Breaking Through Revenue Plateaus: GTM Strategies with Mary Grothe

So you mentioned right before we jumped on, you were, you were just on a revenue operations call. You started a company called House of Revenue after an amazing career in sales. Tell us a little bit about what House of Revenue does and what some of the initial things you guys are looking for when you're talking to a team about their rev ops.

Oh my gosh, such a journey. So I had two different stints selling for Paychex, the payroll company, one very young, 22 years old. And went from admin into a sales role. I actually did very well. What's interesting is my first 2 years when I was 22 at Paychex, I was a district sales assistant and I got to serve on the CRM committee that helped migrate Paychex from the old ACT database to salesforce.com, which was this new thing back in 2006. It was one of the best and most fruitful experiences of my life. I kid you not. The exercise and the meeting I just left was the exact same data mapping process. So mapping fields that I learned— how old am I? I'm turning 40 this year, so 18 years ago. It is so awesome that I got to start off my career by diving into technology and embracing and loving CRMs. I even set up automated commission processes and helped automate data flow processes from sales to operations and And it was an incredible first 2 years. So interestingly, what I learned in my first 2 professional years working, I still use today in the world of RevOps. But I think having that background, that administrative background, when I did go into sales, I had such a great appreciation for technology and processes, data, details, which most salespeople can't spell those words. They're allergic to them. And so I think it really helped fuel my sales career, but In between the two stints at Paychex, I did test out entrepreneurship. I started my first company when I was 28 as a business strategist, helping entrepreneurs like early stage figure out their go-to-market strategy, help take them to market, help them reach profitability as quickly as possible with a very lean go-to-market plan. I love doing that. I did it for 3 years, but I could never figure out how to price my products, price my services, delegate, I was exhausted and broke after 3 years. And so that's why I went back to Paychex. I did well. I served on the upmarket team, sold millions. Last year I was there, I had the great fortune of selling one of the top 10 largest deals in history with my small business partner. And I was also a new mom. So I had a 7-month-old baby and, you know, that sales year I only sold like 9 months out of the year, finished number 7 in the country, sold that crazy large deal. And with that 6-figure commission check, I was so fired up about becoming an entrepreneur again. So I started House of Revenue 5 and a half years ago. And when I started the company, because my background predominantly had been in sales, I started this service as fractional VPs of sales who actually understood infrastructure systems and processes. And for 18 months, we served 45 companies and helped them rebuild their sales departments or launch a sales department from scratch if the CEO or founder was still selling. And it took us 18 months to realize how big of a role branding and marketing played in true revenue scale. So we became holistic, we doubled in size, we brought on leaders in marketing and branding. And by 2020, we launched what House of Revenue does now, and, and it's a fractional CRO and CMO. They pair together alongside our brand director and a couple other RevOps resources, and they take those second-stage scale companies, which are past startup scale, so they plateaued. That usually happens somewhere between $3 and $10 million in annual revenue companies plateau. So we pick them up from that point and help determine that product or service, if it's still competitive in the market, the buyer still wants it, the competitive landscape looks like. I mean, that market intelligence is really key before investing in scaling to answer the question: people still want this? Does it solve the problems that it did at the onset? Do we need to repackage it? Do we need to improve it, change how we're pricing? So once we determine all that, then we're able to brand it and then build a new marketing engine. We're HubSpot partners. We've worked on Salesforce, but we really think HubSpot is that powerful engine that's meant for that market size. And we build these unbelievable revenue operations engines. And then, I mean, all the way across CMS, website, branding, marketing, sales, customer success, you name it. We build these engines, we groom up their sales team, their CS team, marketing team, we take them back out to market. And House of Revenue had this track record of doubling the size of companies within 10 to 12 months. Super exciting. Interestingly, Payroll Network is a two-time House of Revenue client. So first time Payroll Network came around in 2020 and I didn't get to work with them directly. I was busy being a CEO, but I knew the project went extremely well. And when they came around a second time in 2022, even though I was the CEO of House of Revenue, I had some time on my hands and I was quite honestly burnt out and sad being a CEO. I'm a revenue scaler at heart. So I took the project, went on contract in October, and we fell in love on both sides. And so I actually recently resigned as CEO at House Revenue, took on a full-time role at Payroll Network as the Chief Revenue Officer. And I just couldn't, I couldn't be happier. So that's my life now is like diving into an actual running, working engine. And I'm on pace to triple the size of the company in 5 years, which I hope to look back in 5 years and say, you know what, this is the most remarkable work I've ever done in my career.

Love that. Let me hear a little bit about— so, so GTM, go-to-market, is always one of these sort of nebulous terms to me. And you spelled it out a little bit there, right? When you talk about— oh, let me go back. I loved ACT, for the record. I might be the one person that loved ACT. Like, I just love the simplicity of, like, especially when I was carrying a bag, it was like tasks and contacts and, you know, what's the next step? Like, it was just like You know, CRMs today are amazing when used properly, but oftentimes there's just a whole bunch of feature bloat and things that we don't need when in reality we were just trying to get like, when's the next time I need to call Mary and get back on her calendar and like, what's her contact information and everything else is just noise a lot of the time. But anyway, so we'll talk about tech stack favorites here in a moment. ACT is no longer in my tech stack, but the— so this go-to-market, because you talk about it, right? So like the first thing you think about when you think about go-to-market is I'm a startup, I've got a new product or service. I'm just getting going. I need to determine how I'm going to approach the market with said product and service. All those things you mentioned, branding, you know, pricing, all that. But you're talking about doing it with companies with $3 to $10 million in revenue. Like, talk to me a little bit about kind of what that lean, like, initial go-to-market strategy looks like versus what it looks like for a company that's at $3 to $10 million in rev.

