MOVE Revenue With the Right Go To Market Framework, With Sangram Varje

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. Okay. And welcome to this new episode of the CRO Spotlight Podcast. I'm really excited, very excited today for our guest, the esteemed Mr. Sangram Vadre. Hi, Sangram, nice to meet you.

Warren. I'm glad we're able to make it. Let's create some ruckus.

Exactly. It's about time. First, let me just introduce you a little more formally so everyone kind of knows who you are. Most people do that are probably listening to this, but I'll formalize it a bit. So you're the best selling author of the book Move the four Question, Go to Market Framework, which I love the book and we'll talk about it. Okay. You also started or co founded Terminus in 2014 and you've been teaching the business of marketing and signature frameworks. And you're an international keynote speaker. You're named one of the top 21 B2B marketing influencers in the world. And you're also the host of your own business podcast called Flip My Funnel, which we can promote as well. So welcome and I'm so glad you're here. Thank you.

So Warren, thanks for the intro. As you probably have heard from folks like John Maxwell, he shared something that this was probably last, last two years ago where he shared when I was at an event where he said if you want to impact people, you need to talk about your failures. Because if you only talk about your success, which is a lot of bios are all about, then you can impress it, but you can't really impact it. And that really got close to my heart. So to just by, by, by that way. I just want to share a couple of things on a professional level. I've started, tried to start a few companies and they, they busted. They didn't go anywhere. They, you know, lost money, lost time, lost a ton of things along the way, which sometimes it's. It's hard to be in the bio. And then also in the. As part of building Terminus, I almost got divorced because I didn't realize and recognize the important importance of important things. So as I'm starting a new company now, I think about became becoming really intentional about all those things. So. So there, there you have it. A little bit more on the, on the personal side as people start thinking about it.

Yeah, but you're right. I mean, I certainly know I can tell you my. And most people I think would say this too. There are few people that don't. My failures way outpace my successes. Right. And I actually look at my career as like a series of mistakes that led me to things that I ended up working well, you know, so I appreciate that and I agree completely. And I think not enough people talk about that. I think it's an important topic. So let's talk a bit about the reason why I wanted you here. Right. So you know a little bit about what we're doing. Right. We're trying to help re. Kind of calibrate the way people look at the Chief Revenue Officer role and have companies have a much different perspective on how revenue operations work today in the modern marketplace, specifically in the areas where you need to integrate all these different functions. And you know, the reason why I was so attracted to your book and stuff is that you're. You're one of the few people like there's a bunch of people in the, let's call it LinkedIn ecosystem that I read and I'm okay. These people fall into the world of people who are philosophically aligned with me or I'm physically alike with them. I'd probably more or less. Less, more humbly. And so we seem to kind of be on the same page about the way we're looking at the world. Right. It's about. You're. You're one of four people that I think of.

Okay, appreciate that.

Yeah. Well, look, I don't know. I might be wrong about everything, but, you know, regardless, it's, It's. You fit into the model. And here's what I mean. You know, there's definitely a awareness right now which. So many things I want to ask you about. About a couple things. One is how you know the SDR model, right? And this kind of sales automation model is sort of creating other problems and it comes with costs. How the Chief Revenue Officer role needs to have a greater focus on the entire revenue funnel and not just sales, and how that issue is impacting companies and also how CEOs need to look at their revenue model their whole business differently today in order to grow and scale. You talk a lot about go to market strategies and how what those things. And I personally think most of those things fall under the purview of a CRO at a certain stage of a company. So if you don't mind, if you could just overview what's the core sort of general philosophy of not just your book but your business and how do you view the world today from the perspectives that I just referenced?

Yeah. So few things that come to mind. One is, and I recently talked about this on LinkedIn as well, is that I see most companies hire and fire CMO and CRO roles every 12 to 18 months in the hopes that that's going to fix their go to market strategy. And it is the most hilarious things to watch over and over again. And nobody's thinking about the cost it takes to onboard somebody new and the change that organization goes to. And everybody's just doing it because they just don't know what to do and they don't know what the next move should be. So you must not be working and something got to change and there's pressure from the board. So you got to do something to show that you are more in it and you are making toug decisions and letting go of people seems to be the easiest thing you could possibly do. And that's what you do. And I feel like that's one of the hardest lesson that I've learned over the period of Terminus and other companies that I've advised. And being on board of is like no, that's not your go to market strategy is not figuring out getting another CMO or CRO and see that's going to fix you. Go to market is a process, not a strategy, but a process. A strategy would be like you go on a weekend retreat and you come up with like the okrs and you figure out where you need to be. That's your strategy, your corporate strategy. But go to market is a process in the service of that strategy, which means you need to be ready to change and adapt to that on a daily basis, almost making decisions. Where are we going to partner or are we going to acquire? Are we going to hire salespeople are we going to go more on marketing? Are we going to do agency thing or are we going to go in Europe? Like all of these are go to market decisions. But as you said, a lot of times people would slim it down to SDR function or slim it down to the sales outreach activities, or slim it down to even product launches as a go to market launch. And it's way broader than that in the way I've interviewed and experienced in the last 10 years.

