Navigating PLG and the Evolution of the CRO Role with Kristen Habacht (French Subtitles)

Foreign. Hi, I'm Warren Zenna, founder and CEO of the CRO Collective, and welcome to the CRO Spotlight Podcast. This show is focused exclusively on the success of Chief Revenue Officers. Each week we have an open, frank, and freeform conversation with top experts in the revenue space about the CRO role and its critical impact on B2B businesses. This podcast is the place to be for CROs, sales and marketing leaders who aspire to become CROs, and founders who are looking to appoint a CRO or want to support their CRO to succeed. Thanks for listening. Now let's go mix it up. So welcome to this episode of the CRO Spotlight Podcast. This is Warren Zen. I'm the founder of the CRO Collective, and I'm really excited today to have Kristen Hayback here. She's the CRO of Typeform, and Kristen and I met at an event where I saw her speak, and I was like, wow, this is a great speaker. I love. I love great speakers. And she also had some really smart things to say about the role she's in the CRO role. And she also spoke really cool about plg motions of type form, which I thought was a really interesting topic. And we end up having a couple other conversations. I thought, I definitely want to have her on the podcast. So welcome and thank you for being here, Kristen.

Thank you.

I'd love to hear a little bit more about how did you end up becoming a chief Revenue officer? Like, how did your ascendancy go? Because I asked this question from this context. A lot of what I talk about with my audience is, how do people become chief revenue officers? And, you know, what's the pathway that people took? Because a lot of people want to become one. So that's sort of like the context.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I. Well, I started my career not in sales, and mostly I started my career just with someone who'd give me a job. So I was an office manager for a tech company in Milford because I ended up in Connecticut because my husband got a job here. And as you can imagine, it wasn't a giant tech scene. So I honestly don't know how I even managed to find, like, one of the probably handful of tech companies to be at. But I stumbled into that job and. And I didn't know what I wanted to do. And within maybe a month or two, the CEO was like, hey, you can kind of pick a path with us with finance, and our CFO would love to mentor you and coach you, or our head of sales feels the same. So which path would you like to go down. And I was also super fortunate, I think, because even though there's not a ton of women in sales, the head of sales, there was a woman. And so I kind of thought, well, I'm really bad at math. I don't want to be in finance. And I feel like this woman could probably teach me a lot of stuff. So I ended up picking that sales path. And then from there, I started to build out my career, and I really just sort of wanted to be her when I grew up. I wanted to be this, like, VP of sales. I wanted to, you know, have the respect of the team. And so she kind of modeled this leadership position for me, and I didn't even know what a CRO was. And I also think CRO wasn't really a common.

Nope.

Thing. Like, nobody was CRO, right? There was a cmo, there was your VP of sales, and there was your cmo, and that tended to be it. And so I stayed in touch with her over the years. She left, I left, we went different places, and she's the first person I ever knew that became a CRO. Then later on, like, through her path, and I was like, what is this job? Like, we met up at an event, and she was telling me, well, you know, it's like, kind of like the best parts of sales and marketing and owning the business number and having this, like, stay at the table for the revenue teams. And again, like, I'll age myself. Right? Not common yet. At the time.

Yeah, it still. It still isn't, honestly. I mean, I totally get it that that's actually impertinent to the conversation.

Yeah.

Sort of recency of the role is really critical, actually.

Exactly. Right. Because it's not like I set out in my first SDR job to be like, well, I'll be SDR one day, because the thing didn't exist. So, um, so I just spent some time getting to know what she was doing, and then I started to notice that it was popping up and it was taking different journeys. Some people were from marketing, some people were from sales still, I think, true to that. Um, but I. I really wanted to have a seat at the table. And I knew I was never going to be the CFO or, you know, the cmo. I didn't study marketing in school. I didn't do any of that. So it felt like this was my only path to kind of be a C suite person. So. So I, you know, became a sales manager and a VP of sales, and always kind of with that path of hoping to be A CRO to have that seat there. I didn't get it until recently. So I went through. I was the VP of sales for Trello, and then I was head of kind of sales for enterprise sales for Atlassian. And I knew once I was done with big company, I wanted to go back and part parlay that experience into maybe getting a CRO gig. And so it finally came to me at a company called Shogun after I left Atlassian, where it was a PLG motion. And I think especially in PLG, CROs do have a lot of opportunity because it's not a traditional sales motion, it's not a traditional marketing motion. To some extent. It really is something where those funnels get blurred. And I think it makes a lot of sense in that world to have someone overseeing that whole bucket of revenue. And so that was my first CRO job. And I would say of the people I know, and I'm sure you've talked to far more CROs than I have, but it's never one size fits all. There's a million different flavors of what you actually own as a CRO, what scope you actually have. For me, it was always important to have all of the revenue team, meaning sales success support, which I consider part of the revenue engine and marketing channel, all those groups.

