Full Throttle Leaders Podcast- Steve Goldberg

All right. Welcome, everybody. This is episode 7 of Full Throttle Leaders with Michael Falato. I'm the CEO and founder of Full Throttle Full Auto Leads, basically an automation company for lead gen. And today we got Steve Goldberg, who is a diehard CRO from Austin, Texas. Steve, why don't you tell us like what kind of grabbed your attention to even do this round, uh, podcast today?

Yeah, I mean, so I've always been on the go-to-market side. I've been, you know, running, you know, big teams and building and growing, you know, organizations. And I haven't had the time to just ever take a breath and really, you know, do these types of conversations. That I can spend the time really understanding what's happening in the market. I think we're going through a massive market shift right now. And what I'm seeing, I think this is like a tectonic shift of what's happening. And I love to talk to, you know, people that are part of that and they identify that and they see how the market is shifting and, you know, want to be part of it because, you know, years ago we went through this shift where it was from client-server to the cloud. And when I was at Salesforce, we experienced that. And when I was— I got to Salesforce when we were just going public and I was one of the founding salespeople in the field. We were building out an enterprise motion and I had the world as my oyster pretty much. We had, you know, a lot of, you know, lots of opportunity. But what made us unique there was that, you know, we really turned our architecture and our value prop and we helped our customers figure out how to be more agile and more flexible. And when we were competing with a lot of these big companies out in the market that were entrenched in these organizations but not adding enough value to their customer base. So we had to design a sales process and a go-to-market process to, to show them how to do it, but then also explain to them how we're gonna make them successful and get to the business outcomes. Mm-hmm. And we were competing with these development companies too, like the.NETs of the world that the IT teams were building. And I fast forward that to today's world, I think this is a bigger shift than that as companies are now, you know, you're seeing a lot of companies that are start off with the gener— you know, GenAI, now it's agentic AI, and they're competing against like these bigger players out there. And the bigger players are trying to figure out how to change their pricing models and they're trying to, you know, change their, their business models. And then you have a lot of upstarts that are also, you know, going for market share. And I think that this shift happening right now will be like a once in a lifetime shift. And so I love talking to people and talking about these things with people that are like-minded. And that's what kind of grabbed my attention for this.

Awesome. I got a question for Salesforce. I was always told through my 30 years of selling that Salesforce kind of invented the SDR role, that people were selling all from A to Z and Salesforce was like, why don't we have people out there hunting? For the sellers. Is that true?

I don't know if they, they invested. I think they, they invest— invented the customer success manager role. Um, I don't believe— I think what they, what they figured out how to invent was they figured out how to invent, you know, more of the top of the funnel and outbound, true outbound motion. And an SDR role was, was part of that. And the way you do SDRs in like an enterprise versus commercial, I think that they were the ones that adapted a different approach and made it more personalized than like, let's go call everyone and let's go spray and pray. What they invented was you've got to be much more personal in your approach, and you've got to be able to reach people and do the right level of discovery versus just, you know, let's just send out a bunch of emails, make a bunch of phone calls, and just hope somebody picks up and answers. Yeah.

What's your, what's your favorite, uh, new tech toy now that you've learned in as a CRO?

So when I was a CRO, I depended a lot on my RevOps team to do a lot of work, and I was deep into the data. I was really deep into like understanding like pipeline conversion rates and what are the leading indicators around win rates and productivity metrics. And, and I would meet with a RevOps person every morning at 9:30, and I would look at all the data out there. And what I'm finding now as, as I step back a bit, is there's some pretty interesting technologies that will do a lot of that work. Like, like products— like, I'm starting to work quite a bit with Claude Cowork. I mean, what you can build and design with Claude Cowork is, is going to be transformational, I think. And like, the type of like workflows and, and autonomous agents that you can design around that is going to drive so much productivity out there. And it's someone like me who's a business user. I don't need to develop or code. And I can really build a lot of my logic that way and get automated data coming to me and also how I'm managing, you know, a lot of the meaningful tasks that I would do. So I'm just getting my hands on that and that's incredible. But, you know, as a CRO, you know, I think a lot of the technology out there, I think you've got to focus on the architecture and the foundation before you start to put all the right systems and process in place. And so, you know, once you get the architecture down, then you can start to design all the systems associated to that. It doesn't matter like what technology you use. If you've got a bad process, you're just going to get to an answer faster, which is the wrong answer.

Yeah. What's— what do you think has been the best KPIs or OKRs that you managed to be most important to you in your role, or just as a person that's been in technology most of its life?

