Revenue Operations, CROs and Treating Customers like your Children with Dana Therrien

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. Hello, everyone. Welcome to this episode of the CRO Spotlight Podcast. This is Warren Zenna. Kind of had an exciting week working on a number of different initiatives right now and talking to some people about the way in which we can better support Chief Revenue officers succeed by helping their organization serve them better. The main issue we're seeing really is I certainly am part of the wave of trying to put really highly competent and knowledgeable chief Revenue officers out into the marketplace. And I know that that's one leg up. I mean, if a CRO comes into an organization and they understand the role and they know how to get it started and they can influence things, then that's a good thing. But equally, if not more important is the organization that they get hired into. And I'm just seeing more and more and more happening where even the greatest Chief Revenue officers, when they go into the organization and they really want a full spectrum chief Revenue officer role where they're overseeing the entire revenue operation and not just focus on sales, it's difficult, you know, mainly because if the founder of the company or the executive of the organization, and frankly the board, which is a critical part of the whole equation, don't see the role being deployed that way. It won't be deployed that way. And then what I see end up happening is one or two things, is that the candidate then needs to kind of make a reconciliation of some sort or a concession of all right, you know, it's a. It's a good company, it's great pay, it's a good opportunity. It's not exactly the job I want, but it's a good job. I guess I can run the sales organization. They did say that they probably let me over time expand the scope of my role. So, you know, I'll take them on their word and I'll go for it. And then what ends up happening is one of two things. Either they give you goals that are impossible to reach because they have ridiculous top down projections that are just. Were generated before you got their. Their voodoo projections, I call them. And you realize within three to six months that the team you have, the product you have, et cetera, et cetera, is just not enough to get you to the place they want you to. But you signed on to it, so now it's your problem. And, you know, in 12 months or so, they're going to see that, hey, you're not working out, they're going to get rid of you. Or the other thing is, it does work out. You know, you're able to hit the targets, maybe exceed them, and now you're waiting around for them to expand your role because you felt you earned it, but you kind of, you know, sold yourself into a corner because now you're good at what you do and they want to keep you there, which makes sense. It's a pragmatic decision. Why we want to rip out the person who's running our sales organization, is making us great numbers, and, you know, attempt to try and expand his role or her role and distract them from the thing they're working on right now. We're just not going to do it. You know, I'd rather maybe bring in somebody above that person and put a chief revenue officer in who that person reports to. Now, now you're reporting it to somebody that has a title that you wanted, and that's a big problem. And so the other part of it, too is even if they do understand what the CRO does, and they do hire you for the right reasons, and they really do want you to oversee the revenue operation, all too often that's not enough either. They need to know how to support you properly, and they need to know how the organization needs to be set up to succeed and the kind of resources you need and the kind of authority and autonomy and, you know, Runway that you need. And that's not a small thing either. So, you know, you may be on the same page philosophically, but tactically, even strategically, if you're not, then it's going to be hard because a lot of the things that have to be done when you're overseeing an organization in that manner are going to require a lot of investigating and assessments and understanding of what's going on, because in order to transform, you need to know where you are. You can't just change without knowing what you're changing from. And the reality is that Most companies at 15, 20 million or so in revenues don't have as much clarity about their businesses as they think they do. And they're predicating a lot of the changes they want to make on bad information or less than complete information. And the CRO's job, when they start, is to bring that clarity to the organization. So what we're seeing now is how do we help companies figure that out? So how do we kind of intercede in the process? And that's not an easy thing. I mean, first you got to get the attention of the CEO. You got to get them to understand this is an issue. You got to get to understand why it's risky. Did you give them that role? What's the business outcome that you wanted from having that person? And then the second thing is, how are you supporting this person? What kind of resources? Do you know what a CRO needs to succeed, or you have a clear idea about that? What's the information that you're using to derive the way that you're accessing the resources and the permissions and authorities that the CRO needs? What's the data that you're using to derive that? Most of the time, it could be intuition. Well, I think that's what they need. But many times it's giving your CRO the opportunity to bring you the intelligence that you need to understand what's really going on and affording your new CRO the ability to make that assessment with enough time to do it properly. And it's not an easy thing. So I would say it's a. Not a small thing, and it's one that we're working on here. It's a part of our mission. So in any event, we have a great, great guest today. His name is Dana Therian. He's the. He's the head of revenue operations for Anaplan. And he's brilliant. And he's one of the top revenue operations leaders and thinkers in the marketplace. I had the benefit of having Dana be a guest on the CRO accelerator course this week, and his presentation was outstanding. And his knowledge is so in depth. And he gets it. You know, he really does understand the shifting tide and the way that CROs are being viewed. Not so much anymore. Well, I wouldn't say that. I would say there is moving more towards understanding that revenue operations experts have a really good skill set to be chief revenue officers than just sales leaders. And he gets that. And we have a really good conversation store for you today. So I'm looking forward to it. So stay tuned and listen to this great conversation. Hey, Dana, welcome.

