Value Selling Methodology: Empowering Customer-Facing Teams for Consistent Conversations

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. Welcome to this episode of the CRO Spotlight Podcast. I'm Warren Zenna, the CEO and founder of the CRO Collective and this week I had a great conversation with Carlos Noche and Lisa Schnair. They're both practitioners of the Value Selling framework and they're also, they have their own podcast, which is a really, really good one. I suggest you listen to it. It's the B2B revenue executive experience. It's on Apple podcast and these two have a great dialogue that they have. And we were kind of collaborating together on a conversation regarding Chief Revenue Officer role and how it's implemented. And it's a lot of the problems that CEOs are having today in, in trying to grow their customer success organizations and creating value for customers and how CROs can be responsible for that. So I think I've been really enjoy this conversation. I know I did. Please tune in and looking forward to your feedback. So, you know, I'm just curious about something because I didn't really get clear about this when we spoke. What's your working relationship? Your partners in a business? Or have you just joined up together because you thought you're both awesome and you want to do a podcast?

A little bit of both. So how did you meet?

How did you both meet? What was the genesis of this partnership?

Well, that would have been through Value Selling Associates. So when I joined Value Selling two years ago now, I got introduced to the other associates and so Carlos being one of them. And we do tend to partner up with people we work really well with and you know, so Carlos and I made a. Made a dream team. And our colleague Chad Sanderson, he actually ran our podcast there for the first, geez, I don't know, three or four years. He did over 250 episodes and he was just kind of, you know, looking to hand it off. And so Carlos and I kind of put our hands up and Said, you know, if we can be co hosts, then it's not quite as much work on one person and if we needed to, we could record one without the other, you know, if our schedules got crazy. So, so we raised our hands and said, hey, we'd, we'd love to take it over and try to see how much we can screw it up, you know. Yeah, yeah, I got it.

Got it. Great. And you know, if you mind, tell me a little bit about that organization. Sure.

Carlos, did you want to take a crack at that? Sure.

So Value Selling Associates is the owner of the Value selling framework and all the programs that we deliver. So me and Lisa are licensees, if you would, as far as a relationship model goes, we just happened to go a step further and I wanted to, me and my partners wanted to try to create a brand around Visualize and then one of the programs we deliver is this value selling framework.

It does walk me through that framework. What is it like? What does it entail? What's its philosophy? How does it land on a business?

So yeah, the Value selling methodology is truly just that, Warren. It's a methodology that you adopt across your revenue organization to ultimately drive conversation, being similar for every customer facing role. So it just creates a framework around conversation and particularly in asking compelling questions. So even though it's called value Selling, we often say it's a cross functional conversation framework and it's a set of tools that help really to uncover buyer motivation. So helping customer facing teams and even, I mean we've trained entire organizations, so I keep saying customer facing teams, that's typically who we work with under the CRO. But the framework itself is asking compelling questions to help to uncover buyer motivation and really to put ourselves in their shoes. Rather than pitching on features and functionality and talking about us constantly, we help to train people on how to approach that. And because the methodology is set around a framework, it actually creates this consistency from rep to rep. So the conversation, the questions, the way we ask them becomes much more consistent and trackable. So typically we see leading indicators are that we're actually seeing things like mutual success plans being sent out and they're using the methodology and what we call the value prompter. And then lagging indicators actually tend to be like forecast accuracy improves and then the average deal size goes up. And you know, that consistency in conversation and asking those questions really starts to drive, I like to call it a gap analysis because it shows you very clearly what you don't know. And that way we can actually fill in those blanks and Have a much more confident, qualified prospect.

That's great. I mean, it fits in well with what I'm talking about. Lot is that revenue, operations. And this is going to sound really weird and a lot of people get what I'm talking about, but it still sounds weird is that they're too focused on money, not focused enough on customers. Right. So what's happened is just. I just had this really cool conversation just earlier today about this sort of sales automation innovation conundrum, which is that there's so many tools that have been created in the last 10 years that now me, like, I'm a. I pretty much have a small business, but I can automate as much outbound as Salesforce can because I have. I just get access to the same technologies they have and I can blast out, you know, which, you know. Okay, so one would say, well, that's good. Now you can compete with them. It's like, well, no, now we're just noisier. You know, the whole world is noisier, you know, so what I look at it is that someone on the street is really loud. And my objective is now I'm just going to be louder. So everybody has that same objective now. Just everything's loud. And I don't think it really serves ultimately the people who we're trying to sell to. And so how you describe that just now is intended to, I think, anyway, I'm hearing it properly to get underneath the mindset of someone who's buying something more about what they're looking for, as opposed to just trying to get as much stuff in front of their faces as possible to the optimal moment that they say yes to it. So if you don't mind, I'm curious about this now, so walk me through if you don't mind. This framework, like, is it. How is it deployed? Is it just consulting is just a service? Is there software associated with it? What's the way in which an engagement looks like and how does it impact the business? And from a CRO's perspective, I'm a CRO. I talk to you guys and you know, again, my framework here is not necessarily about. And I know you know this, it's not about you guys selling this to me, but explaining its philosophy because it's clearly fits into what we're trying to accomplish here, which is to help CROs think differently about the business that they're in. And it sounds like you guys have maybe figured out a way to do that.

