Leadership Structures & AI at $1B Scale with Steven Birdsall

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, this is Warren Zenna. I'm the CEO and founder of the Zero Collective. And welcome to the Zero Spotlight Podcast. This week I'm really excited to have Stephen Birdsall. He's the CRO of Alteryx and it's a really fascinating business he has. And we had a really interesting conversation about technology and product development, particularly in the way AI can be leveraged, not only in the product side, but in the operation side. And it's also interesting to get insights from him on a company that's complex and a big, huge leadership change. So which. Great conversation. Listen in and enjoy what is going on, what's happening where you are, and what are you working on right now.

Wow. A lot. Okay, great. As any CRO would tell you. So, you know, Alteryx was a public company, went private last year at the beginning of last year, and was largely, you know, run by one of the partners at Insight. Insight Partners.

Okay, got it.

And we were bought by Insight and Clearlake at the beginning of last year. 4.4 billion, which is only 4, 4 and a half x our revenue. So great in terms of that side. And they spent the year doing, you know, the normal things of taking cost out of the business and kind of. Right. Sizing it and get it back to, you know, where we had kind of acceptable margins. And then from there, at the end of December, we hired a new CEO. About four weeks later, I was hired. The CFO started a week later, then our Chief Product Officer, then Chief Marketing Officer, chief, the cto, technology engineering. So we went through a lot in terms of leadership change over the last six months. We've all just started kind of working together. Some of us worked with each other at different companies, but largely the entire C suite was moved out and then brought in new. So that's created a. An incredible opportunity for us to be able to gel together to redefine, you know, our product roadmap, redefine our go to market strategy. Think about, you know, all the things in the go to market that would want, you'd want to change and it was a natural time for us to come in and do that. So that was fantastic. And then it's just, you know, continued to morph from there. AI and our ability to build upon the value of AI both in terms of efficiencies, sales and go to market, efficiencies that come from that, but also just new revenue opportunities. And the way we think about our product portfolio, it expands into that as well. So just a lot of great things that are going on. It's really a transformational journey for the company. But we have 8,500 customers, about 700,000 active users in our community. So you know, like there's, there's a lot of, you know, great opportunity that, that draws from having a good install base, NPS scores in the 60s. So our customers appear to love us, which is great. And with 700,000, you know, community members, not all of those are, are you know, paying customers. A lot of them are just people that are using Alteryx in some other way or they know Alteryx and they're actively talking about best practices and other things that they're doing with each other. So I feel really good about the positive nature of the relationship we have with our customers. The benefits to that obviously on the revenue side in renewals all the way through, the ability to expand using AI building agents. Leveraging Alteryx in our workflows that were built. I think there's about 500 million workflows that were built with automations that are run every year. One customer I know a large airline has 28 million workflows. So plenty of opportunity to continue to kind of leverage the install base and build upon the great assets that we have. So yeah, like lots going on.

Yeah, it's amazing. Great story. So why don't you just give a little background on Alteryx and like your market and who you serve and the product commercialization model, et cetera. Now you're like you're a plus billion dollar company. So this is an interesting conversation because I typically speak to people who are CROs at companies sub 500 million or even sub 150 million, not for by design, just as typically kind of like where I sit a lot. But the issues and stuff you just mentioned about all that complexity is really great stuff to talk about. So I'd love to hear a bit more about your business and all those aspects of it.