You know, I, I think, uh, if you're running a business, you know, like, people talk about gross retention, which is if you've got 100% of your base, what percentage of that base is actually, um, renewing. I, I view net retention as a lot more important because If you, you look at gross, what percent of my base is renewing, but what percentage of my base is buying more products from me? And that means if they're buying more products from you, that means that you're, that means that you're, they're renewing. And, and so you got to look at those metrics and then you build your process around that. Are you trying to grow net retention or gross retention? And, and you want to build your processes around kind of what your growth levers are. And so, you know, from a KPI standpoint, I really— the hardest part to figure out, and I haven't really cracked this, is how do you figure out what the sentiment is? What are the behaviors? Like, you know, you start out with all this pipeline at the beginning of the quarter and everyone tries to drive you to pipeline. But then as you kind of get through the quarter and into the quarter, stuff just falls out. But why does that fall out? Like, it doesn't just fall out. I mean, like, what are the sentiments? What are the behaviors? What are the things that are not happening? That you don't know about. And, and so I always like to find the tools that can dig into the data to show me behavioral sentiment data, because as a CRO, it's really hard to get the sentiment. You can get objective data, but you're not in all the conversations. You don't see actually what's happening. People move things around a bit, and, and I think a lot of people hide things.

I think the call sentiment When I was at Jobvite, the Gong, the first Gong of the world, that was kind of a big thing. Like they can pinpoint what you're saying, what the sentiment was. I mean, it's obviously much more than it is now, just like the Fireflies solution. But I mean, to try to pinpoint, unless you're on a call with a rep, what's going on, whether it's customer success with a client or sales with a new net new logo. That was kind of hard.

Well, it's hard because, I mean, if you got a team that's always on the, you know, that's sitting in their office and they're talking to customers in their office, that's one thing. But you have people that are in the field, they're out in front of customers, and, you know, it's hard to find that sentiment unless they're recording their meetings. And, and so, you know, it's— that's the hardest part, is understanding the actual, you know, sentiment of what's happening. I mean, look, I've used all the all the forecasting tools and all the pipeline tools and all the analytics data and all the tools. And like, you know, ideally you want something that's going to be as flexible to use. Like, what doesn't work to me is, is when you have to modify your process to fit the systems you bought versus let your, let your processes design the systems. Yeah, those that are the most flexible. Because when you think about forecasting, for an example, The way you forecast at the beginning of the quarter is very different than how you forecast at the end of the quarter. So things change all the time. There's forecasting calls and then there's forecasting, and then there's managing the pipeline. I think you got to put as much scrutiny in the pipeline as you do in the forecast. But, you know, you need— I think too many of the systems out there today, they force you to adapt your processes into their systems, and that does have to change.

What, um, what was your favorite lesson you learned either from winning or losing?

The biggest lesson I learned is when you're starting to work with a— well, there's two things. When you're starting to work with a company, any company you jump into, like, I'm typically not the first CRO into a company. And so when I come into companies, there's a lot of people that the founders that have done really great things for the company. But then when the company changes, you have someone that does like a lot of different things and they're very well respected in the organization. In some cases, the, the founder CEO has these great relationships with a lot of the people and you end up creating your organizational structure sometimes around people, not around the strategy. And I made that mistake once. I, I should have pushed back harder and I was forced to try to change the go-to-market infrastructure around a person because the CEO and the founder wanted to keep that person. And then eventually that person left. And then all of a sudden now you have to like unwind that entire thing. Because when you make one change to an org, that's not just one change. You pull the onion back and there's a lot of other changes that you need to make. And I think a lot of people make that, make that problem, make that that they make that same mistake is they want to protect somebody. They don't want somebody to leave. So they build around them. They try to give them too much, him or her too much. And instead, you know, they build a process around a person and then you're not building a process around the customer. You're not building a process around your strategy. And unwinding that is really hard, number one. Number two is as a CRO, I always thought that I was, when I first got into my first CRO job, I thought it was like all about, like I had to be the best salesperson.

When was this?

