Humanizing Your Revenue Strategy, With Steve Travaglini

The CRO Spotlight Podcast, powered by the Sales IQ Network. Hi and welcome to the CRO Spotlight Podcast. I'm Warren Zenna from the CRO Collective and I'm here with my co host, Lupe Feld. Hey, Lupe.

Hey, Warren. This is Lupe Feld and I'm glad to be here with you.

So this podcast is really for aspiring CROs and CEOs and current CROs whom are interested in learning from not only us, but the great guests that we're going to have.

We're here to tell you that there is other areas of the business that can drive revenue and we're going to look and inspect and come up with some great ideas for us to bring in as much revenue as we can and drive some meaningful change for the business.

So tune in, we have some exciting opportunities coming up for really amazing conversations and any B2B leaders. I think you're really going to enjoy it. So thanks for tuning in and we look forward to seeing you. Okay. And welcome to the CRO Spotlight Podcast. Hi, Lupe.

Hi, Warren. Great to see you.

You too. How you doing?

I'm doing great. I'm really excited. It's getting to be really fun to speak to all of these CRO experts. So I can't wait to learn and uncover some great tips and experience from our guest today.

Yeah, me too. So, without further ado, I want to introduce our guest today, Steve Travellini. Steve is the Chief Revenue Officer at Link Squares, which is a contract management SaaS startup in Bost. Steve joined the company at 10 employees in 2018 and since then has driven the go to market strategy to grow the company to 250 employees and over 160 million in funding. And he lives north of Boston with his wife Julia, daughter Gemma, dog Obi, and is expecting his first son in two weeks. So welcome Steve. It's really great to have you. Thanks so much for being on the show.

Thank you, Oren. I'm excited to be here. This is great.

Yeah, good. So I was telling Lupe the reason why I wanted to be on was Lupe. So Steve and I spoke. As you know, I'm just reaching out to a lot of CROs and Steve was nice enough to get back to me in the conversation. Steve, I was struck by the depth of your operational expertise. You really got into the weeds with a lot of the ways that you go to market and all the different aspects of the functional components. Lupi and I, as she knows, we've been talking a lot to leaders whom and the focus has a Lot been on leadership, which is clearly critically important. Not to say that it's not part of your wheelhouse as well. We don't really get in the weeds a lot, Lupe, with operationalizing the role. It's a complicated role, and I thought this would be a great episode to get into that.

Absolutely. The leadership component and the strategic component, those two are table stakes. It's how you execute what you have developed or strategized, that is, you know, the make it or break it type of situation. So I'm really excited to hear what you have to say. Yeah.

So, Steve, if you don't mind, I'd love to just give us a background on your career, because I think for a lot of our listeners, they're really also fascinated to know how does somebody become a Chief Revenue officer? What's their journey to becoming in the role? And then, you know, a little bit of an aspect of how you approach the role and like how you ended up from wherever you started into the position that you currently have right now.

Yeah, absolutely. Happy to talk through it. So. So I agree. I totally agree with Lupe. I think it is table stakes, right? Leadership and the operational components, the strategy, the follow through, the execution. Ultimately, I think the job of a CRO, in many ways is similar to the job of an account executive or a bdr.

Right.

Your job is to drive predictable outcomes for a business at an individual level, but at a team level. So a bit about my background. I started off in staffing. Started off as a recruiter. Um, I was calling, you know, night shift machinists for temporary jobs, you know, making, you know, $20 an hour or something like that. And it was incredibly difficult. Those are my BDR days, for sure. I still think that staffing and human resources is probably one of the harder sells I've ever done. It's the only product where you could find a buyer that wants to buy what you have, AKA a human being, for a job and that product. That's challenging. But I then transitioned into the account side of the staffing world, finding the hiring managers and the businesses that needed to fill the roles. More of your classic account executive type of position. I was fortunate enough to take on an entrepreneurial seat for a business that I was working for, doing regional expansion. I get to put a business plan together, go after a brand new territory, build it up to a, you know, a point where I could hire folks on my team, do the whole brick and mortar thing. It was. It was really fulfilling. And then I was looking for what was next. And that's where I started to look at different industries. Did some soul searching, whether or not I wanted to work in ad sales for like the New England Patriots or something like that, something in line with a personal hobby or interest, or if I wanted to do more of the things that I really loved about the business world, which was, you know, more of entrepreneurial ventures. So I got into tech, obviously fast growing industry and the rest has been history from there.

So tell me about the actual Chief Revenue Officer role and how that came about. What was the pathway from wherever you were at to get this opportunity to become a CRO, which is, you know, it's a relatively, a relatively new position.

Right.

I mean, CROs have been around for maybe 10 years. What was that like? How did that happen and how did you approach it?