Yeah, so Alteryx is, you know, we're about a billion in revenue, 8,500 customers, as I mentioned, 700,000 users on our community, several hundred thousand paid, you know, licensed customers. So it was started 27 years ago in Southern California and the founders had basically a consulting business where they were working on geospatial, you know, engineering, so working with retailers to identify locations of where to, you know, do site selection, things like that, anything regarding taking ESRI data and then transforming it into something that's usable for a specific kind of vertical. So that's where they started. That's Alter YX from a geospatial standpoint. So that's how it started. And what happened was they started building these really cool tools and software that help support the consulting business. And then one of our customers said, wait a minute, what is that? Like I want that. And so that's what started the software business. And then it's just kind of grown and evolved from there. We went from 100 million to a billion pretty quick. I mean it was a pretty fast ride to a billion. And now it's a matter of how do we scale from a billion to 2 billion and then beyond. So there's a lot of that we're introducing as you think about AI, etc. It's changing the dimension and I'll talk about that in a little bit. In the meantime, basically what we do is we can ingest data from any source. Structured, unstructured, semi structured data systems of record. Could be like an SAP ERP system, it could be an Oracle database, could be access or CSV files or whatever. There's all kinds of data that can be brought into our platform. We have very, very easy tools that are easy for a business user to then prepare and blend the data that comes from all those myriad sources. And once it gets there, then there's a very simple drag and drop, you know, capability so you can start building upon those databases to then start building workflows. So if you want to, if you're in the manufacturing process, you're a discrete company, Ford is a customer. So if there's, you know, things like that that you want to go leverage, then it's how do you want to do that? Usually in the office of finance is where it starts and then it expands into supply chain, into hr, into, you know, et cetera. So if you think about these, you know, large automotive companies or banks, 19 of the top 20, you know, global banks use Alteryx. So there's plenty of use cases within the operations team, within finance, but they're the ones that are building all of these workflows around certain things that they're looking to accomplish. The vast majority, you know, there's a very high probability that anybody auditing in the market today is using Alteryx to do that audit. So KPMG, PwC, you know, Accenture, Ernst and Young, you know, big companies on the consulting side as well as, you know, on the audit side. We provide a lot of support through our software for those, you know, thousands and thousands of users that are out there. So we do that as well. But those workflows now what used to happen is it would then transition to a BI tool. It could be a Tableau or a Power BI or whatever, but those, those that would be kind of the way that the information is consumed once you've built out the workflows and then you have automations that are run every day, several times a day, every hour, you know, however often you want it then gets transitioned into a BI tool. And that's the way we kind of operated until I would say about 18 months ago. And now everything is moving more to the agentic layer. So as you start building agents, these workflows become really good vehicles to then transition into a large language model where we become the center of gravity for AI. So one of the biggest problems, or the most intractable problems in the market today is how do I take the data that I want to use for a large language model, but have the appropriate guidance, governance, you know, compliance, access controls, security, pii, the personally identifiable information gdpr, whatever business policies you have that has to be brought into that same kind of workflow and then applied so that when you're taking your large language model, you're bringing it into that same canvas, making it very easy to consume. So rather than pushing it out to a BI tool, it's now consumed in a large language model with the appropriate, you know, we have automated insights and other things that we have that are tools that are built for that. And then we have a product called Live Query for Google Cloud, you know, for BigQuery for example, or Databricks or Snowflake. But we have push down capabilities so that all of that data, you know, retains in the cloud data platform, the store, the compute, et cetera, you still want to keep those workflows instead of it on a local, you know, device or sitting on a server in a hyperscaler, it can also be used in a cloud data platform. So that's kind of the nature of the evolution of what we're doing. AI becomes a very important element of the way we're going to market, working with companies who are building agents, especially with the same capabilities, to push that back down into a cloud data platform. So lots going on, you know, I mean, I can unpack all of that. It's.

Yeah.

But yeah, there's pretty cool.

So I get your business. I understand it's interesting and I totally, I get the problem you're solving, which is organizing complex data and making it usable. Right. And then I'm interested in this AI thing and that's one thing we can talk about. And then I'm really fascinated by this restructuring and like swapping out an entire C suite and putting in a new one. That's really fascinating, particularly as it pertains not just to the general dynamics of leadership change and executive change, but also the Chief Revenue Officer role and how you play in that sandbox. So let's start from the back. I'd like to know. So when we originally spoke, you know, we're very like minded around the role of the Chief officer and your situation is unique because the size of your company and complexity of it. How do you find the role? It's obvious based on though you're, what you're doing there, that the company obviously is clear about what the mandate is from a Chief Revenue officer. Was that something that was inherent when you got there or did it require a little back and forth to figure that out together? Like what was the organization's perspective on the CRO role before you got into the organization?

Well, I think.

Has it changed since you got there?

It, it changed just before I got here, where it used to be that my, my predecessor also had marketing and we felt like rather than having marketing report into the CRO, where I own all of the top line, obviously EBITDA becomes a big part of what I have to deliver as part of that growth. So all the revenue streams, all of the customer success, you know, solution engineering, sales partners, like all of that, you know, fits under the CRO in a very traditional way. But in order to hire what I think is one of the best CMOs in the market, having her report directly to the CEO is a really good thing. We attract kind of a different level of talent and it's somebody that, that our CEO, Andy McMillan has worked with before. So having that relationship is really important as well. So the cmo, you know, Andy worked with, the CFO Andy worked with at User Testing when he was CEO there and took them public. So there's a few people that have worked together. The Chief Product officer, myself, the CTO you know, did not work with Andy. So I like the fact that we've got a good solid mix of people. I've not come into a company where the entire C suite is new like this. So just the fact that, you know, are you going to gel. Do you have the right mindset? You know, how is the culture with everybody? And it's, it's incredible. I don't know how they did it, but we all like, get along so well. It's almost like we've been working together for a decade. And so I love that about it. I think a lot of it has to do with Andy and the way his leadership style is from a CRO. He's a, he's a product guy and very deep into the product, which I love. And, and so my job as a CRO, like he hired me, trust me to go, you know, run the revenue of the company and that makes my life a lot easier as well. Like, neither of us are trying to do each other's job, which is, which is awesome. But I still get to leverage him in customer meetings. I get to leverage him in terms of the product evolution and the way we think about AI. He's very, you know, thoughtful in the way that he lets me introduce as I, I love to, to experiment with different ideas, especially around AI. So as I go out and experiment with things and I shift around the org, he's very, very thoughtful in the approach, challenges me in a very good way, the way I like it. But he's also very supportive in terms of the change that I'm trying to introduce into the team. Being very performance based is that's in my DNA. Having come from SAP and Oracle and taking Anaplan public working at Qlik, I like to be very disciplined in the approach, but also very human and very empathetic as well and be more of a servant leader. And I think it's, you got to balance those things out and not just be, you know, a total jerk and kind of force everything down everybody's throat. But really as a servant leader, you want to be out in front, you want to work with the team, you want to understand what challenges they're facing, whether it's systems or processes or just anything that prevents them from getting a deal done quickly. I want to support that with the team. So that's where I think servant leader comes in. But you also have to be very performant because at the end of the day we're all measured every 90 days. So it's important that we kind of take those things to heart. So yeah, a lot, a lot of change in the C suite, but it's been a fantastic experience so far. I mean, it's six months into it, so consider the timing, but as far as I'm concerned, it's like a perfect fit across the board.

