaucratic. I think it's more likely that we'll figure out ways to solve bureaucracy. Because bureaucracy is— I think it's going to get worse. But I do agree. I think it's crazy, you know, the amount of, you know, do you want it sent by text? Do you want an email confirmation? You know, all we have to do, you know, your OAuth, you know, and your two-factor authorization, and, you know, if your password's wrong, and it's like, Jesus Christ, man, I just wanted to get a bagel, you know, like, please, you know, leave me alone here. You know, I just want a bagel.

One of the things I say, you know, cause I invented transactional email. So you can blame me now when you go buy it.

Explain what that is, if you don't mind. I'd just be curious to know if people that might understand what transactional email would mean by that. I think people might think that all email is transactional. So explain what you mean by that.

Yeah, that's cool. Um, thank you. So transactional email was when the relationship already exists between you and the vendor. So it was your order confirm, your shipping confirm, your password reset. It was that category of email. And back when we invented it, those were just plain courier text pieces of paper, or you got a physical piece of paper if you went to the pharmacy or the coffee shop, right? So we digitized all that and branded it. So Sephora was a big customer. Walmart was a big customer. So when you got the, here's your order, it was suddenly branded and there were cross-sells and upsells in it. And when you, when you had to reset your password, it had nice messaging and it was like, if we can help you with anything, and there was a link to the contact us. I see.

So it was like almost like using these transactions as another way to engage the customer, keep the dialogue and I see. I follow you. Yeah. Makes sense.

So now when you go to Starbucks and you get 3 emails for 1 cup of coffee, it's because I didn't think to put an off switch to limit it to 1 per recipient. Gotcha. Right? Like, if I had thought about that 20 years ago, you'd only get 1, but now you get 1 from your credit card, you get 1 from the loyalty program, you get 1 from the vendor, you get 1 from, you know, and it's because when you're inventing these things, you don't think about full-on, you know, use case, right? It's going to look like 10 years from now when this works, 20 years from now when it works. So when we're looking at how do we help salespeople and buyers connect, we're trying to look at like the crisis we're in right now with the complexity, the noise, the 20 hours of research, missing quota, CRO doesn't know how to do his job, company doesn't support me properly, all this chaos. We're trying to look at that. We're trying to say, okay, we have to solve for the immediate and how do we create an environment that is successful for both parties going forward? Right? And so, you know, just because things are cheap and easy doesn't mean we should be doing cheap single-function apps. Like, I think we should go back to designing solutions.

Mm-hmm.

Stuff that matters, that lives through the life cycle, right? Like, you made a great comment. I am not a piece of funnel. When I am a buyer, I am not a piece of funnel. Don't treat me like, you know, something that's floating in a funnel. I am a human being with a job and a function to perform, and I am considering working with you. As a partner in solving my business problem. We've lost all that.