Yeah, so I went from account executive to CRO in eight years. So I don't know the world where CROs weren't necessarily present. I'm still green. But the story that I have is one that I was looking for. I was looking for folks that had moved up quickly in their careers, got ahead fast, you know, folks that were able to take on challenges long before they were ready. And as I was picking the leadership that I wanted to work with, that was, you know, kind of a criteria. I wanted to work with somebody who had seen the growth that I was looking to see and the type of timeframe that I was looking to see it in. And I think that's really important when you're selecting any type of position in your career. How is it going to fit into the overall design of where you want to go? And are the people that you're going to be spending time with on a day to day basis able to teach you the things that you're hoping to learn?

Right.

So when I was making that change from staffing to tech, I was looking for that leadership and that opportunity. Ultimately that's what I found. And I was able to, you know, do the account executive role, do it well, then learn the team lead and the sales management roles and then get into a director position, eventually VP of Sales. A few different companies along the way to where, you know, I landed in a VP of sales role that became a CRO role and it became that through, you know, my ability to deliver and drive those predictable outcomes I had mentioned earlier. So wasn't necessarily something I was searching for. I wasn't looking for that as a title, but I was looking to continue to grow with the companies that I was serving.

You know, that sounds really Interesting. And I think, you know, what I'm hearing underneath what you just said is the growth was kind of your objective, and to reach that, you took a lot of risks. I mean, obviously, changing industries is always fun. I think, you know, Warren, we've done that quite a few times. But it's also important, and I think you hit on something that's really key is as you move to find people that have done what you want to do and kind of, you know, link up with that type of a leader, they can deliver some growth and some learning. So that's really interesting.

Yeah, absolutely. I wish I could say in hindsight that it was all part of a master plan, but there's a ton of luck involved.

Right.

I think that that's an important thing to call out. It's hard to pick the exact right business. It's hard to pick the exact right leader. But if you keep in mind what your ultimate vision is and you're loose on the path, that will get you there and you stay, you know, in some way, in your mind, flexible in the approach, I think that's. That's kind of a winning formula that even if you have a couple of bad beats or if you're not where you want to be right now, today, if you have that vision still in your mind, there's always an opportunity that you're going to find.

I agree. It's really organic. I mean, I certainly could probably weave together a tale that makes it look like I had this plan and everything was all. Look at how it all fit together, but that's just not true. And I agree it's kind of knowing the kind of things you want to do, listening to your gut, good people, that's so key. I mean, clearly, I think anyone who's at all at our point in our careers can look back and say people were probably the key to most of our successes. Right? The people that we met, the people we work with, the people who mentored us or hired us or supported us, the teams that we work with. So to that end, I'd like to hear a little bit more, Steve, your perspective on what do you think the difference is between a VP of Sales and a CRO?

It's a great question. I think it's a balance of business objectives. It's broader than the VP of Sales role. And I think for a very good reason, I think as a CRO, you need to understand the implications of all decisions. Right. So doing something that's great for the new business teams might have a downside for you know, the customer success post sale teams and I think the fact that you're actually tied at a compensation level to the success of the full business, the health of the revenue, the health of the customer base and their outcomes allows you to be someone that can offer a more of an, an unbiased and balanced perspective in really difficult situations where if you were just wearing the new business hat or if you were just wearing the customer success hat, for example, you might have a stronger opinion tied to those specific metrics that you're responsible for. So I think it's broader responsibility, broader strategy, but it's a broader balance for a business.

That's interesting you said something. I didn't think about that idea of being unbiased because when you run one of these silos, naturally you're going to be biased against their success because that's your baby, so to speak. Right. That's the world you live in. And you're going to protect your team and your turf and maybe even your outcomes where in the role of a CRO, you have to remove that bias. Even if you come out of sales, you sort of have to put your sales like loyalty aside and put into account the ways that sales impacts other things. How do you do that? Like what are some more functional ways that you organize a revenue operation to accommodate those types of alignments?

Yeah. So personally I try to remember why I'm here. I'm here to serve of the business. They brought me in at 10 employees to help drive as much enterprise value as it could possibly create in any given time horizon along the path. There have been several leading up to the series A, the Series B, the series C that we just completed and whatever comes next. And we have big goals in order to do that, you need to drive certain metrics.

Right?

Growth is one of them, net retention is another. And I like to look at it through that lens. You know, we're playing a game together where everyone's trying to do the right things to win, but we have to make sure that winning meets the definition of our investors and of the market, not just of any given department.

Right.

