The Power of Working in a Consistent, Data-Driven Way Every Single Day - Mark Kosoglow - Revenue Today - Episode # 101

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Sales, marketing, and RevOps. It's sink or swim out there, and yesterday's strategies and tactics won't help you today. This is Revenue Today, and I'm your host, Jared Robin. Join me as we interview revenue leaders in our community to learn what steps we could take right now to help you scale yourself and your company. Revenue Today is sponsored by Rev Genius, and we're on a mission to bring inspiration and creativity to all revenue professionals in the world. Want to shout out our sponsor Demandbase. Demandbase is smarter GTM for B2B brands. They help marketing and sales teams spot the juiciest opportunities earlier and progress them faster by injecting account intelligence into every step of the buyer journey and orchestrating every action. For more information about Demandbase, visit demandbase.com. Hey friends, today's guest of Revenue Today is the former VP of Sales at Outreach and current Chief Revenue Officer of Catalyst. Welcome Mark Kosiglo to the show.

What up, Jay?

It is a snowy day in Pennsylvania today, isn't it?

I'm watching the inches accumulate as we speak.

So you, you have quite an awesome journey and we're gonna dive into that. Like, I, I wanna help revenue generators learn from you today, but you spent about 8 years at Outreach, Mark, from early on until past the unicorn status, right? What was the most important lesson that you learned?

You know, I had somebody just ask me this the other day and It's a hard question to answer because there's so many lessons I learned, like tons of stuff.

Well, a few that are like guiding principles.

Well, I'll tell you, I did boil it down to one, but it's going to seem selfish and self-focused. But sometimes those are the most important lessons that we have, right? Um, the thing that I learned most is like, I know what I'm doing. Like, I'm not crazy. My ideas work if I trust in them, have confidence in them, take them to execution. You know, usually things happen. And I think that like just confidence in myself is probably one of my biggest takeaways from my time at Outreach.

Now, how did that confidence develop? Because Mark 8 years ago is different than Mark today with ideas too, right?

Yeah, I've always been— I think I've always been confident. I actually one time did a talk on the difference between confidence and pride with a group of business people. And I don't think I'm prideful. But I think that, you know, when you do things in a large company where you have limited impact, your ability to innovate and move fast and do crazy stuff is somewhat limited versus a company that has unreal growth expectations, a good amount of funding, a good product, and really wants you to, like, kind of push the envelope. Then that's when you can see, like, do you have what it takes to live in that environment, which is extremely rewarding, or are you more suited for, you know, managing a process in a team versus like blazing a new path? Like at Outreach, you know, an example is like I did SDR stuff like nobody had ever done it before. And now I guarantee you the vast majority of SDR teams do the things that I innovated on 8 years ago because everybody uses Outreach and Outreach was developed to, you know, support those processes. And I talked to so many people, but like, you know, I would never have thought I'd have been able to do that 8 years ago.

Well, yeah, you talk about working for a company with lots of funding. Outreach had that. Catalyst is on the path to getting that. But before raising $489 million, at least according to Crunchbase, right? You probably just had 1 or 2, right? Man, uh, way, way back in the day. Like, walk me through the grit and determination needed because, because there's different stages to a company, right? And you earned opening those doors up. How'd you get there?

Yeah, I think I've told the story a million times. I can tell it again if you want me to, but like, the gist is, is it's a 1 in 10 billion chance that I get to meet Manny Medina, that we hit it off, that he trusts me to do some stuff, and, you know, that he accepts my offer to work on 100% commission. And, you know, the product is good enough for me to create some initial sales that start to add up really quickly. We did about $1 million of sales, you know, in that first like 6 or 7 months, and then that really got us some major traction. And started the, you know, a series of, of raises that resulted in the number that you just, uh, showed. But like, in the beginning though, you're right, it's just grind. Like, um, I think people think, well, you know, outreach was always this thing. And like Mark went to some office and he opened up his, you know, company-sponsored MacBook and put on his Jabra headset that they paid for. And he'd taken a flight out there on outreach's dime. And that's not really how it worked. Like, the way it worked is I used my own computer. I sat in the parking lot of my son's gymnastics gym, and from 5 to 8:30 while he was practicing, I'd crank out sales calls based on meetings I'd set during the day. And I would sell outreach from the driver's seat of my car with the seat all the way back. And that— we probably signed the first $300,000 or $400,000 like that, you know. And then I started to— Do stuff from my off my home office during the day, and I was in the middle of central Podunk Pennsylvania doing that—not in San Francisco, not in Seattle, not in some big city. I was just taking the leads that Manny was giving me as my first SDR, and and then I was doing my sales thing on them. And then you know we got enough traction to be able to start to build out a team, and then I was super lucky that my first four sales hires were all complete legendary. rock stars and stayed with me for at least 3.5 or 4 years. And one of them is still there after 8 years. So, that's kind of what got the ball rolling in that way. But yeah, in the beginning, man, I'm sitting in my kids' gymnastics practice in the front seat of the van, cranking out tech sales with people on the phone, stealing their Wi-Fi.

