Making CRO Without Sales Experience, With Serkan Honeine

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 think you're really going to enjoy it. So thanks for tuning in and we look forward to seeing you. All right. Hello and welcome to the next episode of the CRO Spotlight Podcast. Hi Lupe, how you doing?

Hi Warren. Doing really well today, thank you.

Great, great. Against Warren Zenna and Lupe Feld, together we discuss all things Chief Revenue Officer. And we have a great guest today. Really, really happy to have this gentleman on with us. John Honaini from Australia.

From Australia.

Revenue operations. Yes, exactly. A superstar, a revenue operations professional and we're going to have a really good conversation. So thank you for being here today. I'm just going to read off your bio quickly.

Okay.

And you can expound on it a bit.

Yeah, absolutely.

So sure, sure. So, having spent over a decade leading product marketing and sales teams in media technology and telecommunications, Serkan now leads the revenue team at Certain, that's C E R T N. Recognized as a growth expert, he is an award winning marketer and researcher, a serial entrepreneur. In 2017 he co founded Catch Consultants which has transformed the lives of of over 400 youth in sub Saharan Africa through democratized access to training and paid jobs. Beyond this, he's also a dedicated father to rainbow twin boys and like many people is just trying to be the most present parent and partner he can be. Welcome. Great, great bio. I'm really interested in hearing more about this stuff.

Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Why don't you tell us a little bit about Certain first and what your revenue role within Certain kind of entails. What do you focus on?

Yeah, absolutely. So Certain is a background screening company. So we do Background checks kyc know your customer, know your employee. And we like to think of ourselves as the tech forward operator within the background screening industry. We've all probably gone through background checks a couple of times and amongst friends I can say that background checks are not pleasant. I mean they suck. The experience is not pleasant at all. It's, it's full of so much friction. And, and if you think about the recruitment process today, you might go through a culture interview, then a technical interview, then you might meet an executive in the organization, you'll get an offer letter, the employer will say we love you. The employee will say we love you too. And then we'll say, well we don't trust you, you've got to do this background check. And that process today is full of so much friction you get.

So true. It's great.

Different contact centers, pushing paper based forms around and we do certain dozen minutes what, what others take weeks to deliver. So we've got smart workflows which mean background checks are delivered almost instantly. So take the friction out of that recruitment process and we've got plans to almost eliminate that process altogether in the near future which is really exciting. As far as my role, I'm Chief Revenue Officer so I lead the revenue revenue function. Within that function we've got sales, marketing, customer success and revenue operations. We're about five years old as in, as an organization gone through all the kind of 3x year on year venture growth. Just closed our series B which is exciting. What I'm most proud about though at Certain is we just had the industry NPS results or net promoter score results released by G2. And whilst our competitors are all kind of low to single digits, Certain had an industry MPS of plus 86. So by far and away kind of category breaking when it comes to the onboarding experience surrounding background screening for employees. So that's something I'm kind of really, really excited about. The other kind of nuance is I'm in Australia, so I'm in Australia and I lead the revenue function of an organization that doesn't have customers or revenue in Australia, which is probably unique but we're changing that soon, which is part of why I was brought in. So yeah, I'll pause there and see if you have any questions.

That's great. And so being that you're in Australia and leading an organization that's based in Canada, has operations in the us, in the UK and maybe soon to have some in Australia, how do you manage the time zones in the different territories? I think that's just an interesting kind of juggling act to begin with, right?

Yeah. I think anyone who's had a global leadership role will tell you that probably they didn't do it as well as they could. And the other thing I'd say is balance is always going to be inherently relative. Like I start my days at 5am every day, 5am, and I finish my days at 1 or 2pm But I have young twin boys, they're two years old. And that means the time that's most valuable to me, the afternoons and the evenings I get with them and it's uninterrupted and everyone in Canada and the US is sleeping. And it's perfect for me because it's just family time. So that works well for me. It's 8:18am here. I've already had a board call. I've reset investor expectations in terms of H2 revenue forecasts. I've reviewed marketing collateral, I've reviewed an acquisition we're making in Australia and I've taken my kids to daycare and it's 20 past 8 in the morning, so that sort of routine works, works well for me. And as far as the UK stuff, and like, you know, often we say internally, Canada, Australia, new uk, pick two. So you're never going to align all time zones, but for me, I make a habit of putting all of my kind of UK meetings on Monday evenings. So I'm only working one evening and not every evening, and. And try to be quite disciplined about that and that works quite well. So I think routines are important. And also knowing what you're prepared to compromise on and what your colleagues aren't prepared to compromise on is important as well.