Yeah. How— well, I used to work exclusively with startups and Don't do that. For my sanity, I want to work. Don't do that. Getting paid, you know, in actual currency.

Anytime somebody comes to me with a business idea that like startups is their core, their market, I'm like, get the heck out of here with that nonsense. Like, you need companies with money. Go to the companies with money.

I just have such a huge heart for entrepreneurs. You know, I am one and I love visionaries specifically. I'm a visionary. And so those are my people. I'm very blessed to have this crazy brain that can dive into details when I need to, can think very mechanically. And I love being a revenue scientist and I see everything visually as like a puzzle, like building blocks or a puzzle. Like I visually can look at a go-to-market and see all the pieces and I like taking them all apart and then rebuilding it in a way that's meaningful. It's just how my brain is, is wired and working with startups. The ugly truth is that founder better be ready to be the chief everything officer. And if not, they need to find a partner that's willing to work on equity because the best way to scale a startup is in the sweat equity out of the gate. If you can hold on to your cash and also not dilute by bringing in an investor too early or overextend yourself by taking on debt, the best that you can do to bootstrap, the better. When I started House of Revenue, I bootstrapped and I'm super grateful that I did. And some of those key parts where I got a drag-and-drop website builder off of GoDaddy, I built my own website, I maintained my own website for the first— oh gosh, end of 2017. So it was professionally rebuilt, uh, 2018 or 2019, trying to do the math here. It was professionally rebuilt from my GoDaddy website into a HubSpot website in 2019, if I'm doing my math right. So for, for a year and a half I had, or, you know, 2 years, whatever, I had my own website that I built. I never invested in marketing. For me, it was all of my own effort. I created on a Word doc, I used different colors and fonts and created a logo, and I did a screen capture, like a, you know what I'm saying? And that was my logo. So when people needed a high-res logo, I was like, well, how big can I make it on the screen? Super sad. But the thing is, I didn't pay marketing agency $30,000 to build my brand out of the gate, right? I built it. And then I hired a high school intern to help me with social media because she was smarter on social media than I was. I knew the business side, she knew the social media side. So in partnership, I was able to do the content, she was able to do the posting and engagement and stay on top of that. So we were really great partners and she was very inexpensive. And so she actually grew into being my first marketing manager and into a marketing director role before she left. She was with me for 4 years. So it was really interesting. She was just very part-time in the beginning, only what I needed. She was also very good with video editing. So she would even follow me around at different events, capture my speaking. Like, that's another really easy thing in initial go-to-market is a founder or CEO that can have a platform, a good LinkedIn following, get some keynotes or speaking engagements, do some podcasting, ways for them to get the message out. Because when you're talking about that founder, It's their baby. Like they are the go-to-market, they know the value prop, they know the buyer better than anybody. They know the pains, problems, and challenges, and they have a lot of clout because of their title. And so that person should really carry the company through, in my opinion, past $1 million in revenue, if not $2 or $3 million in revenue. I held off as long as possible hiring a salesperson. And now I'm fortunate because I really love sales and I grew up of sales. So for me, I was able to leverage that skill set with some founders just are not natural salespeople, and that's okay. But I do say like the CEO sale, that founder sale, even if they're not great salespeople, they have so much clout because it's their baby and all the things that I just said, that a conversation with that founder, as long as they're willing to go to those networking events, have those meetings, be at the trade show, go get referral partners, and I'll talk about that in a second. Like they, if they're willing to do all of that, they're going to make some some traction, some progress. One of the quickest ways that I found velocity or speed to market when you have a limited budget is through referral partners. This goes back to how I built my book of business when I was selling for paychecks. I was not the rep that sat there and telemarketed 4 hours a day. I was the rep that had coffee, breakfast, lunch, happy hour with 2 strategic referral partners, a broker and a banker. And every week or every other week, we sat there and had a business, like I said, breakfast, lunch, or happy hour. And we would have our laptops open and we would just make warm introductions for each other. It was a matter of trust and credibility. It was not picking and choosing. It was, I'm just going to introduce you as my banker. I'm going to introduce you as my broker to prospects, to clients, to other people I was networking with throughout the week. And we would just crossfire these introductions for each other. That doesn't cost anything. So the cup of coffee that I had while we sat there and did it, I emulated that as a founder and I just found the people that could help open those doors for me. And I, of course, was willing to return the favor by making those same introductions. There are so— I could go on for an hour. There are so many things that you can do without spending any money in order to drive that initial $1 million in revenue. I think one of the biggest mistakes is founders trying to delegate that or get it off of their plate too early. Like you should not be hiring a salesperson so early that you cringe every time their base salary goes out every 2 weeks. If you're cringing over that, you hired a salesperson too early in my opinion. Now, if you are like a sales-adverse founder and you are awful at it, you should get a co-founder, get a partner who has the gift of gab and relationships and give them some equity.

