Marketing and Sales Alignment

Live from Schenectady, New York, it's SaaS Talk with the Metrix Brothers, Growth and CAC.

And I'm Growth, better known as Ray Reich, the founder and CEO of Benchmarkit.

And I'm CAC, better known as Dave Kellogg, EIR at Balderson Capital, independent consultant, And the author of Kellogg.

And together we are the Metrics Brothers.

And we go together like cars and tires.

Ah, I really appreciate the acknowledgement to Car Talk and their host Click and Clack, but I'm not sure how that relates to today's topic there, CAC.

Well, I'm not sure everybody even understands that SaaS Talk with the Metrics Brothers, Growth and CAC, was designed to rhyme with Car Talk with, uh, the Tappet Brothers, Click and clack. So, so yeah, the name format and the rhyming is deliberate. But let me explain here about alignment. Ray, you know, you should never put new tires on a car unless you also align them. Otherwise, the tires are going to wear out very quickly and you're going to need to replace them.

Ah, I get it. So that's why having marketing and sales alignment is so important. Because if the alignment does not happen, you'll be replacing the head of marketing or head of sales every 18 months or so.

You're going to be wearing out those CMOs in particular, but sometimes the CROs as well. The, the, the, what is it when the cables show through? What are they called? Steel belts. As the belts start showing, tires. Yeah, you're going to be burning through them too quickly.

Okay. Well, I think you and I are uniquely positioned to talk about this one, but before we do, let's hear a word from our sponsor. The Metrics Brothers is proudly sponsored by Benchmarkit, the B2B AI and software industry's largest, broadest, and most contextualized benchmarking index. Dave Kellogg and Ray Groth Wright have put the Metrics Brothers podcast on hiatus for remainder of 2026. All episodes we have ever recorded are still available on your favorite podcasting app. You can reach Dave at Kellogg and Ray on LinkedIn at Ray Reich. Thank you so much for listening to the Metrics Brothers podcast. Okay, Dave. So, you know, we did a live SaaS Talk a couple of weeks ago and we talked about alignment between finance and the GTM function. And we started with a couple of things. So, I thought it would be good for us to talk about alignment between marketing and sales. What does it look like? So, you want me to go ahead and go first? Is that okay?

Please, Ray, take the lead on this one.

Okay. So, it starts with—

I'm doing that because he's sales. Just our background, Ray spent a long time in his career in sales. I spent a long time marketing. Notice That's how I defer to the CRO. Go ahead, Ray.

Oh, that is why alignment is so good when you defer to the head of sales. No, seriously though, I think it starts with a shared— at a company level, this is at the ELT, the executive leadership team— a shared vision, mission, and strategy that everyone's bought into. That everyone's bought into what are our company's priorities for this year and what are the measurable goals to know that we're making progress. Towards though, or we achieve them. And then I think when marketing and sales both have their own departmental metrics, I should say goals, that are aligned to the company-level goals and are no more than one step removed from those outcomes we're going to measure, whether that's new ARR or net new ARR growth or NRR, that, that's the goals are there. And between marketing and sales specifically, The next step is that we have clear alignment and agreement on the ideal customer profile that we're going after and the buyer personas that are going to be our primary economic, executive, and/or functional buyers. What say you, Dave?

So I think what Ray is saying roughly, in my opinion, is that we together both know what we're trying to do, right? We're trying to sell, you know, this many deals, this much ASP to these buyers at these personas in this target market. So certainly alignment starts there, Ray. Do we actually, and not at the mission level, because that word often sounds, you know, our North Star is to create a billion-dollar company or improve the lives, you know, make the world a better place through Salesforce automation or, you know, but very concrete, like, what are we trying to do? How many deals do we need to win? How big? Who are we selling them to? And I agree. So that's the first. But it begins there. I think there's also a softer side of this, which I'm just going to call kind of true teamwork. Between the CMO and CRO. And that means they understand that the game is one thing. The name of the game is let's make quarters together. That's it. And you're going to do a lot of things underneath that banner. But the two of us never forget what we together are trying to do is make quarters. And it also means to me, true alignment comes from teamwork, that we are a team. And I have an indicator for this because I always like indicators for things I say. And the indicator here is very simple. If I call the CRO, do they answer on the first ring every time? And vice versa. That means we're working together. Are we talking multiple times per day? Do we— even if I answer on the first ring to say, in a meeting, can't talk, what's up? Or in a meeting, text me. But it's not some, oh, we have a bimonthly one-on-one and I only talk to them twice a month. If they're not in frequent communication, answering on the first ring, answering on the weekends, Saturdays, right? Calling each other back like this because they're a teammate. Then to me, something's not right.