That's great advice. Good takeaways. Yeah. I too have had many international roles and juggling the time zones is always fun, but I like the discipline of one day, so. So I'm gonna steal that one and take that away for the future. So let's talk about your journey to becoming a CRO. You know, it's. I think it'll be interesting to hear kind of your past responsibilities and your background and how you arrived to be kind of the owner of revenue.

Yeah, absolutely. And it is a little bit different cause I listened to a few of your episodes and a number of. Number of my industry peers look like they've come through from sales leadership roles and I've got quite a different background. So, you know, commerce undergrad, so finance and accounting. And in Australia, if you're a commerce undergrad, you go through the loops of different internships around Accounting or investment banking or consulting. I chose consulting as my eventual career path. I wasn't a very good consultant. I still don't think I'm a good consultant. And I say that because I tend to quit. I tend to refer owning the outcomes as opposed to advising on the outcomes. And I get quite frustrated when, when, when, when I don't see action taken on those outcomes. So I've resigned to the fact that I'll never make a good consultant and every time I try and do it, I end up unhappy. So, so I won't do that again. But from consulting I jumped across to one of my clients which was Telstra. Telstra is probably the AT&T equivalent or Verizon equivalent in, in, in Australia. I was fortunate enough to have the Chief Marketing officer at Telstra take me under his wing and, and put me in a couple of senior marketing positions quite early. One of which was B2B marketing, which involved a whole bunch of demand generation and thought leadership. And this was almost a decade ago where the relative contribution of say, digital pay per click was limited. So you had to work a lot harder as a marketer to get key decision makers to the table. I'm talking about thought leadership events with, you know, your former president Bill Clinton or former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, where you're bringing, creating kind of money can't buy experiences to get decision makers from government to the table. So you're working a lot harder to create top line, top of funnel awareness and consideration for your brand. From a couple of different marketing roles, I moved into product management and there's a lot of nuances in what product management is. Product management. A lot of tech companies feels like product development where you own a, a roadmap and you coordinate engineers, product management. In Telco, you're the CEO of your product. And this is where I think there's a lot of alignment between a product manager in that sense and what a CRO would do. Because you're really coordinating ownership of the P and L. You've got the technical side, which is the experience you're delivering to the customers, the roadmap attached to it. You've got your sales channels, direct and indirect, that you kind of own. You've got your marketing contribution and it's almost like you are accountable for everything but actually responsible for nothing, which is in many instances similar to a CRO. So you've got to create alignment and you've got to create influence. So ran a few different products at Telstra. My first product was actually a $700 million P&L. And I was 23 years old. I had no idea what I was doing. And it was a cable TV product, it was a pay TV product, lowest margin product, priority 15 or 15 at Telstra. And I was able to turn that around and eventually ended up running all of Telstra's media products like AT&T and Verizon. At the time, Telstra had sports rights, music rights, streaming products, IPTV products, a few different things. And then after almost a decade at Telstra, I jumped into what wasn't actually called a CRO role. It was called Chief Customer Officer. But effectively the remit was the same. It was sales, marketing, customer experience, customer success. And that was for a pay TV operator based in the Middle East. And that was a lot of fun. It was 50 markets across sub Saharan Africa and the Middle east and did that for, for just under two years. After that, took on another CRO role, selling software to the media industry and to the cable TV industry. Then. And then after, you know, that company, ipo, I found myself at certain. And yeah, so I've been in this role a couple of times along the way of, you know, I've started and sold my own businesses, which has been a lot of fun. And yeah, I guess, I guess the key nuance I would, I would make is I've never had a sales leadership role per se. I've led sales teams, but I've never had a sales leadership role role. I've never been the one kind of day to day, week to week, reviewing pipeline, shape, size, funnel, et cetera, or optimizing sales processes. I've from an early stage in my career been the one coordinating marketing, sales, customer experience, customer success to deliver revenue objectives for an organization or for a product.