Thank you, Warren. Thanks for having me.

Yeah, great. And look, I want to thank you right because you joined the course on a last minute and it was really insightful. When I saw your presentation, I thought, I definitely want to have this person on this podcast. Because revenue operations represents such a critical, I mean you and I are so aligned. I was listening to you, I was laughing. I'm like, man, I believe we ever spoke before. It's such a critical part of the way a revenue operation needs to be run. The Rev Ops function, the rev rot's discipline and the way it's tied to the Chief Revenue Officer and in your parlance, it should be almost the same person, which is something I want to talk about. So if you don't mind, just kind of give a little background on your, you know, how you ended up here, why Rev Ops, what's your, you know, who is, who is Dana and why did you end up here? What's your, what's your kind of basic philosophical point of view on this whole thing?

I'll try not to drone on that one. It's a little bit.

Okay, go ahead.

Well, I mean really, I started my career in the military. I was a, I was a U.S. army officer. I spent some time in the finance corps and I, I gravitated towards operational type jobs. I ended up doing some time in military intelligence and I, I just really enjoy the training and the focus on strategy. And when I get out of the military, I ended up in operations roles. The first foray into tech was with Lucent Technologies. Okay. And then got spun off into a vod. And after I did my mba, I hadn't worked in a sales organization before. This was back in the early 2000s, like 2000, 2001. And there was a job opening for the Avaya New England region. Supporting the sales leader for that group at that time was about a 300 million dollar business just for a little region. And they called it the chief operating officer of the sales region at that time. So I was responsible for the finance and for the budget and for the forecasting. So it was sales operations before it really became a thing. And since 2001 I've been there. So I, I supported that function for lots of different companies. I ended up spending about 15 years with Lucent and Avaya and then went to work for SaaS companies like Akamai and then eventually a company called Navisite Time, Warren Cable from there, after 18 years, I think it was serious decisions was looking for ex practitioners who had been in that field to come and be researchers and advisors to other companies who are, who are trying to stand up a Sales operations organization. And while I was there, I just knew that there was going to be a convergence of sales operations, revenue marketing operations, customer success operations, because there was so much interaction that was happening between those groups. And I started writing a lot of research on it before it was a thing. And I think we probably published the first research on revenue operations back in 2015, 2016. And my name just got associated with it because all these vendors out there that were creating solutions, that were transgressing all these different pipes that were there before these, these silos started to glom onto that message. So they elevated me into that. And now. Well, I had a technology practice when I was there. I advised a lot of different vendors and I ended up working for Anaplan. And going back on my military intelligence background, there was an issue within the intelligence group, we all know about it, where they weren't speaking to one another. And these terrible things happened because they weren't very efficient at gathering information and putting it into the right hands. And I saw a lot of correlations between that and tech. And I saw our Anaplan as a platform that was able to gather information from across the entire enterprise and assimilate that information, put it together in models and information and insights and put it together for the right people at the right time so that they can make decisions in a more collaborative way. So I had a chance to go work for point solution preventer providers. I saw them as being independent and I went to the platform provider because I just thought that that was a future. And now the future's here and we're really trying to gather those. So now I'm really the sales performance management expert for Anaplan and I work with a lot of different CROs and heads of sales and revenue operations, talking about their planning needs and helping them find out what's going on in other. In other companies, other industries and how Anaplan can help them. And then you and I got connected through a mutual acquaintance and he's standing up a rev ops function was just asking me about it.

Yep, that's great. So much in there I want to talk to you about. So the first thing is I never thought about this till now. What a great way to explain the downside or the risk associated with misalignment than the military. I mean, that's a really amazing. I didn't think about that. I talk a lot about different analogies of why alignment and breaking down silos is critical, critical to organizations. I don't think anybody would argue in theory, but when you look at it in reality what you're saying it's so applicable to when you have key functions of any organization that aren't communicating with each other or sharing key data with each other, you just can't have intelligence. It's just not possible. And I'm amazed to how organizations have gone on for so long without having more of a focus on this and how the rev ops function. To much to your probably doing is a key linchpin in how to kind of coalesce all these different disparate groups into one collective mindset so that data is shared across functions. But it's not just data, it's also process, it's culture. You know, it's organizational structure, its hierarchy, authority and you know, its context. And I think these are the things that are missing from it is people tend to look at this a lot like well you know, what stack should I be using? How should I measure my data, how should I share it? Those are all critical. More importantly is how does your company think? I mean, do you guys agree, I'm talking rhetorically here that you know, a company should be aligned? I mean why not? And what are you doing about it? And if so, why do you continue to set up your organizational structure and your hierarchy in ways that ensure that that won't happen? You know, so I'd be curious to understand like your thoughts on this because a you sort of said I think RevOps was like. You think it's like since 2015. Is that when it's been like a thing? Is that like the when did it, when the, when was it born? You think the notion of revops in the manner that you're discussing it was.

