Scaling to $100m+ from a CRO's Perspective, With Zorian Rotenberg

The CRO Spotlight Podcast, powered by the Sales IQ Network. Hi, and welcome to the CRO Spotlight Podcast. I'm Warren Zenna from the CRO Collective, and I'm here with my co host, Lupe Feld. Hey, Lupe.

Hey, Warren. This is Lupe Feld and I'm glad to be here with you.

So this podcast is really for aspiring CROs and CEOs and current CROs whom are interested in learning from not only us, but the great guests that we're going to have.

We're here to tell you that there is other areas of the business that can drive revenue, and we're going to look and inspect and come up with some great ideas for us to bring in as much revenue as we can and drive some meaningful change for the business.

So tune in. We have some exciting opportunities coming up for really amazing conversations and any B2B leaders. I think you're really going to enjoy it. So thanks for tuning in and we look forward to seeing you. Okay. And welcome to the CRO Spotlight Podcast. This week I'm alone. Lupe is not feeling well, so I wrote solo today, but I'm really happy to have this guest with me, Zorian Rutenberg, whom I've been speaking with Zorian now for a couple of years via LinkedIn, because of my blabbering on LinkedIn has caught his attention, because you'll find out soon why. And you know, Zori and I have had many different chats and conversations about the CRO role and his own perspective on it, which is fascinating and really very in depth. And he has a really great understanding of a lot of the nuts and bolts and operational aspects of the role, which I think is really important. I wanted to talk to him about this. So that end, I'm going to introduce Zorian. Hey, Zorian. Thanks for being here.

Warren, thank you for having me.

You got it. So I'm going to introduce you, like, I'm going to, like, tell everybody a little about you. All right. And you can do the same, but I just want to formally, like, tell everybody who you are and why you're so important to me. Okay. So Zorin Dorian is a sales and marketing exec. He's focused mainly on scaling revenue, leading sales. He's really done a great job of scaling businesses up to like 100 million plus. And that's a skill that is really valuable. And frankly, it's the skill that most CEOs hire CROs for. Right. So he's a Harvard Business grad. He's really Smart. He has a really, as I said, really great perspective on a lot of the nuts and bolts and operational aspects of how to grow a business. And he's also very focused on leadership and the type of leaders that you need to be in the CRO role. So to that end. Hi, Zorian. And thanks for being here today.

Thank you very much again for having me. I'm excited to talk to you about this.

Good.

So why don't you give us all a little bit of a flavor of your history a bit in terms of your work history. How did you start out? What got you from where you started to where you are today? Everyone has an interesting story of how they end up in the place to run. I'm sure I'd love to hear a bit more about that.

Yeah, I'm going to have a challenge figuring out how to summarize it all. But long story short, I actually started my career in investment banking at Merrill lynch in New York. So worked about 80 to 100 hours a week for two years as an analyst doing a lot of PowerPoint pitchbook presentations and Excel spreadsheet heavy duty financial modeling. My college education was a major in finance actually with two minors, one in applied mathematics and another in computer science. There's a reason I'm sharing this because ultimately you have to wonder, how in the world did I end up in sales, running sales and being a CRO. And ultimately I went from investment banking to investing in growth, private equity, slash growth venture capital. And I went to business school where I met with a lot of CEOs and I asked them, what's the best path to ultimately becoming a CEO and a leader of an organization. And they all said they that you either built something or sell something. And they thought everything else is overhead, which is obviously facetious and it's not true in that full context. But I was not an engineer, although I got a computer science minor, but I wasn't a coder. But my other path, therefore, was to go sell something. In that sort of interest of being a corporate leader, maybe CEO. And I went into sales and one of the key people that I ended up working for was this CEO named Walter Scott, who was a sales leader prior to becoming a CEO. He was a fantastic sales leader and he actually obviously ran sales and marketing and account management. So what we today call CRO. And Walter was amazing. Under his leadership as the CEO, we took Acronis from about 19 million to 100 million in three years. And it was with 40% EBITDA margins, profitable business and that kind of growth, which is almost unheard of. And I would argue that everything I learned about running sales and being a CRO was from Walter. He was phenomenal and still very fortunate to have him as a mentor. He's now on the boards. He doesn't. He's not running a company at this time. But long story short, I realized that my passion was for growing revenue at companies. And even when I was in venture capital growth, pe before business school, I realized that I really enjoyed deals and doing diligence and understanding how to analyze companies and investing. The one black box, the thing that I didn't understand is how did they actually grow the business? What is it that they actually do? Like when the robber meets the road, what actually needs to happen for revenue to grow? And I never understood it. So ultimately, to summarize, and I said I would be challenged to make it concise, but I went.

