The Strategies You Need to Scale, With Nancy Maluso

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 think you're really going to enjoy it. So thanks for tuning in and we look forward to seeing you. Okay, welcome to this episode of the Siero Spotlight Podcast. Hi, Lupe. How you doing?

Hi, Warren. Doing really well, thanks.

So it's 94 here. You're in Arizona. Are we having the same weather as you there? Now, finally, are we on par?

We are, and we almost are having the same amount of humidity.

That's crazy.

Yeah, we've had a lot of monsoons here, so it's been a bit. That's funny.

Monsoon. Do we get monsoons in the U.S. is that how that works? You're out west. Is it a monsoon? But here it's what, a rainstorm? How does that work exactly?

Yeah, it's. They come in like flashes and then disappear. And then they. I mean, they dump an incredible amount of water. So very similar to Florida, I would say.

Yeah. I mean, monsoon is just an exotic name for a storm. I want a monsoon. So I appreciate you. Like, that's interesting.

Well, you could come visit. Come visit in the summertime if you can stand it.

Well, I'm excited about our guest today. So today we have Nancy Meluso from Forrester, and I've had the opportunity to have some really nice conversations with Nancy. So we'll do a little brief intro and then Nancy, you can kind of, you know, elaborate a bit. All right, so Nancy, currently. Right, is the. She's a principal analyst over at Forrester. Right. She focuses specifically on building revenue engines for businesses in the kind of a, you know, call it the startup phase, like the 100 million or so range. Most importantly, she wanted me to make sure I made this distinction is that she's not just an academic, as maybe people perceive most Forrester people. She's actually someone who's done the work and executed the work. And I'm going to allow Nancy to elaborate a bit on that. So, Nancy, welcome and thanks so much for being here.

Thank you so much.

Great. So if you could elaborate, I'd love to hear a bit more about that.

Yeah. So it's, you know, I have somewhat of an unusual career in that I crossed a lot of the functions that traditionally exist in companies. You know, carried a bag, went up into sales management, but I also ran customer success in a managed services business, which is what we used to call software as a service before it was software as a service. And you know, I, I did product marketing and even one stint in product management a little bit far away from the customer for my liking. But in all of those cases, what drove me across to different functions was my understanding of where the work I was doing at the moment was butting up against something else and having this innate curiosity about, well, how do we make that work better? And so, you know, I've taken that curiosity across pretty much everything I've done. I've been in two startups, two companies in the mid side range, both of which were trying to do a turnaround or a transformation, and two very large global multinationals. So I have a flavor for all of that. And I don't like to get bored, as you can tell. So I like to do lots of different things.

I love it.

Why Forrester? What happened? Like, how'd that transition come?

Well, I actually started out at Serious Decisions and I was providing advice to sales enablement professionals originally and eventually started working with senior sales leaders and started working with my partner in crime and serious decisions on the marketing side. And we started building this growth company workflow on how, based on what stage they were in, how they should build the revenue engine. And we started working with all these companies of under 100 million on really how to do that. And that spawned a lot of research and a lot of interesting work. And most of the research I've done since then has been in pursuit of supporting that endeavor.

Okay, well, I guess we'll start this way. So, you know, the conversation we're having here with the CRO Spotlight and the work that we do is very aligned with what you're talking about, which is we're, we're looking to support companies that are in that growth stage right between the 15 to 20 million and 100 million in revenues where they're developing mature complexity around their revenue operations. And they're sort of groping around in the dark and making a lot of decisions that they seem. What we see mostly is they're making decisions that just seem borrowed from other companies. They're sort of repeating things that they think work, but they're not doing a lot of the work that they can do to analyze their situations effectively to know what's endemic to their organizations because they're under such crunchy timelines to be able to get results produced. I'd be curious to know what your thoughts are on this sort of thing and the kind of things you're seeing right now when you deal with companies like this. It's fascinating to me the kind of stuff that you're uncovering as you work with companies like this.

