E64: My Team Drives 4x Revenue Per AE vs Competitors | Aviv Canaani, CRO @ Datarails

Our AEs close in a quarter what AEs in our competitors in our industry close in a year.

Aviv Kanani is the CRO at DataRails, a company that recently raised a $70 million Series C. In this episode, Aviv unpacks how he flipped DataRails from 90% outbound to 90% inbound and turned that into a recruiting weapon.

This is why I'm also able to target and bring the best account executives in the industry from my competitors, because they know they're going to make more money.

And we discuss why the traditional way of looking at sales math and setting targets is fundamentally broken.

I don't really care that much how much I think they actually can produce. Knowing the real productivity is what matters.

All this plus a lot more from a seasoned operator who knows how to win in the boardroom and in the market.

You need to be able to answer to the CEO that says your target is $10 million a quarter. You need to—

Welcome to the Revenue Leadership Podcast. Momentum is a powerful tool for turning sales and customer conversations into go-to-market intelligence. Using GenAI, it extracts, analyzes, and automates customer intelligence across your GTM org. The best part, it's not a new platform for your team to adopt. It integrates seamlessly with your existing stack, or it can straight up replace your conversational intelligence tool. At Owner, we ripped out Gong and went all in on Momentum. It writes back to our Salesforce directly, captures forecast and churn risk, autofills CRM fields, shares product signals, and tracks sentiment. Companies like Cursor, Zscaler, Ramp, and ElevenLabs use it every day. Check it out with a free trial at momentum.io. Today's guest is Aviv Kanani, who is the CRO at DataRails. And Aviv has an unusual path to the CRO seat. He started as their VP of marketing, then took over sales when he saw the org needed some work. Then he worked his way into running the entire revenue machine, all without ever having carried a quota, which we'll talk about. Last year, DataRails grew 70%. And Aviv projected their new ARR within a 5% margin of error 3 out of 4 quarters. He also wrote a viral LinkedIn post arguing that AEs should never prospect, which, as you can imagine, drew some strong reactions. I happen to agree for the most part. And so we're going to dig into those topics today. So the case against AE prospecting, what happens when a marketer runs the revenue org? We're going to talk about the revenue machine. And this, this like growth demand gen marketing mindset to it and wander around a whole bunch of topics. So Aviv, thanks for joining and I'm really excited for this one.

Awesome. Thank you so much, Kyle Norton, for having me. I love the show.

Quick programming note. So we've been off for 2 weeks. I had a couple of guest cancellations. I was out on vacation. I also, as you can tell by the gear, attended the Super Bowl. And so I want to give a quick shout out to Amanda Kahlo from OneMind. She took like 12 CROs and CMOs to the game and invited me to tag along. And so shout out Amanda, shout out the world champion Seattle Seahawks. We're bringing the championship mentality to today's podcast and we're going to have some fun. Let's start with the path to the CRO seat. We see different levels of success, people going like marketing to CRO. It definitely seems like it's working for you guys. You know, we've traded messages back and forth about some stuff, and I can tell that you are one of the people that, that's making it happen. What made DataRails make the bet? Like, what gave you the confidence you could step into that seat? What gave the company confidence? Just like, talk me through a little bit of that journey.

4 and a half years ago, I was actually VP marketing at a different startup. And then one day I was approached on LinkedIn by one of the co-founders of DataRails. His name is Eyal Cohen. I looked him up, seemed like a serious guy who already built a billion-dollar startup, which was WalkMe that was sold to SAP for $1.5 billion. So I decided to tag along saying like, if I can join his second unicorn. So I decided to join the company, which was like a couple of million ARR, which was 90% outbound. We had like 20-something like SDRs just on calls trying to get the meetings as you do, you know, when you start a startup. And Didi, the CEO, and Eyal told me, try to build marketing. Let's see what happens. And fast forward, you know, 4.5 years later from a company that was 90% outbound, now we're 90% inbound. Based on that, in the last, like 2 years ago, after like we had some organizational changes, they decided to ask me to lead sales as well just because it made more sense. Anyway, most of the sales were coming from marketing. They were looking to have someone manage everything from the lead at the beginning closed one at the end. The only problem is now I had no one to blame for not closing my amazing leads. And as the head of sales, I can't blame marketing for all these crappy leads that they send. So it just like worked out well. And you know, we had an amazing year in the past year. We grew 70%. We just raised another Series C round of $70 million.

Congrats. Wow, that's a good one.

Yeah, thank you. Yeah, so exciting times. So yeah, happy to dive deeper.

