The Evolution of OKRs: How to Inspire your teams to become Leaders with Paul Niven & Chris Wollerman

The CRO Spotlight Podcast, powered by the Growth Firm Production. 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, this is Warren Zenna, the founder of the Sierra Collective, and welcome to this episode of the Sierra Spotlight Podcast. I'm really excited. Today I have two great guests with me. We talk about a really important topic and that is goal setting and okrs, which is a big topic right now, particularly for Chief Revenue Officers who are looking to try and facilitate goals across multiple organizations and are usually pulled in directions that have sometimes very little to do with the objectives and the strategies of the company and the dynamics that affect the Chief Revenue Officer's ability to focus on the bigger picture, which is really a job and it's a tough one. So I'm really happy to welcome Paul Niven, who is the founder of a company called okrstraining.com, which is a he. He's a consultant that he's written seven books. He'll explain it in. In our conversation about the idea of goal setting. And it's really fascinating, this notion of, of how companies need to be trained, how to actually provide strategic guidance around goal setting. And he partners with Chris Wallerman, who's the CEO of of Inspire Software. And Chris's company has created software that actually implements goal setting platforms. So they work very closely together. And I think there'll be really fascinating conversation here, not only about the idea around OKRs and how they're implemented, which is really relevant to this, but also their own business and how they're managing it. So, Paul, Chris, welcome and thanks for being here today.

Yeah, thank you, Warren. Pleasure to be here.

Happy to be here.

I guess the first thing is I just want to like, thank both of you for being here. I know that you both got a lot going on and you're both in different parts of the world, so I think the first thing would be great is for you both to introduce yourselves from this perspective. So our listeners are eager to hear stories about successful people who've either had enough experience under their belts, where they experience what it is that we're all dealing with in the B2B space, which is mostly how do you grow and manage a complex organization and what's the leadership implications of managing growth through different stages. Right. Because we have some companies listening to this are like at a million dollars in revenues and then the other companies that are like 150 or 250 million dollars, those are two different companies completely. And all the issues that we deal with in this conversation in the perspective of a Chief revenue Officer are related to operational complexity and how it's managed. And the whole premise behind this entire conversation is that the Chief revenue officer, when it's appointed properly and the premises will align the most critical part of your business, which is all the customer facing parts of the organization.

Right.

Which is the sales and the market and the customer success organization. So I'd love to hear about your backgrounds and how you've kind of developed over your careers in relation to that and then we can kind of dive into it. I'll have a lot of questions for you, so go ahead.

Sure. So I started off as an engineer. I got my degree in computer engineering. And for my first 10 years I worked in big companies and the cultures were really pretty bad. They were. I was in working with Department of Defense. And even though it was exciting work in software, the 9 to 5 grind was something I clearly didn't want to do long term. So as I started working closely with customers, there was one customer with the Navy that really wanted me to work outside of the big company that I was in and offered to support me as I started my new business back in 1997 in San Diego. So I started the company with just my wife and I and we hired a handful of people, started with seven on our first day. And over the 25 years of the company we grew to 320 people, 60 million revenue. And. And it was a pretty slow growth at the start, but it was double digit in the first probably 10 years. So there were a few years where it really spiked when we won some big contracts and, and then in about them probably the 15 year point or so, we started hitting kind of a flat revenue. And as we it was the time of the US government sequestration, so some of our contracts were getting a little bit of a hit and we started to see engagement decline and retention along with that. So I was on a quest to really figure out, you know, a strategic approach that would help solve that problem. And that's when I started looking into okrs and that's. And I read some of Paul's books he had been working in Balanced Scorecard and he came out with an OKRS book. And so nothing was really on the market at that time. And so we decided to invent our own Software application for OKRs and continuous performance. One of the other things I did was I got my master's degree in executive leadership. And so I was big into developing our people, really trying to strive for a great culture. And we were able to win best places to work every year for 10 years or so. And the okrs product really worked well collaborating with Paul. And so I decided to sell the business. At a peak point, we had just won our biggest contract for about $108 million in 2022. And so I wanted to put all my attention on this new product called Inspire that helps people implement and execute strategy with OKRs and develop their leaders and go through a continuous performance process.