It talked about, it really took off around 2015 and 2016. And I, I just saw, you know, what really drove the, the necessity for it was the, the need for better alignment between sal Marketing.

Yeah, that's always, that's where it starts. That's always where it starts. Yep.

And what had happened was that marketing had started making investments in marketing automation platforms and they were able to gather a lot more insights about what they were doing both on the demand side and on the, on the brand side. So they, they were able to measure everything to the nth degree and those insights weren't being efficiently shared between marketing and sales and the process for handing information between those two groups was not well, was not a well oiled machine. You couldn't get companies to agree on the definition of a marketing generated lead, a marketing accepted lead, a still sales accepted lead. I Think we've gotten better at it.

Yeah, somewhat.

Yeah. So the I, I, I think it was born when, when, when marketing really got their, I don't want to say they got their stuff together because they've always been pretty good, but they, they were able to get, gather insights and, and really prove the value of what they were doing. And those inefficient handoffs between those two group, lot of problems. And like you said, it still happens in a lot of different companies. But there's nothing worse than seeing a CMO get in front of a company and tell them that they hit all their metrics when sales hit none of theirs. That means that they're not aligned.

No doubt. That means that, you know, or, or.

You know, whatever, or sales isn't executing. That happens too either. Right.

Of course, there's no question it, it's hard to know where the fault lies. But the key is that I think, yes, the impetus of this whole thing started because sales and marketing alignment was just being discussed. I've done a lot of research on this when I started this company, and there's discussions about that on Google going way, way back because no one ever would argue the sort of permanent or the persistent frustration between sales and market is going on for decades. I think, in fact, it's funny you say this, but you could say we. One could argue if you're a marketing person, which I am, that marketing became too mired in measurement and too focused on data.

Yeah.

And got away from what marketing is, which is, it's a, it's a creative endeavor which is intended to persuade people to want to take action and listen to things and be, you know, kind of think you understand me. And I think that, you know, if you have both, right, if you have a perfect marketing engine, you've got a great way to measure how things are working and a great machine to understand how people think. And you know, thinking is language and thinking is communication. That's where creative and, you know, messaging comes into play. And I think the pendulum swung so far in the attribution models and data measurement models that marketing became almost like a science and the art got sucked out of it. That's why I think it doesn't really work that much anymore. It got too scientific. Now we're marketing everything. We're measuring everything. And you and I both know, I know you know this, that most of the reasons why people make decisions is ethereal. You don't know why you made decisions. You can't really tell. I mean, I don't know you know, sometimes I do. Sometimes I know because someone tapped me on the shoulder and they gave me a recommendation. I trust that person. But a lot of times it's a bunch of data points that come in and I'm at the right stage. Something happened. So I don't want to go off on a tangent, but I say that I do believe a part of why the divide between marketing and sales got even bigger was because marketing got so good at measuring things, it made it even harder for the data to be understood and how it was useful. And then the other part, to your point that you said before about how the processes weren't in place. Processes don't come out of thin air. They happen because the organization has a desire to create them. They want processes because they understand the goal is to build a bridge. But if the processes aren't in place, it's my opinion that the organization at a higher level wasn't really thinking too much about that enough. And I think there's a much more higher level of consciousness about that right now.

I knew that things had changed because the model of serious decisions was as a leader in that group, you spent most of your day doing what we called inquiries with companies where you just were jumping from call to call to call for. I'd be talking to a cmo, a CEO, a CRO, whatever, from every single call. But then I just noticed the trend in the inquiries that we were getting from CMOs who wanted to speak to people like me, where they started getting frustrated with sales, inability to execute on what they were delivering to the sales organization. Like they felt they were firing on all cylinders and doing everything right. But then everything was getting lost, and I have a cat that likes to jump. They started getting. It was always marketing complaining about sales and sales not being able to generate enough demand. They had an inefficient lead process. Their SDRs weren't delivering. Let's move all the SDRs out of marketing. Let's put them into sales. And it started to change. And I think you're right. They got really good at it. And, you know, in fact, I've. I've had a lot of success of trusting marketing people, especially at those companies where they just put me at the right place at the right time in front of the right audience, and I was able to expand myself and have better success in closing deals because people knew who I was. But it did. It did switch, which. Which is really interesting to me that that happened. The rise of RevOps also coincided with the rise of SaaS based models inside of companies 100 yes, because we're able now to measure everything from lead through, through cash to renewal and we need to be able to see that and Rev Ops needs to be the ones to be able to provide that. We can't have these stove pipe operations groups that are just defending their turf and not defending the go to customer.