Got it. So a lot of thoughts to unpack. I want to talk to you about. Yeah, interesting, right? So you said, like a few things there that are common themes in my world. One is that what's the pathway to get your job as a CRO? And yours was you saw sales as the way to go, which I understand. I mean, it tends to be the pathway that most people take. We'll kind of put a bookmark on that conversation for a second.

Yeah.

And the other one, as you mentioned too. Well, there already is a cmo, Right. So this is another thing that we're battling with right now as the sort of C suite profile changes over the course of time, you know, and I think old models of how to run a business revenue operation are shifting, you know, and so the other thing you mentioned too, is this idea that A, that the role is new, which means it's sort of undefined, and B, you said there's many different flavors of CROs. Right. So I want to talk about all this stuff because this is sort of like where the problem is, is in my view. Right, you've got. Let's call them, let's say, because you said something else, which I think is really critical. It's not just the stage. You're at in your company, but it's also the type of business you're in. You're in a PLG motion business, which is a totally different thing than someone who has like a software plus a service or maybe just a service business. But that being said, I'm going to propose something to you. I want to get your thoughts on this. So you look at a cmo, okay? Your typical cmo, Someone who's chief marketing officer for any company. I don't care whether they're PLG or, you know, sales led or service led, doesn't matter. Their function still is relatively the same. They oversee marketing. Right. I mean, they may have to modify to a degree the way they deploy that because the business is different, but they still, their function is clear. I mean, no one would not say they run marketing.

Yeah, right. Yeah, exactly. Yes.

Okay. Okay. So then why is it then, in your view that the CRO role doesn't have the same degree of concreteness, you know, or integrity, let's say, no matter where they are and why they. It seems almost like, in a way. I don't want to use this word, but I will. It's almost like gelatin. You can make it taste any way you want to some degree. And why in your view, do you think that's the case?

Yeah, well, I think in part, the most simplistic answer is that there's no team called revenue at a company. Right. And I think when you think about cfo, they have the finance team, maybe they have other teams marketing as marketing. Right. There's no revenue teams. And I think revenue is the entire lifeblood of the business. So where do you draw the line between what is revenue in a CRO's world and what is revenue and some other departments world? And so I think to some extent that is part of it. But I think there is also. I'll give the spicier take, which is, I think there's a hesitation still to let sales, somebody who's considered sales, which I think revenue usually is considered sales, like, run the show or be at that table, you know, And I think there is like, you got to watch salespeople. You got to think about salespeople, and they always want their commission plans. Like, someone's got to be a check and balance on the salesperson. You never hear other groups get spoken about like that to some extent, but we've all agreed it's okay to talk about sales like that. And so I think when we go into chief revenue officer, it's a little bit harder to define who they are, what exactly they have. I think that's why some people do have a chief sales officer title. It's not as popular. And I do think it sort of comes back a little bit to that bias maybe people have against sales inside of the organizations. And then that mix of, like, what is revenue, what is sales, what. What is marketing?

Okay, lots I want to talk about there. So you're saying it's a profile issue, that there's this sort of stigma, that people who run sales have a certain mindset that they're not looked at as strategic leaders because they're thinking more about kind of going out there and spearing an animal and bringing it home, as opposed to someone who's thinking more about, like, operational integrity and strategy. Is that. Is that. I mean, I'm not saying that's your definitive answer, but that's what I heard you say to some degree.

I think that is an element of it. I think that is an element of it. I think the other one is it's hard to define what a revenue team is. And that's why, you'll see, I think at least that's why you see sometimes CROs have marketing, sometimes they don't. Sometimes they have customer success, sometimes they don't.

Exactly, Exactly. Exactly. So this is interesting because, you know, you're the first person that sort of said that. I mean, I don't disagree with you, by the way, but I would say.

A lot of trauma.

