What it Takes To Successfully Deploy a CRO with Philip Lacor

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. It's Philippe, correct?

Philippe, yeah.

Where are you from? What's your, your French?

I'm originally Dutch, from the Netherlands, but very French name.

Yeah, yeah, very nice. Well, welcome and really it's great to have you here. You're the Chief Revenue Officer of Airbase. How big is Airbase? How big of a company is it?

Yeah, we have about 400 people in the company. We are a Series B, 16 countries around the world. But yeah, okay.

And if you don't mind, just give me a little brief overview of what your customers are, who you serve, what you do for them, so to speak.

Yeah, so we are a modern procure to pay platform that works for people in the office of the cfo. And we allow companies to consolidate all their spend from a company in one platform. And so we work a lot with accountants, controllers and since a year also with procurement people. And they all tend to roll up into the office of the cfo.

So is it like expensify similar to that?

Well, it is very broad. So we focus first of all on mid market companies. So companies between 75 employees all the way up to like 10,000. We don't do SMB and we don't do Fortune 5000. And the platform is broad in the sense that you can consolidate all your spend, which is on one hand accounts payable automation. So that's payments of vendors through invoices, through ach, we have guided procurement, what we call, which is a purchasing request module. So if employees want to do a request for spend, they can go in there and they get guided through the process. Then we have expense management and you mentioned one of the other players in the space and then we have corporate cards. And basically those are all the ways that companies spend money. And the issue that companies ran into, like, because it's different ways of spending money, it's hard to have control and visibility. And that problem gets bigger. When companies get bigger because they get more employees, they go into more countries, they get more vendors, they have more currencies, they're more tax implications. So finance becomes exponentially harder when you grow. And we help these teams manage their complexity so they can focus on being strategic.

Understood? Great.

Yeah, great.

And how long have you been the Chief Revenue Officer at the company? How long have you been with the company?

I've been a bit more than two years and I joined as the Chief Revenue officer.

So you came aboard as a CRO. Interesting. Let's talk about this. I'm really fascinated by this. So when they hired you as a CRO, the first question I have for you is how did they and I guess you define that role at your company?

Yeah, I'm basically responsible for all the go to market teams. And so I think the role of a CRO is typical to align the different go to market teams. So it goes from marketing to sales, solutions, consulting and then onboarding and then customer success and renewals. It's ultimately what the CRO does is the full life cycle of a customer. So that is really critical. I think there's two other things that are important for CROs. One is in a way you're also, you represent with your team the voice of the customer back into the company. And yeah, that manifests itself not only in support, but how you work closely with product and with engineering. And then finally I think as a CRO, a difference with a VP sales is that you're also really part of the company leadership. So you're ultimately responsible for the strategy of the company, but also the growth of the company. So yeah, that's the CEO, but from a go to market point of view, the buck stops with you.

Well, bravo to you sir, and your company for doing it right. Because I don't hear this often. So you just basically describe the job perfectly. And that's really great to hear. A company is utilizing the role properly. That, that leads me to the next series of questions. So were you the first CRO of the company?

Yeah, I was the first formal CRO. Yeah.

Okay, so what do you think it was? I mean, if you don't mind your understanding of the culture that you're in, why you think it was that your company at the stage they were in recognized that they needed a leader like that.

Yeah. So, so they went through the to the next phase of growth. That is, that is number one. So they just got bigger and as a result complexity got higher. The company also wanted to move more upmarket, so really into mid market and early enterprise. So there were some changes in motions that we wanted to do and we wanted to make sure that all functions were really super aligned. And before I joined, there was a sense like, okay, there is some alignment, but there's still some siloed thinking between the functions and how can we bridge that? So for example, how do you have seamless cooperation between marketing and sales, but equally between sales and onboarding once the deal is closed, and so on and so forth.

Well, look, obviously I am completely aligned with you on the reasoning. I guess that's great. I appreciate that answer because it's great. They're correct. They did recognize the problems. But the reason I have a business is because most companies don't, you know, they recognize problems. I mean, they do see complexities. They say, oh wow, we got too big for X, Y or Z or our company's changing and we need to recon think the way we're doing things, etc. And they recognize symptomatic problems like they have a sales problem or they have a funnel problem, or they have a marketing problem. But unfortunately, I don't see across the board companies having the maturity to know that what we have is an alignment problem, which you know and I know is a systemic problem that needs to be fixed through the sort of position that you're in.

Yeah.