100 defending their position and their reputation and their attribution and their jobs. And you know, when you create that sort of an organization, you're building walls and silos and you're not going to have happy customers. Which is really sort of the ultimate goal. Right. Is you want people happy. But let's talk about this for a second because you just mentioned SaaS. I agree. The rise of these repetitive predictable businesses, it's good for business. It's good to be able to have a business and you sort of can predict like how many people can buy things and of course who wouldn't want that. But you know, that only represents a small percentage of all businesses in the B2B space. I mean there's a lot of service businesses, other types of businesses that have nothing to do with those kind of recurring models. But the SaaS business business, because so much money was poured into it, influenced a lot of businesses to act that way. And I'm interested in seeing like your point of view on how the influence of these models became almost like the way that people view a B2B business regardless of the model that they have and how it's have impacted on I think the B2B space as a whole. Because I see a lot of this in my world, people trying to emulate SaaS practices when they don't have a SaaS business because they, they just look at a business, they just see it's working and they just want to borrow as much of it as they can to see if they can emulate it. But it's really about how customers buy. At the end of the day they.

Well, they want to emulate it because the economics of SAS is so strong in comparison to what they're doing. And I think economics is really driving alignment between these go to customer functions. They realize that it's that you can't afford to have inefficient processes that exist between these organizations because everyone does have marketing, they all have sales. You know, in a, in a perpetual revenue model they might not have a customer success organization although they're trying to get there. But it's more like services and managed services and implementation. But they, they just realize that they can't afford the inefficiencies that have existed between those groups and those silos to continue to exist because it's really setting them behind. And they're, they're, they might not be SaaS based businesses, but they're, they're trading on the same trading floor and they're trying to attract capital. And if they're, if their profitability is not where it needs to be, then you have to do something to try to improve those, those metrics.

Yep.

I think back to the military analogy because you know, you've got all these different services, right? Yeah. The army, the Navy, the Marines, Coast Guard, first line responders, all that. But in, in the military, in the Pentagon, you've got the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Right. So you've got representatives from all these different services reporting into a, a single individual and they're making sure that there's cohesion between those groups. They don't go to war with each other, they go to war together. And marketing, sales, customer success, have gone to war independently and sometimes against each other. And it's stupid, crazy.

It is, it's okay, it's crazy. It's completely nuts. And you know, this is where the formulation of the CRO collective came from, is, and I want to just pass this by you, I think you'll agree, aside from all the stuff we talked about here, which is the obvious stuff of, you know, breaking down silos and sharing data and making better processes and you know, removing these disparate groups, there's also an. I'd probably enclose in military parlance, it needs to be someone in charge. And I think part of the problem that I'm seeing in the business and the reason why I started this company five years ago, is that you've got a cmo, you got a CRO, you got a cso, whatever you call it. And so by virtue of creating a hierarchy that way, or building your, your CXOS profile architecture, you're creating silos by putting C suite people in charge of these different functions. Because now you've created divisions and as opposed to unification. So my proposal and what I'm trying to do, and successfully, frankly I feel pretty good about it, is have the Chief revenue officer be someone whom oversees all those functions, that there's one person whose job it is is not just to go and grow sales, but to actually build an aligned organization so that everything works together to build a more efficient operation. That information is being shared and there's more efficiencies across the way in which Data is being utilized and gathered and shared. There's a lot of you know, I think agreement on this. I think most CROs are still hired to run sales. But I'm seeing the good news over the last three or four years. It's starting to change but sort of a. I guess two questions there is. One is a like your thoughts on that Number two is which we can get into it is what do you think makes the right CRO? If that's the case then how do you look for one and what are the pro what the profile of a great one. If that's the case, I wish I.

Had some good answers for that because I don't know that there's anybody. I mean if we're thinking about the ideal situation for a CRO to lead an organization or even like a head of revenue operations, I don't know anyone who's entirely qualified to, to do it today because we, we've all grown up in those silos. Right. Like you can call me a revenue operations leader but I really came from, from sales ops and I gained a lot of understanding of the way marketing is doing things. But I have a huge gap of knowledge around the technology and the tech stack that they're using to manage something as complex as brand and even demand to a certain degree and customer success is out there. So I think in this iteration you need to find somebody who's cooperative and willing to learn and is a good leader and is able to build those bridges between those organizations and then hire the right levels of talent within those groups to still manage them. Somewhat as a little bit of a substack. If you're a rev ops leader and you came from sales ops then you need to backfill your talent with somebody who's got a strong understanding of marketing operations and can. Can ensure that the mission of marketing does not go away when they put into a sales organization. And that that's the big fear with rev ops is that when you bring marketing operations in there they tend to be a lot more forward looking. They're looking out 2, 3, 4, 5 years and sales is looking out for, for this month, each quarter or this month. Yeah. And let's just be. Because the, the person in charge generally came from sales they're going to start taking funding away from that and they're going to.