Now, I love that soft one about you prioritize your marketing or sales teammate. I also truly believe it as a former athlete. At the end of the day, all that matters was if we won. It didn't matter how many points I had or How many assists you had? If we won, we as a team we won. But if I scored more points than usual but we lost, I shouldn't be celebrating. So name of the game is making quarters.

Hockey has one of my favorite metrics, Ray. We don't often talk about sports metrics. Do you want to guess what my favorite metric in hockey is?

Assist or shots on goal?

Nope. Same spirit. Plus plus or minus. If you're on the ice when we score a goal, you get a plus. If you're off the ice, we get a minus. Doesn't matter what position you're in. Doesn't matter anything. And you have a plus minus rating. It's a true team. It's a teamwork metric, right? Give me a score goal. The name of the game is scoring goals. And, or, and by the way, the name of the game is scoring goals and not giving up goals. Very important. Because if you're heavily minus, it means you're, you know, a cherry-picking offensive player who just likes to score but doesn't hustle back on defense. So, so totally agree.

Okay. But sometimes I guess maybe it's even easier to say, what is an alignment? So I'm going to step up and give 2 or 3 of those. So One is when a department's goals, like the sales department goals, aren't directly correlated and if not even causal. So, one step, you know, removed most to the company goals. Now, typically, if new ARR growth is your goal, my new ARR plan as head of sales, it's going to be that. But if marketing has a goal that say, I'm going to increase my website visitors by 200%, I'm going to generate 50% more marketing qualified leads.

Yeah.

But it's not directly correlated or causal to the new ARR goal. I think that can create misalignment. So I'm going to stop there. What do you think about that one?

I have a different take on this. I just look at it differently, maybe higher level in this case. But non-alignment, I'm just going to describe situations I see where they're not aligned. Situation 1 is what I call hucking stuff over the wall. So marketing hucks MQLs or even SQLs over the wall. or SALs, depending on definition. Marketing hucks either MQLs or S1 opportunities over the wall to sales. And what is the Wernher von Braun fake quote? Once the rockets go up, who cares where they come down? Just throw them over and that's it, right? Because my job is to huck them over the fence. That's clearly not alignment. And you see it a lot, often with siloed management by the founder CEO. So, the CEO is managing marketing, doing MQL, God forbid, or a stage 1 opportunity goal. And then in complete isolation from that, they're managing sales to an ARR goal. I think an indicator when that kind of thing is happening, first, it's usually pretty clear. But here are 2 indicators. One, they're not meeting 3-way enough or 3 or more, right? They're all one-on-ones. And a lot of founder CEOs like to do just one-on-one management. But if you're not in a lot of 3-way or 3+ way meetings talking about GTM, go-to-market. That's a symptom. That's probably it. Yeah. Or, and you're not sitting down talking about numbers together. That's the other thing. So I hear marketing needs to produce numbers. I play it off sales, go back and forth. Right.

Whether you're a CEO listening to this or you're a head of marketing or head of sales, that thing you just talked about is CEO meets with the head of marketing, CEO meets with the head of sales, but they don't meet together. And even worse, and I've had this, the CEO said, well, the CMO said this. Or to her, they said, well, Ray said that. It's like, what the hell? You're actually creating friction between us.

Yeah.

And I didn't understand.

Play them off each other. It's terrible. It's terrible. That happens a ton. The other one, Ray, I just want to get out there is, and this is more of an indicator of a problem, but I feel like when pipeline coverage is, where the target pipeline coverage goal is 4x or 5x or anything above. It's an immediate indicator of a problem to me, which is that sales has basically successfully shifted the monkey, right? The monkey on your back has now been put on marketing's back. So, we, you know, give me— we're not actually going to absurdum, but give me 5x pipeline coverage and I'll make a lot of quarters, right? Because I can convert at only 20%. Or, you know, if I have 10x conversion, I need to, you know, 10x pipeline coverage.

Right.

10% conversion, that is. So anyway, I think a sign of non-alignment is high and increasing pipeline targets. That's the real indicator. Oh, we had 4x, but we're not doing good enough. So now it's 4.5. And that is, wait a minute, why aren't the 3 of us sitting down together and trying to figure out how we can increase conversion? Because burying sales in pipeline is an awful expensive way to try and make the number.