This was when I was at— my first CRO job was when I was at Salesloft in 2020. And I was always running sales teams. And, you know, when, when you think about being, being a CRO is really you're the chief architect, you're the chief go-to-market architect, and you've gotta architect and design something. You gotta keep people— you wanna cultivate people from within. You wanna keep them motivated. You wanna— I love to create environments that people wanna win for each other. They wanna be part of a team. They want to win for you. They're maniacally focused on the customer and they're a high integrity culture. Like they do things because it's the right thing to do. They care about the outcome of a customer, what they're trying to achieve. And so, you know, stepping back from that for a second, I think where a lot of CROs make mistakes because I've made these too, is you've got to spend, you know, you got to spend enough time with the ELT and with the board as well to make sure that you're aligning with a strategy. And every company I come into, I always read this book called The First 90 Days by Michael Watkins. And it shows you how to— it's a STARS methodology. So, it shows you how to integrate into a company and understand the current situation. Are they a startup? Are they a turnaround? Are they a realigning success? Are they a sustaining success? And then you build your A priorities and B priorities and quick wins around that. And so many people come into a company and saying, I did this at this company, I'm going to do this here. I'm going to bring all the people over. I'm going to implement all the same processes. And you're at a totally different company with a different culture, with a different customer base. And you got to be really thoughtful about that. So you integrate in. And if you bring all the people in from places you've been and you have a culture that already exists, now you're creating a clash of cultures. So your job is you got to integrate those things together. The other big thing that's on my mind a lot is, so a lot of times as you're going through your annual operating plan for your next year, which typically starts in like October, August, September timeframe, if you're on a calendar or January 31st fiscal year, and the CEO and the board or the CFO is trying to say to you, okay, here's your plan. Most CROs just say, okay, Sure, it's my plan. And all of a sudden you're building a plan that's got like really just no math. You can make a CFO— can make it look like anything on a spreadsheet. So, you've got to really spend the time and use data to start to figure out, is that plan even realistic? So, you have to look at previous productivity metrics. You got to look at pipeline metrics. You got to look at street quota. You got to look at your hiring plan. You got to look at your conversion rates. You got to look at all that data. And you got to work with and partner with your CFO and your CEO and the board because the math needs to make sense. The math logic doesn't always work. Just because you grew 15% last year, you're going to go 30% this year. But what if you don't have enough street quote on the street? What if you're not enabling? What if your ramp times are slower?

What if something changes drastically like the price or the marketplace or the Right.

And so what happens is if you don't have those conversations and partner with your CFO, partner with your CFO and partner with your CEO, essentially as you get into next year, you're going to typically see 20% of people making the number and more people leaving. You're putting a ton of pressure on them. So you've got to have the math and then you got to build your processes around the data. And then you got to partner with your product team to build a bottoms-up forecast too. To map to the solutions you're going to bring to market and how that maps up against all this. So all those things to me need to add up. And I think in a lot of cases, the CFO builds a plan and the CRO takes it. And, and look, you never know exactly you're going to get to a plan, but I do think you got to be collaborative in that effort and partner in that effort. And like, and look, you got to figure out what makes the most sense for the business because of course you got to grow, of course you got to like improve your retention. But like, but I think it's important that like you're just both on the same page and you can stand up together and have a— you want to push each other, but you want to, you want to have a seat at the table versus just go off and sell.

Yeah, you're, you're bringing each other on the same canoe trip and rolling the same way versus here's what I, I'm gonna blame you if this doesn't work, or I'm gonna, you're gonna blame me versus let's come up with this together so we have mutual acceptance of what we're going to plan to do and buy.

I mean, look, most board meetings are 80% the CRO. But what about the product leader? Are they delivering the capabilities that they need to deliver to actually differentiate yourself and make your customers successful and help build the value prop? Are they held as much accountable as you are as the CRO? Yeah, I mean, look, any CRO out there that would be listening to this, you've been in all the board meetings. How much of that board meeting is focused on what the product team is delivering?

Or just the client success too side of things?

Yeah, I think that's—

well, happy, and you're ignoring them, or you get— you have poor response time, and they feel like the sales guy sold it, and now it's— now they don't give a crap. That's not good either.

Yeah, I mean, you got to do the math in a way and say, look, if— say that, say that I have 120% street quota on the street and I've got— and my, my win rates are, say, low, lower than the, than the market would say. And like, say they're like in the low teens. My conversion rates are also in the low teens, but I even have street quota on the market. And every year my productivity metrics are going down, then you got to say, okay, well, is it a productivity problem? Yeah, there's definitely sales execution issues in that process, but if they're that far off, there has to be a sentiment issue in the base. There's got to be something wrong with the customer base, and you've got to look at that data and figure out what's truly wrong and what's, what's actually creating the bleeding, and don't just put a Band-Aid over it. And I think a lot of people just put a Band-Aid over it because they're trying to put so much pressure on, on the, the revenue leaders and not enough effort into looking at what the product's actually delivering. Are they hitting the dates they said they're going to hit? What's in those dates? So as you're building your financial plan for the year, what is going to be the product roadmap that's going to help you support that plan? And the product team needs to partner with the CFO and with the CRO to ensure that they're very much aligned. And the CMO needs to be working very closely with them to build the right value positioning, to get the right personas out there, to get the right positioning out there. And there's this concept called the 9 blind people and the elephant. And I believe a CEO's job is to make sure that everybody knows it's an elephant. And then a lot of times they don't. Yeah. And a lot of times, like, you're looking at the elephant and you might think it's a zebra or a giraffe or a— I mean, a giraffe would be a little far-fetched, but if you think— but if you don't know if it's an elephant, You got people working off different pieces of paper and not coordinated. And I think that's the problem with a lot of companies is everybody does not know it's an elephant.

