E37: Jason Wolf on Uncovering Hidden Growth Opportunities in Go-To-Market

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

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Welcome to the show, everybody. Jason Wolfe is joining me, who is the president at FullStory, where he's been for the last year and a half. Uh, prior to FullStory, Jason was the CRO at Ping Identity for 3 years, from around $200 to $500 million and a very successful exit to Thoma Bravo. And Jason launched his career at Ariba, uh, joining around the $200 million mark, uh, spending 8 years across a whole bunch of roles, which he'll tell us a little bit about, eventually being acquired by SAP, where he stayed for another 8 years, eventually leaving as the global CRO for SAP Ariba and a $1.6 billion business unit. Did I get that right? Yeah, quite a ride. So welcome, Jason. Looking forward to this.

Hey, Kyle, thank you so much. Excited to be here. Really excited to, to, to, to work through this and, and, and have a little fun together. Yeah.

And so we're going to talk about, uh, finding new growth horizons. Um, it is a topic that is more relevant than ever as the world changes at an ever-increasing pace and companies, uh, can be built faster and easier. We can build product, uh, at a rate that was never imaginable. And between your experience at Ariba across a bunch of markets, a bunch of new products, segments, and what you're doing at FullStory and the Ping journey as well, we're going to talk through how revenue leaders can think about driving incremental step-change growth in their business. So not just adding reps and adding pipeline, but how do you find new segments, new markets, new product applications and really that different type of growth. And then we'll get into how do you make this all work across a bunch of different teams? Because I think alignment is a challenge that people struggle with. And so these are two topics that tuck in nicely. So really looking forward to it. But what did I miss on your background before we jump in as a bit of context setting?

Well, it was a gracious opening, so there's nothing really that you missed. I mean, I think my background it represents a desire to get into an organization, learn how to kind of exploit what they're great at, if you will, learning what that message is, what's meeting the market, but then exploring new growth vectors and growing as they grow and drive some rapid innovations. And so I'd say the thing I'm most excited about and some of the things, the opportunities I've had is And one, I've worked for great leaders and had great opportunities, but two, I've had a chance to kind of build some character around trying new things, identifying new things, and figuring out what glide paths work to kind of find those next exponential growth curves, right? And that's always, that's really where the fun is in this game.

Very cool. So let's just start by laying out the broad strokes for folks. Is there a mental map that people can use to think about, okay, where are the places I can go as a business in terms of incremental step-change growth opportunities?

Well, I don't have a perfect map. I wish I did, Kyle. We would probably be doing other things if we both knew that true answer. But I can give a perspective on what some techniques I've used. So I kind of put it into 3 buckets. First is I think you have to come to a clear definition of what growth means to you and to your organization. Then I think you have to understand trajectory and flows of trajectory. I think of that as like there's a 101 course, a 201 course, 301, 401, and then mastery. And then finally, it's kind of understanding this organic reality between external-driven factors and internal thinking. So let me start with the definition of growth. Really, I think it comes down to growth is typically defined by new capabilities. Or new markets, and sometimes both. Okay? So, you know, a new market could be a geography, it could be a new mind that matters in the, you know, the sequence of what your solutions do. But a market represents a new place to take the solutions that you have and drive growth. The capabilities are more about new things that they can do often to the existing minds that matter or personas that you serve, right? And so, Finding those both become very, very valuable and understanding that you're pursuing one or the other and sometimes both is really important. Okay. So how do you— let's take it to the second one, which was around trajectory. So, you know, I think as you build growth vectors, you always kind of have a core and principal thing that you're serving should be under— should be defined by a set of value that delivers something greater than the cost of the solution that you you serve for your customers. But you really have to find, to find that growth vector, you've got to start with, okay, what's the next step or the next person? Okay. So one of the things that we like to do is like look within an office. Who is at the top of the office that we own? Is it the CIO? Is it CHRO? Is it the CPO? Who is in that office? And then who are the lieutenants that they serve? And are there individual pockets, you know, depending on the, the if you're SMB or if you're enterprise, individual pockets that you can serve better. If you can serve them better, then you have to really start getting into, okay, for this particular role, for this particular person, do I need to have things like a unique screen? Do they have unique value levers? Do they have unique integrations that will matter more or less to them? And as you break that down, you learn to win in that, that kind of that specific C-suite spot, CIO, CHRO, CPO, et cetera. But then you also learn what matters to their lieutenants. I think that the third area I talked about, this balance between external drives and internal drives, super duper important. There's a concept we like to say is our stated truth versus our observed truths. Stated truths are what we want to believe. Observed truths are what are happening sometimes. And when it comes to building solutions or growing teams, growing markets, I think really getting an assessment of is this organic and driven from my customers? Are they taking me there? Or was this really a hunch that someone had that we're following? And I think you've got to force that union between what we think is great and what we think could be great and everyone else should do versus what, what pulls you there by the customer. And I think You know, you, you put, you blend those together, you have a nice little cocktail of, uh, of growth results.

Hmm. Interesting. And so I want to unpack these sort of one by one then.

Yeah.

Um, so then the, what does growth mean is new markets or capabilities. And so under new markets, you mentioned geos, potential new buyers in your existing customer base. Is that you? Is that where you would nest like new segments? You guys are going sort of mid-market to enterprise. Is that right? Is that a new markets thing or is that a new capabilities vector in your mind?

I think moving, you know, moving up or down market is usually around a particular persona. What's interesting is, you know, SMB or very small businesses, often it's pretty horizontal and people in companies do many roles. As you move upmarket, you end up with, you know, job specification that often doesn't relate back to an SMB solution. And that job specification, you have to really identify, hey, do you know, if I, if I pursue this, so if I believe that there's a, a new market here for a new persona within, say, the CIO suite or, you know, the, the chief product suite or even engineering suite, If I believe there's a new persona, so a new market I could go after, do I have this corresponding capabilities, screens, you know, integrations that'll make them valuable? Then you have to really tighten down on, is it meaningful enough for them, right? And that's really that blend of, I believe it is, you kind of follow your gut, and then you got to rapidly switch to data that says, yes, we're meeting that need. Yes, this can be an individual SKU as an example. Yes, this can be an individual screen that serves their particular purpose. As you move up market, right, you've got to, you have to hyper-serve those different roles, which often is really addressed or underpinned by capabilities.

Okay, makes a lot of sense. And so what does the decision-making framework look like? So most companies have a whole bunch of these options at any given time. And I think many companies struggle. They struggle because of reasoning by analogy. You know, they see other companies going upmarket, so they move upmarket, or they see their competitor adding a new capability, so they mimetically just sort of like think that that's what they need to do. But how do you, from first principles, think about, you know, understanding the full map of growth factors and identify where to start? Like, how would you advise somebody to think through all this?