So what they tend to do is they elevate people. Oh, we'll increase the responsibility of our salesperson, sales leader, or we'll make our marketing person more responsible or we'll create a committee. You know, they do all sorts of nutty things that don't address the problem. Because many times now I want to ask you this question is they already have entrenched roles that they don't want to disrupt. So many times what I see happen is you have a company that gets the stage that yours was at when they hired you two years ago and they go, you know, we already have a CMO and we don't want to disrupt that person's, you know, perch. So we're going to, you know, have a CRO and that person will run sales and they'll work together kind of thing. What was it you think about your company that understood the need? And I asked this question because I'm trying to get my listeners to see what it's like to hear about a company that got this right and how they can get it right.

Yeah, so. So first of all, we have a second time founder who's very experienced. So this is his second company, first one was successful and he's doing it again. So he Is he is that obviously helps. Then secondly, we got a, we got a great board, we got very good VCs with very experienced people, they help us as well. But then I think they saw that alignment between sales and marketing was not perfect and there were opportunities to optimize there. They also felt that okay, we can do more in the, in the expansion cycle and the renewal cycle. The renewal numbers were okay, but it was still opportunity to get better. They also wanted to keep innovating on the portfolio. So Airbase is innovating very fast. They have high product velocity. But then if you keep releasing new product, how do you then leverage that to your base? So how do you then drive that expansion motion? So those were some of the questions that I had and that they had and those they wanted to address. And look the way I've always had the sense from early on in my career that the big levers in companies are often cross functional. And yes, you need to really optimize within your function but the big levers are often cross functional. And I always felt that yeah, sales is in a way the tip of the spear where everything that the company does comes together in that. But that also means that there's a huge mutual dependency. And so when I hear companies say okay, hey we want to grow, let's hire way more salespeople without looking at like their top of funnel or how are they, how is the conversion of that funnel going? Yeah, that doesn't work. And currently definitely in times like these where everybody's more trying to be more efficient, that definitely doesn't work. So you gotta approach this really holistically. And I feel the same thing for it's back to the point on representing the customer. If you really believe that we have one of our airbases value is obsess about making the customer happy, that also means that you really understand what their pains are and try to be honest on what you're doing well and what you're not doing well and recognizing where you have deficits and then trying to work with your teams internally, for example, the product team, we try to prioritize, okay, what is feedback from our customers, where do they say we have gaps in our platform or what do they want to see next? And through internal prioritization of these ads from customers you can really also, through close collaboration with your product team, you can really give guidance on here's what to build next and build pretty effective strategies. But there is a huge dependency between go to market teams and product and engineering and equally between sales, marketing and all these other teams, they go really hand in hand.

No doubt we're on the same page. I just probably have a conversation like this, maybe one once a quarter.

Yeah.

Where I'd speak to somebody who gets this and is working like this. I mean, in a way, strangely, I don't want to say this sounds a little opportunistic, but thank God, because that's why I have a business. But. But, you know, the reality is that I really do want to change this. I. I do see a future, frankly. Not too far off, frankly, where companies all operate the way you're talking about, they come to this realization sooner, not after having made a bunch of mistakes and figuring it out the hard way, which happens most of the time. Most of the time, when clients get to the point where they figure this out, it's because they tried it their own way three or four times and it didn't work, and they finally get it together. In your case, it sounds like you had leadership that got this, understood this, and built the company this way. And I tout this frequently when I speak to my clients, who most of them are chief revenue officers like yourself, that, you know, the role is intended to be deployed the way you're being deployed. But the reason why it doesn't, most of the time has very little to do with whether you're capable of doing that or not. It has to do with the company's gonna let you or not, because most of the time, they won't. Most of the time. What happens is they had the CRO run the sales organization because, like you said, they're obsessed with the sales organization. Understandably, it's where the money comes in. But it's just one part of the equation. And so I guess I would ask you, you know, this question, which is, given the fact that your company seems to be really well organized and strategically structured, how did you get into this? Like, when you got this role, why did they choose Philippe to do this job as opposed to the other people that they could have chosen?

Yeah. So I guess I was lucky early in my career, but I always had this mindset. One of my values is always learning. My parents were both in education, so I grew up and learned with the fact that learning is very important. So I always have taken opportunities to learn and develop. And I started my career, my background is in engineering. Then I even worked in manufacturing. Than did my mba. But then I joined Dell a long time ago, and I was lucky enough to do a bunch of different roles. I did, for example, my first role There was FPA and fpa. Financial Planning and analysis gives you a great understanding of like how companies operate, how they look at financial plans. And I tell you, this is a skill that I use as a CRO every day because ultimately you need to translate your financial plan into like a commercial plan. You, you need to understand like, how your reps are ramping about capacity, attrition, all of this, all of these things. So that's one thing. Then in Dell, they actually moved me later on to like a marketing role and which was one of the harder transitions. And why did they do that?