Thank you so much again for listening to the Sierra 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 and I can send you more information, give you a brochure. Of course. So again, CRO Accelerator Course. 15 week program for aspiring and newly hired CROs. Take advantage of it. It's been great and you'll see some more information about it on the website.

Thanks, that's awesome.

I love it.

So I, you know, it's interesting. We just, I just saw on a panel just before this call, we were talking about marketing. It's a big topic right now, you know, like what to do with marketing. What does a CRO do with marketing? Yeah, I think in the sort of early stages and again in that, that sweet spot, maybe that growth stage spot between like the 30 to 250 million or maybe even more. I do tend to think, see the C suite, the CRO Role, grab the marketing role as you have in the past for the reasons I think you probably would agree just to maintain that alignment and create more kind of ubiquity across those things. I think marketing sometimes can be a bit of a wild card. And nothing against marketing. I love marketing, actually have a marketing agency, but I just get how it can become. But you're right, you know, you said something really important here which is when you get to the point at which you guys are at, you can attract certain type of talent that may come with a requirement for that, that role and that title and that sort of access to the CEO. And I could see why that would be a bargaining chip and making, making sure that happens. You get someone in there who you know is really excited about the role. And those are some I think later on concessions. But I'm just curious, I mean when you did have marketing, is this more really honestly just. It's kind of an offshoot of conversation I had before. How did you run it? Did, did you have someone who reported into that ran marketing and what was that person's role in the executive leadership team?

Yeah, I mean well again that's. You want to make sure they have a seat at the table and when they report to a CEO it's natural. When they report to a CRO then it. You kind of have to force fed it. So when I've run marketing, especially as the chief operating officer like you have all of the non sales functions are reporting to you. Like when I was at SAP, it's just even so that's a big company, right? 20 plus billion euro at the time. But they've got a chief marketing officer globally and there's you know, at SAP anyway it was. Everything was dual report, a dual direct report. So you know, I reported to two people, the CMO reported to two people like myself plus you know, somebody else. So I think as you, you know, kind of experience those things in different companies. It depends on the situation. Right. For the most part marketing is you know, communication. Marketing. Com Communications. Right. Marcom. You have your kind of field marketing team which is all about pipeline and you know, pipeline generation and programs and you know, those kind of things. You're investing in technology like things like that. You have brand. So you have to, you know, think about your brand. What are you doing to develop, you know, your brand. But there's a brand voice and brand recognition and all these other measures that you want to put in place. And then you have marketing operations which is in many cases where you get spillage Where I can have a business operations team that supports sales, customer success. Marketing partners, like you can have ops as a horizontal function that supports all of the different teams, but they need to be dedicated to that particular function. So I think in those cases, the challenge that a CRO has is mostly what you care about is pipeline. Like, you're just very focused because you're very sales and revenue generating. You're focused on pipeline build and that becomes a kind of center of gravity for you from that standpoint. When the reality is they need to be thinking about marketing operations and brand and marketing communications and all the other parts of it. And I think that gets lost if it's reporting to a CRO, because I don't think you would have as professional as CMO organization as you would if they were reporting into a CEO. They just, you're at a different point of maturity, a different point of scale. And so it's important to kind of know whether or not it makes sense. For me personally, I am, I am anti hierarchy. Like, I really don't care. It reports to me.

Great.

