Reality of Your First CRO Role & Funding Growth Through Savings with Eric Steele

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 the CRO or want to support their CRO to succeed. Thanks for listening. Now let's go mix it up. Mr. Steele, Mr. Zeta. How are you, sir?

Doing great. Happy New Year.

You too. You too. So you are the first guest of 2026.

Wow. That's an honor. I love it.

I'm kicking off the new year with a close. A close colleague, friend, and recipient of the Sierra Collective work. And it's great to talk to you. Good to see you. And how was your new year? Was it good?

It was great. A lot of time for reflection time with family closing out a strong year. It was. It was great. We're feeling very grateful and excited about 2026. How about you, my friend?

Good. Really good. I mean, you know, similarly. Right. I mean, it's been a really amazing transition for us over here, you know, as, you know, like, I'm kind of. My kids are sort of balls growing up, so we have a little bit of a different sort of vibe, which we're still getting used to. But at the same time, we have a lot of interesting things planned for this year for the business, which I'll be sharing a lot more with everybody. But you and I have had an opportunity to chat a couple times over the last couple months, and we discussed some of the amazing transformations you've making since you and I started working together. How have it's been now? Like two years or so, maybe more. Right.

I think we're approaching three years. Yeah.

There you go.

We're closely together. Yep.

Yep. Yeah, so. So, as I might have mentioned to the audience, I'll share again. So Eric is the chief revenue officer of a company called sib. It's a, you know, fixed cost, if you don't mind. How do you. How do you, like, define the business if you're in your own language?

Yeah, cost reduction. We make reducing costs as easy as spending money. The premise of our whole business is that it's never been easier ever in history to spend money. Today for companies, we turn the tables on spending. We give our clients tools or weapons to use to fight back against the spend more world.

Gotcha. So ostensibly you're performing triage on an organization's spend and you're figuring out where they're wasting money and you're finding it for them.

Exactly. We find it, we save them money. It's a self funding relationship in that when we build a brain or an ontology for a company to detect invoice anomalies, all of that is funded by the savings that we achieve and the cost reduction that is the ultimate outcome of the partnership. And so it's all right to the bottom line, helps companies be more profitable, improve margins and hopefully in doing that they can hire more people, they can invest in technology, they can make acquisitions, they can get promoted. You know, it's, it's a, a fun kind of North Star for us because when we help save money tends to help companies grow.

Great. So it's obviously a very vitally important thing for companies, particularly now. Right. I mean I can imagine what's going on today in terms of like, you know, efficiencies and whatnot being pushed down. But what I wanted to do is talk a bit about first your, your story. Like so when you and I first met, you're at another organization, you took the CRO acced accelerator course. You know, we had a good connection and you ended up as a result of working in that course, then continuing to work with us to help you with the transition to this role. And I'd love to hear a bit that journey. I think they're really important thing to see like what it's like for someone in your situation uniquely who's gone through this whole process and the things you learned, what you did differently, etc. Etc. Just, it's a great story. I'd like the audience to hear what it's like to kind of feel the reality of this sort of journey.

Sure. And we've been on a great journey together and I, I've told you, Warren, many times, you, you've been an incredible mentor and advisor and I certainly wouldn't be where I am without the partnership that we've had over these several years. And I strongly recommend, and I do this with, with my colleagues and peers and folks in my network, I send them your way whenever I can because I think there's a lot of value that you, you provide and you've provided for me. But my journey started, you know, I was at Forrester for 15 years, an iconic brand, great B2B research and advisory firm that I still have a great deal of respect for, and I learned professional sales and marketing there. I, you know, was surrounded by great leaders, great visionaries like George Colony, and incredible sales leadership from Kelly Hipler, Mike Morhardt, Greg Nelson and others. And so I had this, this baseline of understanding what good looks like. And at a certain point, I really felt called to this new role of the CRO. And I credit you because I think you were the first voice that I heard defining what this role was. And this goes back years ago when, when I was an early listener to your podcast. And the notion that a CRO owns the whole go to market engine, sales, marketing, client success, revenue alignment, that spoke to me. And at the time, I, I'm pretty sure you were the only person talking about that. And I, I, there's something about my whole life, I've always wanted to seek out the preeminent expert in something and follow them. And that's been a theme of my life. And, and so you, you, you know, what's the old saying? When the student is ready, the teacher will appear. Right?

I guess, yeah, that's right.

