How Smarter Buyers are Forcing a Go-To-Market Evolution with Guy Rubin

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. Hi, welcome and see you again. So, as I mentioned before, we're having a CRO roundtable here in Chicago. I'm at the chief offices in Chicago, nicely lent to us by one of my other clients, but Guy Rubin, who is a former guest on the show, is one of the sponsors. Now we'll talk a bit about in what capacity. We thought it'd be a great opportunity to do the first ever live sort of, or let's say studio version of a podcast. So welcome back. Yeah, exactly.

It's very different not having a big screen around you.

It is, it's a different vibe, but it's cool. So. So first of all, congratulations. Why don't you tell everybody like some news since you came last and what's going on?

Yeah. So 10 weeks ago now, my business, EBSTA that I was the CEO of, we sold the business to a company called Fullcast, which is a business based in Utah. And they're going through a process of acquiring businesses in ghost market space and doing a roll up to build the revenue platform for revenue leaders. Gotcha.

So congrats on that. Thank you very much. It's really cool news. So I'm just curious about like, why Fullcast and what was her thinking? A little bit more about some of the insights into what motivated the sale, the purchase.

Well, EPSO was a bootstrap business. We took on some angel money in the early days, but primarily we were bootstrapped. And while we were achieving a lot of traction in this kind of revenue intelligence space, when I look forward through this, you can see that the, this whole ghost market environment is changing so dramatically and we're going to see so much change in the tech and the, and the insights and the data and AI and so on that were in the space that we were going to need a lot of capital to try and compete and to win that space.

Yeah, makes sense. And you have a great offering and what it does is solves A real important problem. But like I know from my business, it doesn't matter. So hard to get the traction early enough to get the gains, you know. So it's great news. I think it's a great partnerships. I happen to know some of the people there, as you know, and I'm familiar with the silicon slopes environment. It's amazing what's going on out there and those are great people. So it's a really, really good partnership. So I'm interested in hearing more about. So you look at this company and it's building essentially like almost like a, like a full service stack of sorts.

For go to market.

Most companies are making more, you know, specific approaches into point solutions. Double down on the point solution. What's the sort of thinking around interview this idea that kind of bringing along a lot of different companies into one.

So if we think about what's happening in go to market and the momentum now that we're seeing, we're living in a world where the cost of building tech is going through the floor, but the cost of going to market is going through the roof. And so we're seeing anyone and everyone is coming up with all sorts of interesting kind of AI tools that are almost amazing and they sound good, but once you start playing with these things, they're not quite ready for market, at least most of them. I agree and I think there's so much choice out there and every day there's something like a dozen new tech or AI products coming in the go to market space. And so it's getting busier and noisier as we go. The challenge that a lot of the customers are having is that they're trying all these disparate tools, but there doesn't seem to be a consistent approach to it. And you get some early adopters that are liking this feature or that product. And I think if you think about the market at the moment, AI is kind of falling into one of three categories. You've got some very, very niche use cases where someone has a very specific challenge they're trying to address and they might use some AI tools to do that and that's really great, but it's not really scalable, it's not for the rest of the business. It's just for a very particular niche. Then as I said before, you've got these tools that are out there that are almost amazing, but once you start stress testing them, it turns out that actually the interactions with the customers aren't quite what you'd expect them to be. There's a Lot of noise. Perhaps it's right 9 out of 10 times and that 1 out of 10 is causing a lot of pain. And then you've got adoption issues. I came across a company the other day, sub 2 million ARR and they've got 150 agents, right? It's like, well, how is that? How are your customers ever going to adopt that? Let's get them adopting one property first. Agree. So you've got all of this noise in the market and. But there's very few people that have actually broken the back of it. And in my opinion, when I look forward as to what's going to happen in go to market and the technology that you need, it's going to be more important than ever that this stuff is joined up. And rather than going into this kind of world of individual point solutions all over the business, which aren't really talking to each other, I think we're going to find ourselves in a place where companies are leaning in on perhaps a single data platform that covers everything and go to market where you've got that data being turned into insights and then you've got agents sitting on top of those insights that are delivering value and helping solve specific use cases. And when you look at the larger organizations, they've got real complex challenges and those things can't be fixed or solved with individual point solutions. And so when we decided to make a decision, when we decided we were going to sell the business, we ended up having conversations with four different companies. But the vision that the leadership team at Forkast had was just so much greater and so much clearer than the others. And as you rightly said, that community in Salt Lake City is just incredible. And the caliber of resources that they've got access to and the vision that they got as to what direction travel this thing's going in really aligned with my thoughts too. And they were already on that journey. The first business that they acquired was forecast themselves and that's a territory planning product. And I didn't realize how complex territories really are.