Yeah, it is fascinating because at every stage of a company's growth, what skills and focus you need to bring to the table as a CRO or in any of the functional roles, if you're not already integrated, changes in that very early stage, when you're trying to prove the product, it's all hanging on deck. Everybody talks to everything and does everything and. And then you grow enough and you start to get a couple million in revenue and you start to define jobs, okay, your job's going to be this and your job's going to be that. And then you hit the next stage of growth and you get your Series B because you've proven you know how to do that, right? And so you feel like I'm the best sales guy or I'm the best marketer. I'm, you know what, we've got the best product and our customer, but once you get that Series B, now you've got to grow in a lot of other ways. And so what I often see happen is product says, well, we're going to grow by adding a whole new product line. Or marketing says, oh, we're going to grow. We're going to go international. And sales says, we're going to grow. We're going to go upstream from SMB to enterprise, and they all are trying to grow. So the CEO said, we're going to grow by 30%. And they all think they've got the answer for how they're going to grow, but they're not aligned because their purview of the marketplace is no longer of the marketplace, it's of their internal organization. Sales says, well, I know how to go in enterprise. That's why it's the best way to go. And marketing says, but I know how to go expand international. The people who work in the company have their own histories and experiences. We have our own history and experience as a company on what's worked to date. And we want to just keep doing that, but on bigger scale. And it's precisely this time we're trying to do all this stuff, we've just got all this money and we're going to go invest it that the wheels start to fall off a little bit because of this lack of alignment. So the first thing we tend to do is when we work with clients is just check in to see are you aligned across all these things? Do you know how you're going to grow? And I often get CEOs calling saying, look, we have a strategy, we know what we're doing. What are you asking all these questions for? My guys are getting very uncomfortable. I said, well, that's because they all interpret your growth differently. When I talk to the CEO, then he goes, oh my God. They are interpreting the growth differently because the CEO has gone off to now manage the money and manage the investors and manage finance and other things. CEOs not paying as much attention to gluing. And that disconnect happens in my mind between that corporate strategy and the go to market execution. So first you got to make sure you're aligned, really truly aligned. And that means, do we know how we're going to grow first and foremost? What is our primary growth mechanism or mechanisms? Do we have enough resources to grow in all those ways? And then based on where we're going to grow, how do we go to market, what is our segmentation, what is our focus within that growth strategy? If we can't get alignment across the key core customer success, marketing, sales and product, then we're going to invest in a suboptimal way. We're going to build our organizations, our processes and our technologies in the wrong way. That's first and foremost. You've got to work that alignment.

You see that so often, Nancy, where everybody kind of progresses within the organization and the alignment really comes from looking through your own lens as opposed to a company lens. I think you highlight some really valid disconnects that occur in business. You are the result of all of your experiences, so you really can't filter that out. And as you kind of grow the business and change the direction, a lot of the wheels fall off between strategy and execution. So that's a really good point.

And you've just been rewarded through all this funding for everything. You've done well. And now the next thing you have to do is be vulnerable and question and be curious about what you need to do next or maybe how you need to do what you're going to do next.

You know, and typically when you go to rounds, you've kind of put a plan forward of what you plan to do and so the reward kind of reinforces we told you what we're going to do with this money. So now we have to do what we told you we're going to do. And so it can be a vicious cycle. It can be a vicious cycle.

So I hope that when they put the plan together, it's an aligned plan and if it's too high level and most investors will dig into how are you going to get the work done? And they'll dig into that. But too often they skip from strategy down to sort of what's the org structure you need, what's the processes you have to have. They kind of skip the middle connecting layers of what I call go to market and routes to market and being clear on those a lot of times.

And why do you think that is? What's the. Why do you see that? What dynamics or forces have that be overlooked?

I think because we assume we know what that is. We've been doing it. We don't realize that when we decide to grow the business and we have a growth strategy, we have to reassess our go to market architecture and how we're going to invest our money. Let's take this example. We get Series B because let's say we want to build a platform and we've got two pieces of the platform. When we get Series B to bring in these other companies and that becomes the focus. Let me bring in these other companies. Well, that's going to change potentially how we go to market. How our buyers want to buy might change who our buyers are. It might change what we can do with our buyers. We really have to revisit that and what it means from our architecture. Maybe one of those products requires partnerships to really come to fruition. You know, we really just have to relook at that.