You could have been still at Nitney Notes, right? Which is, you know,

nobody knows about Nittany Notes, Jared. That's the secret.

As a Penn State alumni, I know about Nittany Notes.

Um, you know about any notes?

Anybody that went to Penn State knows about Nittany Notes. What, what some folks don't realize is there was a period from 1998 to 2014 where you weren't in high-growth technology companies, right?

Oh no, I was the furthest place from that. I was in— Nittany Notes was a locally owned business by a guy in my church that just had a good idea and built a really nice, you know, sole proprietorship type of business that just happened to become part of like the cultural fabric of Penn State for probably 25 years. And if you, like you said, if you went to Penn State, you knew about Nittany Notes, you bought it at least once, if not all the time. And It was a great little business where I learned a ton of stuff from. But then after that, man, I went into like selling stuff to schools up and down the East Coast. Like, it was— there was no technology. As a matter of fact, my last job right before Outreach, mostly what I was selling was paper homework planners to school districts. I mean—

That's pretty rad.

That ain't tech.

Now, you know what's interesting? You know, folks You know, this— many leaders will attribute their success to, to good hiring, right? And, and hiring based on, you know, their experience and their track record. It's so interesting because you come on as a commission-only rep, essentially picking, um— how'd you pick Outreach as, as where you wanted to take— make this bet? Why was it them versus somebody else?

Well, so it's kind of weird. I always was like a techie nerd and always like trying to do stuff to become— to automate my process. So, the job, the 2 jobs I had before outreach, I did a couple things. One is I constantly tried to use technology to make my job easier and was pretty successful in that. And And because of that, I was always listening to tech podcasts. I listened to This Week in Tech, and I listened to Jason Calacanis's first podcast way back in the day. And I listened to those all the time as I was driving my 3 or 4 hours in a car. So, I felt like even though I wasn't in tech, that I was in the know of what was going on, how it worked, and all that kind of stuff, which maybe was somewhat true or not. I knew that that's a path that really was interesting to me. I didn't see a way there, though. I mean, I was living in a town of 5,000 people in central Pennsylvania and coaching my kids' soccer teams at night and like hoping that I could make $80K that year, which would make me a big dog in that tiny little town and make sure my grass looked good. You know, I mean, that was kind of like my life trying to figure out like, well, do I need to buy some real estate? Like, how do I like get myself out of this rut? And so I was starting to write sales blogs in order to, you know, just really almost as much for me as for anything of like, how does, how do I think about sales? What do I really believe? What are the lessons I'm learning? And somehow some dude in New York City read it and I helped, he called me and I helped them out and it was really valuable to him. So he introduced me to Manny, who he'd met by doing something weird, something or other. And When I met Manny, I, and I saw what outreach was, even when it was way back when, when all you could do basically was send a sequence of automated or manual emails, and that was about all you could do. Mm-hmm. I thought, I, first of all, I became terrified. Like, if I don't have this software and my competitor does, I don't know how I'll win 'cause I can't outwork 'em anymore. And then the second thing I thought was like, This is like what my system is in technology form, because about a month or 2 prior to that, I'd met with one of my reps in Northern Virginia, and he's having pipeline problems. And we literally opened up that, like, you know, Hampton Inn whiteboard in the conference room, and we said, all right, on day 1, we're going to send an email. On day 3, we're going to make a phone call. On day 4, we'll leave them— we'll call again and leave another phone call. Then on day 6, we'll do— and we wrote out a sequence. And we created a spreadsheet to manage it and his pipeline went nuts. He sent so many meetings, he had to— we had to turn it off. So I introduced it to my whole team, same exact thing. The only problem was, is after 2 or 3 weeks, they couldn't manage the system because it was just too much to juggle, too many things. Everybody's out in a field sales role. It was just very difficult. When I saw the technology, I was like, this is my thing, but these guys have built it. And I just got so excited. Like I knew I had to be a part of it somehow. And so. I was going to buy it. Then my whole team got laid off. Manny and I became friends. Yeah, they kept me on, but Manny and I became friends and I was kind of helping him on some sales calls and coaching him a little bit. And then, then sure enough, he— I said one day, why am I not selling Outreach? He said, we can't afford you. I said, I'll do 100% commission. I mean, what did I care? I was like, my whole team was gone. They hadn't given me anything to do. So I did that. And then—

You doubled

it. I let them fire me. Yeah, I let them fire me and they got a severance too. And then that made sure that I was successful. But I honestly, like, we had set up a nice commission structure for me in the beginning and I was selling so much outreach, I didn't even need all that, to be honest with you. But, uh, it was nice insurance.