Good insight.

Yeah. From finance in Wall street in New York, to running sales and revenue through my areas of interest, through investing in companies, through working for some amazing people like Walter Scott. And ultimately throughout that time, I've always kind of realized that if you're doing something you really love, you can become one of the top 5% to 10% of the best people out there, which is all you really should want. You should want to be in a career where you have a shot at becoming top 10, top 5%. So if you really love it, you can do it, you know, if you have that passion. And certainly the background. And I think that the math, the number crunching background really did help out because, you know, running revenue is pretty quantitative, especially if you do it right. And if you want to scale companies to a hundred million in sales at that scale, you have to really have a very analytical approach. So anyway, that's, that's the story.

I want to talk about something because. Thanks. That's great. What is it that grows companies? What did you discover? I talk about how does a company grow to $100 million? What's the rubber hits the road thing that you figured out and expound on your understanding of not only what that is, but what the role of a CRO is in implementing and making that happen.

Yeah. So the first one is a hard question because it's both complicated and complex without going into details in the find nuances of the definitions of complicated versus complex. But it's both complicated and it is complex. To build a business to that level, we don't think about it enough, but there's so many things that have to Go, right. And I would say at a high level, kind of in a concise way, I would say that you have to have number one great people, right? You have to have really great people. You have to have product because if you want to get to that level, 100 million, you cannot do it without a great product. It's very hard to do and a lot of people may not realize it and they think that sales teams can just kind of sprinkle their magic dust on, on a product and sell however much is necessary to board targets. That's not really the case. But you know, great people, great product and very, very, very exceptional sales and marketing. But under, you know, those are the key big sort of, I would say three legged stool in a people product and the go to market team now under, when you double click on that, there is so much more to it. And that brings me to your second question about how does CRO play a role in that? Look, you know we talked, I think about it before CRO. I like to think of a CRO role as a hedge fund portfolio manager. That's kind of a throwback to my Wall street years and invest in, et cetera and is generating the return on investment for your company, the board of directors, investors.

Right.

You're a private equity or vc. It's consistent risk adjusted returns across the business, which is what a CRO does. It's capital allocation.

Right.

There are three types of resources. There's time, there's money, there's people. And you have to allocate all the resources. But across all those, it's capital. You recruit people, that's capital. You allocate their time, that's capital, you know, hours, weeks, months. And, and that's a very important component of being CRO and ultimately hitting aggressive results. The other role of the CRO is, is leadership. We talk about leadership. It's, it's about getting people to perform and hit results. So it's all about people. I, I think I talk a lot about leadership because that's kind of one of the primary focus areas in the first year at Harvard Business School, the focus on leadership. And it's exactly where I realized that leadership is not a squishy concept. Like you read these books on leadership or blog posts. They're very, I would say 80% of them are just very fluffy and squishy. And it's kind of like a lot of like vacuous statements. You know, you got to be great and you got to, you know, take care of people. Like sure, but, but it's much more tangible and objective. Like leadership means you're leading people and that's the most important thing in an organization. You cannot achieve, you know, results, whether it's 20 million or 50 or 100 million sales. You cannot do it without people, without sales team, go to market, revenue teams, et cetera. And it's a, it's a rock solid skill set of producing results, positioning your team to win, building up new leaders in the organization, you know, organizational structure and how do you align people, how do you or even, you know, let's start with recruiting, which is like the most important thing you should do really, really well is building championship teams. And you know, of course I can use sports analogies a lot and it'll probably annoy some folks, but, but sports are about performance and achieving results that are measurable. That's why we use those parallels in sales and revenue. But long story short, you have to recruit amazing people, A players. And a players are hard to find talent. Really. Top 10%, top decile talent is very hard to find. But that is your job, to find, screen and recruit and attract that kind of talent. And what is eight, you know, what is an A player? What is A plus talent? It's people who have a high probability, you know, 90% plus of hitting the results that you need their quota targets, for example, in the sales team. But they also necessarily part of my definition of is they make everyone else around them better.

