ve-BINAR 5 Ways a CRO Can Wow a Board During a Down Market

Hello and welcome everybody to this webinar. If everyone keeps muted, we'll have better sound quality. And as it is customary for us, we'll open up a Q and A at the end and allow everybody to ask questions. And if in, in the meantime during the webinar you have a question, you can put it in the chat, we'll monitor it and call it out right away. We are recording this, we're making it available at the end on our website and then share it with everyone as well through email and the guest we have today. I'm very, very honored and pleased to have Shelley Perry with us. She and I, or I should say from my end, I had the distinct pleasure of working with her on one of her accounts and had her, you know, work with me and she's been a good advisor and someone who's given me a ton of pointers over the last year or so that I've, I've known her. Shelley, why don't you introduce yourself so people understand why I'm so excited to have you.

Hi everyone, I'm Shelley Perry and today I'm excited to talk to you about one of my favorite topics which is how CROs can wow their boards. And the reason is, is because I'm on several boards and I always like when I have to kind of sit through a board meeting. I really like them to be productive or be part of a board, but that's not really why I'm excited to be here. I today, my predominant business is I work with scale up CEOs, predominantly founders who are scaling their SaaS businesses for the first time. And I do that in one of two ways or three ways if you will. The first is I have relationships with some investment groups that I work on a contracted basis with in a exclusive relationships. I also work directly independently with a few CEOs a year and that's usually from three to six to 12 months just to kind of get them on track, especially if their investor group doesn't have an operating group. And lastly, I also will participate in boards and co invest, but I specialize in the scale of stage of growth and I how did I come to this? I was an operator, a software operator for many years. I started my career as an accountant, learned very quickly that I liked automating the finances more than I liked actually doing them. Went and got my master's in computer science and worked from accounting through to an engineer to a CTO to product to CEO. And I also spent five years working with Insight partners during their scale and so I today take all of my experience as an operator, executive and what investors look at and help CEOs that are scaling. And the reason that I met Hunning is because I am always looking for fractional resources that specialize in the scale up stage of growth. It's a unique stage of growth. And if they're close to scale up, I will see if they want to specialize in scale up and I will typically coach them because it is a unique stage and, and help them kind of create a practice that specializes in the scale of stage of growth. And so that's what I do today. Hopefully that helps.

Absolutely. Shelly, one of the phrases that I love about your LinkedIn profile is that you call yourself an operator turned investor. So let's look back at your days as an operator when you were a C suite executive and you had to present to a board and in a time of a economic downturn or turmoil, turmoil. What are some of the highlights that you remember from back in the day when you were in that role?

So I, interestingly enough, I, when I was a freshman in college, I'm dating myself now and you can calculate how old I am. But in 1987 the stock market crashed, it was Black Monday, I was in economics and my economics professor passed away from the stress of it. And I at that point and again my undergrad was in accounting and so I lot of financial things and I was so enamored with understanding like what could cause so much stress for an individual that this did it. So and, and I, it just carried on. So I spent most of my career in economic downturns and when I started in as an investor working in working with insight, I had to unteach myself what I knew how to do in economic downturns and as well as turnarounds because I had specialized in working for profit companies and although I had worked in startups that had been in a recession and I had to unlearn all of the things I knew how to do, which is do things efficiently, you know, fund growth through profit. Like I had to unlearn that pattern. And it was quite interesting because I kept going, why? Why are they spending so much money? And then I realized that that was the game and you had to go after so much of the market share when you had it and it was really understanding that. So I had to unlearn it. So for me now is kind of going back into a recession. I always look at it as an opportunity because I know how to work in it. But I also Know what's different to what the last 10 plus years have been versus a recession because I had to unlearn what I knew. So now what I like to do is kind of help people who've never been in leadership roles during a recession. Because if you took a leadership role in SaaS or software in the last decade plus, you did not have to work in what I knew as the norm. And so I can help by translating what you need to do differently now versus then.

So especially for those first time or younger CROs that you're talking about, facing a board often feels like a daunting task. What advice would you give them? What should a CRO keep in mind about a board and its members?