You think? Why did they do that?

They had a need and they had a need of marketing. They thought I could do it. And later in my career, actually I went to sales and then back to marketing. And the reason that they moved me later to I led marketing for large enterprise for Europe. I had 125 marketeers. The reason that me to that it took, that, it took me for that role because actually I had a sales background. So they were looking to bring sales and marketing really close together. And I had been doing these sales roles, I had been doing these marketing roles and that's what they were looking for. So anyway, when I joined later on, I joined a big telco named Vodafone. I led large teams of over a thousand people. But there I had. The one reason why I joined this company is because it allowed me to do these broader roles and this conducting role of having these different parts of the orchestra play together in harmony. Yeah, it's just really a lot of fun and it's something that I really enjoy. And, and that was clearly the fact that, that I had done it before, a reason for, for Airbase to also lean into it. Now I will say that the learning always continues.

Sure.

Back when I was at Dropbox a few years ago, it was the first time that I was really became responsible for customer success. And, and at the time, this was around 2017, 2018 timeframe, customer success was still relatively new. I knew a little bit about it, but not a lot. So I felt I had to educate myself. And I spent a lot of time with folks like Nick Mehta from Gainsight. I read all his books, went to a bunch of seminars, met with a number of other CRO's to really learn the craft. So I will say that you got to keep doing these things because the technology is evolving, the way sales, marketing, customer success works is evolving, the market is evolving. So the learning never stops. But you got to keep doing those things to remain relevant. And to stay effective.

That's interesting. So you've been fortunate enough to work at organizations that recognize the importance of cross functional education and knowledge, intelligence, experience, because they put you in jobs because you possessed the opposing knowledge that would apply itself there. Most of my clients are siloed. They run sales, they're kept in sales, they keep on going after sales jobs. You know, they don't sort of expand their horizons very much and they stick to their strengths, so to speak. Right. So, yeah, so it sounds like it's a combination of companies that recognize cross functional competencies and you, who's. You're kind of a learning person. You want to try new things and you're competent at doing a lot of things.

Yeah, yeah. And yeah, the best, the best CROs that I know are always learning, right? They always trying new things. They look at other CROs. I sometimes go to these meetups organized by, by VC and so on with CROs. And yeah, you learn from great, great players. The other day there was a session with the CEO of Zscaler. Now we went there and there are really strong leaders that you can learn from. And I see these careers as like having like a backpack. And the way you have a career is you put like these experiences in your backpack and it doesn't need to be straight line, but from every role you learn new things, you make mistakes, you learn from those and you try to get, get better. And look, I listen, I listen to podcasts every week. I still read sales books every week. The other day we were working with my marketing team on like, again, in the light of efficiency. Okay, what are other ways we can build brand, other ways we can create pipeline? And one of the things that we wanted to lean into was SEO. But I had been a marketing leader, but I did not know a lot about SEO. Marketing leaders come in many shapes and forms. So, okay, I said, okay, let me buy a couple of books, read those, listen to a bunch of things. And then later on we had lots of meetings with agencies and so on. But yeah, you learn and half a year later, you know more. And those things you got to keep doing. And now it's the same with how to apply AI or and so on. So you got to stay up to date 100%.

You're right. And you have to always be learning and building because what's happening now in the marketplace right now, it's insane. The new information that's coming into place, I mean, monthly, it's like everything's just accelerating. I've never seen anything like this before, and I see a huge shift, not only economically, but technologically even. You know, management is changing the way that they're running things. And it's a moving. I think we're in between two phases of business right now. You know, I think it's an interesting thing.

Yeah.

So here's a question, I guess, is that when you. When you got hired as the CRO and they brought you in, what was the thing that you did for the first, let's say, three to six months. What was the first three to six months of your job like there?