Yeah, I think it's such a curious question. It's a tough one for all of us, right? You know, let me kind of link this back to, you know, my days with Ariba to kind of give you a story. You know, we started, you know, in a world that you probably never knew. Purchase orders and invoices used to be done on triplicate forms where you press really hard with a pen and that got passed around. And we're like, well, that's a terrible idea. So let's make that electronic. So we really focused on the workflow of making orders and invoices electronic. Seems easy enough. Reality is though, other people came into our market and cheaper and cheerfuller got, got, became a part of it. Other options started to, to arise. So then we had to think about, What can we do? Where do we go, right? Do we stay in procurement or do we start growing? And what we, what we found kind of in that, that path to growth was, you know, certainly looking at what the market was doing. We talked a lot to our customers. So we've done the e-procurement, but what precedes a purchase? Well, what preceded a purchase was this concept of category analysis and spend analysis. So we learned, oh, there's a different unit within these companies called sourcing, strategic sourcing. So then we, instead of trying to just make the procurement process cooler, we realized we needed to jump into another world that preceded that, the process we were owning at the, really at the transactional process. We needed to shift it to a strategic process. So we moved up to strategic sourcing, made an acquisition actually to to make that faster and better for us. And we learned about that upstream impact in managing spend. Then that started to turn the wheels of, gosh, if we know what someone's spend profile is, and by the way, if we know all their purchases and invoices, our data can generate a point of view on what should you expect as a buyer, what should you expect for savings, or as a seller for for margins. And we started to learn like, gosh, you know what we really have is we have intelligent, we have data that can become intelligent. And so then we started finding our path into a CIO office, a COO office around, say, helping customers assess where do they stand, right? Are they performing well? Are they not performing well? And so we grew there. And then we realized, gosh, downstream of a purchase order invoice, there's a concept of a payment. And a payment is inside of a treasury office. Brand new persona for us. We had no idea what we were doing clearly when we got started. But by the time we finished, we realized from the starting point at the strategic to the operational procurement into the payment processes, we were connecting dots that actually have to connect for every organization. So I think what we did is we let the business process and our customer feedback lead us as much as our our worry about our competitors. And it really helped us to continue to evolve the company, grow the company, but really help ultimately the office of the CFO save money, right? And I think just finding those principles of where your business processes, what the upstream processes are, where your downstream processes are, and where you have a right to win there is much better than just saying, oh, they're doing this, I need to go chase that. They're doing that, I need to go chase that. You really need to have a, you have to take the time to get a formal strategy around how you're going to address the market better and why someone uses your product, it will get more value than somewhere else. Does that help?

Yeah, a lot. And at the same time, you were going multi-geo and expanding in a bunch of other ways. Uh, and how much is too much when you're, because you lived in a whole bunch of different places. Yeah.

It's so interesting. I think the, the, the, the number one, so, um, it went, you know, in, in all these roles, I've had a global role in all, all the, the roles. Fortunately, I've been very lucky to have that. And with, you know, my early in my career, I had a chance to live and work in a lot of regions. So I lived in Europe, I lived in São Paulo, Brazil, I lived in Singapore. So, and then these were for 3, 4-year, 5-year stints. And it wasn't a micro experience, it was a real experience. My whole family came with me, right?

Yeah.

The learning there was, you know, it's not the United States of Europe, it's not the United States of Latin America, it's not the United States of Asia, right? I think the first thing I learned is that Ethnocentrism that can power a lot of companies does not apply in your local markets. So I think the first thing too much is thinking whatever template I have that's been working here, like for example, in the US is just going to apply to the next region. That's usually wrong. I think the first, so, you know, you can't just go run the same play. What you have to do is the first thing you want to do is you want to pause and look at the industry. What's the makeup? Who are the companies here who matters? Then you want to be hyper-intentional and specific at an industry level to go get your first 3 to 5 customers. Whatever it takes to get the customer, you develop them. You focus intently on building them as your local reference. Next thing I typically do, instead of making it too much, I make it very hyper-local. May have the same goals and value propositions of the global brand. but you got to substitute all the brand stuff that you get that's generic and frankly American, and you got to make it hyper-local. So getting hyper-local, what that does is it attracts teams and attracts companies because they want to be in that special limelight. The final thing I really— to avoid the too much, too fast concern is track the number of people that participate in a local community. At FullStory recently, we hosted an industry-specific event in collaboration with Google in London. We have a ton of customers in the gambling and gaming space. And it was, they've been accumulated over the last couple years, right? We took a hyperfocus to the industry and then we took a hyperfocus to those people in it and then we gave them a forum to share. And once you see them sharing, and delivering your message, which is often way better than we can as, you know, the individual companies, then you know that you've tapped into a good market, you've tapped into a local presence, and you've tapped into a sustainable, reliable customer that you're going to be able to drive, you know, long-term revenue from. And I think what that does for you is it allows you not to just try to apply templates, assume it's all going to work the exact same way, and it gives the local teams a sense of their own belonging, a sense of their own worth, a sense of their own, you know, kind of ownership of the company and the, uh, and the place that they live.

Got it. Um, I, I want to come back to the new markets strategy in more detail. I just want to go, go one level back up to this broader decision-making process. So you were going into new buyers in your, in your customer, going up upstream and downstream of your core product.

The core product. Yep.

While at the same time expanding geographically, what, what rough like revenue size or what was the staging? Did you take them on together or was that more sequential? Just, I'm trying to get a sense of like when and why you should be thinking about these different arenas.

Okay. So, I do think that you, you know, you're— it's very interesting just, you know, having a chance to have done this for quite a while. It's very— there's this expectation that this is, let's say it's an American or European or an Asian-based company. You always think like wherever home base is, is going to be the early adopters to things. I think once you've established a core team in a given market, they're often your early innovators, okay? And I think what, what the, the way to measure that is, make sure that if you're releasing new capabilities or new things, right, you can track it, right? So if you have a new product or you have a new segment you're going after, a new industry you're going after, right, it starts with hypothesis on what we think the growth is, hypothesis on how many customers we can acquire, and then measuring that over time, right? And it starts with the pipeline. Goes into the sale, goes into the implementation, goes into the renewal. But what I found that's kind of maybe counterintuitive is once you have the team established, the growth vector is often based on the newer things that you do, and it's often not from the home base. Because I think what happens in some of the regional markets is they treat, they often feel they're pretty far from the sun, if you will, in many cases. And they treat the customers in a more holistic way. And they like to be first. They like to be known as the first to achieve something. So what I found is, yeah, you got to do your analysis. You have to do your expectations. You have to establish goals that you have. But at the same time, don't be afraid to explore outside of home base, if you will, on anything new that you create. Hmm.

I've sold into Europe, never a little, like for a year into Asia, but my sense has always been those markets are fairly like fairly far behind, you know, in some of these in, you know, in one of these experiences 10 years ago, that market felt almost a decade behind. I think that gap has shrunk as the world has gotten more global, but you're, But are you saying that actually some of these non-core markets, these non-US markets were actually adopting some of the new solutions just as early?

They absolutely were. So we, and it was interesting because that's what I was saying, it's kind of counterintuitive. You'd think that that would be the last. I think depending on your life's experience there, you may think that's the slower, but like if you think mobile, for example, Asia is mobile, right?

Right.

Yeah. Yeah. Like America's behind that, what they do. The concept of a super app is mostly unknown. Owned in North America.

And so even digital payments in the US.