I feel like that's almost a better journey to be successful like your career path. So often, you know, the CRO position tends to be kind of a glorified sales leader. And at the end of the day that's not going to really fill and check off all the boxes under the CRO position. And so understanding the components and the pieces and facilitating and coordinating is really, I think one of our guests called it, you know, you're the orchestra leader in making sure that everybody sounds, you know, and creates beautiful music. And I think that that's something that your career path has enabled you to do. I also sense that there's, there's a little bit of risk taking that you've done in your career as well as good sponsorship. And you know, you mentioned somebody gave you the opportunity, how, you know, if you were to give somebody advice, how do you get someone, how do you build that trust that kind of inspires them to give you that opportunity? Because I think sometimes a lot of people are looking for overcoming that obstacle of reaching that kind of aspired to position, but you don't have the experience and you don't necessarily haven't done the job. So how do you do that? Any tips?

Yeah, I think there's almost two stories that I would share. The first one is I kind of, as I went through the various kind of consulting, accounting, banking, internships as an undergrad, I resigned myself to the fact that I really wanted a career in consulting. This is before I knew what consulting was without disrespect to consultants. And I had the opportunity to. I made a lot of effort to actually reach out to various consultants and try to have conversations with them. And I remember there was one in, in particular that I connected with. I got his contact details. Roger, Roger. At some point maybe I'll send the link to him and he can, he can listen to this. And I kind of wrote to Roger and I said, roger, I really want to catch up with you. I want to talk about a career in consulting. Roger came back and said, listen mate, I'm busy. I can't really connect at this point, maybe again in the future. So I remember reaching out to Roger again, same day Monday next week and saying, roger, we're in the future now. I'd really love to talk to you about a career in consulting. And he came back a couple days later and said, listen mate, you know, I'm got a new client, Telstra, where I ended up working. I'm here at 6am every morning. I just, I really don't have the time to meet with you at this point. And then I went into the Telstra building and I found out the name of the cafe downstairs. And I found out, then I found out what Roger's coffee order was. And I don't remember what it was now, but I remember writing Roger a third email. I said, roger, I'll meet you at the lobby Cafe 5 to 6 on Monday morning with your coffee order ready. I just want five minutes of your time. And surprisingly he came back and said, all right, let's do it. And that five minutes turned into three hours. And that three hours turned into my first kind of first job offer in consulting. So I guess that if you want something enough, you've gotta be persistent, you've gotta invest in the networks that you want to Succeed. It's not dissimilar to sales, I guess. And I think the second thing I'd say to people who are within the organization, if they're looking for sponsorship, then they're already in an organization. And you've been on this. No doubt you've been on the other side of these conversations. It is quite humbling when someone comes to you and says, hey, I'd really like your time and your experience. I'd really like for you to invest in me. So I'd encourage people to reach out. I'd also encourage people. And what works for me is in any role I had early in my career, I would always spend two days a week for a couple of hours after work thinking about what I can do on my role and not in my role. How can I do this differently? How could I do this more efficiently? How could I challenge the processes that have been given to me and really rethink doing things differently? And even if. If your recommendations are wrong, you're signaling to your leadership that you've got the capacity to learn and be agile and do things differently. So that's a good trick or good hack in terms of getting noticed as well. I don't know if that answers your question, but that's inherently what worked for me.

It's a great story. I love that idea. By the way. I apologize for my camera issues, but I've been listening very intently here and I have a lot to add or question about some things that you mentioned, which is fascinating. The main. The main thing that strikes me is, you know, not having come from a sales background and being a chief Revenue officer.

Right. Yeah.