Well, Chris had a lot of big numbers there. I have small numbers compared to Chris. So my background is in finance actually. But a long time ago, almost 30 years ago, I was working for a mid sized company, about 3,000 people going through a lot of change that wouldn't be unfamiliar to your listeners, Warren. Competitive markets, you know, margin concerns, all sorts of problems, engagement issues. So they turned to a tool called the Balanced Scorecard, which was very popular in the 1990s. And I was probably the least likely person in the entire organization to lead the effort since I'd never even heard the words before, but somehow they chose me. And one thing I did have going for me, I've always been a huge believer in goal setting. I've used that in my life throughout my entire life. And it turns out that the Balance Worker was very successful for this organization. We were able to fix a lot of broken processes. Customer engagement scores went up, financial results improved. It was a, it was a really winning formula for us. But the big aha for me was that we had done employee surveys before and after and we asked people, you know, do you understand the company strategy? Do you see how you fit in? And before we did all this, that the really robust goal setting, we had numbers in the teens, which is pretty typical for lot of organizations. Fast forward a couple of years and we had numbers in the high 80s and you could just feel it around the organization. The conversations were more strategic, more horizontally focused. So it was a huge win. And so I, at that point I, I made a switch and dedicated my career to this idea of, of Corporate goal setting Chris mentioned. I've written books. I've written seven now. My first book was called Balance Scorecard Step by Step, which came out back, way back in 2001. And it just hit the hit the timing very nicely because Balance Worker was so popular and that book went on to be translated into 15 languages. And so gave me a good, good chance to hang up my shingle, which I did. And we've since worked with over 500 organizations around the globe helping them execute their strategy through a better performance measure. But now specifically with OKRs. And I know it's something we'll talk more about as we get into the conversation, but you mentioned growth and that is something that we're really focused on helping our comp, our clients work with. So that's, that's my backstory.

Well, that's great. It's fascinating. There's so much to do here about. This is like a great topic. So here's the thing, why this is relevant. So you've got this interesting transition happening right now where companies are recognizing that the growth at all costs model is sort of broken because, you know, everyone sees what's happening. More and more technology has flooded into the marketplace that's allowed for almost the most laziest form of outbound automation that I've ever seen in the history of mankind. It makes it all too easy for companies to validate a lot of software investments and activities for the sake of having what they call pipeline growth. And it comes at the expense of customers. And what ends up happening is the chief Revenue officer role usually gets filled to try and help exacerbate that and make it even more pronounced part of the company. And the failure is to your point and why you're even in business, is the objectives of the organization become misaligned because everyone's focused too much on just trying to drive as much new headcount, I mean headcount and also new logos as possible. And it throws the rest of the company off kilter and the customers suffer most because they're really the last people that companies think about really, they're thinking really about just acquiring business and not really taking care of customers. But what I see more, and I was at a seminar yesterday, I did a workshop for the publishing industry yesterday. What people don't realize too is how pervasively this affects the mid level management of a company. Because when people are working in an organization where there aren't clear objectives, where they don't really understand how they fit into those objectives, they don't really know why they're doing what they're doing. And they end up feeling they're sort of stuck in some organizational silo that is really based on their boss's outcomes, not really the company's outcomes. And they lose touch with why they're doing what they're doing. And that's why you have a lot of myopic people working in organizations. But you know, when people are working in that mid level layer, they don't have any ability to make an impact on that. Like they're not going to be able to go to the top and say can you guys change the way you structure things? They're at the mercy of it. And I think that's sort of the issue I'm seeing mostly today than I've seen More more pronounced is mid level management are at the effect of the maturity of the organizational leadership of their organizations. They're constrained about something they really have no ability to have an effect on. So I'd be curious to know when you think about that right from an OKR perspective and the way you develop your business, what are ways that someone, let's say that's in, let's just say in a marketing department that reports into not even the cmo, but someone else who reports up to the cmo. But they have a very critical job within that marketing organization and they sort of feel like it's clear to them that what they're doing on a day to day basis seems to be serving their boss as opposed to serving the organization and they don't really know what to do about it.