It really is.

It can be a real challenge. And actually, as we, you know, I'm a data guy. So we started, I started diving into the data and you can see where territories are over resourced. The revenue per salary is too low, and when it's under resourced, the win rates drop because they're not giving each individual opportunity the attention it needs. The challenge businesses have is they're working through territories, through spreadsheets, and getting individual sellers moving from one territory to another. And they've got They've got deals in flight on territory A, but now they're focused on territory B. All of this stuff can get very complex very quickly. So they, that was the first product that they took to market and, and really blown away when I saw that. Then they acquired a business in the, in the commission space, then us, Ebster and Atrium were required and then more recently they've just announced the acquisition of Copy AI. So when you think about how this stuff comes together, there's an amazing narrative there that allows out the enterprise customer to have one consistent experience on the whole go to market motion, effectively building one revenue platform for the revenue leader.

You know, all makes sense. And I could see the wisdom in particular territory management because you need the data to know what's wrong with the territory, but you need a tool to get that data and if they don't have a good one, they're doing it themselves that way. So by having Epstein come at the front end is the perfect way to get that data to give them the insights needed for the next one. It's like everything leads to the next thing.

Exactly.

You really need more data per layer to inform the next layer or else you sort of have a broken system. And I do think the problem you mentioned, aside from I agree that a lot of these tools are coming out too fast, they look good on a demo, they're hard to manage, but then they sort of don't connect to anything and you're left with something. But you can't progress to the next level in the same way. Now I do think that as things mature, that's going to close up and I think the race there is going to be fascinating when you look at all the players in the go to market space. But you certainly can't argue with the wisdom of this decision and how these things link together particularly cool is like how your platform is like the entry point to this whole thing.

Yeah, we call it kind of plan to pay.

Right.

It's all the way through that, that cycle and the, but the, the vision and that we've all seen. There's lots of interesting businesses out there that are trying to sell really interesting tech challenges. And very quickly you can go, that's an interesting problem and it sounds great. You're trying to solve that. Great. But when you get into it, do they really have the caliber of resources to actually execute? Are they really able to scale that business model? And more often than not, the talk doesn't necessarily match the reality very much. And what really hit me when I met with Ryan Westwood, who's the CEO of the group and his leadership team was that clarity was there. They are not going to let anything get in their way and they are very focused on becoming this revenue platform for revenue.

So you mentioned before we had a little chat about how you think that the go to market space is going to look different three years.

Yes.

So what do you think it's going to look like?