Because, what, you know, Lupe and I discuss here, ongoing is the pipeline to the chief Revenue officer role as a sales manager. It's not because it's supposed to be that way. It sort of ended up that way, and I think the industry sort of has now defaulted to that. And I'm having conversations five times a day with people who just come out of the box thinking that that's the way that they should be looking at the role. They're not necessarily wrong, but. And we are of the belief that that actually creates some of the issues pertaining to how the role is pointed and managed. So what, in your view, are the benefits that you have of not having come from a sales background and being a chief revenue officer? And I guess inside of that answer is maybe even a bit of your perspective about what the CRO role actually is. I'd be curious to know how you feel about that.

Yeah, I mean, I see the CRO as the owner of all the commercial functions of a business like the CRO needs to walk the street and lead the business and align the business to deliver for customers and ultimately deliver for the top line and in some instances the gross margin of the business. And I think the key operating word there is alignment. And I say this without disrespect to anyone who's coming to a croat role through that kind of sales pathway. But my own pathway is one, you know, from kind of big telco to other CRO to marketing product roles. It requires a heck of a lot of alignment. And I see countless times I have conversations with friends who are in sales leadership roles and there's just so much misalignment between say the sales organization and the marketing organization and the product organization. It creates friction. That friction manifests as a lack of trust and growth inertia. If your key responsibility or if your key focus as a CRO is sales and not alignment, it's almost like that expression, if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. If you're not going together, you are going to trip over yourself at some point. You might get some initial quick wins, but you are going to trip over yourself.

I'm going to repeat that. I want to repeat that because that's so great. I'm going to use this as a quote for this entire episode. If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go the distance, go together. That is so true. It's such a great statement and it sums up the entire role. So I want to thank you for saying that. It is absolutely true. And here's the problem. Every CEO wants to go fast. And that's why they hire sales based CROs. Because sales based CROs, their perception is that they're going to get us there fast. They'll get you somewhere fast.

Yeah.

But they may not get you there fast. And I think that's something that we're really trying to emphasize. So appreciate that really great and succinct statement. So I'm sorry to interrupt. I just want make sure we don't lose that moment because it's a really important thing for our, the audience to hear is that if you're, if you're going to go for a chief revenue officer role and you come from sales and it looks like the role seems to be very sales focused, it's likely because they want to get somewhere fast.

Yeah, absolutely.

Which means you're going to be alone.

I would add to that. I look at my current CEO's role and I think about the amount of time he spends on vision, the amount of time he spends on technology leadership, the amount of time he spends on regulatory, the amount of time he sends on all technology. CEOs are spending now on existential fundraising and the realities of burn rates and runways. And, and if he was to be the lowest common denominator for alignment in the organization, he would not devote the sufficient amount of time required to get us there. And if a CEO is listening to this and wondering whether they would need a CRO, I would really ask them to question whether they can devote as much time as they need to create that alignment in the organization to deliver revenue and customer objectives. And I think about, I actually think the biggest challenge that CROs face and why CROs probably experience so much turnover is one where they're unable to create alignment within the organization. I've come into organizations before and I've had product managers say we don't care about revenue and I've had engineering managers say we don't care about deadlines. And as a commercial executive, that's inherently your first instinct is, well, there's malice in what you're saying, but actually it's, it's not. No one in the organization wants to do wrong. They just don't understand the overall direction. And sometimes the CRO needs to come into a business and needs to break glass. And breaking glass could manifest in a couple of different ways. There's a fear element or the existential element. As a venture backed startup, the reality is grow or die because we've got a burn rate and a certain amount of Runway. And if we don't deliver the growth objectives, we don't get another cash injection. And, or I would say even more importantly is a privileged one. We've got a mission that's going to fundamentally change the world and we've got investors that trust us enough to invest in us to deliver that. But the way they keep score is revenue and that's why we need to deliver to that. So I would say as a CRO, if you can't create alignment across all those different parts of the business, you're going to run into things like product managers saying they don't care about revenue and engineering managers saying they don't want to commit to deadlines because they think deadlines are. I was going to swear, but I'm not going to do that because you can, because I think deadlines are bullshit and these aren't. This is Verbatim. This is not paraphrasing. This is verbatim. Right. So I would say that if you're the first CRO in the organization, your first objective is probably going to be to, to kind of address some of those misconceptions in the business because I don't think they're unique. I've been in more than one environment where product managers have said they don't care about revenue and engineering managers don't feel like they should be held accountable to timeframes.