Yeah. I think I, I reached out directly to you years ago and learned about the CRO Collective. I had made the decision at that point in my career that I wanted to become a CRO, and I knew that my path probably would be a little different. I wouldn't stay where I was and climb the ladder. I needed to go take on a challenge. And the reality is, and you and I talked about this when you get your first CRO role, a lot of times it's a role that others don't want, or there's a reason you're getting that role. Maybe it's a real challenge, maybe it's, it's not the sexiest role, but I always would recommend someone to take that leap. If that's the thing that, you know, you want to do, there's no way to learn it other than to experience it. And so I, I joined the CRO Collective, started to really deeply understand revenue alignment, the role, the frameworks, the structure, the system that you, you talk about. And I believe right before I completed that course, I got my first CRO role. And so the timing was really fortuitous. And you and I then worked together in really the first 90 days as I took that role to expedite my ramp, to do a variety of assessments, to get an early read on the engine, what was working, what wasn't, where was their misalignment. And that helped me a great deal. And that opportunity opened up a door later to the current firm that I'm with and with the incredible opportunity that I'm at now. And yet again, you were there early on as we did some of those same assessments and, and sort of diagnosed what was happening within the business. And the net result for us is we've grown dramatically and have grown organically. Rebranded, gone up market, increased average deal size and rep productivity and taken marketing impact to revenue from virtually zero to north of 20% and built an incredible engine that isn't about me. It's about an incredible team that you actually introduced me to. Our dynamic marketing leader, Yu Yang Pei, who has been extraordinary and the great group that I'm surrounded by that's been able to achieve this. But it's.

It.

The journey wasn't clear or linear. It was very much a roller coaster. But I'm so. I wouldn't do anything differently. I think you, you know, these, these doors open for a reason. People enter. Enter your life for a reason. And I'm immensely grateful for those experiences and for the people that like you that I've been able to work with.

It's a great story. And you know, you mentioned something that's really important to discuss and that is like that first CRO role. I, I deal with this all the time. So a lot of my clients are, they're aspiring CROs, like, you were right. And they want to do the role and they want to get that first job. And I sort of give them a little bit of a warning. I'm like, look, you know, like you said, it really articulated it well. You know, someone that hires a CRO that hasn't been one before, there's a lot of reasons for that. You have to sort of accept that, you know, and you're right, it could be, you know, they can't afford the one they want, or it's just a lousy situation or it's a challenging situation. Or maybe it could be a situation where the company's really early stage and they sort of want to CRO. There's a lot of things that make that initial role obviously not ideal. However, as you and I discussed, you can equip yourself to get the best out of it. And I think if you get the competitive advantage like that, you can turn this first role into one that either A, is successful or B, you can learn so much more from if you sort of apply certain principles to it as opposed to being at the. Almost all at the affect of things. And so this is where, you know, since I've even worked with you, right. We've evolved what we do even more, so we expand it out to interviewing and, like, how to look for the role and how to interview for the role and how to vet the role and how to set yourself up in the role. And these are things that are really important that as you can appreciate, when someone's looking for a job like this, they don't think about that stuff. They just want the job and they will say yes to everything, which, again, I'm not faulting that. I understand it. The impulses for that, they're understandable, but they're also dangerous. So you'd be curious to know what you think about, like, the transition that you made from that situation, because, you know, your growth has been amazing. And just like, even the way you articulate things and your comfort level has changed. It's kind of neat to see that happen in real time.

Well, you've articulated it very well. Sometimes you walk into these roles and you don't have the leverage. You don't have the experience to ask for or properly vet, but sometimes that's okay. And, and you recognize that this is going to be an opportunity for you to learn, for you to grow, for you to adapt and give it everything you've got. And when the dust settles, if it's successful or not, you have learned exactly what works, exactly what doesn't, what you will do again, what you won't. And you start to build, as you said, first principles. And you build. And I was having lunch with a friend recently that said, you know, Eric, the most important thing that we do in our careers is the impact we have on people. And the wake of careers that we. Impact. Right. And that is on my mind a lot now. It's like the team that I'm developing, the people that are coming with me, the careers that we can grow and develop is really important to me. And something that more than ever in my career, I'm very conscious of now. But I think those initial roles, you have to come in with a plan. You have to acknowledge that more often than not, that situation won't be ideal for you. They're probably not ready for a CRO, or maybe there's confusion about what a CRO does. You may not have, as you always say, Warren, you need, you know, resources, Runway, authority and autonomy. I may not have said them in the right order, but I always.

Four of them, you know.

Yeah. And you're, you're likely not going to have all four of those in that first one. You, you, you know, my experience was that we had probably Two of those. Right. And, but that's just the reality. And I think if you, if you face it and say this will be the reality. But I'm going to have a plan to develop relationships internally, to do everything I can to, to make the best out of this situation and, and know that at the end of the day, I have given it my all. I have worked very hard doing the right things that may not have been comfortable at the time, but, but I know that they were right. Good things will happen and at the very least we're going to learn a lot and apply that to the next role. And, you know, for me it was invaluable. I certainly learned the importance of having day one insight into the engine, the analytics, you know, the view of your icp, an understanding of your total addressable market, your serviceable, addressable market, the understanding of your positioning of your brand, the market awareness of the brand, where you are from a SEO, from an awareness perspective, what those gaps are, you know, down to the, to the granular focus on, you know, rep. Capacity and utilization and productivity and, and having a scientific way to think about what works, what doesn't, why does it not work, what are we going to do differently? And you played a huge role in helping us quickly get those insights early in both of these jobs and they've been incredibly impactful.