We lost it mainly, I believe, because the way in which business organizations are operating today to grow their businesses, it all has to come down to the way people are incentivized and managed. So if I'm a salesperson and my job is to get a number of deals per day or number of calls per day or get a certain pipeline health count, uh, score per day, then naturally, if I know that I'm going to be measured against those metrics, then every time I talk to somebody, I'm actually going to treat them like one of those things because I'm going to want to create that outcome to build on my incentivized managed goals, right? So if, uh, and we've tried this, right? I've ran teams where, you know, we, we realize, okay, what we're doing is makes sense. I mean, I certainly want at the end of the day to be able to look at people's activity and look at their calendars and see what they're doing. And measure the way they're operating so we can determine if they're successful. But we over-engineered it. We found that people were doing things just to feed the system and get a good signal back from their manager or avoid being admonished for not doing so. And so we changed it. We were like, look, how about this? How about maybe think about it more whether or not you're being in service of the person you're talking to or not? That's it. Just think about whether or not this person really needs this or not and what it can do with them. Think about more measurable outcomes that you as a sales engineer could bring to this person and make that thing. And we found that what happened was even though people felt a little bit more inspired about the conversations they were having, they were having a lot less. And so it was sort of like, it's a weird trade-off. So on one hand, they're doing the right thing, but it doesn't generate as much volume. And so there is a real problem with the way in which we're trying to grow a business, which is we sort of, in a way, have to cajole people to have certain conversations that may not seem natural in order to drive the outcomes we want. And I don't know the balance of this. I don't. I think the key— the problem mainly, frankly, depends what you're selling. I mean, if you're selling something that just has really high value potential, like it's the kind of thing that, you know, if someone got it that they, you know, you could really very easily determine what the value is, like it's life-saving or something like that. Yeah. But most things are sort of middling, you know, they're like, okay, yeah, I guess this will do this much for you. And I have this job and I'm selling this thing that's mildly interesting, but at the same time too, I want to keep my job and I have to fill my pipeline, so I'm going to talk to these people a certain way. And it, it leads me to believe that as the organizations— like you said it before, it's so easy now to do all these communications that it's made the, um, the, uh, the threshold of importance on businesses really difficult because now it's too easy to do— to send out emails, it's too easy to do outbound, it's too easy to buy ads, it's too easy to do it. If everyone can do it, then it's hard to determine the customers, like, what's really, really matters. So it has to be more customer-centric. It's like, well, what does really matter, right? I mean, so I, I think people are going to be gravitating more towards jobs where the, uh, value is, is really apparent and there's fewer of those. And I think it's going to make it difficult, difficult for businesses to thrive when they just don't have as a compelling offer. It's like, so I don't know. I really think we're in the middle of an incredible shift in the way we're going to business and the way we're going to market right now. And I don't think anybody really fully understands what it's going to look like 5 years from now, but everyone's throwing a lot of shit against the wall. I can see that. It's incredible what I'm seeing right now. Curious to know what you're talking about when you, when you talk to your customers about stuff like this.

Thanks again for listening to the CRO 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 CRO Spotlight podcast with any of your colleagues. We just think there's a great wealth of information here and want to get the word out to as many people as possible, and your, 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 6 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 6 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. Yeah. So I want to go like back to the beginning with you. What we measure matters. Of course. And what ruined B2B sales was the software system and like Salesforce. Salesforce. When you suddenly take a relationship and you break it into a series of events written by software people who've never sold anything to anybody who don't understand sales, and then you put finance in charge. Okay. Like now we're in the shit show. Like now we're in the shit show. We're measuring like phone calls and things like that. It doesn't matter if I make 1,000 phone calls to the wrong person who doesn't want to buy my stuff, or if I make one phone call to the right person and have the right conversation and they need my stuff. So we got people wasting their time doing these ridiculous measurements that have nothing to do with the relationship they're trying to establish, right? And so like, let's get back and understand, and the buyer will tell you all day long what the measurement of success is. It's the impact you have on their business over what period of time and how easy you make it for them to absorb that product or service or whatever into their environment and how quickly people improve their productivity or feel better or whatever. The buyer will tell you all day long what the measurement of success is. You just got to start listening. And just because we can measure clicks and phases of the moon and other things doesn't mean we should be, you know, holding people accountable to that, right? Like, I get really I get really twisted because one, I was a contributor to this crap that people are using. So like, I'm mad about that. So I have to go back and fix it is a little bit of how I'm feeling.

So you're on like a, like a redemption, a redemption tour of sorts right now. Yeah. Yeah.

Because if not, I'm going in the wrong direction.

Look, I, we all were, you know, we're all part of it. I mean, we all sold stuff. We were like, what am I doing? But you know, at some point too, I, I, I do see your point and I obviously agree. I just also see it having having now run a lot of businesses and running teams, I also recognize too that I need data. I need to know what's going on. I need to be able to have— I got fired over this. I was a CRO at a company eons ago. I was like, right before I started this company, actually, I got this job running a— it was a lot of mistakes. Doesn't matter. The point is it was an early-stage company that had actually a really unique novel solution. It also happened to be a solution that I knew most— I knew a lot about. I had a sort of very unique understanding of this particular market. So I was a very good hire for these people because I knew this market, and I had just a broad depth of understanding of what we were selling. And I knew the audience, I knew the problems. And so I didn't require any training. Like, I was just out of the box, like, probably one of the smarter people to talk about this particular thing.

It was a good fit for my background.

