E31: The Rise of the 10X SDR with Florin Tatulea of Common Room

Hello and welcome to the Revenue Leadership Podcast by Topline. I'm your host, Kyle Norton, CRO at Owner.com, and every Wednesday we dive deep into the strategies and tactics being used to drive success by the best revenue leaders in the world. So join me as I sit down with revenue operators to discuss actionable frameworks that you can implement in your business today with no fluff, no sales pitches, and no platitudes.

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Today's guest is Florian Totulia, who is the head of sales development at Commonroom. And Florian first gained some recognition for scaling Lupio sales teams. He was the first sales hire there, was a high-performing rep, and eventually ran their SDR/BDR team, having spent 6 years there going from basically nothing to a high 9-figure valuation company. Really exciting success story. But many of you probably recognize him from his LinkedIn and Substack, Salesflow, because he's one of the sharpest minds on all things BDR, all things outbound, all things AI, demand gen. And he's consulted for companies like Shopify, LivePerson, Zendesk, and also happens to be one of my top 5 favorite Romanians, which is a distinguished honor. Welcome to the show.

Thank you. Hopefully I can get to the top 2 one day, but I guess your family's there.

So yeah, I mean, my wife is, uh, probably has to be number 1. I guess my kids, kids would be 2 and 3, half Romanians. So you have a good shot at 4.

Nice.

No offense to my in-laws.

Yeah, I'm excited to be here.

Yeah, yeah, this is gonna be good. So we're gonna talk AI and go-to-market. And in general, high sophistication outbound. Everybody's trying to figure out outbound. Some people are saying it's dead. Some people are trying to say that AI is going to do everything, but you're an interesting person because you're both a practitioner day-to-day building these teams. You're working in a company that is at the forefront of reshaping what outbound looks like, and also you write about it. And so you are well connected. You're constantly talking to some of the brightest minds. So the goal today is really to unpack AI and go-to-market today, the future of outbound, what the CROs who are listening can think about bringing to their organization as they all try to generate more pipeline and do it more efficiently. So tons to get into. But just as we like get settled into the topic, So how much pure cold outbound are you doing? And what's the, what is the split between like warm outbound or signal or inbound? Like what does, what does pipe gen look like for you guys today?

Yeah. I think there's a few important things to define here. The first one is going to be a lot of people talk about signals and then intent. So for me, it's actually very different and there's different levels of warm when it comes to outbound, right? So I think that's the first thing to clear up. Intent is the warmest possible type of signal that you can get. So this is like where people are actually on your website interacting with your brand potentially, or if you're a PLG company, like in your product testing things out, these people actually know about you specifically. They're likely at the very least problem aware, if not solution aware, and maybe even actively in sales cycles. And then there's like a spectrum where you can get slightly more cold. And then there's things like signals, which are more like events or things that are happening at a company that are publicly available, where there's some kind of potential sign that somebody could be interested, or you have a sign that you can likely take that sign or signal and turn it into a message that really tells somebody like why you and why now. So they give you a perfect example of that. This is the most basic signal that is still warmer than going pure cold outbound, but like funding. So you raise a round of funding, you're hiring for a specific role that, you know, maybe your solution can help with. There's a lot of these different signals. And one thing that we're doing is we're combining all of these different signs, whether it's like warmer intent or signal, to try to get the best opportunity at converting people into pipeline, right?

So would it be fair to say that the signals are— it's like a digital footprint that tells you they might have a problem you could solve, and so you're trying— now you can get them to problem awareness?

Or is it exactly— okay, well, so if you think about the, the buyer awareness, I like to use the AIDA, uh, funnel where it's like, you know, you start at awareness and then you go down funnel to like interest, desire, and then action. So there's different signals at each phase of those, and there's different things that a team should be doing at different parts of the funnel to maximize the opportunity of pushing people further down the funnel and ultimately converting them. And not all of this is actually dependent just on the sales development function or necessarily on marketing or like the account executives, right? So the way that I think about it, at any given point in a market, you likely have 3% of people that are actively going to evaluate you and know about you, etc. These are the people that are likely going to come inbound and they're going to raise their hand either through a demo request or a contact form or something like that. Then you have 7% of people that likely know about the problem and are interested, but like haven't gotten, haven't gone through with the push yet to raise their hands. These are the people that where sales development teams are very useful. So if you can identify who that 7% are, they need a little bit of a push, a little bit of education, a reason to take a meeting. And that's where we like to focus a lot of our time. And then there's the other 90%, where 30% are kind of aware of a problem, but not really, they need some more education. And there's 60% or so that are not thinking about you, don't know about you, etc. That last 60%, I think it's, it's much more like marketing's job. And I think this is really like even influencer marketing and creators are building content to educate these people, to push them further down the funnel to the people that do know about you and are interested, and then the sales development team can convert or they come inbound.

Okay, cool. And then signals is really about that 7%, figuring out like in a sea of 5,000 ICP accounts, how do you get to the 7% and then based on what you know, nudge them through problem awareness. Is that—

Yeah, there's definitely some signals in like the next 30% as well.

And what's that 30%? So how would you describe that?

So 3% are like interested now, like they know about you, 7% are potentially interested. The next 30% are kind of like, they're not actively interested in you per se, or even necessarily know of your company, but they kind of, you know, maybe they're interacting on like a LinkedIn post or they're aware that you exist. So there's like mild interest potentially.

Okay. So then going back to these definitions. So intent is sort of the scale of where they are on evaluating the category and your solution. Signals gives you pointers to know who in that 7% and 30% buckets you should be spending human capital on trying to generate interest. And then it's really about designing the customer journeys from there. Would that be?

Yeah, that's exactly right. And I think an important thing here, one of the reasons I even like joined Common Room, there's a bit of evolution in, let's call it outbound. So I like to say outbound 1.0, there's probably outbound Outbound 0.0, which like Yellow Pages, and you're just calling like everybody, which makes a lot of sense. Or door knocking. Shout out to my grade 9 self, door knocking, selling the Toronto Star. That was a lot of fun. Nice. But so the way that the actual funnel itself hasn't changed. So there's always been some people that are interested, some people that are mildly aware of you, and some people that just like have no idea about you or the problem or the solution. Outbound 1.0, which is kind of like a lot of people think the golden age of SaaS where like the outreaches and sales lofts in, you know, 2013 to 2015 came. What it allowed someone to do was essentially you have your target market, you didn't really know apart from the hand raisers who was in market right now. What Outreach and SalesLoft and these sequencers allowed you to do at scale was to message as many people in your TAM as possible with the idea that you were gonna catch a certain amount of people at the right time.

Yeah.

And you were likely gonna burn through a lot of the other ones. The next phase of 2.0 was some of these like account intent platforms. So you have like the Six Senses and the DemandBases and even like ZoomInfos of the world where You didn't know who the person behind the intent was, but you generally knew at an account level that there's starting to potentially be some level of intent. So you can target some people more precisely with customized messaging. And now we're at this outbound 3.0 phase where technology and AI has allowed us to do a lot of this research at scale and agents can find these various signals for you. And pinpoint the exact person behind the intent so that you don't need a sequencer to blast your whole TAM and potentially burn certain people. And you can actually focus and build much more relevant messages for the people that actually are in market.