So tell me, I know that we talked a little bit before the, the recording about your background, where you've been. So if you can get a little bit of that, like what's your history and, and then what you're doing now, which is what we're talking about.

Yeah. Yeah. So my background is I've always grown up in high performance sales culture from Parametric Technologies. I started off as a recruiter before that for PTC, which was a high, you know, very intense sales organization to Siebel. And I spent 10 years at Salesforce when I was just— we were just moving into the cloud and we were just building out an enterprise. I'm sorry, we were just building out an enterprise sales team and primarily from inside Salesforce bought Siebel.

Is that what happened?

No, no, Oracle bought Siebel, but I was at Siebel and then I went to Salesforce. In fact, I walked away from a massive deal at Siebel, about $3.5 million deal. I walked away from that before it closed to go over to Salesforce. And Salesforce was a small company at that time that no one ever heard from. Siebel was the 800-pound gorilla at that point. And I got there in 2003 and I spent, you know, 10 years there, about 10 years. And, you know, I was running, I was doing the first deals at Dell, AT&T, and Walmart. And You know, we, we end up probably selling Dell at that point, um, you know, upwards of almost $100 million, $75 million to $100 million. AT&T, you know, very significant deals from totally white space deals. And but those were partnership deals, like those were relationship businesses. Those were like we were partnering with them, but we were showing them how to be more agile and more flexible and that they want to globalize a lot of their processes. And we were competing against like all the big players in the space. And so So then I was managing those teams and then, you know, after 10 years it was, it was time to go do something else. A lot of the people I had worked with were starting to do other things. And so I ended up going with the CRO of Salesforce to my next couple companies. And, and he's an incredible guy and a great mentor to me and one of the best people, such a great person. And we ended up going to these companies and, and so I, you know, I went with him and I like built, helped build the verticals at, at Yext. We're just going public there. And then from there, I went over to be the chief revenue officer of a company called Salesloft. We were about, you know, $50 million at the time, and we felt like we were in third place. And I ran the whole go-to-market. We ended up selling that to Vista in 2021, and I spent another couple of years there. And by the time I left, we were, you know, roughly around $250 million. And, you know, that was my entree into private equity. And then I ended up in very different going from— we can have a whole different podcast on the VC board versus a private equity board. And Vista was like a great entree into it because they come with a methodology, that's for sure. And I learned a lot there. And then I end up going to work for private equity after that because I wanted to understand how private equity works behind the board table. So it was— I loved it. It was a firm called Primera. They're incredible people. And I got involved in deals they were evaluating and brought them into the value creation team and sat on a board. I was a board observer a lot, so I played the role of liaison between the board and the ELT. And, you know, I brought a CRO community together and then I, you know, I was ready to go back and operate. So, I committed to do it for 1 year and then I ended up joining a company called PowerSchool as its chief revenue officer, about $750-800 million company growing what they shared was about 7-ish percent organically, going to do a bunch of M&A. But we had to transform the go-to-market because we needed to realign around a customer. We needed to build a government affairs team. We needed to change our compensation models. And we were just really not aligned around the customer. And so I came in with partnering with Bain Co to restructure and redesign the entire go-to-market. But at the, at the point of after a year, as we were going through that annual operating plan that I just shared with you, what was clear to me was the next few years was about restructuring the architecture of the product with negative growth. And that's just not my skill set. So I felt I left it in a better place. Like, kind of, you ever read the book The All Blacks by the, you know, the New Zealand rugby team where when you put the jersey on and when you take it away, you leave it in a better place? And I felt that I left PowerSchool in a better place implementing a lot of their sales processes and their go-to-market processes, that it was, it was at a good time to hand it off because that's not my skill set. My skill set is not sustaining negative growth. My skill set is around growth, and that's what gets me excited. So I stepped away from that, and for the first time in my life, doing something that I had no idea what I was going to do. Like, I looked at a lot of other roles, and I just didn't feel it was right for me to stand up in front of all these people at sales kickoff and tell them that they should be excited about something that I just didn't believe in. And so I thought it was the right time to pass it off.

And how long ago was that?