No, no, it's all right. No, you're. You're right. I don't think you're wrong. I think there is no question. I mean, having been in sales my whole career, I've actually been in marketing, too. But having been in sales primarily, and I think certainly perceived as a salesperson throughout my career primarily, I think I know that. And I just wrote about the same problem. You know, I remember a story you know, I wrote for this agency. We had a digital sort of agency kind of thing. It was interesting where I worked for these big. One of the big holding companies, and the whole companies would make these acquisitions of businesses, and sometimes they were sort of products in a way. Like, agencies got into a lot of weird areas. When they started acquiring companies, they weren't always just services. Long story short, the company that was acquired was run by a separate CEO who ran that group. And because we were part of a holding company, we had access to all these accounts. I mean, it's a huge holding company. All the accounts were essentially our potential network for sales. So we were always Under a lot of pressure because it was like, you know, what situation does people have like you that you can go and make all these phone calls, all these account people in your own network and get meetings with people. So what are you doing? Do it, go get it done. And so we were at this event once for Diageo. It was like a big corporate event. Diagnosis was our client, everybody for every brand manager was at this room. You know, it's like every single major liquor brand manager, these are like, you know, your core, these are the people you're hunting every day. As a salesman and my boss, like, go out there man, get them. They're all right here. Go do your job. And basically what he did was by giving me that context and this ties back to what you said, he kind of put the word salesperson on my forehead and sent me out to go talk to all these people. And no one wanted to talk to me because why would they want to talk to me with that sort of attitude like get away from me, man. You just up. You put your hands in my pockets. And I think that that is the way it does occur, like if you're out there on the market that way. So let me bookmark that because I think the other part of it I think is aside from maybe a, call it like a characteristic, I think there's also a need. I think companies need people doing that to such a degree that they don't want somebody with a C suite title doing anything but that it's too important. So it's like why would I diversify my sales leaders role when it might take them away from getting us new customers? So I don't want them to. So I think there is this sort of two thing. One is eh, you're not the right person for this. And B, I really don't want you doing that, you know. And so what happens, I see the people I speak to, these are CROs who like you have the kind of awareness that a cheap chief revenue officer in its truest sense should be really running everything. Because it, and I would say I don't necessarily know if I agree with you. There's no such thing as a revenue team. I just think it just hasn't been designated as one. But there certainly is one. Yeah, but, but because there isn't a distinction as one. Yes. So winds up happening is they end up running sales maybe after five or six months on the job, all of a sudden they're really fined. At the end of the day, that's what they're being Measured against is new customer acquisition. They're like, I didn't sign up for this kind of job. I just left that job. So you're saying another thing, which is because of the fact that there's a CMO in place many times then they don't end up getting marketing.

Right.

And it's nothing more than just political. It's like, I'm not gonna fire Bob. He's had this job for four years. I'm not gonna do that to him. So let's just then work together and put them in the same room, see if they get along well. So I'm just curious, what might your thoughts be? Let's say you're a CEO now and you're running a company because you have, you have the chops for this now you're starting a company and you're going to put together a business. What would the sort of your view be of how the. Let's say you had the, you had the ability, the license, the freedom to recreate the revenue operation in a way that you thought made the most sense today. How would you structure it?

Well, I'm, I'm probably biased on this. I have given.

Well, you are. But I want your opinion.

Yeah.

I have Kristen on here and I want Kristen's opinion. So yes, I want your, I want your bias.

I'm looking for, I think especially in startups, right. Let's call it sub 150 million. I really think you need a strong CRO who understands how to manage an entire pipeline, meaning from awareness. And I. So I consider marketing in the pipeline 100%.

It is part of the pipeline.

Right. All the way through to retention, meaning customer success and recognizing the fact, because I think it's really important. Right. And I'll preach to the choir, I'm sure for a minute here, which is like those three, the top, the middle, the end of the funnel, retention, they are all one funnel because if suddenly one part of that drops, you have to compensate for it. Other places you don't just get to be like, well, I hit my number. Sorry we didn't have the number as the company. But that's not my world. Like if we're going to miss on retention, I better oversell. I have to make more than my number to make the number. Right. And I think somebody who can have the ability to look at it holistically like that, at that size company is needed. And I think marketing is mostly a revenue generating engine for that size company instead of a brand engine instead of a lot of the other Things, an events engine, maybe some of that, but ultimately all in the service of the top of the funnel. And so I think that if I were to build it again, I believe in the CRO, I really think you need to have a strong VP of rev Ops who sits in there, who understands the tools and the analysis because, you know, all, we all come from different paths. I'm not the best, you know, analyst, but I know that I need an analyst with me and that needs to be my partner in my ops role. You know, some people might have a really strong ops background and so they'll need a really strong, maybe director of sales or VP of Marketing to balance them out. Whatever it is for me, I need my VP of ops and I need kind of the leaders on those other pieces. But I want to look at that funnel holistically. And that's what I would recommend anyone do. Now, from a PLG perspective, it's increasingly important because that funnel, things come in, in and out of it, right? You might be talking to somebody and then they go self serve. They might self serve and then come back and need to talk to a salesperson. Like, you can't have it as clean. So I'm very biased to making sure someone's looking at that full funnel. But I think you don't need to start getting into, you know, my opinion, CMOs and some of that stuff until you're kind of past that, that sizing. It's just, it's. You need to be like a, almost CEO of the revenue at that stage.