And so what is it about AI that enables 3.0?

So you were able to do 3.0 to some degree before. Like, let's make something very clear. Signals and intent is not something that's new. We were always, even back in the day when you were in with Yellow Pages, like you can go and do some form of research as long as the internet existed. You can go and talk to people at events, et cetera, to learn some kind of information about them and then reach out to people in a more relevant manner. So the thing that AI has changed is that it's allowing you to do this mass research at scale, identify who the person is behind the digital footprint in what we call like identity resolution. And tie those digital breadcrumbs together. So if I'm, you know, let's say Kyle Norton, the CRO, if I'm interested in some kind of a solution, you're probably doing a few different things before you even go on a company's website to submit a demo. Let's use Pavilion as an example. You're in a community, you're probably asking people around you that are peers to you, like, what solutions do you recommend here? You're maybe writing about it in like a newsletter or commenting on stuff on LinkedIn. Maybe you're engaging or following a company's website, X, asking questions on Reddit. You're maybe hiring for specific roles that are indicating that those people are likely gonna need certain solutions. So this can now be done instantly in real time without a person having to go and manually find these interactions on the web and then push them to you in real time. So our whole tagline now is like, you have the right account with the right person, the right message at the right time. And it was very hard to get the timing right when you did this manually.

That makes sense. And you were relying on SDRs and BDRs who were in the first 2 years of their professional career and maybe didn't have the business acumen to do it.

Exactly. So, and that's a whole other thing around like enabling the actual rep to understand like, what is the so what of this information? And we can maybe even talk about this later around how I don't think that moving forward, the sales development rep is going to be an entry-level role. And it's actually a bet I'm making at Common Room. We're hiring much more senior sales development teams that have even been like the actual managers and directors that experienced this problem, have a network and following on LinkedIn in our ICP, and can leverage a lot of this research and provide a much more contextual message that resonates with the audience. And I'm more than happy to pay these people more money because I know that they're likely going to book significantly more pipeline and have a higher ROI. Hmm.

So let's talk about that right now. And so it is safe to say that running an outbound 3.0 motion requires a more experienced sort of top-end BDR talent.

I wouldn't say that it necessarily has to be that way because it's now like easier to use AI to contextualize the information that you're getting. And it's going to continue to be that way. I just feel like it's almost this idea of like the 10x employee, right? Like you have so much more data, you don't need someone to do like all this manual research. So you're in a better place to give the 10x employee all the information and let them contextualize that. And I think like the human aspect that's still going to be important here and differentiates us from AI is like, this idea of not just contextualizing the information, but deeply understanding the buyer and being able to talk with these people and understand things like internal signals that are not online. I'm going on a bit of a tangent here, but a person that is very experienced, that understands your problem, can resonate with these people, meet them in person at different events, knows the right questions to be asking because they felt the pain. And then use internal signals. So like a very basic thing that I'm enabling my team on, for example, is like, can we find out what is on the SKO deck from this company? And then how do we tie that to the value of like Commonroom? Or what are the internal politics like? Is there a specific reason why they can't buy like software right now? This is all like information that is not online. And to me, that's the value of a human on top of, of AI, and it's very difficult for an entry-level person to do that.

Yeah, it's like the tooling gives people much more leverage, and so the difference in skill has, has a sort of an exponential outcome. It's like if, if the tooling can make you focus on better accounts, get in touch more easily, then the gap in skill is more important versus in a lower skilled game, it's really just more effort driven. Like, you know, there used to be able to be a great BDR by just smashing the phones and outcalling everybody. And, you know, I just call it the brute force tactic. Brute force your way to the number. But in this game, when more craft is possible, then I think that 10x BDR is definitely— yeah, that 10x BDR is definitely possible.

Or the other way to think about it too is like, even 5 years ago, when I was at Lupio, we would spend Or the average BDR would spend about like a third of their time generally doing very low value work, which was like list building and trying to find like the right people. It wouldn't make sense for me to pay a resource, you know, let's just use a random number, like $200,000 to do that low manual effort. What AI has enabled us to do now is like, we can actually feed you in-market leads on a silver platter. and all you're doing now is executing. So if I have somebody that's more high value that can execute significantly better than someone that just came out of school, like that's a good investment for me. And that just wasn't the case before. It would be too much manual, low value work to pay that resource so much money.

Yeah. I mean, that's why you have BDRs in the first place and why the AEs don't do the prospecting. It's like, man, I can't have a $250K AE grinding through a Salesforce list calling people. He's no longer with the company. She does— she's not in that role anymore. Like, I don't know what you're doing. The, the value of that time is, is too much to sacrifice. But if that doesn't exist, then okay, now higher leverage BDRs make sense.

Um, exactly.

What— so does the profile of this outbound 3.0 rep look a lot different? You said hiring from the industry could be, could be an option, but then they have to learn all of the skills of sales. I mean, it's for you, it's different because you're selling into sellers.

Yeah, for sure.

So maybe you have an advantage there. What, how else does, uh, outbound 3.0 rep look different than sort of a 2.0, like carpet bomb your market type of approach?

I think so. To me, the biggest thing is industry expertise. And of course it's easier when we're selling to sales, uh, but I actually think that this could be possible like across the board. So even if you're selling into like engineering, if you're selling into marketing, customer success, whatever, you're gonna have these people that have audiences online I actually think a salesperson that was the persona can learn like the frameworks of sales much more easily and be a much better seller just by being able to come into a conversation with like industry expertise, some kind of like insight. And ultimately, that's how you build trust. If we really break down sales to its like core attributes, I think like being able to build trust is probably at one of the top of the list. So I guarantee you, if you take an engineer and get them to speak with other engineers, they could sell something much easier than a traditional salesperson could. Now there's some questions around whether like an engineering type of person would ever want to do sales, but—

or can get comfortable. Yeah, pushing like pushing somebody and doing the persuasion game.

Yeah. But I would almost say like as a North Star, if you can find one person within that industry that you can like go out and hire, they can make your whole team better because you have access to them like in real time and they could help you with a lot of this stuff.

Yeah, I think having the— I think having your buyer on the sales team makes a lot of sense, but I have actually not found in reality that somebody coming from the market outperforms like a highly competent rep. I mean, it depends on the situation and the segment, but if you dropped a former HR leader into a mid-market sales rep seat selling into HR, I think that would be tough versus it's pretty easy to learn about like some of these markets, DevOps or like selling to sales is such an advantage because you get people with both, but I think you see a lot of successful technical salespeople that come from the market. The horizontal, in some of these more horizontal industries, I don't know. It's interesting. I'm curious to see where this goes.

Yeah. And again, like I only have the numbers that make sense for us as like sales, selling to sales personas. And that's the bet I'm taking on. I don't have the actual data to prove that this is a fact for other industries. It's just something I've been like thinking about more recently and I think we should be trying more of.