Yeah, we could confirm that's not unique. This is endemic. This is a disease amongst companies. What you're describing.

Yeah.

As I listen to you explaining the pieces of it, I feel like the ability to understand the language that each department speaks and then be the interpreter for them to understand the revenue language is key. And that's somehow often missed because people don't bother to use the two ears that they have to listen. And I'm more worried about using the mouthpiece that they have to speak. And I think that's a really, really strong message to a prospective CRO or a CEO that's hiring is to really understand the value and the dysfunction of the organization and not just really cater to let's deliver here at the expense of alignment. So I really love that. Yeah.

And I would add, and it's very important to add and again I have to stress this, I say this without criticism. 20 Sales Leaders Often the KPIs of sales leaders is shorter horizon, it's quarterly. So a sales leader may have the tendency and I saw it with sales leadership in my current organization. A sales leader may have the tendency the focus product on I just need to deliver for this customer as opposed to I need to deliver repeatable experiences that customers are prepared to pay for so that it can go the other way as well. It can go the other way where you're so focused on the short term that you forget about kind of predictable repeatable experiences and subsequent revenue growth. So I wanted to make that point because if anyone from like a product and engineering background is listening, it's not just about kind of sales led growth and delivering for customers. It is about that. Right. Balance.

Understood completely. And you're spot on here. It's, you know, I think that and I had a conversation with a CEO today who is right now looking for a chief revenue officer and we were talking about this conundrum as it were, this prisoner's dilemma between accomplishing his short term goals and also managing long term outcomes. And you know, one has to Come at the expense of the other. Which I don't think is true. I think you can do both. But there is this feeling that you do have to give up one for the other. It's very difficult for someone to grasp. Not because they're not bright, they're by no means they're all smarter than I am, but given when they look at their dashboard and what's up against, they're up against from the board. And you know, like you said already, you know very well, Serkan, you know, like looking for the new round of funding and all the other pressures that come from the board, short term outcomes are much more satisfactory to the people that matter most to this particular CEO at the moment. And so they're going to service those things like the squeaky wheel, so to speak. But this is a wheel that never stops squeaking. So unfortunately it's like you're always gonna be delivering those short horizon results, getting a pat on the back. But it's gonna come at the expense of your culture, of your customer outcomes, customer lifetime value and also scaling the business effectively. Because now you have misaligned, not just misaligned people, but misaligned KPIs and misaligned operational objectives and measurements. So my question to you is, what would you do? Let's say you were injected into a company as a chief revenue officer that you know, like most have these issues and they said, sir, can we need you to come in and sort of help make more of a cohesive aligned revenue engine here? What are the kind of things and steps that you would take to address this so that you can figure out the way through that?

Yeah, the first thing I would do is before taking the role, I would test the organization, organization's capacity for change. I would, I would test the CEO, the cfo, I would test the key executives appetite and capacity for change.

How do you do that?

Because I wouldn't. Yeah, I would present trade offs, I would present trade offs like you just described, like is it short term revenue growth or is it, would you be prepared to take a 20, 30% cut in your next half if it meant more sustainable, repeatable revenue in the next year? Would you be prepared to do that? So asking these kind of really, really direct questions early, early on, because the next thing I'd say is going into an organization where there's that kind of scale of misalignment. And it depends, you know, it's the storming, forming, norming thing. The storming element does, does involve an element of breaking glass like you do need to challenge kind of established, established norms. I remember in one environment I had to bring a board member in and the board member had to articulate the realities of I invested in this company. Like this growth capital that I put into the business was for growth doesn't mean short term growth like I'm in it for the long term, but it does mean growth. And by the way, the money that we invested in the business, this isn't all Gulf oil money. This is people's pension funds. It's mums and dads who have trusted me to invest in you. So creating a connection between the source of investment is really, really important. But also articulating and really bringing it down to a vision and a mission that people can get behind and get excited behind as well. Because if we deliver on that, then with the right kind of commercial alignment, we should deliver on revenue at the same time.