So I took this job and I was running this whole thing. And what happened was I'm out there having these conversations and I was being managed in a way, it was like very, like you're saying, very metrics-driven. Like, how many people do you speak to? Put it in the Salesforce so we can measure things. And I'm not saying I'm right, but my attitude at the time was like, no, that's stupid. You're making me, taking me 40% of my time giving you data. I'd rather be talking to people. Have someone follow me around with a notebook. I mean, this is dumb. And they were like, look, no, we need metrics. This team needs to know what's going on, who you're talking to, what the opportunities are, because we can learn from it. I actually agree with them. They're not wrong. So I see both sides of it. I just didn't want to do it because it was taking me away from the thing that, in my opinion, I should be doing, which is just talking to people and getting more engagements. And I think a lot of salespeople are like this. Oh, yeah, totally. They don't want to do this stuff. Like, they don't want to sit around all day entering data into a system, and they're being asked to. And What's happening is they're trying to identify a different type of profile of person that they're trying to hire. Now they want someone who's more of almost like a systems operator that interacts well with software as opposed to someone that goes out there and interacts with people. I don't know if we've sort of figured that out. I do, having now run enough of these things, understand there is a need to collect enough data to know what people are doing, the kind of conversations they're having. However, I also recognize too, some of these platforms we've created in the last 5 years solve it to a lot degree. They could look at, like, right now, okay, this show is being recorded. And at the same time too, if I wanted, I could have my other listening tool recording this that's taking notes and giving me all sorts of insights and backing up those insights against all the data knowledge that I have inside of my IP library to kind of help extrapolate some very specific knowledge from it because it has contextual understanding of my business and it can give me insights about this discussion and it can help me do other things with it. We didn't have that when I was selling even 5 years ago. So there is a lot of ways that we're able to now compound data that we don't need to use these software systems anymore. In fact, another thing, sorry, I'm going on so long, but it's interesting. I have Salesforce, right? I have it, an instance of it set up. For my business. And the way I worked it out is I don't do anything with it. It's plugged into my AI, and all I do is I open up a Salesforce skill in my AI platform, and I say, look at all the conversations I had this week, every conversation I had, every phone call, every email I got. Look at my calendar, look at all these things. It does it automatically. I don't have to tell it to anymore. It just runs a cycle, and it gives me a list of every single conversation I've had and all the background and everything. And I'm like, okay, great. Put it in my Salesforce for me. Yeah. And it does it. So what I mean is I think we're getting to a point where I don't need to look at these interfaces that much anymore. I can just query my platform verbally and it'll just gimme the data that I'm looking for. And we're going to rapidly get there. And I think that that honestly can create the opportunity for salespeople to start doing the things again that they should be doing. I think it's good. So I, I think it's both good and bad in a weird way. Like I see both sides.

I'm going to jump in here because the scenario you just gave, first of all, the people that you're talking to, you've already qualified or on some level like qualified. You're not out SDRing and spamming.

No, no, that's for sure. I, I, yes.

So you're using the tool, you're using the tool in the relationship. The other thing is you're looking at it from a holistic sales standpoint. So you're not the finance guy saying, hey, hey, Warren, like you spent 7.5 seconds too long on the intro with MK and you should have spent 3 more minutes on the this and that, right? Like this is where we got out of control was when people who don't understand sales Your intro had one more sentence than it should have, according to our metrics.

Yeah.

Yeah. According to our metrics, she should have spoken two more seconds longer and you like—

Just cut down the beginning another minute, you know, like, okay.

So, thank you, Warren Zenna. What you use and what you measure matters where. Yeah. Right. And like, where we, where we went wrong, I think, was when we stopped trusting the human-to-human relationship between the buyer and the seller. And we thought that that was just a series of events, right? No, trust in the brand, your longevity, the fact that you show up on time for your meeting, like these other ingredients are critical to being able to create the relationship and a multi-year transaction with your customer. We're not measuring that. We're measuring clicks, sends, opens, ads. And it's all because that's what software engineers understand. Right? That's all we understand, right?

They were instructed to build it that way. They were, they were saying, what are the key things that we need to measure so that we have the data we need to conduct a, let's say, analysis of activity? And all these things are created. And I understand it's like weird, you know, you give engineers a problem like this and they're going to solve it in that way, right? And it does make logical sense. I'm just saying the, the, uh, sort of corollary outcome is it creates behaviors and also inefficiencies that I think people probably didn't necessarily think about. And now As a result, we're slaves to technology as opposed to just talking to people. It's, it's, I don't really understand how to solve it. I think that I could see both sides of it, but I do think it's out of control. There's no question about that. I, I don't think anyone would argue that point.