That's a tricky one. You picked a good question to start with though. I was just in prepping for this call this morning. I was looking over some statistics and I'm happy to share citations with anybody who's interested. But fair. 55% of all middle managers cannot name one of their company's top five priorities. 55% can't name one. And it's for a lot of the reasons that you talked about. There's such a heavy focus on top line growth now. It's shocking that they can't name that because virtually every company in the world does want to grow. But if you look beyond that, it's almost impossible because they do have these blinders on and often they are serving their manager rather than the company. But what we always tell clients and we see in organizations and I've seen this just in my own work in the organization world, is there are things within your sphere of control that you can influence and so we always encourage. But even if you're seemingly stuck in a marketing department low level, you can still have the influence to determine who are my customers. Start with that. Who do I serve? And in serving them effectively, how does that help the organization be more effective? All of these things are combined at a chain of cause and effect. So if you can find your place and then say, how do I serve my customers more effectively, how does that help the company? Right away you're starting to knock down those barriers, a little bit of visibility into the strategy and that helps drive engagement, a whole lot of other things. So just encourage people to think beyond their limitations. You do have some control.

Yeah. And we'll see a lot of that same statistics out there. And one of the things that as we were investing in some of the leadership programs, it was pretty clear that goal setting and communication was key. And so really focusing on the top three to five goals of the organization. One thing that as we have clients come in, sometimes they try to do fix everything at once and they'll have like 20 goals. And that also makes it really hard for organizations to figure out what the priorities are. So starting with something three to five, where people can really understand what they are for one and be able to remember it, but then how do I align to that and how do I contribute? So when we're working at the executive team level, we did a lot of work and working with Paul and his consulting on getting sure everybody in each department was aligned with each other first. And one of the techniques that he uses in his consulting is instead of dividing and conquering like marketing, you guys go off and solve your goals and finance CFO figures out their goals. He, he gets teams paired up in twos or threes where everybody has a voice, but everybody solves each of the department's challenges with the goal setting. And that gives a good level of buy in, not only at the top level, but one level down. Like business unit leaders or department leaders, if they're involved in that process and they're having to do some of that goal setting at the top, then go out and communicate it and help people understand not only what the goal is, but what's the business value of the goal and why are we asking you to align to this and having that transparency and some kind of system across the organization makes that difference. Where people can remember what the goals are of the organization, but also how they align, why it's meaningful. And we see a lot more engagement happening that way.

I'd be curious about this, what we're talking about is the sort of thing that when I speak to my customers, followers, no one would argue that this all just makes perfect sense, right? There's nothing about this. It's like, what are you talking about? You guys are nuts, right? Everyone's completely agreeing that this stuff happens and it needs to be fixed. There's a reason why you guys are able to have this company, that there's this problem out there that requires your services. My question would be, I'm curious to know how much you probably done a lot of work on this. Why does this happen? Like, what is it endemically about businesses that creates this in the first place? What are the factors? And I say it mainly because as companies are growing and becoming more complicated, which I call operational complexity, which I didn't coin it, but it's, it's the term that we kind of utilize here. These things seem to almost be a necessary, endemic outcome of complexity. But what are the, in your experience, your research, are the forces or dynamics that create these problems in the first place?

Yeah, we call it the whirlwind of the organization or kind of the day to day operations where people are so busy with things, projects and activities. And when you're thinking about strategy, strategy is always a change to the organization. What are you trying to improve from X to Y. And the operation can still, the business can still operate without those goals. So a lot of times people get the impression that my day job and my job description of project management is really all I need to do to be successful. And so I think getting people in the organization to understand that you got to balance your time between operational whirlwind type of activities and helping contribute to the strategy is a conflict that we've seen even in our best years. You've got a portion of the organization that's still pushing back on why do I need to work on these goals? But that's what we've seen the most, is just people. It's one thing to get good goals written, but execution is all about getting people to act on it on a weekly basis, report and make progress and get good coaching and understand that the strategy is just as important as the operations.

Answering your question specifically, how does this happen or what are the contributing factors you think of any company in the world, on day one they start, they're going to change the world. You know, put the dent in the universe, that sort of paradigm. Right. Everybody wants to do that. But as you grow and anybody, Chris can speak to this. My little company can speak to this right Complexity will creep in, bureaucracy will creep in. I love, I've read studies about where you, you show people, once their company's hitting a certain, a certain number of people or certain revenue number, you show them hidden resumes of their founders. And they wouldn't hire them at that point. Right. Like they would never hire them today because again, you know, they're, they're a quote unquote professional organization. So they become calcified. You know, we see this with, with a lot of our clients that come to us for help. And when you do just a, just a little bit of scratching in the surface, you can see that just the, the bureaucracy again is so frozen and calcified that there's no room for change. Right. So it's oftentimes what it takes. And we see this every day. Chris, I know you see this as well as I do. It takes a new CEO, a new leader to come in and say, okay, you know, enough, enough is enough. Here where I live right now in Atlanta, Canada, I won't name the company, but there's a very well known company here that survived for years and years in spite of themselves, and they've just got a new leader. And I was reading an interview with her yesterday and I was just so impressed because she's rethinking everything. And often that's what it takes. It takes someone to come in and just rethink everything. And that includes goals.

