Warren Zenna and Frank Nardi discuss how Chief Revenue Officers are shifting from "grow at all costs" to profitable growth. The change reflects pressure to improve customer retention and deliver real value instead of chasing vanity metrics.
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 and its critical impact on B2 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. Oh, for sure.
This is exciting. Thanks for having me on.
Yeah, yeah, not at all. So, you know, it's funny, a lot of people I meet this way, you know, like I do an engagement on LinkedIn, I get involved in some conversation and someone comments and they make a smart comment and then we end up getting into a chat about it. And I don't know, people put LinkedIn down all the time. I don't know why. I think it's awesome. I mean, it's done so much for me in terms of, like, my career and bringing out this business in invaluable. So I don't know, I'm just curious, what are your thoughts on it? I mean, are you a LinkedIn guy? Do you use X? Like, where. Where are you mostly out there talking LinkedIn.
I think what I like about LinkedIn is if you, if you spend a little time on it and you build a good network, it really becomes valuable, right? Just like anything, you put a little effort into it, you start to, to get into the right channels, you connect with the right folks, you get some thought leadership going. I actually like how it's evolved over the last couple years, right? So if I think back to LinkedIn maybe 2019 to 2022, when we were all in that, you know, they call it the golden age of SaaS or whatever. I think a lot of what people were talking about, there was so much people doing the same things, right? We were all doing the same thing. So there was a lot of. The way to. The way to get clicks was very, to be very contrarian, right? So if everyone's doing one thing, you just, you say the other thing. And all of a sudden it's like, oh, that's a, that's a, that's an approach. And then all of a sudden you get all the clicks and you get all the likes and you get all the interest. But what I've noticed is we moved into that peg now the Profitable, efficient growth mindset. And I think what is interesting to me is there's a lot more folks just trying to help each other forward and try and think forward. On LinkedIn, the thought leadership is much more thought provoking on the path forward. Isn't, isn't, isn't so set in stone. Right. The path forward is a little bit different now. Everyone's trying to find what is efficiency, what is automation, where do, where do we, where do we, where do we maximize our team, our people, our tech, our tooling, how do, how do some of the things that got us here, you know that idea we talk about all the time at SIN seven, like what got us here won't get us there. So what's the what get us there piece of it? And I think the thought leadership has taken a big step forward in the last year and a half for me and at least in the network that I have a lot of people putting out really good thought provoking content about like, hey, this may have worked for us in the past. Here's how I'm thinking about it as a CRO or a CMO or thought leader. And whereas before it was very much like everyone's doing the same thing. So let me just be contrarian.
Yeah, it's a really good point. I agree. I mean, I think there's a bunch of things you just brought up there that I want to talk with you about. So thanks for kind of setting a good stage here. But let's talk about that particular point for a second. Right. So sort of on the heels of this idea of you saw the glorious days of sas, right? That the heyday. Right. So, you know, you and I are both, let's just say, for all intents and purposes, we're both Chief Revenue Officers. I mean, I'm sort of running a business now. I'm a business owner and a founder. But you know, I've come from the CRO world obviously and you know, the world of the Chief Revenue Officer was impacted so greatly by this grow at all costs sort of climate, which was a long time. I mean, it wasn't just a recent thing. I mean I think that the SaaS business was in fact, and I'm about to write a big piece about this as we talk about mfa, you know, made for advertising sites, they're the same thing is made for revenue, made for revenue businesses. Right. They don't really provide sort of a long tail opportunity for customers. They're sort of a flash in the pan, but they're built by a combination of Economic forces that understand the way to manipulate the marketplace to drive valuations and make stock prices go up. And that model of being able to get that repetitive revenue became such a big thing because it got companies multiples and it got them to be bought or acquired or. Right. And so people were making money because they saw a business model as opposed to a solution for people. And lurking amongst a lot of SaaS, companies, in my view, are a lot of companies that are putting out products for that reason. Right. They're made for revenue businesses. And I think the chief revenue officer role was impacted by that because they're. The job is different when you're, when your role is that short term. If you're being told, I got a job like this, I got hired. The CEO told me, we want this company sold in three years. Yeah, that was a mission, right. It wasn't like help customers solve X problem. It was get this company sold in three years. Right. That you're gonna. As the, as a president of that company at the time, I had to deploy and implement strategies to meet that end. Not anything to do with customers. Like almost nothing, in fact. So I'm just curious, like, what your thoughts are on, like, has peg, is it real or is it just because there's no money? I mean, like, if money comes back, will PEG be tossed out the door? And I'm curious if you think we've really reached a shift and if it's permanent or not.
It's a, it's a great question. I do think we reached a shift and I think we've reached a shift because this is what happens in industries. Right. Like you had the Industrial revolution and there's been several iterations of that. Right. And I think you're right about the grow at all cost mindset and SAS. It was, it was not just two or three years at the end there to 2022. It was for a while. Right. And it was about those.
It was, it was, it was probably back. And I remember back, back in. As early as 2015.
Oh yeah.
Without question. There were companies that were. That's it. That was their business model. Maybe even earlier, you know.
Yeah, it, it was very much find a product market fit, find something that you could sell the hell out of and then sell the hell out of it and get a great valuation and flip it. Right. And there wasn't the way that. The way that you see that. Right. Is. Is in the execution. I was talking about this the other day. We have. With so much rigor on the front end of the Bow tie. I'm a big, I've been using the window by design bow tie. I love that stuff, right. I've been, I think since 2014, 2014 or whatever. I think I first saw it, I was like, ah, there it is. I love that process. There's so much rigor on the front end of the bow tie. Right? We know what an MQL is. We've got HubSpot, we got Salesforce, we got SQLs, we've got time to, you know, demos per deal. We know what, you know, speed to lead. All the tooling tech, all the data revenue operations are so much like tight rigor on that part of the fence the minute the deal closes. Like very few companies have the same rigor on the back end, right?
None of them. Very few of them do. And people feel it. It's very palpable in the marketplace.
Right? Exactly. So you look at it like we've spent so much because that's what the job's been, right? That's what the CRO job has been. It's like acquisition, acquisition, acquisition. So now it's becoming more of like the revolution and especially the last couple of years is you're not going to, you're not going to continue to scale and win with just new logos, right? You have to be able to land and expand. You have to be able to get your customers to stay lifetime value. And then what does that mean? Right? That means that you have to continue to provide value to those customers so they stick around, right? That.