Yeah, 100%. You, you, you are, in my view, the CEO. CRO is the CEO of the revenue operation. Right. There's no doubt. And I, I would say that I, in my experience, my conversations, very few people would disagree with what you just said. So here's my question then. If everyone agrees, why is it not done this way? What do you think the problem is? That is having it not be what I think. You just spoke what I'm telling you. 90% of people answer the question the same way, but yet 10 or 15% of CROs are actually doing. So what do you think's going on?

Well, some of it is what I think I said earlier, which is I do think sales has that. I think what I found at least, right. Is that oftentimes when someone says customer success or support, let's take those groups. Well, they can't possibly report into sales because that's what a revenue leader usually is considered. Right? Because they won't, they'll think about the revenue first instead of the customer experience first or instead of about whatever it is. And I think that comes back to there's probably some bad CROs out there. Just like there's bad anything.

Yeah, of course.

Probably have not thought about it. And I think the other thing is that specifically with marketing, which I think is different than those two marketing, you don't go to college for sales, you don't go to college for success or support, you go for marketing. And I think there is an element of like, I'm a anything.

Sure. Yeah, of course.

I probably have not thought about it. And I think the other thing is that specifically with marketing, which I think is different than those two marketing, you don't go to college for sales, you don't go to college for success or support, you go for marketing. And I think there is an element of like, I'm a trained marketer and I'm gonna, what, report to somebody who doesn't even understand that. And I think there is a little bit of that as well in the whole thing.

Yeah. So there's no doubt about it. There's a perception that there's this sort of weird unicorn out there that has all these competencies, and if I don't find somebody that has all those competencies, how are they going to possibly do this job?

Yeah.

And I think these are all bad ways of view. My view, their poor ways of viewing talent and how to run things. I think this is a whole other matrix I'm trying to put together is. You know what I mean? I have sort of a listing of what I think the core competencies of a CRO should be. But the better one is not just like, maybe making like a DNA string of all the things they can do, but more importantly is which of those ones are most important or vital. Right. Because like you said, and I'm like, you. You and I are very much alike.

Yeah.

I'm not a numbers person. I'm not. I'm not a finance person. You know, I'm not sitting in front of spreadsheets all day. Okay. And I know I've had a lot of arguments with people on LinkedIn about the fact that, you know, people saying, if you're a CRO, you have to know finance, you have to. You're going to be reporting into the board, you're going to be crunching numbers and making business plans. And I. There's. There's a lot of legitimacy to that. Right. I mean, I could say, yeah, okay, that makes perfect sense then. My question then is, okay, so what Are the other things that a CRO. These to be able to do aside from that? And what I always hear is. And I think my view, the most important thing is they need to have a holistic view of the business.

Yeah.

Whether they can do it all or not. Certain people are more strategic thinking than other people are. They just see the bigger picture. Okay. There's a certain. Just a brain of someone who is more of a philosophical business person. Right. That's one thing. But I would say the key is probably a combination of leadership and communication skills, because it's the job that you have to. Basically, you're the central person in the midst of a sea of functions and people. You got your CEO, you got the board, you got your marketing team, you got your customers. There's so many things that if you're not good at being able to handle all that, I don't care how good of a spreadsheet jockey you are.

Yeah.

You're not going to be good at this job. And I would say, you know, if I were to almost make a Jenga game where I, like, put on the board, like in a pile, like, all those qualities, which one. If you pulled out with, the whole thing fall apart. And I do think it's that one. That's my opinion, because you and I both know you can find somebody to run finance for you. I can hire someone who's a genius analyst and say, look, I need you to crunch some numbers for me. Is it optimal? No. But I wouldn't. I wouldn't sacrifice the other qualities for that because I need those more. So, again, I do think, like, you're making good points here, which is. I just think it's. If I would be so bold as to say, I don't know yet if leadership culture. And I would say that's a combination of both CEOs and boards. They're the people that really make these decisions, have enough of a. I don't want to say understanding because it's not the case. I think it's more of a willingness to say, okay, I know this makes sense. So I want to structure it this way. I think they think it's risky.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I agree. I think that probably is it. And I think the other thing. Right. You know, we don't have a clear path to treat. To teach people how to become CROs. And so I think there is a real, like, there you go. That's why there should be more people should engage in that. Because inside.

Pointing thumbs at myself.