Yeah, that's so true. What you're both pointing to is something that I'm seeing is the sort of like the harsh realities of business. There are certain unavoidable realities. I don't know many companies that just seem to naturally be able to avoid these things. I look at it like teenagers, you know, I don't know if you probably both have kids. If not, I don't know, but I've raised three. And you know, there's, and we were all teenagers we can certainly speak to that is, you know, there's just a point where you're at a certain age where you're just smart enough to think you know everything, but too dumb to know. You don't know what the hell you're talking about, but you won't listen to anybody. And you know, if you had teenagers, you know, it's insane to try and get them to change the way they think about something, but you realize that they're completely wrong. But. And you know that there's a crash ahead for them, you know, and you have to just kind of watch them go through that because that's the natural course of life is that you know, at a certain level of maturity you're going to reach the point where your current paradigms just don't work anymore and you're going to have to really redo things. And I think that companies are the same. I think they have maturity curves, no doubt, like human beings do. And there are organizational from realities and dynamics that affect companies. And I think you can call it bureaucracy, you can call it complexity, you can call it myopia, you can call it loss of focus, you can call it a whole bunch of things. I think a lot of it frankly, is economics. But what I'm seeing on my end is that you're 100% correct. I mean, Paul, there's this sort of keeping the teenager analogy alive. There is this sort of naivete to an early starting company, right? They want to change the world, world. And they have these great dreams and they're full of all piss and vinegar and a lot of them are really amazing, brilliant people. And they have now yet really kind of managed with the, the constraints that they're going to be confronted with as they try and grow things. And the realities are going to hit them in the face as to how harder it's going to be for them to realize this stuff. Which only makes it that much more fascinating. When I see companies that actually end up fulfilling those dreams, it's like, it's amazing to me that they're able to keep that going regardless of the complex complexes. But there's other factors too, right? We're talking about internalities right now. What about externality? So one of the things I'm seeing mostly, not mostly, but the biggest factor I see is the investment community as the other externality. Okay, so now you're at a point where, like you said, I'm all full of fire and I've got this great idea. I'm going to put together an organization, I'm going to find a friend who's a brilliant engineer, we're going to build a product, going to go to market. And what's happened culturally in the last 20 years or so is the natural next step is you go and find money. I need money. Right? And when you bring in money, you're bringing in an entity that has outcomes tied to that money and a different perspective on the way they want that business to be generating returns for that money. And now you have an inherent conflict, which is we needed that money to continue with our growth, but now we have to kind of manage the outcomes that come from that entity that may be different than the ones that we want want for our customers. And I think that that's what we see. The biggest issue is when I'm talking to CEOs who want to hire a chief revenue officer and they agree with me that they'd see, they'd rather have their CRO oversee all this stuff, but their boards or their investment groups are saying, look, you know, I want you focusing on top line growth. I don't want your CRO focus on marketing, for Christ's sakes. Your CRO should be running sales and we have to hit next quarter's goals and that's where things get thrown off. So I'm just curious, you look at okrs and goals, how does it take into account such a big external factor that is pulling such gravitational weight on how companies operate?

It's a very timely question today. I don't know if you read the Wall Street Journal or any reporting this morning. WeWork is headed for bankruptcy. So I think a lot of what.

You just said, it's about time, frankly. Yeah, okay. Huh?

Yeah, exactly. But you talk about bringing money in. Nobody could control Adam Neumann when he was running the place. Right. So a lot of what you just talked about is predicated on the leadership too. And look at the early days of U. Right, a lot of that.

Great story.