Yeah, that's so great. And I agree, I speak about this a lot, which you're articulating really well here is there seems to be this sort of almost symptomatic and tactical way that these companies are being led. There's very little, I don't want to say very little. But there's not enough systems thinking, strategy, thinking about how things fit together. Right. Much like you look at an engine of a car, which is a very complex thing. There's the carburetor and then there's the turbine and then there's the intake valve and then there's the, you know, I mean there's so many different parts. You certainly can look at the engine when it's broken and see which pieces. But when you're building an engine, you have to understand the way all those things work together to create the outcome you want. And I think that I don't know why. I'd like to hear your thoughts on why do you think this is like why is it that they're firing symptomatically the guy to get rid of them, that that'll fix the problem? Or this is a marketing issue they think, or this is a sales issue, they think, as opposed to system problem or a strategic problem, what do you think it is that's going on that's happening right now?

Well, there's probably a lot of things, but one thing that I feel pretty summarizes in this quote by James Clear that you may have heard about. And I love this quote. I actually talk about this with my family as a thing as well, but also in business is that you don't rise to the level of your goals. Because everybody has great goals. Everybody wants to have a great company. There's nobody saying I want to create the least profitable company in the world. Nobody says that I want to create a team that doesn't perform at a high performing. Nobody wakes up. So everyone wants to have very similar goals. If you put all CEOs in a room saying what do you want? You want to grow and, and to grow profitably you want to grow at scale, you want to be efficient. Like everybody's going to say the same thing. So then why is it. And his second part of the quote is really the reason for it. The first part is you don't rise to the level of your goals, you actually fall to the level of your systems. And that to me is the crux of this whole thing is that people, everybody has the goals, but they don't know what the system, what the framework is or what the, what is the way to ask questions, to prod and understand more. How do you make a set of decisions on and get your team truly aligned as opposed to being just right, just truly aligned on certain things? That is a mental framework that most companies lack. And without a framework, it's not a rigid framework, it's without a framework of mindset around what growth really means and what is market is or how do I think about efficient operations? These are all systems. This is not a very complicated thing. We make it complicated because we are just trying to make knee jerk reactions and decisions on a lot of these levels. So given the amount of money there is right now getting poured into companies, I think it seems much more what people are easily able to do. They think it's the hard thing, but it's actually they're making the easiest decision of letting go of people or doing certain things as opposed to fully jumping into it. So the quote around you don't rise to the level of your goals, but you fall to the level of your systems is almost something every company should have as part of their, their overarching strategy and conversation at their off sites.

I agree. I so agree. I think you're right. I mean that's a human condition, you know, because I certainly aspire to do a lot of things that my own systems are limiting me to do them. I think we can all say that, right? So, okay, so what might be then, more practically speaking, I guess a question for us to ask before I ask this question is what stage of an organization would you think that this sort of thing would be most effective for? Is it like the day I found an organization or is it after there's some level of complexity, when is the point of view or the perspective that you're espousing, when is it most impactful and utilized? From a practical standpoint, it just gets.

Increasingly hard as the company grows and more complexity comes in. I remember this conversation with the ex, the last CEO of HubSpot who gave a quote for the book for the move and he said look, it's like a product. Like when I asked what is the Go to Market to you? You've started the company from zero and you have taken all the way to public. So you've gone through all the phases of building a company. You have 100,000 plus customers, you're a billion in valuation, but you started with zero. So you have gone through it. And I asked him like, who owns Go to Market? That was a key question we did and asked as part of the research across all the CEOs, CMOs, venture capitalists interview, hundreds of interviews we did. And he said without blinking, Warren, without blinking, he said, I own it. And I'm like, come on Brian, like you know, you're the CEO of the company. I understand the buck stops at you. And maybe that's what you mean. But no, no. Who in your organization owns Go to Market? He's like saying, I want you to be very, very clear about this thing. There's only three things I as a CEO own. I own the vision for the company, which is I need to articulate that to my teams, to my employees, to my customers, to my partners, to my investors. I need to be the most articulate and most excited person about our vision where we. I have to do that a hundred times a day and I have to do that. That's my job. Second part is the culture. If you can get the right people and if you don't build a culture where people can feel thriving and feeling like they are valued, then we, no matter how great our product is, we're never going to be able to outpace everything that's happening in the market. But the third thing, which is he said the first two are sexy, the first two are fun, the first two are hard, but. But still, still kind of what people expect you to do. And you kind of have joy for those two things. The third that I wish he wished he wouldn't own it, but absolutely his responsibility is go to market. And that was very eye opening to me. He's like, yeah, I own Go to market.