I think he can read. I think we'll get to the place, just like right now we can read the whole internet worth of information and come up with, with a thesis. I think we'll be able to read trust. I think we'll be able to, you know, we've got some colleagues that we know and in common that are starting to measure the quality of interaction between people. If somebody tells you they're going to deliver you something on Friday and they don't deliver it to you on Friday and they don't have it by Tuesday, then what do you do next? So I think quality of interaction, the reliability, the transparency of interaction, it is not measuring bit functions. It's about a higher-level form of measurement to get back to, you know, what are we solving for? They're solving for business problems. We want to be their partner in solving the business problem. The person wants to get their commission and get paid. Let's start measuring those things. They are measurable.

Thank you so much again for listening to the CRO Spotlight podcast. This podcast is an important plank in the CRO Collective communication strategy, and we're really thrilled to have such great guests on here. So, um, listening and sharing the podcast with other people is really vital because we want to get as many people listening to this great stuff as possible. A couple things to note, uh, if you're an aspiring CRO or a recently hired CRO or even an 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 5 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 whom are probably like more like ready to be a CRO right now. They have a number of years under their belt as a revenue leader, whether it be a sales leader or a marketing leader or even a RevOps leader, and they either want to move into the C-suite or they're CROs that want to just make sure that they win in 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 the 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.

You know, I worked for this company, Eons, before the AI came about, and they were trying to do this exact thing, which to measure— it's kind of— I don't know if it's possible. Maybe it is now. Measure how people feel. Yeah, right. So like when you're having calls, what signals indicate someone feeling like manipulated or feeling gratified, gratified, or, you know, grateful, or helped, you know, or satisfied, or annoyed, you know. Um, and it's more subtle than just someone saying, you know, you're annoying me, or I'm really happy right now, you know. It's more like tonality and pausing, like really interesting ways that they're able to do it using language recognition. And the idea would be that they would— I think this is being done now— you basically look at a dashboard and you can tell over the course of all these conversations across the entire organization, like, what type of things are we saying that tend to drive people feeling distrusted or feeling annoyed or feeling alienated or feeling not listened to, or vice versa, that they feel really excited or they feel like relieved or something. And if we can identify those things, then maybe we can engineer the way we can talk to people in ways that will make those things more outcome. And I don't know if you can manufacture that stuff. I think it's interesting to know it. I'm not sure that I could say, well, you know, do it this way. I think it's just, well, how about just don't be annoying? It's probably a better piece of coaching, I think, you know, just don't be annoying. I agree with you.

I think we can measure it. And then I think it is about coaching. And helping each other. And I think it does start with the question. Yeah, sure. As a human, you can tell when you're annoying somebody.

I don't know. I don't know. I think a lot of times I think I'm really smart and really engaging, and I think people are like, well, they're probably going to shoot themselves or slicing their wrists while they're talking to me, and I don't even know about it. So I don't know about that. I think I'm probably the worst person to ask because either A, I think everyone thinks I'm annoying, or no one thinks I'm annoying. You know, it's never that subtle with me, you know. So I don't really know I'm a good person to ask about that.

You're funny. You're funny. No, I think the signals are there. I think we need to start measuring what matters. I think we need to help each other know about what's going on in each other's world. So the conversations are valuable because everybody is lacking time and overstressed and under pressure. And so, like, you know, when you get the opportunity to have a conversation, like, You know, come ready, come, come interested, come, come, come to serve and solve a problem.