Yes, I get it. I agree. I'm trying to articulate it. It sounds, what you're saying is it's like a failure to connect future plans with current situations and how they affect each other.

Yeah. And whether we're strategically ready, whether we have the fit yet. Right. If we're going to go after a new buyer, do we truly understand how the new buyer wants to buy? If we're going to go after a new market, have we really assessed what it's going to take to meet buyers in that new market. And of course, this is all complicated because now our buyer behavior is changing. Right. So at the same time, we're doing all this and we think, well, I know how to do it and I know what I want to do. The buyers are changing. And the pandemic accelerated that change pretty substantially.

And what are those changes, in your view?

So, like, what do I mean? So our data showed that buyer interactions almost doubled. The number of buyer interactions almost doubled from before and, you know, during a purchase, how many interactions they have. And by interaction, I mean a digital touch. Go to a website, talk to somebody, go to an event, et cetera. And over 55% of those are digital. Consumers are used to buying, buying through the product itself. Let me get a freemium. I learn about it, and then I purchase the product. So this product led growth, that's what we call product led revenue, if you will. Product led sale is I touch it, I play with it. Well, now B2B companies are starting to do that. It's a great tactic for some, and buyers are increasingly wanting to do that. But maybe when you started out your company, you couldn't do that because buyers weren't aware of your kind of offering. Or it was really complicated at the time. But now you can maybe start to introduce a freemium offer. But often we don't think about that because we made a decision a couple years ago that it wouldn't work, perhaps. But now we have to revisit because maybe we're going downstream or maybe we're going upstream. But they're more sophisticated. They understand how to do that. So that's one example. Another might be that we started out by going to our friends and family. As we're growing the business, we built up a sales team who knew how to get to certain kinds of buyers. And now we're going to expand. So we've got to really get our digital chops in order. And if we don't have our digital chops in order, and what I mean by that is just not just our website presence and our search engine marketing and all that kind of stuff, but it's, are we in all the places that buyers want to be and are we giving them all the information they want to get? And they want a lot more information digitally details like even pricing transparency.

Yeah. And you see so often the behaviors that exist and dominate in B2C spill over time into B2B. So the same people that are accustomed to going on their Amazon app Ordering something and having it be delivered between 5 and 10 are going to eventually have that expectation in B2B. And so often that infrastructure is not there to support it, not even the the opportunity to communicate. And in a lot of times they're willing to pay a premium. So that's a missed revenue opportunity as well.

Yeah, we're seeing more and more interest on the part of B2B buyers with purchasing through marketplaces and purchasing in a self service way. And that doesn't mean that sales assistance doesn't happen. I'm not talking about the death of a salesperson. There's definitely a role there, but it's changing and we have to continually assess have our buyers changed, are they changing?

So as you mentioned, the number of interactions are increasing by the purchasers and so you would have to digitize those in order for there to be capacity. So the salesperson is really going to be somewhere in that process of interactions, but they really won't have the capacity to service all of those interactions. So those interactions have to be digital. So I get what you mean.

Well, they don't have to be digital, they may be digital. A lot of them will be digital. And the digital interactions will happen across the whole sales cycle. This is not tossing the baton, right? This is, it doesn't go marketing then sales anymore. It goes marketing and sales sort of, you know, if you think of marketing as the digital sort of face of the company. So it could be that it's digital and we have to test that. Is it going to be a digital. You know, maybe I insert a salesperson in the middle of it to help do configuration and solutioning, but then they still buy digitally at the end, you know, they want to process digitally, you know, the contract and the purchase. So we really have to reexamine it and it's really hard to do. To Warren's point earlier, hey, you're trying to grow the business and you're just tactically looking at everything all the time and taking a moment to step back and re examine this and look at it is hard to do, but you miss the market if you don't. And so it's really tough.