Well, I would even double down on that and say, I mean, if you're, if you're that averse to it, what are you doing? Like, why are you doing this in the first place? Like, what is the point? Like, like a business needs, you know, nothing happens until somebody sells something. So like, if you got into entrepreneurship and you didn't think you have to sell anything, you have been wildly misinformed and quite frankly, like, have no business being out there creating a product or service without a market to go sell it to. And a way to position it. And to your point, I see this over and over again with founders and it drives me nuts. It's like, you know, how quickly can I get some intern in here to sell this for me? And it's like, dude, you're going to trust a college student to sell for you your baby? Like, give me a break, man. That's like asking the 8-year-old next door to babysit your 5-year-old, man. Like, come on, that makes no sense. And so, yeah, that's one of my biggest pet peeves among many of my fun pet peeves. But the founder-led sales are so important now. Like, we have such a distinct advantage to be a recognizable founder in a market where you're trying to compete with ADP, Paychex, Gusto, you know, their executive staff is untouchable to 99.9% of small businesses, whereas you have the distinct advantage of being touchable and being in your local market. And like you said, going out and speaking at events, even if it's just that simple, dude, you show up to the chamber event and they give you the opportunity when they pass around and go, who's new here today? Well, you know, you came last month, but do it again anyway, 'cause you get another chance to stand up and tell people who you are and what you do. You know, I joke with people all the time, like, is speaking in public my favorite thing to do? Absolutely not. But like, that's part of the game, man. When you get a mic and you're a small business owner, it's your job to be able to stand up, deliver some value to the people around you, and ultimately attract people to your brand because of what you're saying. Not stand up and go, we do payroll, and if you guys need somebody for your payroll service, we can beat ADP by 25%. Thank you. And yes, there are many of you out there listening to this that have given that same sloppy spiel somewhere. One other quick thing and I'm going to read on. I want to talk about your tech stack here, but I'm going back to the first original hires. So our first hire at Guru was this woman. She, you know, we always hired people to do the support stuff because unlike a lot of founders who want to do the support stuff, I didn't want to do the support stuff. I wanted to go out and sell. And this poor woman would— we paid her $11 an hour because she had been out of the workforce for 3 or 4 years after having children and was just looking to get back and get her skills settled in. And it was like, hey, this is all we got. You need us, we need you, let's do this thing. She worked 20 hours a week for us. And I remember at one point she was literally hiding in her closet from her 3 sons while she was taking customer support calls from our clients. And, you know, I'm at home in my bonus room, she's hiding in her closet. Like, it's not all beautiful and pretty in the early days. You got to bootstrap it. It's not about having a ton of capital, it's about doing the right things and then hiring and paying people when you can. That makes sense, um, to get it to a point where if you need capital, you can get capital, but it's very rarely, uh, out of the gate that you're going to need it until you find product market fit. So let's, let's, let's kind of dig in a little bit more to that tech stack piece. So you talked about HubSpot. What are some of your other go-to tools and why when you're going in? And, you know, you're coming into Payroll Network right now. What were some of the things that you looked at there and said, hey, we need to maybe adjust this or tweak that?

Everything. No stone went unturned. It's a very big, lofty goal for our company to say that we'd like to hit $50 million in 5 years, which is about a 3x. Well, that takes a serious look at the current revenue engine. You can't scale chaos, you can't scale inefficiencies, and it's very expensive to scale anything that is inefficient, right? So First thing I did, I love HubSpot, but I dug in there and I mean, I was grateful they were on HubSpot. We actually set up their HubSpot, House of Revenue did, in 2020. And when I dug in there, I wanted to understand the mechanics of why things were built the way they were built. That's one thing I learned back when I did that ACT to Salesforce migration at Paychex was understanding that the technology should be built around the processes and behaviors, the people that need to use it, not the other way around. So when you have off-the-shelf technology, you require the users to adapt their processes and behavior to the way the technology works. But because Salesforce and HubSpot, they're so highly customizable, you're able to truly build the most efficient process. Then you build the technology to match the process. So what I was looking at is how much of the process was built inside of HubSpot spot that the behaviors, I mean, on the team are adhering to it versus us adhering. So I did an evaluation of the step-by-step process for the entire customer lifecycle from the people side. So I met with marketing team, sales team, implementation, operations, and our account management team, and the executive relationship managers, the ERMs, understanding the lifecycle of the client. What are all the things that we do to attract them, earn their business, onboard them, get through adoption, retention, expansion, and advocacy. And when I understood every single person's role and the flow through that and the desired way of doing work, I was able to identify where we had a lot of redundant processes. We also had workflows upon workflows upon workflows because when HubSpot was implemented in 2020, HubSpot didn't have the functionality it has today, so what was built were some workarounds. But then as the functionality was released, those workarounds were never dismantled to adopt the new features. So we had redundancy. HubSpot could do it now, do the function, but we weren't using the function because we had built this workaround that everybody was conditioned to using, which wasn't as efficient. So we spent a couple of months starting to understand this and dismantle it. We then looked at the supporting tech stack. We had several project management tools, or variants and project management tools, that were being used by different teams, and nothing was integrated with HubSpot. We had a data source, ZoomInfo, that was being misused in how the data was being used inside of HubSpot. We had I mean, I don't know how much you might go into detail here, but I'm going to ask you even more detailed questions after this.

This is about to be very self-indulgent. So for those of you listening in that are going to go like, what the hell are they talking about? I'm ready to take this a layer deeper here in a moment. So feel free.

Okay.

Because this is what people want, right? People want actionable stuff where they can look at it. Oh, good. You and I talking about how great we are.