Mm-hmm. For your market, 100%. And especially because you have so much leverage. What else would you say is important for a 3.0 rep? Like what are the other skills that are important to be able to run this new type of playbook? Because it's not just smile and dial.

100%. I would say like a big proficiency with like artificial intelligence. We've already seen the memos from, you know, the Shopifys and the Duolingo of the world. And one of the things that I have in like my onboarding doc, I just onboarded a rep this morning, it's his first day. I have like, there's a cold call, cold email, um, account research certification, but it's also like a, a Common Room mastery certification where it's like, I expect you to be a master of this platform because you are ultimately a power user. And it's like, if you don't master it, how do we expect a customer to, to master it? And that involves a lot of different aspects of like, do you know how to build workflows? Do you know how to prompt like AI to find you or the research agents to go and find you the right information? And of course we enable them on this and like we have RevOps and like, you know, even pre-sales that is helping us internally, like our sales solution engineering team. But I expect you to be a master in this. And another cool thing that we do too is like on outbound, we've built certain prompts that go out and find what signals would be relevant for an account, and we'll use those signals specifically in our outreach to them. So that, that to me is like the insight layer, right? So I expect you to be able to do these things, build these types of prompts, and actually use, yeah, these, these agents.

So lots more business acumen, proficiency with tooling in general, and you'll teach them the common room stuff. I want to jump off of your comment about like, oh, and we have, you know, RevOps to do some of this stuff. So this is something that we're digging into right now. Like we have been 90% cold call driven. Our persona, restaurant, mom and pop restaurant owners, they don't really use their email a whole ton. And so the incremental value of getting good at email has been quite low, but we're now just moving into a series of experiments to figure out if we can get cold outbound or signal-based outbound to work. And so, I'll have more questions about that that are entirely selfish in nature. But who owns this? Because one of the things I see oftentimes is, so, we want to make this transformation to something that's much more sophisticated. Much more highly choreographed, much more technology-driven. Okay, like knowing what signals and how to roll them up and how to build a scoring model for prioritization and what gets dispositioned to what reps and how do we rep. Like there's a lot of sophistication both in terms of the technology of how to like actually make the system work and pick the tools. But then there's also more sophistication in terms of the sales craft. Like how do we execute these plays now? And I want to I want to ask you more about building plays, but who owns that? Because now you're in sort of an in-between sales, dev, revenue leadership, rev ops type of thing. And so ultimately, who in your opinion needs to build the strategy, own the roadmap, make the decisions, and where should people be thinking about if they want to build this in their organization, have that? Have that DRI, the directly responsible individual live?

Yeah, it's funny that you mentioned that because it actually took us, I'd probably say 6 months to really figure out like who did own this. So Common Room made a pivot where we were just more like a community monitoring and signal platform for developer relations and just communities in general. And then I think there's a big eureka moment in January of '24 of like, hey, community is actually a signal of intent. There's so much more here. So it— I joined last May, and it took us like 6 months to figure out, you know, what are the top organizations doing? So we know now that the most sophisticated orgs, the owner of this is usually going to be— it is RevOps or marketing ops or GTM ops. I think there's a lot of different names here for it, but that's where the most sophisticated organizations put the responsibility. And then of course it's a cross-collaboration effort. So I can tell you even internally, like for us, RevOps technically owns the platform, but there's always input from we actually have like a task force internally for our own Common Room instance where that involves the head of SDR growth and demand gen, GTM strategy, and obviously like VP of sales.

Hmm. And so if you were not a sophisticated customer, so like you've got CROs listening to this that are saying, I need my outbound engine to work better than it does today. Who do I say, go figure this out, look at the tools, look at the approach, build, build the strategy. Where would you say they should put that on us?

Probably within the— if you have RevOps, I think it does have to be RevOps because they just cross-functionally collaborate with everybody anyways. If you don't have RevOps, it would usually fall on marketing or growth. Because I think there's a lot of aspects here and you touched on it too around like lead scoring, for example. Or how do you prioritize what accounts, what signals matter? You can get inputs from the different departments like SDR, like sales, but ultimately a lot of this stuff, or even if you think about who are we really replacing as incumbents, it's like the Six Senses, the Demandbases, and Bombours of the world. That is usually owned by marketing today.

Interesting. And they're going to have to build the technology strategy and the go-to-market strategy? Like, hey, these are the signals, this is the approach, or they're at that point pulling in sales dev?

Yeah. Well, even so for us internally, because I am the persona that we, you know, is heavily involved in, in Commonroom or at the end of the day, like the end users really of Commonroom or any of these signal platforms are going to be SDRs and AEs.

Yeah.

So I help with a lot of like the messaging there because I get the pain points. And then obviously for the use cases where it's for AEs, that's like VP of sales has like their opinion there. And then there's some marketing use cases as well. As well.

So, are you mostly outbound into RevOps then? Or you're multithreading RevOps?

We're multithreading into like the 4 personas. So, SDR, AE, ops, and marketing, or more specifically growth and demand gen. Yeah.

Because one of the, I think, problems is I don't know a ton of sales development leaders that have enough sophistication to, to like put this whole picture together.

Yeah.

Like I've over the years interviewed tons and tons of sales dev leaders, man, it's like finding a needle in a haystack. Yeah, it's really tough to find somebody who has the sales craft and the leadership experience plus the technical acumen that I typically look for in these roles because, you know, we are a fairly sophisticated shop. And so the thing that I'm trying to unpack, not as much for my org, like my RevOps leader used to be a sales dev leader. He's super forward thinking and all of like, you know, I have a perfect guy for it, but I'm more thinking like for other companies that are trying to go on this journey, because I get asked a lot about this, you know, like who do they assign to the task? That's not going to just like, oh yeah, like this is a cool tool. And they just like randomly buy some tools and it's like not stitched together by a coherent strategy. And then you just have a bunch of noise in these systems or in Salesforce.

Yeah.

But, but it sounds like it should be give RevOps the task to stitch together the strategy and bring everybody else along. Would that be the right recommendation?

I just think it's because you do need like a single point of accountability. So it's like, the person at most organizations that are most equipped to do this and understand like cross-functionally all the departments is RevOps, GTM Ops, whatever you want to call it. And then they just need to get like the expert, the input from the various teams. Like one of the things that's been super interesting for us, even like I've been analyzing a lot of, our cold calls. The main, when we don't convert a cold call, the top reason we don't do it is because we get the, I'm not the decision maker objection. Now, why is that? And it actually goes into this conversation a little bit. So when we talk to RevOps and GTM Ops, they're like, yes, I own the budget, but I'm not going to be your champion. I need to know if my end users would like it.

Yeah.