This was in January. This is January. Yeah. I mean, I walked away from a lot. Yeah.

2 or 3 clients now that you're doing.

Yeah. So, so, so now I stepped away from that and I wanted to get in the middle of where the market was going around this growth in agentic AI. And I picked up a couple of customers right now that I'm partnering with to help them redesign their go-to-market structure because go-to-market process, as I talked to you about at Salesforce, becomes the differentiator.

Yeah.

That product market fit, but you also have that go-to-market fit. And you've gotta help these customers get to the business outcomes they're signing up for because I've been in so many board meetings where the board's asking you, how are you using AI? And then the next conversation is, well, whatever you bought, what value is it creating for you? And if it's not, get rid of it and go find something that is. So if these companies, when you build your ideal customer profile, you've got to look at that as a lifetime value of a customer, not just getting a deal done because you, the second and third deal should be bigger than the first if you do right. But you got to solve business problems. You got to prove to them that you're solving these business problems every single day because if not, they're going to get rid of you. So, so many companies will be going like this. They're going to start going like this if they don't figure out how to make these customers get to the outcomes they agreed to. And so that's a big piece of what I'm focused on right now is helping these companies think through and implement a go-to-market end-to-end process that's going to show the customer what it's like and the business outcomes you're going to help them deliver in a presale cycle to show them what it's like to be a customer. And then in a post-sale cycle to deliver that value. And there are different roles and responsibilities, different compensation plans, different skill sets. And there's a lot of agentic AI process you can implement in there to drive much more efficiencies to improve your productivity metrics. And how do you build business cases and value creation levers early in the sales cycle and then deliver those? I'm spending my time doing that and having a blast.

And, um, so how do people get a hold of you? And what, what, and like, what, why do you want them to get a hold of you? You want them to, for you to help them build out something— it's like $5 million company?

Yeah, so I'm typically working with Series A through C. Okay. Right now, but I'm building my ideal customer profile as well because I also want to be really thoughtful and ensure that I can actually add value. And so I'm looking for places that you have a founder CEO who's more of a product person, engineering person.

Yeah, right.

Different— we have different skill sets. They have identified product market fit, like they've got a product, they got a niche, and they've got to figure out though how to take that and turn the product feature into a value prop and an outcome-based value prop. And also something that is— they want to be collaborative, they want to partner along this way. And with a board that's more of a venture capitalistic board, a VC-backed board than a private equity-backed board at this point, And, and, and I'm looking for those 3 pieces of it. And you could say, all right, if you have, if you have a great product and if you have a good product market fit and you have a CEO that's— me and the CEO have a different skill set, then that, that is the ad. That is really what I'm looking for. Because if my— the CEO is more of a CRO, then me and the CEO I just, yeah, we're bumping heads and I think a lot of companies are out there. Like if I was gonna go back to a CRO job, I would do it in a place that me and the CEO had a different skillset.

So how do they rate you? We're running out of time. I just wanna make sure.

Yeah. So, so Steve, my, I don't have a company name. I'm playing around with the name StrataArc because strata is foundational. I think it's architecture and arc is scale. And I'm more of a go-to-market engineer than I am just like an advisor and a consultant or a fractional CRO. I'm gonna help them architect and design. I'm going to help them build out their outbound motions too, which a lot of companies really do not know how to do to get more at-bats and then put the right infrastructure in there to go do that and build a bunch of their processes. And then you can start to layer on these capabilities. So it's my cell is 512-632-8387. My email is stevegoldberg4317@gmail.com and I'm on LinkedIn. But, you know, my wife told me the other day, it's like, my name is Steve Goldberg Consulting LLC. You got to change that. So I'm building out this infrastructure and I've signed a number of contracts right now, but I'm really trying to be thoughtful about the companies that I work with and ensuring that what they're trying to solve for, something I can really help them get to that outcome.

Yeah, I would definitely suggest you keep doing your own shingle. I got my name Full Throttle for a lot of leads from a Marine. I'm an Air Force veteran. He's a black belt in jiu-jitsu. So am I. He's like, you're full throttle all the time.

I'm like, I like it.

That's, that's who I am as a sales guy and jiu-jitsu. So that's how it's a long name, but it's me, so I get behind it, you know. So I really appreciate you making time for me today. Um, I'll— you'll see this on my channel for— on my YouTube channel, which I'll send to you and post on LinkedIn and YouTube. And then, uh, we'll definitely keep in touch. And please, anybody that's out there wants advice, this guy's brilliant. Feel free to reach out to me or Steve, and I'll get you in touch with them. Thank you, Steve.

All right, thanks.