Right?

So they're not like this kind of, you know, star player that, that disrupts the, the culture and the behavior of the team. They make the rest of the team better. The CRO's job is exactly to build that kind of team, bring in these great people to work together and put the right people in the right seats on the right boss, right. And lead them towards those results. And that's what I mean by, by leadership. And it's hard.

Got it. So yeah, I could see why, the way you just described that, why you make leadership such an important emphasis. Because I mean, I agree with you, but the way you articulated it just now, it makes so much sense that even if you have all these things in place, without proper leadership, none of it's going to get done. It sort of needs that like someone who's in charge of things and has a certain skillset. So to that end, like when you look at the competencies of a CRO, if you look at like maybe the, if you were to take like the really good CRO, maybe a whole slew of them, and you were to sort of evaluate or analyze, let's say their DNA, their competency DNA. What do you think are the commonalities between Chief Revenue officers who are successful? So, and I'm looking at it from two perspectives. Your answer? One is just so that people understand like how to profile one, but also if you want to become one. Like if I'm looking to be a CRO, what are the things I need to be thinking about that'll help me succeed and areas of development I can start thinking about that'll help me get a better chance of not only getting the role but also being successful at it.

Yeah. So what are kind of the, you know, the skills and I would say also like competencies plus experiences plus personal traits, characteristics you need. So all the above, all the above. It, you know, there's a lot to it. I think, look, I think at a high level you are again like a hedge fund portfolio manager. You need to produce results, get a return on investment. And what that means is that you have to have some experience, like to be a CRO. You're the Chief Revenue Officer. It means that you could have gotten to that by having been a non chief, like a lower rung on the hierarchical corporate letter Revenue officer. So revenue likely means sales. Right. You should have been a sales VP and prior to that a sales, maybe regional director.

Right.

Or prior to that sales manager. So you ultimately are responsible for, for bringing in revenue, you know, initially bookings and ultimately recurring revenue, yada yada yada, you know, without sort of going into gap accounting and the differences. But you need to have experience managing sales and ideally progression towards that level. But it's more than just sales because a Chief Revenue officer ideally should not be just another title for a VP of sales. You are running all of revenue, which is the entire revenue funnel, the entire life cycle of revenue. So from the time a suspect, a cold suspect, becomes a lead for your company to the time that lead becomes a meeting and goes to sales and they qualify it, whether it becomes an opportunity in the pipeline and from there on, when you win a deal closed one, they become a customer, paid customer. And you have to have account management experience on how to manage that customer or the relationship with that customer and how to renew that customer plus customer success, plus all the other supporting functions from revenue ops and sales enablement, et cetera. So you see, there's a lot. And from the time you generate a lead, you need to understand demand generation, how that happens, but not only how it happens, but how to hire a great VP of marketing or VP of demand gen and what are the key processes and campaigns that will ultimately drive the right results, that produce meetings and ultimately opportunities in the sales pipeline. At that point you have to really deeply understand how to win deals and run sales cycles, running account execs globally, right? And then after that, account management, et cetera. But within all of that you have to understand how to do that. It depends what is the size of the company. But certainly if you're asking for like $100 million company that's typically global, larger organizations, you have to have experience different geographies, you know, managing different teams, creating alignment across teams, getting results of those teams. So as you can see, to answer your question, you should have those experiences or majority of those experiences. You should ultimately have managerial management experience, but not just your people internally and not just managing people, not just managing sales, but also managing customer relationships and managing internal colleague alignment. Like if you're an executive, you shouldn't be able to manage your alignment as a sales leader, for example, with the marketing leadership, with the product leadership, with the CEO, with a board. So these are all the experiences you should have. But what we didn't mention is your personal traits, characteristics, and that's different from experiences. And I think to simplify that, I would say somebody who has a personal trait of relating well to people, having empathy. Because I think without that focus on people, you are not going to be an effective leader. And not being an effective leader necessarily means you're not going to produce exceptional results that are sort of, if you think of a hedge fund portfolio manager who needs to produce results that be the benchmark, you need to be a CRO that produces results better than other competitors in your space. Otherwise your board should seek out another croat from a competitor to produce better results. And on that note, I would say that people trade, that leadership trade is critical because unfortunately there are quite a few executives out there, including CROs and CEOs, of course, who are the opposite of what the board should seek out. And Eisenhower had this great quote that leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because they want to do it. And he said, you don't lead by hitting people over the head. That's called assault, not leadership. Now, funny enough, and it's a funny point, but Eisenhower is a great leader. He obviously was not only a US President, but also was the supreme commander of Allied forces During World War II and D Day, right? So we can all agree he really knew what he was doing. And there were hundreds of thousands of people who followed him effectively and produced exceptional results. There are a number of people who operate by virtually hitting people over the head, which is not an effective return on investment. And I would bet that if measured effectively, that kind of leader does not perform very well for the stakeholders, for the investors. And there is a need for better approach to producing results that delivers better than a benchmark in roi.

