Full Throttle Leaders Podcast - Episode 1 with Amy Cook the CMO/Cofounder of Fullcast

All right, we have Dr. Amy Cook in the house from Fullcast. Why don't you tell us, uh, who you are, what you do, and why you decided to be my first guest on Full Throttle Leaders?

Well, it's an honor to be your first guest, Michael. Thank you so much. Uh, my name is Amy Cook. Um, I am a co-founder and CMO of Fullcast. At Fullcast, we help companies sell better sell more and sell faster. And we love being able to do it. We're a technology company. Sales performance management, go-to-market, revenue operations is the field that we're in. And we work with mid-market and enterprise teams.

And how long you been with them, Amy?

So we've been there since the beginning with a caveat. So Bala Balabaskaran was the original owner of Fulcast, and, um, 3 co-founders and I— Ryan Westwood, Isaac Westwood, and Lance Westwood— excuse me, Lance Evanson— bought, uh, the— we purchased Fulcast from Bala, and then Bala became one of the co-founders as well. So Fulcast 2.0 has been around for about 2 and a half years, and it's just a lot of fun, growing fast.

And speaking of growing fast, you made some really good acquisitions of EBST, ESPA, EBSTA.

Yeah, thank you.

And Copy.ai.

And Atrium. Atrium.

So why don't you give us what those 3 companies do and why was it, why was it a good reason to acquire them?

Absolutely. So our goal is to help companies have a full stack for sales performance management. And when we bought Fulcast, what it did was territories and quotas, and it's only one piece of what a sales performance management platform needs to be. So we acquired Commissionly for the incentive compensation technology. We acquired Atrium for the advanced analytics. We acquired Ebsta for the forecasting and deal intelligence, and we acquired CopyAI for their AI enterprise workflows. So now we have an AI-first AI native go-to-market platform.

And they all talk to each other or do you still working out the how they work?

Yes. So we, so we are in the process of finalizing the re-platforming on AI. So it's all one data source like you were, like you say.

And then the Fullcast name, how did that come about? Is that because of—

Fullcast was, yes, Fullcast was inherited. We loved the name. I love the the connotation of just kind of casting your net across all of sales performance and being able to pull in additional leads and additional revenue.

What, what was solving the problem before this? I mean, a lot of people when I was at, uh, Jobvite and SymphonyTel, I mean, they were doing a lot of this stuff manually and trying to figure out the territories and what the quotas were. It just seemed like mathematic person had to figure this out and it wasn't always fair to the salespeople or didn't make sense. Like what— this product causes a lot of less angst what you're doing.

Yeah, I really love what you said just now. So, um, the reason that Bala created Fullcast 1.0 is because he was the head of revenue operations at Salesforce and He spent, took him 1,500 spreadsheets, a team of 100 people, and 6 months to deliver the first ever on-budget, on-time territory groupings for Salesforce. And it was so laborious and so time-consuming, he thought there has got to be a better way than this. And so that's how the original Fullcast software was born. So it really does come out of a need, and you're absolutely right. Lo— it's like very slow, manual, frustrating process, um, without some of these tools and technologies that we have today.

It seems like that was either preactive or proactive, what they were doing before. Is yours more reactive during the, the, uh, the quarter to kind of make adjustments if it's not doing what you do?

Yes, in fact, um, I run the revenue operations for one large healthcare company, and they have been, uh, needing to redo the territories every 3, 4 weeks because they've had so many acquisitions coming in and new people coming in and out. And what it allows us to do is just have that, that database, and with the click of one button, realign territories based on your pipeline, your number of accounts, whatever you want to lean in on as your metric. And so it's just such a, such a powerful tool on the territory side. And then, you we've got all of the other pieces of it as well.

So how did people do this before? Because I was in sales, so I didn't get to see all the angst with the CRO, the CMO, the CEO, the founders. Like, yeah, how do you figure out what Michael Filato gets? What do you, Steve, get? What does Tom get? Um, what's fair? It just seemed like a kind of somewhat of a guess, and you're putting together numbers of what it could be with— this sounds like Moneyball for, for sales operations and revenue operations, where it's using AI and and digging into all the analytics of that particular company and figuring out what is it worth really versus what someone thinks it's worth.