So there are certain areas where we've done incredibly well in the past and at times you have to pull back a little bit to make sure that the other metric can catch up and balance things out. Because you want to have a really, you know, healthy revenue picture that you can show the world. And that really is the report card of a CRO. Show me what is your GPA across all of these different key areas of the business. And if you're failing in any one given area, you know, over a period of time, to me, that shows unbalanced or that you're not able to, you know, lock arms with the other department heads across the business and drive strategy. That's going to be necessary in order to get this metric to where you want them to be.

Good stuff. So I love that GPA idea. I never thought about that before. You're looking at, how'd you do in math? How'd you do in English, How'd you do in science? And the idea is to try and get an A in every subject as opposed to I'm a math whiz. And that's an interesting perspective too. I like it. So I was thinking more because when you and I spoke, you had walked me through a bit. Moving a company from 10 employees to 250, that's a big deal that you're going through four stages of complexity, if I may be so bold as to say, you're going through a lot of areas where the business goes through. Even I don't want to sound kind of weird, but it's prepubescent, then post pubrescent, then young adults, and there's a lot of differences in the way those organizations operate. How do you navigate that? If you don't mind, I'd love to hear more specifics about the ways that you built the organization from your perspective to make it work that way. And what are the kind of ways that you helped operationalize growth and complexity to ensure that that report card was always being hit properly?

It's a great question. It's complex. It starts as a CRO, making sure that you're picking the right, that you have founder fit. That's something that's very popular amongst the VC community. When evaluating a company, they look for founder, a market fit.

Right.

Is this the right founder to lead this new business in this industry? And I think it's not. There's a high enough value placed on picking the right founders as a revenue leader. There should be.

Right.

So that's step one. In the early days, our CEO Fishal and co founder Chris Combs did a wonderful job assembling a team that fit well for them, that fit well together.

Right.

And I've tried to reenact or follow their lead by doing the same thing with my teams for the stage of the company that as we were a series A company, it was a broad group of people that figured out what it meant to be successful at that stage. And a big part of My responsibility as my peers who are running different departments, their responsibility was to find the right people that would help us understand how to go execute on our opportunity at the Series A stage. And then as we evolve the business, a lot of those same people then grow with you to the next stage.

Right.

And they continue to understand what needs to happen next, and they can grow and develop to be the leaders in some cases that you need for that stage, and in other cases, you need to find individuals who have seen that before, who have done that before. And I think that there's been a really nice balance at our business where we've been able to help folks grow, they've helped us grow, and they're still the right people for these challenges because they continue to push the envelope, continue to push themselves, continue to keep thinking differently at each stage. But we've, for, for every person that we've promoted internally, we've also been able to hire some phenomenal people from the outside to help us understand the challenges that we might not be seeing yet, because we haven't necessarily seen them before. So I think the mindset that I take to the table is the mindset that our team took to the table. Just put a great team in place and understand that you're going to need a whole lot of people that know what's right more than you need to know what's right in order to be successful.

That's great. That's. You know, as I, as I think about the stages of the company and the growth of the company, you're absolutely right. There are so many variables that change over time. The priorities change over time. You know, when you're Series A, you're thinking about growth, and when you get to that next level, you're thinking about growth and meaningful retention. And there's other components that come into play. And the same people that got you the growth may not be the same folks that get you to that next stage or the following stage or can even predict what the following challenges are going to be. So I think that's great insight to find the right team to support the stage of the company. I think that's right.

But one thing that I'll add is that there are a lot of people that write about how it's the, you know, the team that got you here won't get you there. And I was on be very particular. There are many who can go there with you. It doesn't mean that you're not going to need more to help them and you get to that next level. But the team that you had oftentimes are the ones that have so much valuable, you know, tribal knowledge and insights and learnings that the partnership with some of the outsiders that come in is really the magic, right? Because you can't bring somebody in that might not have that perspective and get them up to speed as quickly as you can if you partner them with somebody who's just seen all of it. Right? So I think, I think it's always so important to acknowledge the people that helped you get here and really give them the opportunity to succeed at the next level. Which means that you need to acquire at times skill sets from the outside to help the people that you care most about succeeding and continue to succeed with the business.

So how do you grow and develop the original team? How do you keep kind of the skill sharp? And I mean, obviously I think it might start with kind of their personality and their kind of DNA makeup that they want to grow and learn. But how do you support that growth? I mean, obviously bringing in people I think helps, but how do you make sure that you don't leave anybody behind?

I think it's to be as inclusive as you absolutely can be in the planning process so that everybody understands the data and the inputs that are leading to these projected outputs that you are selling the board and the investors on.

Right?

When people feel like they're totally on the same page as to why the different goals matter, whether it's retention of employees, ramp time of employees, things of that nature, everybody is much more excited to go after the problems that we need to solve at the stage that we're at, versus continuing to just do more and more of what we've done before.

Right?