So I'm curious because you bring up a lot of points about sales and marketing, which is a conversation I'm every day. And the big topics we're having now is whether or not the sdr, you know, kind of model has sort of supplanted the marketing channel in only almost too much. Right. And the SDR model is doing what marketing should be doing and in the, in the scenario you're presenting, which I, you know, I align with is there needs to be different ways in which customers are being touched in the marketplace that are different now. And I agree completely. I'm very much against a lot of this sort of, I would call it like, you know, lead generation type stuff, which customers don't really like as much anymore. But to that point, right, if I'm, if I'm deploying a group of people that are going out there just specifically to get appointments for people, is that marketing's job? How do you see it happening at stages at which companies, at the point that you're talking to smaller companies that are sort of, I guess, toying with the idea of whether or not they just need to deploy a different sales methodology or a different marketing methodology, what you're using is more effective at the stage that, that we're discussing here. It depends on what factors.

So, well, you know, if the company has functions of marketing and sales, and the question is, where should my BDR set? I would say, where does alignment need to happen the most? Is it tight integration with campaigns and awareness that we're driving? So, for example, inbound traffic's coming in based on things we've put in the market. We need people to be aware of that and respond to that. Or is it based on sales going out and doing something? And we need to make sure we're tightly coupled with sales teams. So where demand gets generated by a person. Okay, where you put that really depends on what makes the most sense. Now, ideally, sales and marketing are so aligned, maybe they're part of the same organization, maybe they're not, but they're so aligned that sales knows the campaigns, has had input on the campaigns, because we're going after the same buyers. And so there's no disconnect having to have different people in different orgs. But that doesn't always work that way.

Yeah. Lupe, any thoughts on that?

Well, it's ideally they're going after the same program. However, I think historically sales and marketing have not been that aligned. So what are some best practices to. To align whether they're under the same leadership or not? What do you suggest? What have you seen as good best practices?

Yeah, the very first thing is, do we agree who our prioritized buyers are and where we're going to invest our money? And when I say investment, sales and marketing needs to make their investment in people, campaigns, technology, whatever you want to call it in an aligned way. Marketing shouldn't go off and purchase something to Drive marketing alignment with that input or knowledge of sales. Because there's an integration that needs to happen. Every member, everybody who touches a customer in any way needs to be able to see the same insights that come out of those interactions. We've got this great opportunity because of artificial intelligence ability to look at and process all the signals and interactions that happen digitally. That's one of the great things about digital interactions. In this case, I'm including sales interactions that happen over a digital medium. Right? Other than face to face, everything else can be digitized so we can use these AI engines to give us insight about what's really going on. And we want that to be ubiquitous, that insight pool to be available to everybody so we can make decisions based on that. So we've got to have an aligned process. We have to have aligned underlying data architecture so that we can capture and we have to call things the same thing in our underlying data architecture. And we need to make sure that we know how. We're calculating metrics we shouldn't have. Marketing calculated one way and sales calculated another way. So we don't like to use leads, we like to use opportunities because that's common language and in fact that's what we actually close our opportunities, not leads. So getting the conversation and the language to be similar is really important. But your investments have to be aligned, your underlying architecture has to be aligned. And maybe most important, we should have one customer aligned life cycle from before awareness all the way through renewal and upsell. Right? We should have one aligned process. Not a marketing process and a sales process and a customer success process, but one underlying process. So when I work with companies who get to this stage, the first thing we do is try to drive the alignment. The second thing we do is say, let's look at a customer aligned process. Now that's painful because now we've got to use similar terminology and we've got to agree on the data sets and we've got it. And it causes changes to underlying stuff. We now use the opportunity object in Salesforce instead of the contact object and it changes stuff. It's hard, but if you do it early enough, it's less painful. And then you set the foundation for you to grow in a very aligned way.

I want to address something because you're saying something really important here and it's that it's hard and that it's difficult. And I know why. Because change is difficult and people having to reevaluate things that they've invested in is difficult. It's all emotional stuff. Honestly, it's people, people holding on to old ideas and not wanting. Right?