Digital payments. Exactly right. So you, you, I get it, totally understand it. But the, but what I've found in, in kind of doing this is it's also the mindset the leaders put into those, those teams. I think there are expectations that it's going to be slower, it's going to be a laggard. I think one of the things, one of my things I've done with most of the organizations is I talked to my Mayo leadership team and leaders and say like, I want you guys to be first. I want people other places to talk to you about you. Um, with the Asia-Pac team, I always talk about lead east to west. Make everyone else talk about what you're doing here with your customers by name before someone else. And it's amazing once you have a core to see how fast they grow. And I would say that the, the customer basis, if you're building something of value, the, the customer base likes to be the little bit known on that bleeding edge, just prove that they're better than someone else. And there's a little bit of like game theory and competition that can play in here that it surprises people. Um, I remember when I, uh, I took over Latin America, it was pretty small. It was like almost nothing. And we ended up being the second largest, uh, uh, you know, region, which didn't make any sense from a GDP standpoint.

Yeah.

But we were able to get there because these customers wanted to be recognized. They wanted to be in a community. They wanted to be seen as someone that was growing differently, different and faster and saving, in the case of Aruba, saving more money.

Very interesting. And who are you selling into in LATAM? It sounds like a pretty like horizontal product.

Yeah, so if I look at, It's definitely industry. So it's going to be— so the financial services and banking, uh, is massive there, but it's also like your, your mining companies are going to be big. Um, you're going to have large— government's massive down there too, but you'll have large, uh, retail. There's big retailers down in Latin America. So I think you, you have to figure out if you're going to go into any of these regions. The same with, with Asia, because there's going to be more of a manufacturing base. There's going to be logistics and, and, and supply chains that you need to contemplate. There's a lot of, lot of things made. Um, you really have to think about, does my product actually uniquely fit the people I want to go after with the largest TAM? Be really intentional on that, right? Do I start asset intensive? Do I start with, uh, mining and minerals? Do I start with financial services? So I look at, uh, the, the work that we're, we're doing with, with FullStory in Latin America, which we've grown this region significantly, uh, over the last and a half. It's really been a heavy focus on travel hospitality as well as, you know, financial services and insurance. And there's big companies down there, massive companies. But what I see, even with our solutions, a behavioral data platform, these people, they'll have, you know, 2, 3 million people accessing a site a day. They want to know when they're frustrated. They are also— I've got some of my best examples, my most innovative customers are in Latin America because they want to show that they can be first. They want to show how they can harness this data maybe different than others have. And there's this— I don't know, there's this grittiness that's amazing, Kyle, when you find that right customer that they just want to push through. They want to be on stage, if you will, in a real sense, to show I'm better than someone else. And we give them that. We tell them we want them to be there and it's amazing to watch them run towards that goal. Very cool.

And so, let's double-click into this new markets topic now. How do you go about markets? Actually, no, I want to go back one second. And so the timing, when did you go multi-product at Ariba versus when did you go multi-region? Do you think there's a correct staging for that generally, or is it all, is this context dependent? Like, just talk to me about timing and size and scale of some of these different things.

Look, I wish that I had a very clear answer on this because I think it's, it's often been a, it's been realistically relatively opportunistic to start. I actually think you have to have a pioneer's mindset to go into a new territory. And then you've got to be willing to assess or to go into a new capability. And you have to be able to be okay to assess it's bad or it's not so bad, or I'm going to double down. Okay. So I think there's a couple, there's a couple guidelines when going into a new market. I kind of think about, it's kind of what is that industry? We talked about that a little bit. What is the revenue that could be associated to that? Be careful not to get too close to what your ASPs are, et cetera, in, in a given geo. But what's the long-term revenue? What's the likely referenceability in that market? Will there be strong references? And then what's your company's willingness to spend money to invest in enough people to be successful? And each of those markets are different. What's required in Latin America, for example, is very different than what's required in Japan. Right. And, and those, those, those, those, those cost thresholds, they're tough. But I think going into the market, you have to say, I think you're best going into a market when you've got a couple of solutions versus just one. Okay. Because it gives you flexibility on where you can land and where you can get started. Then you can, if it's adjacent enough, then you can at least build from there. You've got a good growth vector versus just one product. So I think having multiple products actually helps quite a bit. But the decision to go, there's a bit of gut that goes into that, if I'm honest. And then it comes down to, you gotta attack it with data, right? At that point, once you go, you have to really attack it with data and be mindful it's not America if you're American, it's not Europe if you're a European company, it's not Asia if you're an Asian company. And like, you're gonna have to understand that there are nuances to those regions.

Yeah. And How extensive was the research before putting any dollars behind that market? Like, are you doing a 6-month market study and hiring consultants, or are you saying, hey, let's like toss a rep out there and, you know, get some feedback and see how they do. And if we close a customer, great. But like, what's the—

It depends on the size of the company, right? Bigger companies, you can put a ton of investment. You have, you kind of have research arms that'll do this. I think as you move down the chasm of revenue, you probably want to evaluate starting in a market simple and with partners. So I'm a big fan of finding an incubation partner to help you make those initial connections and then relying on them. Okay. Um, I don't think you have to start with 50 people or 20 people. I think you can start on a reasonable level. I think the choice of the partner is super important. Like what I observed at, full story was we maybe went super broad, all the partners, right? We had a lot, a lot of them. And what we realized was that's neat and maybe over time we're going to need a lot of them. So those relationships may pay off. But for us to start to penetrate the market, it did come down to a pretty direct union with a very few number of partners. Okay. And I think, I think the, you know, my CEO, myself, my CRO, they, we all are very connected to these partners that we're growing with. I'm committed to monthly meetings with them. I'm not worried about the market size. I'm more worried about the market growth. I want to show that there is direct personal involvement. And I really do leverage the partner to help us get in the door, stay in the door, and then I reward them. If they, you know, in many cases will bring a partner with implementation services to make these things a success. So it gives them some value back, right? And they can make some recurring revenue. But at the same time, I think you've got to be willing to say sticking someone on the ground and telling them go probably doesn't work. You need to, you need to connect them with a local presence as a local understanding that can get you in the local doors. And if you get, can't break into any doors, then you can you could probably cut out. You start breaking into a few doors and you're going to have to start working through that plan. But start simple. Don't start alone. Start with a partner. Choose a specific area, usually by industry, and choose a specific use case that you think is going to deliver more value than what they have today. Right. And that, that, that use case and that value point, you really need to understand, is it from a global, national, or is it more local tools? Are you replacing something that's similar to what you've replaced Rapport? Do you even know what you're replacing? You know, those are the things you really have to get into. And I think those first 5 customers, hopefully in the same industry, are probably your best indicator of success.

Got it. Okay. And so then when did Ariba go multi-region? When did FullStory go multi-region? Like what's like a rough, I know ARR range is, is tough to use as a rule of thumb, but like, what would you give another revenue leader as the rules of thumb by when they should be thinking about international? Because any of these things, like going too late, what's the— Jason Lemkin has a, has a great quote about, um, going multi-product. He's like, go too early and it's a distraction, go too late and growth stalls. And I think you can say that about going multi-product, multi-region, multi- anything. And so how do you think about that timing?