Exactly. That's right. Yeah. To the viewers who can say. But, I mean, it is true. Right? There's any. I. No one sat me down and trained me how to do it. Nobody sat me down and taught me how to play nicely with all those other departments. And there is a little bit of an internal sales person mentality to, like, I go and I make demands. Right. I have demands of. Of products. I have. And it could feel like demands. Right.

And I think responsive generally.

Right, exactly. And I think if you're not doing it the right way, it can feel like, well, sales is dictating down things me. And it's like, no, it's a partnership, and we should be having these conversations. That's a hard. That's a hard skill. That is a soft skill. Right. No one's out there teaching that 100%.

So I have a client that's a CRO right now, and he's in the same spot you're in. Even though with my work together and for a long time and getting this job and advocating to the entire organization that the vital importance of the CRO being pointed this way and everybody agreeing. Right. Everyone has a long crossbow.

Yep.

This makes perfect sense. We're really on board with this. The resistance is still there. There's still, you know, this sort of reluctance. And the CRO is never going to find themselves, maybe not for another five years or so. I think it'll probably change.

Yeah.

In this position where they sort of being given that sort of authority, which, by the way, I think the four things they need CROs you to have is authority, autonomy, yeah. Resources. And Runway. And Runway is the hardest one to get because everyone wants everything done next month, not six months, but anyway, that's my opinion. But I'm saying, I think your point is well taken in that I think there's a reluctance and a resistance. Plus, you know what I think, too, is if I. This is another part of it, which I think is a weird political part. If I mandate that the chief Revenue officer is going to run the revenue team, well, then there's a potential ascendancy that I've cut off from people who may want to become C suite executives in other departments.

Yeah.

Like, what do you mean now there's no CRO role, CMO role here anyway. Well, then I don't want to work here because I want to be a cmo and my aspirations aren't me that. And I think there is. Title is. You know, people have. Understandably, they have egos and they want C suite positions because it comes with certain things. Which once we get there, we find it doesn't. You know, that's a whole, whole other conversation. But you know, it's all looks good and stuff, but there's a currency in the marketplace for the sort of thing that people want. And I get it and I don't want to deny that, but I think that it comes at a big expense. Sometimes when there's too many, I call it the C suite, traffic jam occurs.

Yeah.

So then your company now is much larger than a startup. I mean, you've got a nice size business now.

Right.

So were you there during a shift in those stages or did you come in at the point at which it was already pretty heavily established as a. More of a enterprise?

I came in well, I'm the as I think I'm pretty sure I'm the first CRO for Typeform. They had had a cmo, they had had a kind of VP of sales and they were at this inflection point. And so it's been a transformation inside the company. And it's been hard. Just, I mean, I'll be honest. Right, it's been hard. And I think specifically it's hard for marketing, especially having had a C and then have this move of like, hey, the next move for us is the CRO. I think there is sometimes a feeling of marketing's being consumed by sales. Even though I never position myself as sales, I position myself as revenue. You know, like I said, people think what they think. They know my background, they know that's generally what it is. And I think it is hard. I think now we're a year and a half in, I'd like to say I think people are seeing those changes and that they're making every. Everything better to some extent. Hopefully. In terms of, you know, I think there's a fear, especially with marketing, of like, well, we'll just become a performance marketing house. All she's going to care about is MQLs and all, you know, and I think now that they're seeing that that's not true. Right. Again, I understand the full funnel. I understand that there's a place for brand, but I think you have to do a lot of that trust building. So it has been definitely a transformation moment for us. I think there's other companies I've looked at. You know, Atlassian is a good example. When I was at Atlassian of they didn't have a CRO, but they had Jay Simons who was their, their president, but he had been there as a marketing hire and then grew into president I think there had already been an innate trust that he understood holistically how these pieces work together. I think it is different when you grow into that from when you're dropped.

Into it and your air dropped in. That's true. You're right. And that's. Unfortunately, you know, some of you. You said a lot of stuff there. It's really vital, is one. It's okay. So how does the CEO make the communication transition from one culture to another culture? This is part of the CRO readiness program that we do, which is, aside from all the operational stuff, it's just. It's really communication strategy first. So I look at it like this. Like, you know, the way I would describe it is, you know, you show your entire company in, like, some town hall picture of a, say, a kayak, or a better yet would be a canoe.

Yeah.

And you say, okay, so up to this point, we had a department called Back of Canoe, and we had apartment called Front of Canoe, and, you know, we need to just be Canoe. Okay. And so, you know, it doesn't make sense for us to have a KPI for the guys in the back of the canoe and a KPI for the guys in the front of the canoe. So we're just going to kind of now transform into canoe, and Kristen's gonna run the canoe.