So I I want to before I give you the five tips to wow youw're Bored. I want to put into context that it was really hard for me to separate out what you should be doing strategically in your company to create value versus how to present to a board because they are two different things. And so while I'll try to give you tips of strategically what you should do, this is a framework of kind of how to think about things. And the tips I'm going to give you what will apply to any stage of growth. But I will give you some unique things related to the scale of stage of growth because that's what I'm most passionate about. I've worked it all, but I will kind of skew you a little bit and I'll call it out when I'm doing that. So before I give you the tips, keep in mind that a board is not a thing. It is a collection of individuals. And every board is different because it's made up of a collection of unique individuals. Your board is going to be different than the board that you had at a last company or your friend's board or your mentor's board. Every single board is made up of collection of individuals. And as a CRO you have experience prepping for enterprise deals. You have multiple stakeholders. You have to understand who's going to be in the room. You have to do a map right of who's in the room. You got to figure out how you're going to present to them, how you're going to influence them. A board is no different. You are. You need to look at all of the individuals and see where did they come from, what are they most uniquely interested in. There's all kinds of ways that you can do that. And when you're talking to them and they ask you questions, you can put into context why and how they're asking you that if you do the same homework that you would have to do if you were doing a deal prep. So you should be like way into being able to do that more than some of your peers. The next thing that I want you to keep in mind is that board members are often on several boards and they do not run your business. They don't really hone in on all of the acronyms and all of the day to day slang. And even if you change your product names or your packages, like they don't remember all of that. And it's really your job to help them make get to know your business quickly through the presentation or the update that you're giving them. And the best analogy that I know is when you go into the doctor now they have electronic medical records now. But let's those of us who are a little bit older and we remember that little plastic thing that was outside the doctor's office and they'd pick up the file and they'd flip through it and you could hear them standing outside flipping through that. Now they still do that electronically, but a lot of times they now read it when you're in the room. But nonetheless it's, it's like that they want to get to know you, they remember you, they are part of your growth. But you need to present the information to them in a way that they can quickly get into the headspace of when they're concentrating on your company. And so you have to keep that in mind as you're prepping that they're on a lot of boards and they're not in the day to day of your company. So we like to kind of think let's create a presentation internally and then let's just use it for our board again. Let's think about the fact that you're prepping for a presentation with a set of stakeholders and sometimes that internal representation in that way isn't appropriate or the best way to use those people's time. And so sometimes I'm not asking you to create new data or a different story, but sometimes you need to present it differently for the stakeholder group, which is the same thing I'm sure you have to do for different deals when you're in them. And the last thing to keep in mind before I even get into the five tips, this is just to get your mindset, is that during the scale of stage of growth, your board, while they are responsible for governance and risk management, they are your partner in growth. Right? They are there to help you grow. They're often made up predominantly of investors and they want to grow with you. So yes, they want to manage risk. Yes, they have governance responsibilities. And I, sometimes I might say I because I'm putting myself into the board role, but we're also partners in growth. And so that the board meeting and the board interaction isn't just about one way updates. The updates should be clear and concise so that you can get to the conversations that help you grow. And so just say, keep it all of those things in mind as we go through the five tips.

Well, I definitely wished you had. You and I had met about 18, 19 years ago when I had to face my first board because for me it was a daunting task and there was no one giving me that kind of advice on how to prepare for it.

Eighteen years ago I wouldn't have been able to help you, Henning. I promise.

Good. I'm glad we're all in a continuous learning experience.

When I, you know, I think for me one of the big transitions is that you have all of this prep of people telling you how to prep. Then I became a board member and I'm so thankful for the first CEOs who advocated for me to be on their board because I was not the best board member. Going from an operator to a board member, you, you're such an operation mode and like you want to fix it and you're kind of like in CEO or CRO mode and it's a different role as a board member. And you also have to kind of watch your tone because as a leader you have like an authoritative way that you speak and you don't even realize that people will like follow you. It's like, no, no, that was just advice, right? So you have to change. So I've taken my own experience of transitioning from, you know, being someone who prepared as a C suite non CEO preparing for the board meeting, as a CEO preparing for the board meeting and being on the board and try to combine all of that to, to give advice that kind of helps both parties. So hopefully that sort. So 18 years ago I would not have been able to help you.