Who?

And he asked this question, who is making decisions like acquisition versus partnership? Like how would anybody else make. Only I have view into all of these things. Who's going to make decision between where the budget goes and all. Like it is, like it all comes down to people. Again, make Go to market very myopic as you said in the opening. And he's like, no, no. It is a CEO's responsibility to make go to market decisions with team leaders to help them drive it.

Let's Talk about, it's really interesting because I mean, is this CEO's job to be the head of go to market or make go to market strategies throughout the entire lifestyle of the entire organization? Or is there a point where that CEO hands off that to somebody else? Because this is something I run into. I mean, my view would be that it's the Chief Revenue Officer's role to, you know, maintain and own the go to market because it's a revenue based sort of a function is to go to market. It's, it's all around sailing marketing and customer success, which is what the CRO's purview is. You're saying it's the CEO, which I agree the CEO sort of needs to be, you know, the senior sponsor of everything in a company. But you're saying specifically it's the go to market. That's a CEO's purview. What do you make the relationship between a CEO and a CRO in a let's say mature organization where there's, let's say over 50 million in revenues and there's a complexity level where CRO is really necessary.

We're experiencing that right now, even at terminus, literally right around those data points. And he obviously has experienced it at multiple levels and he's like, if the CRO, and this is also what our research showed. If the CRO truly owns marketing, sales and customer success for periods of time, typically most companies have in and out of like 12 months, 18 months. And people move around. Sometimes they have only marketing and CS or sales and marketing. So very few companies are actually practicing through CRO role based on everything that I'm seeing that they call people CROs, but they really don't give them all the CROs. But in his point of view, even the product is part of go to market, what new acquisition are you going to do? That is not what a CRO can make a decision on. Where else do you need to grow and scale? Should you go on an agency partnership model or do you want to actually do an acquisition position or do you want to build? A CRO won't be able to make that decision because they're trying to hit the numbers and quota for the month for the quarter and their job depends on it. So in many ways CRO is going to be an incredibly vitally important part of making go to market decisions. But it's still going to be a part of it. It's still going to be part of it. A lot of times the view that a CRO will have is probably the broadest of all and probably the most important of all. But still the CEO has to truly own across at least from. And I'm not a public company CEO, so I couldn't speak for him, but I'm using Brian's words for this. He's like, I'm a public company CEO. I can't imagine anybody else owning go to market, especially at this level. So it increasingly becomes complex and it is increasingly important to own it. Because in the early stage, Warren, as you know, you may just have one product and one SKU and one thing to sell in a one way the CRO can own that. Actually as a matter of fact, in the early days it would make sense for a sales leader to own it. You had five products and how they integrate. Now you got to have a product leader involved in making a lot of these decisions because the CRO is like, I don't know, you tell me what to sell. So CEO ultimately ends up becoming the person who has to make this call.

Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. Very interesting because this is a new perspective. So let's back up for a minute. For the purposes of. I'm sure everyone knows what this is, but you're definition of this would be very interesting. How do you define go to market?

Well, so it's a broader definition in the book. So I'll just read through it.

Yeah, yeah.

So one is the first part is go to market is a transformational process which we talked about. It's a process, it's not a strategy. A lot of people keep talking about strategy. No, it's a corporate strategy. As a strategy, go to market strategy. It actually is a misnomer. Go to market is a process and I think there is a huge mindset shift in it as we, as we talked about. So it's a transformational process and it is all about accelerating your path to market. So whatever market it is, it is regional, international, different products, services. It's really a path to having great market space. And then you're doing that with high performing revenue teams. And this is the part where we are now, you know we talked about in line on is the revenue team has to be. It's not a sales or marketing or only cs. It is sales, marketing, CS and product. All of that really involves those are your product actually is big part of your revenue team. And ultimately your customers would never say oh, your marketing sucks or your sales sucks. They would say your company sucks if you're not giving them a connected customer experience. So to say it out fully Go to market is a transformational process for accelerating your path to market with high performing revenue teams delivering a connected customer experience. So that's the fullest definition of it and I'm glad you called that out because when you talk when we, nobody's going to remember this. So it's in the book to take a look at it. But the reason it makes sense is because once you say that definition, everybody takes a step back and say, okay, so who do you think should own this transformational process of path to market with bringing high performing revenue teams together to create a connected customer experience? Who in the company should be responsible for it? And when you pose it that way, I think the role of a CEO starts emerging as the true contender for it.