Yeah. Well, no, we don't need to do that. Okay. So then the marketing team had some access to some tools, but they weren't really centralized. So like there was a Google Ads setup, but like we didn't have analytics set up and we were running campaigns, but we didn't have Google Search Console. We didn't have some of these other things like to tie it all together. We didn't have all the analytics built in HubSpot. So we weren't getting the visual into our marketing attribution and we weren't doing verification on like the quality of lead sources and some other things like the marketing qualified leads coming through. We weren't validating how successful those were and where they were coming from and getting back to the root of the info because we had our data tracking was in different places. So like that was an issue because we weren't able to see the revenue efficiency inside of the funnel based on lead source. So where did the, where did the lead come from? We also had manual processes for things like requesting assets for an event. The marketing team was doing a lot of production work and it was very reactive. It wasn't strategic. It was viewed as like, oh, hey, I need you to make this look pretty. Oh, hey, I need a PowerPoint for this. Oh, hey, I need a 5x7 ad for this event. Oh, hey, I need whatever. But it was very reactive. And so you had people requesting things that weren't strategic marketers. They were just a department head that thought they needed something. So that process was very broken and misaligned to that actual, like, what are we doing to move the needle here on prospects and customers? So moving down further into the funnel, there wasn't a very defined process for tracking implementations. There was some confusion because of lack of visibility between the salespeople turning in deals and understanding the status and implementation. So being tracked on a spreadsheet that only the implementation team had access to. So the sales team couldn't log in and see the step and stage of where the thing was. So then they were calling the client, then it was clouding it for the— yeah, everybody's probably been there. Then, so when we got into service, we're using Microsoft Dynamics CRM. And, you know, that is interesting in itself because Microsoft Dynamics is actually a very robust and powerful tool. It just depends on what level you have it built out and the way you have it integrated, if you do, to anything else. So like it's not integrated to HubSpot. So as soon as that client record was sold, then it was being recreated inside of Dynamics and then we resell, we're an ISOL reseller. And so we have then client information in ISOL and those two don't talk to each other. So it was all manual export between all of those syncing all the way through the engine. And with that, because it's so manual, guess what you run into? People get busy, they don't do it, things go outdated for a while. You have someone newer in the role, they don't quite understand, you know, and so there were just some pieces that was quite fit. So we were really fortunate before I started, and she had a HubSpot background, and we just asked, like, do you want to take this RevOps seat? It's not going to be easy, and this is going to be one of the biggest projects you might do in your career. But it reminded me of when I was 22, and I thought, man, I've used that for the rest of my career. So she said yes, and she's been an unbelievable asset to the project. And so we are just making huge headway. So here's some other things in order to increase our brand presence. We're refreshing our brand and we're going to expand nationally. So we're getting on big review platforms like G2 and we're adopting some intense software like Sixth Sense and we'll be removing ZoomInfo eventually. We're looking for better integrated tools where, where when our salespeople people are actually prospecting and building lists. So we have LinkedIn Sales Navigator, they're looking at Apollo right now as well, um, as like a Chrome extension to help them augment data that they're pulling in from that. But overall, it was— I think when people go to reevaluate their tech stack, it shouldn't just be, should we switch to a new CRM? Like, it's usually where it starts, but you need to understand what are the actual processes of the way that we do work across the whole client life cycle, and then figuring out if they're efficient or not, where we're lacking visibility, where data that we need that we're not getting today? Like, what do we actually need to get our jobs done and move the needle? Make that list of requirements and then build it around that. And then you really need somebody long-term that can own it because a revenue engine is always changing. You and I both know the speed that technology advances. And one of the challenges in the prior revenue engine install was that all those workarounds were created to make up for technology deficit, but then they were never undone. As technology became available, like in the homegrown, in the system. So I think that that's something that's very key is that who owns it ongoing to ensure that it is running and efficient longer term.

A couple of things there. First, so, so yeah, I said I want to dive in just a hair deeper on one thing, particularly because this is an area we are always looking to improve, is that time from proposal to implementation. Right? So like, I know I do a big onboarding session for our clients, or I used to anyway, where we talk about Twitter has 75 steps from yes to desk, right? From the time somebody accepts an offer to work at Twitter to the time they park their butt at their desk for the first time, there's 75 steps in between. And there's that pre-hire checklist that, you know, automates and handles all those things. And it's similar in the sales world, right? From the time you get a verbal So the time that thing is actually being worked on in implementation, there's a lot of steps in there that need to occur. And there, you know, we've, we've gone round and round trying to automate as much of that as humanly possible over the years with some success and some failure. But I'm curious what that from yes to implementation process looks like and what you guys have automated and where you still continue to find ways where you're going, uh, if we could just find something that did this, that'd be great.

Well, we're pretty fired up because we are unleashing more of the technology inside of HubSpot for quotes. What I love about the new release that they had end of last year— well, I take that back, it was actually March or April of 2022— they released the ability to do a custom-developed proposal. So you can use your branding, your font, your photos, your everything, and you can custom build just like you would a landing page. So you can build these beautiful proposals before it was very like drag and drop templated and add a comment section here, add a pricing table here, but you couldn't really design it. Now for the last year you've been able to design it. And so we are, we were using HubSpot Quotes for the pricing table and like the SKUs that would update the deal amount, but then printing that or exporting to PDF and then attaching it. We would then customize an executive summary in a Word doc proposal, save that as PDF, merge the two PDFs, email it, which is not trackable, email it to the prospect, wait to hear back. Now we can do all of that in HubSpot. And so when we quote, we're able to build the table and the proposal all in one. It's already designed, so you just have to plug and play and turn the executive summary pieces. But then you get all the analytics behind it every time that it's viewed and like when people are clicking. So cool. And that is one way that's helped us. But then also they can electronically sign right there in that quote. So we also use DocuSign for some of the IRS forms that we need out of the gate and for the Master Services Agreement. So those are some items that we send separately through DocuSign. However, we will be able to send those out of HubSpot. There is an integration with DocuSign, so we'll be able to upload those forms and it pulls in the client information. So you're just attaching it to an email to send outside of HubSpot and it'll get completed, which is really nice. So then we have Teamwork now, the project management tool, and that's integrated with HubSpot. We've been in beta just building it and testing it, and it's unbelievable how that's working to create visibility for implementation. Now there is an integration component that we haven't activated yet where we can actually think about a new client profile. So you have like a shell of data, so you have like the fed name, the EIN, the address, all that static information. You can actually get it to create a shell inside of Teamwork for the client which is super cool. We have not set that up yet. We have not gotten to that point. Right now we just have the integration to where it's identifying the company and the contact. So when you're inside of HubSpot, you click on that deal or company screen and hover over the Teamwork icon and it pops up that client and you can click through to see it in Teamwork, or you can see the current stage and status, which really we just needed the visibility out of the gate. So that's been an improvement, but we can get it to where it creates that. The next thing that we automated is we brought on QuotaPath as our commission software. In the payroll industry, it's very common to have multipliers and tiers It's also very common in the small payroll companies where not everything is commissionable, or you may have certain products that are commissionable at different rates because of margin and third-party reseller costs. That can be difficult to track. Also, it's really helpful for salespeople to have this ability to see forecasted commission, if they're trending toward a bonus or not, since not everything goes toward the bonus amount, and so they can't use full deal amount. So it's extremely helpful to have this ability. If the salespeople are very excited— we're in implementation right now, it should roll out in the next month or two— it's also saving a ton of time for our accounting department to be able to have the truth in the data and streamlining commissions because that was like a full-time job for someone. And I mean, transparently, we— that's like a full-time job for somebody right now manually, it feels like. And we have half the amount of salespeople we're going to have 45 days from now selling. So to think like it's a $7,000 or $6,000 software versus hiring a $50,000 accountant to like come in and help, you know, maybe not accountant, but somebody that can come in and do that administrative work. So the technology, like really digging into the tech stack again, it's looking at what are the processes, the behaviors, the jobs to be done, the tasks that we need to take into consideration on those specific pieces. I don't remember the question you asked me, but I don't know if I answered it.