Yes.

So, you know, here's the conundrum that we're dealing with a lot and I'd like to know your thoughts on this. So the stage of the companies that we're talking about are in a predominantly short term emotional mode. Right. They're trying to accomplish short term goals to survive. And so they make short term decisions. Right. Mostly it's usually quarterly, maybe monthly. Right. Everything they do, the technologies they buy, the people they hire, everything they're doing is designed to see things actually see on the horizon in front of them. They're in front of them. That's a very difficult environment to start to have conversations about decisions that have long term implications. Like you're talking about, you're talking about things that are planning things that imply implications two years from now. Whatever. How do you get a CEO or a leadership organization to think and make long term based decisions when they're faced with short term situations?

Yeah. Oh, it's such a, you bring up such a great point and it is probably the critical one really when you think about it, because our switch, after we get a B series level investment, we have to switch from tactical to a more strategic mindset because we have to stabilize and scale that engine at the same time. And you can only do that if you put in underlying infrastructure, not just people, but processes and technology and you need to put those in an aligned way. Now I talked to a CEO recently and he said that he was at this stage and he said one of the things I'm considering is bringing customer success and the BDR team into sales and having that BSCR a role and have them own the customer lifecycle. And then I'll have an operating officer who does the whatever and I'll have marketing do the digital piece. And he said, but my marketing person's really pissed. I'm taking the BDRs away and the customer, and the customer operations person is really pissed. I'm taking the CSMs away. And I said, well, they have a lot to do if they're going to scale their engine. Don't they have enough to work on without having to worry about all that? He said, oh, right, I guess I should have them focus on those things that they have to be working on that are going to be big enough jobs that they, you know. And he called me later and he said, I had the conversation with the head of marketing and her comment was, oh, thank God, I don't have to do that CRO Thing and get all those processes and stuff in place. So, you know, it was just flipping and understanding how big of a challenge this is. I also recommend some really simple things. Our best work happens in the morning and we never want to do planning on Monday because we're in tactical mindset, getting back in, checking our email, you know, whatever. So typically Mondays are reserved for let's find out what's going on with our pipeline, let's find out what our forecast is, what's the most important deals we got to work on. That's the sales leaders mindset. Right. So let's do that Monday. Okay. Tuesday morning should be maybe process work and Wednesday morning should be maybe investment decision work. And then Thursday's deal work and Fridays, you know, closing out the week and coaching our teams and doing whatever. And then so in the, in the mornings we need to carve out time to do this work with our peers. Now we do this. You know what, I have tactical things that happen every day. I'm coaching, I'm advising clients and we're talking about their world. And that takes up about a third of my time. Then a third of my time is doing my own work, like heads down, I got stuff I got to do on my own. A third of the time is research that is cross functional, that I'm working with other people in the organization on. We have to plan those meetings out way in advance and hold them carefully. We have to protect them and guard them if we're going to ever make progress in some of these bigger research things that we have to do. And it's the same. And those leaders, but the CEO has to drive that. The CEO has to say, guys, we need time to do this. And then there's the monthly and quarterly opportunities to get together, making sure we're executing in alignment. And then the annual planning piece, which everybody hates because we don't tie it to execution too often, but becomes too theoretical.

Yeah, it's great. It's like you're proposing a more of a long term behavioral mindset in the way that the company operates as opposed to that reactive model, that sort of fierce battle every day that most startups think when they come in the office. Every day it's like another thing they have to react to as opposed to planning out strategically when they're going to think about certain things and plan certain things that are in many ways feel counterintuitive to what's going on right now. Right. That's the strain is how do I get my people to keep their heads down and avoid all the bullets coming at them. When those bullets are a distraction, they're really actually not reality. They're. We've created them in to a lot of respects. And I asked this question mainly because I want to address the audiences that are listening to this. Right. So we've got aspiring Chief Revenue Officers. These are people who want to become a CRO one day. And they're thinking about stepping into a role that has to manage all the complexities that you're talking about. And then there's the CRO who right now you and I know, and Lupi I know knows, is going, my God, how do I deal with this sit situation? I don't know what I got myself into, or this didn't work out the way I thought, or I'm not getting the kind of autonomy I need or whatever. And I'm trying to actually create a role from whole cloth that was handed to me and not really doing a good job of it. And what do I do? And then last is the CEO who is at the point where they might get that B round and they're thinking about hiring a chief renew officer. And they're probably going to start making a lot of the common mistakes that you, myself and Lupe know so well that they may listen to this and figure out ways to start thinking differently.