You're absolutely right. And that is a huge piece of the puzzle, is the automation of it. Like you said, you and other sales leaders would be given a set of territories and you'd be like, wait, what gives? Why does this guy get way better territories than I do? And why is he going to crush his number and I'm going to have to, you know, like really really scrounge around for good leads. And so that this allows us to level the playing field and in an automated way, in a data-driven way, be able to equalize those territories. And if you, for example, if you're leaning in on pipeline, whereas normally you just go by geography, let's say you have 50 sales reps and you've got each one in a state. Well, clearly the person who has California has more to work with, right, than the person who's in North Dakota. And so what it allows you to do is leverage in those metrics and say, all right, where is our current pipeline coming from? 70% of it's coming from California, which means that we're going to realign those territories to be, you know, smaller pieces of California. And then other people have a larger map across the Midwest. Um, before that, it was very manual and people were guessing. If sometimes people would get too big of territories and then they would just cherry pick and they'd leave a whole lot of stuff uncaptured for sales for the company. Other times the territories were too small and they didn't have enough to work with. And so that led to a lot of morale problems with salespeople and a lot of them quit. And with 35% of salespeople turning over year over year today, and with 14% of salespeople doing 80% of the work, those are the most recent statistics. It's never been more important to get this right.

Are you seeing that this is also a way to kind of figure out where your ICP might be better? Because I mean, obviously sometimes doing this a different way you could, but this seems to also help other ancillary things that you've tried to figure out. Like, okay, we got all this work done for the, for the forecasting, but we also figured out that we should go with medical versus pharmaceutical just because of what the numbers are telling us in forecast. Is that helping?

100%. So what I've been doing is talking about Fullcast as the, what we call Fullcast Plan, which is the territory piece.

Yeah.

As what you're talking about now is getting more into the Fullcast Performance piece, which is the advanced analytics. And so what it does is it'll take your entire database, it'll take your Salesforce instance, it'll bring in unstructured data, conversational intelligence, and be able to pull it all together. And using AI, it will help you understand some of those things you're talking about, like, and it'll spit it out for you based on rep performance. John here, he is able to get 70% of the deals that he goes for, like his, his win rate is 70% when you have, uh, when he's talking to the VP. Now, if he's only talking to the director, his win rate's at 20%. So make sure that he gets up. So those are the kinds of analytics that it surfaces, and it will also surface things about ICP and industry. And all of those different types of metrics that we lean into in enterprise sales work.

Is Fullcast more for the executive team to look at what's going on, or is it— is there also modules for the sales team to go, here, I want to— when I'm calling on Susie, I want to understand all the things I should know. Is it also a pregame?

Yeah, thank you for asking. It is very much so. So Fullcast Plan is used by the revenue operations team and the CRO to give people their territories, right? So there's not a— it's mostly a back office function. EBSTA, which is Full Cast Revenue Intelligence.

Guy Rubin.

Guy Rubin, you know, Guy, he's amazing. And that is used for both back office and front office teams to be able to understand their deals. Same thing with Atrium's performance and full cast performance. Both of those are used by the revenue operations team in the back, but also have an output. And it's a direct, you know, off a direct access to the sales rep so they can look and see what they're doing well, not doing well, and how they can perform better. And then of course on the full cast pay on the commission side, the reps are looking at their commissions daily to be able to see, you know, where they're tracking on their pay. So in all of the areas, there is a front office and a back office component. It just depends on who's, um, it depends on, you know, what aspect people are using.

And who is your ideal customer profile? And do they have a Salesforce instance, a HubSpot instance? Are they ADP? Or, I mean, does it tie into, like, what do you tie into? What do you talk to the most? What is your average deal? What's your average Revenue per year per client?

Great questions. All of those are great questions. So, um, we tend to go up more enterprise, mid-market and enterprise is where we sit. We are able to service SMB customers, but if they are, if they really want that technology, it's on the higher end of SMB. But we are built very nicely for companies like Cloudflare, for example, and they have millions and millions of records that we have to process. And so we can do anything, you know, all the way up through the largest of the companies. We have— what were some of the other questions you asked besides ICP? Oh, technologies. We're Salesforce native. We also integrate with ServiceNow and HubSpot. Our copy AI piece is technology agnostic. It works with anyone and anything, which is great. And so we're very flexible and work with companies however they want to.

With ServiceNow, tell me a little bit about how that works, because obviously that's less of a CRM like Salesforce and more of a, if I remember correctly, yeah.

So it's a great Great question. So, um, they have a new CRM, uh, they're going very, very hard into CRM and going head-to-head against Salesforce. And they've, they've said that they want to take over Salesforce in the market. And, uh, I think that's a very ambitious and, and very interesting plan. And, um, anyway, we're here to service them as well.

Tell us about your journey, um, like what What's some things that you learned at a young age? Probably last year when you were 26.

You're the best, Michael.

Yeah. So, like, some things that you've learned, like, when you're the younger Amy.

Oh, yeah.

And then, like, what's two? Answer that one, then I got the next one for you.