But there's a lot more. That's okay.

You answered it. Yay.

Well, and I'll— I was interested to hear you say QuotaPath. So a little bit of context for us. So we've got, you know, this is March 28th, 2023. We've got one director of business development in seat right now. We have 3 salespeople starting next week. So we've been building out our infrastructure to accommodate, you know, 3x-ing our sales staff in the course of overnight, if you will. And so QuotaPath was one of the things that we stumbled, you know, I remember, geez, I remember when those guys first started and they were originally getting up and going. The product's come a long way. It's It's a product for sure. It's still kind of like the— and there may be a Zoho integration there somewhere. That was kind of the struggle was to your point, like we've had, we have tiers as well. We have escalators, we have all the stuff that like always breaks in the spreadsheet or the analytics tool and then somebody has to manually go in and fix it. And I think we finally got, and I'll share a little bit about our tech stack just because I know that we got a lot of Zoho listeners out there. We've recently gone to— so all of our stuff is standard. So when I say standard, I mean our pricing for perils, our pricing for payroll, our pricing for our PEOs, our pricing for our PEO. So there's no discounting, there's no, you know, there's no variance in pricing. It's a little bit closer to a Gusto model than maybe an ADP model. And so we've got Zoho Forms for our proposal and signature page and signing off on our terms and conditions. So they're all one in the same. So from the CRM, we can send an email that has a link to sign up. Those same links are on our website. You could sign up on our website. Obviously, nobody just shows up at your website and signs up without talking to a salesperson. But the— so then that form also triggers a bunch of automations that are doing things like populating the CRM with data, creating the account in our accounting system, creating the account in our customer support system, attaching the files to the account in the CRM. You know, where we're, where we still have a lot of room to grow is on that triggering and the implementation side. It's still, we use Trello as our project management tool. It's not doing anything to create there yet. I don't think that there's any reason it can't. We just haven't got there. And then, you know, the biggest gaps still are always tend to be that piece of like there's this, you know, you talked about, you know, the little thing I was trying to solve for this morning was, you know, when is the commission triggered, right? Like, is it triggered by somebody in ops pressing a button in the CRM or somebody, you know, somebody else pressing this right button in the CRM and then it goes to the commission's dashboard and like, who's, you know, so just there's always this little points of manual intervention in there that are required. But we've definitely come a long way there and we're, we're closer to where you are than we were 6 months ago, that's for damn sure. So excited about that. But the— when you talk about the revenue engine, you go into an organization, let's, let's kind of, you know, both that payroll network and maybe some of these non-industry specific ones, not, not payroll industry ones that you've gone into in the past. I mean, what are the core components of the revenue engine when you go in that you're looking at and you're going, hey, here are the, here are the 3 main drivers. Is that brand? Is that the sales team? Is that the digital presence? Like, what are those key components? What are you looking for?