Well, as I say, I think we're going to see a lot of consolidation. I don't think there's going to be as many players in the space as we're seeing at the moment. There's a whole host of AI companies out there and everyone seems to be pitching the same point solutions. But I'm not seeing as much value. I'm not seeing people are actually getting the value out of these things. And a lot of that's just down to the maturity of the technology. But also it takes a lot more. You need a combination of data, insights, technology and service or change agents. And when you bring all of that stuff together, special things happen. And we see it, we see it in the data. Introducing consistency and go to market is what this whole motion is all about. If we really are going to achieve efficient growth. It only comes if everybody's seeing off the same issue. Your question. So you know, and most organizations are nowhere near that at the moment. You know, you ask, you ask the vp, sales marketing success what their ICP is, they're going to give you different answers. But actually we don't need them to have an opinion. The data will tell us what ICP looks like, right? An ICP is something that evolves and changes and the more data points you can throw at it, the more clarity you can get. So, for example, maybe the organization is going through a growth phase, maybe they just raise money, maybe they're about to exit the business. So all of these things influence whether they fall into or out of your icp. And so the more information you've got visibility over and giving the right information to the right person at the right time and getting out of their way. You know what AI is very good at is taking away all the admin, but that frankly sellers are never good at in the first place. What AI is really bad at is building really good relationships with customers, building that trust, running a sales function and then actually closing deals. And so that's what our sales people are good at. And I think what the AI will do, the good AI will start facilitating that. And we were in a world two or three years ago how do we get our B players to act more like A players? Now we're in a world where, you know what, if the B players can't step up, let's move them on and let's enable the A players to do 50% more. Okay? And we can do that by, by filling their diary with the right types of meetings and taking away all the burden, all the distractions so that they're able to perform at a high level.

Hey everyone, want to 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 two 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 three and a half, four 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, 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, over next year, over the next, like 2026. I want to share them with you so you can, if you're in, 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, on my website and my, and, and, 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 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 wanted 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 at the events. Yeah, it's interesting to me because I, I don't think, I don't know how far away from we are. I don't know if there's going to be a CRM anymore. Like the idea of us entering data into a sheet and entering stuff into forms and chasing people to do it all the time. We're at a point already where we sort of gummed it up a way that it could be done automatically. There's still a form. Yeah, I think that form is going to go away. I, you know, I don't want to be too like sort of prognosticator here, but I can't imagine why you wouldn't have a data lake of sorts has everything in it and you just inquiry into it and they automatically sort of knows how to look at the data and derive the answer you're looking for. It's we're going to be outcomes driven.

Exactly.

And say, this is what I'm looking for. Help me understand X. And then it'll be able to look at the data, give you back. But I think the key is going to become knowing what questions to ask it. Because you don't ask the right questions a lot of the time. But you and I are in this situation a lot and we see that people just sort of like they're asking the same questions that they're used to asking, but they're not asking the right ones, so you don't get the right answer. So I think the training is gonna, is gonna come in sort of knowing more and being clear about what outcome you're looking to get so that you can get the right information out of it. And I think that's a shift, is a much different shift than hoping that you do stuff long enough, you'll start to figure something out. It's, it's a, it's gonna become a much different flip thing. And I Think companies that have interfaces stuff are going to be sort of not as big anymore? I don't know. I, I, I'm, I'm definitely seeing that. Plus I only almost always talk to my computer now. Yeah, I very rarely type anymore.

Yeah.

So I'm getting better at speaking what I want in ways to these machines and I'm seeing a lot of this. So I'm just curious in your perspective, how long is it going to be before where. I don't know if you know the answer but you know, you're on top of this stuff. How far are we away from the point where we're just sort of really just allowing things to come to us as opposed to a lot of these tools that we have to connect together?

Yeah, for what it's worth, I agree. I don't think CRM is a long term play anymore. Now whether people call what comes next CRM or not is another, is another question. But I think what will happen is we'll all become managers but instead of having human teams, we're going to have teams of athletes that are serving us. But you're absolutely right, we've got to get that data lake correct.

It's got to be right.

It's got to be right. And the data is coming from all sorts of sources and it's not good enough to just solve one specific use case because you don't have enough data to do that. So we need a data lake that covers everything from plan to plan and then we need that data to be interpreted and then we need agents that can use those insights to actually drive the right outcomes for the sellers and ultimately the buyer.

Right.

So yeah, I agree with you and I think, I think the investment, the companies that are not investing right now are the ones that are going to fall behind very quickly.