That's great. Really great answer. Thank you. I'm curious, so when you think about a CEO that's looking for that kind of person or evaluating the marketplace, I have a philosophy or a point of view on this. I'm curious to know what yours is, how first, before the CEO that hasn't hired a CRO before they're looking for one for the first time does. I guess the first question is, does a CEO first need to set up his company in a specific way to ensure that a CRO succeeds or do they just bring one in and let the CRO figure that out? In other words, is there a way that a CEO sort of needs to have an environment that will bring forth a better potential outcome for a CRO's success or not? And if so, how would he do that?

There are several things. First of all, to answer your question, the CEO, if they can set up a, you know, the company for the CRO to come in and be more successful, of course they should. Like, if you can make things even better than they would be otherwise, do it. So yeah, I would say if you can do it.

But I understand, I guess the. Yeah, the reason for my question is more, I guess it's, it's look, you and I agree, you just said it. It's already hard enough to find somebody that's good. That's first of all. But then it's also expensive, right? This is not a small investment. And once you hire a CRO, even if you're not sure, it's still going to take a year or two to find out if it worked. And that's a big investment of time. So again, my philosophy stems from the idea that being more preparatory and risk averse by making sure you're doing certain things ahead of time is only going to help to ensure that that hire is going to be more successful. That's all. I'm looking at it more from a risk management perspective and I guess, given that, what might some of the things a CEO think about internally and externally as they start thinking about bringing it to you?

REVEN OFFICER ON yeah, I mean, it's a good question. I haven't been asked that Before I would say this, that you, you want to start with what is the objective, what are the goals? We talked about this before, right? So what, you know, what are you trying to achieve? And we kind of talked about this in the context of at which point the company needs a CRO or does the company need a CRO? I don't think every company needs a CRO and a lot of companies that are small don't. I don't think they need a CRO.

Because there's like more like a timing thing. In your view, you needed CRO at a specific point in the company size and stuff like that.

Correct.

Or more importantly, what is the goal?

Right.

So if your goal is to grow sales, you probably need a VP of sales or a better VP of sales.

Right.

If your goal is to align different revenue functions and have somebody who's completely responsible and accountable for all of revenue, like a one stop shop, that person gets the entire revenue funnel and manages it and creates a lot of, you know, a lot better outcomes through doing so. That's a great goal. And if your company has those functions in place, means that it's not a small company, it's at that point likely, you know, 20 million in sales probably.

Right.

So if that's your goal and you want to create that alignment and you want to find somebody who can make the entire revenue function much more successful and effective.

Right.

Much better growth. And by better I mean that you have faster growth. But better means that it's highly cost effective. That doesn't break your unit economics. You're not just throwing money at the problem or headcount the problem. They're actually growing faster but very cost effectively profitably. Well, of course that's a great goal. And bring a CRO. So then once you've identified that objective and you realize that the answer to that is a CRO, great. So what can you do to make things better? Well, I would say bringing in a good CRO I think produces better results. If you already have some stability from product being pretty effective in the market, good NPS from customers having a decent, not perfectly optimized, but sort of well thought out, consistent sales process, A fairly good team on top of which a CRO can build.

Right.