I think there's another one, but I, I think there's probably two layers to this. This is interesting. I give a lot of thought to this. There's a couple things. So one is there's the obvious thing, which is I'm making a purchase for some reason. I have some business problem, and usually it's I want to make more money or I want to save time, right? Like, it's not a difficult thing to think about what most transactions are going to— I'm investing in either I want my money to increase, or I want to save money, or I want to save time, right? Those are pretty much 3 things. So, you know, if I'm selling something, I certainly need to know first which one of those is it that we do, right? So are we someone that— we a product that makes people more money? We make people that saves money, or we save them time? You have to know that. And then how much money, or how, how less money, or how much time? And if you can do that right, So then I can then have a transactional discussion with the person around, all right, so let's just say it's a time saving. How much time? Right? Okay, fine. So we could, we think that we've seen customers X number of hours. Fine. And all that. And I think that needs to happen. And I don't think that's being done. Even that minor thing we just, I just discussed is not being done with the level of precision it should be. And it's not engineered properly. I don't think there's a point in, I don't see too often where someone in the sales process says something like, here's your business, your particular situation for our product, and here's the impact we believe that the product will have on your business from, let's say in this case, a time savings perspective. And this is how long it'll take and this is how much it'll save you. And we're going to agree to this. And that means that you now know what the cost is going to be to you, what the time it's going to take for you to get the value. And then we can measure that. And if it happens, then satisfaction was realized, right? Person's like, okay, you made a promise to me for this. And then now that satisfaction results in what else can you do for me? But you see this happen right now. That's prison. But then there's the other piece, which people don't talk about, because let's say you do that. I think it's a good thing. You should.

So our reports do that, I have to tell you.

I'm just saying, I don't see it happening a lot. I talk to a lot of people, they don't do that with me. They don't engineer a value, you know, exchange. But the second part though is things like chemistry and frequency. Yep. And energy. Like, I don't know, you know, it, it, it plays such a big role in this stuff. And, you know, if you don't think about that sort of thing, a lot of it's not in your control. I mean, why is it that you— you certainly— you and I, we had dinner, we talked for like 5 hours, right? Why is that? I don't know. I'm not God. I don't know the reason why you and I— I don't know. And why is it there's someone I talk to and in 2 seconds I'm like, get me away from this person? Like, I don't know the answer to that question. And so I think a lot of it is sort of very— we don't know. And I think if you're, you're, you're You have to be kind of self-conscious of that stuff. Yes, you can do the things you can control, which is what we just discussed, like engineer the conversation properly and keep your promises and do what you said you'd do. No question, right? But whether or not you kind of have that other stuff, I don't know, it may not happen.

I'll tell you why I like being with you, okay? Okay. I'll give you some indicator. So one, I really appreciate your curiosity. You're incredibly curious and you ask really good questions. So it's not like the, oh, hi, how was your day? You know, that's the 30-minute dinner conversation.

Like, that's the one. Yeah, baby.

What's in my head? I gotta get out of here. You dig in and you dig in. So that's number one. Your curiosity is number one. Okay. Two, you listen. Okay. You actually have to listen. If you're going to ask somebody a question, then actually listen to their answer. Yeah. Full picture. Right? So get curious, ask good questions, listen to the questions, build the conversation from that. Respect each other. You and I come from completely different universes. Yep. Completely different universes. We meet in a center of absolute respect and regard for each other's history and what we're committed to doing. Okay, so get curious, listen like hell, respect the person that you're with, then 5 hours feels like 5 minutes.

Yeah, I agree. I do. I appreciate— thank you for that. And, uh, I do the best I can here, you know. But, um, uh, I would say those are probably trainable skills. I think that someone probably might more naturally inclined to have those, but you can train people to do those things. I would agree with that. I think you could do that.

I really do. I really do. And I do. But we've got everybody down worried about like clicks and calls and subject line using AI and Apollo and ZoomInfo. No, no, let's get— we can handle all that with AI. I got it on my Signal side. You've got it with what you do. Now let's get the— learn to be curious. Understand their business. Yeah. Understand— you made a really great comment. Like, am I saving you money? Am I saving you time? Am I saving you resources over time?

You add— it takes time. It's not going to happen immediately. Warren Zenna. And you have to agree to that. I think that's another thing too, is people want things too quickly today. They do. They want everything to happen right away. And then, you know, the best things take time. Unfortunately, um, the things that last anyway take time. But, um, you know, it's a— we're in a fast world. Everybody wants things immediately because you can get everything immediately. I can make a call right now and I have pizza at my door in 20 minutes, you know. So, you know, yeah, we, we really have a weird way of measuring time. Has become a thing we measure differently, you know. I was just thinking about this. I was watching a movie with my, my kid. It was like showing New York City in the '90s. I grew up, you know, in New York City in the '90s. Yeah. And, you know, like, you know, you didn't— you couldn't— you couldn't call someone right away. You couldn't text somebody right away. You had to wait for them to get back to you. You might call them and their phone might actually be busy. Like, imagine, it's busy a lot. Busy signals. I mean, you know what I'm talking about. And I mean, this is something that, like, you know, is our relationship with time has been completely altered in a way that's not good. And so, you know, the speed with which we want to get things done has created a false expectation about what's possible, and we've created false realities about what success looks like. If it happens really quickly, well, that was more successful than something really good that took a long time. And I think that's— we're up against all this, and salespeople are really up against all this. So I just—