Exactly.

Near term. And so I, I guess it's, it's a problem without great solutions right now. I mean right now I would advise people to be aware of it. Be aware of your tendencies. If you're a CRO and you've got marketing reporting into you. Don't kill marketing so that you can make your number this quarter because you're going to pay for it at some point in time.

I've agreed that you're, you're, you're preaching to the choir here. So I. Let me respond. I appreciate that. Great answer. I agree there's no unicorn. I mean, you might find a couple, but does. It's not a good strategy because there's not enough of them and I don't think there's ever going to be. I don't know how you're going to find people even in 10 years that know all this stuff. I don't think it's possible. It's a different type of brain anyway. I mean, someone that understands data and analytics is a different brain than someone understands how to persuade people to do things. It's different. I, I would say because I've had this conversation a lot and I've created a bit of a profile for. This is almost identical to your answer. It's just you need someone who's a good leader and has a good strategic understanding of how these things work together so that they can build an organization where this stuff is being shared and breaks down silos. But they, they don't necessarily have to be a marketer or a rev ops person or a technologist. They need to be a business person who understands how businesses operate at a high level and they need to employ people who are good at those things. I think the right structure would be if I'm a chief Revenue officer today and I'm given the opportunity to run the organization in the manner that you and I are suggesting. You bring in a great CRO who has a really good track record of knowing how to build businesses and, you know, create value, understands customers, outcomes, et cetera, et cetera, understands marketing and sales to the extent that they work, you know, the way they work. But more importantly is they have a great sales leader, they have a great marketing person and a great customer success organization that reports into them. And you deploy those people in a way that's not siloed. But they're in the same organization, they're actually on the same team. They have to actually work together. That seems to be the way through this. And you have to have leadership, the CEO and the board on board with that idea. Because to your point, and this is the problem, I want my CRO focused on sales because that's what's going to drive the engine for me that's what's going to make me get up every morning and feel like I'm getting my numbers back. If I got a CRO in there that's not focused on that, at least I perceive it that way. I might see that as a threat to the outcomes I want. And I think that conflict is where I think a lot of this is happening. It's desire for money, the way the money is lended out, the expectations and conditions that come with that money and the ways in which companies are going to market, like you said, tend to be very customer acquisition focused and not strategically focused. And when you do that, you tend to bias too much towards the sales organization. So I'm just curious what your thoughts are, how you, when you see this sort of thing, what's the way that companies can think about, like you said, unbiasing themselves so that they do think more in a more connected way and not on such a tactical like acquisitional kind of mindset.

Yeah, I'm trying to think of examples where I saw it work incredibly well. And I have to go back to, to the two founders of Serious Decisions and they were sort of a marketing led organization. They both came from Gartner. They saw no benefit to when they did a sale. Look, it was still a small company at that time. I think we were about $150 million when, when, when we got done. But they, when they did a, when they did the annual sales kickoff, they didn't just bring sales, they brought the entire company. We were still small enough where we could do that and it was close enough and they kept it low cost enough where they could bring everybody. So people who came from research, people came from sales, they came from marketing, finance. Everybody shared in the spirit of that company and they understood what the mission was. And if, if you go back to those days, I don't know if you had any interaction with them, but it felt like we were working for a billion dollar company because we, we just had that much of a presence and we, we were that well known and we had that much credibility when it came into talking to a C suite. So I think it came from the, the founders, you know, John, John Neeson and Rich Eld, having just created a family. It sounds a little bit cheesy, but they really did. They created a family and they created this organization where people felt more benefit for supporting one another than they did for working against each other. So I think if somehow you could bring that spirit into an organization and get people to trust one another and want to work towards Bettering the entire organization and not just their little division of it. I think it works. So it's a little bit esoteric, Warren.