Yeah. Well, and regardless of revenue team, it's data, people, and processes. So those are the 3 layers I always look at. Data, people, and processes. Data is going to be tied to the tech stack. So we have data and we've already dug into that and the tech stack, and then we have the people. So one, and in We don't have humans being a part of the delivery of their role. It's so close. Make people one of the top 3 because people are unpredictable and, you know, they're expensive and they're make or break to a lot of the revenue engines. And a lot of times where underperformance comes from is because of there's lack of clarity on their role, lack of accountability, and they're not in alignment with the vision of the company. So it's vision, clarity, and alignment are key for those people. I've seen a lot of of job descriptions that are very outdated. That, like, specifically with a marketer, you know, the digital transformation that occurred in marketing was massive. There are a lot of marketers out there that are very well trained in traditional marketing methods, especially heavy on like the PR comms side, but really don't know much about digital marketing. And, you know, that's unfortunate if that's your person that's leading the charge, because where's the strategic direction and the planning going to come from on the digital side. And so I've, I have mixed feelings about this because I can talk out of both sides of my mouth. I get it and I understand it. And if somebody locked me in a room and said, you have to do this and can't come out until you do it, I could figure it out and I could make it happen. Like, I know enough as a revenue leader, as a chief revenue officer, like I could do it. But my head of marketing I'm working with right now, is such a technical revenue marketer that, I mean, she'll do circles around me, what she knows from a digital marketing standpoint and just activation and campaign architecture and more of the programmatic advertising side. And it's just so impressive. And it's like, okay, so as a leader, if that's not your strength, can you just get away, like maybe you're better on the PR comms side or brand strategy side as a marketing leader. Can you get away with with just hiring an unbelievable digital marketer. Well, how do you know what good looks like? How do you hold them accountable? How do you know how to log into Semrush or Moz or any of those backend SEO tools or Google Search Console or read your marketing attribution reports in HubSpot? How do you like— because oftentimes what happens is you've got these great marketing heads who like may just not be real technical, so they hire those people, but then You're only as good as that person and like, where's the bar? So then you go in and audit it and you're like, well, I know you really like this person, but they actually were mediocre at best. And you've— this is where you've left all this on the table. So it's one of those, when you look at the people component, a lot of times we're unclear on job descriptions, we're unclear on responsibilities, we're not tying it to a greater vision, and we don't have the accountability metric. We're not describing what good looks like. And then especially in anything other than a sales position, where most leaders don't hold people accountable to performance the way that we would a salesperson, because it's not as easy to see or interpret. So when we look at the people layer, it's critical. You hear the thing, right? People, right seats. But like, yeah, I mean, that's like a really great phrase, but you've got to look at the seat first and dig in at the most granular level of what is the seat actually, and then do we have the right person in that seat? And then what do you do as things evolve over time? Because I think that's an Achilles heel of a lot of companies, especially those that are very very team, community, and family oriented is how do you move someone out of a role when they're no longer a fit for it because the role evolved past their ability to be a top performer. And I think that's probably one of the hardest conversations that employers face. And so, they start adapting the role to get the person into it, and then the seat suffers, and then the whole revenue engine suffers. So, there's that people component is super critical. And then after that would be processes. And we talked about that a lot too, is just understanding. I mean, it's the trifecta, it's the three-legged stool. You have to have all three of them. So data, people, and processes are critical. But then yes, as a part of holistic revenue scale, you have to start with branding and brand strategy. You got to get into marketing, sales, customer success, but before you can even launch on those, you got to go to your product and service. And that's what leans into the go-to-market strategy. I mean, you have to go as far upstream as possible because if your product and service is is not something people want or willing to spend money on anymore, or it solves the pain, problems, and challenges, or maybe you've been surpassed by a new competitor or an old competitor in the marketplace that just launched new technology. There's so much complexity in what it means to actually grow or scale a company. And when you're looking at revenue operations and holistic revenue scale, it's not easy. I mean, that's why it costs so much money to have experts in there, and it's why it's a trillion-dollar industry or whatever it is. And that's why anybody who claims to be successful working in the field of revenue is always going to have a pipeline of business. But the thing is, you know, that poor buyer that's buying revenue services, like, are they just gonna be hopping from agency to agency, from consultant to consultant, and internally new hire to new hire to new hire? Like, it is a very, very complex undertaking.

Yeah, it's funny, you had me at the start there. Somebody— I— we had an opening, a marketing opening recently, and, and somebody referred me this individual, and she's like, she is going to level up your marketing. Like, you're gonna love her, she's amazing. And then I'm looking through her, her history, her experience, and I'm not going to pigeonhole this lady. I didn't even talk to her, to be quite honest. But it was, it was a lot of the traditional marketing, as I, I call it, the same exact thing, the traditional marketing. Like, oh, she made a trifold brochure that was really nice for our, our, you know, conference we're going to coming up. And oh, she ordered the donuts that, you know, the, the salespeople brought out to the, to the, bring to the partners. And, you know, There's digital is everything now. If you can't attribute where your leads are coming from, if you can't understand what's moving the needle as it relates to your brand and to your marketing and do that with specific data, then you're already behind. And that's a very easy thing to, like you said, you can get into it, you can tiptoe into it and you're going to evolve and move past it. I mean, we're, we're with that right now as an organization that we're kind of moving past. Like we've had some decent marketing, like systems and processes in place, but we're just outgrowing them a little bit and we've got to have a tighter attribution to our revenue. Um, all right, so one other thing, a couple of things here, we're coming up on time, but so you spoke at the IPPA Summit, you did a tremendous job as always, um, on the— you were on a panel with Lee and Andy and a gentleman from UKG, I don't know his name, but one of the things you said that, that jumped out at me, um, that I wanted to touch on is you talked about hiring world-class sales talent. If you want to hire world-class sales talent, or any talent for that matter, I'll leave that open. You mentioned having to have world-class tools and infrastructure in place before you can hire them, because the real A-players aren't going to come somewhere that doesn't have the infrastructure and tools in place. What are some of the key elements of having that infrastructure in place, particularly on the sales and revenue generation side?