Yeah, it's funny, I see one of the things that, you know, having now done this for a while is, yeah, I sort of try to boil things down to some basic things and what it really is, honestly, and what you said it really well, is it's just making sure that the people who take these initial roles don't end up becoming in this victim kind of mentality. Right, where they delude themselves or they want things they're never going to get, or they listen to stuff the wrong way and, you know, they convince themselves of things that are not true and then six months, a year later they're complaining and they're walking around feeling all the stuff that you feel when you're in leadership position like this. It's tough already. Then on top of it, you know, if you sort of blaming everything around you, it can be really bad. It can be really toxic. So what I'm trying to do is say, look, yes, you know, your, your second CRO role will be a lot different, you know, but you have to use this one in the right way. You have to look at it the right way and that the right context around it, which is, yes, it's not going to be Optimal. But you uniquely now know what optimal is. Most people don't. Okay? So when looking at this, they're sort of looking at things. Think, I know something's not right here, and I can point to stuff, but I don't know what good looks like. I just know this isn't it. And if you don't know what that is, then you don't know what to shoot for. And it can be really confusing. You're trying to fix a whole bunch of stuff, hoping that some of it works. What I'm trying to do, we're trying to do is provide, you know, our clients, our customers with that clarity and a process that they go, okay, I know what good's supposed to be. Like, you already said, right. I'd love it if I had all that authority and the autonomy that I need. I want the resources I need. I need the access to Runway that I need, which, you know, that's the hardest one to get, but I'm not going to get it. So here's what I do have. Here's what I do have.

Yeah. Okay.

So how can I make that work? And how can I get some small wins that maybe own me or buy me more real estate that I don't have? Right? And find out what I can do and what are the levers I need to pull? What are the right questions I need to ask? What are the questions I don't need to ask? If you don't know that stuff, you're flying really blind. And, you know, I want to make sure, like, someone who's listening to this right now is like, oh, crap, this sounds, like, horrible. Why would I want that first job? Well, because it's the best one. Because you're going to learn the most. Success is not a good teacher, you know, failure is great. You learn everything, you know? I mean, that's how I even started this business, is failure, you know? So I think it's a cool story. And then, you know, how you were able to then take all that. I watched it in real time. Is this new role at sab, and you started off on the right page. You interviewed properly. So I'd be curious to know, if you don't mind. We talked about this. Be good for everyone here. Like, what was the way that you were able to take the lessons from that first job? And then from the very beginning, when you're interviewing for roles and how you set this up? Like, what are the ways in which you're able to win things through the conversations you had and the challenges you were able to overcome to get those things so that maybe they can maybe borrow some of the, you know, kind of, let's say, knowledge and practical application that you got.

Yeah, it's a great question. I think the first thing that comes to mind is financial fluency and alignment with the cfo. To the extent that you, you get this first role by nature of being in a C level role, you will be directly aligned to the CEO who becomes your boss and then of course, your peers, the cfo. Most revenue leaders probably haven't interacted that closely with their CFO if they're taking on a new role like this. And that's a whole new dynamic. And so I cannot stress enough the importance of that relationship. Understanding the language that that CFO speaks, understanding EBITDA and net operating income and operating cash flow and what the, the margin goals are for the company and what they're tasked with so that everything you're trying to accomplish becomes a teamwork conversation around. Look, the goals of the business are X. These are the ways that I'm going to grow revenue. Let's, let's find ways to make this work together. And if you can establish that relationship right out of the gate, rooted in trust, proving to them that you understand their language and that you're a disciplined steward of the business and trying to accomplish something with their goals in mind, that is critical. And it's hard to get that without the experience of having those conversations every day for a year plus. Right. So that's one thing that jumps out. And you know, I think it's so simple. But when in doubt, just be in the field. Just be with customers. I think there is a danger in stepping into a role where you can be trapped at looking at dashboards, looking at spreadsheets every chance you get, break through that spend, any chance you get in the field virtually or in person with customers with prospects, because the answers to the test typically are there. You get respect from the troops. You can learn actually what the company does and the value that you provide by being in those rooms. You get to refine what the actual story is and the pitch and identify those gaps and the objections that the sales folks are hearing. And you pick up on positioning and brand nuggets as you're doing that. And so those are two things that come to mind, Warren, that I think maybe they're obvious, but I certainly learn in some cases by doing it, in some cases not doing it and learning the hard way that those are two critical steps that you got to take.