Okay, I can give this a try. So if you think about when we Talked about earlier, you thought about a CRO, and you said, hey, it's not just sales. They'd be looking at any part of that revenue engine. So if we're thinking about from marketing to sales to the way we deliver it, and also customer care and success on the back end of it. Right. How do we deliver? You know, everybody asks, well, I need a common language or framework across these things, and that's where the value selling framework comes in at its core. And you asked about how to deliver it. I kind of break everything up in threes and sixes. So if you think about first off, before you start delivering anything, before you rush off to do some sort of training around your folks, let's make sure we tailor it to the organization that we're talking about. So what are our buying Personas? What do they care about? What are some of our differentiators? And, hey, how do we get everybody aligned, especially from an executive perspective, before we start rolling this out? My little silly analogy, Warren, is we've all painted a room sometime in our life. Putting the paint on the wall isn't the hard part. Prepping that room to accept the paint and it doesn't get everywhere is the hard part. So how do you prepare for the program to get there and then delivery of it? Yes, we do consulting, we do workshops, and we actually have an application as well over Salesforce to kind of track some of that data. The reality is, what I tell folks is, hey, whoa, whoa. Before you think about the application side, it's not a tool that's selling for you. Sooner or later, you got to have conversations with someone. You need to have an interaction, talk to someone, whether it's over the phone, over Zoom, or in person. Hey, we need to be able to have the skill sets of thinking about what kind of structure do we want for me. And I'll. I'll give you that structure here in a little bit. So we deliver it through these workshops, consulting, and. And then we work on the last tier, which is, hey, nobody became a pro golfer from one class. You got to practice. You got to inspect what you expect. And how do we do that through our behaviors as leaders? And then how do we also do that through the applications and processes that we have as an organization? How do we make this part of our DNA? And ultimately, we're trying to drive a measurable impact, not an event. And I think that's a key differentiator in what Lisa and I do. And if you want more, we can dive more into what the framework is along the way, if you wish, because honestly, it's pretty simple.

Yeah, it's interesting. I'm hearing a couple of things I want to ask you about. So it says value selling, which I understand is kind of confusing to people. And I get that, believe me, the CRO role is confusing to people. Everybody thinks it's a seller too. So I know everything's confusing when it comes to that. Seems like every single thing sticks to sales. No matter what it is you throw at it, it sticks to it. It's just crazy. So let's say, for example, someone who's not in sales, let's say someone who's in marketing. How would this be applicable to them who's not actually necessarily having direct customer conversations?

So I think the beauty of it, Warren, is that the way that we use what we call the value prompter is to collect that information from our customers, from our buyers. And so there's a lot of storytelling that comes from that as well. So as we start to collect more information across the conversations we're having in the organization, then this value prompter evolves into a storyboard of this is what people are looking for, this is what, how they answered the questions we asked them, and ultimately then helps the marketing team to market, to target our buyers in their own language. So as the conversations continue and say, you close that deal and now we're post sale, we're also learning what are the value stories of working with us, how are we impacting their business? And how can marketing then take that and make really compelling messaging for internal and external? Right. So it's interesting because it's also one of the things that we notice that comes out of it is direct product feedback. So what are people actually when we ask and, sorry, I have a geriatric cat that likes to howl at the top of his lungs. So he's going to be a star on this podcast. Yeah, he's. He's an old man. He's. He's kind of deaf, so he likes to. Likes to sing opera in the stairwell. But we also see the. Yeah, as we collect this information, we start asking questions in a different way and, and really approaching it from what motivates our buyers. Then we actually, we get a lot of feedback and the direction we should be going in, how we should be focusing, how. How should we evolve as our customers, really, our relationship with our customers evolves. And so it's all collected in the same way. And the value prompter is made up simply of five parts. It's understanding the buyer's business issue, which is their number one goal or challenge that they have to achieve in a specific amount of time. It's how they're measured, it's how they keep their job. So that understanding that and then simply going forward to uncover all the problems that are standing in the way of them doing that, their view of the solution and how that would be rolled out, ensuring that they actually agree that we're differentiated in the market based on their other conversations. And then of course, the impact of solving those problems, which is where the value piece comes in, is it's not just solving problems. There's an impact to solving problems. How are we going to measure success? Success. And then of course, power and plan being the last two steps. Let's understand the power structure who can prevent this deal from happening. And then the plan piece being that mutual success plan that we coach people to put in writing and send after the call. So that's the value prompter. And it's, it's very simple. I know that our listeners might not be able to see this, but it's on my business card. Yeah, we actually have the, the prompter is there to help them manage the conversation and again to act as that gap analysis around like, okay, what, what, where am I weak? Where's the risk in this deal? And that then translates across all of those different departments and the different use cases.

Great. It's really helpful. So I'm curious now, why is it from your experience, do you think companies just don't think this way already? Why do they need you?

I can give that a try. So first off, I'm gonna go back to your marketing example. Hey, usually, and I'm stealing this from Simon Sinek, hey, organizations, they're thinking about, hey, here's what we sell and how it's better. And all our messaging that comes out of marketing is around that time set. And then you got sales going, ah, it doesn't make sense. And I just show up and throw up all over them. And my hit rate is pretty low. And just like Simon says, hey, we gotta really start with why she'd even listen to me. Warren, you said it earlier, we can create these marketing engines and bombard the market out there with junk emails on how you need a free yeti or plant a tree for you. But what we really need to do is give people a reason to have a conversation. And that's where it all kind of starts in these kind of perspective of this engaging with someone. And I think I've gone off on a tangent. Yeah, I don't remember if I got.