All right. So a couple of the things that I've learned over time. Are number one, be as prepared as you possibly can because you're gonna have to rely on that preparation when you get questioned, when you get, you know, taken to task, when people, you know, question your abilities. I remember one time when I was in my early 20s, I was the marketing director for a large healthcare company. And this, we were on a, it was for nursing homes and the CEO. And again, I'm like, I'm young, maybe I was early 30s, but anyway, it was a long time ago. And he brought me up to the front of the room and every single one of the people I worked with at every single one of the skilled nursing buildings was there. And he pulls up some, like a flyer that I had done. And he's like, Amy, is this your flyer? And I was like, yes, it is. And he said, This is the worst marketing I have ever seen. And I cried. I was so devastated that my boss would like humiliate me in front of everyone that I worked with. And I quit right after that. And because I found a new job. But what I learned from that is you're going to have times where people are going to question you, when they're going to say that your work product is bad, when they're going to be political, and you have to rely on your preparation. And I knew I knew that my marketing was actually quite good, and I had a doctorate degree, and I had 20 years of experience. Well, I guess at the time I had probably 10 years of experience, but I had enough to know that I could, you know, dispute what that, that message, right? And so, you know, that kind of stuff just builds resilience, and you just have to, you know, pick yourself back up and realize everybody You know, not everybody's going to get you. Not everybody's going to like you, and you just have to—

Everybody likes you, Amy.

Come on. Oh, I wish.

You go to a conference with Amy, like, oh, Amy's awesome. I mean—

Oh, that's so nice.

Because I feel the same way.

Well, thank you. That's so kind of you. Thank you. But I would say that, you know, just building resilience is probably one of the most important skills that we can learn. And I hope that, you know, as my kids become adults and enter the workforce, that I can teach them that.

So yeah, I think, you know, from my background in sales or just being a black belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu, you lose, you learn. You can't learn from your mistakes or you can't learn from someone being a jerk, then you're, you're missing the point. 'Cause everything's gonna be hard at one point, everything's gonna be good. And the good times just make you realize that it's not gonna be always that way. 'Cause you always have, you have bad times too.

So yeah, I love that. So you're a black belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu, huh?

Yeah, I do that. And, uh, Muay Thai and wrestle. I was a wrestler. So yeah, I'm 55 and I've been 3 years of black belt in jiu-jitsu.

Wow, that's amazing. And also you can cut a rug. You're a good dancer, Michael.

And fun at parties. Amy challenged me to a dance-off at Silicon Slopes. I think she killed me.

I did not. You were awesome. That was a lot of fun. Yeah. What about you though? Like, what would you say you've learned? What are a couple of lessons that you've learned over the past years of being in sales?

I think as a sales guy that I was too eager to sell services and what we do, not care about what they do. So the biggest question I learned to ask on a first call is like, so Amy, you booked a time with me. What brought you to the table today? Like, what kind of— I got to talk to Michael today. And asking it that way versus, what keeps you up? What keeps you up at night, Amy? Don't trigger them and don't ask salesy questions that sound salesy. Just ask them about what they do and why they booked the call and about— make it personal. It's just like dating, you know, when people date, it's like get to know someone, ask them what they do, ask them about them. People like to talk about themselves. Then maybe ask them for coffee and then ask them on a date and then ask them on a cruise. Same thing, same thing on business. You can't— people like, if you pitch slap on email or LinkedIn, you're going to get kicked off those different platforms, so they're going to block you.

Yeah, that's right.

And I get so many messages on LinkedIn because I do LinkedIn automation, email automation, roundtables, masterminds. Is the one that works the best is, hey, we're doing a roundtable, we'd love you to be part of that. But we want you to be a special guest. But before that, why don't you book a time with me so I can understand what you do? Who's gonna— I get 15 meetings a day doing that. So that works really well. And then I started doing these podcasts because if you're executive and/or CISO, especially in the IT world, you're not going to get on a roundtable and talk about best practices unless you are the expert and you're going to talk in front of 500 people. So you got to really come up to what's important for them and then figure that out. The other thing is, is turn everything into a challenger sales in your mind. Like, like you just said, you solved the problem of what people were spending on. You spent 15 days to produce these, all these different documents, and now it's reactive versus proactive. So that's a, that could be a million dollar project 4 times a year, cutting up all the different operations stuff where you could be— maybe it's $60,000 a year for the software, I don't know. But you turn into, this is what you're paying now, and just be more of an educational approach versus a sales approach.

Yeah, I really, I really like what you said there. Um, when I, I used to run a marketing agency, I founded and ran it for 15 years, and I was the person who did all the selling as well.

Okay.