Yeah, you know, I see this too. So you know, I have clients who live in weird bubbles like you and I, we're in this stuff a lot. I talk about this all the time. So I sort of have this awareness of things and I speak to other people, other industries. They know anything about it. It's almost like they're not aware of it at all. They hear about this stuff, they, but it's all more very superficial things like weird videos they see and talking to stuff, but they don't work with these things on a day to day basis. There's still a much larger audience of people that need to be educated about these things because in the SaaS business, stuff like that, it's table stakes for us. I Think we're deluded into thinking that there's a lot more awareness than there isn't. We're very much part of a bubble of sorts in a way. And I think that that's. It could be. You know, I was saying last night, we had dinner last night, things are moving fast, but they still take a lot longer to happen than we. We think.

I think that's very true. And also, while everything is changing, nothing's changing as well. Right. We still need to be curious as sellers. We still need to run structured processes. We need, still need to help buyers through their buying journey. My, my gut feel is that we're buyers are doing more and more of the buying process without the seller, that's for sure. And we're seeing technology now where that can help build a whole complex business case without ever talking to a seller. Because the case studies are on the website and you answer a few questions and here's your case study and it looks. Or your business case, and it looks beautiful. It's all the pictures within it. And rather than needing sellers, I think what we're going to be leaning into more is kind of the clay model where you've got more solution engineers there to support the buyer rather than sellers there to sell themselves something. Yeah. So I think, I think that's the direction of travel we're going in. We're also seeing in the data that the, the, the partnership motion is, is taking off in a way I've never seen before. If you're not already engaging with getting a mature, a material amount of your revenue now through partners, you're either going to fall behind or you, you're going to need to invest in that.

Sure.

People are leaning into their communities, they're leaning into their networks, they're leaning into references. And, you know, imagine if a buyer could speak to one of your customers before they speak to you. And ultimately the buyer gets to choose who they want to talk to. Do I want to talk to a salesperson? Do I want to talk to a solution engineer? Do I want to talk to an existing customer? Right. And there's going to be ways of breaking down those barriers. Because ultimately sellers at the moment are really just intermediaries. They're trying to facilitate a process, and there's the technologies out there to do that, and the buyers want to go through that process in a more efficient way, then talk to a really expensive seller who maybe doesn't have all the information they want and is giving them an angle that maybe they don't want to hear.

Yep. Seriously, I was buying a car again recently and I haven't really ever bought a car like this before where I have a very specific vehicle I want with specific features and you know, there's price issues and you know, I was getting into that. So I started using ChatGPT and I did all this research and I basically trained it to be sort of like a car buying consultant for me.

Okay, great.

Right. And had his dialogue with it and I was like, all right, so here's the car I want. Or. But actually here's the car I'm thinking about getting.

Yeah.

And here's what I want to do. Let me know if this is the right vehicle for me.

Yeah.

Based. Am I just wrong because I think it's a good looking car or maybe because I'm attracted to it? Like maybe it actually isn't really what I think. But I know this is the point. If I spoke to the car dealer, he would absolutely tell me it was the right car.

Of course he would.

Right. So it basically helped me make choices. It showed me these three models of the same vehicle that had different features and why the one that they were selecting might be a better choice for me based on the things I wanted and the costs. I think the preferences that then it helped me find where that configuration was available.

Okay.

Within my 50 radius or 100 mile radius that they're on the lot right now with the VIN number on them. And then it offered me a script of how I should speak to the dealer when I go into the dealer and the way that I should ask for the car. It was great. And I thought, you know, these guys are screwed because, you know, that's an environment where you're really fighting a bunch of gladiators. And to your point, I'm a far more educated customer now that that business is to change their model dramatically. And I think that that's indicative of the way anyone's selling anything anymore. So a lot smart, even doctors, people come into the doctor's office really smart about things.

Yeah. Okay.

So here's the question that I have is winner, what's that shift going to look like in your view? The way that buyers are going to manage people go to market systems being smarter. Because I mean this is like a whole other shift too is on the other side of it. We're talking about selling things to people, but the buyers now have a whole other advantage. I think that there might be almost an evens out in a weird way we're going to be smart about go to market. They're going to be smart about buying. I think the purchasing decision is going to happen in a much shorter everyone's going to come to the table knowing enough that there's probably what, three things to work out, you know.