Look, no one can argue. I think you're right. I think that it's interesting because there's so much has to do with stages because you said it before. Right. So you have a lot of different situations but typically the ones you and I probably encounter most are these sort of founder led companies. Right. Someone who created something or they have engineering expertise and they built something that's really great for the marketplace and they have some business sense and they want to bring it to market. So they have that one product. Like you said, it's simple enough. They get some customers as they're pre revenue at this point. They're just trying to get customer fit. They want to find out if their product actually solves the problem. They want to identify the people that are going to buy it. They want to identify the people that this makes the most sense for. That's the product market fit component which I know never ends but it's sort of the beginning part where at least you know where your, your target is. Right. Your, let's call it your, what do you call it again? Not your, not your tam.

Yeah, trm. Total relevant market.

Total relevant market. Well let's talk about that for a second. Yep. So what's your distinction between the total addressable market and total relevant market?

Yeah, it's a big distinction in many ways. So when you think about let's define the stages for sake of everybody listening in. So in the book, based on the research we found that most companies are in these three stages. Problem market fit, Product market fit and platform market fit. So the 3P's problem product platform and you express just shared the whole problem and product. But there's a third stage, the platform market fit, which is literally the place everybody wants to end up at the end of the day to do fit. And we could talk about why. But in the early stage of problem market fit, you are just trying to get a pulse for somebody to buy your product and you'll be fine because you're trying to figure out is the problem real, is somebody going to buy it, is their market big enough? You're just testing it out. So yes, you're going to try. It's founder led to your point. And at that point you're probably just looking to grow ARR your annual recurring revenue. Just basic.

You don't even think I show somebody that there's someone buying it on a relatively consistent basis and you know, you can show that there's some predictability to it.

Right. It's simply that. And you can probably get to a million, 2 million, 5 million revenue just in that stage. As a matter of fact, our research showed Warren, which was very shocking and surprising to me. I'm curious if it is for you. We saw that you could be a $20 million company and still be a problem market fit company.

I don't question that at all. That makes perfect sense to me. I think that's probably the case because you're talking about this in a way that probably a lot of the people that are in market don't think about it. They may not make that distinction, but they probably are in that distinction without really being aware of it. They may think that they've got product market fit, but in fact they really haven't done the diligence they can to certainly determine if the problem is in fact one that is as defined as they think it is. As a matter of fact, I'd say that's a problem in that you probably see this better than me. People in their own mind jumping ahead stage when they really are in fact in an earlier stage of that process and they're operating like they're in product market fit stage when in fact they're.

Not all the time. As a matter of fact, the reason, the telltale signs, if you will, of that are you in a problem market fit or product market is quite simply are you selling the same stuff over and over again? Are you servicing the same use cases? If the answer is Yep, we got 80% of our customers at the same exact use case, then you are clearly in a product market fit. But if you reach $20 million, but every time it's a customized solution, you got to put integrations in place, there's.

Some degree of sort of being a little besieged spoke every time, then that's.

What makes it your in the problem market. Fit. Because you truly can't add bodies and scale to anything like that. To be in a product market fit, you at least have to answer that, all right, 80% of the time I know what the size of my deal is going to be, how long it's going to take, who's going to buy, what stage they're going to be in those. That's what makes businesses product market fit. That's what's repeatable because you can hire more salespeople to do the same thing over and just keep expanding and doing.

Makes perfect sense. Makes perfect sense. So. So let's talk about the stages. So now you're in the product, the problem market fit, which is like you said, now we're trying to find out how to identify that really specific problem that we know has this quantifiable value for the customer at this price. Repeatedly, right?