Well, 18 years ago I also didn't bear the title Croat. I did have revenue responsibility if I look at what a full CRO responsibility includes. But I was simply called a VP of sales and marketing.

Yes, the CRO role is, I think it means a lot of different things. And I think sometimes people will often be like, I was a head of sales and now I'm naturally a CRO, but but they sometimes forget about the rest of the revenue besides just sales revenue specifically or new logo. So we're going to talk a little bit about that. All right, so now I'm going to go to the five things that you can do to while you're bored. Just tips. And again, these are framework things. I'm not going to give you answers. What I want to do is give you things to think about and in two cases, some visuals to kind of think about it. But you have to make your story unique to your business that's relevant, to tell the story, to give the update for the things that are unique to you. And I will interject some examples and stories to kind of help you understand that. So I'm going to list out the five. I'm going to go over them individually, but I'm going to recap the five first and then I'm going to deep dive into each one of them but quickly because we only have 30 minutes. So the first is you need to ground your audience in the entire revenue section of your story and I'm going to show you a visual on that in a minute. Often you start presenting information and the board members cannot ground themselves in it. And the second thing I'll go into the detail later. The second thing is walk, don't run. You need to learn this view of something called a walk. And it is a presentation style that if you worked in management consulting or as an investor, you would know what it is as an operator and becoming from being an operator to an investor. It's not something that I knew off the back of my hand. And so I always like to share that with people who not haven't necessarily had the background that I have. And even I came from a financial background and it wasn't something that I did all of the time. You need to embrace and map your customer journey, but not the customer journey. That's la la la customer journey in terms of what it means in financial speak. We're going to talk about that. Churn and retention analysis during a recession is a star of the show, not the only show, but certainly much more important and even looked at more than it was during the massive growth of the last 10 to 12 years. It was kind of something we looked at later or something you might have looked at if you were later stage scale up or in a public company you might have looked at it, but during the scale of stage of growth it was like one of those things we'll get to only if the number Starts to dip down. But after that, we don't want to see it. As long as we're growing, as long as we're getting new logos and fast enough, well, you don't need to look at churn. So if you might not be that well versed in the best way to represent Churn analysis to a board. And the last thing, which is very small and insignificant, but I learned it from some of the amazing analysts who came to Insight that had worked many, many years as management consultants, as an operator. I had never worked as a management consultant. And that is simply make the title of your slides be the so what of what you want the board member to walk away with in that slide. And it is so simple and yet never done. And it's just a very simple thing that you can do that will make a huge difference. And I have one more bonus tip, which is this. In times of stress, all of you, if you have children, if you have friends, if you have anything in times of stress and stress could mean lower growth rate than had been predicted when you were funded. That could be a stress. Just saying in today's markets, in times of stress, we all want to help. When a loved one gets ill or our child, like, gets in an accident, what do we do? We go into this mode of we want to help. So if you can find ways, constructive ways to point your board members in ways that they can help you because they can help you. They have huge networks. If you can figure out ways to ask them for help, they will then feel like they're participating in, in this time of stress. Right? And a downturn is a time of stress because it has changed. We haven't normalized this cycle. So. So find ways for your board to help you or my friends, they will find ways to get you to do things for them that you may not necessarily want to do so because they want to help. Right? And I'm sure you've all experienced that. So that's the bonus tip. All right, I'm going to ask you for the first two to kind of bring up a visual because I think they help. So if you could bring up the first slide.

Here we go.