Your core question, because this does sound like a lot of. Because I just one of the things that I, I've been training salespeople for like 20 years. The thing I tell all my sales. Now, granted, the. What we're. I think you were on the same page with this, that what we're talking about here are complex sales. Right. We're not talking about transactional SaaS businesses. It's like you have to go in, meet with multiple stakeholders, and there's a long sales cycle. If I'm wrong, tell me. But it sounds like this stuff is applicable to that because it requires a lot of that kind of thinking. I'm not saying it wouldn't apply for someone who's just able to register for a piece of software, but many times you never speak to those people. They just go online and they log in and they, they, they put in their credit card information or not, and they get a freemium and then they show up as customers some point, at which point maybe you can then onboard them and then, then you start a conversation, which I think is a different flip end model that's been prominent today. But in the situations like you're referring where the kind of show up and throw up, you know, kind of thing, the question I think is most pertinent for someone at that stage is a simple one, which is, before we start, tell me why you took this meeting.

I love that, Warren. I used to coach SDRs to ask that all the time because there, you know, like there are times, of course, where sheer persistence would be the answer to that. However, I, I'd argue that people aren't just giving their valuable time away because they've got nothing else to do. There's. There's an underlying motivation. Yeah.

Why did you expend the calories to join this conversation? You know, and I think that the. Really. And if you, if you can get the person to give you the true answer, and if you're good, if you're adept at selling, you can eventually get them to get you the real answer because they usually, obviously don't usually give the first answer. First center is always a lie, by the way, but that's okay because it tells what the truth probably is underneath it. But my point I'm making is I want to get into kind of psychological stuff because that's really what we're talking about. But ultimately it's to your point. You're correct. It's. If I don't understand what someone's here for, what most salespeople do is they're going to make a whole bunch of assumptions of why they're there, and they're going to be walking down an entirely different pathway than the reason that someone actually showed up. And it becomes just. You're not listening to me. Well, you didn't say anything. Well, you didn't ask me anything, so that's why I didn't say anything. And it becomes a whole kind of horrible thing. But that's, that's a sales conversation. So I'm thinking more about, you know, you get the luxury of having this conversation. Something must have happened that this person's in the room with you. In your viewpoint and based on your methodology and your experience, what's the way that you get somebody to actually have that conversation in the first place? How do you get them to want to have that conversation? How do you get them to show up and ready to have a conversation? Because that's the hardest part today. Because we just said before, everyone's getting barraged with all this crap. You know, chief revenue officers are just plagued with the idea of the guy, a board of directors or investment groups saying, get me more pipeline, get me more pipeline, get me more pipeline. And you have the CEO saying, well, you know, I want more pipeline. But at the same time, too, we have churn. It's horrible. Customers are leaving us out the door as fast as we can get them in. And so the CRO is trying to figure out how to manage the two masters, which is the dollar and the customer. Right. And they don't necessarily always meet. You know, there's two different pursuits in many cases. So how do you have, in your view, more conversations? How do you get people to have those conversations in the first place? I know it's marketing, but what's unique in your perspective about how to get those conversations and what's your methodology kind of doing about that?

You know, it's interesting, you said about the dollar and the retention side, so, you know, initial revenue, let's call it that order.

Yeah. Getting new logos, you know, new, new, new right. Net. New net, New net, New right.

But if you look at research, like SaaS companies, the majority of that dollar revenue, not initial revenue, but profit side of it, comes in that year, two or three down the road.

So customers are your best base for money. There's no doubt about that. Yes.

If we don't know why they originally bought us and the goals and outcomes they wanted to have, just because they're using our product doesn't mean they're getting value. And that's why these conversations kind of come in play. So I kind of wanted to go back to you and say, hey, this usually works in a complex sale. Yes. However, when you think about if all we're doing is selling a few thousand bucks and people are going online and clicking yes and putting in their credit card, we're awesome. As soon as that pivots to hey, Carlos, I really want to get more into mid market or enterprise and it's a different sales cycle or hey, they bought our product, they seemed happy, but then they left a year later. They seem to be using it well. Did you ever talk to them? You know, how'd you know they were happy? Right. So when you, this goes back to Lisa's point about conversation engagement and that's where we get brought in. And it's like, yeah, look, if you have a product led growth and it's this segment of $5,000 or less, those initial buyers, awesome. As soon as you want to turn them into a larger size transaction, we need to engage with them. And I think that those initial dollars and retention are related. In our conversations when we got that initial order and I had one client says, hey Carlos, that first order, it's 80% of the, it's 20% of the battle. 80% of the battle is implementing them, making them happy, making him a raving fan, getting them to renew and better yet, getting them to expand and tell others. And I think this is where our framework kind of comes into play. Go, hey, if we know why they're buying the project, you know how they're measuring success, who's involved in timing. We can try to fulfill that promise throughout that implementation and use that information to show, hey, this is where you were at Warren just six months ago. This is where you're at today. Did you realize that now by the time we get to renewal, it's a no brainer. Better yet, you know, I call it, we're not just trying to get some of the renew, we're trying to get raving fans. If we're just talking to em a year later when they're coming up for renewal. Man, you really didn't show how that customer was in the center of your selling motion to begin with. So I don't think you need to be, you know, pulled, hey, it's just about initial orders or logos or it's just about retention because they both come into play. And if we can get this framework at the beginning, it'll help us get those deals, shorten those sales cycles, get bigger orders but better yet, it'll set us up for success in the long run.