Thank you. So Much again for listening to the Zero Spotlight podcast. This podcast is an important plank in the Sierra Collective communication strategy and we're really thrilled to have such great guests on here. So listening and sharing the podcast with other people is really vital because we want to get as many people listening to this great stuff as possible. A couple things to note. If you're a aspiring Croat or a recently hired CRO, or even a old salty CRO and you're looking to either become a Chief Revenue Officer or improve your chops and gain some more insights and improve your competencies as a Chief Revenue officer, we offer the CRO accelerator course. It's five years now. It's the first CRO focused course that was out there. It's a 15 week course that is populated by aspiring Chief Revenue officers. And Crosby, we're pretty selective in terms of who can be a member of the CRO Accelerator course. It's people who are probably like more like ready to be a CRO right now. They have number of years under their belt as a revenue leader, whether it be a sales leader or a marketing leader, or even rev ops leader. And they either want to move into the C suite or they're CROs that want to just make sure that they win in the role. So if you are interested in being a member of the next cohort, please just write me a note on LinkedIn. Just DM me CRO accelerator and we'll set up a time to talk and then I can send you more information to give you a brochure of the course. So again, CRO accelerator course, 15 week program for aspiring and newly hired CROs. Take advantage of it. It's been great and you'll see some more information about it on the website.

Thanks.

Yeah, I want to talk about this a bit because we did another podcast about this with you and Larry and I think it's important to reiterate again and I agree with you, I think this CFO is, you know, if I would say that the sort of leadership triumvirate at a company should be like the cfo, CEO and the CRO. These are the three people who make most of the decisions for the organization. If it's done properly. Many times it's really locked up between the CFO and the CEO because as you're going to appreciate these businesses are being run like businesses and the CFO tends to have a lot of power and those things. But you also recognize too, you know, you know, this is CFOs come with certain skill sets but they also lack perspective on revenue that our CRO brings. And it's a very important thing, which is like for example, I see sometimes. I've had a couple arguments recently with people who feel that the revenue operations organization should report to the cfo. Right. Which I think is a mistake. I think that the C Revenue, a revenue operations person, it's a revenue role. It has the word revenue in it. It should report to the revenue leader, you know, and for a couple of reasons. One, not just semantics, but because it's. That's intended that way. But mostly because a revenue operations function that is managed by a financial leader, they're going to use the tool differently for the business than it's intended to use. Many times we see, for example, revenue leaders, revenue operations leaders spending a lot of time putting together spreadsheets for board board meetings as opposed to running rev ops and building models for revenue realization, which is a different thing. And I think that's an important battle I see fighting a lot. Right. So if you were to sort of like, let's say lay out like at high level, even maybe granularly, what's the optimal relationship that a CRO and a CFO should have? How would it look if you were to like put it down on a piece of paper for somebody?

Yep, great question. I've been blessed with great relationships at this current job here with sib, first with Larry and now with Dave Bertolino, who's our cfo. Both extraordinary, extraordinary guys. Both unique in that they're great CFOs, but they also have a deep understanding of go to market. They really get it. They understand you have to spend money to make money. They understand that the concept of as you're hiring, hiring a little ahead maybe of where you think you need to be, that, you know, you do have to invest in marketing and that investing in marketing builds pipeline and pipeline converts. So it's been a pleasure working with both of these guys. And specific to Dave, who we have a great relationship. You know, I think the key components of it are first having alignment on exact goals for the business. Right. We, we have to achieve this revenue growth next year. We have to achieve this EBITDA goal next year. Alignment on the ways that we agree as a team that we're going to do it, you know, we're going to have a mix of increasing our marketing investment to get there. We're going to grow these functions of the business. We're going to double down on these specific channels, deciding what to do together and just having that be a collaborative Effort, as you said, revenue should exist with the revenue leader. But I greatly value Dave's perspective. He sees more of the business than I do. I mean, you know, the cfo, I

think it's a, it's a dotted line. I think, you know, I don't, I don't think you're, I'm not suggesting you cordon the person off from finance. I'm saying that you should have, you know, nominal control over the revenue function. But there should be either somebody on that team who is someone whom is utilized by the CFO or has a line in there. Because you're right. I mean, there are different perspectives there. But I'm, again, I, I'm, I'm saying it more to qualify my point, which is not to have it owned by finance. Then it becomes a financial function solely. And that's not what it's intended for. That was my point exactly.

Right, totally agree. And I do think that increasingly the CFO is becoming the ultimate decision maker and economic buyer for really everything.

I mean, you sell to them. I mean that's your customer right now. So for your business, it's a unique perspective you have to have because the nature of your business.

Exactly right. And even prior to joining SIB in former lives, the most frustrating thing ever is when you're a rep and you have a deal that gets to the one yard line and then you learn that it's been shut down. Why?

Many, many times.