Yeah. And I'm going to take that to more of an interpersonal relationship basis. And that is a lot of times the output of marketing is the input to the sales factory. Like qualified pipeline often is the direct input that the sales leader needs to hit their ARR bookings. But at the same time, quick response to inbound leads or highly qualified leads, right? leads to higher conversion rates, which makes marketing look more efficient. And I think it's really important, Dave, that you understand how your, both your inputs and your interactions are critical to making the other person successful.

Yeah, that's a really good point, Ray. I never thought of that one before. I think it's the same thing with overall pipeline, with week 3 pipeline conversion, right? It's the same basic thing, which is We could either get more pipeline and convert more of it. And by the way, as a marketing person, I can help you with either, right? A lot of marketing people are like, well, I'm really in the pipeline generation business. Sales is in the pipeline conversion business. And wait a minute, I can do a lot to help conversion. Case studies, references, competitive analysis, sales training, enablement, ROI calculators. There's a whole bunch of things I can do to help on the conversion side as well. And that's why to me, it's kind of a team decision to say, look, It's budget season. Here's how much it costs to make a dollar pipeline. Here's our historical conversion. What do we want to do for next year? Do you want to up that conversion target?

Um, right.

Because all of this eventually pops out in the CAC ratio and virtually every company on earth is under pressure to improve their CAC ratio. So how do we want to do it?

Yeah. I actually think the other thing I would say here is what's not alignment. And you said it right up front. I truly believe if ARR growth or net new ARR or new ARR or expansion ARR, whatever that goal is, if it's an ultimate outcome metric like ARR, that sales and marketing both act and feel the same commitment and the same pain if we don't hit it to that new ARR goal. And I don't always see that being the case. What say you on that one?

The simplest way to do that, which is what I recommend, Especially in a small to medium startup is everybody on the staff is on new ARR as a goal. I look, if I see a salesperson or a CRO who's on net new ARR, it's a giant red flag to me. Net new ARR is kind of a result. And you might say, well, as CRO, I do own both new sales and renewals. Okay. Still, what makes the company worth money is growing. And I don't know how to say it nicely, but the renewals goal, it's very important. It needs to happen, but it's kind of a sine qua non, right? Like, we need to have good or better than average renewals. But the name of the game is new sales. That's how we're going to grow this thing. We're taking the renewals rate from 85% to 91% is a very important goal. I'm glad you can do it. And it's going to really help the business long-term. But ultimately, if you have sales in your title, the goal is new stuff. So, I can't stand net new. I would actually even prefer 2 separate goals, to be honest, and just say, if you're CRO, 80% of your comp is on new ARR and 20% is on churn ARR. But I'm not going to do any math games to make that a single number on net new because I think it messes things up. It's just the wrong way to think about it.

We are totally aligned on that.

Net new is a really bad goal for I saw this script and I thought you bumped your head on the way to work today, Ray. I saw net new in here somewhere. Like, if you— what?

You know, this reminds me of one of my favorite books I ever read, and I've used it a couple times to try to get better alignment across the team. And that's The 5 Dysfunctions of a Team. And the dysfunction number 2 there, Dave, I don't know if I need to talk about them all, but it's the fear of conflict. A lot of times when I would walk into a company, and they had an existing head of marketing. I didn't want to have a lot of conflict. So sometimes I bit my tongue or I didn't ask tough questions. What do you think about that? Is that key being able and willing and even proactive and having those critical debates as soon as possible?

I mean, I mean, all of them are. I mean, just the list is, you know, trust. The dysfunctions are absence of trust. I mean, my telephone first ring kind of thing is a test of trust and relationship. Fear of conflict. I think you're pretty rare. Most CROs are not afraid of conflict. Normally, it's the CMOs afraid of conflict. Some CEOs are afraid of conflict. That often generates the silos where the CEO doesn't want to get them both in a room at the same time and have to have an argument, right? So fear of conflict, big. Lack of commitment. Yeah. I mean, certainly, you know, fake goals that people sign up for but don't care about. So we're, it's a goal, but we're not really committed to it. Avoidance of accountability. I think that can, that can cut both ways because I think, for example, somewhere in the script, let me see. Oh no, I'll let you get to it. But we'll talk about avoidance of accountability in the next topic of the script. And then obviously, inattention to results, which I think is virtually impossible. So, I'm with you, Ray. I think it's a good— look, I think it's a great book. I think it's a good little 5-point checklist to say, hey, how's the CRO-CMO relationship? But I think they all matter. I mean, fear of conflict. Yeah, usually not the sales guy.