Yeah, I mean, as we prepare to go to our next series of growth and get our next round of investment, we need to think about whether we've got the second in command who can do the tactical stuff. And if we don't, we better groom them. We have to offload and stop doing some of that more tactical stuff to give us space to start laying the foundation for stability and scale. And if we don't, and if we don't take the time to do that, we're going to be out of a job. Because chaos will ensue as we grow. I just talked to somebody later today. They have so much demand, they can't keep up with it. They have so many bottlenecks. What do I do? It's a great problem to have. We want to have it, but you need to have people who are tactically running after that stuff and somebody who's thinking about how do I scale and stabilize this thing.

Yeah, so often the focus is on growth and that becomes kind of the point of arrival as opposed to sustaining and catapulting that growth by building that infrastructure. It's not the sexy work.

I mean, that's why so many founders don't end up running their companies. Once they get to a point, because they have that myopic, tactical view of how to bring something to market and get it out there. And laying all this foundational stuff is not what they want to do. They find it boring or not exciting or anything like that, and it's hard for them. So, look, it's true of all of us. We're all good at certain things. And so I hope, as people are thinking about whether they want to be a CRO or whether they are a CRO, are you spending the right balance of your time on developing your people, building your infrastructure, both process and technology, and are you doing the tactical stuff you have to do?

So that's great. It's interesting you say this, because I'm actually talking to somebody about jumping into the CRO accelerator course to talk exactly about that point, Nancy, which is how leaders need to take better care of their mental health. And I couldn't agree more. I feel this more now than I ever have, especially now running my own business, how disjointed it is trying to manage multiple different things that require multiple different types of competencies and talents and focuses, and how it does make leaders defensive or they don't listen as well or not as effective. And I could see it's not just someone becoming difficult to work with. It's also, I miss things like I'm not seeing the bigger picture because I'm trying to consume ideas too quickly without thinking about the implications of them. And I think I want to emphasize this point because, you know, I'm speaking to a lot of people right now who are looking to move out of an already complicated sales leadership role into a CRO role which brings in other functions and other disciplines. Right. And financial implications. So I'm curious if you could elaborate a bit on what you see as that transition to be made, aside from the disciplinary knowledge, what's the right way for a person to prepare themselves for the complexities that come with the role? From a leadership perspective, aside from what you already said, which I think is great, by the way, it's really inspiring to hear. Thanks.

So I think the biggest thing is that when we're a functional leader, it's about what that function does. And the minute we move up to a CRO leader, it's about what we collectively do. So the number one skill you have to be really good at is comfort and delegation. You're going to be delegating down, but you're going to be delegating across. Like you have to understand the role and the contribution that everybody plays and you have to let them play it, which means you're spending more of your time coaching them and supporting them and encouraging them and less of your time doing the work for them. And so we have to have a shift in mindset that is much more generous about holding people accountable for doing their thing. And I say generous in holding them accountable because it means we have to spend time coaching them and working through them. And it's so much faster and easier to do it ourselves usually. But we have to start. That's something in here. Think about it with if you have kids and you're raising kids and they kind of go from this, no, they can't get any food without asking mom or dad to get it for them too. Oh, they can make their own breakfast. Right. We have to make sure that they have the skill and the capability to do it. And then we have to let them go, even if they're going to make a mess, because otherwise we're going to be making breakfast for the rest of our life. Right. So we have to think about it the same way. We have to let go of quite a lot so that we can stepping in. And by the way, if you're a CSO and you haven't taken a vacation and let your second in command run the thing without checking in and micromanaging, then you're not ready for a CRO role because you have to count on your second in command in sales. You can't do that job for them. So you need to test that. And there's all kinds of maturity models out there that can look at the maturity of your organization and assess where the weak spot is. You can prioritize. Do I need to work on process or technology? I mean, we work with customers all the time in assessing sort of where's the first place to attack the CRO job from? But what we're talking about here, Warren, is really the mindset we have to have when we go into that role.