I actually want to dig into the shift from 90% outbound to inbound and then come back to like integrating sales and marketing. How the hell did you do that?

Yeah. So when I started in marketing, I knew that in order to be effective, like I wanted to impact revenue. So when I joined, it was 2021, the good time just after like our Series A funding. So I had some budget to spend. So I decided to build both our paid media activities like our growth channel as well as organic. And in organic, I started to do like fun stuff, like on our LinkedIn channel, we started a podcast. But you know, with all the respect to brand, these are games that take a while, super important, happy to dive into it, but you want to generate impact immediately. So I knew I wanted to build a team in-house, but I wanted to generate results fast. So I brought one agency for LinkedIn, one for Facebook, one for Google. I know it's like not obvious, especially like Facebook. I didn't mention it, but DataRealize, is a leading FP&A provider selling to the office of the CFO, to SMBs, mid-market. You wouldn't expect like CFOs to be in Instagram or Facebook, but we decided to do it. And the moment we started doing campaigns on these 3 channels, we just started to see results. The messaging wasn't that good, the creative wasn't that good. I just got started. We were a tiny team of 2 or 3 people, but it just felt like, you know, like you were drilling and you were discovering oil. There was a product-market fit. You know, you need to have product-market fit at the end of the day to be successful in marketing. And we started generating more and more revenue. So I started building an in-house team that took over the agencies with time. We have like a big team running across like all of our different channels and it just became more and more impactful. And what we saw is also the conversion rates for the leads that we're generating from inbound were much converting, much better from the ones in outbound, especially when there was a tech meltdown in 2022. That's when the big shift happened. We just saw like outbound leads weren't converting barely at all as opposed to inbound that were still converting fine. Because of the intent. Yeah, so gradually it happened. 2022 was like the big change, but since then we're 90% inbound. So we're doing outbound, we're doing partnerships, but inbound and marketing, paid media in specific, like that's the main channel.

Were these agencies that you had used before?

I got some recommendations on them because also before I was working more in-house, like one of the agencies, it's a guy I worked with in the past and this is what I recommend for people listening to this. Like you need to find agencies that can speak to you in dollars and estimate numbers and say, okay, let's say I have a $50,000 budget. This is how many leads that we think like we can generate. Talking already like in, you know, SQLs, opportunities, revenue. Good agencies have like some sort of experience. And yeah, we started, you know, seeing revenue coming in.

I get a lot of questions about like, hey, I'm trying to build my first demand gen motion. Like, do you have any good agency recommendations? And it depends on your market and it feels like that's a really tough one to crack. There's a GTM fund guy who has an agency that helps you find agencies.

Oh, really?

Which is, which is interesting. And it's, it's, uh, uh, I think like emblematic of how tough it is. And so you set up these like original channels and then you were also building organic, like right out of the gate. So at Series A, you, you started doing organic.

Yeah. So I started doing organic from the beginning, actually, like in my first week on the job. I looked at like her LinkedIn page, super boring as most LinkedIn pages are, and I decided to do like a funny meme, you know, talking about like the CFO. And actually like a week later, the CEO came to me and said, you know, we had a board meeting and the board was asking like, why are you doing like these funny memes? And I told him, trust me, with time it's going to work. I used the playbook of Gong, you know, what Udi did there as a CMO. Luckily for me, like the CEO trusted me and allowed me to continue like that. And I had like a great thing ahead of brand that took over that. And now we have like more than 60,000 followers. We have some posts we put on LinkedIn that get like hundreds of comments and dozens of, you know, shares. And again, we're talking about like CFO stuff, sometimes like niche CFO kind of humor, sometimes like thought leadership. And that worked. And also the second thing that we did organically was we started a podcast. Like we're doing now, like with our niche of FP&A, financial planning and analysis. There was no like weekly podcast in the, in the field that we partnered with the leading FP&A guru, like influencer, to do that. And now, like 4 years later, we had more than 600,000 downloads to our podcast. Wow.

Good for you.

Thanks. Yeah, it became big. And so I, I want to say, like, for, for the listeners out there, CROs and CMOs, I highly recommend investing in brand, but the way I explain it, especially like to sales leaders, is first of all, you need to generate the results now in this quarter before you talk to like this high and talk about like brand. Just the same thing as like if you're a sales leader, you're gonna spend some of your time now hiring new AEs, investing time in training them. They're not gonna help you in Q1 results, but they're gonna help you in Q3. So I think as like a marketing leader as well, like you need to do the long-term investments, but it doesn't mean you can't show result. You, you should show results within this quarter too.