So many times, right. CFO said it's a freeze on, on spend. And so I think with all of the volatility today, with the, the confusion out there around the impact of AI and looking at companies that are growing, but they're shedding headcount. The CFO is now being positioned as the ultimate decision maker and economic buyer. Almost on par with CEO in some companies, we're finding. And that's an interesting dynamic. As a CRO, you definitely want to be aligned there. You want to have a relationship that's built in trust, that's, that's supportive that. You know, I read Daven. He's part of our planning meetings. We have a weekly meeting where we talk through strategy and what we're doing. He and Yu Yang have a regular one on one. I mean we overshare, we over communicate. He does the same with us. And so I think when you have conversations in the shadows or if there's a lot of silence or if you don't have a regular cadence, that's, that's, that's going to hurt you at some point. You need to have that, really make an effort to have that relationship steady. I will also say for any new CRO, one of the big changes you have to acknowledge, just like when you're an individual contributor, when you become a manager for the first time, it's a big leap because now it's not about you, it's about your team. And then when you become a senior executive, there's another leap, which is it's not just about your team now, it's about the company. And if there's a fourth leap as a CRO, it's a rare dynamic that is it's not just about the company, it's about your CEO and what they envision needing to achieve that becomes the CFO relationship is critical, but I think the CRO to CEO relationship is the one that is most certainly most critical. It's paramount, but it's also the one that any CRO probably has the least experience with. When you move into that role, you know, sales leader isn't always directly working with a CEO. Every day that's a different dynamic. And we have a remarkable CEO here at sib, Shannon Copeland. And he's a visionary and he has helped us totally transform the business. And working with him, understanding what he is trying to achieve and recognizing that I play the role of a integrator of that vision into go to market models has been the unlock, like he knows where we're going. I view my job as within our go to market. How do we execute that vision to get there fast? And that's a really critical dynamic.

Hey everyone, want to thank you again for listening, get great comments across LinkedIn and other channels about the show and it's really gratifying to see that we're having an impact on you. Another thing I wanted to let everybody know is that we also produce events. About two and a half years ago, we started the CRO roundtables predicated on the idea that, well, two premises. One is CROs are looking for other CROs to talk to, which is really true. It's a very lonely job. How do we get a bunch of CROs in a room where they're not being, let's say, disintermediated by panel discussions and sponsorship events and demos and stuff, and really give them a chance to talk to each other. So we created a roundtable event that is essentially that it's a three and a half, four hour discussion between between 20 and 30 chief revenue officers. And these are amazing events. The format took off, people love them and I get requests all the time as to when, when is your next CRO event. So to that end, I just want to let you all know that we have a number of roundtables coming up over the, over next year, over the next, like 20, 26. I want to share them with you so you can, if you're in, if they're in your market, you can come. So the next one we're having is going to be in London, actually, in February, February 24th in London. So if you happen to be a Chief Revenue Officer in the UK or even in Europe, and you want to come by, you'll be hearing about it more on my, my website and my, and, and, and LinkedIn, but put it on your calendar. And then following that, we're probably going to be doing an event in San Francisco in March. There's going to be one in New York in March. I'm going to do another one in Chicago probably in April. And then I'm going to do an event in Boston. I'll do an event in Atlanta, I'm going to do an event in Salt Lake City, I'm going to do an event in Austin, and I'm going to do an event in Los Angeles or the Southern California area. So those dates are to be determined, but they'll be going across all next year. And these events are taking on huge momentum. They're the place to be if you're a Chief Revenue officer and you want to be in a room with no interruptions and have an opportunity to really share with each other in a sort of a private and confidential open discussion about everything that you wanted to talk about as a Chief Revenue Officer and collaborate with great people. So thank you and thanks for supporting the show and I look forward to seeing at the events. Yeah. Talking about relationships, which, look, I'm not surprised that it ended up there because this is the thing. You know, you're right. It's two parts of it, right. There's the quality of the relationship, which is just how well you work together, and your shared vision and your understanding of each other's goals and your willingness to support each other and speak frankly and all the stuff that goes with it. But then there's also the dynamics of what those roles represent. And you make this clear, Right, that the CEO role, and I tell my clients this all the time, that's the most important role for you when you're interviewing for this job. Like, I don't care who you talk to, it's the CEO part of the interview is where you're going to learn everything about this job, because that's the most important person in your life at that point. That's the person who's going to give you the authority, the autonomy, the resources in the Runway, ultimately sign off on the things you need most. And, you know, there's a skill to know how to navigate that. You know, it's an interesting thing if you're a bit, I don't want to say younger, more, less experienced with dealing with CEOs and founders. You know this because you've done it. Now. We tend to place a great deal of weight in that title, even with ourselves. And, you know, the CEO walks in the room and it's. It's understandable. There's a certain degree to which you probably imbue that person with maybe some powers that they may not necessarily have earned. They're just people just like you. You know, you have the same problems you have, you know, but, you know, because they're that person, they kind of control your destiny. They have this title. You know, there is this sort of weird dynamic that can go that, you know, you will give them latitude or you'll listen to things they say in a certain way. Maybe who am I to question this great leader kind of thing? But, you know, you should, because this person is responsible for your destiny. But here's the thing again. It goes back to I said earlier, is if you don't know what you're looking for, if you don't know the questions to ask, you're never going to be able to figure it out. You have to have a plan. You have to know, okay, what. What does this role mean for me? The obvious stuff is, is this someone who I get along with? Do we have the same sort of work ethic? Do we agree on the way we approach business? Do we have the same principles, the same values? I mean, that's really important stuff. That's table stakes. But then it's like, what do they understand about what I do and what my mission here is and what my role is, and all the pieces of the puzzle that I need to have at my disposal and the resources and the access I need to be able to do my job, and what degree of trust are they going to give me so that I can do it? And to find that stuff out is not easy. So how did you. I mean, do you. You had an interesting situation in your job where you. The leaders were changed a little bit. But what was the way in which you were able to ascertain the qualities, the functional, pragmatic, qualities of those relationships that you knew you'd succeed. How did you. And maybe some cases have to maybe influence them a little bit so they can be more amenable to you.