Yeah. So. And the first thing is there are internal and external stakeholders. Let's start with the external ones. The first ones are your customers, and then there's partners in the board. But let's start with your customers. Now it's important that you really understand the customers that you're selling into. What are the. What are the Personas? So in our case, the accountant, the controller, the procurement person. And yeah, I know what an accountant does. But to really understand day to day, what makes their life hard, what are they running into? And I'll give you an example. A few weeks ago, I was chatting to a customer, and this is one of the things I learned. Customers produce tend to have to pay and process thousands of invoices per month. So can you imagine that you're at home and you need to process life, five of these stacks of invoices every month, huge tax, and they cannot be double payment, they cannot be fraudulent invoices. And then ultimately everything has to reconcile. Now, when you really spend time with accountants, how they do that and how they close their books. I was chatting to a customer the other day, and there was this lady in the conference and she said, my team of three processes 10,000 invoices every month. And it's so painful, it's so manual. We're afraid to make mistakes. Yeah, there's got to be a better way. And yeah, once you really go deep on understanding their pains, then you start to understand what also your company is about and what you're trying to solve for or procurement people. That said, okay, we would like people to follow the process, but they don't because the tools are so hard to use and things like that. So I think spending a lot of time with customers is important. It's also important for your team. I believe that sales teams want to see that the CRO also leads from the front, takes calls, or the customer success team. When a customer is unhappy, that happens. Right. So you got to support your team and show up and listen to the customers, why they are not happy. And I think that is important. Then on the internal side, yeah, it starts with like diagnosing your team. Do you have the right leaders in place, do they understand their roles and responsibilities? And then I always say that you're part of two teams and that leads. That links to the previous discussion that we had is you have your own team, but then spending a lot of time with product, with engineering, with finance, with legal, the CEO, obviously that is all important. So having regular one on ones and being aligned with the CEO, the CFO and all these others is like critical.

How did the organization prepare the company for your role? So they knew what the hell you did and who this guy is and how we report to him and how do we support him and what disruptions this person going to make and things. And how do they do that?

Yeah, they context is really important, right. So it starts with the CEO sets the context of like this is where we are as a business, here's what we need to do next and this is why we're making the change. So start with why. Explaining the why for the change and putting that in the context of the company is really important. And in Airbase's case it was really the next stage of growth that was really important and the importance of having these functions play together, that was explained very well. But clearly the founder CEO played a very big role in that. Then the other thing is that I think it's important that in the first back to 30, 60, 90 days is that you listen a lot and don't try to make very big decisions early on because you just don't know exactly what's going on. So you think you know, but you don't and your opinion might change over time. And I usually try to come in with, with a few like hypothesis based on the, the interviews that you've had and think okay, there might be opportunities or issues in the next three or four areas and then you, you go in and you start having all these conversations and you listen to people and you might be right on two or three and you might be wrong on two others. But at the end of the 60 days you sort of know like, okay, this is where the key things are that I need to work on. And then you start building a plan together. And we use okrs a lot so objectives and key results to keep the company on track on a quarterly basis and also to communicate to the company what are the most important things. And yeah, you build those together with your, with Your team, that is a, that is a co creation process and we do that every quarter where we've just done it now for next quarter. And this is how you then start. And going into your second quarter, you got to be really ready with plan and execute. Time always goes quickly, so you want to move fast, but you tend to want to hold off on big decisions in the beginning. So.

Yeah, that's for sure. I mean, it depends on the situation. You know, I've worked with CROs who went into companies that are in distress, you know, and they have to make big decisions in the beginning because that's kind of why they were hired. You know, in fact, a lot of times it's some form of like almost like abdication. It's like, I don't want to make this decision. Let's hire a CRO to make these decisions. That way I can kind of keep my, my face with the company, you know. Seems like you were brought in at a more, I'd say, paced time when the company recognized that they were ready for this and they had it all set.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So, you know, because the experience I've had is know when you bring on somebody whom has such high and wide remit, right. They oversee all these different things. Now all of a sudden you're responsible for multiple components of the business. The people who are the stakeholders in those businesses are threatened by this new hire. Right. What's this going to mean for me? Do I have less power now? Do I have less say? I have a new boss. I used to report to my CEO. I don't anymore. My budget going to be taken away. Am I going to be evaluated differently? How do you deal with those things when you know that those are obviously human reactions to someone coming in, taking over these positions?

Yeah, that's a, that's a great question. I think it all depends on you when you come in. But, but the first thing is to do is really build relationships and get to know these people. Get to know what them personally, but also what makes them tick and what motivates them and what are their needs. And again, I think it's important to listen to them and understand, get their view on the business, get their view on what would help them. I think it's important to regularly ask, how can I help you with your next step? I think there should also be a mindset of humbleness. You've been here in this company for a long time. I, I'm coming new in. I don't have the knowledge that you have. Yeah, I Bring other experience. But I feel that when you come into, into a company that you should not have a predisposed playbook. You should every. You should take a very situational approach, understand what the situation is, understand what the stage of the company is and the customer stage of the team, and then formulate your plan on that and not like, don't take a cookie cutter approach. So, and again, that plan you built together with your team through the relationships that you build. So relationships, first get to know people, listen to them, and then start formulating a plan together.