Yeah. And then that's when you do that and you see 80% of your deals follow that particular model. Then you are in a, you could be a $500 business and truly be in a product market fit. But you could still at the same time, if you don't have repeatable use cases, that's the key phrase, the use cases and repeatable use cases and you're doing bespoke, then that's where a lot of people fail and miscategorize themselves into product market fit just because of the revenue numbers they might be in and at that time. So in the from a go to market perspective, in the early stage, probably market fit, really what you care about is ARR. Because you're just trying to sell more and get more advanced. When you get to product market fit, the real thing, that, that, that is what, that causes companies to have this value of debt that will pull them back. That will never let you be a product market fit company. And we'll talk about that in a second. Is grr. Right. Your gross retention rate. You now got a bunch of companies, let's say 80% of the people are buying. So you already got the buying motion. Right. But you're not able to retain them. You're not able to show ROI to them. They love what you're doing. They get excited about it. They love your marketing, love your sales. But when it comes to renewal, they're like, don't know how to show ROI to my boss. And a lot of companies fall into this romanticizing event of their life. It's like we're at 10 million, awesome. And they have a big trough coming to them with a $3 million not renewal. So GRR is really, that's what they should be watching at. And to your point, a lot of companies start watching it too early. Unless you have a couple of years or one year of customers on your product, you won't really measure that. So GRR becomes really important. And then from there on you go to platform market fit, which is the most curious, most amazing place for companies to go because that's what, what it means is twofold. One, you're actually going from a single product company to multi product company, which is why you're a platform now by the way. Warren, I see a lot of people, they launch a company, we are a revenue platform. I'm like, you are a feature on an Excel spreadsheet, like you know, you know, staff calling yourself a platform. So it's very, very sad when I talk to founders to tell them the truth around that. But you know, platform means you have more than one products to sell now. And at least one of the products is your product market fit. And the other one, now you're figuring it out how if it becomes a platform. But also this is the exciting part, the second fold of this thing is the market. Until now in problem market and product market, your market was pretty much still the same. You're still figuring out in the same, let's say you're selling to the marketing organizations, you're still selling to marketing. But then at this point when you have go from product to platform, you also get, you earn the right to expand your market, which is what we see with Salesforce and Hubspots of the world where they were selling, Salesforce was selling to sales and they earned the right with their platform to increase the market so they could sell to marketing, sales, customer success, developers and all that stuff. You don't start there, but you end up there because that's where you start feeling the most important metric in SaaS, which is the NRR, the net retention rate. So probably market fit. You think about ARR and if you can get that going, then you can get to product market fit which gives you grr. That's what, that's the monster you need to be thinking about the behind the door. And then as you move towards platform market fit, the big monster that you need to really make sure that it doesn't eat you up is your nrr.

Got it. That's great. Really helpful. So I suspect, and I know because I read your book, that there are processes and systems that companies can put in place to help ensure that those things are being looked at. Properly and companies are being managed effectively against those growth stages. If you don't mind, just kind of describe a bit like what some of those things look like. If I'm a founder of a company or I'm a CEO of a company, or even a CRO of a company, which is probably appropriate for this conversation, or what that relationship is to those processes and the systems and what are they?

Yeah, I mean I'll just point to the MOVE framework. I think that's the best thing we have seen at work, I've seen in board meetings, now I've seen in decks of companies and presentations. So it's fun to watch this, but the MOVE framework is very simple. And Warren, when we started the research for this, we interviewed so many people and we had about 51 questions that we were asking people as part of it, like who owns it? What do you mean by GTM? What are the metrics? All these things. And it came down to, thankfully for you, me and everybody in the audience came down to these four questions that everybody is asking. And if in the answer for this by the way, are going to be different based on the stage of your business, but the questions are the same. That's the beauty of it. The questions are the same but the answers will be different. And we'll walk through what that means in a second for the stage of the business you're in. So the four or the MOVE framework really is about who you should market M for market. Your second is operations. What do you need to do to manage it effectively, operate effectively your business? The O, where is the rev ops and marketing ops, sales ops, all those comes in place the velocity, which is the common question we all ask when can we scale? When can we scale faster and how do we do that? Right. So that's the velocity, which is in the book we go in detail around how do you figure out your velocity factors for employee ramp, technology, ramp, sales ramps, all those things and expansion, which is all about where can we grow the most. So market, operations, velocity and expansion. And as an example, you think about operation, let's just take that as an example, when I said the questions are the same but the answers are different, operations wise. In the early stage that we talked about in a problem market fit, you might just need a finance person might be doing all of your operations or maybe you have a marketing operations at tops and that's pretty much it. That's all you needed to run your single product, just figuring out solution for it. So that's all metrics you might need so the question is still how do I operate effectively? Hire a finance guy or an ops person to do it. As you get to a product market fit question still remains, how do I operate effectively? Well, the answer for that one would be, well at this point you need to figure out if you can have sales and marketing ops. That's when most companies hire sales ops, marketing ops, sales enablement, all of these people to align marketing, sales, conversations. Because this is where you're doing probably ABM more than ever before. And then as you go to platform market fit, you ask the same question, how do I operate effectively? This is the stage where most companies would have, if not should have revenue operations. Because that's really when you have multiple products. And you need to be able to look at a go to market dashboard to see how each product is doing, not have every different silo reporting on their numbers. You want a centralized way of reporting, understanding, tracking and supporting those numbers. So questions still the same, but the answer changes based on the stage of the business.

That's interesting. So what I'm hearing you say is that because I believe too that the sort of, let's say event trigger for a CRO is a point at which there's marketing, sales and customer success complexity where silos are starting to be created and a CRO needs to sort of set systems up for those three functions to start operating together. And that's when I think even, maybe even some minor rev ops activity needs to be taking place because there's data that needs to support the three of those functions working together and there needs to be somebody doing that. You're saying this is interesting. I never really thought about this. You're saying that the CRO appointment, it aligns well with a product market fit.