So what if the objectives are, and I've heard this before, I actually had this job where the CEO said we want to be acquired in two years.

Yeah. Then you're optimizing for a short term objective and that's fine. I think the other thing I would say that kind of new CROs should really think about is there are different leadership styles for different business contexts. And we all, and I'm very guilty of this, we all inherently adopt the leadership style that we're most comfortable with. Like is it a startup or am I accelerating growth or am I setting us up for a sale or am I turning something around or am I sustaining performance? So we've got to recognize the environment that we're going into as well. If the goal is to sell the business in two years, then I'd be very clear with the team on what that means. And everyone from kind of product leadership to engineering leadership to sales and marketing leadership needs to be aware of that. And I would suggest that probably off the back of a shorter term objective like sell the business in two years is probably going to be a longer term incentive, some sort of earn out some sort of equity piece. So your goals are probably still going to be somewhat aligned to longer term sustainable growth. But you know, the truth's always somewhere, somewhere in the middle. But I don't know if that answers your question, Warren, but it comes down.

To, well, it's a start. So yeah, let's say, look, I'm in agreement, so there's no question you're speaking to the choir here. I want to know though, okay, so let's walk through this. You have this sort of, let's say tire kicking conversation, right, where you test the leadership and you pose some questions and scenarios and trade offs and they agree, they say all right, fine, you said you convinced me. You're very persuasive, sir. Khan, you made a case here. Now. Now what?

Yeah, now what is in now what do you do?

So they give you the green light. Like what's the way that now you sort of build out something. So you look at the landscape and you see, you know, the normal silos and infighting and you know, misalignment and operational disjointed stuff that most companies have. And your job is now you've been given sort of the green light to do something about it. Where do you begin? Like what's the way in which you start to construct a organizational alignment in the way that you're, you're, you're envisioning.

The first thing I do in every organization is to ask that for the metrics that matter. I go to the product leadership, the sales leadership, the marketing leadership and I say show me the metrics that matter. And one of two things happen. They either don't have the metrics at Matlab or they have different metrics. So the starting point is and what we don't measure, we don't manage. So the starting point is aligning everyone behind the right set of metrics. And if we're delivering for a shorter term outcome, let's break down what that means at a quarterly and a monthly level over the next 24 months. Behind that I would then begin to challenge and as a CRO, you are invested quite significantly in kind of product, product roadmap, in market positioning as, as well. So I then begin to challenge those plans in more detail. But to answer your question, the first thing I do is always, always come back to those metrics and kind of mission and vision are we aligned there? And if we're not, often there's some sort of kind of breaking moment where we get everyone together and we have the difficult conversations and we create that alignment upfront. But I've never been in an organization where actually may exception of Telstra and a large corporate where the trading cadences are more mature but in kind of startup or even kind of scale up. I've never seen that create like that complete alignment of how we measure our success. So do we understand what success is and how do we measure it? So I always start there. The next thing I do is I always focus on team and again, sales leader versus revenue leader. I think the biggest kind of objective after alignment that a CRO should be focusing on is creating a world class team. Creating a world class team. And that, that, that means different things to, to, to, to, to different people. If it's helpful, I can talk a little bit about what, what I look for.

Yeah, please.