Okay, I am fresh in recruiting because we have doubled the size of to my sales team in the last 30 days. And as a part of those recruiting conversations, I want senior HCM sales consultants, which means they've been selling for 5+ years. These are people not afraid to sell above $500,000-$600,000 as a baseline. They're happy to sell $1 million a year. I've done that before in various roles, and they are a whole different breed in caliber. And I think of all the sales recruiting that I got to play in with House of House of Revenue. Over 5 years, we recruited hundreds of reps and other revenue roles, and it was the common theme every time. These small payroll company owners— and we worked at House of Revenue, worked with other types of companies too. It wasn't just payroll, but all different types of industries. They have these small no-name companies, and, you know, they had no brand recognition, an outdated website, a pixelated logo. Trying to think, like, you know, they don't— their last About Us page that they was 7 years ago and it has like really old stock photography and too much text on the page. They don't invest in digital marketing. You know, the last time they posted on LinkedIn was in 2018. And I mean, I'm like, the comp plan is super like variable heavy. It's a low base salary. The owner doesn't want them working inbound leads. They think they should just go hunt for everything, but they're not even willing to reimburse them for Sales Navigator. Navigator. The database is really old. They imported a few lists from a couple trade shows they did over the last 10 years. So there's some contacts in there, but they need to be worked. But that's what you pay a salesperson for, right? On their base salary is to work outdated, stale data and drive their own pipeline. You know, they're just not willing to invest in technology and enablement resources in marketing and lead generation. Those companies are so common, yet they want that top 10 rep. And it was probably the number one conversation that I had over the last 5 and a half years was, your expectations are misaligned with what you're going to market with. A lot of concerns on the high-performing, high-caliber salesperson side is, this is my brand, my reputation, my Rolodex, my network. My network will follow me wherever I go. But what they'll do is they test the waters with their new employer before they open up the floodgates to their network. And then that makes the employer really unhappy because they're like, well, they said they have this huge rolodex, and maybe some of that was overselling, but real high-caliber good reps, they do withhold until they're confirmed. So then you think about what does the service actually look like when they get in there? What does implementation actually look like? What is the NPS score? How do they survey their clients? How do they ensure retention and that their problems are solved? How knowledgeable are the service people? How quickly is the time to resolution on support calls and tickets and the retention rate and all those things? Because the salespeople, the good ones, they care about that stuff. You know, another thing that they care about, has there been a sales rep in there before them that actually succeeded? So a lot of times these, and this is one of the most commonly asked questions on LinkedIn right now. I'm kind of a LinkedIn junkie in the newsfeed and follow a lot a fair amount of people and influencers or whatever in the head of sales space and the CRO space. And one of the biggest gripes from salespeople is that they're actually starting to ask, what is the actual percentage quota attainment? So you're telling me it's an $85,000 base and it's a $250,000 OTE. What percentage of your reps hit the $250,000? And when you find out that nobody has hit that plan, or that 7% of reps are hitting the number and There are some crazy numbers out there. So there's like, RepView is a tool for salespeople to go to see self-reported, like how it's like Glassdoor on steroids. Like, what is the base salary? What is the comp plan? It's built for salespeople. It's amazing to see how successful reps can actually be inside of a company. All of this conversation that I just rattled off is not being had. It's the owner of the company is like, I'm ready to grow a sales team. I want those A-players, I want those top 10 reps. Well, they don't want to be with you. Like, are you willing to pay a 6-figure base? Are you willing to hire a digital marketer? Are you willing to invest in brand building activities? Are you willing to have the tech stack that is going to bring efficiency into their pipeline building and closing process? Are you going to give them a fair and equitable comp plan where you're not going to be like, well, you don't get commission on that because that's a lead that we had for 2 years? I mean, owners do that stuff all the time. I can't tell I can tell you how many— I have a saved message from a sales rep I recruited to work for a private small payroll company on the East Coast back in 2021, 2020, sorry, 2020, maybe even 2019. I take that back, 2019. I have a saved message that documents the amount of a commission that was withheld because those prospects had a prior relationship with the owner. And I'm like, nowhere in the complaint, but like people do this. Stuff. And that was a top rep that we had recruited, someone used to selling about $1 million a year, making about $400,000. And he just said, see you later, pulled his contacts out of there and said, peace out, I'm not working for this joker. And like, that's the stuff that people need to take into consideration and really understand. I'm a former top sales rep. I will always be a sales rep advocate because it's hard to be taken seriously as a top performer because a lot of people see sales reps and they just see like BS, right? Like, that's just who we are. But there are some really good ones out there. And I think if you want them, you have to honor them.

I was going to start with my snapping up here of agreement. That's how we like to, you know, the snaps of agreement. The man, so much great stuff in there. And the— all right, listen, so whoever's editing this, go ahead and insert our acquisitions commercial right after that, because if that described you, Mr. Payroll Bureau owner, I will acquire your company right now so you don't have to go out and acquire that top talent. No, so the shameless plug in there. No, so So I love that. I love everything about that. And to your point, like the, you know, that's the number one thing I see all the time. And it's really hard as an owner to battle too, is like, yo man, I just got this hot lead. It's a friend of mine who's gonna do business with us anyway. Like, do I work it so that I don't have to pay you commission, which is an easy mindset trap to fall into. Or do I give it to you because I can give you a fully baked lead that's gonna do business with us no matter what and give you some free commissions so that you can feel good get a win under your belt, get your commissions rolling. Like, that's the way to do it. You want to keep these people, not drive them away because you're being so damn selfish trying to hold back every deal from them. Um, so I love that. All right, I know we're coming up. I want to be conscious of your time. I've got two— you can rapid-fire these, uh, um, if you'd like. So first, you've got a book coming out, or well, two books, I guess, according to, uh, something I saw somewhere in all, all of your Why? Why are you making a book?