Oh, by the way, I'm not— not that I am afraid of conflict. I try to wait until I'm in the heat of battle to bring it up, which is sometimes way too late. You should have that critical conflict right up front. But that's a whole other discussion.

Let's go see that lack of fear of conflict. Come on, Ray.

Okay. Top 3 ideas to achieving marketing and sales alignment. Now, I'm going to metrics and we're going to talk more about metrics. But I've always saw, and you may not agree with me here, Dave, that having the new ARR goal being a shared goal between the CMO and CRO Now, when I say a shared goal, that doesn't mean that 100% of the sales guy's bonus and the marketer's bonus is the same, but we should at least share it. And there's some bonus on that pipeline, how much pipeline we need to generate quarter by quarter. It can be quarterbacked by the CMO, but I think the CRO and CMO both need to act like they own that. And then they meet in the middle and they both sink or swim on this. And that's the pipeline conversion rate. Both top of funnel from that qualified lead to a stage 2 opt-in, but also honestly from a stage 2 to closed one, even though sales really runs that, I think marketing can really help with the right content. They help use cases, customer stories, et cetera. So I believe those are 3 things that really help achieve marketing sales alignment.

Yeah. Let's talk about them. So one, so first in the script, and I think you said it, Pipeline goal. Yes, there should be a pipeline goal. Yes, they should agree on it. There's, in my view, but you put it in the script from a bonus perspective, and I just want to more than quibble, radically disagree here. There should be no bonus whatsoever on pipeline for anybody, in my opinion, except perhaps the director of demand gen. That person maybe, but even the CMO should be, the whole East half, in my opinion, should be on new ARR. And I don't, because pipeline is an intermediate thing, right? It's not a result.

Yeah.

So, yes, they should have the same goal. No, neither one should get paid. They should get paid on it the same way. Neither one gets a penny for achieving it. And then the quarterbacking issue, I say that a lot and I don't think everyone understands it. But even the way you talked about it, I'm not sure you got exactly what I mean. To me, it's a second hat the CMO wears. The CMO is their job and they might be responsible for generating 60% to 70% of pipeline, maybe 60% to 80% of pipeline, not the whole thing. Other people are responsible for generating some. But the problem with the quarter— and the reason I created the quarterback notion was usually it only all comes together at the CRO. Sorry, CEO. So, the only person who would actually own the whole pipeline goal would be the CEO. And if you're a typical startup with a product-oriented CEO, they're not the best person to own the pipeline goal. So, there's no natural owner because it's distributed across organizations usually. So therefore, I think, especially when the CMO is the majority source, They should step up and say, I have 2 jobs here. One is my CMO hat on. I am responsible for generating marketing share of the pipeline. But my other hat is I want to be the quarterback of the pipeline meeting. I'm going to create a little pipeline committee where me and the other kind of VP or C-level execs who own AE outbound, SDR outbound, alliances, and/or potentially community, and/or potentially PLG, which are the kind of the 6 total pipeline sources. I'm going to sit around with those owners and we're going to make and execute a pipeline plan and also kind of call audibles when things are not going according to plan. So, that's really when I say the pipeline quarterback, that's what I mean. So, I do think the CMO should be the quarterback of the pipeline. I do think the CRO and CMO should have a shared pipeline goal. They should absolutely agree on what it is. And then I further agree, Ray, that, but the CMO, some CMOs over-rotate as if all we care about is top of funnel and we can help a lot on bottom of funnel too, as I previously talked about. So, we need to increase conversion rate. Okay. How are we going to do that? Sales is going to do a couple of things, but marketing can do a couple other things to try and hit that goal.

Hey Dave, we don't usually do this, but I'm going to go off script because I think this is really important. Pipeline goal, even if it's, you know, 10% of the bonus, right? Individual objective bonus. You really don't believe that because that's the number one input to new ARR. So if we miss that and we have to get a pipeline coverage ratio of 1.8 to make our new ARR, someone's got to feel the pain of that, Dave.