If it doesn't report to me, I don't care. I really don't. Trust me, I will leverage marketing to the hilt regardless of where it reports. Like, it's a really important partnership either. Reporting line. Like, I don't care about reporting lines. I don't care about hierarchy. I don't care how many teams reporting to me. You know, I'm, I'm approaching a thousand people on my team. You know, so I had marketing and now it's like 10, 50 or something. 75. It's. I, I have, I have no vested interest in trying to expand the number of people I have. I just want people to be successful in the role that they're in. And, and so that's why I really don't care about, you know, reporting lines and things like that. I really am, you know, kind of more agnostic that way. I see the benefit of both, you know, so, you know, if it makes more sense to have report to CEO, then great, then it should report to a CEO.

Yeah, I get it and I see your point. I certainly love the idea of just hiring great people and just letting them do their thing. If they're good at what they do and I trust them and they should be able to know how to do it. And there also is that sort of orchestration and coordination that the CRO has to bring to the table to make sure that everyone's on the same page and that they're even within their Own functions and their brilliance are doing things that are consistent with the larger strategy. So how do you do that? How did you build out that consistency so that you give people that level of freedom to do their job, but also keeping clear that everyone's running from the same rhythm?

I think there's a few things. One is, you know, focus in the areas that I know best. So demand generation. So the head of demand generation is a senior vice president. She's awesome. We just hired her from a competitor, which is great, but she's really, really good. So I love the fact that we have the domain knowledge on, very focused on demand gen and pipeline building and aligning with the rest of my team on initiatives that we want to put out an employee. So I think there's goodness there. So partnering with her is a very, very easy thing. Her name is Rin and she's. She's fantastic. So I love the fact that we can partner together, we can kind of work closely together, but on the branding side, like, I don't need to spend my time on branding. Our CMO does a great job at that. So, you know, in the areas of interest for me, communications, you know, thinking about marcom or thinking about demand gen marketing operations, like, I definitely have a vested interest in those things a little bit less when it comes to, you know, branding and brand awareness and things like that. So I like the fact that I just kind of pick my functions that I want to align to more closely and make sure that they're kind of focused on the right things from my perspective. And so it's an easy partnership, you know, to employ. But anyway, yeah, that's. It just. It makes it very easy that way. Again, I think as long as you're kind of not hierarchical and wanting to usurp more of, you know, the other teams, then it doesn't really matter. I want to. I want to be successful. They want to be successful. So I don't care about reporting lines.

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

Gotcha. So you mentioned now that you have productized AI and it sounds like it's become a big part of the way that your product teams are kind of re thinking the way that your products work. Are you operationalizing AI within your own go to market organization and if so, how are you doing it?