Yeah, I think it's, um, look, you, you have to have something, um, you have to have a commitment that it's going to work up front. It cannot be half in, you know. If you're going to go into another region, you have to have done your analysis. If you have 5 competitors there, don't go, right? Or go where they're not, right? Uh, you know, potentially. I think, I think that, I think, I think, I think you're sitting right. It's like if you go too late, you're going to be trying to catch up. You're hoping that they've had, you know, stalls. You go too early, like way too early, you know, that means you may have not done the right assessment that this product made sense for the market. You just made the assumption that, well, it was selling in North America, therefore it's going to sell in Australia. When do you do it? I think once you find that market fit in any market, That's your moment to start looking up. Okay. So, I mean, whether it's at $20 to $50 million, I think you got to start looking up when you get to the— you're starting to get some scale. That scale's probably been on a high growth curve. You're going to get some pressure to stay growing. If you're growing at $40, $50 million, there's a reason that you're growing. Let's figure out where we go next. And I would use GDP as your indicator. It's probably, uh, EMEA. Okay, and then it's going to be probably Latin America for proximity, possibly, but very specific partner-based. And then Asia if it's a North American company. And I think when you do those, right, you have to go in there with an intention of who are the people I put in the market? I typically like to lead with someone that's kind of a GM-style person that is going to look across the lifecycle of a customer. They're the sales leader ultimately. You definitely got to have a pre-sales consultant. If you're going to have enough customers, you better be ready to put support. You're going to have to have local support in, in those regions. But the sales, the pre-sales, and then an implementation person have to be ready to wear multiple hats. Okay, if you go in at least with those 3 plus a support person as you build enough customers, you're going to figure out, is this an expansion territory, as in I got into my first 10 or 15 customers and my growth is going to be predicated on additional solutions being sold. Or is this a land and expand territory? And then you're going to start going down the path of adding more AEs, adding a sales management layer and corresponding pre-sales layer. But I think that first crew that you send down there, having a seasoned pre-sales leader with a seasoned or person that's had an opportunity to be a GM that's end to end, that doesn't just think sales, but thinks about the implementation and renewal. That's going to make the difference, right? And they've got to be super pioneers. They have to be the people that are just nuts that, you know, you get on the phone with them in the morning, they're talking about it, they're in the shower, they're calling you like, dude, what are you doing? I hear the shower. You know, like, what do you do? I don't know. I came up with a great idea. You know, those are the— you got to— there are people like that that exist everywhere. And I think those are the people that you go for. They're pioneers, but they see systems. And I think that's how you kind of build it.

Okay. Interesting. And so roughly it's like, you know, $40, $50 million ARR as you start to think about like initial market, not saturation, because that's way too early to be saturated.

It's way too early. You're not saturated at that point, but you clearly have found something that's resonating, right? And you want to get into that another market that's, there's nothing the same, but yeah, yeah, you got it.

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Okay, cool. So, um, I want to move off of new geographies and move into product expansion. So you, you use the words new capabilities here to, to talk about it. So I want to hear about the role of go-to-market leadership in product innovation. I think this is something that a lot of companies struggle with is either there's way too much go-to-market leadership in product innovation and then your roadmap just ends up being whatever the biggest most recent customer, yeah, whatever your deal needs or there's not enough and then the product becomes disconnected from what's going to drive revenue. And so how do you think about the role of go-to-market leadership in product innovation, specifically like these new capabilities and new segments and opportunities?

I mean, frankly, Kyle, you nailed it. Like, I think what can happen is if it's too go-to-market led, it's too deal specific. If it's too product-led, it's too high-level. And so what's that right union? Number one, I think you want to— so a couple things that models I use for this moment. You really need a product organization that can think end-to-end and is really kind of can assess and build a long-term strategy. And what I've done is I've built I have special teams. So I don't know if you like the book Lead and Disrupt. You ever went into that?

I read this. No.

Okay. So what it talks about is this concept of ambidexterity. So the ability to write with your right hand and left hand at the same time. So as you build new products and you roll things out, you'll have the things that you know and that you can kind of put into a core structure. Like, You kind of have a good idea of what it costs to get a lead, what it costs to work it through the funnel, what it means to get that first meeting done, what a successful outcome is. Those kind of got— become kind of clear and routinized. But then you have these other things, these new products, new capabilities, and that's called the explore side. So you have kind of an exploit side and an explore side. What I've done at all of the companies I've been at is kind of built this. I've got the team focused on exploiting, which is really my sales engineering team connected to the product teams. And then we've got a team focus, kind of like our solution experts, if you will, that sit aside from that group and they work on the new product. And they are hyper— they're in the field. I have them in the field 50% of the time. They are taking what the product team is kind of trying to put out there and they are battle testing the living crap out of it. They just focus on that. It's super important. So the model I use is say, show, prove. So as organizations go into new territories, they'll say that they can do these great things, right? This is the puffy side of sales. It's the marketing glitz. So we got to say this. Then I have this team that backs up. So everything that we've said, Give me the vignette to show. And often there's gaps. Okay. That's okay. Fight through the gaps, figure out which ones matter, change or say. And then the prove is really the hard part, which is how do I build a turnkey reality to what we've just said? So if I'm going into a new dimension and new capabilities, I've got to say it, got to get it out there. I got to show it, got to be able to demo easy way to say it. I gotta be able to show it, and then I've gotta be able to prove it. Prove it is this concept of finding a verifiable result, not what we want it to be, but what a customer says. And so by putting a kind of set of specialists, solution engineers just on that explore territory, I work through that say, show, prove kind of paradigm really fast. And we also find out like, you know, many times you're not fully ready or you'll roll some of them, be like, oh my God, that was just awful. And it's okay. And you assess and adapt, right? CEO at FullStory's got a great language he uses with the organization. It's like our winning ways. And one of them is be brave. The other one is assess and adapt. So we want to fail if we need to. That's being brave. Okay. But assess and adapt on that. And we can shut things down or we just assess and adapt and improve it. Right. And I think It's very powerful, but you have to have the dexterity and willingness to set humans that are highly valuable to you testing and proving and getting customer verifiable results to make sure it works. Otherwise, what I've seen happen at organizations, it's where they go to die. It's where they, they, they go and say, well, we just need to go into this market. If we have 1,000 customers, uh, we're going to get 20% to adopt it. So that's, you know, 200 customers. Here's the price point I want. It's $100K. I've made it up, you know, and then, and then that becomes a baseline. You probably can't make that back of the napkin math example until you know it can do it, right? And so I think that's, that's that say-so prove model is a really effective way with the space to be hyper-focused on the new that will help companies It'll feel long, but it actually, it feels like it's harder, but it actually moves things way faster, way faster than assuming you're right.

Yeah. And this is after you've built product that's ready to take to market, or is this? No.

So, I mean, look, pin on size, right? So, you know, at a larger company, you have grace to say you're going to do things. And so you've already, especially if you've got a, you know, MPV ratio, like you can say bold things and then kind of be wrong. Okay. But as you move down market and you're trying to expand for the first time, I think it's okay to say things, but we try to do those in more of an EA style. I have a great product leader at FullStory. That really, really hyper-emphasizes early access.

Early, that's what EA means, okay.