Thank you. Okay, this is what I mean by ground. Your section, the start of your section, your update in these, your. Your section is, does not stand alone. Even though you might think that especially in times of boom, everything was about the growth and the revenue and. Or the growth it always is, especially in scale up. But you need to ground your update in the financials. The financials are Always in the front of the board deck. Often, especially as a company matures, the financials are sent out even a week prior to the board meeting so that the board members can get familiar with them, ask questions. And then the board meetings are often an operational update and a discussion of how they can help you. So this is a P and L. And if you have never P, Ls all look slightly different. If you as a CRO do not know what your P and L looks like, that is job number one. You go find out what your P and L looks like. And as a chief revenue officer, which is why this title was made, your responsibility is reporting on this total which is total revenue. Now this particular example has recurring and non recurring it. Sometimes you will see it in. If you have software plus transactional financial transactional revenue, or any kind of single transactional or E commerce revenue, you'll see a line of kind of individual transaction on there as well. You might see professional services, you might see implementation. However, your total revenue is broken down. You are responsible for reporting on that section. And often what I see is we have this great report. It comes from Salesforce or pick your product. If Salesforce is predominantly used and you start reporting on bookings, often your P L is recognized revenue. You want to take this view that's presented for the quarter that you're working on. You want to ground the total. And then if you're only going to update one section of it, you pull it out and you say the report reports that follow map to this number. The reason you want to do that is because in times of stress you need to build credibility and trust. If the person who is reading your section can't figure out where the totals are coming from, you've instantly lost credibility in the entire update. It is very, very important that you just grounded. You don't have to report 100% on everything all of the time, but you do need to map the total. And then if the following sections are a different view, bookings versus recognized revenue, map the difference and then go through your update. Because otherwise I promise you, as a board member, I'm in the background not listening to you. Because what I'm doing is if you haven't put them out and enough time for me to do it prior to then I am actually trying to map it in the background so that I can then follow what you're telling me. So that's what I mean by ground. Your update started out with this section in this total. If it's a Q3 to, you know Q2 to Q3, Q1 or year on year update, ground the total and then pull it out. There's different ways to do that. I have examples. I think I have some board templates that you can download from my substack if you're interested, let me know. And then the next slide is Walk, don't run. This is a very simplistic view. There you go. This is a very simplistic view of a walk. And if you've never seen a walk, you might have seen it, you might have ignored it. This is an incredibly important tool. It's a visual. Remember that doctor coming in and kind of looking quickly because they only have a few seconds outside to kind of get to know you. You want to give your board visuals that helps them understand your business pretty quickly or get reacquainted with it pretty quickly so that they can get into the details, especially where they can help you and understand the risk. So this is just an example, but it is always a period to period. So here you have Q2 to Q3. It could be year to year, it could be half. It doesn't matter. What you're starting with is if you remember the P and L. Don't, don't flip back. But if you remember the P and L, when P&Ls are presented to a board, they're often quarter by quarter and multi year. It is a schedule that they're looking at because they're constantly looking at the changes. And so if you're presenting quarter to quarter, that first number should match, right, the 15 million or 14.16 in this case to the ending number, which is 16 million in the example here. And you want to break down what was new logo, what was upsell, what was downsell, and what was churn. You may have other things you need to put in this walk. Could be cross sell because you did an M and A and you want to represent or what was actually cross sell or upsell because you told the board the reason you were doing this acquisition was to cross sell. You may take that upsell and break it into two buckets because you're trying to show the board something that matters, something that you said you would do and you did it, or something that you said you would do and you needed to change and you still made the total. The makeup was different. The important part here, especially in a down market, is that logo count. It is really important that your logo count is going up during scale up. Even during a recession. Oftentimes it will be much smaller packages. It will be less like before it, before the downturn it might be, let's get our contract value up, let's get our average asp up, let's get that up. Right now it's very important that you can maintain new logos and even though it's a smaller package because after the downturn starts to turn up, that's where your growth is going to accelerate because you're going to be able to cross sell to new logos. Even though that number, net new number, the value may be lower if the logos continue to grow, that gives you future value. And that's very important to understand, especially during the scale up stage of growth. That sets my two visuals.

Great. Let me insert a question here real quick because during the 2008 downturn I was part of a platform that provided lead gen services and a bulk of our renewals were in quarter one. And that's when the whole thing fell apart and the first financial collapses happened. And so we had customers holding off on those renewals and our tactic back then was to let them use the service in hopes or with a goal of renewing them in Q2 and Q3. And while the tactic paid off, we did renew all of them later and actually grew throughout 2008. In my today's knowledge. I know that that's not the right strategy to do because you mentioned logo count and a client that doesn't pay doesn't count as a logo, right?