Lisa, you have something to say?

I was just going to circle back to your original question there. Warren as well, is like, how do we get conversations? How do we actually earn the right to have them? And a lot of that is around what we call credibility. So it's understanding the problems CROs are facing today through research, through our own experience with our customers, and then crafting a compelling credibility introduction to say, like, I'm contacting you today, like, not because you're on a list, not because I hit send on 3,000 emails through a sales automation platform, but because we solve real business problems for people like you. And these are the results of those.

You.

Is that something that's top of mind for you in 2023?

That's good. So it brings us to another topic, which is one, when we did our little pre interview conversation, we talked about SDRs and I gave you my whole rant on them. You know, I think that my opinion is, you know, I'll be pretty, I'm pretty resolute about it, is they probably had their place. This sort of SDR strategy had its place in a while, a while back when not many people were doing it. It was fresh enough that it could make a difference. But I think now, like, like everything else, like, because everybody's doing it, it's like the new. It's created a problem that it doesn't have as much effect anymore because you're just cannibalizing the same people you're selling to. And so, you know, at the same time too, I think that the SDR organizations sort of have become de facto marketing departments. They're doing what marketing's supposed to do. But I'm just curious to know that you, I remember, Lisa, you had some pretty strong opinions about it, but I wanted, we never got into it. So I'd be curious to know, when you think about the SDR model today and especially relates to what you guys do, what's your, what's your take on it?

Yeah, and I'll agree with you right off the bat, Warren, is like, the evolution of the SDR function has been ongoing. Like, I started in it over 10 years ago as an SDR myself and then went on to build those teams from the ground up for multiple startups. And yes, I've seen so much change, so much challenge in that the advent of these new technologies that allow you to just super spam people and then it, then it comes down to training and it's like understanding that this is meant to help you do something scalable but valuable. And there's, there's always going to be challenges with that. And then of course we saw like, cold calling's dead. Oh, no, it's not. Okay, let's revive direct mail campaigns, and all of a sudden everybody's doing videos. And you know, so the, the, the change in the, I guess you would say innovation in a way of, of prospecting is it cannibalizes itself. Right? So once something new comes out, then every SDR team on the planet's using it, and then our customers and buyers get sick of it and it stops working. And then we've got to find another way to earn their attention. And I'll also agree with you in that I feel like companies have no idea where this function should sit. And you know, I, at one company, I, as the director of sales development, reported to the head of sales, then to the cmo, then back to the head of sales within, within two years. So they just have no idea where this function is supposed to sit, how it's supposed to work. So I think, you know, to your point, there's, there's very few organizations who know how to do it really well. And it doesn't work for every company.

Yeah, exactly. It's not like something that you're just supposed to do, which I think is sort of what I'm seeing. Matter of fact, it's interesting. I had this conversation with another.

Oh, no way. Really?

I get. A lot of people call me that have software and they want to talk to me about it. This is really interesting. There's people all the time, they want to talk about trade. If they can, like, like, like give me a software program that would run alongside of what we do. I get once a week. Anyway, this one company was really fascinating. They're Goldman Sachs company that came out of more the investment side, and they developed this really sophisticated tool that analyzes all these things. It was pretty impressive, actually. But one thing I noted was when they were showing me the dashboard and the cadence of the onboarding, they just had SDR as, like something that was baked into the way that they're was baked into their coding. In a way it was almost like they just assume like, okay, this is when you bring on your SDR group. And I stopped her. I said, hold on a second. I said, is this for a specific client or is this the way that you design this thing? Like, well, you know, we designed it. You know, these are sort of the steps. I said, well, what if you're wrong, what if an SDR organization is not the right fit? You know, it seems so. It was amazing to me that it's got to the point where it's an assumption that you're going to now build out that next department almost as much as it would be that you build out a marketing department. It's that much become a must have or a have to have. And I think this is where these things. I agree. Get completely out of control. So my question is two things. One would be when and how do you think that type of an organization would make sense? When doesn't it make sense? And what's the right way for a company? Right now I'm a CRO and I'm building up my sales organization and I'm getting pressure to like start hiring SDRs, but my gut tells me I'm not really sure if this is the right thing to do or not. So when you frame your answers, if you could think about a CRO who's struggling with the same problem and what kind of decisioning ways they can think about this from a different perspective, and maybe even ways they could rationalize or build a case as to why it may not make sense if that doesn't.

So, Warren, before we jump into it, like most of my problems in my life, they're usually due to miscommunication. When you think about this SDR function, let's be. Can we clarify, what do you. What do we want it to do if it's. Is its key role to open doors?

Open doors.

Open doors.

What it wants it to do is open doors. Get. Get me meetings. Get em. It. Get me as many meetings as possible in front of people.

Do we want meetings or do we want qualified leads?