So what'd you learn from hiring your first people? You know, going back to hiring, that, that's quite a, a grit-laden story that you have. How'd you find those first 4 and, and how have you carried that to Catalyst for your hiring?

I'm, I'm like super lucky. I think it's because I'm like mostly a positive person. I like to have fun. I like to work hard. You know, I like to really, you know, enjoy people. And so over the years I've accumulated what I call my squad. It's like people that want to work for me. And, you know, now there's dozens. Back then there were still quite a few, you know, a handful, 10 or 12 maybe. So I called my squad and I said, listen, I know this sounds crazy, but do you trust me? And I was like, if you trust me, like, I think that you will go, you will make so much money and we'll be so successful. We're gonna have so much fun and I'm gonna like change your life. And I had 3 people I knew, one that worked for me for maybe 2 or 3 years and had become, gone from being a teacher to the best sales rep I'd ever seen. The other one was a longtime friend who had worked for me at my company previous to Outreach and was just a strong, thoughtful performer. And then another one was somebody that I'd known for probably 15 years. I knew him since he was like 12 years old, and I'd given him my sales territory when I had left my previous job and he had taken it better. And I asked him to come over and those, those 3 people plus a referral I got, Uh, from somebody I really trusted, uh, who we went through a wringer to hire him. But those 4 came over with me and, uh, we had a, you know, a good commission plan that was probably crazy, but like, you know, it was what we needed in the beginning to get started. And it didn't last forever, but we brought those people in and this is how they turned out. Jared, I'm actually about to do a post on this. One of them stayed with me for almost 4 years.

Yep.

It was at one— in the time she left, she was the number one rep ever at Outreach. Uh, the second one, um, left, uh, and basically retired. He now runs a school for his church, and that's all that he does now.

That's awesome.

The third one retired and became a pastor because he made so much money. And then the fourth one is still the number one all-time AE at Outreach, and he's still there. And so, like, I, you know, that's pretty nice. The, the one that left early is because she got a job offer that was so unbelievably good that, like, she, she had to go take it. And so, like, it's, you know, it's kind of, um, it's kind of fun to look back on how well we did as, as a group. And that was, like, my key group. We added a few more along the way, and when we got to $10 million, we probably had, like, I think, 9 to 12 reps and, like, 7 or 8 of them stayed with us for a long time. And that's because we created an awesome culture, awesome work environment. So the same things happen in a catalyst to finish it.

Yeah, because I'm thinking you had some circumstances that just added extra grit that you probably don't have now because you've spent so much time successful. So now success, and not saying you weren't successful there, but mega successful, Mark, right? Like, going into here. How, how do you recreate that with your hires?

Well, I'm in— I like to be in the dirt with my hands dirty. You know, I like the high-level strategic stuff, but like, if I need to go coach a rep, like, I'd probably get more buzz out of that, would rather go do that than like go sit in another executive meeting to talk about stuff. And, you know, again, like, I've come here, I've hired the best frontline manager I ever worked with, I hired one of the best reps that I've ever worked with. I was able to help bring over my product marketing partner, who he and I did a ton of the outreach messaging over the years together. And so, I think that Catalyst, first of all, has a unique proposition and opportunity that attracts people. But I also think that, and again, I don't like to toot my own horn, but I think it is true. It's very I create a fun, high-energy working environment where you're going to grow and you're going to learn, and you're going to learn how to do your job like a freaking pro. And we're going to balance the— how do you have freedom, but how do you have accountability at the same thing in a really good way, I think. And I'm going to demand the best of you, but I'm also going to believe that you can be your best. And so, I think it just kind of creates a place where people come to work. But then I'm really honest with people. I usually try to talk people out of it right before they take the job. And I'm like, listen, it's a grind right now. Yeah. I'm working— I don't know if I'm working more hours than I did at Outreach, but like the thought work that I'm having to do is much more complicated right now across all the different stuff. And I'm like, that's how it's going to be for a while. Like, we don't got some of the stuff we developed at Outreach. You're going to have to come figure it out and help me build it again this way and take the learnings that we had and do it a little bit different and a little bit better. And so that's— I think people get drawn to that once you You know, people can know who you are and feel your energy and it vibes with them.

I noticed that Outreach still has, I believe, a State College SDR unit, or at least a couple reps, right?

There's probably— well, a couple have just left, but I think there's probably 3 or 4 people in this area that still work at Outreach. There's probably There's been a total of probably 25, and some of them have gone on to like leading the SDR, all of SDRs at CrowdStrike, 300 people across 9 different locations generating hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue. I took him from being a back office guy at a Verizon wireless store to putting him in a position where he could do what he had inside of him. And then he rode That to what he's doing now, which is just like blows my mind. And, you know, there's probably like a dozen stories like that of people here in Central Pennsylvania whose lives like completely changed.