Stage 100% at least in my view.

It makes perfect sense to me. I'm curious to know what do you think? And it's probably impossible to answer, but I'm saying generally in your research, what size of a company is usually at that stage, how much revenue are we talking about usually?

Now that's exactly where my head goes when I think about these is like I think sub 10 million is really a bad place if you're less than $10 million to hire too many C level people. A CMO, a CRO? I would say unless you're a co founder, you don't need a C level title. You need, I think about people as dreamers, doers and drivers. That's my mental framework of it. You talk about frameworks. I love, love frameworks.

Me too.

So early stage, you have a bunch of dreamers and early doers. That's what you need. You have a dreamer founders who are trying to do and you need a bunch of doers to test different things and do it. You don't need drivers because your dreamers are already driving a whole bunch of things. And then at Some point about 10 million to 15 million, you come to a point where all of a sudden you have a marketing. You only had sales, but now you have marketing and now you have customers. So you need customer success. All of a sudden things that work stop working and you need to figure out what's going on. All of a sudden your sales cycle becomes longer because you're increasing the size of your deal and your investors are saying that increase your acv, increase your acv. So you're increasing it, which pushes you into, from mid market to enterprise. And you're like, I don't even have a product that supports that. So you go through all that and then you all of a sudden the competitor monster pops in that you did not think about. And then Covid hit like all of these things hit. And then you're like, okay, I need an adult in the room who could work on the sales thing so I don't have to think about territory and quote undate meant and making sure people are saying the same stuff. And there's a first call deck. Like all these things that you go through, it's impossible to for a founder, early stage leaders to continue to do that like after 10 million. So 10 million is really where it becomes interesting.

Yep, I agree. It's great. You're confirming a lot of things that I've said, I'm assuming. And it makes a lot of sense. I think that there's a inflection point, you know, or critical mass point at around that much money where a company of that size needs certain functions in place with layers. And those layers, they bring levels of complexity that you can't manage anymore. You need somebody to step in who understands all that stuff. So then I guess my next question to you would be, so you're talking to a CRO who is being put into that situation. So you've got a CRO who's being hired. Let's say it's a 15Mrr. 15Arr company, 15 million. They're the first CRO of the company and their job is to do what you and I just described. What might be some of the things that you'd say to a CRO in that position that would Be helpful for them to be looking out for, thinking about to succeed and not be like you. And I said in the beginning, the guy that gets fired 12 months later because the CEO is not happy anymore. What's the right. Not right, but what are some of the things and functions and methods and strategies that they can employ to ensure that they kind of break through that two, three year mark and succeed in the role?

Well, I got three S's talking about frameworks, I'm all about frameworks. So the three S's that, that I would say people should write down if they get a chance to listen to it while they're in their office or something. I think it's been, it's paramount for them to at least have these three. One is set expectations at 10 million and between 10 to 15 million or 15 to 25, you are going to be thrown into a whole bunch of things. Somebody's adding a new product, you have new money coming in, you're hiding 15 people. All of a sudden you're going to be in all world, all things and all while all doing all that stuff. You need to hit quota. So it just becomes really, really hard to do it. So you set expectations like when I'm coming in, I'm not going to change everything in 30 days like that. Like everybody forgets that you know the timeline. So set pace, set expectations. And constantly, like almost every week you gotta set expectations of the board.

I would imagine you mean set them up management and set down management. But it's mostly up, right?

Mostly up. Mostly up. Because the rest of the people are expecting change and everything to happen. But they will be fine with that one. Because you're still at a much smaller size company. They're expecting the change is constant. But upper man, because everybody's like, oh, we're gonna have an adult in the room and they're gonna just take care of everything.

Oh my. Yeah, forget about it.

In a lot of times we put into like hey, help us with the messaging because you need to sell. So you end up becoming the gotcha guy for everything. So set expectations very much so. That's the first second is simplify because at this point everything is complicated, everything is overdone, everything is probably not clear. The pricing, the packaging, the way people go about it. People are just doing willy nilly at this point. You probably have heroic salespeople who do it get over you over the month. And now you gotta simplify stuff so you can have some frameworks, have some scalability, you know, some, some, some framework to create some repeatable process. So simply try to. The goal is to not complicate, to simplify. That's you got to really think about like my job is to simplify, not complicate stuff because that's what the other people hate. Like when, when, when somebody with a C level comes in is that, oh, they're going to complicate? No, no, you need to take the red tape out. You need to simplify things. And the third is that you need to run. You need to start setting foundations to have a scalable company. That's your job. At that point it's like, how do I scale this? What do I need to scale this? Do I need to have sales enabled now, right now as opposed to six months from now time? Go ahead and hire. You need rev ops in order for you to know what really is going on. So you need to hire people for scale as opposed to just hiring bodies on other salespeople just for getting to a number. You need to make those trade offs now because later on it's going to be just complicated. So set expectations, simplify everything and build everything from a scale perspective. Make those decisions early.