And you know, it's funny because most CROs come out of sales leadership. Those are people that are doers. That's how they succeeded. And all of a sudden they got to give up all the glory that comes with closing big numbers and managing things that sometimes don't touch those outcomes. And that's a tough shift for a lot of people that are really good sales leaders. That's why, even though I know CEOs typically look to sales leaders to find new chief revenue officers, they're in for a rude awakening when they need that person to shift more over to manage multiple functions and not do all that sales leadership stuff, which if they bias themselves in that favor, they're actually not going to do their job well. And that's something that I'm also trying to help CEOs understand is that the type of personality that they need or the shift they need to make is very difficult for them, particularly when again when they're in that short term mindset.

You know, I'm going to oversimplify this something in the next statements that I make and it's my personal opinion, I haven't done research and validated this, but I think you need to be a science oriented sales leader versus a relationship oriented sales leader in order to make that transition.

Can you elaborate on that? That's really interesting.

Yeah. A relationship oriented person is going to scale through people. They're going to do deals through people and to scale and to take advantage of the capabilities that are now available in market through AI. You really need your CRO to be science oriented. Meaning what do we have to do and how often do we have to do it and what does excellence look like in doing it? Very process and operationally focused. That's 1 and 2. Really focused on the competencies and development of the organization. It's people and it's this operational mindset. And there are sales leaders who get this right. And they tend to be the science of selling organized oriented people. I need to make 100 phone calls to get three, blah, blah, blah. And they know that there's a math to this. Right. So they have to have that sort of mentality to understand. Now that doesn't mean relationships aren't important. They are critically important. Many of them have to now switch from building relationships with key customers to now building relationships internally and making sure that those relationships are as full of trust as the relationships we have with our biggest customers. And we have to put the same kind of attention to them. That's my thought process on that.

That's great. I never heard it before, but it makes complete sense. Almost like saying more process oriented thinkers will be probably more easier acclimated to the role than relationship. And I can get it because I'm a relationship person and it's hard to scale that. It's valuable and you know, you win a lot of hearts. And I can, I can motivate things and get things done. But systems work harder than relationships do for larger complex organizations. There's no doubt about that. Yeah, that's great.

And so if you're a science oriented person and you're going to fit the CRO role. Great. Well, do you need then a relationship oriented person to kind of balance you out?

No doubt you do.

In the sales leader.

That's right. That's what you need. I would say if you're a CRO, you need to have like the greatest, most magnanimous sales leader you could possibly find. And you need to manage that person to succeed and you need to run a system. And you know, I talk about this quite a bit and it's a very, very jarring thing for my clients to hear. They want that person that has the Rolodex, you know?

Right. The other thing is, if they are science oriented, I mean, if they're not science oriented, it doesn't mean they can't make it as the CRO, but they better have a really strong RevOps person who really understands how to build all this. And they need to invest in RevOps.

That's right. Which key? Yeah, it's so, so key. So key. Yep, totally. I've said that the RevOps person is the chief of staff of the. Of the CRO.

100%.

Yep. Well said.

Yeah. Well, we're getting close to out of time here, so I learned a lot. Personally. I made a couple of actual really good realizations, or I guess I could say I concretized some kind of more foggy thoughts here today that really helped me articulate certain things that I've been thinking about. So thank you for that.

Welcome.

And it was really great having you. And I'm sure we'll talk again.

Absolutely.

And we'll see you next time. And thanks everybody for tuning in.

Thanks, everybody.

Once again, this is the CRO spotlight. Bye. Bye.