Yeah, I would. For me, for me I look at kind of five, five principles. When I, when I think about world class team I think of attracting, onboarding, developing, retaining and I look experiences. When it comes to attracting talent. I have a very simple kind of philosophy and that is to build the smallest most talent dense team possible. I'll say it again. Build the smallest, most talent dense team possible. I've been in so many environments where we go in and we say okay, are we aligned on success? Are we aligned on metrics? Well this metric isn't going as no one's focused on this metric. We need to bring in an owner. But the thing we need to recognize is organizational complexity is not linear and sometimes bringing in more people actually slows you down. If, if we change this conversation from three people to four people, that's not adding one more point of engagement. That's adding three more points of engagement. So, so the process of alignment is just going to get slower and slower and slower. So so the first thing I'd say when attracting talent is I always look at building the smallest most talent team, talent dense team team possible. The, the, the second thing I look at when, when I'm kind of hiring is I'm hiring for learning agility. And particularly in a high growth environment you often hear conversations like oh, the team that took us from A to B is not the team that took us from B to C. For me that's a function of we haven't hired for learning agility. So I'm really testing people's capacity to learn. I'm testing examples of where they demonstrate learning in the past. Often I'm recruiting leaders so I'm testing how they're creating patterns which, which accelerate the learning of their entire team. So if I'm hiring a sales team, a sales leader, how are you accelerating the learning of, of, of your team or a marketing leader? The, the, the, the, the same thing. So I really look at kind of learning agility and, and I look at leadership agility as well and, and, and, and leadership, leadership style. And I have a couple of kind of go to questions which, which always really kind of stump my audience when I'm, when I'm, when I'm recruiting and the first one is kind of who would follow you and who would follow you, for me is not about like, you know, you know, for me, it's more about can you demonstrate that you have created kind of influence and followership that people would follow you, that they do desire to be. To work for you in different or partner with you rather in different contexts. And the second question is the one that kind of stumps people again, why would people be led by you? And it's not something that leadership often kind of articulate or even write down, but it always creates a bit of silence in the room. And I want individuals to reflect on kind of their leadership styles. And I want individuals that can bring in tenets of. I'm not just focused on the capability of individuals. I'm focused on the environment and the climate I create. And I'm focused on the clarity I bring to the team as well. I'm focused on environment where people can come in and do their best work. And we create that by being a little bit vulnerable and all that kind of stuff. So, yeah, I would say align on what success looks like, align on how we measure it, and then align on kind of creating a world class team. And create a world class team. That's where I would start. They're my first three. This is the third time I've had the CRO role and each time I follow the same process.

I like it. I love the approach of being able to come up with a pattern that works, but also have the flexibility to move within that pattern. As I think about your current position and I know Certain enough to understand that culture is a big component of your culture, what role do you think that plays in the alignment and success of a CRO?

Yeah, Certain is quite a remarkable organization. And I made the observation in my first week that if Certum delivered a customer experience as strong as we delivered an employee experience, we would realize every commercial objective we have and more. And I say that coming from the context of having a plus 86 MPS, whereas our key competitives are kind of single digits to negative. So the employee experience at Certain is so well thought out. And it's so well thought out because as an employee experience manager and it's documented kind of what happens from signing to starting, to kind of Certain camp in the first week, to your first 30 days and all that kind of stuff. So the experience at Certain is quite strong. I think all of us come to this realization. We come to the realization at different times in our lives. For me, it was kind of, for me, when I had my kids is when I really Kind of started to realize that I don't just have the right, I have the responsibility to be selective on how I spend my time and who I spend it with. And, you know, some of us have reached that, some of us will reach that. But increasingly a lot of us are going to be able to be selective around the environments that we, that we, that we work within. And like I, you know, we went through this kind of experience where we all stayed at home for a year and a half or two years, and it made us rethink kind of what was more valuable to us and what was less valuable to us. And I had this beautiful moment with my wife where she turned to me and she said, you don't need to take that job. I'd live in a tent if it meant we got to spend more time with you. And not everyone can or has the capacity to be in that position. But for me, it comes down to having the responsibilities to be selective around how I spend my time and who I spend it with. One of certain policies specifically is no assholes. And I think, or assholes, as you say over there. I could think of so many times in my career, and I'm sure you can as well, that you've had the capacity of working in an organization where you've had really, really unpleasant colleagues. And for many reasons. They could be malicious, or when they challenge, they play the man and not the ball, or they play the person and not the ball, rather so they make it quite personal or whatever it may be. But I would say, you know, I think a great culture is so important. And, you know, before every employer, before every recruitment in certain, we have a culture interview. And that culture interview is two way. We close the videos so we're not looking at each other. There's no bias. And it's us understanding the individual's culture and this individual understanding certain's culture at the same time. And it needs to be a degree of alignment on both sides. Yeah, I don't know. Did I answer your question, Lupe?