Then we go to SDR or the A leader and they're like, oh no, like this is RevOps budget or marketing. Marketing is like, yeah, like we do potentially own the budget and we might have a solution, but if the end users are gonna be like SDRs and AEs, you should talk to them. So you kind of end up in this weird place of we need to break in is like the first thing. So we need to build champions And I think one of my learnings is that RevOps is never gonna be your champion necessarily. You need to build your champion with like the people that execute on this, which are usually gonna be like SDR or AE. But they're gonna support you at some point and you need them completely 'cause RevOps can cut you completely from the discussion. Whereas SDR and AE sometimes don't have that. Power.

Yeah. Yeah. This is the, where the question comes from. It is unclear of who needs to like lead on something like this. Cause most companies don't have, don't have like a GTM ops, GTM engineering type of person. Like I've worked now with Steve for almost 9, well over 9 years because he's that guy. He can do the technical Salesforce stuff and has the business and sales acumen. But like those are, I think, a rare breed for the most part. And so you end up with like a very technical Salesforce person who's reporting dashboards, MBR, but not like go-to-market innovation.

Yeah.

And then you might be paired with a sales leader who like doesn't have the technical acumen and you just end up— those companies are really struggling to figure this thing out. And so maybe the other question there is, so if you're a CRO and you're not, you're more of like a deal-focused CRO, you're not a systems engineer technical person, but you wanted to go down this path and generate more high-quality funnel. Would you tell people to go hire a consultant, ask your team to level up their skills to figure this out, um, hire like a full-time GTM engineering, GTM ops role to like, where should people think about starting?

Well, I think about like what role right now most closely maps to this engineering role. And I think it's hard to hire for because it is somewhat of a new skill set, right? Like even when you look at platforms like Clay, it's not necessarily super easy to understand how to use it properly. And it takes like a lot of dedicated time to learn it.

And it's a new Venn diagram. You have to do all the Clay stuff and have really good sales and go-to-market acumen.

Exactly. So it's like, what person kind of gets this the most? You have to be a bit data-driven. You have to like understand AI. And even though it's only been around for a few years, I actually think like when you think about the org within a company that has probably started to adopt AI the most, it is marketing and growth. I just think that's naturally where the lowest hanging fruit has been for AI. And it probably started with like content generation and all that. They're always, uh, the budget holder on a lot of these platforms. I don't think anybody in an organization, maybe engineering, has more budget than marketing. So they naturally are more forward-thinking when it comes to technology. It is my general assessment from talking to them so far. So if you don't have the resources to hire someone, I'd probably figure out if you're a growth and marketing person, has the time and like the interest or capability to start learning some of this stuff. And if not, it's a lot of these like agencies at the end of the day, it's like that's why they're successful, right? So maybe that is the play. The problem with that, in my opinion, is that when you don't have any of that in-house expertise, I think it can be very dangerous because it's like, what happens if this person leaves? Like what happens if they drop you as a client or, you know, there's another client of theirs that's paying them more and is going to take precedent? And so there's value to me. Yeah.

Your engagement expires.

Yeah, exactly.

You have to know how to do it and you have to take it on.

So I think there's a lot of risk with just hiring an agency and if you have no internal expertise, um, and I think that begs the question too, like maybe you do hire a GTM engineer, but again, new role, like what I think my problem if I had to hire GTM engineers, like I actually don't really know what to look for in that interview. Yet.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, they, what most companies need is a Florin. They can think in systems, both technology and go-to-market systems in terms of like go-to-market choreography and has sales craft. That person, I think that just this role now is coming into a very different level of prominence. Yeah.

Um, because you, because I don't even think I'm like that sophisticated from like a process perspective or, you know, I, I know generally how to like used Clay, but I'm not fantastic. Obviously, Common Room now, I understand being here for a year.

But I think you have the systems engineering mindset to understand, okay, if I do these things and feed them in there, then they can go into a script in this way.

Yeah.

Like if people read your Substack, it's like pretty readily apparent. You don't need to know how to like be a Salesforce developer. You just need to understand the tool stack.

Yeah.

Interesting. Okay. So let me change gears a little bit. So we talked about who owns this thing, where should it live? What else are you doing sort of outside of using Common Room? Where else are your big AI use cases right now when it comes to sales dev?

So Common Room does cover like a lot of the AI use cases for us from obviously finding the right signals, account scoring, AI messaging, and also like POVs on accounts. It's like, what are the entry points that make the most sense? The other place that we use AI today is around like call recordings and like Nuxt, for example. So like power dialing, um, and just like call summaries, follow-ups. Those are really the only two places like we're really using, uh, AI on the sales development front. We're actually pretty light on tech stack, um, because Common Room can do so much for us. Like we have what out, we have Outreach, Common Room, Nuxt.

And who are you using for the AI call summaries?

We use Gong.

Oh yeah.

Gong does a lot of like analyzing of our calls and obviously Nuxt also does that, does part of it as well.

Does it write in as a Salesforce yet?

Yeah, so you can like update fields automatically based off of, you know, whatever happened on those calls.

But in Common Room, you're getting all of the signals in, it's helping you find the right accounts and people, and then also running plays like with the messaging?

Is that— That's correct. So one thing that—

So a lot of the use cases are all just wrapped up in there then.

Exactly. Like account plans, account research, drafting of messaging. We even have, we never want to impose on like what a company should fundamentally be doing, whether it's like go full AI SDR as an example, or like, do you want to have human intervention? It's like ultimately up to you to decide like what kind of leads should be more automated versus where do you want that human intervention. So we do have some AI SDR functionality in the sense that we can, we can take all these different signals and feed it into an LLM and then push that automatically into your sequencer.

And then send it out automatically.

Yeah, you can if you want to, or like one thing that I do with my team. I think human intervention is important. And I mentioned this idea of like the internal information that's not online. I think what a lot of like leaders get wrong with an AI SDR is that you don't fully realize that a lot of the input that goes into an AI SDR is just commoditized data. So like, Funding rounds, job listings, um, reading of a 10-K report. AI can now do this pretty well, but everybody has access to that information, right? And that's actually fundamentally why the AI SDR, I think it was like super hot over the last year and it's starting to like die down a little bit. We actually even used an AI SDR to try it out. Um, a few months after I started about a year ago.

Like another, another—

Yeah, well, we didn't have the functionality of the AI, like SDR automatically building messaging at that point. We do now. And our hypothesis is that commoditized data in itself is just going to lead to generic messaging. So why do we believe we could potentially be the right solution for an AI SDR if it makes sense for you? Because we can pull internal data. that is not available online. So that's like product usage data from like your data warehouse. That's, uh, your— we just released a Gong integration today where we can actually like look at summaries and use that as like, hey, and whatever said last year that you should reach out on April 25th, and that's an input to the model. Um, and then obviously we can couple that with third-party data like everybody else, but now you get a much more coherent message that's based off of a number of digital footprints that are both commoditized and internal data. So it's like, that is the best shot that you have. And then the human intervention side of it and why I still have like manual steps in my outbound sequences is going back to the idea of like this internal information that you just will never find online. So it's like, oh, I talked to someone at an event and I learned this, this, and this about their company. Here's the internal politics. Here's what's on their SKO slide. AI can never use that or find that information because it's not online. So that's the value of the human.