And you need conviction like that. That's, I think, the tough thing with brand and organic is like it takes forever to pay off, but it's a compounding asset. So like over time, that compounding really starts to add up. We did something similar. This was like our founder's conviction and his bet, but we started investing in like a lot of money in brand and organic when we were, I think, Series A or late, late Series A. And it didn't really help us that much until, you know, maybe like 12 or 18 months later. And now it is like a monster superpower. Like we've got 140,000 followers on Instagram, 40,000 on YouTube, and like, like crazy consumption hours on YouTube. So people are like really learning to love the brand. It was easy for us because it was the founder's conviction. But, but I'm curious how you made that pitch to spend a bunch of money that has this like long-term payoff?

You need to show examples like exactly like the conversation we're doing now or listening to these types of podcasts. Like you want to see what other companies are doing and you see companies are absolutely crushing it in terms of organic or brand and other things. Like I mentioned, like the example of Gong before, even within our industry, there are companies that are crushing it that also sell to the CFO like Ramp is doing now a great job. When you really think about like the importance of like brand or marketing, like in general, it's impacting everything. Like, you know, like we're seeing now some great sales coming in from outbound where when I listen to the calls, it's like, you know, a complete cold outbound call saying, okay, I'm calling blah, blah, blah from DataRails. And it's like, oh yeah, I've been seeing your ads. Like I love your content. This makes everything easier. You know, like there's this Dave Gerhardt quote that says like, you know, life is too short to work for a CEO that doesn't believe in marketing. So it's the same thing. Like if your CEO completely doesn't believe in marketing, there's not a lot you can do other than go to a different company.

So we talked a little bit about like getting this early marketing traction. And so obviously like this helps you build tons of credibility and like you've, you've got some foundation to show that you know how to execute and what, what made the company think that like a marketer can run sales?

Yeah, I think it all depends on like the person. You know, it's very easy to me to come and say why marketers can be great CROs, but I would say it's more about the personality. It can come from marketing, from sales. I've been seeing recently like, you know, from RevOps. I think it depends on the person. And I think what I did that helped, you know, in this kind of career path is that I was able to build this predictable revenue model that starts in marketing where after doing this for a few quarters, I was able to project Let's say we have a revenue target, let's make it up now, like $10 million. I know how much more marketing budget we need to spend, how much meetings is gonna generate, what's the conversion rate to opportunities, from opportunities to close one based on the number of meetings. And we can talk about like how many AEs I actually need. And it just kept on working. Like in the past few years, I also need to estimate, you know, like cost of meeting changing per quarter with increase like in a budget. But you know, the moment that it worked, just I think makes it also easier for the CEO when you don't have like this weird situation, like in a management meeting where the VP marketing says, oh, I hit my target, I generated enough pipeline. The VP sales says, oh, I missed my target. It doesn't make sense. So as a CRO that also understands marketing, it's like for working with the CEO, I just have two goals is revenue growth and cost of acquisition. There's one person to talk about it. Just makes it all easier. He doesn't need to like, you know, judge between us who is right and who is wrong if there's two different people.

And obviously, you know, coming in from marketing, you don't bring in the sales craft or the like sales pipeline management experience. And so have you gone and tried to learn all those things or has it been about just bringing in complementary pieces so that, you know, their strengths can complement yours?

Yeah, so luckily we had like a great sales team, you know, when I took over. I think at the end of the day, you can't learn everything, you know, talk about the T-shaped model and other things like that. You can't know everything. What I did when I took over sales, there were just 6 account executives back then. The first decision I did was promote one of them to be a team lead. A few months later, I promoted another one to be a team lead. And the first team lead I promoted, fast forward now 2 and a half years later, she's now VP sales managing a team of 30 AEs.

Wow, good for her.

Yeah, yeah, she absolutely crushed it. And I think like when you have like a good team and we both, you know, the account executives as well as like the, those team leads, it makes it easier. Like you have to count on people even like coming as a marketer. Like some people come to like the VP marketing role from content marketing, some from product marketing, some from paid media. It's not that you need to run, know how to run LinkedIn campaigns yourself to be a good VP marketing. And I think the same goes through sales if you, build the right kind of leadership under you, it becomes easier.

So you didn't bring in outside sales leadership expertise? You, it was about promoting from within?

Yeah, we just really trusted that account executive. She was crushing it for a couple years before and wanted to promote her. We, I took a risk, it paid off, but it's not obvious. If we didn't have the right person on the team, I would've hired someone external.

What gave you the confidence that she could figure it out? Because obviously the best rep often does not make the best manager. Those are like job— those jobs are very different in nature. And so what was it that gave you the confidence and how did you like stress test that understanding?