Do you think there's something to that? Because when you hire folks from certain areas and certain backgrounds, it appears often that the will is there. Do you see a correlation?

Yeah, all the first SDRs I hired, almost all of them were in their early 30s, mid-30s. And then the second wave I hired, most of them were like people with kids that were like in their 40s, but they all lived in Central Pennsylvania. It was the best job they'd ever had. Free snacks at work. Oh my God. Plus you're making more money. And it was— I got people that were so thankful and grateful to have a job. Like, I didn't have a discussion about a promotion or a raise for probably 2 years because they got their promotion and their raise from their crappy job as an assistant manager at Walmart or a bartender at Red Lobster. And those are some of the first people I hired. A bartender from Red Lobster, dude, that became a world-class SDR. Then we moved him over because he, uh, always— he had a degree in, I think, IT, and we moved him over into security, and now he runs security for some, like, hotshot company. in Silicon Valley. That dude was tending bars when he was 24, 25 years old, not starting a sales career. And so like, that's— I think you can do that with people if you find hungry people that are smart, want to work hard.

There's definitely something to that. And without, you know, hiring people from the Valley, they want to make a certain amount of money or quote unquote need to. They have preconceived notions with where they were with other companies or the space. There's something really beautiful to being able to mold somebody without all of that, right? I don't

know if this is entirely true or I entirely believe this, but I'm going to make a very crazy statement is the biggest enemy of success I think is expectations. And when you have all these expectations, you act entitled. Instead of like, you know, my first job, you know what my promotion was? My first promotion was you didn't screw up too much, you get to keep your job. You know how many raises I got my first 7 or 8 years? None. The way I got raises, I sold more.

Mm-hmm.

And you know what? You know how many times my titles changed the first 8 years? Like zero. And like, you know, but you know what? I was able to learn a lot. I was able to grow. I was able to provide for my family. I did make more money based on my effort and like, You know, this kind of— and I'm, you know, I don't know if I'm too old school or whatever, but like getting a promotion every 6 months, just, I don't, I don't know. I don't know how you can learn enough in 6 months to understand how to do something so well that you should get promoted. But, you know, maybe that is the case. Maybe I'm just too old school.

Well, are you seeing like with, with attrition, right, in leadership and in reps? at an all-time, you know, short stint mode. Is that becoming harder from where you're hiring from? Like, or, or do you think you don't notice it as much?

I think there's some really, um—

Because if you have a rep performing and, and you're not giving them that promotion, there's a mindset now, or was with the Great Resignation at least, right? And some of that's carried over, that they could be making more.

Well, if you look at the Great Resignation, like, that was, I think, the trickle-down effect of like, we can raise $100 million and be a unicorn, and we don't even— haven't even done $10 million of revenue yet. And like, why is the company— why is the CEO all of a sudden a multimillionaire? And like, I'm the one doing the work and I should share in some of that. And I honestly, like, that probably is very true, right? And that probably helped with some of the expectations and stuff that people had. We're not in that world anymore.

No.

And so I think, I think a lot of people that resigned in the Great Resignation took a job making 50% more than the people that were already at that job because that's what the market dictated, or have either already or soon will be looked at by their CFO and wondering like, why the heck are we paying that much? person so much money. And I think that that's a lot of that's going to backfire versus, you know, I never— I asked for a raise in 8 years at Outreach one time. That's because I was moving from Central Pennsylvania to Seattle and my mortgage was going to quintuple. And I asked for them to cover the difference in my mortgage. That's the only raise I ever asked for. Never asked for a promotion. I just put my head down, did my work, and thought my work would speak for me. Now, That was a mistake in some areas, and I should have advocated for myself more. But I, I think for me personally, in my situation, that's how I'm comfortable doing things. Like, I'm gonna just grind and my results will speak for me.

I like that, and, and I subscribe to that too. And there's ways that I've been burnt with that, but overall, um, you know, spiritually with the greater powers, everything will work out. Uh, You took over your current role at Catalyst, you're at 1.9x pipeline coverage, which is—

Yeah, for Q1.

Yeah, you all, you all weren't closing 60%, right, at the time? Is it where that would have covered it?

We didn't have 60% win rates.

So

we did, uh, we did a great job in Q3, which I came in at the last month, less than a— less than a month Left to go. We had a— our most tenured rep had a huge deal with a huge logo, and he closed it and got the quarter, which, no, uh, that's not how I would do it all the time, but sometimes that's how you got to do it.

That's, uh, that's stepping in you know what.

Right. And then my thing coming into this quarter, the things that we put in place hadn't, uh, taken into effect enough yet to affect the pipeline coverage coming into the quarter. So we had a little bit of a gap, and we an aggressive goal to go after. So there was always probably going to be a little bit of a gap. And, and, uh, but listen, man, the team has, uh, rallied. And, uh, we just got an update last night from my director of sales. And I think that we're gonna beat our number by, you know, as much as 10%. Just real strong execution.