Yeah, okay. Well, you know, as you and I both know, right. I mean, the reason that people want meetings is because it's a great vanity metric. And if I can show whomever that I'm getting more meetings, well, then, you know, I'll get a pat in the head and they'll send me home. Now, granted, you and I both know later on those meetings may not result in anything, but at least for a couple quarters, I look like a hero. Because look at all the meetings we're getting. Right. I think that's sort of like what drives us, frankly. I do.

And that's a bit, you know, like you think about the when and how question you ask. You got to go, well, how are you going to measure the success of this team? And if you're purely just measuring it on meetings. Guess what? I'm going to get you one with my grandma. I'm going to get you one with my mother. Hey, my cousin Louie might accept one. We had a guy on our podcast who's a client of ours, and he goes, carlos, it went great. This whole value selling was wonderful. Here's the things that I figured out. But there were some bad outcomes. I go, like what? He goes, my pipeline shrunk 50%.

Yep.

Because once we put your framework over these deals that we threw into the pipeline, we realized, hey, this is smoking. This is a meeting with your grandma.

Exactly.

There's nothing really there. And I go, is that. Was that horrible? I mean, I get it. If you have a board that's using it as a litmus test against you, then you should really sit down with the board and ask them, what do you mean by pipeline? Do you want grandma's on the list, or do you really want qualified opportunities? Because from my client's perspective, he goes, hey, Carlos, it was horrible at first because it was a metric well looked at, but to be honest with you, now we were able to actually focus on the deals that could close this quarter next. And that other 50%, it isn't like it disappeared, right? Hey, we're still going to nurture those accounts. Now it goes back to your when and how. Well, who should nurture them? Are reps actually going to be prospecting within your. Your CRO? Are reps going to actually be prospecting? Because it's a discipline that most reps flat out suck at.

Yep.

All right. The marketing organization, or SDR team, or whatever you want to call it, set up the meeting. It seemed like a good meeting, and I had so many at bats that if I only batted 145, hey, I'm still successful. Life is good, right? But when you ever get into a new product category or you got to get into a harder segment where just showing up and showing the product isn't going to cut it. Hey, we gotta get better at this. And that's where I think, if you think about having an SDO organization that is focused, for example, on purely prospecting and creating a qualified pipeline, your reps can now focus more on closing it. Your customer success team can focus more on servicing them, then it makes sense. And it works like a, you know, like a triangle offense of the old days of the Bulls, and you can create a really nice pot around it. But if you're not willing to put that discipline behind it, then you get organizations that run amok. And we see this all the time. It's where Lisa and I get involved. Like, you know, Carlos, you know, we got, you know, we, we're hitting, you know, one of the stories that we're hitting record pipeline numbers, but we don't have enough pipeline to hit our numbers. I go, what do you mean? Because it's such horrible crap that we're.

Throwing into the machine, into a bag.

You got.

Well, here's the thing though, because that's a bit of. I understand, I agree with you. And the way in which you and I both agreed to sort of characterize the scenario as a bit of a straw man, which is that they're either completely clueless about what they want and you ask a couple questions. They figure out what about a more sophisticated organization where they do know why they want an SDR group and they do know what they want. They do want qualified leads and they sort of have identified qualified leads and they've got a really good system there. In my case, in many cases, I still think it's still not necessarily the right thing to get an sdr. That, that doesn't, doesn't solve it still for me because look, I don't know, we're probably all close to the same age. I think I'm a lot older than you two, but it's fine, I'll, I'll be younger for the purpose of this conversation is, you know, I never had an SDR group to rely on. I mean, I was trained at 20 to prospect and get on the phone and ask questions and do research and all the stuff that in my opinion salespeople do. That's what they do, you know. Well, they, that's what they're supposed to do. I think the definition of a salesperson's changed as a result of this. What's happened now? You're right, Carlos. Most the reason why salespeople are suck at it is because they're not being asked to do it because they've had the benefit of an organization doing it for them. So they're, you know, I look at it and I'll play this game with you a bit. I look at it like I have a 28 year old son and you know, when he was like dating, he was using dating apps and I sat down with him like, you loser. I said go to a bar and go up and talk to somebody like 50 times. Like that's, that's what you do. This is nuts, you know, this thing, you know, and so I think it didn't, it robbed a generation and I think A sales thing to kind of create the thing. It robbed them of the same opportunity to learn how to do something properly because they just didn't have to. It was made too easy for them. We're creating, in my view, a kind of generation of salespeople that are not really understanding what the sales cycle looks like and the benefits of what it would be like. If I was on the phone doing the research and I had to find out what they wanted and it was on the line for me and my number and my quota to do that, they would just either a, they get better at it or they'd weed out the people that aren't. You'd find more people that are. And I think we wouldn't need this stuff so much anymore. Now I understand this is sort of what I think is part of what's going on in the marketplace today. And I'm curious to know what your thoughts are on that.

Well, backing up a bit of a step as well, Warren, because you mentioned how like really it should be marketing function is bringing you qualified or if it's being done properly, Leads that fit. Yeah, leads that fit your ICP buyer Persona. And then a salesperson could pick that up and run with it. Well, I, in the three years that I've been running my own consulting company, I've worked with more companies who told me they didn't believe in marketing.

Oh yeah.