Yeah, it's a great question because it's, it's very near and dear to my heart right now of, you know, how do I continue to see growth in the business and continue to see that, you know, going forward while at the same time not growing my OPEX at the same rate? Like ideally, it should be half to a quarter of the rate, ideally about a quarter of the rate of growth in OPEX to your overall growth. You know, as a business, if you're growing at 25%, then you should see, you know, I don't know, 8%, you know, 5% growth on the OPEX side. That requires you to be very efficient. Right. So your sales efficiency metrics become really, really important. I think that there's plenty of ways that you can become more efficient there's just again, in a performing culture, you want to make sure that if people have been here for a couple of years and not successful, then maybe sales is not the right place for them to be. Maybe they can be in more of a biz dev role or they can be in like some other part of the organization. But I think you have to kind of weigh that out. And then I think there's tools that I can introduce. Like I'm introducing a tool now or I'm experimenting with a tool that allows you to basically create a three dimensional GPT in a way where it seems very human, like, but it's not just, you know, it's not just answering questions that are kind of broad in the public ether. It's actually specific to your company data. So as I build out, for example, use case libraries of all the different use cases, thousands and thousands of use cases that are out there and across each of their functional areas, different lines of business or different industries, I want to train on that and I want to train that. I want to bring it into a call. So if I can have my absolute best of the best sales rep or the best SDR or the best SE or the best technical account manager on a call, that can be leveraged immediately. So if a customer asks a question, you get an immediate response because it's trained on all of your corporate data and it feels three dimensional. It feels like another person on the call. You know, with a name you get a ton of value from that. So the more success you start to see in messaging and what's resonating and what's working, or when you have a very technical dialogue, you want to immediately be able to leverage that. And so we're, we're testing, you know, a solution right now that gives us all of that and it works so perfectly with, with Alteryx and building the workflows and like I said, use case things like that. So experimenting with new things around AI that does that. And then the third is our product itself. Like as we think about this, this incredible canvas that we have for business users to build upon these workflows and then be able to leverage AI like a new GPT that comes into that. Our product should be, you know, alteryx Designer is the product designer for Databricks or designer for BigQuery or designer for Snowflake Designer for whatever. So you got to bring those tools or a subset of those tools into your canvas to make it very easy to leverage that in the right, you know, push down into a cloud data platform and like I said, could be bigquery, you know, doing things like that. So those are all really, really important to us as we think about that business user with hundreds of thousands of people that are, you know, active users on our platform, in our community as well as licensed, you know, to work with us, that's a huge advantage for us, a good competitive advantage because it's so easy to do that. You typically don't have a large language model you're just going to put right on top of a cloud data platform. You typically would want a governed set of data so you can manage pii, GDPR and other things, like I said, inside that canvas. So you need AI ready data. AI ready data means it's for an agent, it's for a GPT, whatever it is. But you've got a subset that has gone through the governance model with the appropriate traceability, you know, the access controls, the gdpr, the pii, the, you know, business data for the analyst, all of that needs to be governed in a very structured way. Then you bring in the large language models on top of that and you're still doing the storing compute down into the cloud data platform. So that's the ideal state for us to be in. So we're continuing to build product, you know, that way. So again, AI is transforming every part of our business, whether it's bringing in tools to be more efficient, whether it's leveraging tools to build things that we want to use internally, or whether it's building product that includes AI and the ability to take cloud data platforms and encompass part of what they do. The last thing I would say with that, because again, it's a great question and again, it is near and dear to my heart. Take one use case as an example. Think of an SDR right today they would get an SEO lead that comes in, somebody downloaded, hey, Warren, came in and downloaded a white paper on X, whatever it is that would then just go to an SDR. Now smart SDRs know that in order to do an outreach, you need to personalize the information, right? You need to personalize the message. Sending out a generic message just equals fast delete. So how do I make relevant information for an sdr? Well, typically what they do is they, they look at Warren Zenna, they go out to LinkedIn, they look at your background, they look at your experience, look at the companies you work for, try to find things that are relevant to the message to bring that together. Then they look at the company, right? They're going to go look at your company, they're going to go look at, okay, so what is, what have we done with CRO Collective? What's in the pipeline, what's in Salesforce, what's in Marketo, what's in six Sense? Optimizedly, you know, are they in the forecast? I'm looking at Clary sp, all these different systems. They're going to go out and they're going to look at the information. Then they're going to scrape the web. They're going to go out and look at, you know, is there an annual report? Is it public, company or private? You know, what do I know about what, what's been publicized? So they go sift through all that public information, annual report, 10k, 8q, whatever it is. But they're out looking for that information and then they start to pull all that together and they, you know, industrialize it, personalize it, and then they hit send, right? They're going to go back and check GDPR to make sure they can send something that it's, you know, PII and everything else is taken out. That process could take days, even a couple of weeks sometimes. Like, you got to do your homework to be more effective in your outreach. Now, I can tell you that the moment that somebody downloads a white paper, every minute that goes by, that information becomes stale, that lead becomes stale. So if you takes you a week to go back and, or two weeks to go back and get back in touch with them, you kind of lost their interest. More than likely they forgot why they went in to get it in the first place. If you do it in the first hour, well, now you're actually applying, you know, a better logic. So what did we do? We took and built a workflow to make it very easy for an SDR so that when somebody comes in with an SEO, it automatically goes to all these systems, it goes to all their public information. It goes to, you know, Marketo and Optimizely and 6Sense and ZoomInfo and Sales Loft and Right, Salesforce, etc. It pulls all that together and it customizes through Geni, an email for you to send. So now you're an sdr. You wake up in the morning, you go to Your inbox, there's 15 messages, all personalized, ready to go, right? Somebody came in overnight and they downloaded the information. And now the next morning they're getting an email that's very personalized with all the information that aligns to the their company, them as an individual, the, the focus of the CEO and what their initiatives are. And it's all Personalized and ready to go. Like, to me, we call it our, our rev IQ. But to me, that, that's adding significant value, making SDRs more productive, giving them the ability to, you know, get constructive immediately with a customer or a prospect. And like, those are things that, that are making the difference. Like that's, that's how you drive AI into an organization. Again, we get to leverage Alteryx, which is great. But regardless, there's plenty of our customers that can go use AI, use Alteryx to go do that on their own. And I'll tell you a funny story. I was talking to one of the revenue leaders at another big software company that uses Alteryx, and I was telling him about this use case and he goes, that's incredible. He goes, our team actually just built that. And I'm like, really? Like, I thought the. We were unique. I thought this was something special. And so I'm like, I gotta go, you know, find out. So I waited for a little while and I went back to him and I said, I really want to learn how you guys, you know, did this. Well, come to find out, they actually used Alteryx to do it. They did the exact same thing we did. So it was like, awesome. Like, it was really cool to see that, that, you know, like, we're not, we're not going to be the only bastion of good ideas. But it's great to see customers that are leveraging, you know, AI and Alteryx in the same way. So it's great example.