Excellent. Okay, great. Now, conversely, I'm the CEO and I'm hiring my first CRO. What should a CEO be thinking about in regard to placing and appointing their first Chief Revenue officer at that stage?

Oh man, it's probably similar, but they're going to struggle with that for sure. Because the pressure, I think most people don't empathize with the pressure a CEO really has. I think it's a point where CEOs typically have a ton of pressure. Actually they're the most likely to be fired person and scared person in the company. Like most CEOs will never admit that. I have no problem admitting that. As I said, when you are in a founder CEO role, you are actually scared almost. You're fearful of what's going on. You try to create this, this larger than life Persona for yourself that you get it and you're cool and then you're like at midnight staring at the wall, trying to figure out what's going on, what's wrong. Like I've been there, I hope I'm talking to somebody there. So I feel like you're in that. It's a very vulnerable position, quite frankly. So when you're hiring this, I think it's very easy to almost do the opposite of. It is like breathe so heavily like, okay, we got a CRO now he or she is going to take care of all of it. And that's just not going to happen. It's just going to take time.

So you need to like a managing expectation sort of thing.

Same thing. You have to go through the same exact mode. If you can manage expectations, if you can prioritize the most important thing that you can do for your CRO or any direct reports, as a matter of fact, prioritize the most important things they need to do that quarter so they just have a clear plan to do it. Otherwise that's where Monday morning, do this, Monday afternoon, hey, about that Monday evening, the person is already like, okay, what am I doing here? So help prioritize, help the clarity around these things.

Yeah, it's great. I would ask this, it's probably impossible to answer this question definitively, but generally, what should a CEO expect the CRO to do at that stage? What are the things they can realistically count on happening as opposed to, like you said, dreaming of happening?

Yeah, you're right. It's a very hard question. And different companies would need different things. Like for example, if your company that's going to be enterprise ready, that's what you want to build, then the expectations from the CRO is like, well, are the people over here, are we hiring the crew that will help us get ready? And there's probably a lot of dependency on the product and whatnot. But if you're doing a PLG motion where you're a product led growth company, that's what you're building and the CRO's job then becomes very different. It's not about closing, doing inbound and outbound on all those things. You expect marketing to drive the PLG motion for you, the product to do it by itself, so that sales is all about okay, we need to convert more, faster and at a higher value. How do we do that? So it depends on where it obviously is, but it's a cop out answer in some ways.

No, no it's not. I gave you that out when I first asked it. And I understand that it's a tough one because what I'm thinking like is because you said something in your first response which I think is true and that is there is an unrealistic expectation of what I believe a lot of CROs are stepping into in these roles in terms of what it is that the CEO wants or maybe believes is going to be happening now or is going to be possible now with this new person. The advice I give my clients who are aspiring CROs or CROs who are going to these roles is like you said, it's not even so much just setting expectations. I take it a little bit deeper. It's really more. You got to have a really clear upfront agreement with your boss, your new boss, in terms of what's possible, what's not possible, what's achievable, and what are the desired outcomes. And the four things I talk like frameworks too, is you need to have my view, you need to have authority, the autonomy, the resources and the Runway to be able to execute as a CRO, or else you're going to be strangled and unable to do the things you need to do. But those four things need to be matched up against what the expectations that you agreed to. Right. So do you have to have both? Right. And I think the failure. I see reason why a lot of these situations that come up, the one like you mentioned when we first started, is they don't do this. And so then it becomes the CRO's fault. Like this guy doesn't know what he's doing and I got to get rid of him and that sort of thing. But that was because this upfront agreement, or like you said, setting expectations process wasn't deep enough and detailed enough so that there was a way for them to build a framework for how to work together. So that it may even be that if that's done at the point at which maybe normally the CEO would think about firing the CRO, he could see that as. In fact, we're exactly where we said we were supposed to be. Nothing's broken. It's just that my expectations were more on point, so I was actually expecting it to be this way. That's a different framework, which I think I'm trying to get things to work towards.

You know, you're so right, Warren, because there's also two things that I wrote down as you were saying. One in the book, the move, you see, there's a squiggly line. It's not a straight line. Meaning that no company, no matter how.

You look at this sort of thing, doesn't happen. Right.