EA, yeah, so we do it, so before we launch, we do a pretty long study on early access, okay? And this is where we'll pair the PMs with the solution experts and we kind of figure out, is it working, is it not working? And we have customers that also want to see growth too, usually, right? But we don't do like EA with like 2. We'll do it with like 20 or 30 customers or 40, sometimes 60. And what I think we, in that process, we're able to kind of work through this. Now, we didn't always have that principle. This is something our new product leader brought in. I'm super thrilled to work with her. Claire Fang is her name. And what Claire's brought in is this sense of, let's go test it before we overmarket it, right? And so Now, you know, when we're releasing new solutions, we have a depth that's greater than what it said on the PowerPoint. We have a testimonial that's greater than our own, which is a customer's.

Yeah.

We've got a value point that can be proven. And that's usually that union of that special kind of solution experience team and then the PMs getting to that point. But I think, I think as you grow your business, you want to start, you want to start with a model that looks a little bit more like that, not just throw something out out there and hope. Now look, that works too. There's plenty of companies that do it, but I just think as you're— I think the buyer, the way buyers buy, and the skepticism at a buyer level, and the need to produce more value on this, on SaaS companies, it— the algorithm to get through, you know, a purchase isn't have something cool. Yeah, it's, it's now you've got to, you got to you got to be ready to turnkey it and improve it pretty fast.

Right. That's a really interesting observation. I think, and I think it's oftentimes overlooked how different the market is today in the expectations of the customer and what's all there. And I know when we get into driving alignment, I want to get your thought on the the revenue algorithm and like what's going on with the market. 'Cause that, that's a clear, that's a good foundation. I want to ask two more questions here before we move on. Yeah, for sure. So the name of these super special solutions engineers, do you have like a title for those folks?

I mean, it's just a, we literally call them our specialists and And, and they are solution engineers by trade. They're specialists with, with specific focus areas. And we do a couple of things in that group. And, you know, we have a really great leader in this. He's very practical. So each of the specialists, I think we have 6 at the moment, they have very specific areas. They go, they go down to ones like for mobile, another one's for data, another one is for like building new products, another one is for integrations and middleware type work. So they've got very specific lanes of, of thought. The other thing that he has each of these members do is name an enemy. So if you're going to have a focus, you know, look, in the world that we're in, people are consolidating. So if we're going to have a focus area, let's not only have a new capability we're trying to roll out or a new product we're trying to roll out. Let's understand what that means in the technology landscape of a customer and who we could potentially replace. And what this does is it helps them think through, number one, it forces really better research on your competition. It forces them to be specific in where they're working. And it helps us get to kind of these, these, these we call starter kit moments where it's like a very, a much more turnkey experience when you engage with us, right? So we're a, At FullStory, it's an SMB company that's— what's really most of our business, frankly, now is enterprise. Over the last year, we've— I mean, it's all enterprise. A high percentage is enterprise. But we've been really shifting upmarket. And— but what that requires is the depth of expect— the expectations of those buyers, I think, are different than your SMB buyer who often occupies many roles. And at larger enterprise, they'll occupy less, if you will, role space and more deep space. And so what we've done is for the specialists, they're kind of learning those deep spaces. They're learning what other tools they may have. And I hate to say it like this, but they're naming that enemy and they're trying to figure out, do you really need that too? Why do you need that? Why don't you go with this? And I think that's a— it sounds a little off, but The reality is the world's kind of shrinking and that, you know, CIOs, CFOs are wanting less tech. So better know what you can serve and then what you can replace, right? And so we are very practical in that approach.

There's a lot of echoes here to one of my recent episodes with Hayden Stafford. He is the president at Seismic and was a longtime Microsoft guy. And one of the things that, you know, they, they sell true enterprise, like, uh, Fortune 500, really focused there. And as they went multi-product from sort of customer content automation, uh, to like this full enablement platform, they went really deep with the, the rep being a business generalist and somebody who understood value and could speak to the C-suite. And then adding specialization at the solutions engineering level. It sounds similar to what you're doing, having these specialists across—

That's right. And what we'll do is once, you know, not all of the things that we think are going to work, work. Once they start to take root, we'll have, then we'll take someone from the solution engineering side. That's the general day-to-day. They kind of major in the new product and then we pass it out and we go through a pretty hardcore enablement program to make sure that SEs, which are, you know, for our business and for a lot of businesses, they carry a lot of the ball, if you will, in customer conversations. We really try to do a really good job of like, you know, you start with one specific specialist, one specific, you know, person that everyone relies on initially. That develops the knowledge, develops the flows, develops the demos, develops the things that need to be fixed in the product. Then when we think we've got that quasi-right or right enough, then it starts to matriculate through the rest of the org. And I think choosing to have specifics versus expecting everybody to know everything, I think that's true. I think you've gotta, and I think also just at the AE level, that concept of being a technologist, if you're a technology, you know, company to having depth, knowing what you know, your counterparty, what their life is, you know, like there's a higher expectation that you are a student of the game that you're in, that you know what it's like to be them, that you've talked to them about how hard their QBRs, MBRs, and WBRs are. You know where you can fit in that process. Not all account executives want that, right? Not all solution engineers want that. But I think the world is saying, If you're in a specialized place, be a specialist. If you want to make an impact and actually get someone to move, you got to know their business, right? I think that expectation changed from, you know, a few years ago. I don't think you had to have that. I think you just needed to represent a product. Now you got to be pretty dang deep these days.

I agree with that.

Yeah.

And AI is just raising the bar so significantly. Even companies that don't have an agentic experience you can learn from. You can go into ChatGPT and get a full market map of an entire solution space, all the competitors, strengths and weaknesses, pricing. I recently did this. And it is incredible how much of the sales process is now so much more at your fingertips. I mean, we've been saying this for years and years, all the, you know, the buyer has never been more informed and there's all this information out there. And that was true, but it was oftentimes scattered across the internet and sort of difficult to get at. And now with deep research specifically, you know, it just delivered this entire report on this one market space and I knew everything about it going in. And so now, you know, I've never been the easiest guy to sell to, but like, I think sales leaders are like that. But now me going in armed with this, with so much more information, that's a nightmare situation for an account executive that's not all that well prepared.

And I think it's a nightmare situation or it's the reality. And I think it's really the reality. And so if you're an account executive, you have to really ask yourself, am I ready to dedicate to this trade? I don't think it's, do I want to sell for this company? You also need to start to evaluate, does this interest me? Do I want to be an expert in this space? Because who I'm going to be talking to on the other side, you know what, they now expect that. So you better like the space, you better have a natural curiosity for the space, and you should be willing to be reading about it like on your own, right? And I think, I think that, I think you're, you're, touching a nerve that maybe it's a nightmare or maybe it's just the reality. And I think, you know, we— I see this all the time. People that really dig deep, kind of learn the solutions, really kind of take the time to talk to the customer, not even about our product, but about their life, what it's like in their landscape of a day, right? I think what happens for a lot of software companies, people are so focused on their vacuum, they forget that people that use your product, they use your product in like 200 others. Yeah. You know, right? You know, it's like, like, so you're going to occupy probably a small fragment of their total login time.

Yeah.

Better make that so freaking awesome, like, or so accessible, meaningful, or connected to their day. You got to be a student of what matters to them, and you got to connect that to how your product feeds that, that, that their motion. Not what you can do, not what your product can do so much better than someone else. You got to really step into are you an expert of the trade? Do you, do you think that's interesting and will you pursue it? I, I think that's the, when you, we're hiring people, that's something we look for is do they have enough curiosity?