Right.

Okay. Yeah. And I think everyone will sort of get the. Okay. You know, I guess this, you know, I could sort of maybe sacrifice my personal feelings for the reality. That does make sense. Because it does make sense.

Yeah.

And why should the back of the canoe have their own metrics that are irrelevant for the front of the canoe? It just doesn't make any sense. And that is almost precisely what is going on today. Okay. So if that's the case, then, you know, the CEO sort of, in my view, should have a meeting and say, okay, look, we've sort of evolved to this X stage, and here's where we've done a great job, and we're at this point, but now we've reached a inflection point which is well articulated, perfectly said. And we need to kind of grow and change, because in order for us to get to the next goal or the next level, we can't do this anymore. And so now we're going to have a CRO. And, you know, then if everyone can get into the whole, let's say, you know, canoe model.

Yeah.

One canoe model.

Right.

You could reiterate that enough that over time, people will start to get into it and realize that it makes sense. But if you don't, then people are going to always think they're still in the back of the canoe. They just have a different boss. And so I think there is this sort of thing. So, you know, again, I, I'm curious to know your thoughts on. Okay, so you're going through these growing pains, which I think are normal, by the way. It's fine, I get it. But you know, what would be, what would your advice be then? Let's say an incoming chief revenue officer who's airdropped into a situation. Same thing. What would some of the things you might say, hey, here are some, like three or four things that you could do to help make your transition better than.

Yeah, if you don't. I love the canoe. I wish I had that on my own. We. We had.

You can borrow it. It's totally.

I'm totally going to. We. We had a similar one, not quite to that example, but Typeform's done a lot in the last year talking about one funnel. We've talked about it for our customers and we've talked about it internally. And that basically is talking about the fact that your customers don't view, you don't view these points as disjointed moments. They don't come to your website and say, and I've now hit marketing, and now I've hit web, and now I've hit gated content. So I must be hitting the content. You know, they don't view it like that. Right, right. Customers don't. And if you think about your life.

They don't make these distinctions at all.

No, they don't. They don't. Right. It's. It. No one is like, well, I wonder how the social team got me to engage. And now, well, it's just not how it is. And so if you think about your own buyer experiences, you don't think like that. Our. Our customers don't think like that. And so really talking about the team of like, let's have customer centricity, let's think about the customer journey. This is also a big part of plg. Right. And let's think about how this should work for a customer. And if we think about that, we also think about, well, all those moments where you transition out. Are those as smooth as they could be? Are they artificially difficult? Because we've constructed departments that put these blockers here, different C level people that have put our blockers here instead of thinking about what that customer flow is. If your metric is around gated content, you need X amount of signups And I say, I don't care about gating the content, but let's just get people to use it because we need top of funnel awareness. I can do that because I can look at holistically what the best thing is for the business versus somebody feeling pressured to show performance for their individual world. And so at the end of the day, if this is working right, it should be better for your customer, should be better for your teams, ultimately. It should make growth easier in theory, along the way.

That's the overlay. I think, you know, if I would again, maybe my prescription here would include two things. It would include the canoe, which is more of an internal view. Yeah, right. We're in a canoe. And I think everyone get that. Maybe even there's three parts to canoe. There's like the marketing part of the canoe and there's the customer part of the canoe and there's a sales part. Yeah, but you could do that. I think people get it. Then there's the customer part, which is a different conversation, which is you make your point. Is so great. It's the customers don't care about our departments, so they give a shit about our departments. They don't think about it. So you know what's best for the customer. So, you know, the direction that I give to my clients is, you know when you're sitting around in a room and you're making revenue decisions, whatever they are.

Yeah.

There should be like a whiteboard or something on the wall, almost even painted on the wall that says, how does this impact our customer?

100%. Yeah.

And if it doesn't, well, then why are we doing it? And if it does, how does it impact the customer? And if it's negatively impacting them, don't do it. That's it. It's a simple thing. It's not. This is not rocket science. And I think that, you know, we know this isn't going on because, I mean, how many spam inbox crap do you get a day? Right? I mean, none of it's good for the customer. And I think it's because, again, going back to the canoe model, the people sitting in marketing don't think of it as a customer. So they're not thinking about it that way. Yeah, they have to be trained to think like, well, it is actually a customer. Because if you do your job properly, eventually they're going to be in the customer bucket. So why would you want to do this to them? Now? They haven't transformed into that maybe that modality yet, but they're Going to.

Right.