That's correct. So I think back in 2008, it's a great question and story in 2008, that's the same thing I was doing in 2008, that which is, you know, provide your customers with things free, you know, continue to maintain them. But there was one, two, two key things, there's probably many, many more. But two key things that didn't exist in 2008 that exist today. And that number one is the cloud and variable infrastructure did not exist in 2008 to the extent that it existed today. So being able to kind of offer smaller packages or kind of even downsize packages or figure out how to like clear off things you could provide to a customer and give it to them in smaller packages just wasn't that feasible because it was very hard to kind of allocate the capital or do different things associated with that. And so giving them to it free was just kind of cheaper because even if they couldn't pay for a year, the cost of spinning down the resource and then sprinting back up the resource was too expensive and you actually would cover it. Yes, Anyone who's younger, that was actually the case. So you thought they would, they would continue to do it and you were taking a risk on that. The other thing that exists today that didn't exist then are products like chargebee and Recurley. And I will always use chargebee first because in fact I am on the board of chargebee and have been since early in its growth because of its power in this and the ability to quickly spin up packages and present different packages and payment schedules to your customers. And it often was those were hard coded, they were the last thing that developers would do or any company would focus on. But today your ability to spin up resources or spin down resources and offer your customers different packages and right sized packages just didn't exist in 2008. And so that's all we could do. So now take your knowledge and understanding of what you had to do then and apply it to the new technology today and you have much more powerful tools to deal with this downturn. Now that's a strategy, not something to present to the board. But it does represent when you're talking about new and downsell and new packages, talking about offering lower packages or the fact that you can offer a package and then the next one is the customer journey. You know, if you bring someone in lower over a five year period or three year period, you can tell the story of how that customer type is going to grow over time. That is going to be something very interesting to your board and investors.

Thank you. Let's go to the last three of the five ways and recommendations.

Yeah, and the last three, the last one was just map your customer journey, which is what I was just talking about. And that is know your customer profiles and know their journey because this is what happens and know how to apply them in financial speak. This isn't walking in front of saying here's my story of a customer journey. And they go from here to here to here. Sure, you can do that. But right underneath, and I don't have a visual for this, but right underneath that customer journey. I need to say a customer. I'm just going to pick an example. A customer. Let's say you're in health care that has, you know, a hospital that has 100 beds. They're going to buy it here, this small thing and then they're going to kind of buy the next thing and the next thing, and the next thing they're going to buy an adjacency. They still only have 100 beds, so they're going to buy something that gives the patients, something adjacent. Or you might grow and say you're going to go to 200 beds or 300 beds because you're growing with them. If you can map taking that last walk, your new customers, and you can map them to different customer journeys, it extrapolates out the total over two or three years. That new customer, even though they're coming in at a lower amount over two to three years, you can extrapolate how they're actually going to be able to influence your revenue in year two, in year three, and in year four. Because in fact, you know the customer journey and you have other customers that didn't retract, that did grow over time that way and that has a proof point to put the multiplication against those new logos. So it's very important as a chief revenue officer, as a salesperson, you might have been every quarter you got to start again. Every quarter I start with a new quota. As a chief revenue officer, which is a very different role, you have a responsibility, especially in SaaS, to be looking out year two, year three, year four, and understand how those customers that you're bringing in today are going to impact revenue over time. I think that's one of the main differences. Again, it is, it's a different title. It's also different responsibility. The last is churn and retention. I don't have time to go through all of this, but what I can tell you is I've spent a lot of time over the last six months and specifically over the last three months and probably over the next, you know, the next year, teaching people how to present churn and retention. It's really retention and churn in a way that is projecting out a go forward. Because we can tell when customers are going to churn. We can tell because if you are in a SaaS business, unlike software that was on prem back in the day, you have access to every action your customers are taking on that platform, every single thing they do. As a SaaS provider, you have view into you can tell when those customers are going to churn. Often the biggest time of churn is during implementation, just an FYI. But you can, if you know what's coming up, if you know who is renewing in six months or 12 months and they are not doing certain things on the platform, you can be doing something today to help prevent that churn in 12 months. You didn't have to do that in the last decade because we had so much growth on new logos. It just was something that was done later stage during optimization. But you can actually affect that much earlier. You need to learn how to present it and you need to learn how to ask for help because often those board members have connections into those companies that can either make introductions or maybe give you their advice on an industry of, you know, yes, you should invest in this to prevent churn. So if you present that churn information in a way or retention information in a way that is multi year looking the further back you are to know when someone's going to churn, the more time you actually have to help them. And if you ask your board members, especially for those big customers, they can help you. I will never forget I was working at, I was working at Hewlett Packard at the time and I had responsibility for the airline reservation systems. And I will never forget that when United merged with. Oh my gosh, Continental, Continental and United merged. I don't know if all of you guys remember that, especially if you travel. And at first they selected the platform that United was on and I was working at HP and we owned the, the platform that Continental was on and I was actually responsible for that software. And we raised the issue to the board also Mark heard and they, they made it. The board made a decision to have HP's travel go ununited if they selected our thing for a certain period of time. There are now that's a very big example. But this is just an example to say there are things that your board member, board members can do. There's something called right share of wallet or you know, trade reciprocity, different things that can happen. And in a recession, my friends, you do these things. So reach out for your big customers earlier is better than later because once that train moves, it's very hard to do. So that's just one example. And the last thing promise and we're up so we can get to questions is make the title of your slides representative of the so what. I will give you an example. Title of the slide is sales KPIs great, right? That is not. That's the template title. You, you list the KPIs the same way, but you put a so what in the the title. The title of the slide should state what you want me to walk away with. The body of the slide can be exactly the same. Tell me that new logos are down but upsell is up. Tell me that retention is increased or tell me whatever is the so what of that slide. Do not make me hunt for it. And if you do not know the so what of the slide, redo the slide because if it does not have a. So what? Do not put it in.