Yeah. And the reward for doing it. It's a philosophy. They will feel the pain because they're paid on a new— they're going to feel the pain in 2 ways. One, They're paid on new ARR and that will shortly become a problem. So, look, within 90 days, you're going to feel that pain. So, the answer number 1, they will feel pain, just not right now. And number 2, the primary way you should feel pain is the CEO saying, you missed the pipe gen goal. And if you keep doing that, I'm going to fire you.

Right?

I guess I'm saying, I like when the bonus is on a positive thing. Let's all go hit this goal. And it's an end result. It's the thing we're trying to do, right? Score points in a hockey game, or not points, score goals in a hockey game, score points in a football game, score ARR in a SaaS game. So no, I don't like intermediate goals because I could keep doing it all the way up the funnel. I could have an MQL goal and pay them on that, and I can do this. And then people get all upside down. They forget the game they're playing. They think the name of the game they're playing is make 50 opties. Right. Or generate 200 MQLs. And it's not. So, so no. And to me, it's very simple. If I'm CEO, I'll fire you for missing that goal. You're going to feel a ton of pain. But, but I don't need to complicate the math of your comp plan, right? Because the math gets so hard when you break this shit down. I just think it becomes meaningless.

Got you. One of the reasons I think I said that is because of my own experience of non-alignment, where when I did lead just sales, Right. My job was on the line for the new ARR, black and white. You made it or you didn't make it. But if I knew I could still have a 3 to 1 pipeline coverage ratio, and if I had that much pipeline, I knew I would make my number, but it didn't happen. I needed to get 2.1 pipeline coverage ratio to make my number. I never felt like the head of marketing really felt the pain because you weren't their boss, but I got fired. Does that make sense?

Well, firing you makes sense, Ray. I understand that part. Um, no, I, I think you maybe messed up one thing when you were talking. I, I think what you meant to say was, if I need 3.0 to make my coverage, 3.0 coverage, and I'm getting 2.1 and then miss my number and I get fired, it seems unfair.

Yes.

And, and it is, right? I mean, you know, my whole GTM troubleshooting is you start at the top. Did we give sales a chance to make the number and did they make it? And my diagnosis for you in that situation is you didn't have a chance. You were sent to storm a beach that you had no chance of winning. So, firing you would be stupid in my mind. So, to me, the answer is I'm not going to give somebody a 10% pipeline goal to make them feel a bee sting. And it's first, you don't fire the CRO in that situation. And second, you put a lot of pressure if marketing is generating all the pipeline. You put a lot of pressure on marketing to do that. And by the way, in most organizations, you're responsible for 20% to 30% of the pipeline anyway. So, part of it is look in the mirror, Ray. What are you going to do to get more pipeline? Part of it is let's put pressure on the others.

Well, I don't want to tell you what—

I agree, by the way, that example is all too common.

I don't want to tell you what I did, but you may not approve of this. But when I was running direct sales, I would actually give my AEs pipeline goals of self-generated pipeline. And I would have like 10% of their total variable comp on objectives. And I would actually pay them if they hit their own self-generated pipeline that converted into sales.

AEs are different than executives, right? Right. AEs are coin-operated and live in 90-day increments. So I think that's a fine thing to do, Ray. I just think executives are more sophisticated. The bulk of their compensation Compensation comes from stock and we don't need to play the game that would work quite well with an SDR or an AE with executives.

Yeah. I'm gonna go off script here for how metrics can help increase alignment. And I wanna give you an example. I think metrics do, and I'll give you an example. You and I both love the CAC ratio and that's efficient new revenue growth, right? But, and when I say new, from new name customers and/or existing customer expansion. But that requires the sales organization to have the right ratio of expenses to new ARR. And the same with marketing, because there's a marketing CAC ratio and a sales CAC ratio. So I think having the CAC ratio as a top-line company goal, and I know how my sales CAC ratio directly impacts that, and marketing CAC ratio, I think that helps because end of the day, we're trying to hit the new ARR and we're trying to do it at the right investment levels. So I do think metrics can help. What do you think?

I don't know if that helps alignment. Look, the CAC ratio is, just speaking as kind of former math guy, it's a constraint on the solution, right? Like solve the problem to get this much new AR subject to a CAC ratio constraint. You could, it's certainly a company-level financial goal in many companies. We need to prove go-to-market efficiency in the coming years. Let's prove the CAC ratio. I got no problem with it as a company-level financial goal. So yeah, but it's not— I don't want to pay— I'm very simple. I've done this stuff too long. I want comp plans to be super simple. And I will remind them that if you don't do your job, I'll just fire you. I don't need to make everything a lever in a compensation plan. Like, you know, I'm not going to give marketing a goal to not have typos on the website. Right? Like we could do that, I suppose. Or I could just say there's typos on the website, fix them. And if they happen again, I'm going to find a new at least Head of Communications or Head of Brand, if not a new CMO.