Yeah, no, I hear you. I think again, what we're seeing is that people will make their decisions based on their network. So the, the idea that we talked earlier about the fact that cost of going to cost of building tech is going to be four.

Sure, it's easy.

Well, easy, but it's faster.

Thank you so much again for listening to the Zero Spotlight podcast. This podcast is an important plank in the Sierra Collective communication strategy and we're really thrilled to have such great guests on here. So listening and sharing the podcast with other people is really vital because we want to get as many people listening to this great stuff as possible. A couple things to note. If you're a aspiring CRO or a recently hired CRO or even a old salty CRO and you're looking to either become a chief Revenue officer or improve your chops and gain some more insights and improve your competencies as a Chief Revenue officer, we offer the CRO accelerator course. It's five years now. It's the first CRO focused course that was out there. It's a 15 week course that is populated by aspiring chief revenue officers and CROs. We're pretty selective in terms of who can be a member of the CRO Accelerator course. It's people who are probably like more like ready to be a CRO right now. They have number of years under their belt as a revenue leader, whether it be a sales leader or a marketing leader or even rev ops leader. And they either want to move into the C suite or they're CROs that want to just make sure that they 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 about and that 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.

It's a whole lot faster. You can get agents to help you build things and spin things up very very quickly. But the cost of going to market is going to be very, very, very and so building having a brand that people recognize, having a brand that People trust having a brand that people will recommend is what's going to make the difference. And being in those communities, getting back to a place where people are meeting you and they're shaking hands and so on is all very important. But people are going to lean in much, much more to their network and ask for those recommendations. And then, as you say, they're going to go through that buying process more and more on their own or their own advisors. And if they need access to a reference site, they're going to find ways of connecting to your customers. Director. So finding ways of doing that or helping to facilitate that I think is.

Going to be key.

And leaning into those communities, this stuff takes time. But having that go to market motion, through partners, through community, through networks, is going to be transformational, and it's going to be a barrier for the smaller businesses to come into. And which is why I think we're going to see a lot of consolidation and a few key brands are going to accelerate away from the rest of the market.

So let's talk about the leadership. So I'm in a company, I'm a chief Revenue officer. I now have access to all different sorts of new tools, but I'm already embedded into the tools that I'm currently using. And I have all the friction that comes with making decisions on which tools to buy, how do I evaluate them, how do I implement them? Like, where would a CRO, for example, start in terms of determining how to make those changes, when they have to take care of what is on the table right now, but they also have to learn how to innovate or else they'll lose the game to someone else who's innovating. I run into this a lot. My clients tell me all the time, like, what's the right thing for me to do.