When you can show somebody in a model, explain to them that the model is the data driven explanation of our strategy, why decreasing ramp time from six to five months has an incredible impact. People become incredibly self motivated to then go find the answers that need to be uncovered to drive those results. So I think it's really all about trust and bringing people into the picture. Trusting that when you explain to them why things need to happen, they'll be able to, you know, do what they do and what they've done, which is come up with answers to, to, to problems, sometimes different problems. But, but I think that when I learn most in my career, it's when people aren't giving me a map saying this is exactly what you have to do to get to where you want to be. But more or less, you know, give me a problem and let me figure out how to and I think that that's been the approach that we've taken is given people ownership and given them an accelerated learning curve. And I think that's why people sign up for these fast growth, venture backed businesses that need to double and triple and things like that year over year. They want those opportunities and I think that you need to trust them enough to give it to them. That's great.

So it's very much a people first approach you're taking. And I agree. I mean obviously without the right people in place, it doesn't really matter. All the strategy in the world is not going to get done. And I think that's where the leadership part comes in. But I'm curious too as to the kind of structures and systems you set up. So as you integrate marketing and you integrate sales, integrate customer success into one cohesive organization, like you said before, what are some of the ways that you've figured out how to do that? What was your approach to making sure these functions work together seamlessly? Is it technological? Is it operational? Is it process? Is it all the above? I'd love to hear more your thinking on how you look at managing all those different functions together and making sure that there is that unbiased aligned version of, you know, functions within the revenue operation.

Yeah, so, so, so for, for me, my world as CRO is the flavor where I'm an ownership of sales and customer success and I partner with our CMO and I think that that's phenomenal. Works incredibly well. They're incredibly complex functions. Our relationship as CMO to CRO is also one of trust.

Right?

It's one of respect. It's one where we know that the other person is working incredibly hard and we try our best to drive alignment amongst our organizations. But most importantly, the cmo, cfo, cto, all these different people, they're on my team as a cross functional leadership team of executives. We are one team and we try and drive the same type of philosophy and beliefs to all of our leaders. You are one team with the other leaders at your level across the business. Together we push that down through our orgs and, and we try and incentivize folks working directly and solving problems directly with their peers in the different functions across the business. And we're setting goals and we're setting top line objectives, but we're trusting our people to work cross functionally to solve those problems. And then when things get bubbled up where we need to address disagreements or difference of opinion on how to execute, I think that we have that Trust as a team to be like, okay, this is what we're hearing. So let's make some decisions and then help drive it back down. But when it comes to sales and customer success, for me it's about driving again. Alignment of leadership have phenomenal customer success leadership, phenomenal sales leadership and revenue operations leadership. All of them are just one team. It's not individual silos with individual metrics and individual goals. And we try and drive alignment there in every humanly way possible. From the meeting cadence to, you know, quarterly projects that are non revenue related, all the way to comp plans to make sure that people are empowered to make the right decisions that are going to help the business without having to think about, you know, how it's going to impact cash for them per se. So there's a lot of things that we do there to successfully to have folks bring the right solutions up as a team without us having to get involved.

So does that necessarily like play into how you reward and compensate people? So is it more of a scorecard as how you did in these kind of three areas or four areas? I mean I'd like you to kind of dig into that because I think that, I think you might be hitting on something that's often missed. You know, in order to collaborate you have to be able to be measured in a way that makes sense.

Yeah. So, so, so I'll give you one example. I'm responsible ultimately for net retention. I'm also responsible for ARR. Net new revenue growth, new new logo growth, new customer growth is probably a better way of putting it. When you have sales leadership that is in charge of new business growth as their exclusive way of being compensated and you have customer success in our world, they handle all upsell expansion, cross sell, all of that good stuff. Our new business teams do not grow accounts after the sale. We find this drives a much higher focus on quality in both areas, high performance in both areas. But when you do that, the typical downside is that you'll have new business teams that will try and cannibalize upsell and, and you'll have customer success kind of grinding against that as they're trying to hit their upsell and net retention goals. So what what we've done is within the first year of a new business deal, it doesn't matter where the upsell lands on the post sales side, we'll still compensate new business sales folks equally on the front end side. Okay, so, so what this does, it actually incentivizes our sales team to get the right deal done. For the customer, which is oftentimes the lower barrier. And they're just as excited to kick it over to customer success to help them hit their goals and grow the account over time. Works out for customer success, works out for sales. It definitely, you know, an example where, where at a comp plan level where you know, actually putting our money where our mouth is and this allows them to bring stuff forward. You know, it's not common if you don't have something like that in place that a sales manager will raise their hand and say, hey, I have an account where I think we're going to be able to get a lot of upsell. We should just get it done at this so that we can grow and help the customer success team hit their quarterly goal if possible.