Well, you're. You're poking at such a critical point, which is in that relationship, you have to have enough trust established where you can disagree, you can challenge each other, you can question. And that starts, I think, at the CEO level. It. That's. That's really on that. That leader, thankfully, with, With Shannon, he's. He's an incredible leader who understands you got to create a space where there's trust. And if I disagree or if I push back on something, he understands, okay, there may be a reason for that. I'm going to evaluate what he's saying and do that in a safe space. Most of the time. He's right, though. But the fact that we have this open dialogue is. It's amazing, and it's a huge deal. I'll tell you an anecdote, though, just to this overall point. My kids, you know, I got young kids, and I was telling my son recently, I. I took a call from our CEO and I hung up the phone and I said, john, I'm going to tell you a life lesson right now. When the CEO calls, you always answer. And it's true. Like, and it's not to say that, like, Shannon calls me all the time, but when he does, I'll always answer. I'll always answer that call. Doesn't matter when or where I am, because I know it's important. And we have a relationship that is respectful in that regard. But to your question, I think building this relationship, it started as you alluded to. I had a unique situation where our CEO moved to the board and Shannon became our CEO. And I remember when that happened, I pretty immediately sat with Shannon and just told him that I have his back. I'm here to do whatever it takes, and I'm ready to go. And we cultivated a relationship, I think, over dinners and coffee and, and sitting with each other and really talking about our perspectives just as people first, on how would we solve this puzzle. And earned, I think, a lot of mutual respect as we saw how aligned we were. And he's a guy that deeply understands AI. He and his team have been building ontologies and knowledge graphs and agentic AI since, like the early 2000s. You know, he's not one of these charlatans that just is coasting on a new concept. Right? He's one that has put in the time and really gets it. And that Spoke to me, that was. That was important. And I think he saw the rigor and the discipline that we were bringing to the Go to Market. Org. He respected that. And so we, you know, but it takes time. You got to build that relationship and gotta have trust so that you can disagree, so that you can have alignment. And, you know, it's magical when you do.

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

And thank you.

Yeah, it's great. I see when this works, when the relationship between the CRO and the CEO works, it's a magical situation. And unfortunately, it's not as Often as I'd like. And I think some of it's just stuff you can't control. It's just not there. It's like any chemistry thing. But if you have those underlying principles, then you can make, make it work if you understand what the pragmatic overlay is to those principles. I want to talk to you a bit about the business itself. So you mentioned AI and I watched as your organization transformed from sort of like almost a consultancy to a technology. So I'd love to hear about that because I know you, Yang, and you put together this really cool kind of messaging platform. And I think it'd be interesting to hear how your organization embraced this new technology to enable your function in a way that's really innovative. It'd be kind of interesting to understand it.