So, first of all, it's about working out what is the problem that you're trying to solve. What we see a lot is in larger organizations in particular, you've got a revox team that know what the problems are. And they keep talking to the leadership team about, we've got to solve this, we have these challenges, how are we going to go about it? And the leadership team kind of served it with lip service. Yeah, yeah, we'll get around to that. But we've got to focus on the next quarter skills and we'll come around to that later. So I think Revops has got an amazing role to play. And I think the challenge most organizations have is, though, that rev Ops function isn't as senior as it should be. So Revops really does need a seat at the table alongside, you know, VP sales, VP Marketing, VP Success. We also need a VP of operations and that, that that role is a strategic role. And then really the data and the insights will tell us what they need to prioritize. And so one of the things that we did that really was transformed our business, we have all sorts of insights within our platform. I mean you can't imagine we know everything from, you know, how multi threaded you need to be every single sales cycle, which Personas are giving you better outcomes at certain stages. You know what happens when you spend a certain number of days in a certain stage on the win rates, all of these things and, and many, many more. The challenge we've got is our whole platform is delivered inside Salesforce and the C suite that we sell to, they don't open Salesforce. So what we did is come up with a way of extracting the latest insights and delivering it back to our customers in kind of picture format. And so they're able to digest the problems and the challenges they're facing in a really easy to digest format. And they can see right here are the next three challenges we need to address this quarter. So I sit with the leadership team of our customers every three months and I walk them through this kind of audit, their whole go to market and what it does is it highlights what they need to prioritize and then three months later we can see whether they actually executed on that. Did they actually have an impact? Did they solve that problem? Are people skipping through stages and that's leading to late stage closed loss? Are we not qualifying well enough? And therefore we're losing deals far too late and costing us too much money. And as soon as they start to see that, look, our early adopters, our more innovative sellers are being a lot more consistent the way they're working and we're seeing the outcomes, suddenly the penny drops and now everybody comes on board. Now you've got a desire because ultimately, however much ego the sellers might have, ultimately they just want to earn more money. And when you can show them, look, if you can engage the finance Persona at stage two instead of stage four, we're going to double our win rates. Look at the data and now all of a sudden they want to follow that process. So the beauty of fixing the data is that you can convert it into insights that everyone can understand and get behind. And it's the same with the ICP question we talked about earlier, right? We need everyone singing from the same sheet we need consistency. And then when we got it, we can make small changes that can have a big impact. And so what we're seeing is that by, by unlocking the insights now, we've got access to these data that's still sitting inside us. We've still got huge volume of data in our mailboxes, in our callers, in our CRM and all over the business. But if we can bring that data together and convert it into insights that everyone can get behind, then you've now got the opportunity to introduce consistency across the business, which leads to accelerated process.

So this is fascinating because I do think that the first thing a CRO needs to do is to get under the bottom of all this stuff, which is why it is that I've always been attracted to what you guys are doing, because when I talk to my serial club, the first time they get the role, first thing is you got.

To figure out what's going on.

But the problem is you're never given enough time to figure it out and you don't have a process to do it. So you're kind of in the dark a bit. You're given maybe a month, do something that takes three months with the current tools that people have and not the right questions to ask. So a platform like yours is like the easiest way for a CRO to become really smart about a lot of things pretty quickly. And like you said, being able to present a very compelling report to their board and their CEO very quickly and.

Say, this is what's going on.

And it sort of makes the CRO a hero in a way of being able to someone who kind of came in fresh, provider all sorts of insights, good news and bad news. Right. Mostly not great news, but stuff that needs to be addressed. Right. And I think this is like the opportunity, I think, for the incoming Chief Revenue officer to be able to sort of quickly get themselves situated in a way that they can make intelligent decisions and the foundation of their job. Which the most reasons why I see CROs fails, because they don't do that. They're sitting on top of bad data, and then, you know, six or seven months later, everyone's wondering why this didn't work, because they were never getting the opportunity to solve the real inherent problems, you know, And I do think that this is what's going to create a big shift in the role. I think people in this role are going to be afforded with ability to be successful faster, smarter faster. And the only thing I'm seeing as a barrier and I'm interested in Your perspective on this is just the. Given all the tools you're talking about removing the, the silos that still impact everything. Right. You still got the marketing organization, sales organization. I know you go to work mostly in the sales function, but you and I both know that the marketing organization has a big impact on those things and you probably reveal a lot of those things. Right. That's the shift I see is aside from the CRO being smarter, the organizations now need to embrace that there needs to be one leader in charge of a go to market organization that can manage all this stuff. Because you take all this stuff and you put it into an organization that's broken up into silos. There's. You've got three different opinions about it as opposed to one opinion about it. I think there's two things. It's good data, good insights with the right organization. And the barrier we see is it's hard for people to make that leap. It's very difficult for them.