Yeah, exactly. But, but you're right when, when money comes in, the expectations are ratcheted up. And I think that's where, you know, so a lot of the early stage companies that we work with, from a goal setting perspective, that actually can be a very good thing though because you know, you do, you come in, you want to make that dent in the universe, but really you have no sophistication when it comes to actually running a company. So we're excited when we get that phone call from somebody that wants to, they've received, you know, they're in their series B or they've received a significant infusion of cash from a well known investor who's got significant expectations for them. We can help them, but what we want to do is you want to balance that obviously with their entrepreneurial zeal and never lose that. But you've got to bring that professional level of goal setting and it can help. And this is coming kind of apropos full circle to what we started with. Often they're focused on top line growth, but our job as consultants and intermediaries and Chris as well, is to help make sure they balance that equation. How do you get to that growth? Well, you think of the customers and you think of the value proposition so that we're telling you, making them, helping them tell a comprehensive and cohesive story. So that's, that's what we work a lot with, helping our founders, helping the investors make sure it's a comprehensive story that they're telling, not focused on one thing.

Yeah. And you know, I had the luxury of being a private company for the whole time, you know, the 25 years in the previous organization. And so we were really able to kind of flip, flip the model upside down and say we want to start with employees and get the culture right first. That was really more of a personal thing I was after because I wanted to work in a place where people love their job. And we thought customers would see that and react to that, which they did. And then the financial made its way by customers being happy and recommending to others. But as we went through the last two and a half years of M and A, going out and looking at buyers and talking to investors, we saw clearly that some were going to come in and just really want to change the model and you know, and make it all about finance and really affect the culture. So we look carefully for that cultural alignment and even through, you know, a couple different rounds of looking at big strategic organizations versus mid size, small even, that's hard, hard to do to find a cultural alignment that understand, you know, how to really focus on the customer before the finance side of things. And so as Paul said, you know, when they do come in with revenue goals, that seems to be really the number one most common goal that people, clients come in with, we can certainly help them, but we make sure it is a balanced approach where you're looking at, in addition to increasing your finance and revenue, what are you doing for customer improvement, what are you doing for process improvement? And then of course, what are you doing for learning and growth in the organization and making sure there's a balance there.

This is the thing that I'm trying to focus on most what you just talked about, Chris, which is really critically important, is that when I read on LinkedIn posts from founders and CEOs and mid level managers, and mostly it's a lot of founders, you know, understandably, and I'm not making a judgment here, but the conversations are about our own issues. Right. Or our own successes. Right. We closed this much deals today, we got this much growth this year, we were able to acquire this company today, or we got our seed round of money this week or whatever it might be. And those are all exciting things that People clap their hands about, but I don't hear hardly ever on LinkedIn from people is our customers are really happy. We had great customer outcomes. Our customers are experiencing X as a result of our business. And I think it really is because the culture that has been created within the B2B community has been so focused on financial growth and these are all important things. The customer is the biggest loser in what's happening today. There's almost no focus on the customer anymore. And we feel that. I mean, I was saying, you know, if I log into, I have, I don't know how many different software dashboards I have to log into on a day to day basis that I use, you know, whenever I log into them. Even the interface of the software on my computer screen is indicative of this. The way the UX is built, the word login is a tiny little button, but the word sign up is huge, you know, and I'm a customer, you know, so I mean, I'm already sort of second fiddle to the bigger deal here. And you know, it's a small thing, but those are decisions that product people make and they're driven by someone who wants that particular dashboard to drive a very specific outcome. So it may seem like a small thing, but you can ladder that decision up to the way the company's operating, which is focusing a lot more on trying to get more people to sign up than taking care of somebody that you're already getting your dollars from at least a day to day basis. And so I look at it like this because I think that, and, and I'll use another analogy, I use them a lot, which is that you know, when, when you're single and you're dating your, your partner before you get married or anything, you have all fun, you do all kind of crazy things, you run around, you go to clubs and you go travel and you do all kind of nutty crazy stuff and eat whatever you want. You can have a lot of fun together. And then you have kids and all of a sudden your priorities have changed, of course, and now you have to think about, they have to be in a place where they're going to be in a good school and what kind of house do we want them to live in, what kind of food do we want them to eat. And your lifestyle takes a massive change because the prioritization was about people whom you require your care and you care about them heck of a lot more than you care about yourself. And I think that companies need to treat their customers kind of like their kids, you know, they have to look at it like what's in their best interest? Would we do this if we were trying to get the best outcome for our customers as opposed to just trying to drive more top line growth? And I don't think, I don't think companies are having that conversation enough and the revenue function enough. I don't think that's a focus. And I'm curious to know how your business could help companies become more aligned with the values that would drive that sort of. Because again, just one more thing is that when everybody in the organization is making decisions about any change they're going to make in the company, it would seem logical to me that if the conversation were related to, well, how does this decision that we're about to make affect customers? It would be a lot easier to solve the problem than it was. How is it going to affect my department? Right. So I'm just curious, like how do you guys think about that from the perspective of how you serve customers?