I think we always trusted her. She always was super smart, even when we had like another layers of like a director and a VP. Even before that, we would go to her like with me and like the co-founders, like sometimes to ask her opinion on stuff. She knew how to give feedback. She knew how to balance between, you know, what's really AEs are complaining about to what really is needed. With time in a career, you can tell like the right personalities that can come in sales and marketing and partnerships. Again, like it's not that, you know, she started as a VP sales. We first went with the team lead and she proved herself with time. So we decided we don't need to hire a director above her and she can take over.

All right, let's get into the, your comments on AEs. So like lay AEs in prospecting. Just lay out for people your thesis first off, and then, and then I'd love to unpack it.

Yeah. So what I wrote is like, I don't believe AI should prospect. That's a big claim, especially I would say like SMB and mid-market might be different in enterprise. I'm talking about my experience after being in a couple of companies that focus on the SMB and mid-market space. It's based on what I mentioned before about being this waterfall model or a predictable revenue machine. I believe just like in sports, you know, we started with that, like mentioning the Seahawks, like everyone person has their role on a team. Again, I'm no football expert, more into basketball, but I'm saying like to be a great football player, it's not that you need to be the best person that like knows how to punt and be a quarterback or running back. You need to do your role. And I think if you look at it as a revenue machine, marketing is in charge of generating the leads or, you know, SDRs. Sales need to know how to get those leads and have the best conversion rate to turn that into sales. Just like, you know, a solution consultant's gonna help you in that. Process and do their roles. Customer success does their role and account management. And it's not that like I'm opposed to it because of a skillset. It's just a matter of like, how is it going to be efficient? I got to interview a lot of different account executives after I took over sales. And it's interesting how many people I interviewed where they told me, oh, I had to prospect as well. And in my previous company, I did get like a little bit of leads from inbound. But when I ask them, okay, but how much of your sales actually came from inbound? Most of the answers are like 80, 90%. So it just seemed like sometimes sales leaders tell people you have to prospect even if it's not efficient at all. Based on my experience, like I want them to focus on what they're great at, which is selling. I don't want them to do something for the sake of doing it.

There's like a weird sales machismo when it comes to prospecting. It's like, oh, you got to create your own pipeline, create your own pipeline. And yeah, and like our reps, they, you know, call their customers for referrals and they prospect into their closed loss. And it's a good way to supplement, supplement their funnel. But I don't think our reps generate more than 10 or 15% of their own deals. Everything else is inbound or SDR, BDR. But leaders have this thing like, oh, it's, it's like hardcore to do your own prospecting. But when you pay a BDR, sometimes half, sometimes a third in like the upper mid-market of an account executive, the economics for blasting a bunch of cold calls for, you know, a third or a quarter or half of your days just sort of fall apart. And I think that's maybe why you as a marketer, it seems obvious because you're trained to look at things through CAC.

Yeah, exactly. Maybe like the fact that you didn't come from sales, I don't know, they have this kind of machismo about like how to do this and where it just made more sense that every person in the process needs to do what they're great at. I don't care if in the past you earned your right by prospecting, if it's not the best use of your time or you don't have a good way to do it, again, in SMB mid-market might be different than enterprise, I don't want you to do it. And I mentioned that not only do we fill the calendars, we have a whole system of how we do it. Our account executives can get more than 100 meetings a quarter, it can be like, you know, more than 2 a day sometimes. I only hire more account executives when I know I have more pipeline. I would not hire another, like when I build my plan, I know, okay, I'm increasing the marketing budget by X amount based on this. Now I would need more account executives. So it's unlike also like what you hear in other companies where they're going the other way around, they're hiring more account executives and then telling them, okay, you have to prospect because you have a lot of time in your calendar. I want to fill their calendars.

I think this is one of the gaps that drives this a lot is people don't, run the unit economics and the P&L to ground when making this decision. And I talked to Jenny Dingus about this, who runs sales at Clio, who said the same thing. It's like your, your model, like what drives revenue is not account executives times quota. And that's how most people do it. And it's a faulty assumption. What drives revenue is pipeline times conversion rates, and conversion rates are impacted by having enough account executives to manage the pipeline, the funnel generated. And then like the math equation is just different. Like it is not AE times quota, it's pipeline times conversion rate. And there's a separate calculation which says, what is the ideal number of meetings per day for an account executive to host? Before the win rates start to diminish?