This is your first quarter or second quarter there?

It's my first full quarter. Yeah.

Wow. So yeah, rolling it back, like how would you bridge that gap? Like, like what steps did you take? And I know you had an awesome LinkedIn post on this. Um, this is helpful because other others are in this exact same position right now.

Yeah. You know, the first thing I did when I came to Catalyst was I looked at the pipe gen and thought, I think that there's some efficiencies we can create there and some extra productivity. It wasn't bad. But I thought there was potential there. And then when I got in and met the actual SDRs, I was kind of blown away and I'm like, wow, we could blow this thing off if we really like get these people engaged. 'Cause we have 4 unbelievably talented SDRs here. And, um, so we uncorked them, we showed them some process, we created some expectations, created some accountability around that, and then let them loose. And, uh, They were doing 75% the productivity of a bigger team, 75% more productivity than a bigger team had been doing for months. And so, that was a quick win that started to help develop us pipeline. That started to really take into effect around November, around Thanksgiving. I started in October. We started this 6-week pipeline push sometime in— November. late October and it went through basically Thanksgiving. AEs participated in that too, which was really key. So it did exactly—

Can you unpack some of that process? Because it sounds like you just taught your team the grit that the other team you recruited for. That's pretty cool.

Yeah. Well, I mean, first of all, it was like, what is your ICP? Like, do you have those accounts? Are they assigned out? Are they being worked? Like, that's like number one. And we We— I went to my customer success leader and I said, show me what our greatest customers look like. And we developed the ICP from that customer-centric perspective and got those all loaded up. My RevOps guy did an awesome job figuring that out, got those out really quick. That was the first step. Second step is, all right, who are we going after? Then we looked at the personas and we made sure that we were going after the right titles and the right people. Right now, that's it. Now you got to have the messaging, give the right messaging. So that's when we created a sequence that I had seen this kind of structure, this kind of language work really well. And so we put in that sequence. Then we spent 2 or 3 days in a room together and we're like, they're like, we don't do cold calls. I'm not like, we will do cold calls. This, let's pick a methodology. We picked a methodology. Let's write out the script together. We wrote out the script. Let's This, what are the objections we're gonna get? Let's write out the objection handling. All right. Now, you know, it does, it also helps that like the first time your team makes calls that they book their first meeting within 10 minutes of being on the phone, but like, that's how the world works when you do the right things. Mm-hmm. Right. And so that created a lot of belief. And then we just, we're now we got a new channel that was, could be optimized and we're booking meetings through that we weren't accessing earlier. Then we start to look at, all right, what are the daily expectations? And we agreed on those as a group, and then we held everybody accountable to those every single day. And then if they don't get caught up by the end of the week, and they're simple things like put this many people in sequence a day, make this many phone calls and no overdue tasks. Like that's the 3 things. The SDR does that, they're gonna probably win. And, and if they're not winning, you can coach 'em on their cold call, their email or whatever, as long as they're, or just make sure they're using the right sequence. Then we lock down all the content. We only have like 2 or 3 sequences we use. That's it. That's all you need. Right. And so there's a series of steps like that that we took that were very pragmatic, that, that an SDR was like, it redefined what the SDR's expectation was. They still get comped on meetings held and all that kind of stuff. So that didn't change. But what they were trying to do is they were trying to get meetings held. If they didn't get a meeting set and held, they felt like failures. And what I did is I brought it back to If you just put people in sequence, make your phone calls, and you do your tasks, you will eventually get the meetings and you can go to bed at night thinking, I did a really good job today because I did those 3 things. And if you do those 3 things every single day, if you don't succeed, it's my fault. And I will take the blame and I will work to support you through that. But if you don't do those things, it's your fault. And you shouldn't work here if you don't want to do those things. And so we kind of move the ball back earlier on the field to help them understand that, like, I can go to bed at night feeling like I really did a good job if I did my 3 things, whether I booked a meeting or not, because Mark's got my back.

That was the most— that was the biggest learning years ago when I was a rep, or the biggest feel-good moment. I had a manager that once said, if you do these things, these process things, I'm gonna shield you from the sun, from, from the higher-ups.

Hmm.

Because I have such faith in this process working that if you do this and your numbers are off, we're good. We're good. You're, you're good here. If you're not, right, like, if your numbers are on, you could, you could hide from anything, uh, assuming you're not doing any deal-breaking type of things. You could hide from Activity-related stuff, right? And, uh,

hey Jared, is this a, um, is this a video podcast or just audio?

There's gonna— the video is recorded as well.

All right, you want me to show you something, a framework? Yeah, please.

And you know what's funny, Mark, which you'll like? Under that manager, I became the top-selling rep in all of the company at FedEx.

Of course you did.