Yeah, Forbes reached out to me, otherwise I wouldn't be doing it. I actually started working on the book in 2020 with a pretty famous sales author, and it was a really interesting experience. But the way he wanted the book positioned was to tell my story about the path to number one sales rep, and it really made me come across like a hard ass, and I'm just, I'm not that person. And I was a number one sales rep, but I also was a monster during that time, and I wasn't very kind to people, and I don't think I didn't want to tell that story. He had me lined up with a pretty big name publisher and they wanted to edit out all the personal aspects of my story and really just have this playbook. And I thought, if my name is going to be on this, this isn't the story I want to tell. So I took it off, out of process. And then Forbes reached out a year ago and they had seen me online and whatnot. And, you know, I'm a very open faith-based leader. I tell a lot about my testimony and my story. The redemption that's occurred in my life. And so I was shocked when I did my interviews with them, like, you know, I'm a Christian, right? Because some people think that's taboo to put that in mainstream. And they're like, no, we need more female authors and your story is incredible. And they really gave me the encouragement. So I recorded probably over 40 hours of my life story. And their writing team, my writer, his name is Alec, and he has just become a good friend. And he took all of my recordings and transcribed them and cleaned them up, made sure there weren't any holes and the storylines were consistent. Assistant, and he is my writer, and I am like indebted to him. He's so amazing. So the story, the first one is Destination Remarkable, Survive— oh my gosh, I can't even see the name of my book. It's called Destination Remarkable: Surviving the Dark Side of Success. Uh, really the underlying story in there is if you live for the world and you, and you thirst, um, for success and fame, money, recognition, you'll always be thirsty. And it's a really sad way to live your life. And there's so much more. You can be successful and you can do great things in this world, but there's a greater calling and purpose on our lives and ways to do that in Kingdom, while furthering the Kingdom. So I hope that people are inspired by that book and really challenge themselves to look in the mirror and how they're living and showing up. The second book is a little bit more business-focused. It is The Revenue Scaling Playbook. There is no published date on that yet. Destination Remarkable is coming coming out in September of '23. People can get on the waitlist now at marygrothy.com, which I'd love to see some more waitlist submissions come through on that. We'll do a bigger book campaign coming up, but that's for the first one. The second one, I mean, I have to write it. I haven't even started. So when we get there, I'll let you know.

That's awesome. And that was one of the original ways we got connected as being sort of open faith-based entrepreneurs and running in the same circle and then finally getting connected. It was just awesome to see you be so open with sharing your faith. And I will put that— I was— I, I, you know, the Christian in me wanted to put this more towards the beginning and like the, uh, you know, not bury the lead here at the end, and that it's okay to express your faith openly. And, you know, persecution may come, and maybe some people might not want to do business with you, which is literally nothing in comparison to like persecution that others have faced to further the faith and to further the, the, like you said, the kingdom and the real reason why we've been put on this earth. And So if you're open to having a conversation about Jesus and you'd like to, I'm happy to share my testimony with anybody listening to this. And, and if there's something that may be beneficial to you in your own walk with Christ, I'd love to have that conversation. And so I'm sure Mary would as well.

Oh yeah.

All right, we're right at time. I'm gonna ask you one last very loaded question, um, the— because it's the topic du jour, right, is AI. So where are you guys, if at all, leveraging AI, ChatGPT, any new tools in your current sales strategy?

Yeah, look, it may help with some writing. There's some cool tools out there that you can use when drafting a sales email that makes you sound really well put together. And I think that those have value. I think that, uh, a salesperson's first impression or continued impression, it's very important. I love using Grammarly with the restructuring of my sentences. Uh, there are tools like Jasper AI that'll really help with those outbound emails. There's a lot more Lavender AI and some other that will help write emails. And I think that that's really cool. AI used for blog content, website copy, articles, I'm not a fan of because it is going to be detected and your site will be penalized. And so I think staying true to writing those items from who you are. Now, one thing is you can have AI clean it up so you can write it and then like Grammarly, it can fix your sentence structure and make sure it flows really well. And the way you introduce new paragraphs paragraphs or topics, that in my opinion is okay. I think that's just more like automated copy editing. So from a sales and marketing side, those are the two ways. Now I do think like people have called BS on ChatGPT a lot because they're trying to do like research. Like they'll look up themselves, you know, who is Mary Grothy, and then it's like, I did not do that. Like, that is not me, you know. So if you think about as much that is about me on the internet, I mean, it's crazy, right? Searching my So if ChatGPT can't get it right of my real life story, like that's a problem. What are they saying wrong about? Like you're researching your prospect or, you know, whatever, getting that type of market information. So I think it's cool. I think that it's in its infancy. I think that certain people can leverage it for certain things that provide a lot of value. I'm proceeding with caution. I think it's very important that what we produce is coming from us, potentially validated or cleaned up through AI, but we shouldn't be starting with AI as the source. We should be starting with us as the source. Then on like on the technology side, you know, I know that iSolved is releasing AI features. There's a conversational virtual assistant which is super cool coming in, and I love stuff like that. I think that that is where AI can be leveraged heavily, so I think that that's pretty cool. But other than that, you know, it's like going to be seen everywhere in technology. Specifically to your question, sales and marketing, I am— that's my, my two cents. I know a lot of people really love it and they're like, oh, look how easy my job's going to be moving forward. I'm like, what?

Well, and I'll tell you, so if you want to kind of going back to, all right, I'll give you, it doesn't know everything about Mary Grothy. Like maybe, you know, the, some of the data models are only hitting a small percentage of the internet or, you know, it's not even hitting the internet, whatever. But let me, let me give you this one. So I tried putting in, so I coach baseball. Um, I tried putting in one of the hardest things to explain to kids is all of the different backups that need to occur. On every play. So I was like, by position, asking it for backups by position. It was wrong on like 75% of them. And these are things that are like super well documented, right? Baseball backups. Like, I mean, it's the type of thing that like, there's definitely enough data out there to easily pull that together. And again, I realize that, that it's only pulling from a pretty select thing. So, so yeah, make sure you're double-checking anything you're out there. And then the other thing I'll tell you, I see y'all on LinkedIn posting stuff that was obviously just written by ChatGPT because you could— you start— if you played with it enough, you know it's writing format and you're just copying and pasting the writing format that is clearly the way ChatGPT writes. At least mix it up a little bit and make it look like you wrote it. I know. All right, Mary, we're going to put links to all your stuff in the show notes. I'm so grateful for you taking some time to share with us today. We appreciate you a ton.

Thank you for having me.

Of course.