Very cool.

Yeah, I mean, I'm big on it and doing a lot, a lot more work now and working with CROs to become more AI ready. You know, when they get into the organizations, they come in with an AI strategy and they know how to kind of operationalize these tools because a lot of it, as, you know, some of it makes some promises you can't keep. You really have to play around with things. So it's always good to get feedback from people where it's working in the operation so that you can replicate that stuff. And I think I've. I heard similar stories to the one you're talking about.

So I'm curious.

You mentioned things like, you know, SDRs and your sales organization, et cetera. What role, like when you're out doing plays in your organization and trying to go get new customers, what role does the relationship with the buyer, the actual relationship with the buyer play is that, I mean, are you able to circum. Circumvent, you know, instances where you don't have a relationship pretty successfully? Or if you had relationships with people, how would you leverage them? And I asked this question because what's happened as you know, today more than ever is we're so distant from the people we're selling to now. I mean, we're like, you know, 17 layers away from the people we're talking to. It's like you're, like you're saying we're having all these tools talk on our behalf. We're not even really actually having conversations with anybody. But when we do have conversations, it could become really impactful. But a lot of people are sort of not like they've lost that. I'm curious, you know, do you have an effort in place where relationship development and relationship building is baked into your operation? And if so, I'm curious how you do that as a CRO across your organization.

Yeah, like I mentioned, the one tool that I'm really excited about that we're just starting to experiment with is this AI agent that has a Persona. You know, she. She has the same kind of look. She's an expert in everything though, because she's trained on all of our information. She's trained on to go to market on her icp, on the messaging that we want to use. So she is like your best sales rep, your best sdr, your best whatever, and sits on the website. Right. So now you can go, or you will be able to go to alteryx.com and you'll have it be the ability to interact with a, what looks like a human being, but with incredible amounts of knowledge, always putting the best message, you know, forward, and it's constantly iterating. Right. The message that resonates continues to you kind of learn on that same model. To me, that's, that's an incredible opportunity for us to have something that's sitting on the website, engaging with customers and prospects, always feeding them the best information. You're not having to go hunt and peck, you know, all the different products. And what does this do, what does that do? She'll just answer the questions and, and interact with you. And ultimately I see it kind of using it as a. For the technical account management as well, the tam, because somebody is coming in and they want to be able to say, I'm having a problem with this workflow. I don't know how to do xyz. And this tool actually will allow you to be able to do that. It'll actually answer your technical questions. It'll be able to ultimately see your, your screen and tell you kind of, here's how you point and click to solve that problem. So if I can do all that in a very digital way, always knowing that I'm going to give the right answer every single time. I'm not relying on, you know, whatever the skill set is of the individual, it's the skill set of the AI agent. Like that becomes a huge advantage. Technically, functionally sales oriented, you know, however I want to use her. And so we call her Annie Alter, but that's the idea. So I think that's just such, like, it's so cool to see new technologies like that coming to market and being able to leverage them in ways that we never would have thought of even a year or two ago. And now all of a sudden, you know, like, I'm going all in. So I think there's, there's ways that we can leverage technology in a totally different way and you need to embrace that like we're a billion dollar business. But why can't I be as entrepreneurial as somebody who's a $10 million company who wants to do the same thing?

100%.

That's the way I think about it.

How about, how do you do revenue insights? How are you measuring all the data in your go to market systems and being able to know, for example, deal flow, deal success, you know, what customers are closing, why how long it takes to get a customer who you're losing, what your win loss rates are and why. Well, how do you manage measure all that stuff?