You did. You did. No, you did a great job. But I think there's some nuggets there we could steal away for a CEO and CR as they're both interviewing or being interviewed. I think culture plays a huge component. You know, you hit the nail on the head with the fact that I think the last two years have really changed people's perspectives as to what they want and what they're willing to sacrifice in order to, you know, to do the job, to do the day to day. And that's something that a lot of employers are becoming aware and it's challenging right now to find talent and it's challenging to retain talent. And being a croat depends on people and talent and deadlines and things being measured. So I think now more than ever culture is important.

Yeah, absolutely. I spoke about world class team earlier and spoke about attracting talent and talent density and what I look for when I recruit leaders. But one of the important roles of any leader, not just any CRO, is creating an engaged team. And like certain is a remote first business. And increasingly businesses have a degree of remote work, be it kind of or remote or hybrid or whatever. But there's an index which I follow, the Remote Employee Experience Index, and IT surveys about 11,000 professionals in knowledge capital. And knowledge capital means like anyone with uncallous hands like me. And it looks at professionals across the us, Australia, the uk, Japan, Germany. And what they found is that employees who have kind of a hybrid remote office work environment have a better work life balance, are more satisfied with their working arrangement, are less stressed, are more productive, but the negative, they have a lower sense of belonging. They have a lower sense of belonging. So. So going back to kind of your point around attracting and retaining talent, I know personally as a leader that's where I invest a lot of my time. And the reason I asked that question of kind of the remote when does this podcast kind of go to where? Because as an example, in the next week I'm sending the partners of all my leaders a gift. I'm sending the partners of all my leaders a gift. Because I know as a remote worker, I don't have corridor conversations with my colleagues. So when I'm angry or when I'm sad or when I just want to vent, I use my wife, Mariam. I tell her what's stressing me today. I also know that I'm kind of required to work on different time zones and I'm required to travel. And I know that kind of a lot of partners, be they like a spouse or a roommate or whatever it may be, take on that burden. So one kind of initiative I'm championing at the moment is just sending a gift to all partners just to say thanks. Like I know you. You play role of kind of counselor to whomever may be, you know, said leader at certain I know that they're required to travel and that means compromising on certain things. I know that sometimes they take calls at inconvenient times of the day. So you're as much a part of the certain community as they are. And we just want to say thanks. So little things like that you cannot lose sight of because what you're never going to probably or very rarely see in a remote kind of work environment is a greater sense of belonging than what you see if everyone was in the office.

That's brilliant. I like it. And you're right. You're absolutely right. You definitely have your go to people that you reach out to to discuss frustration and celebrate and do all those things. So that's amazing. I think you've given us some great insight. I don't know if we still have Warren. He's a little quiet, so I'm thinking we don't.

No, I mean, I would encourage more product leaders to put their hand up for CRO. I'd encourage more product leaders to do that and I'd encourage sales leaders to kind of really think about that t shape skill set and really think about investing in the relationships that they need to succeed sustainably. Because if we're just thinking about a quarter or 2/4 or 3/4 of sales growth, well, eventually that's going to translate to a 12 month tenure as a CRO because you weren't able to align the organization behind growth. So focus on what success looks like as a business. Test the organization's capacity for change. Focus on aligning around how you measure that success and then create a world class team. Everything else around tactics below that will follow. And you probably have the capacity to execute on the tactics because you were put in that role. But if you don't do those first three or four things, you're not setting yourself up for success, you're not setting the organization up for success.

I think that's a great note to close on. I thank you for being our guest today.

Thank you.

And I look forward to catching up with you again in the future. So thanks so much.

Thank you for having me and Lupe on a personal level, it's so wonderful to connect again. And Warren, I know we lost him, but thank you for the opportunity. Yeah, I've enjoyed it.

It was such a pleasure to kind of get to know you a little bit better. I think that was probably my biggest regret is missing out on the opportunity and getting to know you and spending time with with Andy.