Grinded. And I said, you know what? This guy was a nice guy. I thought I thought he was fine. But now that he has my back, I'm going to work.

Yeah. Um, for some reason the video is flipped. I don't know if

I says way and results on the left and and way underneath.

Yeah, way on the right. Right. So this is a simple. I can't I can't. A guy from CenturyLink taught me this when we were selling to him. And I thought it was, it's just always stuck with me. So there's, uh, there's, uh, 2 ways you can do things your way and my way. All right. And there's 2 types of results that you can get bad and good.

And explain, uh, for the audio only part of it, um, where everything is on the axis.

Yeah. So X-axis is, starts with your way and it goes to my way. Y-axis is results and it goes from bad to good. And then you divide those things up into 4 quadrants. So what happens if you do it your way, Jared, and you get bad results? What happens?

Um, that's 100% on me for accountability, and, and I have to reap the consequences.

Right. You're going to get fired.

Most likely fired.

Right. If you're doing it your way and you're getting bad results, you're gonna get fired. If you're doing it My way, or, and what I mean by my is not Mark's way, but like the company's way, the way we've agreed to do this together. If you do it my way and you get bad results, what do you think you're going to get?

You're going to stay and you're going to get coaching.

You're going to get coaching. That's exactly right. You're going to get coaching because if you're doing it my way and you're getting bad results, that's on me. All right. Now, if you're doing it your way and you get bad results, you know what you are? You're risky. Because you don't know what you're doing.

If you're— you're—

I can't help you.

You mean,

yeah, if you're doing it your way and you get good results, you're risky. You're always about to fall back down to bad results, and I can't help you because you're doing it your way. I can't like help 200 reps, I'll do it their way. I have to have a way, right? And guess what happens if you do it my way and you get results? You get promoted. And so like, that's the construct that people need to kind of think through, is like You know, the thing that everybody wants is data and everybody wants data-driven decisions. If everybody is doing data-driven decisions or doing things a different way, the data is inconsistent and nobody can draw any conclusions from the data. And you can't apply a help that helps everybody 'cause everybody's doing things differently. So the only way to get a team of people to produce consistent data that can actually be valuable and to help each other out is to have a consistent approach.

Without a doubt. And, and now what about the rep that wants to experiment doing it a better way? How do you, how do you recommend? Mm-hmm. You know, because, because this rep could potentially be your next all-star manager and you need to enable them. You need to enable that person because otherwise they feel stunted because there is a chance that your way isn't the best way. Let's be real.

All right. So first of all, I love this person that wants to do it their way, but wants to make sure that they're not breaking the consistency of the data. And a quick story about what I did at Catalyst is I put in a sequence that had crushed for us at outreach, the structure, the language, you know, it was obviously, you know, customized for Catalyst situation and personas and whatnot. And about a week and a half in, one of my SDRs was like, Mark, I'm getting a lot of unsubscribes, like more than I normally get. I was like, really? And I was like, I don't know. Let me go check. Dude, the unsubscribes were off the charts. And that's because my way wasn't the right way. So the first thing is, is like, you got to make sure the leaders open up. So what we did is we went back to an email that highly performed and like everything fixed itself like immediately. And we got a little— our persona doesn't like quite as aggressive follow-ups. We like you know, got the stages or the steps a little bit more spread out, and that immediately picked up our results. So, the first thing is you got to stand up and say, hey, I'm not getting the results I want to with your way, and somebody has to make sure that you're doing that. The second thing is, is somebody wants to experiment, that is cool. But you go and you say, listen, I'd like to run this experiment, or like here at Catalyst, like we have a way of saying in our SDR meetings or whatever, This is an experiment I'd like to propose. And then we agree on we're going to do it, who's going to do it, and then we measure it and we see if it works. If it works, we automatically do it and everybody does it. If it doesn't work, then we know it doesn't work and we move on and keep doing what we've always done. But you piddling around by yourself, it doesn't have the visibility and nobody's going to be watching to see if you work and nobody's going to believe your anecdotal story about how it works. So say, hey, I got an experiment I want to run. Can me and 2 or 3 reps go wrong with this? I will say yes to that like almost 100% of the time. But I'm going to say, you run it for 4 weeks and I want to see the difference between what you did and what your peers did. And then we look, and if it's a winner, everybody does it. If it's a loser, then we just move on. And I think that if you don't have leaders that help you with that kind of stuff, you should leave your job because then you're stuck. You're either— they're either a taskmaster and it's just like, do it my way, or they're like, however you want to do it. And there's no way that you're ever going to find your way. You mean you can find your way, but it's just really hard when it's all by yourself.

Nice. Now, what's, what's the biggest myth? Like, debunk the biggest myth you see from revenue leaders in revenue today, like, like how they're acting, what the space is like, debunk it.