Okay, Agreed. There's no doubt, empathy, relationship humility, no doubt. At the same time, you're being given the responsibility to evolve the company to operate in a way that hasn't before, which means you're forced to have to evaluate the current resources and determine if they're appropriate for the next phase of growth. And that might result in you having to say, you got to get out of here. You're no good for us anymore. So how do you confront those things? So you're in this humility tour, let's call it. Right. You know, we're out there making relationships and listening, but you realize that, you know, some people just, they have to be replaced or I have to move people around. I want to hear your thinking on this because again, just for context, you know, the people listening to this show are people in your position and they want to know how do they deal with this sort of stuff. Like, I'm going to be brought onto a company as a chief revenue officer and I'll be faced with all these decisions. Whether I do them in a humble way or I do them in a nice way, I still have to do them. And so what's the sort of your thoughts on the right approaches to, and maybe even more personal examples of things you had to do in your situation that may have been not popular, but you needed to do them, you know.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, There, there are, there are always things that, that, that are not working. Right. That is, that is the case. And you got to assess your, your team on like, do you, do you think you have the right players on board? And yeah, there have been situations in the past and I won't name names, but there was a situation where there was a customer success leader. This is not an airbase, but a previous company that did not work out. And how do you know? First of all, people know in the organization and people, when you go deeper in the organization, people will tell you. So you start to pick up on things. Then in this case, this person was not very data oriented. So when you think about like how is the leader diagnosing their situation and how are they diagnosing where the problems are, then you want to see sort of like a data driven approach. And when that is not there, when there's not a clear diagnosis, when it's not data driven. Highly, highly anecdotal. Yeah, that is, that is usually a red flag for me. And then yeah, you got a pretty early on also like give, give clear feedback on what the expectations are and what your goals are. And if someone then doesn't make it, then you gotta have these candid discussions with them. And I think it's then important to be candid and try to help the person get to a better place. In this case, I gave feedback on what needed to be done on the team of that person, how that person should interact with others. I recommended weekly peer to peer meeting meetings to be. There was also an alignment issue with peers. Yeah, if, if you don't see them follow up on that, then you need to have like candid discussions and be clear on that. And at one point you got to make a decision as well. That is part of it there. When I say you gotta listen a lot in the beginning. Yeah. After that there's also time where you have to be very decisive.

You gotta act, you gotta be decisive. No question.

I think, and I believe that, look, when you have set your strategy, then strategy is also about resource allocation. And that means that sometimes most companies don't have like unlimited resource. So you sometimes have to cut or take like open rules away or even existing roles away and reallocate that to other parts. So I've seen situations where the ratio of solution consultants to AES was too low. Okay, how do you then find that headcount? And I think those are questions that CROs also often get like, okay, where are you going to focus and where are you going to free up resource to reallocate it to other parts of the business? I think that's an important question as well. But then you got to be decisive. Yes.

So you mentioned data driven decisions and substantiating reasoning and providing evidence for making decisions. I agree. There's a combination of course between data and gut. I mean, some good leaders have a good sense of things. Right. But when you first came into your company, you mentioned that the reason you were brought in was because your CEO recognized that there was some, you know, split or a misalignment between things, which I think is inevitable reality that you get to a point where you need to fix that. How did you, what, what tools and resources did you use and if you don't mind, what sort of process you use to alignment, like how did you make an assessment and how long did it take and what, what process did you use to do that?

Yeah, yeah. Okay, great. So first of all we have as a CRO, when you have your team meeting, team meetings, your leadership team, I like to have the, yeah, I have the, I will have the different players at the table. So marketing, product marketing, sales consulting, they have a seat at the table. So there is a dialogue happening very regularly on the, on the, at the leadership team level. I also do a people leads meeting where you have the second level of leaders. They are getting together and they are meeting. So that's one thing. Then I think you can do a lot through the OKR process. So one of the things, for example that we, I'll give you like one or two examples. At one point we saw in Airbase we wanted to change our sales motion. We have this platform, it has four modules in it and a few years ago we were trying to always sell the complete platform, which is a bigger digital transformation. We then did win loss analysis and we looked at a number of deals and we said, okay, it's probably better to sell product by product or module by module. In other words to change our motion to a land and expand motion. Okay, now that's easier said than done but it has a lot of like implications and the implications are that yeah, your product needs to be ready to do that. So that's a dependency on product. But also your pricing and packaging need to be able to do that now. So we worked with product marketing. Product marketing was in my team to also change pricing and packaging to modernize it. Now that's also good. But then you need to align the incentive for your salespeople because if you tell your to your salespeople, hey, I want to do a land and expand motion, they go like, okay, yeah, as an ae, I'm responsible for new business sales. So if you let me do the land only then I'm only going to do small deals. So why would I buy into this? Now this is an example that is very cross functional. So we said, okay, once you win a new logo, you can keep that logo for 12 months and that allows you to not only do the land but also do the expense. So sell the second or the third or the fourth module or add subsidiaries or whatever it is now. Then the next dependency comes because after the land you close a contract. But then the customer needs to be onboarded. And clearly you want a smooth onboarding process that maybe takes let's say three months. So there is a nine months window to then do the expand. Now when you look at that simple strategy of like hey, why don't we go to land and expand motion, it's highly cross functional. So we had okrs on this that indeed touches like the product marketing team, the product team sales had to be enabled. So enablement played a huge role which was revenue, operations, marketing had to change pricing and packaging, we had to change our website. The onboarding team had to tighten the onboarding processes and so on. So again this is a very big lever. But it's also you can see how cross function, how cross functional these levers are by nature. And again you drive then these two or three of these big initiatives every quarter or every six months. That's it. But those are the big needle movers that drive your company forward and to drive growth.