So don't do that. So I think, like, if I. If I were to kind of say, I think the CRO is the steward of the customer.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. I agree. Yeah, yeah. And that's why one of the things we did when I first came in was we sat and we did a customer journey walkthrough and we talked about all those points in the customer journey and showed like, hey, guess what, guys? After you get this sign up, there's a whole other world that this person is going through. Let's talk through that. Because to your point, I think you. Yeah, it's almost like they see it as like, well, that's the lardable state of customer. And it's like, yeah, but man, it becomes customer.

Exactly. It's a pretty important one too. You know, in a way, I kind of refute that by saying, well, maybe you don't take your participation in this whole experience that seriously because, you know, in marketing, it should be pretty important, the first impression that people get, don't you think?

Yeah.

And you're responsible for the first impression. So it is important. It's vital, in fact.

Yeah.

So how do you currently work with your marketing team now? Like, what's the way that you have it set up? What's the. If you don't mind me, I'm curious to know more about like the model or the process that you have for integration.

Yeah. So right now, so I have the marketing department, sales success support, and they all. Sales success support, channel revops. They all have a centralized leader at the top, and then they have a management structure under them. Marketing. I had. And I've actually changed that now I have each one of the marketing leaders report to me directly instead of a VP of marketing. So I have like our head of growth, our head of brand, and then our head of integrated marketing. And I have all three of those people reporting directly into me. And they sit with their peers as a GTM leadership team. Right. So their peers are those other folks in those other groups, which is really important to me because they're also just like an LT team. You know, you'll people talk about. It's one. You're supposed to be team, first team. Right. Like the executive team is my first team and then these folks. So their peers are their first team. So those three marketing folks, their team is their sales counterpart, their success counterpart. So when they're doing planning, they should be doing it with those people and functioning as a revenue team. Right. Instead of these like artificial silos and so we've really, we're working really hard to create that culture. So even now when we're looking at things like off sites and stuff, you know, marketing is having an off site because it's important for them to have a team building opportunity. But our sales team is also having an off site at the same time in the same place and hopefully they'll have times they come together. So it's, it's. We're trying to create individual culture but shared culture at the same time. Because people. You do want to have a team of your peers.

Yes.

But it's also just as important for you to have cross functional peers. And I think these have to be somewhere between like, you know, if product is your cousin, cross functional peer, these people should be your brother and sister. Like you're in the same house together, you have the same parents, you have the same rules in the house.

Yeah. It's interesting you bring that up because I have another analogy I use around that particularly, which is, you know, customers are like your kids, you know.

Yeah.

And you know, when you have kids, you change the way you live to accommodate the care of those kids. You don't do the same things anymore.

Yeah.

You know, if you, you know, fall into this demographic, you know, if you believe that there's a difference between a mom and a dad and their role in things, well then, you know, you still perform the same function. You just bring a different element to it. That's all right. Yeah. So I think that's an important thing to kind of create. So you're saying then that you're, you have a. I don't want to call this, but it's like sort of like a pod in a way. You have people work together in groups. So there's functional diversity, let's say, within each organization. But at the same time too, there's still a, it's not, let's say denigrating or the importance of your peers that do the same thing.

That's right. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. So they, I mean they still have their own, you know, they'll have their own weekly business reviews and stuff like that. But then we all get together and it's, it's a GTM Monthly, you know, or GTM All Hands. Those moments are all spent together and we talk about. And it is hard to pull those pieces apart. Like think about going to an event. If you're going to go to an event and the team wants to talk about. Well, here's the pre event activation. We're doing. Here's the swag. We're getting out all that stuff. Well, who's at the booth? Probably a couple of sales people. And we're probably going to do post sales nurture on that. So even when we talk about event marketing, at its core, it has all those. It has lifecycle marketing as part of that team. It has brand as part. Every one of the. I've really very rarely found it something that truly is isolated, 100% in revenue. Right.

They shouldn't be. They should all be integrated. You know, even if I do, let's say, I mean, we do this, I have an agency of my own and we do organic marketing mostly, you know, content driven marketing. And one could say, well, you know, sales is not involved in that ever. You know, it's all happening in the background. That's not true. And, you know, the customer is involved all the time in that. You know, we're talking about their search intent and the way that they're looking for things and the kind of questions they're asking and their stage. So, you know, I think, yeah, there is a good thing. I think if my view is if a CRO does their job well, aside from the obvious things happen, is marketing has a incredibly smart understanding of sales and vice versa, because they're not siloed into this thing where they're like, oh, those guys, those guys over there, it's like they understand it. They're like, wow, okay. I didn't think about it that way. I didn't understand the way the integration of these things, the importance of them. And I have a new respect for this role now because I see the importance of it. Right. I think it's different between the salespeople that go to a company and they're interviewing at your company for a sales role and they spend a lot of time asking how good your marketing department is. And the other one that goes in and never brings it up, like they could care less about it. They just want to know, like, what's my compensation plan? How are you gonna get me out there? And you know, when I interviewed a lot of salespeople when they talked a lot about marketing to me, it was like, well, they have good understanding of the importance of that for them and they want it to be good, you know, good. That's. That's smart. That means they're thinking about the bigger.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah.