Well, my wife teases me because every book I've ever written there's at least one reference, and often frequently more, to Peter Drucker, who I consider one of the greatest management thinkers of all time. She reads not another Drucker quote. But I can't help it. I mean, you know, the man was prescient, right? With these quotes that were coming 50, 60, 70 years ago. You probably know what he said about what is the purpose of a business. To create and keep a customer. That's what Drucker said, that that's the founding paradigm of a business, to create and keep a customer. And I think we've definitely lost sight of that. So how do you fix that? Well, again now I'm going to switch from Drucker to Covey and use the word paradigm. But it is a paradigm shift. You need to, you know, when you, when you're doing strategic planning. And both Chris and I work with a lot of clients and that helping them because to develop a good goal, it's got to be translated from a strategy. You got to start asking more questions about customers, right? So here are some of the questions that we see are not asked that frequently that you could be asked for. Things like are there any customer groups that use our products really successfully because maybe there's room we can learn from them and we can have modifications or add ons or adjacencies. Conversely, are there any customers that are using our products very unsuccessfully where we're seeing a lot of failures and what can we learn from them? Are there markets that Other companies in our space don't want to for whatever reason, whether it's economic, cultural, could be anything. Choose not to serve. But again, starting your strategy voyage from the perspective of the customer is a great way to help combat what you talked about, Warren. So rather than so many people go into a strategy setting situation with say, okay, what's the top line for next year? We're going to go from 100 million to 125 million. The hockey stick has to keep going up to the right. Start with the customer. You know, love them or hate them. With Jeff Bezos, you know, it's all about the customer at Amazon, right. And you can't argue with that.

Business is huge success because of it.

So start with the customer.

Yeah, I guess our environment that we were in, even though it was B2B, the other B that we were serving was more government and military. And our key to growth was customer satisfaction, customer referrals. We had to have the highest, they call them the CPAR scores, which are the contract performance. But it's always about graded by the customer and you don't want anything lower than all A's on that thing. So I guess we just kind of naturally started with that. And then we also again believe that making sure employees know that that's number one and they're happy, you know, customers see that. And so if there are policies and your culture are geared towards the customer, then they're going to see that and then reward you in the end. And so as Paul mentions, when we do talk to clients, we always make sure there's that perspective or category of strategic objectives that what are you doing to increase your net promoter score if it's not? Nobody's net promoter score is perfect. So that's a great place to start because you can always improve on that. And some people, when they start measuring it, are pretty shocked on where they really are when it comes to promoters. And that I think has been proven through a lot of studies that customer net promoter can really drive revenue higher than just satisfied customers.

So when we originally spoke, you mentioned because you're experiencing this stuff now with your own company, I mean, how big is your company right now? What level of complexity are you guys at as an organization?

We have separate companies and mine is tiny. So it's. I have relatively low levels of complexity. Chris is, Chris of course has experience with much bigger companies.

Yeah, mine's. Well, I'm in a second startup, so in the first year, so it's still small, about 20. We had 320 when last year that I was managing. So yeah, definitely very different. But fortunately we have the all the lessons learned of that first company to know, you know, these are some of the things that we want to not repeat.

Sure.

As we go through these similar stages.

Yeah. Success is a lousy teacher, isn't it? So. So I'm curious to know though you had mentioned, I remember you just briefly mentioned to me when we spoke that you have someone who you're using as like a fractional chief revenue officer to support your business right now. Is that, is that correct?

Yes. Yeah. We have a consultant that's been CRO and several successful startups worked at Google and. And then we have a senior VP of sales who's very interested in getting into the CRO. And I know, you know from listening to your other podcasts, it might be better to have them coming from either a customer focused CS organization or marketing. But this guy really understands and gets it that, you know, having them over client success and making sure that client retention is really just as big of a metric as revenue growth on the new sales, I think is a great model to follow. And having them overseeing marketing so you don't have those silo problems is something we're really striving for.