Yeah. Well, one of the reasons you and I have been working so closely together, one of the takeaways for me from our engagement, we. So we've got this whole platform now that we put into our customers and inevitably there's an implementation process, so we need to get it onboarded and so on. And then, you know, three months later we can get people out their first report and we can show them the whole audit. And what you came to us to say was, look, that's all well and good, but we need the customers to commit to this whole kind of buying of software and implementation and activation and so on before they can start to see the insights. Is there a way we could break that down? And then six months ago, what we came up with was, well, what if we could separate the two? What if buying the licenses was stage two rather than stage one? What if we could just connect to the data sources and deliver back the CRO that kind of snapshot of where they are, what's happened over the last 12 months, so that they could see where the challenges were and then they could go about trying to solve their challenges, whether they had their own tech internally or whether they wanted to implement what we had. But that could be a separated phase. So it's only recently in the last six months where we've had the ability to offer customers the ability to, to effectively connect all their data sources to us. But we don't give them any tech back. All we do is give them that complete audit. And the beauty is it goes back a year and it fixes the data the incomplete, inconsistent data that everybody's got inside Salesforce. The reason, what we hear over and over again is, well, we can't start to affect change because our data's so bad. We can't affect change because we don't know what's actually happened in parts. And so we've built this beautiful engine that can actually go back and fix all the historical data. It deals with the data hygiene it shows by going to source, so mailboxes, calendars, phone systems and CRM. And then without the customer having to commit to buying licenses, we can give them that audit. Now suddenly they've got that X ray vision as to what the problems really are and they can go about trying to fix them. And three months later, when we report, when we present the next quarter's report, we can start to see how good that, how well they're doing at affecting change in those specific areas. And what that does is it gives the CRO the edge and they're able to now understand where they should prioritize and then they can present back to the leadership team, look, here are all the problems that we've got. We're going to prioritize fixing this one this quarter and then three months later, as an independent, we're coming in and showing them how have we done on that, right? And then they can make. And then if they started to have an impact and you can see that it's having an outcome, it's delivering a positive outcome, that's when they can start to double down and invest in whether that's change agents, consultancy services or buying technology to speed up and ramp up the changes that they want to make. But, but rather than starting with the tech and the data or starting with the tech and the platform and the implementation and, you know, three months in before you start to see an impact, we've decided to switch that round. And a lot of that came through our discussions where we just makes so.

Much more sense to be able to do that fast. Everyone's like, quick return, easy way to get in there, give this CRO a win. And I'll tell you the truth, what it really does for the she Revenue officer, aside from the credibility it gives them, because they really need that. They need to be able to show, like, what's the return on investment for you? If you paid a lot of money for you, we searched hard for you, now go make a difference for us. If you can come back in six weeks with a report like this, very quickly, you're super, you're. They're like wow, this was really good. Great.

Thank you.

Like we already see, we could see a difference happening already just from that knowledge, particularly when it's followed by now we can track this particular thing. Zeros need this, they don't have this. And so that's important. I'm curious about something now. It sounds to me, to me, I think probably thinking about this PE would be like just a crazily good place for this. I mean they need this sort of thing so they go to market in that whole area. Their business is sort of still floundered a little bit. What are your thoughts on private equity and how to kind of get them to adopt these sort of things across their portfolios? Because I think it's a, it makes perfect sense to me.

Yeah. So look, we do a lot of work with PE backed businesses and again, they are outperforming the rest of the market at the moment. So the work that PE does with their portfolios is having an impact, but they don't have the visibility that they need. And I think again it was that you reach a moment that we had together when we realized that actually if we swap this around and deliver people the insights before they commit to technology, we can give them, it doesn't even need to take six weeks, we can deliver them within two weeks that complete go to market audit and giving them visibility of content they just couldn't have just by analyzing just the CRM on its own. Because we're connected to all these different data sources across the business, we're giving them that one vision. So when we kind of made that, when we had that Eureka moment and we swapped them around and we started with the insights, what happened very quickly was we saw that we were able to then offer that as a service to PE. And we've now seen, we've now got three different PEs that are engaging with us to produce these reports for their portfolio company. And in fact I thought we might be able to get involved kind of during the acquisition processes that they're doing. We haven't seen that. But, but the day after.

Right.