Hmm. Interesting. Yeah. As the recipient of a lot of AI SDR stuff, you can, like, smell it right away. And, like, I'm faster to delete and unsubscribe and block people than I ever— not block, I just mark it as spam in Superhuman and I never see it again. But, like, my trigger finger for that is very quick if it feels like the messaging is generic. I got an email from a VP of sales. It's like, "Hey, great meeting you at this event." I wanted to follow up on our conversation about whatever, and I didn't go to that event.

Yeah.

And I replied, I was like, hey man, like, I didn't go to this thing. He's like, oh, you know, whatever. I was like, I was like, I was like, AI SDR gone wrong. He's like, oh, you're not wrong. I got to figure out what happened with the clay table. And, and like, it's— there's just so much of it. And automatically, like, I look at that company because that company actually does some AI stuff. I'm like, Oh, and like, I take that company off of my like legit contender list. I don't know if this is just a me thing, cause I get so much like outreach, but my, the like, um, how aggressively now I'm like dequeuing people just on bad outreach is way higher than it used to be. Yeah, because you just have to be like spam, spam, spam, spam so that I can actually have my inbox not get overrun.

It's actually an interesting point that you bring up, and this was a thought experiment that I ran because it's like, it's very hard for me to picture what the future even looks out like 5 years from now. But there's this world where it's like, if we get so good at building hyper-relevant messaging that's one-to-one based off of all these different signals, and everybody's sending fantastic information to the right person at the right time. If everyone's doing it, like, it's no longer valuable anymore. So it's like, yeah, I almost see us approaching some kind of a singularity, and I don't know where we go from there.

Yeah, I mean, it's sort of— this is the— I think this is what happens in every single one of these market evolutions. You know, the sales acceleration boom, sort of 2015 and onwards, you just ended up getting so many emails. And then, you know, now people use— I use Superhuman, and Google has its like promotions inbox like thing, so you don't see any of those emails anymore. Like the, the spam filters are so much higher now, and email deliverability is basically nothing. Okay, now we're in this AI landscape where people are like now able to get, get into the inbox more because we're doing all the inbox warming plus personalizing and doing the thing. Okay, now there's an advantage there for some period of time and that will go away. Like all of these, these advantages become commoditized over time, but then, then it will become some other motion. And I think for people like us, it's all about just staying one step ahead. And, you know, it's, I have some guesses on what that might be. We're going to see, let me ask you first, like, so, so as this becomes an everyday staple, the same way Outreach and Salesloft became, what do you think is the next big wave of outbound?

I think one thing that's working really well for us, it kind of goes back to the point, it's like, what can AI not do? We're seeing an insane, uh, ROI on like in-person events or even just like go— going to like a company's like offsite and just like talking or presenting about like, uh, not even necessarily— we don't even like demo because I think that's just so tacky. Yeah, what's our point of view on the industry as someone that's a leader in like GTM tech? Or, you know, for owner.com, it's like, I don't know, going to maybe for like some bigger restaurants if they have like a corporate office. It's like just talking about like what are, what are the best restaurants doing? And like you're not even pitching owner.

Well, we do this at scale with, with our YouTube, like our organic approach. Now we have more Instagram followers than Toast, and Toast is obviously like—

okay, that's interesting. So you guys have already picked up on that.

Yeah, organic, I think, is definitely one of them. Brand, like brand, organic, founder brand, influencer, I think is like definitely one category.

Yeah, like the, yeah, the creator side of things. That's where it goes back to like if you have someone that understands the problem and has a network or an audience in that space, like the few, it's all about attention. That's ultimately the number one currency, right? So it's like, where are you going to get the most attention? And it's like doing things that are just not scalable with AI. And it's, the funny part too is like one channel that works very well for us right now is LinkedIn specifically because it's very difficult to automate at scale. You have platforms like, you know, there's a lot of like LinkedIn automation platforms, whether it's—

Phantom Buster, Dripify, whatever.

Yeah, KReach, whatever. But because LinkedIn is somewhat of a monopoly, they know that if like you go over 60 messages a day, like you're cut.

Yeah.

So it's like what we're doing right now is like sending GIFs and just having like a ton of humor and sometimes just sending silly stuff. Not because that's necessarily like the best sales practice in the world, but it's just people know it's not AI. And that is just breaking through the noise. And AI doesn't have that level of humor and wittiness, which maybe you can program into a prompt, but it's like, it's still very difficult to do.

Yeah. Breaking through the noise is like 80% of the game. You know, the sales acceleration platforms made it happen. Now you can break through the noise with AI personalization. Then it's going to have to be some other thing. I think like network marketing as well. I've talked to a couple companies, a few startups in this space recently. I think we're going to get to a place where people really rely on their network for advice. You know, you and I are in a couple like Slack communities and different groups where people talk about what they're using and what they're having success with. And we're just like private chats. You know, like I have a handful of people who I'll text and be like, hey, I was thinking about this. Have you seen anything cool? Or when I see a good demo, I'll like fire that off to a few folks. I think that is going to become the, like, I think that's going to become the way to get in front of folks. And there's no tooling right now to be able to do that. To be able to like, you know, accelerate that dark social sharing of things. You know, is there a platform that's going to give people the ability to see the tools their friends are using and see ratings and commentary, but in like a private, like a semi-private space? And there's G2 Crowd, but like, I don't care about who the generic G2 reviewer likes. I care about what the like 10 people that I think really know go-to-market care about. Yeah.

Yeah, I think that that's a good point. It's hard to imagine exactly what that's going to look like because I'm asking myself like, is that something I would generally consume over a prolonged period of time? Maybe. I know another thing that's been working well is like networking and like referrals where we've actually even considered integrating with platforms like Crossbeam or The Swarm where you can upload like your own network and then see based off of the, you know, your network, like what target accounts can they make introductions to and stuff like that.

Yeah.

And I think GTM Fund used to do something like that too.

Yeah, GTM Fund used to use, I can't remember the term.

Cabal maybe.

Cabal. And then there's another portfolio company called Noble. I just talked to Raul and Josh, the founders, last week. That's another like network insight platform that I think is pretty sharp.

The only issue I have with that general space is like, I think any one individual gets tapped out pretty quickly at referrals and it's like, Giving a referral is not just that simple. Like, there's your reputation's on the line. It's like you only have so many favors you can ask of like specific people before you start burning things. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the, the problem there is that the medium that is getting you the introduction doesn't actually get any benefit from it.

Well, I think that's the thing for people to solve. Yeah, I think they need to attach monetization or something else. Like, if you had a platform where every time somebody uses or like demos a tool or buys a tool based on my recommendation on it, I get, you know, like a 5% commission. You know, it could be, could be a couple grand that, that's just like for you to write your reviews about the tools that you use so that if somebody, yeah, you know, goes off of that. It's a hard problem to figure out, but I think one that somebody's going to, somebody will crack.