That's great. The reason I say that, and I think you're correct, I mean, I've made that proclamation many times, is the reason is I think there's two things I would say about it. Maybe just to sort of explain it is yes, the CRO role is typically plucked from sales and there's reasons for that which we don't need to get into. But it is a common place that people look for. One for the reasons that we just talked about for the last half hour. But the other one is because it's always a matter of this is about moral human dynamics. If I come from a very specific departmental focus or I have a specialization in a certain department in a departmental discipline, then it makes sense that when the pressure is on me, and this is human beings, I'm going to default in the area where I know I can succeed to win. Right. So if I'm under pressure and I'm screwing up and I'm really good at sell sell sales, then I'm probably going to go close a deal to save my ass and that's probably going to be the thing that I'm going to default to because I know that I can and it'll probably work. Right. No one's going to, you know, yell at somebody because they got a new Deal. Right. And because it's a winning formula, if you put somebody that's in a sales role that's really good at that, in that role, there's always a danger that they're going to sort of lean more towards sales a lot as just their nature. They're not going to look at the world bigger because they're going to be, you know, outside their comfort zone. And so does that mean that you should never promote a sale? No, of course not. People, there's a lot of people who run sales organizations that are incredibly sophisticated. And as you both know, running a complex sales organization, as it becomes more complex, it requires a deeper understanding of how the other disciplines affect sales. And you should be good at those things if you're any good at it. So I do think, however I'm seeing that now, and I think it's good news and doesn't mean it needs to stay this way, but it shows a maturity maturation of the marketplace. A lot of more rev ops people and marketing leaders are starting to become candidates for CRO roles, which makes sense to me. But I think the customer success organization is probably the place that we should be looking for a lot more leadership because of what we just talked about. But that being said, so I just wanted to. Tangentially, I'd talk about that bit, but back to you guys. So walk me through, if you don't mind, or our audience, through your business. Like, talk about inspire and what it does. Is it software? Is it a service? And explain a little bit about what your audience is, who your customers are, and how you deliver your offering and, and the way in which it's utilized.

Sure, yeah. We're a software platform that focuses on people and performance to help companies achieve strategy, execute goals, improve their performance through continuous performance management models, and really get return on investment on leadership development programs. Because the one thing we learned, maybe the hard way, is that you need really good leaders at all levels to execute strategy. And you also need good leaders to be great coaches of people. So we have that component in there which is kind of unique from. There's a lot of platforms out there that you can track your okrs and you know, report your goals up to the executive team, things like that. But when it comes to execution, there's a lot of details at the, at the individual level, you know, the team leader and the individual, like when the rubber hits the road, they're the ones that are actually contributing towards the goals that are serving up to the strategy. So what they usually need is good coaching and we use situational leadership as one of our models because we think that most people as they go through goals, they'll start off kind of excited and then they'll get to this confronting stage where they really need a lot of direction. And so the leader needs to understand this is the stage or the development level of this person. I need to provide direction. And at that point it's not micromanagement, it's the right type of help. As they start to progress and as they achieve, then they need to back off and provide support. So just being able to understand what phase are people in and coaching them. And that's where we've seen probably the biggest gains in engagement as well, because people are feeling like these one on one meetings that they're holding are actually helping them on their goals in their career. You know, we always have career goals in there as well. So if they get that leadership component right at all levels and then of course, you know, the more senior levels, they need to be good at change and communicating change and you know, continue to really oversee strategic progress. When all that comes together, it can make a huge difference. And so our system supports that holistic picture where set goals, execute, talk through continuous performance and then continue to develop leaders continuously.

My company is a proud partner of Chris's company. My company is called okrstraining.com and we typically work with a client, not always, but typically before Chris's software solution is introduced. So that we can help clients do everything we talked about thus far, grapple with their strategy, make sure they're translating action with better performance, performance results, coach, facilitate, train to make sure that that happens. But again, our big job is to help them tell a comprehensive story so that they're doing everything we talked about thus far in this conversation. They're not forgetting their customers, they're not forgetting their employees, and they're doing all that of course in service to hopefully grow their business, but do that in a, in a focused way.

Awesome. That's great. Well, so good. I mean, we're going to start wrapping up because we're getting out of running out of time. But so what's the best way like for people to get in touch with you? How can people work with you? Who do you want to talk to? What kind of people you're looking to connect with?

For us it's inspiresoftware.com or inspiresoftware AI. So AI is a big push in our world now and it is doing some great things to augment as assistant and we work with CEOs C level, Crosby as well as HR, they will come in in a different couple Personas, you know, some that are looking for performance solutions versus overall strategy. But the one thing that we really strive for is assuring there's that top level buy in. So being able to help CEOs. We like to call this tool the CEO Secret Weapon. Because if they want to execute and also see great retention and great results, we can really help them for us.