Yeah. So, you know, we're coming up on time already. So, I'm going to go to kind of the last thing I wanted to talk about. And that's the impact of alignment versus misalignment. And I don't have a lot of numbers to tell you, hey, when companies have heads of sales and marketing who are aligned, That they make quota more often or they grow faster. But I am going to tell you that it's a hell of a lot more fun going to battle with a teammate who I feel has the same goals and they feel the same pain when we don't win as a team. So to me, alignment just makes the job so much more fun, especially in revenue growth. Battles are tough, man. So that's number one. And number two, if we can both be there for 30 months or 48 months and win every day, we're going to build a good solid relationship for the next company or next company. And I want to work with people for more than 18 months or 9 months. So I think there's a lot of personal, professional, and corporate benefit to having alignment.

Yeah. I mean, yeah, yeah. I mean, yes, yes. Hard to disagree there. I would say a couple of things to help wrap this up, Ray. One, just be careful because people think metrics can help align. And I see metrics do as much harm as good. You know, the degenerate example is you comp CMOs on MQLs and you feel like everyone's aligned and they're not because all of a sudden marketing only cares about MQLs. Really, they don't really care about sales hitting the number or pipeline coverage, right? So some of it is just kind of careless use of metrics can do more harm than good. I think there's a notion I'm going to call lowercase versus uppercase accountability. Like, I would argue that the CMO should be lowercase a accountable for opti generation goals or pipeline generation goals, right? And uppercase A accountable to starting pipeline coverage goals. Because the name of the game is make quarters. How do we make quarters? Start with enough coverage. And if we somehow manage to start with enough coverage, even though you generated 180 optis instead of 200, I'm going to hold you lowercase a accountable, right? You're going to get slapped with a wet noodle for that, but you're going to get a lot of praise if we end up making the quarter. And the last thing I'd say is a lot of this stuff gets broken because we forget that there's 2 modes of operation in a business. There's planning mode where we have all these numbers and models and conversion rates and pipe-to-spend ratios. And then there's execution mode. And as is often said, no plan survives first contact with the enemy, right? That was, what's his name, von Moltke, a Prussian General or a Prussian field marshal who said that no plan of battle survives first contact with the enemy, which is the real name of the game here is we go make budgets, we assign dollars to demand gen, to SDRs, to alliances, then we start executing. And I want to say we should be lower a accountable, lowercase a accountable to all those intermediate goals in this kind of pipeline community, these 4 Horsemen, as they call them at Salesforce, these 4 pipeline sources. Or 4 of the 6, whichever ones you have, you should be uppercase A accountable for starting pipeline coverage. Because how do you make 16 quarters in a row? One at a time. And how do you make them? By giving yourself a chance to make them with starting coverage and then converting at the rate you've budgeted.

Well, I think a good way to end this, you talked about planning and all the numbers and models, easy. Execution, hard. And I'm going to go back to the car talk, um, discussion. Where the rubber meets the road is when we make the number. And if you make the number quarter over quarter, you're going to have a much better opportunity to show great alignment. That's my last statement.

Thanks.

See you, Dave.

The Metrics Brothers AI, SaaS, and More is a production of The Metrics Brothers Growth and CAC. and a member of the Benchmarket Podcast Network. By accessing this podcast, you acknowledge that the Metrics Brothers make no warranty, guarantee, or representation as to the accuracy or sufficiency of the information provided or the humor content of the jokes told.

Ahem.

Ray? Information, opinions, and recommendations presented are, according to our spouses, probably wrong and provided for information purposes only. This podcast should not be considered professional or, for that matter, unprofessional advice. We disclaim any and all liability for any direct, indirect, indirect, misdirect, incidental, special, ordinary, consequential, inconsequential, or other damages arising out of any use of, or God help you, reliance upon the information presented here. Ray Grothreich is based in New York City and available on X at Ray Reich. Dave Kellogg is based in Silicon Valley and available on X at Kellogg. Schedectity, which is French for unspellable, is not our actual production location. Thanks for listening. Take care.