No, it's fine. This is the answer I was looking for. Strangely, I was kind of leading to something here, which is, let's say that you do have that. Like, I agree with you, by the way. Let's say you have a culture like this where you have people who promote this sort of cooperative sort of culture, right? Okay. Now that I have this culture and I have these people who are aligned on this and they want to do it, then I can implement or introduce processes to enable that to happen, because I have the willingness and desire, and those processes are going to be utilized and adhered to because they're consistent with the way people are thinking. But if I put processes in place in an organization that doesn't think that way, those processes may not be utilized, or they're going to be perceived as a constraint or a friction in the way that I really want to operate. So, for example, I'm trying to protect my silo, and a process may, in fact, threaten my silo. I may not want to adhere to that process because it doesn't align with what I'm trying to accomplish. So I think the culture does come first. And it is esoteric, but that's the truth. And I suspect that most of the people I speak to, when they're working with me, the things they ask me first are the symptomatic solutions. Find me a process that works. Give me a tool that does this. Give me a system that I can implement. And my question is, do you have a company that will use it? Do you have the right organizational structure for that? Because I can give it to you, but everyone's pissed about it and nobody wants to use it. It's not really useful. So I'm kind of curious. How would you suggest. Let's say you're a Revops leader. You're speaking to CROs. The audience here that listen to this, mostly chief revenue officers and founders, by the way. They're thinking, I have this problem. They're thinking, I have an issue right now where I've got, like, Dana's completely right. I got a siloed organization. I'm trying to put in these processes. I think they make sense. I know it needs to wear. What is it? That might be a way to engineer the proper way to break those silos down to create more cohesion across the organization.

I love that question because I did serve as a head of revenue operations for A company that the revenue operations function was largely still a sales operations function. Marketing operations was off on its own, and customer success operations was off on its own. So we created what Kerry Cunningham from Serious Decisions started calling a coalition of the willing. So we found individuals within these groups who were willing to shared common values and a common vision and were really interested in solving their, their part of the problem that was contributing to the bigger part of the problem, which was ultimately revenue for the company. So we, we just started with, well, what, what can we do? We, we know we have a lot of problems. What can we solve right now? What's the most important thing to us? Let's just start to list it up on a board. And, and we did that. And it was basically around insights and analytics. And we wanted to be able to create a view of everything that was occurring from lead all the way up through renewal. And we said, okay, we, you've got analytics resources, I've got them, you've got them. Let's pull these resources together. Let's come up with the insights that we want to, that we want to capture. The ones that are going to show us the entire process from lead all the way through renewal, that are going to capture information from marketing, sales, customer success. And let's, let's build out some, some reports and some dashboards and, and some plans around those. And let's, let's drive it. And we did, and it took about three months. And you know, a report is good when the day, you don't, you don't produce it, everyone calls and asks where it is, and that's, that's where we got. So I think start where there's commonality, not where there's differences, and then work on those common issues. And once you get good at that, it's like practice now, practice on something else and then keep going.

I like that. I like that idea of identifying the people. And there are always people in the organization. You can identify them that feel this way, the way they behave and they speak or they raise their hand, or they have a certain point of view all the time that represent someone who is more interested in being part of a solution and they have a good idea around bringing, building bridges than people who just sort of want to stick in their little world. I think it also comes down to leadership. You know, if I'm being, I've seen it. I've worked in big organizations and small ones, and I've seen where you've got a divisive, protective leader who runs a marketing organization. They tend to hire people who fit that for them because they want people to protect them. And so they have people on their team who speak for them. You know, you could see the culture being created internally within these organizations and the marketing department. Then I'm using them all. Using example. I'm not trying to point them out. Is that how it may be? Some organization might say, oh, the sales organization. There's just a bunch of people who all seem to feel the same way because that's the way in which they're not only being incentivized, but that's probably the way they're being identified and hired. And you do have to find people who are willing to break that cycle, agree with you, and maybe replicate those people so that you can get a different sort of a coalition. Because, you know, this is a leadership problem. This is like, why did this happen? How did I end up here? You know, what kind of organization am I running where my marketing leader feels like he or she is trying to protect themselves? What did I do to make them feel that they need to be protected? Why is that happening? And that's a good question to ask.

Or am I a CEO that thinks that you can just chunk a company down into individual processes and bits and pieces, and you measure these individual bits and pieces, and as long as these bits and pieces are making their individual numbers, then you're able to identify what the problem is into the entire system. And I just don't espouse to that. To that idea because it's way too complicated. You know, it's like the difference between Western medicine and Eastern medicine. If you break your arm, you want to go to a doctor in the U.S. but if you're not feeling well, you probably want to go to somebody that practices a little bit more like ayurvedic medicine or something like that. So the first questions they'll ask you is, how are you feeling? You know, are you happy? Are you sad? Because it's so. It's more complicated than bits and pieces. And no doubt we fragment companies up into bits and pieces and measure those bits and pieces and expect that the organism to run well. And it doesn't work that way.

Totally. And I was just so wild. I was just talking with a client just before this conversation today, literally right before I started this conversation with you, we were talking about my analogy. I use a lot, which, God bless you for saying that is I use the health example a lot. Because leaders and humans, understandably, because of our brains, tend to be symptomatic.

That's a better way of saying it symptomatic is perfect.