Yeah, it's great. I love this analysis. And you laid out what I think is sort of like a process analysis, right? Like how to incentivize people and plug them into a new go to market strategy. Additionally, there has to be some way to like you mentioned, and this happens all the time. If I'm brought in as a chief revenue officer, one of the things I'm dealing with, aside from what you just mentioned, which is we need to change to our model, but it's also marketing has one story about something, sales has another story about something. Customers have. You know, there's all these broken, like disparate, almost siloed versions of reality. And the CRO's job in my view is to bring coalition and bring unity to all those stories. There's one story at least to what degree? So how do you do that? I know I have a business model where we do this for companies. We actually do this. We call it CRO readiness. But as a CRO, what was your approach to creating data truth and how did you go through the process of assessing each person's version and then building the right version? How did you go through that? I'm curious to know.

Yeah, I'll give you two examples. One is on the alignment with go to market and product and engineering. We did a couple of things there. First of all, we established a customer advisory board and we did that with key customers that really can know the industry and know also our product. So. And a customer advisory board, although we were hosting it, is not for me or not for go to Market it's really. I see, I see that as an opportunity for product and engineering to test their hypothesis on the product strategy and, and to even get direct feedback on the product experience. So that's one thing. We also have what we call like a product council next to like a priority council. But a product council has like handpicked customer facing people. So a combination of solution consultants, a customer success managers, product marketeers and product and their job is to give like customer insights back to the company but also to stack rank them because it's easy to say like hey we want a thousand things from product. It's much harder to say okay these are the top 10 things and this is like stack ranked and the other 200 things we don't want to do because these 10 are the, are the, are the most important one. That, that is a great discussion to have with a cross functional team and have them make these trade offs. Because ultimately your product and engineering team is like a factory. It has a certain capacity and the question as a CRO is like okay, how can I get maximum output or most relevant output from that factory? And that's by stack ranking. Some of these asks. The other thing we do then is win loss analysis and we look at internal data but we also use an external agency that, that interviews customers. And they interview customers about, not only about. Well we do 2/3 of the customers that we are customers that where we did not win a deal and one third is where we won. And we want to know both why did we win and why did we lose. And the beauty is, is that you get sort of like a 10 page report per customer per deal and there's verbatim quotes from the customer and they will tell you either the product was better than competition and this is why we chose you or the sales rep, they did not do a great job. And we put those report in the channel that are accessible by a larger group of people and this is reality from the customer. There's no filter on that data and, and it's across everything, it's across our pricing, how we manifested ourselves, our product. So there's no bias to that. So these are things that really help with like working closely with, with the product. Another thing that I feel really helps also working with product marketing when you're making a pitch or when you're doing pricing is listening into customer calls. So these calls recording are being shared throughout the company. And when we talk about pricing or campaign people will regularly say hey, here are five calls. So you have five snippets that you need to listen to. And that is also like unfiltered truth. And again, this is one of the areas where AI makes life simpler. You can get these call transcripts, you can search on certain things. But again, these are like realities. And yeah, we have a lot of product managers listening into calls and say, hey, I really understand now better what they want from us and how can we, we can solve these issues.

Fascinating.

So these data we didn't have like 10 years ago, right?

So yeah, no, it's amazing.

So many more insights that we have right now.

Totally. How about the. Your Salesforce I assume, right? You Salesforce shop?

We do, yeah.

So how did you optimize your, your CRM? I mean that's always a mess. You know, whenever CROs come in, they look at that thing, they're like, oh my God, this is.