Because otherwise you're bringing someone in to start from scratch. There are plenty of CROs that don't want to do that. They've been there down there, they don't want to go back and do that again. Another thing is just going to slow them down and it's going to create More room for misalignment where you're expecting much higher level of performance, but they can't because they're. They're still building the foundation and you could have done it prior to that. So I think those are some of the things to think about in terms of helping a CRO be more successful when you bring them in.

Okay, that's helpful when you think about marketing and customer success, because you mentioned before, and I'm in agreement with you, that those are obviously important areas for a CRO to be familiar with. How familiar, I mean, does if a CRO comes out of sales, which I think you and I agree is likely the place they're going to come from?

Yeah.

What's the way in which a CRO gets familiar with or comfortable with customer success and account management and marketing to the degree that they're able to lead it effectively without actually being a CMO or a customer success leader first? Like, what's the right way to inject that intelligence or knowledge or competency into your system without having to traverse often, like moving your career around all these different roles?

Yeah, great question. I think that, you know, a very successful sales leader will likely work or the result, the result they're getting. The successful outcomes they're producing at their current company in their current role is highly probable to be a function of their ability to work really well with the rest of the revenue function. Meaning, for example, with marketing teams that are very focused on demand generation and therefore they have great exposure to that because they're constantly working on having exceptional alignment and working closely with that team by understanding what they're doing, providing them the necessary feedback to constantly optimize the processes.

Right.

So they, by design and by definition will, you know, eight times out of 10, have a much deeper exposure to those other roles, including demand generational marketing and account management, et cetera. And a lot of VPs of sales will actually run account management and customer success in sales or revenue ops anyway. So I would think that coming into a CRO role, you're probably already successful and have that experience now. You don't need to be that involved in marketing. As long as you're good at either bringing in a marketing leader under you, like a director, for example, if you're a VP of sales or if they're not working under you, they're like a separate team, that's fine. But then you're working exceptionally well with them and have a thoughtful alignment with them. So I think that exposure is sufficient that you don't need to have Ron actually or very closely run marketing or other functions to be able to be a great leader for those. One other thing I'll say a great leader is not someone who necessarily. Well, let me simplify it. They're not going to micromanage it. A great leader creates the environment for great people to succeed in. So for example, going back to leadership, you're bringing in the best possible people, the a players that you need on the team. As a leader, you create a culture and that culture drives behavior. So if you create a culture where successful demand gen marketing teams can be successful, that's all you need to do.

Right.

The behavior and performance of your people, your sales and revenue teams is a reflection of the culture that you've created. Therefore, a great CRO will create an environment within which a player marketing teams or marketing executives will be highly successful without any kind of micromanagement. Which necessarily means you don't have to too much deep hands on knowledge in marketing to successfully be a leader where that marketing team is at.

Yeah. So other words, you're, you're taking on the mantle of being responsible for something, but you hold somebody else accountable for it based on their specific subject matter expertise and you lead them and give them the opportunity to accomplish the goals required. Yeah, yeah.

I mean in a simpler sort of analogy, I would say, you know, against sports. So you know, any great coach, you know, I'm in New England, so I'll use Bill Belichick. I know some people will hate me for that. But it's a great analogy nevertheless that he's not necessarily an expert quarterback.

Right.

Like he's never played that position before. But he's very good at bringing in great quarterbacks and putting in the right coaches who are coordinators and coaches for that quarterback as well as any other position. He knows exactly the kind of person to bring in. He knows the kind of processes, approaches and coaching and development frameworks to use for that. But he doesn't have to be a former quarterback himself or any position. Right. It's really the same thing.