Yeah. Our clients led us here. So we've been around for 35 years. Grew by acquisition over many years, acquiring best in class, like utility and energy cost reduction, best in class shipping and logistics, cost reduction, best in class telecommunications, et cetera. And what we noticed about a year and a half ago was procurement had become more decentralized than ever. It was very hard. If you're a cfo, if you're a sourcing manager or a chief procurement officer, it's never been easier to pay vendors fast. There's a lot of really sexy tools that help you to pay vendors. It's also complicated because of the decentralized nature of it. You've got decisions made in the field. Companies struggle to find their contracts. Like 70% of companies don't know where 20% or more of their contracts are. They just can't find them. And when they do know where their contracts are, there's an endless amount of errors. 30% of waste invoices contain errors. 65% of telecom invoices contain duplicative or redundant lines. You know, on your small parcel shipping, if you look at page nine of the contract, you'll notice that some of these vendors and carriers are using jet fuel as the fuel surcharge rate. It's an endless amount of shenanigans. And so clients were moving us here. And because of Shannon and his team, we had institutional knowledge on how to build knowledge Graph ontology based AI. So we created SpendBrain to solve this problem. SpenBrain takes all of your contracts as a client. It then maps knowledge graphs to the invoices. And as those invoices are processed through Spendbrain, we're detecting anomalies. And those can be just little things. Like we see this all the time. For example, a propane bill that on the invoice there's a $300 charge for a paper invoice fee. But when you go back to the original contract that was signed seven years ago, it clearly states that no ancillary fees can be charged other than tax. We had a client that very large 3,200 plus locations, and we built a spin brain for them just around their national waste contract. And within about eight days, we detected 43 anomalies in one month of data and about 1.4 million in errant charges. Okay, so material, material changes there that can be made, that can make a company more profitable. So the clients led us there and we call this kinetic cost control. It's a self funded AI loop. You know, you have this brain that is getting smarter, is detecting anomalies and that then feeds our, our audit and negotiation teams that can go in there and say, hey, that large waste hauler who's been overbilling you or errantly billing you, let's reprocure, let's negotiate a new contract now and you know, recover those funds, but also restructure this so that this doesn't happen again. Reset the baseline. And what we found, Warren, is that clients that are with us for a number of years that we're able to do this with, they have a 40% reduction versus the market in their spend. So it really is material. And our job, you, Yang and the team and I, we had to basically just tell that story. You know, we had to find a way to present to the market that first, this was a novel idea. It turns out this is the first spend ontology that exists. And so defining that, like articulating that to the world. Second, telling the story in a way that is compelling and authentic. You know, this idea that we make reducing costs as easy as spending money, that we help you turn the tables on spending, that there's the spend more world and there's a lot of ways for you to pay vendors fast, but we're going to turn the tables on that. But that, that became a compelling way for us to communicate. And then of course, as you always talk about really defining your icp, really understanding now, okay, who is that ideal client profile? Where are they getting deeply, intimately aware of who they are? Firmographic, behavioral, size of the company and industry. Yes, but also things like amount of shipping spend, amount of waste spend, mix of vendors, how fast they're growing, do they have unmanaged spend, are they private equity backed? And so kind of sticking all those Things sticking the landing on those was really the job for us.

Now you have vertically oriented your business, right. So you go after different specific industries. How many sectors are you going after?

Right now there are five predominant sectors. We look at property solutions, which you think about restaurants, QSRs, multi site asset heavy, a lot of locations. There's healthcare which has an enormous amount of spend and a lot of times a lot of waste. Our public sector business so cities, states, counties, school districts, we have our E commerce direct to consumer. So anyone that's shipping a lot of product to customers, they, they're part of our kind of logistics, D2C Group and our enterprise, you know, upmarket large, Fortune 1000 kind of large public companies that have many thousands of employees, an enormous amount of spend, an enormous amount of complexity and a lot of times really are challenged by line of sight into all of that spend and a lot of times even despite their size, don't always have the domain expertise across waste. Telecom, shipping, SaaS, all those different kind of spend categories that we do and

is spendbrain technology, the package through which all these are delivered across all those verticals.

It is now increasingly it is, you know, and so what we've done is moved from really a contingency, only 100% performance based service to a hybrid, you know, fee based for building a brain for our clients that's a self funding loop with a contingency on some of the savings that we help them achieve. And we even show our clients kind of an optionality of pulling those levers. You know, we have a client two weeks ago, right before, you know, kind of the break who said that they by no means wanted to pay any contingency or savings share. They wanted a complete predictable annual fee. And we're more than happy to oblige that and build that. We have other clients that based on where they are, need us to save them money on a contingency basis first and use that to justify the, you know, the build out of their brain and the payment for that. Fine, you know, so there's some flexibility and malleability but increasingly clients are pulling us to more of the platform fee and I think it helps them from a projecting, you know, their, their costs and their savings a little bit better.

And you're a PE backed firm, correct?

Yep.

You're doing a whole lot of board presentations now, so.

Yeah, yeah. How's that been? It's great. And look, I, you know, we've talked about this. You could do a whole course on the PE backed CRO because it's, it's the only experience I have because the two CRO roles that I've been in have been both been PE backed and coming from a company, a public company prior to that. It's so different. And there's, you know, from my perspective, I love it. Because PE firms move fast, they're results oriented, they are decisive. We're very lucky to have an incredible partner in Roark Capital and they are incredibly smart and they are great thought partners to say, have you tried this? Have you looked at this? They've pushed us to really think creatively and strategically about the business. It's been awesome. And I had a great experience with BV investment partners in a prior stop as well. Um, so. But yeah, you know, board meeting prep and a great deal of understanding every number. You know, that's the thing is CRO for private equity backed company has to have a PhD level understanding almost of every potential number. You just have to know the numbers cold. And that frankly is why you need a great RevOps person. You need a great RevOps department, which we do, and someone that can help create an analytics engine and a system of insight so that you're not constantly scrambling for a number. But it's there and you understand it and they bring a perspective to it. Because when you're in those board meetings, you've got to know it. You've got to know it cold and definitely an opportunity that I think a lot of CROs, first time CROs are going to have to learn on the job. And it's tough, but you know, the closer you can get to every number and have a great rev ops person by your side to feed you those, it's going to make your life a lot easier.