Mm-hmm.

Have they analyzed our space? You know, for us it's behavioral data. It's quite interesting. It's highly, I mean, it's very agentic. I mean, you literally capture all of the, the workflow, all of the, the processes that happen on a digital process, a digital property. and then we can manifest them and say people were frustrated, they were engaged, they had errors. We— it's, it's very data-centric. So people don't want that. You know, I don't care that they've had, you know, 7 winner circles or clubs in the past years. If they're not gonna be dedicated to learning the craft, I, I just think you'll— they'll eventually, they won't be a consistent winner for you. And it's not good for them either.

Makes sense. Um, I want to put a pin in this and I'm going to come back to it. I want to ask one more question about product. So we talked about go-to-market's role in sort of bringing new product to market and when it's, you know, in early access beta. But what about go-to-market's role in figuring out the product vision and like where to go next? What, like, what to build next? How do you do that well without overstepping and just asking for what the big customer wants and, but having the market input there.

I think go-to-market's position in that is, may depend company to company a little bit. Okay. I believe it serves a role, but it's not all go-to-market leaders because I think some go-to-market leaders will be highly opportunistic. I was lucky, I kind of started as a systems engineer for like E&Y, so I had a long run of being a consultant, very technical, very detailed. And I learned quick, it's not what the short term is, it's really what the long term that wins. So I think for go-to-market to earn the opportunity to work with the product teams and the engineering teams on the next step, they have to be able to demonstrate enough balance in their requests, okay? And I think that's important for the hiring of people that serve in go-to-market roles. You wanna hire individuals that are willing to learn markets and willing to adapt to a market, not someone that's just gonna sell, sell, sell at all costs. And so once you've got teams of people that have some balance in that, which is a bit of human and customer and not too short-term, then I think what it is, is it becomes, and you want to have like some cohesion, a little friction, right? Like we need this, we need to go do this. You actually want that. You want the teams to be able to say, this is the direction we think. No, this is the direction we think. You want people to work through that. We have a very healthy balance of that at FullStory. Our CEO really drives that. Like, he's skeptical by nature. He's like, does this make sense? Is this really right? And what it does for us is it makes us write down and work through those algorithms. But I think go-to-market's position there should be have a point of view, get customers to the table, get results to the table. Okay, so you can have a point of view, but to have a point of view, the way that you do that is you get other customers there to validate the strategy, and then you get them there to show their value. Back, right? So your role in go-to-market needs to be to help the product and engineering teams find the right kind of access points and test.

Right. Okay. That's, I think that's a great framework. And I, I think that's a subtle but important point. Like it's not all go-to-market leaders that should really be spending a bunch of time on product vision. It's, I've seen this go well. I've seen this not go well. It takes a lot of humility to say, actually, I'm not, I'm not a full stack thinker and maybe I shouldn't be voicing my opinion on the roadmap, but we'll leave that topic for another time.

Yeah. That's a tough one. Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. So, okay.

We were, we were digging into sort of what the future holds and the implications of AI on the buying journey. But before I get into a bunch of this, I want to hear your thoughts on like what is changing. And you mentioned quickly before the call, this thing like the revenue algorithm. So just give me your market map or looking into the future of GTM.

Yeah, so look, I think, I don't know if it's a new algorithm, I just think it's our reality. I think For a while, we were in the market where if you had something cool and a little bit unique, companies would invest in it, right? And there's a lot of, you know, I guess I would say positive growth there. I would say this. I used to say to my teams, it's just part of this assess and adapt concept. You know, I would say, man, the glory, you know, the glory is in the deal, but the gold is in the pipeline. And so we should work on more pipeline. I think that's, and people like that. Like, and like, 'cause everyone wants to be a salesman one day a week or salesperson one day a week. Like when the big deal happens, everyone's like, oh, I could have done that. Right? Yeah. They have no idea that it took like 84 meetings and 4 meetings that didn't happen to make the big meeting ha— you know, everyone, everyone likes that concept. But I think what's happened is the shift has gone from not can you sell it, But can you renew it? I think this is particularly important as you roll out new capabilities connected back to the earlier conversation. It's not what you can say, but it's ultimately going to be what you can show and prove, right? You know, all companies have to have this many times we saw a big strategic deal, but then you end up can't, can't prove it. That's going to happen.

Yeah.

But if you do that over and over, then you're celebrating the wrong consequence, which is a deal. You're not celebrating the renewal. And I think this shift, and it has to be across the whole company, not just the sales team, to not, it's not what you can sell, it's what you can renew, has to be really absorbed. That creates a crucible that's deeper for the pre-sales team, that's clearer for the implementation teams, and it's a heck of a lot harder for a product team that just wants to roll out new things. You have to think about when you're rolling something out, will it be highly renewable? What is it going to deliver? Why is someone going to invest money in this? And if they're going to invest money in it, what's the dollar value benefit over than what, you know, not doing it? So is it, you know, if I'm investing X, it needs to be 3 to X, 3 to 10 times greater in value than, than, than the cost point. If it's not, you're selling churn. And so I think, I think that new algorithm is it's moving from celebrating the deals and the, even the pipeline to celebrating the renewal. So shift from what— it's not looking at what you can sell, but what you can renew. Does that make sense, Kyle Norton?

Yeah. And so how do you operationalize that? Like, I think that's a fascinating framework, and I think aligned with where many companies have tried to get to, especially as the market really washed out in late '22, '23. And so what does that actually mean tactically for your team? Like how have you driven that change?

I think it really, really has to manifest in the presale process and it has to be absorbed in the post-sale process. So first things first, I don't believe in building a lot of silos across those teams. You probably need to have them on a consistent leadership team. Whether it's dotted line or it's direct lines, I'm okay with. But you need to have a forum where you've got, you know, sales, pre-sales, implementation, delivery. I like support in there as well, frankly, because I think that's actually a hypersense to what customers feel. You got to have that on your leadership team. But then I think what it does is instead of saying, hey, go buy this cool capability, don't you want it? I've got this principle I ask the teams to follow, which is clear solution, based on clear value, organized around a clear plan. Okay. Sounds simple. Sounds so easy. But it's not. Like, really, most people don't like that third part and they're scared of it in a contracting process.

The clear value part?