Exactly. So that's exactly what we're always thinking of. Like, I know how much I need to generate in terms of like meetings, opportunities. Then the question is how many A's? Because on the one hand, I want them to be busy, but also like, you know, if they're too busy, you know, like they might just run from one meeting to another and not give like 100% into the meeting. We're all playing with the numbers, whether it's the right number is like 90 meetings or 100 meetings, you know, a quarter or something like that. Of course, you know, every business is different. It depends on how many, like, your sales cycle, how many follow-up meetings. We also have a deep dive with the solution consultant later. So that's like the numbers we're playing with and we're playing every quarter. We're making some changes and seeing, you know, what works, how it affects, you know, this kind of machine. But at the end of the day, like, this is how you can plan. Like, I don't want to plan of just hoping people are going to prospect or having them spend all their time on like an outreach or sales stuff trying to, get meetings if it's not productive? Like, I don't see the point of it.

Plus, AEs are never going to be as good at prospecting as BDRs because they're just not getting the repetitions and they don't really want to do it. The number one goal of a BDR is to stop being a BDR as fast as they can. So, you know, sometimes you have like unicorns who love being BDRs and the lifetime BDR and that's special and great. but most of them are just like, how fast can I get to AE? Because I don't want to rip 200 cold calls a day.

After talking with like a lot of AEs in other companies when I interviewed, like I learned something where in other companies, like I'm not going to mention names, but there are some AEs when they don't have inbound flow coming in, so they just go to the gym or do other things because they know they're not going to be as good in prospecting. So here's like an interesting stat for you and like the audience. Our AEs close in a quarter what AEs in our competitors in our industry close in a year. So this is why I'm also able to target and bring the best account executives in the industry from my competitors because they know they're going to make more money. After hiring a lot, like I've been hearing, you know, the stories from other companies and I just feel like we have a model that works better.

Our per rep productivity is 3 to 4x most of our competitors because similar to you, I've hired and interviewed people from, from, from all those companies. It means we can give like really fair quotas, like our OTEs aren't crazy. Most people give like a really high OTE and then only like half of people hit it and it's like all fake. Our OTEs are fair for SMB, but our OTE attainment is like 138%. So like 80% of reps hit their target. Most people make way more than their OTE. And we have a ton of reps who actually like just blow it out of the water and make, make like way more than their OTE. You know, if you have this level of efficiency, if you have that 3 to 4x, you can just pay top of market. You can pay for the RevOps and the data team and the enablement and the BDRs so that, that like it's pretty sweet to be an AE owner. You don't do any of your prospecting. People like you close deals at a high rate. Like you don't, you know, it's like you got all these automations and, and, but you can spend that money if you, if you drill the efficiency.

Similar to like what I tell my team. Like, you know, you come from the sales background, I come from marketing, but I think it's how you build this kind of revenue architecture to allow that. So, you know, even maybe being a marketer, like you mentioned this, like I don't really care that much about the quota. The AEs are gonna hate this for saying like, I care about how much I think they actually can produce, but I want like the AEs to be able to do like, get like 80% of quota. Like some of them, by the way, like 200%. When you do the model, like this is what you need to take into account, how much they can actually do, less about just What kind of number you set for them as a goal? I'm not saying it's not important, but knowing the real productivity is what matters.

We've done a bunch of analysis to look at like what is the exact right number of leads to give to an SDR? Because if you give them way too many leads, they don't follow up on them all the way. And then that AQL to op conversion rate diminishes. Or if you give them not enough, then you're not getting the productivity. And you can just do the analysis to figure out what that what that number is. Same on AE. If you have a lot of at-bats, like our AEs, our target is to have them have 4 booked demos a day and 3 of them held. That's about where things start to crack. There was a point yesterday where every single account executive was on a demo at the same time. Then the managers were having to take the hot handoff demos that the BDRs were booking. Cause marketing like way overproduced for what we had planned for. And so now we're like, all right, like do some BDR promotions. Like let's get some more capacity, but like you got to find that balance point.

Yeah. Amazing.

Yeah.

That's like great problems to have. And we got that like a lot like last year. So it's like, you know, you're all of a sudden like rushing to like hire more people, hire more people. And it's, you know, finding the right balance. It's not like an exact science, like as much as we want it to be. So sometimes you have like too many meetings, sometimes not enough meetings, but you have to find the right balance and make sure you have like a good hypothesis, like how you're doing it, like learn from different mistakes and so forth. But this is again how you build an efficient revenue machine.

So what was the pushback like? What were— I didn't even see this post. What were people saying was the issue with it?