Great advice. Not just for board presentation.

That is not board, that is just executive presentation. But I think it really, you know, remember your board is there to help you and the faster that. So much of what we think the board is is that, oh, I got to make the donuts. For those who know that it's like a duty I have to do. But understand your. Especially during the scale up stage of growth. But I think in all stages the board is there to help you grow. So when you present the information, help them get up to speed, help them understand the risk and the risk mitigation. But more than that, get to the period of time that they're actually helping you. And again, I'm going to use another healthcare example just because it's the only ones I know I'm not that huge into sports, except from afar, so I can never use sports analogies. But when you have a catastrophic illness, you often have these periods of time where multidisciplinary doctors come in and they look at your case. So the pulmonologist will, in the end they'll look at different things because this may offset that. You want that board because they're coming from different experiences. Even investors are coming from different stages. Independent board members like myself, you want that collection of time when they're working on your business to not be like, go get this answer for me. Because I can't tell what your business is actually doing, which is why they send you off to the side and use the time to talk about strategies and ways that you're going to win. And if you present the information in a way that they can quickly get through it, it makes sense. They built trust, it's predictable, it' consistent. You will get to very good conversations and help that will actually make you both grow. There you go.

Before we open it up for questions, I have one more question for you, Shelley, and that's if you are a new CRO or even a new CEO and you want to do some of the things that you outline, but you're lacking either the resources or the experience, what are you recommending your CEOs and CROs to do if they're, if they're stuck, if they find themselves in that situation.

So thanks for asking that. I'm gonna, I'm gonna couch that what I'm telling them to do. I'm gonna explain to you what I told them to do a year ago in the last decade and a year ago, what to do and kind of how that's changed today. And that is, you know, a year ago or five years ago. What I would have said is if you're growing, you know, 50, 60, 70% during this scale up stage or your revenue is, you know, over kind of 80 million ARR and above, go get the most experienced CRO that you can get. Even if they're too big for what you need right now because your growth rate is so high that you know in a year or two that's what you would need and you would actually get there faster with, with a more experienced person. So it was always go find the most experienced CEO and grow into it. And in the interim, while you're recruiting, bring in an interim or fractional CRO so that you can actually get some movement. So when that CRO comes in place, they're not starting, you know, from you know, home plate, they're starting from, you know, first, second or third base. Just putting in some basic things that anyone would do but not doing. Massive change to the organization today is a little bit different. So we're in a down market. The growth rates are a bit slower but still need to be growing again. I emphasize you can, your absolute value of deals per deal may be lower. You still want to push to get as much new logo even if that means smaller packages to get in and watch that retention because that's going to give you the most value going forward. So what I say now is there's actually time to grow executives in place because the growth is a little bit slower. You're not actually going to, you know, get there as fast you can. You can grow an executive if they have experience functionally, but they need to grow into being an executive. But they fundamentally don't know how to be a CRO or don't know, I'm sorry, they don't know all of the actions or the functional experience. There's that's really hurting your business if you don't do that. But if they don't know how to be an executive, they don't know how to do the things and present the information and plan strategically multi year. You have time to teach them that if they don't actually have, if they don't have the functional experience, you will lose if you have to teach them both. So if they do need to, if they can learn and grow into an executive, I recommend one of two things and that is to get a fractional experienced CRO as an in place player coach. So to work alongside of that person and what you're doing is growing them into A CRO, real, real time. So you're working in partnership with them. You can do that by hiring a fractional CRO, you can do that by having a board member who has that expertise. Or the third thing you can do, or second thing, depending on the number, is you can hire a number two and a revenue operations person who is highly experienced as your number two, who understands a lot of these things, as in putting them into context for you and gathering the data and you're learning from them on what to do with it. So those are the three different ways that I kind of recommend today. But that person, if you have an executive, a VP of sales or marketing that you're growing into a CRO, or however you've grown them into their first C suite, they have to want to grow in place. And even if you bring in a fractional or that, if they are not creating their own network or community of other CROs and aren't motivated to grow in place and use resources outside of your company, they will never grow in the time that you need them to grow, and it will hurt you as a business.