Right.

They're coming up with those solutions versus leadership higher up above being like, hey, you know, that'd be good to put into our net retention bucket for this quarter. They're coming up with those ideas themselves.

You know, I love that because I think that tends to be a huge gap that I've seen in tech and I've spent a lot of time in tech and it's the acquisition team takes the approach of love them and leave them and the retention team sometimes doesn't even get a proper transition into the customer relationship and they're expected to achieve certain goals without really having had the benefit of that trust and relationship being built. Was the dual compensation a tough sell internally or how did you get that done? Because I think every team out there would love to be in a compensation plan of that nature where everybody wins and it's truly, you know, kind of the representation of the customer journey and making sure you're focusing on the right things at the right times.

Yeah. So a great question. So close relationship with our cfo.

Right.

And what we're trying to do is, you know, get straight A's. So at a number one level, going back to the report card, you know, net retention is one of the most important metrics for any SaaS B2B company to optimize for. It's one of the most significant in driving, you know, valuations and it's one that we do well today, but one that we can certainly improve on as many companies at our stage naturally start to ratchet up net retention as they become a bit more mature. So you can't just have the, you know, open ended, pay everybody everything. Across both organizations. You have to partner with finance, you have to go through the modeling exercises. And what we found as we went through it the appropriate blend of benefit and, you know, risk was to set some caps. So for any new business deal that was, you know, under $50,000 and starting, you know, ARR, for example, that deal would have up to the equal amount of upsell in the first year. For any deal that was over 100k, they would have a max of an additional 100k in upsell credit towards the new business team. Looking at historicals and how things had grown in the past, if we figured we'd get a certain percentage in uptick and we applied general parameters to limit potential exposure, we saw a world where we could have a great impact on net retention while also paying people well without all of a sudden having an A go to a C plus in a different area of the report card. We don't want to have CAC payback, get all out of whack at the expense of net retention, for example. So it was finding that balance with our CFO that kind of made it all make sense. And you have to do that work.

Right?

That's a part of, I think a CRO's responsibility is to dig in with the CFO and make it make sense on paper so that you can make it simple and make it make sense for your teams.

No, absolutely. I think that's exciting and that's great. It's also very timely and very industry conscious as you think about the great resignation and the great reshuffle and everything that we're experiencing now. When your people are challenged and well paid and they work in a collaborative environment, you've ticked a lot of the boxes that are important.

There's so much conversation right now, Steve, I'm having with customers about changing compensation plans and incentives. These old models are just broken. And I don't hear enough people iterating like you are talking right now to try and figure this stuff out creatively. They put together old models, they throw them into the system and then they measure people against it and they let a lot of other things fall to the wayside and then they later on have to go backward and fix things because those incentive plans created issues and problems and breakdowns that they just weren't really willing to do the work to figure this stuff out. So it's really great to hear. It's almost like while you're telling the story, if I may, it's almost like you putting together a little white paper on how to rethink compensation plans. Because what you're saying here is valuable to a lot of people who I think frankly are just Going historical. No one's going to argue with the old compensation model. And I've seen a lot of people get put into the. And I was guilty of this. I'll be honest with you. Even early on, I would go to a friend and say, give me a comp plan that you want to put together for your team and show me how you put it together. I might modify it a little bit, but I sort of would do something that looked like what I think an investor team would be comfortable with as opposed to what's best for the business. And I learned along the way. But I think it's a really valuable insight you're giving here and it's very timely. Very timely.

Yeah, totally. I hear a lot about the great resignation and I've read up on the great resignation in detail and who it's impacting and what populations are most affected, industries, things like that. There's so much to be learned about it. And like any great crisis for many businesses, there are going to be folks that look at it as a big opportunity and folks that will look at it as a big emergency. I think it's a blend of both, especially when your ability to hit your revenue targets and the outcomes that you're responsible for are tied to first and foremost. Every single plan that we've ever built at Lean Squares comes down to people actually executing on it.

Right.

Hitting your hiring plan is so incredibly important and a lot of people today are talking about their inability to find people to hire people and all of that. And I can empathize because it's not easy out there.

How do you do it? What's your approach? How have you solved it?

Yeah, I think you just start with your internal people. I think just like a net retention equation and why it's so important at a revenue level, you got to look at your net retention at a human being level inside of your business. Who's happy, who's not, who's motivated, who's hitting their goals, who isn't. And one of the benefits that I have of being a relatively new and less tenured CRO in the game, having been an account executive all the way to CRO in a short period of time, is that it's very much a reality for me what my teams are facing in their day to day jobs. Not just how difficult it is to sell, not just that, but how difficult it is to buy a home for the first time and things of that nature. What it's like to have a comp plan that just doesn't make sense. Or doesn't reward you for really going above and beyond or where competing internal priorities hard for you to make the right decisions for the business. We're trying to have your equity hat on. So I try and keep all of these things in mind. I think that most of my decisions I put through a framework of would this have motivated me when I was an ae? How about when I was a manager? How about when I was a director? How about when I was a vp? Would this have made it easy for me to partner with customer success? Or would we have been butting heads?