I saw like some comments saying stuff like, you're not a real account executive if you don't know how to prospect or But cheese mouth. But cheese mouth, yeah, it's exactly that. And like some AEs were also saying, I don't want to count on anyone. Like I want to count only on myself. I can't count on marketing or BDRs, SDRs. And to a point I agree. But that said, you know, talking back about like the sports analogy, if you don't have like a good team, anyway, you're going to fail. You have to work on it together. As for example, like also like for marketing, like they can talk about how they can generate like all these amazing leads, but if they don't close, they didn't really do their job. Just like, You know, in basketball you don't count like assists if the shooting guard didn't make the shot.

That's a good— I've never heard that analogy.

That's good. Yeah. So it's the same thing. It's like, yeah, if you don't have a good team, if people aren't generating meetings for you, rather than prove that you can do everything yourself, go work in a company that generates meetings for you and you can focus on closing and making a lot of money.

So what have you done in the business and what have you instrumented and how have you gotten to that level of precision? To be able to like hit the growth target while doing it with that level of predictability? What were the big lessons learned?

First of all, it's experience. Like we were able to do it in the past year just after like a few years of testing stuff with marketing budget, you know, and understanding close rates. So going back, you know, to like, let's go to the math. Like if I know I have like a specific target, I go back and say like, okay, how many deals is it? Let's say I need to get to 200 deals and then it's like a 50% conversion rate. So you need like 400 opportunities and you can continue the math like that and how many meetings. So at the end of the day, it comes down to like really understanding actually for us, like the marketing side, which is what is going to be the cost per meeting. So when I can do campaigns, you know, for a large amount with time, I was— I'm able to tell this is going to be the cost per meeting. Let's say I'm saying like $2,000, you know, a meeting. So then I know exactly how much budget I need. And if you go back for a second, you know, like we're in startups too, what the CEO wants or the board wants is exactly that. You want to have like a CRO where you tell them, let's say the target is $10 million and they come tell you, okay, that's the plan. Like this is how much marketing budget I need. This is how many AEs or solution consultants and so forth. And you can just build that waterfall model. So with time we were able to do it. So we mentioned, you know, 3 out of the 4 quarters last year was within like 5% margin of error. And the one that actually was much better, that was like 30% above our target, was because we made some big changes, you know, to our pricing structure and bundles. And also we introduced like a few new products. We started doing like a multi-product. So it's more like internal stuff that, you know, we changed. So it was hard to anticipate in the model. But, you know, once it happened, I updated the model, you know, for the coming quarters.

You must have had good instrumentation in place. To like understand the inputs that closely? Any lessons learned on being able to have that level of visibility?

Yeah, so I think you need to have like a great revenue operations team as well as like a marketing team to have that kind of visibility into all these numbers, all these conversion rates. Every team needs to know like what they can do to influence, you know, the conversion rates and the efficiency and the metrics of what they're working. With also like it was a big part of my focus. Maybe it would be different if I came from a sales background. I don't, so I never carried a bag. I'm not like, you know, when I took over sales, my goal was never I wanna be more involved in sales, I'm gonna help improve the conversion rate just because of my title getting into more calls. Like I was more focused like on building, you know, the system and the spreadsheets, you know, to support the logic of how it works and just put the right people in the right spots to make it happen.

Is it RevOps in your org that owns building the data foundations and the visibility, or is this like a separate data team? Like how's that constructed?

So I have like the growth team, especially coming from marketing, the growth team is critical. That's the team that we decide, okay, what's the budget? How many meetings and opportunities we can generate? I put RevOps under growth. Because it's so important. Even the SDR team that I used to manage myself before, I put it under growth because as far as I'm concerned, like, you know, they can generate meetings with outbound or with marketing, whatever is needed. But at the end of the day, I have someone there that is in charge in that type part of the funnel of how many meetings and opportunities are generated. One level down, you know, we have like the sales team. It's all about, you know, the revenue. They know how many meetings they're going to get this quarter. What they need to do to get to that revenue number. We also have solution consultants. In our industry, it's, you know, the deep dive, the second meeting, the demo, you get added like a solution consultant. We know like, you know, the sales cycle length, it's usually for us, it's like 30, 45 days that we close deals. So each person in this funnel knows exactly what their responsibility is and what kind of number they own to. The only person in my organization that doesn't have a number is the VP of brand. Like, because they want brand to do crazy fun stuff. I don't want them to think about like MQLs or opportunities and all that kind of stuff because then it's like, you can't really be creative. Like you can do stuff that every time is like, the goal is I request a demo.

And so who's building the visibility and the like BI? Is that RevOps under Growth?