So you mentioned your ICP before, before we sign off. Who are your customers, who you talk to, who's the optimal person for you to be speaking to and what situations are they in that would make it viable for you guys to come and help them?

Yep. We work with CFOs primarily, increasingly CPOs, Chief Procurement Officers of large, complex, multi site, multi category, spin category firms who are experiencing price drift, who lack some visibility in their spend and who have aggressive cost reduction, EBITDA enhancement, profit margin enhancement goals. And so that can range from a hospital, a county, a Fortune 100 manufacturers. It's just those hallmarks of that level of complexity, enough spend that is likely unmanaged or at least sprawling a little bit and needing to reset that and work with a partner to help them do it.

That's great. And how big is the organization? How many people we're talking about right now?

We have 600 employees, I think just around that, a good 400 of whom are, we call them PhDs. They're experts in different spin categories. So we have a group of waste negotiators that came from some of the large haulers. We've got individuals that worked at a large linen and laundry company that now help negotiate with clients against those kinds of companies. So we've tried to really, they're the bread and butter. They are the, they're our moat in a lot of ways. Like, it's ironic that we're launching an AI tool that really is only as good as the human fine tuning and expertise that's behind it. Right. And it turns out we say humans are back a lot. It's like a catchphrase here. And they are like, as we build an ontology for a client, it's the human experts that are sitting right here, I'm looking at them that know all 15,000 GL codes coming in on a, on a waste hauler invoice and are able to build that into this tool that then incorporates the client's data and starts to create real value. And so we're proud of those PhDs.

Yeah, I think, you know, the rumors of the human demise are a little exaggerated. You know, we still, I think I'm seeing a lot more of that, you know, coming from my circles. You know, we're dealing with this a lot now. We're training a lot of CROs to use the AI tools because they need to. But you had to go and got to deploy these things now because it's table stakes and the fear is allaying a bit. I think I can see consulting firms getting nervous because you can run some crazy models on these things. But you know, if you're an implementer, you need people to implement the strategy. I mean, if you can just deliver a strategy, that's fine. But if you want to solve the problem, people do it with tools at their fingertips to help. But you still need people and you

need customer facing people. Always.

Yes.

You know, I call me old fashioned, but I just don't think we'll ever. Maybe we will, but it maybe not in my lifetime be at a point where humans don't want to interact with other humans when they're making really critical decisions.

That's never going to go away. I mean, maybe you're right. Maybe when we're dead, you know, there'll be some weird robot robot thing going on. But No, I mean, we do as you know how many events we do a year now. And it's because people want them. I mean, I put this out like three years ago. Zeros want to meet each other and they're like, where can we go? And they show up because they really do. They really are sort of behind phones and keyboards and LLMs all day. They're like, get me in front of people. I got to do this. It's continue. Well, I mean, look, we're running out of time here. But look, I always appreciate you very much, your advocacy and the success story that you've had. And you, you represent, you know what it is that our organizations, you know, with the possibility of what we can do. And it's also great to see you succeed so great in what you brought to your organization and this collaboration, I'm sure will continue. So thanks for the check in here and again, happy New Year to you and we'll. Well, just so you know, Eric still owns or did own a movie theater in Dallas. The Dallas theater.

Still do. Still do. I mean, I'm like a silent, passive investor in it. But yeah, the Texas theater down in, in Dallas and Oak Cliff, Barack and Jason run the show there. But yeah, 15 years ago, we invested in a kind of a rundown movie theater and helped turn it around. And they, the guys have done an amazing job. So, yeah, but we moved. We moved from Dallas to Charleston this year. And so I am. I haven't been to the theater in a while, but I need to get back down there.

Amazing though. I mean, you know how much of a film buff I am. So we will talk more about that. We probably can do an episode about that. I'm not kidding. I mean, we both know enough about movies. You probably talk four hours about it. But in any event, look, I really can't thank you enough and, you know, more to come. We got some other things to do. And also we have some announcements coming. You know, we've, we've increased their team. We have some new people on board, some really exciting things happening that I'm very, very eager to bring out. We're probably, probably about, maybe a month away from letting everybody know what we're up to. And it's exciting and you'll be benefit, benefiting from it yourself. So, Eric Steele, thank you so much. Great to see you again and let's have a great 2026.

Warren, thank you. Happy New Year. You're the man. Thank you for all you've done for my career and for CROs out there. You're the CRO whisperer, as I say, and so job well done.

Thank you sir.

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 organizations. You can find out more information about our services@the crocollective.com that's thecrocollective.com and we look forward to having you join us next time. Sat.