I want to jump on that with you, Dave, because you talked about defining satisfaction. Uh-huh. Right? And so when we define satisfaction with our buyer or our colleague or our SME or whoever, when we define it, it's over time. Right? Where we got distorted was when we started measuring a click. Okay, a click is a nanosecond. Or a like. Distortion came, right? Or an open or a cursor over. This is where we got distorted. Again, I'm going back to we're measuring the wrong thing. So if we're going to measure satisfaction, satisfaction is built over time. Trust is built over time. Respect is built over time. Solving complex most business problems is built over time. So again, when you measure the wrong thing, then you just don't see, you just don't see the opportunity. Yep. Just don't, right? And I'm working with you and others, and I love what you're doing with your clients, right? On what is it to be CRO ready? Okay. What is it to be CRO ready? You start to measure what really matters to growth. You change the operating environment of your company to a growth operating environment, and that is not nanoseconds.

No, it does take time. Time is in fact the enemy of everything we do. Is what it is that a new CRO needs to do if they want to do it in a way that's going to really make the impact that they're hired to do, is going to take them longer than the company really wants to spend. And so what ends up happening is the CRO is battled between solving really many times important short-term goals, which are much more like— there's a lot more dopamine in solving short-term goals than long-term goals, you know. Um, because that's sort of like immediacy. It fills you, you know, with kind of like in charge and stuff. And I can run back and go, look what we did today, you know. As opposed to like, are we still waiting for this? When's it going to happen? That's a much less dopamine-driven sort of a context. But yet those are the things that tend to make the biggest impact. And the CRO is up against this from day one. And so what they do is they get these roles where they're asked to do monumentally important things, which is like the proverbial, like turning a Titanic around. It's a very difficult thing to do. And it gets halfway turned around. It's like, well, it didn't go all the way around, but we're in a different direction. So this is good. You'll say, yeah, but it's not all the way. So we're sort of like not really there yet. Yeah, but that's fine, continue. And the CRO knows that that moment is where they're going to be held accountable for that ship not being turned around, even though they were told not to turn around anymore. And that is a very difficult place to be in, in this job. There is a way to do it. However, if you don't know how or what, you're in a no-win situation. So I wanted to make sure that we close this in a way that's really compelling and gives you an opportunity to, like, talk a bit closely more, if you don't mind, just about what specifically you're doing, how can people work with you, what is it that you're operating right now, and who you're trying to talk to.

Yeah, fantastic. So thank you for that. So I created Sales Sleuth. So salesleuth.com. Yep. Is save salespeople time. I want to do all the homework for them all the time so they can create the relationships, so they can focus on the satisfaction measures. So they can invest their time properly. And, you know, we make a difference. We change the value in your pipeline. We focus on people who are buying. We align your internal team. We show you the tech structure and if you're going to fit or not fit. We take the guessing out of this. And that's what tech is really good at. It is good at reading all that data. And scoring all that data. And then I want to work with people like you and others to get the measurements back where they need to be. Measurements of satisfaction over time. To your CRO that's, you know, halfway through and then we fire them. What's the cost of firing multiple CROs over time? Let's start measuring what really matters to the growth of the business. We give CROs like 90 days, 120 days. Okay, you're on your fourth. You've missed quota 9 years in a row. What's the cost of that? So I want to work with you and others. Let's get the right measurement system in place. And let's cause those creations, those connections over time.

Well, you know how I feel. I'm with you. So. So, salesleuth.com and MK Marsden, as usual, thank you. I love talking with you. We can talk for 6 hours and I look forward to the next one. Likewise.

Appreciate you so much, Warren. Thank you. You too.

See you soon.

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 thecrocollective.com. That's thecrocollective.com. And we look forward to having you join us next time.