Yes. So it's RevOps under Growth are doing that. Now we're also building like a data team to dive even deeper into it. That's how I framed it. And maybe it's historical. In fact, I came from marketing. I was able to build it there. So now when I took over sales, I got like RevOps to be involved more in sales as well.

How have you made sure that you're getting the right data inputs from the sales team? Because like oftentimes that's a black box. Like marketing is highly visible and structured and you can, you know, you can see the clicks, you can see the downloads, you can see whatever. And then it goes into sales and then you're just relying on. Reps to tell you the right things and move stages appropriately? And how do you address that?

You know, one of the frustrations is, you know, having CRMs not updated, especially as I'm telling them, like, I need to know the conversion rates, you know, from the discovery to the demo and, you know, so forth. And also it took a lot of time. We didn't speak about before building that kind of trust, you know, for them as well. It was kind of crazy having this marketer all of a sudden like manage them. And so I had to build that kind of trust with them. And I think, At the beginning, we had some compromise of what to update and whatnot. And what really made a difference is AI. Like you were the one that also recommended me like Momentum.

Oh, you're a Momentum customer now?

Yeah, yeah. I'm a Momentum customer for more than a year now. All of a sudden that like all the stuff that was important for me to understand the machine, now I can leverage like AI, like Momentum to do so I can understand, you know, like exactly the funnel, exactly what's happening. I look at like conversion rates. I want to understand why people convert more things to opportunity, people convert less. Like I can have all these mails jumping on reminders, you know, for, directors and the VP sales. Yeah, it's leveraging technology. It's especially like as a marketer, I think when you move into sales, like you want it to work in the same way. Like understand the campaigns, like, you know, the campaigns when you look at them on LinkedIn, like everything is like, you have like columns, everything is organized. It's sales, it's harder, it's human beings. But I think now with AI, there's so many things you can do. I know like you're the pro on that.

This is my default answer. I'm like, just go get Momentum to do it all. We're like, well, doesn't AI make mistakes? It's like, way less mistakes than your sales reps are making. Cause we were one of the earliest Momentum customers when it was still like, you know, AI hallucinates and, you know, we didn't know about the accuracy. So we looked at the quality of inputs that we got from the reps versus the quality of inputs we got from Momentum. We compared that to like what we, what we like could see in the transcripts or what we like could confirm as true. And we're like, okay, so the reps put the information in like You know, a certain percentage of the time AI is all as 100% and the accuracy of the information, like AI is not perfect. It's way better now. And the accuracy was actually better. And then we just flipped every, everything over. 'Cause at, at the beginning we would like give the rep the, the information and they would have to like approve or edit what got synced into Salesforce. And then we just flipped it to like, no, like Momentum's just gonna write all the fields. We're never gonna ask the reps. They can go and change it in Salesforce if they see something's wrong. But now I can just ask for anything. Like we, like every time we have a new thing we're trying to solve, we're like, well, just make a Momentum prompt in a field for it and you can just get that information and make decisions.

Exactly. Exactly. I think it helps so much, especially as you try to do this kind of revenue architecture. And even now, like there's something new I introduced, like for the past year we're using the solution called Ditto that helps us with customer voice. It does like references and reviews and something new that they launched like a couple of months ago is like a win-loss analysis. So if now like I'm frustrated when I look at the field in Salesforce, the AE decides why we lost the deal, which is, that can be a lot of different things. Like I don't know like how the AE's gonna pick it. Now we automate like calls going to our close loss saying like, okay, we'll pay like $50, $100. Just get a call, you speak with AI, it gives the answers and then it pre-populates like, Salesforce, much better. Like you hear it from the customer. Yeah, I want something that is more scientific as much as possible.

For those who don't know, Momenta got bought by Salesforce 2 weeks ago. What did that make you feel like as a customer?

Yeah, I think every time like a company, like a startup you're using gets bought by something like a Salesforce, you're a bit concerned about what's gonna happen. Of course, like, you know, I sent Santi a note, you know, the CEO congratulating them, but like, I hope, you know, the service is gonna be continue and be great as it was before and they'll, going to keep like innovating. And also, you know, there's the opportunity, the fact that goes into Salesforce, that is anyway our CRM. Hopefully there's going to be opportunities there. What do you think about it?

I'm excited.