Right.

How would I have felt about this? So there's all different types of things that we're doing that are pretty innovative. And I think the thing that you need to look at as a CRO, I mean, it's your responsibility to take what should be ideal state and figure out how to make it be operationally realistic for the business. So for me, I want to have reps every single quarter, being incredibly motivated to come in, hit their goals, work super hard, do this job that is so challenging because they know that at the end of the day, like they might be able to go from $0 in their savings account to having a $75,000 commission payout. And that's what we want.

Right?

So, so how can you do that? Like, how can you possibly pay somebody that much? Well, you know, that's the ideal stage. Then you work it backwards. What we've done is we've set up a tiered commission structure. So on your first 25% of quota, you get paid a certain amount smaller percentage. On your next 25, you get a higher percentage. On your next 25% of achievement, you get even higher percentage. And then by the time you get to 100% of quota, you're at full ote pair for the quarter. Then what we do is pay people 26% on every single dollar that they hit above quota. So for folks that are underperforming, they're incredibly motivated by the people that are overachieving. And we make the numbers work by paying the people that are overachieving with the people that are underachieving. And we create this cycle of motivation and inspiration because everybody that we hire can do it. And the management team is incredibly motivated to get everybody there. So anyways, again, you've created this best in class comp plan. But how? Well, you had to get creative and you had to do the work and you had to partner with finance and you had to come up with some out of the box ideas and say well, what if we did it this way?

Right.

And I think that that's a responsibility that everybody has, is to kind of push things forward that way.

Yeah. And that's. It sounds easier than it probably was. Or you're making it sound easier than it probably was because in my experience, you know, CFOs play with one color. They don't use the full box of crayons. And that sometimes is a challenge. So that speaks highly to your sales ability at a very senior level. That is compelling enough because you're talking about the good of the business and the value proposition of the comp plan of the benefits. So kudos to you. And I agree with Warren. You could definitely do good for the world by writing a white paper as to the process and breaking down into steps. This is a problem, and it's a systemic problem that every business at every stage faces. It's the, you know, the. I think it's difficult for a lot of businesses, even established businesses, to really make peace with the fact that some of your top performers are going to make more than some of the senior executives. And I think when you're okay with that as a senior executive, then your business will be successful. When you resent that as a senior executive and you put obstacles in place to prevent that, then you're going to see your sales team shuffle and move and go different places and quite frankly, leave money at the table. Because you know what? It's not worth sticking around another month to get that quarter payout. And so I think you're onto something here. And I'm really excited to.

I want my team to be able to leave whenever they want. So having an annualized accelerator to try and keep people who are unhappy in the seat until December is a horrible business strategy.

Agree.

It's a horrible strategy. So we just do it every single quarter and it resets every single quarter. So you have to keep showing up every single quarter and working hard every single quarter. And we'll keep giving you the opportunity every single quarter to go and have these amazing outcomes.

It's funny, I had this one client say to me, who's his senior executive? And he said, I have this one senior level salesperson who's making more money than me. He's making too much money. And I said, the question is, is he earning that money? And he was like, yeah, he is. I was like, so what's the problem? The problem sounds like it's you. It's not like he's finding dollars lying around. He's earning it. So this is really great. This is a very timely topic. I want to kind of focus in on one other thing before we sign off and that is you mentioned you have a cmo.

Yeah.

And I'm really fascinated to hear the relationship between marketing and sales in your organization because this is another complex issue that's happening now. The whole how does marketing contribute to sales? How is that measured? The death of the MQL and all that other stuff that I'm hearing and moving more towards a demand gen based marketing approach as opposed to a lead gen based marketing approach. And I'm curious how you balance that metric between the outcomes that each one of those organizations produces and what systems you set in place for measurement and metrics for success.

Yeah, it's a great question. So I think it kind of actually relates back to the executive who has a problem with someone making more money than them. I think that there's a population of people that need all the power, they need all the control. And then there's a population of people that realize it's probably actually better when you don't have it all and you have more partnership and you have someone with a full tank of gas, their own operational resources that they can deploy on a day to day basis. And what I had in our CMO is a partner in more ways than one and together we're able to cover more ground than either would. And she would be fully capable of doing what I'm doing. And I'd like to think I would have some capability of helping to lead that organization, but I don't have that interest today. It's not my interest. I don't see it as a necessity for us to be successful. I don't think that you need to own everything in order to drive a unified strategy. I think you actually get a better diversity of ideas and differing of opinions and, and you know, sometimes I debate with myself in my own mind about what's the right decision. But I would rather debate with her because she was a salesperson at one point. She was at HubSpot in the early days in sales. She grew through their product marketing teams. She has an MBA from Sloan at mit. She's brilliant. We're incredibly complimentary.