Warren, it's okrstraining.com and if you've got a C in front of the rest of your acronym, we would love to speak with you. Whether it's a cmo, chro, CRO, anybody with decision making ability in an organization that wants to improve their performance, we would love to speak with them.

All right, great. So. Okay, good. This has really been a great conversation. Is there anything that we have not talked about that is missing from the dialogue that you think would be pertinent for us to talk about? We can include, I would say, if.

You'Re, if you're thinking about OKRs, the key role, in addition to having that C level that Paul just spoke about is the champion and some ambassadors, and I know Paul talks about this in his teaching and books, is that you've got to have somebody who's really dedicated. You can't just make this somebody's second job, at least initially when you're rolling it out. So figuring out who's going to be the champion. We've had some recent clients that have gone through Paul's training that are doing a great job at this and it just makes a night and day difference. You have top level buy in plus the champion and some ambassadors that can really implement this up to the organization. It helps the CEO know that they've got a great team making it happen.

That's great, Chris. I would just add, Warren, quickly that we often see clients who I think mistake goal setting as a substitute for strategy or strategic planning. Yeah, they say goal because goal setting sounds a lot easier. Right. And a lot of companies will do anything they can to avoid thinking really hard. It's like that's a fact. But I think strategy can be demystified. Right. It's just like, who are our customers? What products are services? Do we sell to them? What's our value proposition? Getting back to what we talked about, customers, I'd be happy. We have lots of resources to help companies with that. But please go into this. If you're interested in goal setting, you got to take a step back and first say, you know what are, what are we as a company? You know, what, what is our again? What is our strategy? And then you're ready for the goal setting and everything that, that Chris and I can.

I see. So it's, it's big picture thinking before execution, not execution.

Absolutely.

You know, it's interesting to say that because I think that the software industry has created a problem. And I know this is the case because I've been involved in it too many times. Software as a strategy. I don't know what we're doing. Let's get Salesforce. That'll help us figure it out. Which is about the dumbest thing you can possibly do. But, you know, technology usually is without question. It's definitely a substitute for to really thinking about what you want to do. Technology should be an enabler of your strategy, and goal setting should be the enabler of your strategy. Right. I think it's a really, really good point. I do think that people want to jump right in. Matter of fact, the work I do tends to be like yours, very top line. I talk a lot about leadership principles and organizational structures and how you should set people up. You can hear the way I'm talking about it, right? People always ask me, well, how do I build compensation plans? It's like, okay, hold on a second, we can get into that, but what do you guys do? Who's your customer? And people want to get right down to business without thinking through, I think, a bigger picture. And I don't know why. I think there is a discomfort that people have thinking strategically because it's not easy. It's, you know, it's philosophical in a lot of ways. And I think people are designed to sort of like get stuff done as opposed to think things through. Some people are. I'm a little bit more of a philosopher, but that just because of personality types. But generally when you put people in big groups, they start working on things all of a sudden, you know, so we've seen get.

We've seen clients come in the door that their boss read Measure what Matters or one of those books on OKRs, and they're like, go implement this. And that's a red flag right away. But the first thing we try to do is get them over to Paul's organization to give them that foundational strategic planning and values and mission. And that's another reason why we, we partner with Balls because he really gets that kind of holistic picture versus just jump in, start setting goals and put them in software. Yeah, because that's, that's not going to work.

So I get it. So that's helpful. I probably should have asked this before, but the working relationship between your organizations, it sounds like, you know, Paul's the tenderizer. Right? Like, you know, Paul.

Paul gets.

Paul gets the steak ready to be thrown on the grill, so to speak, you know, and is that how it works? So in other words, if I don't want to speak to this, but it sounds to me that, you know, you're. Paul is. Is. Is delivering a strategic message that enables your organization that implement something that'll help make it come to fruition.

Absolutely. And also the. The refresher as well, because people. People change, you know, and. And change positions. New people come in or they forget. And so always having kind of those step back and refresh a little bit on some of these fundamentals. And yeah, we have. Paul's got folks in his organization that do certifications and things like that that really. We love getting them through that. So when they come back, then we're going to be able to facilitate them to really execute the software.

That's great.