No, well, it bit clear, but clear plan for sure is the one where people are most shy. Okay. If you think about team, organization that's hyper-focused on selling, they just want a clear solution. So that's the, the product and the metric and the dollars it costs. If you think about a company that's focused on the renewal, they're going to have a value story that underpins that solution, why it's better than today. And importantly, especially as you move upmarket, you need to have a clear implementation plan. So when you're selling upmarket, it, it's as much about these new capabilities and value as it is a reduction in risk. And you're not really going to reduce someone's risk in the real world unless they know exactly what they're getting by when. And pushing your teams to go through that in a presale process is very different. But I can tell you from many, many years of not doing that to many, many years of doing it, it, it, it, it really is this unlock moment. It's a harder thing. Makes it tougher. You gotta have a point of view. You gotta be an expert. But a clear implementation plan, when you're in a final stage negotiation, you're not even, I mean, you're gonna always talk price, but really what you end up talking to most of the senior leaders about is how the success is gonna work and why that we can clearly state on this timeframe when you're gonna start to see benefits. So that clear solution is the metrics and the dollars. The clear value is what is this doing that you don't get to today with specificity, often at a value lever area. And then the clear implementation plan is who does what, my side, your side, partner side, when will it be complete, what is the program that we have for kind of ongoing success. And I think, and that's why you want to put that leadership team together again, whether it's dotted line or it's It's direct lines. You got to have people that are there to know what's happening. Okay. And, and I think, I think not everybody wants to do that, by the way, Kyle Norton. Not everybody wants to get, get there because it's generally a little bit more work. But what you find is you find patterns that can be repeated and you can do them fast. So I, you know, I always try to say like, if we can find a verifiable result We can find it multiple times. We can rerun the play. And so don't be afraid to rerun the play and don't be afraid to say, this is what so-and-so did, right? Because now you've established authority, you've established clarity, and you've established a plan that reduces risk. And I can tell you, most of your larger business buyers, that's what they want. They don't want another cool tool often. What they want is an outcome that they can't get today, and they want to trust and they want to believe that you are going to bring it to them. It's when you can't do those 3 things, I think your negotiations fall down. I think your authenticity is tested. And I think you're moving more towards the getting the sale versus getting the renewal.

Yeah.

Um, it's a lot on you there. I think I just like, I don't know if that was, that was okay there.

It's very helpful. And now I'm trying, I got 10 questions in my head and I'm prioritizing. So, Uh, let's make this more tangible. Like, I think, uh, directionally that makes a ton of sense. So what is the bar for clear plan? Like, if I'm, uh, if I'm selling to enterprise, it's like, I've got an implementation plan. You know, we have an implementation meeting, we show them the Gantt chart and the, you know, the mutual plan. But what I'm picking up is like, that's probably not a high enough bar. So like, what does world-class look like when it comes to clear plan to you?

Yeah. Thanks for asking the question. I mean, I'm sure if any of the people that have been sellers under my organizations are going, oh man, he's going to— they know this. A clear plan is not a Gantt chart. A clear plan is a name from the customer organization that owns a particular lane. It is a set of time that's pre-agreed to that you will have that name and that person to work on this. And it is not a generic element. What I hate when I would go into meetings and we were forcing people through the crucible, they would show a generic slide. I was like, at least put the customer's name there to start. What I want you to do is if you show a Gantt chart, I want you to not say this is our Gantt chart. I want you to say This is what we have seen success with. What's wrong here? I'm going to ask you two questions. What's wrong here and who owns these pieces? And for us to be successful at a clear plan, we'll know who the owner is and we'll have revised this to be something that works in concert with your programs. Because what you'll find, especially at large organizations, they have different sprint patterns, different implementation programs, different people. You need to fit their lingo, not yours. You learn very quickly if you get good at this, what you think is reasonably irrelevant. What they think and how they articulate an implementation plan could be different than how you thought of it. Putting it in their words, making it theirs, much like a business case. I always look at a business case as a negotiation. You start with something and then you work through it and you have some heated moments. That's when you know you're finding the value points. I think it's the same on the implementation plan, right? Now look, it doesn't mean it's got to be complicated and take months. It just needs to be hyper-specific to that customer and mean something, hopefully at a named level.

Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. It's funny, you know, having done some enterprise in my career, how you get a deal signed, you think you have an implementation plan and like, oh yeah, well, I mean, that dev team, their roadmap is filled up for 8 weeks. You go, we put them on a, we put that on a line there and, you know, like getting to the level of fidelity and commitment where it becomes concrete is always so challenging.

And I think some of the pre-sales and sales folks will not love that, but I can assure you it actually speeds your time to close typically because you've established a clarity. If it's a large deal value, you've established a clarity on the other side. They're like, man, I want my other projects to go like this. You find that they'll say, you know, I wish I would have done this, right? Because the thing is, we track like number of days till you start the implementation, number of days that you complete an implementation. We've been hyper-focused on reducing that. Part of that is this process right here, right? When you have a name associated to something and you start getting delays, you can say, well, I need so-and-so, like that point that you just made on the bill. I mean, it happens. You know, and then if you're selling short-term deals, you're toast.

Yeah.

You didn't have a clear implementation plan, so now you've sold a churn, you know, like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Does that make sense? I mean, I know it's a—

it's— and if you're selling real enterprise, it's almost always land and expand.

Yes.

And if you— it's, it's, it's so tough to get reps to think in multi-year time horizons. One of the things that I coach people, we sell SMB now, but, you know, people who have, who are in enterprise from my alumni, I'll explain to them. I was like, you got to think about your role in 3 years. Year 1, if you can hit your quota, awesome. You're, you're getting, you're figuring out your territory. You're trying to land some of those initial deals, but like you're planting the seeds so that, you know, because most people, if you spend 5 years at a company, you, you hope if you're a good rep, every year you hit quota. And if you're— and what you really want is like one or two of those years to, to bank like your million-dollar year where you have a customer that you worked with for two years and you do this, you know, multi-division, multi-product deal. But that, that requires a very different time horizon. And I think once you start thinking in that time horizon, okay, this is, this is a deal that I need to win with such a level of professionalism and execution that, that when I come to ask for $2 million, $3 million, $10 million, that, that they're willing to put that behind you. And, and that's a, that's a tough, tough lesson for people to internalize when you're just like, I couldn't even agree.

I mean, you have no idea. I'm glad we're not next to each other. I'd be like, yes, this is it. Because, because, because this is a short-sighted long-term is important, right? You know, there was one of the, your previous shows, I forgot which one, there was a good discussion around getting people to own their territory, right? And it's not, it's a territory of accounts. It's my place. It's my franchise. It's my, and I see each one of these giving customers as a long-term opportunity or annuity for Yeah, certainly for you, but then you're, you're a long-term annuity for them because you should be returning more value than they're paying, right?

Yeah.

And getting people to get to that mindset can be tough. It's also what you have to kind of interview for.

Yeah. I think that was Alex Kramer from Cresta. They do super duper enterprise, like all, or like mostly multimillion dollar deals. And an account executive will have like 3 or 5 accounts.

3. Yeah. Yeah. Or 1. Sometimes. Yeah.

Or one. Yeah. Yeah. So I want to ask one more question about organizational alignment. So getting to this new place, which sounds fantastic. I think everybody would like to get there requires a very different level of organizational alignment. You've talked about the necessity of having that group together, but maybe just share some lessons learned and some specific tactics on how to drive that alignment and what world-class looks like across a highly aligned go-to-market and product team.