Yeah, I agree and I've made this point many times that the best sports coaches of all time weren't great players. It's just, it's a different competency, you know, and some of them were right. But I think the difference is that they, what they all possess is an incredible understanding of the game and they know how to construct the game. You know, you watch a baseball manager in particular, you know, I look at a baseball manager. Interesting, because if you look at a baseball game and you look at the positions on the baseball diamond. You know, each position has a very specific mechanical skill set that all together work towards a winning team. And a manager doesn't really know how to play, but he certainly knows what kind of pitcher he needs against this particular batter. He knows whether or not we need to right now, or whether we need to shift the players this way. And they're constructing the game live while it's playing, because the game changes throughout each inning. And really great managers are always looking at the whole bigger strategic picture and system that the game represents. And they're putting the players in who are their pieces, and they know how to find the right people to be put in those positions. That's why the Steinbrenners spend all this money, because they're smart. They're like, we need the best people. If we have the best people in the bullpen and in the back, then we'll put them in the game at the positions we need and we'll more likely win. But I think about this a lot because I agree with you. I see. Two things I think I'm taking out of this conversation, aside from a lot, is you're either a hedge fund manager, which is you're managing a portfolio that's very financially driven, or you're a baseball leader or a football coach, and you're looking at the systemic way in which a game is played and the players in it. And I think that's actually probably a really good summation here. Right. A CRO is sort of like a combination of like a financial portfolio manager and a sports coach leader who knows how to engineer leader and people to win games.

Yes, exactly.

And, you know, I'd like to ask you one final question, because it's something that comes up a lot. You probably would be uniquely qualified to answer it. What should the relationship of a CRO be to the cfo?

That's a great question, and I apologize. Before I answer that, I do want to say one thing, though, is that while we talked about coaches in sports like football, the coach may not have been a quarterback, but necessarily has played football before, is a master of the game and understanding it. I would say that a CRO, most likely and more, you know, a lot more than not, will have come from sales. And I know we talked about it before. Yeah, you ultimately, the difference here, though, from a regular coach who hasn't necessarily been the best player is that you do have to generate revenue or sales. So you, as a CRO will most likely need that direct experience. It's very Important, you will have to understand how to do pipeline management and forecasting and coach the teams on more effectively, win deals and close deals and generate new customers and revenue. So that is that kind of fine, important point.

Very, very good point. And I agree with you. I think that, you know, I don't see how a CRO could be successful if they haven't really been a really top salesperson and a really top sales leader. It's such a critical angle of the role that without that acumen, having really expertise in there, you probably will fall short. I'm in agreement with you there. I've had a lot of people argue with me about this. I can tell you that. Fights with people who say that really great chief marketing officers could make. And I don'. Want to knock chief marketing officers. I think they're incredibly talented people, especially now. But it's just, it's a different. It's a different skill, it's a different perspective. When you're growing revenue, you have to know how to be in the market and close deals and like you said, build a pipeline and know how to get customers on board and grow from a sales perspective. And I have no doubt that I'm going to have people writing me after this is over and telling me that.

I'm completely full of shit. And you. And I agree with that. I think I also want to be clear. Look, you can't be a sales leader in a CRO or a CRO, in my opinion, without understanding how to manage the pipeline, how to forecast sales effectively. And that requires experience in the field, like actually having done it and having managed sales teams. And if somebody disagrees with that. Look, I mean, I'm a data guy. I'm an applied math minor, right? So I have a passion for data, for numbers, for quantitative or measurable, even qualitative. But as long as it's measurable information, let's look at historic data points. If there were CMOs that have never actually done the roles of sales management and selling and pipeline management and forecasting, let's discuss that. Maybe we're missing something. I don't know of many, and I'm not saying that in a playful way, I genuinely mean that. But I also want to be clear that I'm not saying that someone who is in a different role cannot have the vision of becoming a CRO if that's what they want. But then you should, in my opinion, go get that experience. I'm not saying you cannot be a CRO.

I agree. You and I are completely aligned. First of All I'm going to go even further with this because I've had this conversation before, and before we move on to that last question is my opinion is in a competitive. An organization that's really hard charging in a competitive marketplace, if they bring on a chief revenue officer that came out of marketing, I just think that that person would be eaten alive. I just don't see how a sales team is going to be. It's very difficult, you know, because sales organizations, of all the revenue functions, are the most difficult to manage. They're very difficult. It's such a unique aspect of the business. The types of people that are in that organization, the personalities, what goes on there, the pressure. If you haven't been in that, you know, you gotta have four stripes on your. On your shoulder, you know, I mean, you kind of have to have them there. And, you know, it's. It's just. Well, anyway, I think we agree it's.

A slightly different role. And we're definitely not saying. Let's agree. We're not saying that somebody.

It's not better. It's not a. It's not a condemnation of the CMO role.