Well, that's a great question. So we, you know, I, I believe in sales efficiency metrics. I believe in, you know, testing your icp. The Persona that we sell to, that, you know, we've always sold to in the past has been the business user. So the business analyst, you know, whether in supply chain or in finance or sales or marketing, whatever. Like that's been our Persona that we've sold to. It hasn't been an IT sell. And so now given all of the cloud data platforms and the advancements they're making, how they're all trying to take and create as much as they can, a single data model. It's never going to be a single data model because you're always going to have some local data that's in the Excel file. You're always going to have some data that sits outside of it. You're never, and you might even have two different cloud data platforms. So you need to be able to connect all of those things together, which we do in a very seamless way. But it's built for the business user. So the right now the cio, the CTO is building out their cloud data platform strategy and you know, they're doing that and thinking, how do we get access to the business user? Because most of the time you don't have business users going into your snowflake environment to basically do whatever query and analysis. It's typically done by a data scientist. So you have to go to the data scientist who then, you know, have to expand, expound on whatever it is that you want to do. But it's, it's very kludgy in terms of your ability. You only have so many data scientists. You have the business coming in with a thousand ideas and things kind of break down. In our case we don't have that. Like we have business users who are able to use all the data in a very, you know, structured way using our canvas, our designer canvas. So now selling to CIOs and CTOs because they're the one building out the cloud data platform. It's either the cloud data platforms will build tools on top of their platform that can be used by business users or they'll leverage Alteryx like they always have and have push down capabilities and compute store into the cloud data platform. So I think both of those models are being tested in the market today. I can tell you which one I think is better naturally, you know, but I'm a little biased. And so that's where I think there's a bit of a race. And I don't think it's going to be an either or I think it's going to be an and I think there's some elements of what the data science is always going to be a role that's going to be important for a company. But being able to pull all that data to get together becomes very relevant. So to the core of your question of how do you manage the business, our access to data because of who we are is so much easier. Like that is who we are. We can, I can connect to any data source I want, I can build workflows around it, which we've done. So we have literally thousands of workflows that we run all the time as well. That helps me manage the business. So I have sales efficiency metrics. It's very easy to pull in our data. Our CEO for example, just went out and said he wanted to, we have a snowflake environment with, you know, tons of data. How do we take that and then start to expose it? So I'm looking at pipeline, I look at sales stages, things like that. And he literally Built it in Alteryx. And it's so great to have a CEO who's like very product centric and he knows how to build this stuff. That's fantastic. So I think our access to data is unlike most other companies because of who we are and what we do and then whatever metrics I want to go look at, it's very easy for me to pull in information. I do it myself. I can go into Alteryx, I can just, I can pull in my own information. So that makes it much easier. So I think there's just ways that are easier for me to do it than most CROs because, you know, of the company that we are in, my access to data. But I think those things are really important, like, you know, use your own tools, use your own technology and then use that as a basis to share the information with, you know, with your customers, like I did with our Rev iq, you know, as an example, sharing that with a customer, finding out that they're using Alteryx to do the same thing, like that's, that's nirvana, right? That, like that's the best case scenario. So I think there's plenty of that that's going on.

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 the 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 want to just let you all know that we have a roundup of them coming over the next number of months, over the remainder of the year. So the next one is in Boston on August 20th. Following that we have two events in September in San Francisco, one on September 16th, which is a dinner, and then we have another roundtable in San Francisco on the 17th, and then we're going to have one in New York in October, probably mid to late October. And then I have one in November in Chicago November 18th. So if anyone is interested in attending any of these events, if you're a Chief Revenue officer working for a company, over 150 to 200 people in your, in your organization, just send me a DM on LinkedIn and ask me about which event and I'll provide you with either the information or the links. But again, it's August 20th in Boston, two in September, on September 16th and 17th, New York in October, late October and then again in November in Chicago. So sign up for the CRO round tables. They're amazing events that I hope to see you there.

I agree, amazing tools and coming in my network that do this sort of stuff. But it sounds like you guys have an interesting opportunity because of the particular product set you have. It can be leveraged in so many different ways.

So I want to kind of close.

Out with a question for you about the role of the CRO itself. You know, it's evolving, right? It's a different role than it was even three years ago. If you were to like think about the role today and you're talking to an up and coming CRO, someone who is at like a 50 or $60 million company and they're a CRO and either looking to maybe expand, what would you say are the real, the, the sort of like the, let's say the character, characteristic qualities and competencies that make up a really good CRO for today.