So I saw you mentioned something today. There's a new partnership, that type form just announced, which is that now there like some sort of a. Recently was it was. It was an older thing.

We have.

I mean, we've been kind of integrations and stuff for what's going on.

Yeah, we've been really close with HubSpot. We recently got the HubSpot Essentials out. App integration. I think in general, Typeform's been leaning in a lot more on integrations. That's one of the initiatives that I've been bringing with me. So in terms of, you know, Typeform itself as a product is it can be a single player tool. It's much more powerful when it's kind of a multiplayer tool, meaning it plugs in with your CRM or plugs in with your. Whatever it might be. Right. And so, yeah, we have a number of integrations across the board on that. And we've just been basically this year building out that partnership team. Because before it was very much. This is a good example of like, it was very much a product motion. Right. Like, customers want to send data from A to B, so we should make an integration for it. And there is an element of that. But then it's like, well, there's a revenue potential here in terms of expansion of stickiness of keeping retention and expanding use cases. And so we've started building out more of that commercial element of what those partnerships can do for us as a revenue team as well.

And is that your. Your. Your leading the charge on those types of things? Your. Your baby?

Yeah, that's my baby. And I think that's a big part of it comes from my background with Atlassian and PLG before that, because partnerships channel sales. It's a huge element of how PLG functions as well. And it helps you with marketing, it helps you with sales, it helps you kind of. I always talk about, like, looking bigger than you really are. Right. So if we're not going to go have a sales team of 300, how can we look like we have a big force out there? And by leveraging channel partners, you can kind of have that. I look bigger than I really am out in the world.

Yeah. Great. Well, I'm not surprised. It was a great conversation. So thank you so much for kind of affirming and adding some more, more interesting elements to some of the stuff we talk about here. Anything else you're up to that you want my audience to know about?

I don't know. Now I'm on the spot. I should have better ideas. No, I would just say, yeah, I mean, people should check out Typeform, give us feedback on it. It's for CROs, I think if you're trying to figure out a better sense of who your customers are and have that view of them. For sure. Take a look at that. People can find me on LinkedIn. They can message me. I'm always happy to chat. I talked obviously about CRO stuff here, but I also talk a lot about being on boards and becoming advisors and some of the stuff that, again, I think CROs are. They should be on the short list for that, but oftentimes aren't like other. Other titles tend to get picked for those roles more often than us, which is probably a topic for another day. But always happy to chat through that stuff too, if people want to ping me.

Right. Great. And one last interesting personal question I always ask is. Well, sometimes ask is they say you're independently wealthy.

Yeah.

What would you do for a living?

I mean, first I think I'd lay on a beach for at least a couple of months and then I'd come back to it. But the one thing that is a legit thing that I've talked about with my friends is I'd really love to start a company that comes to events and helps salespeople and just in general, anybody with things like public speaking. And I love to do that through improv. I was a theater major in. In college. And I just think when you get people kind of out of their head and you get them into those moments of being able to be freely creative, a lot of people are actually really great and they're witty and they're fast, but they get in their own heads about it. And I think the best salespeople I ever worked with, the most creative marketers, those are always those people that basically could really do improv. They could just be on the moment and talk about anything. So that's my. That's my. If I was independently wealthy, I'd travel the world teaching improv to SDRs.

Love it. It's great. I was a. I was an actor, too, so I know what you're talking about.

It's a good skill for sales especially. Yeah.

It's funny though, you think about this. So you say, all right, so. And I know some people that do this. I have some friends who went into improv classes or acting classes because they saw it as a skill they wanted to develop. But, you know, that's like a 1% most people go into because they're already extroverts and they want to go be idiots and live in front of people like me, you know? So it's like it does attract a certain type of person. And they tend to be good at this stuff that, you know you're good at. It would be a good idea. I agree. To have more people be encouraged to go and, like you said, confront some of the anxieties and maybe some of the ideas, the perceptions they have about themselves that are most of the times complete nonsense. Unlock a lot of ability. I completely agree. It's, it's, it's a really, it's a great skill. Well, anyway, thank you. And it was great talking to you.

Thank you.

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