So thank you, that's tremendous advice and certainly even more powerful because you contrast what you would have recommended five years ago and what you're recommending now.

Yeah. If you have a year ago, even.

Here or a year ago. Yeah. Just unmute yourself if you have questions. And Andrew, I'm going to call on you first. Is there anything in the chat or anything that came to your mind?

Yes and yes. John Williams, do you, you, you made a couple of comments. Do you actually have a question? Do you want to ask? Yes, definitely. So, as many of you who know me know, I'm not shy and not afraid to ask questions. So first, thank you both for putting this together. Super helpful, especially given the context of the actions we have to take today, which were very different even than six months ago. So super helpful. Thank you very much. My question for Shelley is it's so important to prepare for your board individuals as an audience. And I was curious, what, what advice would you give in terms of, I have some new board members that I don't know well and how do you go about in that discovery process of making sure that you ask the right questions or you're navigating to the right place in order to learn your audience and then prepare for them.

So first of all, John and I had the opportunity to work together a little bit. So it was with us in a specific situation with a CEO. So that was fun. And, and so we've talked a lot about this, but I' you some more advice. But before I go there, I want to say this. I want to make sure that you don't walk away from the session, whether you're live today or listening later, saying you have to spend a huge amount of time getting ready for the board meeting and therefore it pulls from everything else that I'm doing because I've got to take all this time to learn my board members and I just want to go sell I promise you the act of what you're doing, which is prepping this information in a way that the audience, your board can ingest it quickly, will make you a better strategist, will allow you to actually step back, put it into context, make it into English, look at the trends the last three years and look at the trends going forward. It makes you a better executive. And so I tell everyone the board meeting of the board deck is merely an output of the prep that you should be doing anyway. I just suggest that you have it stack it, you have it stack your strategic planning with your board prep and Therefore you get 2 to 1. So I don't, I just want to make sure people aren't walking away thinking I've got to spend all this extra time doing that. And then to answer your specific question and that is you can look them up online. Most of the time board members are either during the scale up stage or not. They are predominant members of the community. They're probably, they post things, many of them post things or they're cited in articles as quotes and often as a CRO a chief xx whether it's chief, chief financial officer, chief anything, you're at the top of the company. And if you're especially in a scale up stage company public companies are slightly different because of the rules and regs, but you can reach out to that board member and say, hey, what'd you think of my board presentation? Is there something else you could have done? You can actually get to know them one on one in a way that is productive for both of you. And you should be treating those board members as your very influential network. So if you can't find information online, you know, ask them for a virtual coffee if they're coming in town for a board meeting. Hey, say can we have coffee before the meeting? I doubt any of them will say no, especially if you do it in there and ask them about themselves. And here's the other tip. If they have assistance, ask their assistants for tips. Right? So it's, I mean they, they should become A very powerful part of your network and an advisor and help when you need it. Right. Don't abuse it. But those are just some tips.

Great. Any other questions.