And that was why they wanted to hire me to build an SDR function. And I thought one should never exist without the other. And to your point, maybe the SDR model is not a fit with the more sophisticated companies. Now I did work with, with a few that have really good marketing functions. Now the problem back to your point is that the sales people, or in this case it's a services company, they call them business development reps. They are not willing to nurture leads that marketing brings in or they're just not good at it. So, and you know, you can have your marketing drip nurture programs and things like that definitely were already in place when I got hired to work with them. They were trying to understand the business case behind hiring SDRs. And so from the initial get go, they didn't have any. This is, we're talking, well, geez, 50 million plus, like they weren't a startup. And so we built a business case for hiring one sdr. And that was because the marketing team had these buckets of leads that people weren't properly following up with and the nurture campaigns weren't converting them. They weren't as Aggressive as an SDR would be. So we ended up building a team. It's now four people, a manager, like a player, coach, and three other SDRs. And they're purely supporting marketing campaigns, event leads, those kinds of things. And once it's almost like behavioral scoring. It's like once they hit a certain amount of qualification so actions taken, then it becomes part of their pipeline. Now they're being very strict about what they're putting in pipeline. They are not a company that wants meetings. They, they don't want to sell to just anyone. They don't want the $2 million one year deal. They want the $10 million three year deal. So. And they're being very strict about that. So the SDR team is much more sophisticated than just a meeting booker. They are actually properly trained to have those conversations. You'd almost call them like I think some organization would, would call them ISRs because they're not, they might not be closing that $10 million deal, but they're qualifying well beyond 20% of the sales cycle. So you know, it's interesting the different. I, I agree with you that there these teams that have meetings or even, oh my gosh, activities as vanity metrics. It blows my mind. Like I can tell anyone to make 100 calls a day. What are the. What if they don't know what to say when someone answers the phone?

Amazing.

And so, oh, I have had that conversation, Warren, with so many CROs, CMOs who are like, well, they should be making. It should be easy to make a hundred calls a day. We've got a dialer, we've got this in place and that in place. And I was like, yeah, sure, anybody can make a hundred calls a day.

We made it too easy.

It's really not that hard.

I can send out 100 emails with a button. And so this is it. So really interesting what you just said. I want to think about this because I didn't think about this before. You're looking at. Because I think that actually could be really smart is. You're right. I think that the ability for a busy sales team to follow up on leads is always a problem. Right. It's like you got these great leads sitting around waiting for people to call them and it's too late. There is that timeframe. You gotta get them quickly. When they get that, it's maybe to have like a group of maybe two or three people. That's their job, is that when they get to this point of interest, they're the initial people that reach out and say, hey, I'm just checking in. Is this right? You know, and then. Okay, great, good. I'm gonna get Bob to get on the phone with you, you know, so that they get a conversation. You know, it's. I look at it almost the same as if I were to walk into. And I think this is very similar. What happens if you walk into a car dealership? They have a greeter that walks over to you within the first. I think it's like three minutes. You walk in the door to say, just get a sense of what you're looking for so they can find out the right person to send over to you. But without that initial person, you're just kind of moping around the floor, kicking the tire of the Mach 3 that, you know, you're never really going to buy because it's just so cool. And someone has to walk over and say, what do you want? And they've got it worked out. I mean, I did a lot of work in the automotive space, but they've got a science which is correct. Lisa, Someone comes in the store. They came in for a reason. Right. And you need that initial person. Now, I came in because, let's say I was looking for a specific vehicle, and I saw that there was a 0 APR promotion that was possible at this location. Because I'm financing is my challenge. I want a vehicle. I lease it. I wouldn't buy it, but I want to get this rate right, that those are a specific ICP that's coming in the door right there. And if someone can walk over to me at that moment and ask me three questions in a really smart way and ascertain that that's the sdr, that's more of a marketing respondent, not a sales respondent. They're. They're reacting to this person saw some messaging in the marketplace. I want to find out what they saw and how it connected them to this store. And I think that would be a wise place for one to be put, as opposed to army of appointment setters, which to me is just. It's just crazy to me. I'm sorry. I still think it's completely nuts. I don't get it. I wouldn't even hire a sales person. Like, really. I don't hire. Get out of here. I was like, what do you do? So anyway, I'm going off on this, but I think it's an important thing because my CRO clients are all faced with this challenge ultimately, all asked, when are you bringing on your SDR group? When is that going to be brought on why don't you have that yet?

And interesting kind of looping back to what you were saying before with like the when. So I had that team, Warren. I had a team. I think we were only like 12, 14 people reporting into me at the time. But it was a startup and we could book meetings. Like I had 23 year old SDRs getting the CMO of General Mills, the Chief digital officer at Nestle, you know, like higher level brand executives at media, major media companies. And so. But they weren't converting. And so once these incredible meetings that directly matched our Persona exactly who we wanted to work with were happening and handed off to the sales team, they would die on the vine. And this was actually the company I was with when I was first trained in value selling, which did help a lot. But I got to the point where I was like, I was supposed to be hiring another cohort of SDRs. And I said to my VP of Sales, I said, okay, so we got you the meeting with the chief digital officer at Nestle. Like, who else do you want to talk to? God. And I felt kind of bad about pushing back on that conversation because he had this epiphany of why are we going to continue to hire these meeting bookers who sure are getting us a meeting and the meeting's happening, but if we can't convert it from there, then what are we doing? This cost center is ridiculous. So ultimately led to a bit of a reduction in force, which I felt some somewhat responsible for.