Doesn't happen year over year. Yes, Terminus. We grew like 1 million in the first, 5 in the second year 50. Yes, we grew as a straight line. If you look year over year, but if you look quarter over quarter or month over month, you will see bunch of and then drop and up and all these things happening that people don't give enough credit for as to what the makings of the company is. The one, it's never a straight line. It's a squiggly line. So typically when you hire a change agent like that, there's going to be probably a dip that is going to happen in the first quarter before it actually gets better. And imagine a CRO walks in, all right, we have a CRO and the first quarter you have a dip like so your confidence level is down. People are like, what is he doing? We're not. Or she doing like, we're not where we need to be. So that. But that's setting expectations like, yeah, there's likely that there will be a dip because you now are re architecting a lot of things that were not even architected to be begin with. So that's one. And the second part and goes back to the earlier part. Who owns go to market? If the CEO owns go to market, it is not your CRO's job to own go to market. And I keep saying that, especially as you grow as a bigger company. And again, the part of the go to market which includes CRO shouldn't be giving the direction of the product. What needs to be done. If that starts happening, then the CRO is doing a CEO's job and then maybe the CRO should be the CEO. Right? Like there needs to be business leaders. A CRO is a business leader, A product leader is a business leader. CM is a business leader specializing in those skillset. But they only have certain view of the puzzle pieces. There's only a certain view to it. So a lot of times when a CEO hires the CRO, they're like, okay, he or she's going to take care of all my. Take care of all my ugly kids and all those things. Just that's what you end up doing. And all the skeletons. Here you go. Watch all of them clean up, put them. No, that's. That. That is the reason why CROs fail, because they get overwhelmed too early. They're not prepared for the dip as a company and you have over expectations on it and now all of a sudden you're backtracking.

Yep, yep, I get it, I get it. It's so true. So I talk about that upfront. A contract I call it, you know, which is I think is key.

Oh, good.

Yeah, yeah, it's really key. So I'm gonna a couple more questions before we sign off because we're running here close to time. One thing I want to know is what are you up to now? I mean, you mentioned already there's this project you're working on. You've been a little bit sort of quiet about it. Maybe you don't want it to get into too much detail. But is there anything you can share about what you're up to now?

Well, I mean, I'm next. You know, we're just launching the company we're figuring out right now. So that's why some of it is like you're figuring it out. And this time I'm doing it differently. Like last time I raised over 100 million to build Terminus. We built it. It's a new category we built and it was clearly a product. And then there was a whole thing around it. Now we're actually. I'm thinking of starting doing something completely opposite. I'm not going to raise a dime. Like, I don't want to do that. Go completely different to that. Start with service. So consulting, advisory practice around go to market. So we start with that. Like, let's let the cash, let the customer.

Sounds like what sounds that I'm doing. Yeah, same thing. Yep.

Yep. Start there and then figure out what the real product is going to be. Because there are ideas of product. But I don't want to just go raise 10 million and then start and just do it. I want to practice what I preached in this book and see how we go. So there's a lot of things that I'm trying to figure out. It's not there yet to be fully. Fully audited, but I get it. It's going to be go to market.

Well, everyone's excited about it, I'm sure. And then lastly, I want to talk a bit about how people can get ahold of you and they can listen to you and a little more about your book so people can have an action item to follow up on some of these great things you're talking about. So the name of your book, as we already discussed, is called Move. That's M O V E the four question Go to Market framework. You can find that on Kindle and all the other Amazon platforms, I'm sure. And then you also have a podcast, which I listen to all the time. Flip my funnel. I'm assuming that's everywhere, right? Spotify, Apple, et cetera.

Yep, you can. And we just renamed and rebranded that to Move recently. Okay. Yeah. Because now it's about Go to Market and how companies can figure out their next move. So it's the same podcast. If you look for Flip, Phone or Move, you should be able to figure it out and find it. And maybe one thing that I will leave everybody with is, you know, every time I do this, I hope there's something that people take away with. And so lately I've been doing this where, like, you know, just DM me on LinkedIn. Tell me, what is the one thing that gave you an idea or that changed something for you that would be useful that you're going to practically use? Because I try to make sure that every conversation I have is practical enough where people can just go do something about it. And so that's the only gauge of my time and hopefully respecting you and your time and the audience's time. So just DM me on LinkedIn, let me know, and I will send you a copy of my book.

That's a great request. And I'll tell you what I got out of it. I mean, aside from a lot, the big takeaway I took was I love this setup framework for a CRO when they first get into the job. The, you know, set expectations right and then simplify and then scale. And that's a really wise, really great way to look at that, that entry point. So I appreciate you saying that. And you've also, I'm happy to say, you confirmed a couple of things that I've been thinking about. And so I'm not an idio. That's really. That's always nice. But, look, I can't thank you enough. It's so great talking to you, and I'm sure we'll be talking more and I'll be looking out for you. And thanks for being here.

Absolutely. Thank you, Warren, for having me. And I hope everybody got at least one thing from this talk.

You got it. All right.