Right.

So what do we do? We think about the same things. We think about the report card, we think about the growth rates that we're trying to, to influence. Think about net retention. She thinks about the big picture. She just think about new business and mql. That's, that's, that's small ball, right? We're thinking about how do we build an amazing brand, how do we actually make our customers who are already with us happy? How do we help them understand what's going on with the product and how do we take like an industry leading stance on different things? How do we differentiate ourselves? And of course she has the metrics to a table. Of course she has all of, all of that going on and she's doing a phenomenal job with an emphasis on, on product marketing and creating content that our actual buyers want to consume related to our product, but also not to build, you know, strengthen the mind of our, of our customer base. She has an incredible video team, like very, very forward leaning. Like we have super bowl commercial grade videos at Link Squares that just the entire image of the company in everybody's eyes. So. So I think for us it's more about thinking about building a world class brand and not making it so much about just roi, roi, everything all the time. Although we do have the metrics to address those conversational, you know, pieces for anyone that's interested, but that's just not where our focus is.

So it sounds like without saying it, your CMO partner checks their ego at the door. And you do that as well. Because I think that sometimes is difficult when you're in a particular lane and you're an expert in your field to be open to the fact that that person could step into your role, you could step into their role and function in the role. And so I think that's, that's another key little secret ingredient in your, in your success here.

Yeah, I had a mentor tell me that you can have ego or money, you can have pride or success, but you can't have both. And, and, and one of my only mantras with my team, with my direct reports, is that I have no interest in being right. I only care about doing what works right. And I think that I authentically believe that in order to continue to grow with the company and all of these different stages that are very, very different, you have to have a total clean slate on how you're going to solve problems and it's other people that are typically going to have the ideas right. And, and then you have to make them a reality and all that type of stuff.

So.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. There's one other thing that I wanted to talk about, you know, before we get off the great resignation piece. And now we're coming up on time and it's parental leave. Okay. I want every CRO to hear this and every aspiring CRO to hear this. Why at these tech companies that have incredibly generous parental leave, by the way, sometimes just maternity leave. I think it should be parental leave for everybody. But why is it that when an engineer who's making $150,000 a year, $200,000 a year, goes on parental leave for however long of a period of time that they make their full salary, but when an account executive or somebody inside of a revenue organization takes parental leave, they get 50% of their OTE? How does that make any sense?

I get it.

It's a problem.

Why do you. I'm just curious. I mean, I think I know the answer and that I'm sure that companies probably value their engineers so much they'll give them whatever they want to keep them around. But I understand exactly your question. It points to an imbalance in the way you create a perception around the way you value everybody in the company.

Absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely. So for me, when I ask people that question, sometimes someone said, well, because they're not closing deals when they're on leave. And my response to them is, are the engineers shipping code?

Exactly.

And this isn't about sales versus engineering, it's about. Your point exactly, Warren. It's about treating people equally, with respect, inside of a business. Sales folks, revenue folks, customer success folks, they shouldn't be treated as second class citizens to the folks that are contributing to the IP of the business. These are the folks that are bringing your customers and taking care of them. I mean, in my eyes those things are equally as important. So one thing that we did at Link Squares was figure out how to pay people again. You have to go back to the malls, make it work with finance. But you had to have a clean slate. And everyone should be kind of thinking about this. In my opinion, how are you going to make sure that your people are made whole while they're out during an incredibly important time of their lives? And then how are you going to make it so they want to come back?

Right?

So at Link Squares, what we'll do is we'll take your 12 month trailing quota attainment and will pay you up to 100% of OTE. So if you're a rock star that's making 150% OTE, you're at least going to be getting 100 when you're on leave. And when you come back, we have 14 weeks for however long you're taking on your leave. If you take the full 14 weeks, we're going to drop your quota. It's a comp plan by 50%. So if you're at 50% of quota. As you rebuild your pipeline, we're going to pay you as if you're at 100% upon your return.

Right.

So that's one other thing that I'm proud of that we've done that's a little bit outside the box as it relates to compensation. I think it's really important and more people need to look into it.

I agree.