Yeah.

So what did you do to determine how to improve? I mean was it usually utilizing third party Salesforce engineers or did you have to do an internal analysis around your business to determine whether people are using it properly or whether the data that's being entered into it is probably how is another, another tech. Like what other tech part of the tech stack did you evaluate in order to improve system operations and operational consistency?

Yeah, so the, the implementation of our Salesforce was, was okay, but there was a lot of opportunity to improve the data.

Okay.

Now we have a small but mighty internal rev ops team and we have been, yeah, investing in that as well because I think the tech stack is really important. But one of the things that, that we wanted to do was do the following. We cleaned up our sales process and sales stages and we said okay, as part of having a consistent sales motion, we use some form of, of medic. So we look at champion economic buyer, things like that. But we cleaned up our sales stages, we defined exit criteria per stage. And then one of the big things that we had to do is clean up fields. There were way too many fields in Salesforce that were not used. There were like seven industry fields. And we said okay, what are the things that are critical for us? And if we want AES to fill out these fields then we have to explain why we want that. How are we going to use the data. But we got, but we also got to make Salesforce then easier to use. So and part of that, a big part of that is getting rid of everything you do not need. And that tends to be a lot. And that's a multi quarter approach. We did a lot of other things in our tech stack. Our Lead routing software, for example, that was sitting on top of Salesforce was not working well. So we exchanged that, we went to a new one and this is one of those things where we felt like, hey, we're missing a lot of efficiency in the funnel. A lot of leads are routed the wrong way or they get stuck or there's no real time data enrichment. So yeah, there's a real bottleneck here if you want to increase our funnel. No one really understood well how the technology worked. We obviously had the wrong application. So we said, okay, let's take that one out, put a new one in. And we've been making a number of those changes. The call recording part was important, as I said, the call analysis part, I think that is really critical. This is also where again if you, one of the things that you, that I always find like a lot of work as a CRO, it's never ending is enablement. And obviously always you always can get better. But really understanding where, where can you help your, your AES or your BDRs get better? And as part of like, as I said, we have a broad platform with multiple products that is great, but then you also need to be really good at discovery to understand which use cases you are talking about. So we overhauled our discovery training and we really doubled down. We even had a KR on that for a quarter and we said, okay, let's first do a baseline how every rep is doing discovery. Then we said, okay, this is what we want the standard to be. And now we're going to train everybody. And then they had to like do a certification with enablement. Then they had to like do certifications with their managers and the ones who didn't make it, they had to do it again. But, but these call recordings then are vitally important. And then in your sales meetings and you go to market meetings, you can also leverage these calls, call recordings to show hey, this is what good looks like, this is what the perfect discovery calls. And we would do then call out people, call out people who did fantastic discovery. And this is how you can improve a certain part of your salesforce and to get to excellence. And then the next part. Now we have for example revamped our demo motion. Now we're now coming quarter going through that again. And so that's. So enablement is a very important lever for CRO, but it takes a lot of time and effort to keep, to keep leaning into that.

Do you use outside third party consultants to help you do any of these things?

We do occasionally, but we do Mostly internal. But for example we wanted to do, we wanted to get better at value selling so we had an ROI calculator built by a third party that also interviewed customers and tried to get objective metrics on the value that we deliver. And then they had to be built in a calculator and a deck that was easy to use. So that's where we use a third party. But most of the training we will do internally. In the past I've, I've used like medic training and so on. But yeah, you can, you can do, you can do it as an enhancement but your enablement is a core function of every go to market function. And yeah your core, you can never outsource. So you always need to have a core team as well.

For sure, for sure. So I guess the last couple of questions for you. So one would be for the, for the founders and CEOs listening to this podcast right now, whom for may right now either a have a chief revenue officer or it's maybe not the greatest situation or they're looking for one. What would be advice or guidance you'd give to a founder or CEO who wants to bring on a chief revenue officer? What would be some things you'd say would be they should be thinking about or preparing for to make sure that that's a successful hire.

Yeah. So the first thing I said they need, I would say is they need to assess the situation that company is in and what they want from this person. That is number one, there will be companies where the collaboration between marketing, sales is great and so on. So there you might there the setup might be different. So it depends on the situation. Number two, my view is that the collaboration of a CRO with product and engineering is absolutely critical. With finance is critical with HR is critical by the way as well and obviously with the CEO. So I would always look for yeah, someone who's not only capable but who was also, yeah has that collaborative mindset and puts the company and the team ahead of own success in a way they go hand in hand. But the mentality should do, should be okay, I'm going to do what's right for the company. And I know that there's all these dependencies and I have my role to play. That's what I would look for.