Right. It's just the way it works. So I, we, I think we have a sales problem. Fix the sales organization. Yeah, but ayurvedic view of a business would be we have like a more let's say for that. Keep the analogy. We have an inflammation problem. Right. So why is the organization inflamed? You know, and that the symptom is showing up this way, it's manifesting itself this way in the sales organization. And you know what's underneath that? Right. That's a hard thing because it's easier for me to tell the board I fixed the sales organization. That's what they want, you know. But how do you. It's not easy. I'm not suggesting it's simple. I know how hard this is. But you and I both know because we both been. You're both gray haired dudes. You know, we've been around long enough that we've worked for companies where it works. We see that people that do think this way, it's better. You know, we've all had experiences like that. There's. How do you.

Yeah, there, there are companies. I see. There's one in particular, I see, like how are they this good? Like how are they this awesome? And I use Garmin as an example, like their fitness technology. I'm a runner. I love their tech. I love the products that they create. I love, I mean the fact that I can get as many insights off from my watch as I can. And I'm not paying a subscription to that watch. I buy the watch and I get the subscriptions for Life for free. But when they deliver something, the quality is so unbelievable and so incredible. And they're not just doing this for fitness technology, they're doing this for airplanes, they're doing it for ships, they're doing it for, for defense contractors. They just kick ass. And I would love to know what's going on inside that company so that they can deliver such amazing results and they just hire the best engineers and they are always winning culture awards and stuff like that. I don't know what's going on there, but something's happened.

Well, he has. I have a suspicion. I don't know, I don't know if it's true, but try this one on. Right. So I talk about this a lot. You're thinking about you. And I really moved away, which I think is appropriate frankly, from processes and data to culture and thinking. Right. Because ultimately that's where things start. And that Is that if I don't know your situation, but, you know, I'm married, I have three kids, they're in college now. And, you know, when my wife and I were first dating, you know, it was a different type of a focus, right? We're having fun, we're doing crazy things. We traveled all the time, we went out to dinners, we'd stay out late. You know, very much like a how do we stimulate ourselves sort of a culture, because that's what we had. We had each other's interests in mind. And then all of a sudden, now you have kids. And, you know, every decision changes everything. It's not just, you know, now I have kids, it's, you know, we really shouldn't eat like this anymore because I don't want my kids eating like this. Even though I screwed up my stomach, I don't want my kids to screw up their stomach. So I'm going to issue bad food because I want the kids to eat better. And, you know, we can't stay out late anymore because I want to stay home with the kids. And, you know, it's cool living in this part of town, but the schools here are terrible and I want my kids to go to a really good school. So we're going to move to a place that we may not necessarily have chosen, but it's better for them. The school system is better. My point of making is our concern for their well being supersedes our. Well, our concerns for ourselves. And we make dramatic lifestyle changes in pursuit of that because the kids become more important, they become the focus, and your life changes. Similarly, I would say customers are the same thing for a business. For Garmin, I don't know, but Garmin probably thinks you're more important than anything else. You're the most important thing in their business. So you're always surprised and thrilled with what they do for you because every decision they make, even though it may be more expensive to do it that way, or they're giving away something for you for free, and someone says, you idiot, what are you giving? They probably pay for that. Yeah, I know, but he'll be happier if we don't charge them for it. These are the things I think the customer success organization is the heart of the business. And if everybody in the organization could kind of align around a customer outcome, that's, I think, a place where people can coalesce around a higher purpose. I think I'd like to think, and I think companies like the one you described, the way you talked about it, right now, this is obviously a company that puts you, you specifically at the front of every decision they make. And I think a CRO to kind of bring it back to what we're talking about needs to be very customer centric for that reason. Because I can easily go to my different groups sales, my marketing say, how does this impact the customer? Is that marketing campaign going to annoy them or is it going to educate them? Is it going to enrich them? Are they going to be. How are they going to react to us when we take this action? How are the sales processes we're doing? Are you going to call these people 60 times after they said they want to talk to you just because you want to get more things in your Salesforce dashboard, or is that going to annoy people? What's best for the customer? And I do think that may be a way forward to kind of run these organizations because we all have examples like this, we all have companies that we work with. So what are your thoughts on that sort of notion?

Well, it's an interesting point you make because Garmin does make you feel like you're the only person in the world. If I've ever had a problem, I call them. They pick up the phone. Right. Or when it's not a chat bot, I'm chatting with somebody actually there and I waited three seconds to speak to that person and they're solving my problem. And you know, I put Bennington Boats, I, I own a pontoon boat. That's another incredible American company out in Indianapolis. It was founded by a bunch of people who love boats and they love people who love boats. So how do you do that though? When CROs jump from company to company to company, it's not easy.

I agree. Yeah.

Personal attachment to what they're selling, it's really hard.