No, not at all. But go get that experience and that's perfectly fine. Nobody's saying you cannot be. One thing I will say on that note is I always, when people come to me and ask that, I always want to understand, why is it that you want to be a CRO? What is. Why are you. Let's say, I've heard folks in different roles, they want to become a CRO, and I always wonder why. What is so attractive in a CRO role for you? I don't get it because it's just for someone who has passion for running revenue and closing sales. I get it, but a lot of times I don't quite understand what is actually driving them towards that.

Look, I ask this question a lot. I ask this question a lot. It's one of the first things I ask my clients is, why do you want this job? And, you know, you don't usually find out. Yeah, it's not easy because they're. Well, you know, it's a lot of times it's because they don't really understand what the role is. They think understandably too, because the marketplace has told them this, that it's going to be the same job as ahead of sales, just with a C suite title. And that's not true. And so I'm sort of trying to educate the market a bit to say that's not what's going to happen.

And it's not as glamorous as it sounds. It's like being a CEO. People want to become CEOs and then it's very lonely at the top. It's not that.

It is. It's a very lonely job.

And you shouldn't want to take a role just because it's glamorous or has any title. I've always told people that, you know, for a long time, you know, in my career, at least after I thought I matured up after business school, I couldn't care less. If you call me a chief janitorial officer, the title doesn't matter to me. They're just letters. It's an acronym. What's important is the role. Ultimately. What am I doing? Am I enjoying it? Am I adding value? Do I feel like I'm constantly growing? And of course, the compensation part, to put food on the table for my family. But other than that, the glamour of some letters from an Alphabet that fall into some title, I don't think that's the most important thing at all.

I agree. It's so true. And it's hard for younger people who are earlier in their career to kind of get that because, look, it's understand people have a understandable desire to want to feel like they've accomplished something and they've achieved growth. And when you get to a point, you realize, I just want to do good work and I want the opportunity to just have the job, to make the results, produce the results that I'm capable of. There's a lot more freedom with that. And I think that I'd like to see more people get. So anyway, I want to move on to this last question because this was a big one that came up a lot of times. What is the CFO role? Because I think you're right in that the CRO is very involved financially with the organization. So what should that relationship look like between a CRO and a cfo?

Well, I think you should have a very effective work relationship with all the executives as a Croat, whether it's a CFO or Chief Marketing Officer. Unless CMO or VP of Marketing report to you. Well, if as a CRO, they typically would be, but with the CEO, with Chief Product Officer, chief Technology Officer, et cetera, et cetera, with the entire executive team. But the CFO is, to your question, is responsible for ensuring that the money is correctly managed by the company. The CFO supports the CRO in ensuring that there's a budget to bring in to recruit the team, but also to ensure that the CRO provides forecasting to the cfo. It's very important for cash management.

Right?

What are we going to hit? Providing guidance on the forecast. Think about a public company. They're providing forecasts to the market and there are analysts that estimate where the earnings per share will be for the company and the stock price is a function of that. And in a private company, as a CRO, you need to manage that effectively in a relationship with the cfo, where you're going to end up how much money you need for the Even the operational, the sales, operations and production model that should be built out in Excel, that shows exactly what the plan is for the entire year, what your expectations are, capacity analysis, headcount, ramp, everything. You typically work with a CFO to build out a more accurate and more aligned and integrated model like that, and then execute it and work with the CFO and the money and the forecast part of it.

Okay, great.

I mean, I agree. I think that some of the people I've been speaking to, some of my clients, in fact, they find that there's so much crossover between those two roles at some point that it becomes sort of strange to manage them. But I appreciate your perspective on it, but we're getting close to time here. I wanted to thank you. This is such a great conversation, I can tell you, and I could probably go on here for another hour or so, but you know, other lives we have to live. So. So thank you for being a guest and thanks for your expertise. Again, this podcast will be on Spotify. It'll be on, you know, itunes and all the other channels that the podcaster found. It also is hosted with the sales IQ people online there and I'll also post a link to this online for everybody to listen to once it's done. So again, Zorin Rotenberg, thank you so much. Your expertise is really helpful and you got a great perspective and I learned a lot here today. So I appreciate your time.

Warren, thank you for having me. Always enjoy talking to you.

Likewise, sir. Bye bye.

Thank you. See you.