Yeah, 100%. I think a lot of like B2B ultimately follows B2C. Like even for this example, like all we're really doing with like signals and intent is that you're trying to get down to like one-to-one relevance. And I think like a lot of like e-com, I mean, you probably know better than me working at like Shopify and stuff, but I think a lot of e-commerce has gotten to the point where it's like one-to-one marketing, right? It's like you talk about something on your cell phone and like that ad comes to you, like, or like you're on the website and it follows you. Yeah. Yeah. That's kind of what, where we're at now in B2B. So we're really just like lagging some of their ideas over a 5-year period. And I think with AI and how easy it is, like I literally started using Replit the other day just to mess around with it. So it's a platform where you you can literally like prompt something, it'll build like full software for you in like 2 seconds.

I've coded a working app in Replit over the last couple of weeks.

Oh, nice. So we're on the same page.

I had to get it connected to Windsurf to actually get it to work in the end, but it's awesome. It's so fun.

Yeah. So like as more of these specialized like softwares come out, like we are moving to more like a consumerized world in B2B.

Mm-hmm.

So I haven't deeply thought about like what the other trends that they're doing very well there are that we can do in B2B, but it seems like that's like a good place to start like ideating.

Yeah. Um, I want to spend the next like 15, 20 minutes just getting some best practices. So, um, you answered this a little bit, like what do people get wrong? And we were talking about the you know, only relying on commoditized data with their outreach. What, what else do people get wrong as they're trying to build a signal-based motion or even just like an outbound 3.0 motion?

Uh, definitely we talked about this a little bit, but I keep wanting to harping in on it because I think it's super important. It's like, where do humans not, uh, Or where can AI not help? And it's like that internal like information, or I did a full enablement session on Groundswell. It's like sometimes the best way to book accounts is like go talk with end users and just like deeply understand what is the current state there and like where are the gaps. And then use that information that is not online to provide insights, um, to you know, to the actual decision makers that would actually turn into, into pipeline. And I'll give you another example of this, like, let's get very tactical. We had strategic initiatives for a number of accounts that we codenamed Leviathan at Common Room. If somebody went out and started talking to an SDR or whatever and be like, hey, what, What's like the top initiative at Common Room right now? Like what's the name for it? Leviathan. And then it's like the subject line was Leviathan and then you were able to tie the value that you had to like that specific code name and project. Like of course I'm gonna take that meeting. And all it really took for you to do, I'm not saying it's easy, but like go and talk to someone and ask them, it's like, what are the strategic initiatives? I literally even got the screenshot of the slide at an SKO that the CRA, the CRO shared. There was like 10 initiatives, 3 of them were bolded. I used one of those bolded things because obviously it's one of the most important ones in the subject line and tied the value of Commonroom to that. And it's like, that's likely what they're comped on. It's likely their top priority. They're thinking about it every day. It's the 100% best shot you have at booking somebody. So leveraging that and mixing it with some of the more commoditized signals, like for example what's in their 10-K report, is important. But a lot of these even public companies, like the, the really interesting meat and potatoes is not in the 10-K report.

Yeah, it's in somebody's— it's in somebody's, you know, like private discussions.

Yeah, it's on Slack.

They'll share with you Yeah, exactly. If you talk to them. Yeah, the roll-up of end-user feedback is a great one. You also mentioned earlier something about like having a point of view.

Yeah.

I want to go back to that. Like, so, so what do you mean like, you know, reaching out with a point of view?

This is not even just for SDRs. This is like as someone that's now a buyer and like takes demos. And even I try to do this now, like when I'm also pulled into like demos as a subject matter expert from the sales development side. I think it's the more I buy, the more I realize that like discovery in the sense of asking like questions is, it is important. But I feel like it, I can come with a point of view to this call and teach you something, or at least like take, uh, some insight that I have, let's say about Leviathan. And I learned that like you need to book these 10 accounts over the next year. If I can somehow figure out and tie my solution's value prop to that, you know, the how I'm going to help you get those 10 strategic accounts. That's something that's going to make somebody like listen, uh, whether it's book a meeting or actually convert into like real, um, pipeline. So I'll give you another example of something that we've been doing. We actually analyze like the top 6 sectors or, uh, industries where we're talking to the most number of accounts in whether it's like, you know, digital infrastructure or HR software or whatever security software. And then we were running like a competitive play where one of our signals is website deanonymization. So we can tell you like the exact person that's on your website up to a certain degree of confidence. Mm-hmm. So how do we, uh, we have an email or we, we now started doing this on some demos too as a first slide. It's like, hey, we, we can find you hundreds of signals, but let's focus on one because it's low-hanging fruit, website visitors. I'll take screenshots in SimilarWeb or SEMrush of their top competitor and of themselves.

Mm-hmm.

It's like, hey, Your top competitor, uh, who we're talking to or is now like an active, uh, customer has 3 times the web visits as you. Like, here's the data. And it's not easy for you in the next 3 months to 3x your web traffic. But what you can do is fish in a pond instead of an ocean. And then I can break down the exact number of leads, uh, based off of some conservative estimate as to how many people we can feed directly to their SDR. And it's like, at the very least, if you're not going to get up to their website traffic, you should be like pinpointing the person to talk to. Now that's like an insight that maybe they knew their web traffic, but they probably didn't really think about their competitors' web traffic or the fact that that website visitor signal can actually give them 375 people into their SDRs, like inbox, de-anonymized people on their websites.

Today.

Yeah. So then it's like, okay, that, that now we're talking. Like, it's like you can tell people start like sitting up a little bit and like the conversation gets more interesting. And people don't, they don't do that, like in whether it's an outbound or in sales cycles enough from someone that sits on a buying committee.

Yeah. Teach them how to do something interesting that just happens to be possible with your Yeah. What are the other things that you teach people then? So, like, what are the plays that you would try to tell people to start with?

I'll give you another very specific example. So, we work with a lot of, like, open source companies. So, we can monitor who is engaging with not only, like, your GitHub repositories, but also competitive GitHub repositories. And there's a specific website called, actually the new SDR that started today introduced me to this because he used to work at GitHub. And so I'm pumped to work with him. It's called starhistory.com. So it shows you the number of GitHub stars or like essentially how many people like upvoted specific like repos. And you can see what's trending month over month. So what we're doing there in Common Room, we have an AI agent that goes and researches our top accounts in open source, tells me what repositories could be interesting for them, and then we'll screenshot the trend lines of like, hey, this repo of your competitor is like surging.

Hmm.

Have you considered like if we can de-anonymize who's using that GitHub repo, like how many more leads you can get. And then this is very specific information that I'm teaching you that you probably didn't think about.

That is really interesting. Um, all right, give me one more. Give me one more good, like, signal, signal play that you would teach people to do.