What type of person should they be looking for? Like for example, let me give you a little sort of a choice question here.

Yeah.

If you're a CEO and you're interviewing, let's say a bunch of potential chief revenue officers and one was like an incredible sales leader. Another one was an incredible marketing leader. Another one was an incredible financial leader. You know, like which one of those three do you think? Just, I know it's sort of superficial, but generally speaking, lend themselves more towards being a good chief revenue officer.

I would say that based on the fact that customer centricity is so important, you gotta have someone who wants to be really in front of the customer.

Okay.

And so I either think a very strong sales leader or a strong customer success leader or chief commercial officer, both of those could do it. Now there are strongly marketing led companies. So if you're a PLG company, that is where the funnel all comes inbound, where brand is incredibly important, then you could look for a CRO that has a stronger marketing background. But for a B2B sales company with like an both inbound and outbound motion, I think the sales capabilities are still important.

Yep. You know, I asked one question I forgot to ask you before is just really quick enter. Do you have a rev ops leader in your business that reports into you? A rev ops?

Yeah, I do. Yeah, I do.

In place before you got there or did you hire that person when you got there?

There that person was in place and we have enhanced that team. But we, we have a very good leader in place.

That's important. Yeah. Okay, good. So I guess the second question is for you. So I'm an incoming Chief Revenue Officer. I'm looking for a job as a Chief Revenue officer and I'm, I'm someone who's, you know, got a lot of seniority. I've ran big sales teams, I've ran big marketing teams. You know, I'm sort of like my next role certainly could be potentially a Chief Revenue Officer. And I'm looking for one right now. What should they be looking for or what sort of things would you advise them to be thinking about as they approach Chief Revenue officer opportunities in the marketplace right now?

Yeah, I would say there's a couple of things. First of all, get to know the CEO and spend a lot of time with that person. It's important as you have that there's trust with the CEO. There will be good times, but also harder things that you will need to work out. There's always like things that you need to do together. So I think capable CEO with great values, I think that is incredibly important. The second thing is look at the TAM in the industry. Is the market big enough? How attractive is the industry? Take the VC view on that. And then thirdly, I think it's very important as A CRO, one thing you cannot do or I cannot do is code. So there's a high dependency also on the product and engineering organization. So having a strong product organization is important. It's certainly something that I looked at at Airbase where I felt like product velocity is really high and there's an openness to receive feedback and to listen to customer feedback that I think is really important.

This was great. It's amazing. Probably one of the first conversations I've had with the CRO who not only do you are completely aligned with what we're doing, but your job is, I mean, it's great, really great. Perfect case study for how to get this right, right.

And yeah, look, there's always enough to do, right? So it's not that, of course, it's never ending, but I think at least.

You'Re set up properly, do it right, which is. That's the whole thing. I mean, imagine being in your situation and they're only letting you run, you know, one department, you know, it's impossible, you know, So I think this is sort of like what I see a lot. But so Airbase your operate globally. Where are you? Where, where are you, where are your customers located? All over the world?

Yeah. We mostly focus on customers that are headquartered in the US but have like international subsidiaries. As I said, when you're, when you have customers of like thousand, two thousand people, they tend to have subsidiaries all over the world. So we have customers with big subsidiaries in India, in the uk, Europe, Asia and so on. So we serve those. We do 200. We do payments in 200 currencies.

Okay.

So really for these customers across the world and.

Yeah, it's Airbase I.O. correct?

Airbase I.O. yeah.

Okay, well, Philippe, this is great conversation. Thank you so much for the time. I think that people get a lot out of this and they see what it feels like, what it looks like when it's done properly. So thank you for being here and for your sharing your experience and your expertise in the role.

Yeah, Warren, and thanks to you as well. And thanks for what you're doing for the CRO community. I think they can really benefit from things like what you are doing, so I appreciate it. Thanks for having me.

Thank you, thank you for the support and we'll see. We've got a lot of way to go, but we're getting there. We're getting there for sure. Thank you for listening to the CRO Spotlight podcast.

The CRO, I think they can really benefit from, from things like, like what you are doing. So I appreciate it. Thanks for having me.

Thank you. Thank you for the support and we'll see. We've got a lot of way to go, but we're getting there. We're getting there for sure. Thank you for listening to the CRO Spotlight podcast. The CRO Collective's mission is to help CROs succeed and help founders and CEOs build CRO Ready organizations. You can find out more information about our services at thecrocollective. Com. That's thecrocollective.com and we look forward to having you join us next time.