It has to happen, right?

This is it.

It does. I. We do a similar thing. I mean we have an analysis that we do and we identify those sort of inefficiencies and it frequently results in you have too many salespeople, you have too many SDRs, you're just like, not. It's not an efficient machine. So I want to just ask a question because we talked about this too in our pre interview, which is about the chief revenue officer role and like what it is. What are you guys seeing? Like when you look at the companies you're in and you meet with chief revenue officers, I'm curious, like I'm percentage wise, how many of them just run sales?

90. This is off my gut and I know we talked about this ahead of time. Yep, it's.

Yeah.

90% of them run sales. Very few of them run marketing in addition to sales. And besides those, very few of them even run. Lisa, what do you think? What percentage of them run the BDR SDR team?

I would say it's probably about 50, 50 from my experience, it's either the SDR function's either reporting up into a CRO who is really just ahead of sales, or they're reporting into a cmo in the very rare case, they are actually considered their own department versus part of one. Like it's actually its own revenue department versus, you know, sales or marketing. And the SDR leader would report then directly to the CEO. But that's really rare. And, and I would say our. What we're seeing in the market, our definition of a CRO is just a, A chief Sales officer. Only once have I actually worked under one who has the true meaning, like you talk about all the time, Warren, of all the revenue functions actually reported to her. And that's once and have never seen it again.

I agree. Look, believe me, I see this all the time. And it's weird too, but it seems to me, and I've been talking about this now for about a year, I see it more now, more clearly. Is that okay, so let's say you get a CRO who has a little bit more of a higher or more strategic purview. They oversee the customers. Maybe they even have a line to product. I always think the last mile for any CRO is marketing. They almost never get it for some reason. And I think, you know, I kind of know the answer. Usually it's because this. Right. If you look at the. This is an interesting problem I think owners have to solve for. So I see how it can happen. So if I'm running a business, let's say, you know, I start a business and I build a product or a service, whatever the case may be, and I get, I get it out there and I get some customers. Let's say I get 5 million or so in business, it makes sense that I initially have to hire someone to run marketing because you need, you need marketing. So I'm going to hire somebody, right? But whoever may be, and that person is doing their job and you know, sometimes, in many cases, they're doing a good enough job that it's working and they're running good campaigns and stuff. What ends up happening is I see CEOs and founders, and this just happened to a client of mine just yesterday. They promote their marketing people so much faster than everybody else. It's almost like cmos. Get. Become a CMO before any other C suite executive. Okay, so now what you've done is you've essentially created another C suite position. Now. Now what do you do? I mean, now if I, if I really want to hire a CRO, in the manner that I, you know, proposing, I've created a crashing point between two C suite executives where now that CRO will never get marketing because there's someone who runs it already. Okay, so then, now I, now I have two leaders running two separate groups. So the scenario continues. Let's say. Now I say, all right, got a CRO, we got a cmo. It only makes sense that CRO is going to oversee sales predominantly because that's sort of like the domain that's left. Right. I mean, customer success would certainly be there. So what I'm saying is I think I'm seeing this kind of impulse to promote marketing people so quickly that they lose sight of the fact that, that marketing and sales and customer success, in order to even adhere to the methodology that you guys promote, they all need to be working together. And in order for them to work together, they need somebody managing all three that has cross functional oversight over them so that there's no silos or fra or factions that are created. So I'm curious, like, what's the ways in which, based on your. First of all, I don't know if you agree with that and maybe you don't, but maybe that's the first thing to ask is do you see the benefit of having someone who oversees an entire revenue function as a leader?

Yeah.

And if so, where would you think that would be?

So I do, Warren. But the other thing is like, you know, it all depends on the size of the organization. So let's say we have a small company. Right. We, then we got multiple people wearing hats and we're just trying to keep it all together.

That's, that's for sure. Let's say for the sake of this. Carlos. I agree. Let's say we're talking about a 15.

We can afford business. Yep. And if you want a leader for revenue that has a leader for marketing and a leader for sales underneath them to drive the organization. I like the model. I just haven't seen it run effectively very often.

Okay, and why do you think it's not run effectively?

And maybe your point's right. You know, we're small, we're scrappy, and we're growing and we throw people into that C suite. And then it's too difficult to kind of take a step back and hire a real croat they could manage across those functions. One of the guys, one of my clients that I worked with multiple times was running sales and his next step was really coo because he looked at it more from an operational perspective. Right.

Yeah.

You can argue this Chief Customer Officer is becoming a hot title and anything kind of touching the customer on that other side. So on the CRO role, I like the idea of running sales and marketing together. Hopefully customer success. If it's trying to create renewals and expansion.

Yeah, for sure.

You still. And then within it, you. You want the one thing that's kind of like a little catch 22. And this is a question for you. So if you are really a CRO, by your definition, do you have someone underneath? You're running sales.