We bought this asset. They've told us they've got this interesting.

Right now they want to analyze it now they seems to be a perfect due diligence tool. Right.

I thought that. But it turns out that, that more often than not they're in a competitive tender and they want to minimize the amount of asks on the business until they are interesting. But once they own it, the first thing they want to know is how real is it? Right. And, and you can't get that data from one source. It doesn't work just from Salesforce, but if you. If you can connect to Salesforce and these other data sources, we can go back a year and give you that X ray vision as to what's actually going on. And it becomes really easy to identify which problems we want to prioritize and then go.

So it really just accelerates the way they can get that business ramped up. They make the purchase, they evaluate it. Now they know where to go to work, as opposed to waiting six months to figure that out the hard way. Or maybe not figuring it out at all.

Not very. Yeah. Or, or. Or using whatever's available in Salesforce to try and understand what's going on, when in fact Salesforce has only been populated by the sellers themselves. And so it's inconsistent.

So.

Yeah, but they've. It's really been. It's. It's. It feels like we've been pushing against an open door.

Now it makes sense. It's interesting too, because I would imagine that PE has sort of like most of them have their own sort of managerial methodology they put across their teams. Right.

Yeah.

It'd be cool for them. Also, I suspect you're thinking about this is even testing their own management technologies or management processes to see how well those are working so they can modify their own way that they manage not just a company, but the way whether our model works or not. I mean, it could be an interesting way to have some scale across a lot of different businesses and maybe change the way that they go to market themselves. I don't know, but just seems like it's. It's not just the one business, it's all businesses. And how they. There are trends in the way that companies are not making. That's.

Yeah. Well, last year we analyzed over 650,000 opportunities representing, I think, $48 billion of pipeline. And we produce our benchmark report each year, and it seems to be very well received. But what's been interesting, and we're looking at data for 2026 now, is looking at how PE are outperforming the rest of the market. Not necessarily. They haven't solved all the problems. They've still got 60% of their sellers missing quota, but the market's seeing 78% of their sellers missing quota.

Right.

So they are having a positive impact in their approach and their consistent approach and the way that they manage their teams and perhaps the caliber of resources they bring in to actually run their businesses. We are seeing the PE businesses are having Better outcomes than the rest of the market. But there's still a long way to go. We live in a world where sellers are spending three quarters of their time on deals that close lost and we spend twice as long on deals close losses. We deal on deals that close one. And so you find yourself in a world where less than 10% of the sellers day is being spent on, on, on activities that are going to generate revenue. I, I don't know any other industry that's that inefficient. And so the, what that means from our perspective is there's huge opportunity to have a big impact. And we talked earlier about, look, you know, a couple of years ago, we try and bring the beat players up to A player standard. We can now, we can now free up the A players to focus all of their energies and time spending on, on deals that are going to generate revenue. And, and the intelligence is there and the data is there to drive that behavior. And we can now achieve a whole lot more with a whole lot less.

So what's your plan for the next year? How are you taking this to market? What's the kind of people looking to speak to? Who's your customer? You know, how have you identified that? How could you know? Maybe some of the people listening to this get a little more understanding of how you can help them.

Well, Fullcast has a whole suite of technology. As I mentioned earlier, they have everything from territory planning through to commissions. See, we're part of the revenue intelligence piece and then we recently bought Copy AI and I suspect there might be more to come. The piece of the puzzle I'm now focused on is this Revenue Insights as a service and we're now offering that as a standalone solution. So those that are interested in finding out more, get in touch. We can connect with me on LinkedIn and if they mention the podcast, they promise to accept the invite. Fair enough. We can have a conversation, see what happens. Great.

Well, as always, man, it's real exciting. Excited about it. Thank you so much.

Thanks for having me.

Thank you for listening to the CRO Spotlight podcast. The CRO Collective's mission is to help CRO succeed and help founders and CEOs build CRO ready organizations. You can find out more information about our services@the crocollective.com that's the CRO collection and we look forward to having you join us next time.