So I think in many cases there, there's a lot of things, the attributes that make successful CROs, if I think about that, you know, they're just like their sales team. They're heavy on grit, they're perseverant, you know, in everything that they do. They're very data centric, they're very mindful of, you know, and empathetic with customer experience. So I think a lot of those are similar attributes that I could go back 20 years and the role of head of sales or the head of, you know, revenue would need all of those. But with the age of AI, you've got to have this attitude and, and I would, I would kind of earmark the conversation depending on not every $50 million company is the same. Some. You know, when I started anaplan, it was $100 million business, but we were growing at 100% year on year. So, you know, like that's it. When you're at that kind of level of growth. It's all about, you know, don't get in the way. You know, it's almost like the Sun Tzu message of, you know, if your enemies make mistakes, don't, don't get in their way. If you're scaling your business quickly, like, don't get in the way of that. But how do I then kind of build that so that I can go leverage other tools and technology to make their life that much easier? And it doesn't mean like getting another system of record that requires them to do a bunch of work. It's leveraging the tools that you have, but to get the information that you need in a more holistic way. But your job as a CRO is to make their life easier. Right? Get, get, get into the field, understand what their priorities are, and then go solve those. And so depending on, you know, what level of scale you're at, whether it's 50 or 100 or 500 million, a billion, 5 billion, we all have to figure out what our sales teams need and knock down the roadblocks that are preventing them from getting that and make sure there's, you know, heavy incentives that give them the benefit and reward for the work that they do. But I think attributes is something that I've taken personally for a long time. I think about the attributes, like I said, grit, perseverance, things like that. I actually inverted the way that I hire people. Probably 10 years ago I used to think about it more for what's their pedigree? Like where did they come from? SAP or Oracle or some other big software company. So I know that I can trust that they, they have these kind of skills. That was our first order priority. The second order is the grit and the perseverance and the, you know, the way that they attack the market, the way they treat customers or the customer centric, all the other kind of, let's say soft attributes. I flip those. My primary interest is if somebody has grit and they're perseverant and they are very focused on customer success, that's the most important thing. I can teach them to sell our software. I don't need to have somebody that comes from SAP and Oracle. Sometimes I've gone out and hired people for new business. Hire somebody that comes from the pesticide industry that sold door to door. Find people that have sold alarm systems. Like these people are just, they just hit out and they go, they go, they go. They're very perseverant, right? These are people that I love because they're just out. They know that, you know, they might knock on 100 doors and get nothing and then they might knock on the next 10. And every single one of those customers, you know, buy. So it's just somebody who's got that fortitude and grit, you know, that, that mindset that's. You can't teach that. Like either you have it or you don't. But I can teach people how to sell software, I can teach people how to sell my software, but I can't replace grit. Like, that's just something that somebody has to bring to the table. So I focus very much on the individuals depending on the role that they're in. And I try not to go back and look at people that have been around for like me 30 years, but may not have the right mindset. Mindset is really, really important in any of the roles today. And you have to be very forward thinking. Embrace AI, embrace new technologies. Experiment, fail experiment, get success, experiment. Like, just be experimental regardless of the size of the company that you're in. Like, I, I find that I love to experiment with things, but I'm also very entrepreneurial. You know, I've invested in a lot of different businesses myself. You know, everything from nuclear reactors to enterprise software to IoT with hardware device. Like, I've done a lot of investing. I'm a limited partner at Stage two Capital, so you kind of get that, that experience. And then I work, of course, closely with our sponsors, Insight and Clearlake, who are awesome to work with. So I just think there's, there's a lot that goes into it, but you have to be very kind of universally minded as a CRO, you have to think, you know, very, very fast. You have to be, you know, digest information quickly, make decisions quickly, but always be focused on the success of your sales team and the success of our customers. And if you're very focused on them and making sure their experiences are partner on best in class, then you can't help but be successful on the other end.

Who you want to, who you looking to talk to right now? Like, what's the kind of communication you're looking to get, what kind of people you're trying to connect with and what is it that you want to want to tell them? Anyone who's listening to this right now.

You know, I love to mentor and develop people and I give a ton of outreach, you know, via LinkedIn. Like I, I've got a ton of people that I, you know, personally invest some time in, so I like to talk to them I like to talk to other CROs, so I try to do a lot of CRO, you know, roundtables, I like to go to CRO events, I like to do podcasts, you know, that typically is a good way to meet people. So I'm just really big on networking, you know, and normally, you know, what I like to do is find ways that I can help other people. And I think again, it's part of that kind of servant leader. But I think just, you know, what can I do to help you? Are there things that you'd like to kind of brainstorm around or things that you want to do? That usually comes back in spades, you know, so it's somewhat altruistic, but it's not, not entirely because I get a lot more out of the conversation as I mentor people than what they get, I think. But I've been around a long time and I've seen success and I know what works and I know the recipes and the ingredients. So I think when you have all of that, you know the, in the ingredients, the recipe, you know what success looks like, you know, how to implement it. That goes a long way, especially with some of the younger sellers. I've got people that I've been mentoring for literally two or three years and I've never met them in person. So it's just the nature of things sometimes is we can be very virtual. But I love that I, I love just finding ways to help people. I'm very spiritually minded, you know, so I think of my life in a very eternal, you know, from an internal perspective. So I don't think about it like, you know, this life is over and I'm going to take out of it everything I can get. It's more of that, how do I help you, you know, become successful? I'd rather be more kind of personally supportive of people than thinking about what I get out of, you know, any relationship.

Yeah, we're like minded that way for sure. And you know, what, what market are you in? Where are you located right now? Like where are you? Philadelphia. Gotcha. I asked because I, I have a whole bunch of CRO round table events that I run all across the country. So next time we're doing one locally, I'll let you know.

Yeah, and, or Philadelphia, New York, D.C. like they're all an hour or two away, so it's perfect.

Great, we'll be having them.

Well, look, Stephen, really appreciate this, this.

Is a great conversation and appreciate the time and the insights and it was good meeting you.

Yeah, I enjoyed it. I look forward to it. We should do it again. Maybe. Round two.

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 crocollective.com and we look forward to having you join us next time.