The other thing we do, so sometimes, like, some accounts that are targets are not displaying signal or intent. Like, that's just the reality, right? Like, in a group of your 10, only 3, 10% are maybe like even aware of you. So we still do go colder. My ask for my team is like, we never go fully cold. Like you always are, you should be able to teach them something. And at the very least, we have a prompt that we've now built. It's like an AI research prompt that we just input a target account's URL. And it'll brainstorm 5 signals that they can use. So we're like, hey, have you considered, you know, it looks like you have a free trial. I was able to sign up with like a Gmail. Have you considered that like if you pull that into Common Room, we can actually find you their work email address automatically? So like how many of those signups do you have? So for as a brainstorming ideation phase, what we do is if we don't have a lot of signal on a target account, we input the prompt, it gives us 5 signals that we can share with them. And it's like, hey, at the very least, like if you don't take this meeting, here's like 5 plays you should be running. And usually like they're realistically not running most of them anyways, because most orgs are not very like sophisticated in this stuff yet.

Yeah, interesting.

So that's what we do at the bare minimum.

Okay, that makes a ton of sense. Goes back to like Jordan Crawford's PVP stuff, the permissionless value prop. Like give them an email that's so good they would have paid to receive it. It's like, hey, like here's 5 plays that you can run based on your exact business. But that's the same, that's the same as the offer of value we make to our prospects. It's like, hey, come to this meeting. We're going to show you exactly all the stuff that's broken with your current digital, digital marketing landscape. You can fix it all on your own if you want. Like we're going to literally just give you all the answers and not just like what's broken, but how to fix it. And obviously we'll tell you how owner could do that a little, a little faster, easier, and at a higher degree of sophistication. And it's a, it's a, that's a much different meeting to book when they know they're getting like real value.

Yeah. Funny enough, actually, my next newsletter is going to be with— it's a 30-minute recording with Jordan Crawford where we walk through like his HVAC example.

So good.

It's so good. But yeah, essentially, it's like, imagine if you have access to the data somehow, being able to tell like an HVAC technician or like a company that does HVAC, like, hey, here are the 3 addresses that have outdated HVACs. Here's how much like that is in potential revenue. It's like, of course you're gonna like respond to that email and get value from it.

Want the rest?

Yeah. The question becomes like, how do you do that with B2B software? Because I know like a lot of people here are probably selling some kind of software or I don't know, have you thought about that for restaurants?

Yeah. I mean, we're, We're manufacturing some of the data ourselves. So we've built, um, we've built an agent that will take their— you just type in their website and it pulls in their entire digital presence.

Oh, nice.

Everything that's been written about them online, Yelp, Google. It looks at their web page, looks at who they're using for online ordering, and it analyzes, um, like hundreds of these hundreds of these criteria, and then it will tell them all of the things that are broken. So right now that's operating as like our PLG motion, but what we're also doing is taking that and then running cold accounts through it so that we can then equip the BDR team to reach out and be like, hey, uh, you know, you're ranked 5th for best pizza in Toronto, and you know, the 2nd ranked person has worse reviews and less reviews. So the only reason they could be outranking you is because Google likes their website better. You know, they've, they've done the things that Google, um, looks for in, in terms of search rank. It's like, we can fix that. You know, we can show you how you can fix it.

Yeah.

So we're, we're doing a bunch of that. That's what, that's what, um, we're going to turn into our like cold outbound email motion. Now that we've like done some testing more manually with it, I'm actually talking to Jordan. Jordan's going to help with that as well.

Nice. It's—

I am cautiously optimistic. Again, our customers don't really use email all that much. Like response rates are hilarious. So we'll see. But we have those signals. We have manufactured those signals. Because de-anonymization doesn't work for us because our customers, they primarily use a Gmail. They don't even have like a work email address. It's mostly off of their cell phone. They're interacting with our web presence. They're not on LinkedIn. They do most of their stuff on Facebook. So, all of the intent signal because I've looked at some, the intent signal platforms, it doesn't quite work. So, we've had to build a bunch of this ourselves.

Yeah, 100%. And that's still, so you're like, a restaurant review is a signal. It's obviously not intent, but one thing that we've realized over time, and I think this is—

Search rank is a signal. Like, yeah, yeah.

But yeah, I think one of the most important things for people to understand is account-level intent or signal in general works very well if you're signal-rich or if your buyer is leaving a digital presence. And for most vertical software companies, that's not a thing.

Yeah. Yeah. Which makes some things more difficult, but also means most of our competitors are never going to figure this out.

Yeah.

You know, it's, it's like all of this stuff is actually execution moat in, in, in my opinion, the fact that we've had to like build and build this like crazy enrichment engine and the scoring algorithm, like all this stuff we've had to do. On our own and we can't buy tools for it. There's no, there's no database out there for this stuff, which is a difficulty, but also means that like now that we're figuring so much of it out, it is a big competitive advantage.

100%. And you got, yeah, you'll be at the forefront with Jordan too.

Yeah, big time. How, so a couple last questions. How should CROs be thinking about hiring XDR leaders? To me, as a CRO, it feels like this landscape has changed so much, and I have— I am certainly thinking about the profile of that person differently than I have in the past, like the mix of skills and maybe how that fits into this broader landscape of opportunity generation. But How would you, how would you advise a CRO to look at finding a sales dev XDR leader for this like 3.0 world?

Yeah, I definitely think the profile is definitely changing and it's evolving so quickly where even me who, you know, you could argue Common Room is like, we're at the frontier with a few other companies like thinking about this stuff. I almost feel like I'm like behind, so I can only imagine how others are feeling. I think in the past, like we have to over-index significantly on like real projects that they've done with like different AI like tools. I think it's very important to have people that like, if you can understand Clay, which in my opinion is one of the more complex but obviously powerful tools, you can likely figure out a lot of these other things. And I think in the interview process, one thing that I'd actually vet for is like, you know, maybe build me like a clay table for a specific use case or build me, or even just diagram like a workflow of, you know, what signals would you use and what would happen like here? What kind of messaging would you have? And try to get them to like architect what that framework would actually look like. Where I think more traditionally, the way that we've been interviewing SDR leaders, or even when I've been in interviews, is very much like, you know, what's your 30, 60, 90-day plan? How do you coach people? Like all this kind of stuff, which obviously is still very important, but I think there's like a different level that we can unlock with a lot of this artificial intelligence stuff. So you have to be proficient in that, and I think find a way to actually test that in an interview.

Yeah, the systems engineering piece is so much of it. Either they have to have it, or you have to have a RevOps leader that has a ton of go-to-market craft, and then maybe your XDR leader can be a little bit more like of the, um, old school, build a team, coach reps, hire, drive engagement, drive activity. But that— an analogy I often use is building any team, but a revenue leadership team's like building a basketball team. You can't have 5 centers. You can't have 5 point guards. You need like a really tall guy who's playing lots of defense and dunking the ball. You need a short little guy who can shoot it from really far away. Short little guy, they're like 6'2". But you need this variety of skills. And, you know, the exact composition can change. You've got the Warriors playing like small ball with Draymond Green, who's only 6'8" at center, but like it works because the variety of skills lives in a certain way in that team. And I think architecting sales, dev, AE, rev ops, marketing growth in a way that somebody needs to have The set of skills need to exist across this group of people. But if you don't have that today, the thing I've been telling folks is to try to go acquire that in your next role. So, if you don't have a lot of systems engineering, go-to-market craft, well, then your XDR leader should probably bring it in or your growth leader needs a lot of sales acumen, more sales acumen than just like an MQL, um, yeah, an MQL generator. Yeah.