And so What I learned from selling all those contracts was that people wanted me to be their chief problem solver officer. They didn't want me to be a chief sales officer or chief marketing officer. They wanted me to just fix their problems and help them grow. And that's one thing I did learn really easily. Um, and very quickly was that the only value that I can really bring is to help them solve their problems. And so I focused on that. So I love what you just said just now.

Thank you. Yeah, I mean, people hire Full Throttle for a lot of leads, not just because the tech that we do, but what's the ideas that I come up with. We're a small company. Or who are your people servicing your client success team? Are they trying to sell product? Are they trying to solve a problem? Are they trying to implement? Or are they listening and trying to figure out how I can help them?

Mm-hmm. Well, just from being a happy client of yours, one thing that I really like about the way that you approach things is it's, it's very much like an A/B test mentality. It's like, let's try this, and if this doesn't work, let's try this, and, and you keep going, and you're very resilient— back to resilient— and you make sure that we get a great outcome and we get great value. And knowing that you are— that is your highest priority. So we get great value from it. It makes me want to work with you again and again. So I appreciate that a lot.

I just think there's a lot of people that rest on, especially in software, is the software working? No, the person that is the, the, uh, client success person or whoever's handling the account, that's going to be their main reason why they come back. I mean, the tech has to work, but if you're not helping them solve the problem— I learned that early on with Full Throttle. Like, I'm an automation company. I'm not your marketing team on this. And like, I was too boxed into like, I'm just going to be a FedEx and deliver it because that's— I'm not going to be this whole market. No, I need to figure out, be consultative, whether it takes more human time than I want to, because it's— if I want a repeatable and scalable service, means that they need to come back. And there's a lot of turnover in this space. That you're— how good were you the last 3 months? I'm like, how good was an SDR team? Most of the time they're not. I mean, you guys just got rid of your whole SDR team because you're finding that— is there better ways of getting leads that are, that are sales quality leads? So tell us a little bit of like what, what, what happened there real quickly about the whole like top of funnel approach for you guys.

Well, we actually didn't get rid of our whole inside sales team.

Okay.

No, but we recalibrated some things for sure. right? So, um, the way that we convert leads is a little bit different. The way that we, um, go to market is a little bit different. The way that we, um, the way that we try to leverage AI is also different. And so it's more like, from my perspective, I don't believe that, um, humanless SDRs possible or even advisable. I don't, I don't believe that. What I believe is that AI assists are necessary and that we're using it to promote people to be more effective, but that people want to sell to people, people want to buy from people, people want to have relationships with other people. And so, and that's the, the, the AI, um, workflows that we're building are designed to make humans more effective. And I think that that's an important distinction.

Yeah, I think that's what I tell people with the whole SDR approach is don't get rid of them, retest them to human behavior.

Yeah, I totally agree.

Pressing buttons all day and making 22,000 phone calls, they're gonna burn out. But if you have them solving problems and learn how to be a better salesperson so they can be more of a hybrid versus a typical SDR have, you know, use the AI to assist them, not to take over their job, but also you might have, might need less lead gen people and more solutions folks that are in between an SDR and an AE and they're trying to get their career going.

Yeah, totally agree.

Well, um, I guess I'll leave it at one more question and we'll wrap it up. What's one thing in the last 60 days that you learned that was amazing Or one thing that you're like, I'll never do that again.

Oh, wow. That's interesting. One thing that I learned that was amazing is that I can probably quadruple my effectiveness with AI. I have been really diving into AI tools. One of them is Copy AI that we have, but also Gemini, also ChatGPT. And the ability to, you know, really expand your productivity with AI is absolutely fantastic. And in marketing, I've been able to use it to extend my capabilities personally a lot. One thing I'll never do again is I will never— ooh, what will I never do again that I've learned in the past 60 days?

Or it could be 6 months.

Or 6 months. Let me think. I will never not use AI.

Give us a way to get a hold of you, Amy.

All right. Well, thank you. I'm available on LinkedIn. My profile is Amy Osman Cook, and my email is amy@fullcast.com.

Well, thank you, Amy. I'm gonna basically give you guys a little bit of our sponsor today, a little video for them. It happens to be Full Throttle Fulotta Leads. I don't know how they got in here, but that's my company. I'm Michael Fulotta, the founder of Full Throttle Fulotta Leads. I'll be doing these, um, I do roundtables and I do these podcasts to try to help build top of funnel for people, obviously get to learn and get deeper into someone's psyche of what they do and why they do it. So thank you for listening today. I'm going to let this go for the next 15, 20 seconds, and then we want to thank Amy for being our first guest. Thank you, Amy.

Thanks so much.