Shelley, any, any perspectives and tips on working with boards that over time, you, as the C suite executive, you're feeling that there's increasing disalignment or misalignment within boards. In the early days, as with, you know, a new dating relationship, it's all hunky dory. And sometimes over time, these, these relationships, these, these board members can get disaligned and, you know, you're getting messages from one side of the table to go in this direction, and sometimes the other side of the table is messaging to go in a different direction. So there's.

Yep.

They're not working together in the background. They arrive at the board meeting and all of a sudden you're there. You know, you're, you're doing what you need to do. But now you're reading the room and you're thinking there.

I'm saying with that, I'm going to say a couple things. One, it's a great question because typically that happens most of the time as you get bigger. Now there are situations where there's smaller companies, where there's multiple board members or investors, but most of the time it happens as you get bigger. If you are getting bigger, your customer base is also getting more diverse. Right. Number one. So you're going to do this every time. If you have ever worked in a large corporation, which I have as well, you know that it's not you just reading the room. You got to do your lobbying behind the scenes. Like we learned this in a big company. So I would say you aren't doing what you're doing if you don't get in that room and actually know what the dissonance is and you're not working to unite them right. Then, in fact, like, you're not doing your job. And it, it mixed. Boards are difficult because they do have competing agendas and often that's because they've invested later and one investor already made their money and the other investor hasn't made their money yet. Normally that's what happens. Right. And so they, they do, they do have dissonance. This is why it becomes very, very important for you to do your homework. And the best analogy that I give for this is, and I don't even like using this analogy anymore because I saw something about Robin Williams that he didn't love the movie, but I'm gonna use it anyway. As my daughter was growing Up. She watched the Aladdin movie, the Robin Williams Aladdin movie. I think there's other ones. A hundred million times she just watched it on repeat, repeat, repeat. And if you watch any of those Disney movies, a child can watch it, a teenager can watch it, an adult can watch it and they will watch the same movie. And in every single scene we pick out different things, we laugh at something differently, we. A child sees something different and they're engaged the whole way. But in fact there's these subtle differences in the way that you present information to align it. And as a CRO, I promise you in selling to a large enterprise, you're doing the same thing. It is your job to present the information in ways that unite the, the, the board. Right? Not this like you have to find ways strategically to meet both parties things in different ways. And that is part of your job. A C suite role is not just a title. It is your job to align all stakeholders. The stakeholders are also the board. It's your employees, it's, it's your customers, their stakeholders. That goes with C suite. So it becomes part of being part of a big boy game, a big. Sorry, a unisex, a big person. And it really is an important part of your job and why you need to spend more time thinking about how you are presenting the information to actually help unite that board.

Yes, that's wonderful advice. The unifying effect of presenting information and.

It takes a long time, right? There's a saying somewhere that's like I didn't have time, so I wrote a long document. The the act of creating a, an update to a board that both gives them updates and kind of not shielding where the business is, but being truthful of where the business is, but allows conversation and aligns is not something that, that you can do like at midnight the night before. Right. And. And I promise you it is not. I said it before when John asked the question. It is not. If you're not doing that, if you're not solving for the dissonance that's there, I promise you're also not planning the strategy for your company. Right. In a way that has multi year impact. So that same act of, of figuring out how to get alignment with the board is the same activity that you should be doing as a C suite to actually strategically plan your company. And the board is just a represent. The board deck is just a representation of that work. So if there is big dissonance, it's probably because you're not doing that work or sharing inappropriately.

Wonderful. Shelly, you offered up earlier to share some of the blueprints you have. How should people reach out to you? How can they get in touch with you?

I have, I. I'm in the process of updating a substack blog that I have where I just kind of post a lot of different templates and if it's not up yet, it will be because I knew I was coming. So I've just. It's a blog post that will give you some tips like this, and then I'll typically attach the templates to it. So it's a sub stack. If I think there's a Link on my LinkedIn, you can find it there.

Okay. Wonderful, Shelley. This was a wonderful session. 51 minutes, full of knowledge. I appreciate it, and I should say knowledge and passion, because as a operator turned investor, you have been on both sides of the table, if we want to label it that. So thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for being here. And everyone else, thank you for joining us for this webinar as well.