I think, I don't know if it's a myth necessarily, but I think that Most revenue leaders only pay lip service to the importance of customers when it comes to growth. And they're like, oh yeah, we can't lose customers because, duh, that's kind of obvious. But they don't really believe it. They don't act in a way that's consistent with that. Like, if I believe customers was really important, the— in my first round of layoffs, why does the team that gets hard— hit the hardest, the CSM team? Like, it's inconsistent behavior and talk. And so I think that what most of them are unwilling to admit is that, or maybe don't even know, is that they're playing a recurring revenue game using a legacy software purchase strategy. And, you know, that kind of like, you know, old thing where I buy the DVD, from Microsoft once every 4 years that has all my Office updates on it, and I install it on my computer. And if I want to skip an update, I don't have to pay for it, I can still keep using it. You know, that perpetual license software model is still too directly influencing the current recurring revenue model that most companies say that they are— they're trying to do. They're just not doing it correctly. That's the biggest thing I see wrong when I talk to revenue leaders.

Do you think it's because they're optimizing for the wrong metric or KPI?

I think it's because they know acquisition much better than they know post-sale success and revenue expansion and stuff like that. And so they tend to go to what they know with and invest in what they know because they're going to get a known quantity out of that. But I think that that's become very tenuous in today's economic conditions. Like, acquisition is really slowing down and elongating. We're seeing it in everybody's metrics. So you better find a different place. And I think that that's where a lot of them are coming up with, oh, well, we need to help with expansion. What do we do? Versus, and then what they say, well, yeah, I can't figure it out. Like, let's just pour money on acquisition. I need more top of funnel stuff, marketing, give me more leads. I don't think that's the answer right now.

So yeah, what, what, what are the important KPIs that they should be measuring?

Well, I mean, I don't think there's any KPI I'm gonna say that is going to be revolutionary or whatever. Of course. Like, everybody's tracking NRR right now, but, you know, how much impact does someone actually have, an individual person have on NRR? Like, let's look at, let's look at a customer that's having troubles in your product. They could be having troubles in the product because they recently made a change that nobody could control, that now our product doesn't really support that change, and we can't overcome why our product should not allow that change. So now they're operating in a way that nobody can control. It's just out of the, out of the thing. That happens a lot. Maybe there's a functionality that they realize they need to have that we don't, that you don't have, and they're not getting as much value. That could happen. Maybe their entire sales team or marketing team gets laid off. You can't control that, right? A lot of the NRR stuff is uncontrollable. Mm-hmm. And what we, what we do when we set that up as like the biggest metric, what ends up happening is, is people feel defeated because I can't control what's going on and I can't win. And so we have to be really careful about what we tune our teams to, to make sure that they can control it and that the inevitability of control of that thing leads to the outcome we want, which is better NRR.

I like that. Now, Mark, what are some challenges that right now as an earlier stage CRO at Catalyst you're going through right now that's keeping you up at night?

What's something I'm going through right now that's keeping me up at night? Nothing. I sleep like a baby every night, dude.

Why is that?

I don't know. Because I give it my 100%. I'm doing my best thinking. Giving my best work. I don't— I work from home. This is my home office right here. I get in my seat about 7:00 AM. I don't leave until 5:30 or 6:00. And people can call that hustle culture or grind or whatever they want to call it. I call it like my company pays me a lot of money and I owe them to do a hard day's work every single day. And so like, am I nervous or anxious about how things will turn out? Yeah. But like, you know what? Like, I know what they are. I'm working on them really hard. I'm trying to do my best work, my smartest work. So if they don't turn out my way, like, there's nothing I can do about it. Like, if I was like, well, you know, I, I like— I gotta work out in the morning, I gotta do this, this, this, I get in about 9:30, and you know, like, I have to take my hour to lunch for myself, and then, you know, like, I got this and this and this, so I gotta leave at 4:30. Like, you're not— you're— Not putting in the work, you know, unless you're just a really unbelievably, I can focus for 3 hours and get 8 hours worth of work done person, which I don't think that there's many of those people out there. So I hate to make it be that simple, and I hate that it's kind of old school, whatever, but like, that's my personal truth, is if I sit in this seat, work hard and work smart, like, I don't have anything to be nervous about.

Now, I mean, some people will work 9 to 9, right? Or 9 or 10 AM to 10 PM.

And that's fine for some of them. I couldn't do that, right? But like, what I would tell you is that like, that the terminology I use, that's called work-life harmony. There is no work-life balance. Like, sometimes my family needs me more. Sometimes my job needs me more. My job is to find the harmony in doing what I need to do between the two, and they're constantly pulling are pushing demands.

Yeah, I mean, Mark, what excites you the most about the future in this space?