Uh, it's funny that you mentioned that with the basketball analogy because like, obviously as a CRO, you have a lot of like different functions that you manage, but even for me, it's like I actually have on my team someone that I hired that is a social selling expert, just like killer with like the LinkedIn channel. Then I have, I have some people that come from you know, some competitors. So like we have like, uh, an interesting dynamic of like they understand how we should position versus them. I have somebody else that's like, uh, you know, really good on, on cold calls. I'm, I'm very good at like, uh, copy and emails. So it's like, I'm just trying to build a team that's very well-rounded because we can all like learn from each other. And, um, that's just within the sales development org.

I think about this with every team. Yeah, yeah, you need a variety of skills in each team to try to, you know, there's certain things you, you will over-index on. Like, we're 90% cold call. You, you can't just be an email jockey and be successful as a BDR here. But we do have certain people that are more crafty with follow-up, and there are CRM sharks. Like, we've learned a lot from certain BDRs who are just like experts at crawling through Salesforce, and we're trying scale that. But yeah, last question on this topic. Are there as few good XDR leaders out there as it seems to me? Like, one of the things that I get hit up by founders for the most, more than VPs of sales, is like, hey, do you have— do you know any good sales dev leaders? We're looking, and we've been looking for 6 months. We can't find anybody. Like, what's with that, you think?

It is hard. I don't think there's a lot of like good leaders out there, generally speaking, to be very honest with you. And even less that have like an understanding of like these modern like stacks and what to do with them. It just takes like a— because we're still like not past the, you know, the point where this is like fully to the masses. We're still like in the early adopter phase. So it's like you need that personality of person that wants to like tinker and try this kind of stuff. Um, and I myself having like leading a SDR leadership, uh, group here in Canada and just like going to a lot of different events, you don't find people that are very well versed in that. So you're definitely not alone. I actually think one of the main problems with like CROs is that they're now so detached on average from like the sales development function. Especially when it's like, it's probably the function along with maybe marketing that is changing the fastest. I think like, for example, like deal cycles and AEs, first of all, there's not a lot of like tool changes there in my opinion, quite honestly, because like you're still running the same stuff. It's like MedPic and like you're doing demos and there's POCs.

Yeah.

There hasn't been as much innovation there to me as it has been on like growth and pipeline. And I think CRO should learn some more of this stuff so that they can be part of some of those communities to recruit better people that are at the forefront and just know how to like vet these types of people in the interview processes.

Yeah. I also think a lot of it is we still don't pay sales dev like a premium rate. Like you're, you know, we've, we still continue to position BDR director as more junior than AE director. But there's an argument to be made that generating pipeline is the most important thing you can do in a business. Yeah, it's got to close. But, but, you know, the difference between those two roles, I think, is much closer than people really give it credit for. And therefore the comp is all wrong. The comp is so different that awesome BDR leaders are just, you know, they're clamoring to move to AE leader because the comp's better than— the prestige is better. But we should really be making that role be, you know, high profile, comp it really well so that people want to stay in those functions for longer, or else your, your best people are always just like graduating out of it.

Yeah, that's— it's actually a very good point. Uh, and I don't know, maybe we'll end on this as well, but I think one of my biggest like learnings has been I used to want to like really optimize. I was like, I wanted to be a CRO. And then I actually had a conversation with KD and he's like, why? And I didn't really have like a fantastic answer. And it made me realize like I'm kind of trying to optimize for something in the future when like the type of work I'm doing now is like what I love to do. So a big thing before I joined like companies or Common Room and another company, I was like, I need to like, everyone's been telling me to get experience managing AEs. Like I've been an AE, but I've never managed AEs. And it's like, you can't do that. You can't have that gap if you want to be a CRO. So I kind of like over-index on trying to do something. And I just kind of ignored like what my passions were. And I think one thing I'm realizing now, the market's starting to like compensate for deep expertise in certain fields. And I was like, I really love this. I built a brand on this. I've been writing, you know, I have 105 like Substack articles on prospecting. Once you become like a top like 1% in any given field, like you're gonna get rewarded for that. And I should stop worrying worrying about optimizing for things that are too far out, because it's going to work itself out to some degree, and have faith that if you continue to be curious, it's going to be okay. So if that's a lesson for anyone, I hope that's helpful. But I think the market will catch up to this as we're seeing that it's becoming more complex to be in sales development and pipe gen. Yeah, for sure it is.

Okay, two last questions because that was one of the rapid-fire questions. What do you think separates, you know, a good sales dev leader versus one that's best in class? Is it just the AI proficiency today or what else is there?

I think that's one of it. I think one of my own competitive advantages is that no matter how far away I get from like the ground floor, from like a, you know, career ladder perspective, I'm always in the know and still prospecting. Like, I still cold call, uh, I'm still building like messaging and emailing and helping my team multi-thread. I think you can't get too far away from it because it's like the most important thing is that you're teaching people and then leading by example and not making them feel like you're telling them to do something that you wouldn't do. So being that like, I guess, servant leader to some degree that actually goes in, like is in the trenches with the team helps me ideate and like figure out what we need to like enable on and like, oh, here's a new talk track that actually works. And I, most sales development leaders surprisingly don't do that. It's just been natural for me.

Yeah. Yeah, all of my managers and my director still make calls, still rip into formers and close losts and are generating pipe. Yeah. What's the most common advice you find yourself giving to like first-time BDR managers?

I think it's probably some advice I should have taken myself when being a manager. One is like, I don't think you deeply understand how much this role is like part therapist, part like helping people just figure out like who they want to be in life, especially because it is more entry, more of an entry-level role. And then the other one was, I did read the book Making of a Manager by Julie Zhao, like before I became a manager, but like you don't realize how much the only metric that really distinguishes whether you're a good manager or not is like the output. Output of your team. And it's like you can't will your way into building like a good team. So for example, I think a lot of people might over-index on like, I'm gonna go and book all these meetings for like my team and give them credit. And then it's like, if we hit our number, it's because the team— when it's like really you, you have to find ways to like scale your knowledge to other people through process and documentation. And I know this is something that you're probably on board with too. And just like not making excuses that it's like, hey, you, the output of your team is how good of a manager you are. Like that is the metric that matters.

Nice. That's a good, that's a good one.

All right.

We'll end it there. This was great. I think people will take a lot from trying to untangle what is a rat's nest of complexity.

So we don't even know either. It's like we're still figuring it out.

So I know. Yeah, you guys got to get out there and do it. That's half the battle. All right, dude.

Thank you for joining. I hope it was good.

Yeah. Yeah, it was. Thank you for listening to the Revenue Leadership Podcast. If you enjoyed it, don't forget to subscribe and you can find a link in the show notes and be sure to leave a 5-star review, share it with your network, and please join me next Wednesday for another great conversation.