So I've been, you know, I've had lots of experiences, larger and kind of medium and then also smaller companies. And I think alignment is chiefly a personal decision. So you have a HR structure, but if you care about kind of lifetime value and you care about a customer, even without the formal lines, as a given revenue leader, you need to be thinking upstream and downstream of you. Okay. And, you know, whether you do that in the form of, you know, a weekly cadence, biweekly cadence, worst case monthly, even if it's not a formal kind of structure, be kind of courageous and say, gosh, I really need to have my sales, my pre-sales, my customer success, my implementation team, at least in some sort of a forum, some sort of a model, and then invite the product team in. Obviously marketing's in that the whole way. And make sure that that forum exists. It has to exist. And even if you get people in and out of it, they're not always there. This concept that you are a custodian of— the company is only as good as their customers, right? And if, as a leader, with or without the formal lines, you establish that, everyone responds. And you find, especially in circumstances where it's not formally defined, people love those meetings, right? When I, at Ariba, we were pretty tight and pretty connected. Full story, I feel the same way. But when I was at SAP, it's a pretty large organization. I had a lot of people, like a ton of people. You couldn't do it. Like it was not humanly possible. But boy, we found a way to find leaders across those teams to get back together. And I was like, what a relief. Because then you learn what their daylight is like. You learn what they're going through. And you realize, man, I can help them, right? And I think, so I think it doesn't have to be formal. It should be there. It can be informal. And I think as revenue leaders, you're not a victim of that. You've got to be the leader of that, right? You got to embrace like doing it on your own sometimes.

And how do you surface and deal with the tensions? Like there's natural tensions between, you know, sales needs to hit the number, CS has a retention goal. Sometimes those things can feel at odds. And what do you do to bring those tensions to the surface and resolve them?

Yeah, I mean, look, these are real, so sometimes they're going to be there. I do a couple things. I don't know that anyone has the— truly, if you know, let me know, by the way. Don't ask me, tell me. But the couple things that are done, for any organization, I always lead with a a mindset, and we often evolve the mindset over time. And it's usually like 3 simple sayings that we can use, or in the case of FullStory, it's kind of gone into this winning ways approach. I think you need to establish a language of what the company wants to do at the very top level. And I think when you hit these moments of impact like that, you got to say, let's call timeout. You know, we've got this one that's called Level Up, right? And so it's like, how do we level up, right? So if there's a big fight that's kind of going down, it's like, well, hey guys, let's just pause for a second, right? How do we level up? Or, you know, using our new language with these Winning Ways, it's how do we assess and adapt, right? And you've got to find a language to call out that is neutral. Trying to pacify one side, the other side, trying to do it one-to-one, it's not a high quality, it's not a fast process. Finding a neutral language and a neutral zone to point an issue back to, move it away from the personal feelings and back to what the company needs to achieve, very hard to do, but very much how you move through those moments and get people back on board. Okay. I think you have to find that neutral language or that overarching kind of point of view. Otherwise people, people can start fighting and that's not valuable.

Yeah. It's surprising the power of semantics. It seems like, oh, we're just squabbling over words, but that shared language is such an important, it's such an important toolkit to work through things. And I took a bunch of this from Shopify. It was almost cult-like in some of the repetition of these certain ways to deal with things. And in my first couple I'm like, yeah, it's like when somebody wants to win an argument, they just go into the bag of words and then they use, they pull it out. And then, you know, I got so much more appreciation for it. And, you know, this, this shared context, you know, people would say like, well, we're building a 100-year company. And so there would be a decision and, you know, two sides would be on an opposite and somebody would be like, well, you know, the 100-year, 100-year company decision here is really this. And it felt like they were doing it to win an argument. But then I saw this pattern repeated, and I saw, you know, the stacking of 100-year decisions over time. You go, oh damn, like, it really, really works. Like, it really— you know, if you just indoctrinate people with, like, these are the, these are the values, these are the, the decision heuristics, you can really drive something pretty impressive there.

And then it's moving. You're also creating intentionally, but in an organic way, purpose. And when you hear the language come back to you, right, going back to semantics, it's not just in the hard times, it's in the good times. And when people use those semantics back to represent something, now you've actually built culture, and that culture can feed into momentum. And those, those equal, equally, those, those those winning ways or the mindset that you use actually start to contribute to, we're going to do this, right? And there's a pot, it helps people like, I want to level up, right? You know, I want to, you know, I want to do, all right, I got to ask myself, am I better than I was last time, right? And it, that's when it deposits, when some of those semantics deposit themselves into individuals, when they're not with their teams, that's when you know you've actually connected, right? And at that point, you're building a little bit greater strategy.

Yeah.

Okay.

We'll move into the quickfire because we're already out of time, even though I got a bunch more questions I didn't ask. Um, what do you think separates a good CRO from a truly great one? Somebody world-class?

I think, I think it starts with the recognition. It's not what an individual does. It's what you get others to achieve. And I think whether it's revenue leadership or it's anything else, people with the mindset it's about them, got to kind of— that's not going to go good. It's people with the mindset that they're really there to help others elevate. That's really what— like, you sense it, you know it. There's a belief and intrinsic note of like, okay, that person's going to be that way. I think that's what separates people.

Great. What's the most common advice you give to new senior leaders? So somebody taking on their first VP of sales job, the first CRO, or a new third-line leader in your org. What do you find yourself telling these people most frequently?

I let them know, like, if they're new to the business, it's learn the craft. Know your data, meet some customers. So get really curious about the space that you're in if you're new to it. You better know your data, right? How many people? What are your funnels? What— how are things moving? Boy, make sure you make some tangible customer meetings because that, that's going to feed the first one, which makes you better at your job. And when you talk to people, it's not just— you're not mechanical. You're your actual.

Makes sense. What's the hardest lesson you've had to learn in your career?

That's a long list. Uh, I would say be comfortable realizing you have to adapt. You chase patterns, you chase that consistency, and you want to follow it again. That's the rerunnable side. Run it, But there's a moment where entropy occurs or cheaper, cheerfuller enters. And the moment that you can't just do the same thing, have the self-awareness to say, man, I got to adapt. And what can happen is people get that tractor pull of I figured it out and it's working so well. And then the moments it doesn't, they start figuring out like something's not right, but they hold on to that original belief too long. I've done that. I don't want to count it. It scares me. But I think that willingness to find the pattern, important. Willingness to let go of a pattern is actually the hardest lesson. For sure.

Last question. What's the best thing you've read in the last 12 months?

Ooh, last 12 months. There was a really— is it like The Almanac of Naval Ravikant? Yeah. I read that like again. So like for a second time recently, because someone else had asked me this question. I was visiting our team in Europe. And he's like, hey, because I had told them a long time ago to read it. And I was like, hey, you should read that. Tell me, tell me what you think. Uh, he's a young, young, young guy. And I was like, I should read that again. And I, and I just love some of the— there's a, there's a good, like, pullback moment in that throughout the book that I think just helps you. And I think it's one of these books that the more chapters you have, the more relevant statements become and the richer it becomes for you. You know, I don't, I don't know if you've read that one. Sounds like, yeah, yeah, that one's, that one's just popped right into my head when you said that.

So yeah, it's a good one. Okay, well, Jason, this was awesome. I didn't get to half the questions that I had mapped out, but I think we got into a level of depth on new markets and some frameworks here that are going to be super useful for folks because I think this is a thing that people struggle with so frequently, and there's not a lot of content out there to think through this level of complexity. And you've just done it across many companies, so many different versions of these growth vectors that this conversation had a ton of depth. So I'm excited to get it out there.

Well, thanks for the opportunity, Kyle Norton. Great to get to know you. Really enjoy listening to your podcast, and thanks putting it out there for people. It's awesome you do that.

Thanks for doing that.

Much appreciated. Yeah, that's great. Thanks. Okay.

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