So, you know, outreach was a powder keg. To me, it was like a case study of this new role that everybody is experimenting with and wants to invest in to create more predictable revenue, to steal Mary Lou Tyler and Aaron Ross's books, ideas like this SDR thing, right? We feel like this could be something big. So, that's being created and figured out. It's being staffed by a bunch of early-stage career people that don't necessarily have the discipline or the understanding of how to do the job. And because people are starting to figure it out, there was just a lot of ambiguity of what to do. And then, so, in that crossfire of also now the explosive growth expectations that investors have for every company because of Amazons and all those kinds of companies, it created like the perfect confluence of things for Outreach to create this thing called a sequence, which is how to get an SDR to work in a consistent, data-driven, disciplined way every single day to get massive results to fuel growth. It was like perfect. So that was like, boom, powder keg. Like I just, like I said, 1 in 10 billion cases.

The SDR role came out roughly the same time in, you know, it's important to note because I got into tech in 2013. So I could say this with certainty right around 2013, 2014, my leadership said, how would you like to have SDRs? And I'm like, no, because I thought it was going to take away from my commission. Because we were full cycle, right? Like, yeah, I didn't know what that meant. I thought that it made them less reliant on me and made me more vulnerable in some ways. So I think, I think it's important to note that there were no— the, the function of SDR came out right around that time too.

I did some work with David Delaney, who I think is a real historian of SDR stuff, and I think that he estimates in the 2014 range that there was like 10,000 to 20,000 SDRs. And now there's multiple hundred thousands, right? So that it was just getting started. Now, I think what I'm most excited about Catalyst is I see something similar, but I think maybe more powerful. I see a way of doing business, a go-to-market strategy called SaaS, that is 20 years old. And that people are just now really starting to understand the importance of customers in that equation. And that that's starting to become a talking point and things that people are exploring to figure out, but like nobody really has an answer yet. I see a CSM or customer success post-sales role that's not like an all-in-one AE, probably like you are, Jared, where you would source them, you'd close them, you'd success them, you'd support them, you know.

All for a great price of $70,000 a year.

Right. If you did 300% of your quota, um, and one week off. And so the CS or post-sales roles that are specialized have only been around for 20 years. And I think we're just now starting to see some of the thought leadership best practice stuff that the way that I communicated is like, I could go on LinkedIn right now and see at least 20 posts on how to start a cold call, not the how of the whole thing, just how to start it. But there's zero posts on, I'm a CSM about to do a meeting. with an at-risk customer that wants a big discount. And I would argue that that conversation is way more important than how to start a cold call. But nobody's helping these young people see that. There's no content on it. Actually, there is content on that because somebody heard me say it so many times. They actually did a post and like, hey, Mark, here's the post you keep saying that doesn't exist. It exists now. And they went through it. It was really good. But so that—

Catalyst reps creating personal brands with exactly this starting next week.

So there's that, that CSM role, I think, is begging for a proper seat at the table and best practices and how to do it. And the thought leadership and stuff is just coming to be. The third thing is this ubiquity of data warehouses and product data. But nobody can turn that into something that a rep can use to action to do better performance and have better productivity. So they just kind of keep doing what they're doing. And then the last thing is, is the current economic conditions require faster, cheaper, easier, less risky growth vectors to invest in. So the confluence of those 4 things to me, after, you know, I probably had 20 or 25 companies that wanted to hire me as a CRO, I explored all of them and looking at those market conditions and everything, and then looking at all the other players in this space, it was clear to me that Catalyst was taking a new and different approach. So that's what I'm most excited about is like every week I call my CEO and I'm like, dude, I nailed my decision to come here. Like this market is begging for a winner. It's begging for a change. It's begging for modernization. It's begging for investment. And, and we just have to do and show that we're the people that are worth taking, taking what they want to give us.

We could end right like that, Mark. How could people get in touch with you?

I'm on LinkedIn. I post almost daily, uh, you know, Mark Cosiglio, uh, if you want to search for me. And yeah, I'm, uh, I, I respond to most of the DMs and, uh, you know, try to do my part of being a healthy part of that community.

And plug Catalyst. Catalyst is what you're most excited about, essentially, um, that opportunity there. And that's That's pretty rad when, when you find that place that you could work at, because let's be real, uh, work for most of us, uh, is a necessary part of the equation, combines with what you are most excited about the future. You found a great home. Thank you for, for coming today, Mark, and thank you all for, for listening. This is another episode of Revenue Today. If you liked it, share it. We look forward to seeing you next time. Thanks again, Mark. Whoa, another great episode of Revenue Today. For show notes, links, and mentions, visit revenue today dot live. For all my friends in the Rev Genius community, thank you. It's been awesome to spend this time with you. Please DM me any feedback and ideas in our Slack channel or on LinkedIn. If you're not in Rev Genius, Join us at RevGenius.com. It's free and it only takes like 2 seconds, and you'll be joining a group of 27,000 revenue professionals strong. We've got it all. Looking forward to seeing you there. Catch you on the flip side.