It's really hard. I look, believe me, I get it. So many complications. I mean, everybody wants to be on board and, you know, kind of be on the same mission. But a lot of these companies, as you and I both know, a lot of them are in business because they found a business that is good deliverables and good multiples.

Yeah, you know, I'm thinking about the attributes of these companies too, because Bennington was an engineer, founded company if by boat makers and boat lovers. The same thing with Garmin, it was a bunch of engineers went out there and created all this technology. There's another company, I think in North Carolina, sas, still privately, privately owned.

I know them.

Yeah. And you know, you talk to people that work there. If you go to their Campus. It's like a little city that you go to. And they know especially, you know, some of these employees could go somewhere else and they could make a lot more money. And they've been there for 30 years because they like the way they're treated. They. They. I think SaaS has probably left money on the table. I'm sure they could have sold that company a million different times, and the owner could have walked away even more of a billionaire than he already is. But it just was not. It was personal.

Yeah.

Yeah. So how do you make. How do you. How do you make being a CRO personal? I don't know.

It's a.

It's a great question.

But I do try to imbue this in my clients a lot to say, you know, if you're going to go work for someone, go work for companies, a chief revenue officer. You understand your job. You've got to find some thing, some thematic reason why you're going to try and build bridges. Maybe you're just someone who likes that. There's some people really just more like they like building consensus and creating communities. Other people, you have to kind of believe in what they're up to, and it's not easy. A lot of these companies don't really do much that you can believe in. They just are creating some widget or something like that.

Yeah, I think Akamai is along that line there, too. The CEO of Akamai is Tom Layton. He was an MIT professor. He started at Akamai based upon a science project with one of his kids at mit. You know who. He founded that company together with that. With that kid. Unfortunately, he was killed in a plane crash with 911. But Tom Layton is the CEO of that company, and he's calling the shots, and he won't let go because it's his baby, you know, and they've been incredibly successful. That company has done so well, and it's grown so fast. I guess the answer, Warren, is you have to care about what you're doing. Yeah.

Yeah, I think so. I do. I do. It's not easy. I get it. I'm not naive. But when I see these things happen, I think there's a. Such a large cultural component to this. And I sometimes get a little chided because a lot of the focus on the work I'm doing tends to fall in that area. But I'm a firm believer that without that stuff first, a lot of the stuff you're going to do tactically won't matter.

Yeah, I love it when A CRO sold for a company for five years and you know, just espouse how much they love that company, how great their product was. And then you know, their, their employment contract comes up, they leave and they go to work for the, for the competitor that they've been trying to beat for the last five years. And now they're saying that this one's the best one. It just happens so often. And now we've turned salespeople into mercenaries. They just go from company to company to company to company and they're selling against themselves in some cases. And agree there's a big cultural problem. Maybe.

I think.

So we can get into that.

It's a longer philosophical discussion, but I think that I appreciate your point of view. It's really refreshing. And I follow up one question before we sign off here and that is, I think I know the answer. It's somewhat self leading but I asked this question of everybody and that is, if you were hiring a chief revenue officer and someone who came to you who was just a really outstanding sales leader and someone who was an outstanding customer success leader and somebody who was an outstanding rev ops leader, which one do you think would be the best person for the job?

I don't mean to offend my CMOs and CCOs out there, but I would gravitate towards the salesperson because it's the meat between the two pieces of bread. You can't have a sandwich without it. But you, you still need somebody that can help with the overall go to customer function and the go to market function. And I'm sure there are, there, there are CMOs out there and CCOs that would prove me wrong for this and I'm way biased because I've spent my entire career almost inside the sales organization today. And I know, I know the pain and some of the detail that goes on inside of that and I don't know it as well in the CMO and CCO organization.

Yep.

Good.

There's no right answer to that question, by the way. Just good. Thank you for your perspective. So what are you up to and is there any way that you are looking to, I don't know, reach people or anyone want to reach out to you or any way that you, I can help you in this conversation get more accomplished through communicating with the people that are listening to this right now.

One of your students reached out to me after I had that conversation and you know him and I followed up with another half hour conversation after. So I never say no to an opportunity to get to know somebody else because you never know where this, where this brings you. And you and I got connected through a mutual acquaintance and now I'm having an opportunity to speak to you and your audience. And I'm so LinkedIn's the best place to get to get me. And if you love to have a conversation, I'd love to have one with you as well. I live up in the state of Maine. Come on up. It's a beautiful.

It is. It is beautiful up there. Well, look, as I expected, this was a really great conversation. Really great that we ended up kind of serendipitously meeting. Thanks so much for the last couple, last week of being generous with your time and your, your thoughts. Thanks for being here and I look forward to, I'm sure, collaborating with you in the future.

Thank you, Warren.

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