Yes. So I'll give you the whole kind of layout. I have this written out pretty, pretty explicitly. I'll share stuff with you when we, when we hang up, I'll send you some stuff. I. So this is hard to do because things happen organically. But if I'm in control of the organization and I understand the principles that I'm referring to, and I agree with them, there's a point at which I'm going to hit a certain level of what I call revenue complexity where a recalibration is going to have to take place in order for me to scale. Right. I just can't just keep on doing what I'm doing because, you know, I like my people so much or I'm, you know, there's got to be other reasons. And this is where the problem sets in. And so the way it should work is that at some point you should have a CRO who oversees a head of marketing ahead of sales and head of customer success. There should be three functional leaders whom have complete and total authority over those functional areas. The head of sales, that's their area. It's not like I'm trying to usurp you in any way. I'm all giving it to you. Like, you run this, okay? And marketing, you run that. And customer sex, you run that. But the reason why I'm here is because I'm strategically refereeing the relationship between these three functions. So that to your point, I mean, what you guys do is a perfect analogy for this, that the customer centric conversations are happening throughout all three of those functions. They don't stop somewhere in sales. Frankly, this is what happens. Doesn't cannibalize our business by trying to like build out this machine. You know, that kind of overtakes everything. You know, it knocks all the furniture over, which is what happens. And I think a CRO is the person who can create a revenue engine that looks at the efficiencies across all three. I mean, we've been saying this really well throughout this entire conversation, which is things like, is this the right lead? Is this person ready to talk to, do they know? Do we know what they want? Do they really want what we buy? Are they ready to pay for it? Right. That won't happen that well if you have silos. Because they, they'll keep that information contained within their Little Bo box because it fulfills their own individual respective KPIs irregardless of the way they impact the rest of the organization. And that's what happens. And so the reason why the CRO is there is to sort of mitigate that. And that's why it works. I know it does. It's just that I understand it's hard because it's going to require change, you know it is.

But just to add a little bit to why it's so needed and the complexity of it all. It's not just marketing, sales, customer success. You got compliance, it's product. Yeah. You got the future direction of the product. Right. What are the features customers want? Which ones do we really want? Do we want? In a small company, a customer could kill you. In other words, it could take you down this rabbit hole that you can't replicate with anybody else. And then you don't have the manpower or dollars to be able to create the product you ultimately needed to create. And now you're in this toilet bowl swing going down. So whether it's compliant, legal. So some of the best implications we've done that, we do this executive alignment workshop and I go, hey, well who should be on the call? Marketing, sales, the head of pre sales ahead of customer. Well, what about legal? What about your ops people? Why do they need to be there? Do they affect your sales cycles? Is there a legal process? Do reps understand that it's going to take X amount of time just to get through the legal mumbo jumbo to get a deal done? Because if they're truly quarterbacking a deal, they need to understand that do they know the compliance issues that need to be done? A good friend of mine was just hearing, she's a compliance officer. We were just talking about sales and we're just joking around. The worst, hey, it's coming in this quarter. We're three days before quarter end. The compliance team, they're killing us. They're the deal prevention desk. And you're like, really? You got to go through the process. You knew that it takes at least X amount of time. Where's that in your mutual success plan? So the technical win demo, the product, they love it, in my opinion, is 50% of the battle, the managing, yes. Everything else is the other 50%.

God, yes. That other 50% is harder. You know it's harder. But that you're 100% right. 100% right. It's great. I love it. I, I, I. This is great. So how do people reach you? Tell us more about value selling. How can people get in touch with the organization? What are the ways that they can find you? What other things you up to that you may want people to know about?

Well, I'm the most reachable person in the world, Warren. You can reach out to me through LinkedIn. Make sure you mention this podcast or something that we've that you're interested in. Not just the old quiet connect and I'm happy to have a conversation. You can also reach me through Lisa Schneer, valueselling.com and you can also reach me through my consultancy, Impulsion Sales. And that's just Lisa. Impulsionsales.com to make it easy.

LinkedIn's probably the best way to reach me. And like Lisa, if you can mention the podcast, at least it gives me a point of reference. And on there I have all my contact information, so it makes it a lot easier for everybody.

Got it. Yeah, same LinkedIn's my phone book for basically. Well, great look. Thank you so much. It was really fun. I really enjoyed it and I will be following you guys a lot, so.

Likewise, Warren. Thank you. I really enjoyed some of your other episodes. I'll be honest, I was listening to some while I was on my. I have a rowing. Well, Carlos and I both have the same rowing machine in the basement, and I like to crank up podcasts while I'm rowing. And I just listened to the one with Rosa. Oh, my goodness. Rosalyn, Rosalyn, yes. Yeah, she's amazing. The Rev Ops and funny. I followed her for ages. I was part of that collective as well, and so I thought it was really good.

Oh, thanks. She's great. I just had another one, which you should listen to with Jackie Russo. It just came out and it was a really, really good conversation. She's someone who uniquely came into the role not from sales, not even from, from marketing, not even from customer success. She came in through like, analytics and rev Ops and she brings a really unique perspective back to the role and she's really smart. It was really great, but thanks, I appreciate it. You know, it's funny, a lot of people write me about the podcast and I looked at the numbers and they suck. Like no one's listening to this thing. I'm like, so many people write me, you know, like, must be the. Every 10 people that write it, write me a note. So it's nice, but, you know, we'll get there, you know, one day at a time.

Yeah.

But thank you guys, and I really appreciate. It was really fun. And I'm sure we'll be speaking again.

Sounds great. Take care.

Thanks, Warren.