I think it's not just, and I understand the focus for you was on the parental leave, but it's a bigger picture about how do your policies create perceptions of value across your organization. So you're really thinking more about the way that you set forth new either comp plans or whatever policies and thinking about the implications of how they're perceived and that they're being met across every function, every person. Because I agree. I've been in so many companies where I see really strange decisions being made that seem to favor certain groups or certain functions differently. And it sends the worst message. So that's really great. You guys really seem to be very thoughtful organization. It's really, really cool to hear.

Yeah, thanks.

I think often organizations forget that compensation plans are designed to pay humans. And when a human takes a leave for whatever reason, they should be treated like another segment of the business. And I've worked for organizations that do exactly what you do. The one missing component was the benefit when you return. Because when you're in sales, you're leaving. Whatever period of time you left, you haven't been cold calling, filling your funnel and doing all of that work. So like hitting the ground running is going to be tough after taking time off. And if you feel like you can't get there, that's going to have a spillover effect and motivation and in your engagement and other things. So, and I've been for, you know, with organizations that didn't even consider that, you know, you took time, that's your problem. And quite frankly, those are the folks that are probably right now, during the great resignation, the big quit, the big reshuffle, whatever you want to call it, are hurting the most because people have options and choices and looking at companies and understanding how you're going to get paid. I think that's another thing that a lot of companies are not transparent on the compensation. It's almost like you're asked to make this incredible decision about where to go and then once you join, we'll show you how you're going to get paid. That's like the one like, you know, you must be a member before you can see it.

Yeah.

I think that's a huge mistake.

I put it all on LinkedIn. I want everyone to see it. There's no negotiation on salaries per title. Everybody gets paid the exact same amount at every single title in the revenue Org for the title that they're at. People that have larger titles oftentimes always have larger goals and they scale. So anyways, I could go on and on and on, but I totally agree with you. I think what people are looking for is transparent. They're looking to be treated with respect. And I wish I came up with the whole leave thing on my own. I actually learned from a failure. I was trying to recruit a local account executive who I just think is phenomenally talented. Wanted her on my team really bad. And she told me about how she was thinking about getting into sales enablement because of how backwards leave plans look. And she's trying to, you know, plan to build a family. And to think that someone that talented would leave sales because we're not doing a good enough job to put these types of plans together was like a total heartbreaker for, for me as a fan of the craft. So that, that was inspiration. You know, this isn't something that I just came up with. I was, what would you think the best plan would look like?

Right.

And well, okay, great. That's a good place to start. But anyways, I know we're getting long here.

This is great. I want to ask you three questions before you leave. So the three questions are, if you're speaking to a aspiring CRO, if you're speaking to a existing CRO, and you're speaking to a CEO who's going to hire a CRO? What are the top things you'd say to each one of those people as they think about either pursuing the role, succeeding in the role, or hiring for the role? It can be succinct. What are the top, most important things you'd want to say to those three people within that value chain?

For the aspiring CROs, I would say to align yourself with a leader who's done the things that you want to do and if you can go earlier stage, that you can get more face time with them and that will help accelerate your path. I think that when I talk to account executives, there are two pockets in your career as it relates to the CRO journey, and they can start at any time, at any age. It's when you're learning how to do the job and then when it's your job to do it right. So know exactly where you're at. And if you're learning how to do the job, prioritize the proximity to the teaching would be my advice to the current CROs. You know, think outside the box. Create the ideal state that you wanted when you were an account executive or you were a BDR coming up, don't forget about that person. That person's why we succeed. And then to the CEOs hire for fit. Hire for the person that can do your sale.

Right.

If you're in a Mid Market B2B SaaS sale and you're going to do an inside sales model, hire for that. Don't hire the Salesforce or Oracle person. You know, if you're doing that type of sale, hire that person. Absolutely go after them. But hire hire appropriate to your style of sale. It's going to help you a lot. And then I would say absolutely hire for the personality that you think you'll be able to work with on a day to day basis. And I think that that's a big thing that a lot of CEOs get wrong. Look at your revenue leader as truly a partner in the business. And if you don't think that the person you're hiring you're going to be able to look at as a peer and as a partner, it's not going to really work out. So keep searching until you find that person that you think is every bit as good of a partner, not necessarily a subordinate. And then that's the type of person that's going to go to war for you because they're going to feel that trust and respect.

Thank you. Those are great answers. So Steve, this is so great. There's so much little gems in here and we're looking forward to slicing this thing up and putting it into production, getting it out there. Lupe, any follow up comments you want to make before we sign off?

Enjoyed the conversation, learned a lot through the process and kudos to you. You're doing everything right. Like the manual to success.

Yeah, the CRO manual. Steve, thank you. This was really awesome. We appreciate your time and hearing from your expertise and I know the audience is going to get a lot of value what you had to say. So thank you again.

Thank you both. I really appreciate it.