I like—

I went from being a big Salesforce skeptic a couple of years ago and being like a pretty like prickly customer, I think, in the Einstein years. I'm optimistic. Like they bought Bluebirds, they bought Momentum, they bought Qualified, they bought Informatica, they're just like all in. And when you have a founder CEO, that helps a ton to like make these big bets. As much as like we are custom coding a bunch of our own stuff and hosting things like elsewhere, I think a lot of enterprises will use Salesforce as their like very safe, like governance built a home for agents. And I think there's a good chance that Salesforce becomes like more of like the ecosystem hub than even, even it is today. Cause they've got all these moats. They've got the partner ecosystem. They've got the integration ecosystem. They've got, it is safe. Nobody's ripping out Salesforce for an AI CRM when they're like $100 million plus ARR. Maybe you see that for like the 10-person marketing shop, but yeah, I'm optimistic.

Yeah. I'm like, I'm with you. Like, I think maybe with time there's going to be more consolidation and like, you know, you want to have like one system you're working on as opposed to like a lot of different ones. Sometimes, you know, you don't have any other option. But it's, you know, I used to work many, many years ago, like at IBM. It's like, you know, the saying, you know, you never got fired for buying IBM. So I think Salesforce is the same thing now. And like you said, it's like with even with all the AI and what's happening in the stock market, it's like I'm not going to like drop Salesforce and Vibe Code like a CRM. It's like it's easier for me if everything is there.

Like, yeah, I've been on a bit of a buying spree. With tech stocks recently. Hopefully that doesn't crush me later, but Shopify getting crushed by like, you know, 20 whatever percent makes no sense to me. Amazon being down makes no sense. Like these are businesses with big moats and you know, there's some seat pressure, some like license-based pricing model pressure, but that's not Shopify's model. It's not Amazon's model. Like Amazon's going to be completely run by robots in a couple years. I think the they have a big COGS reduction opportunity. But yeah, it's gonna be a fun, it's gonna be an interesting couple years.

Yeah, I think, you know, I know you're crushing it in your business, but even though with how AI-forward you are and like getting people to be more effective, like you're still gonna hire more people. They're all gonna be like more effective. So it's not that like tomorrow like AI is replacing everyone and like, you know, you don't need like reps anymore because everyone would still wanna grow and just, make it more efficient and faster.

Our AI team ships some awesome improvement that makes us more efficient and productive, like feels like every week at this point. It's sort of crazy. My answer isn't like, okay, great. I'm going to like hire less sales reps now and just like grow at the same rate, but cheaper. No, like we're, we're not in that company stage. I'm pulling forward headcount. I'm like now pulling in at this point, like June headcount. Into, into March. As outbound efficiency goes up, those unit economics are really good for us now. They were always like really solid and, and they've gotten like significantly better. So it's like, great, more people, more channel diversity, more pipeline. We— this is the first time like the last week where we've had not like definitely not enough AE capacity. Like that's a problem I'll take all day.

I don't know, it makes sense since I think the same thing like with the product, like you're talking about like developers, but like we mentioned with Salesforce, the same thing goes with like startups like ours is the fact that we can be more productive. Like we want to become more like an FBA solution. We started shipping new products like month-end close and cash management and more things. Like we just want to be the platform. We want to be the place where like CFOs go to, just like you were doing probably for restaurant owners. And like the same reason, like, you know, in Salesforce are buying all these companies, like, you wanna be the one-stop shop, like the platform where, you know, people reside on your target audience.

For folks that are listening, they're like, this sounds good. I'd love to be more predictable. It's, I might, my, like, you know, motion isn't all that predictable today. Where should they start? What, what would be like the first few things that you would suggest somebody put in place to get to this level of sort of like the reverse engineering specificity that you, you've got?

I think they need to expect from their leaders, whether it's director or VP, is to create stuff that's predictable. For example, if you manage even an SDR team, you wanna know how many meetings you generate, how many opportunities, what's the conversion rate to close one, just to understand if that works, maybe quadruple the team if you have the right metrics. And of course, I mentioned the examples in marketing, you want to have like a head of growth that knows how to do the math I mentioned before of like, you know, the cost per meeting and opportunity, close one, et cetera. So you have to have like this kind of leaders that don't just think in terms of the micro tactics, but more in terms of, you know, like the full strategy. And then based on that, you know, you build the whole mechanism, you connect, you know, the numbers of the SDRs to the ones that are more sort of growth and sales, solution consulting. Of course we didn't talk about like account management. The same thing goes, you know, with upsells, but you want to have like a system and you want to put it like all in one place. Sure, like if I want like just one aid to sell like $100 million, like let's do like, let's do whatever works. Like I can drop paid media completely and do something else like organic if it works. I'm not like invested in anything specific. I just want this to work. I feel like I found something that works, but you always need to evolve. You always need to change. You know, there's so many tools out there with what's happening with AI and other things, but you can't stay stagnant. And going back to the example we mentioned before, you can just say like, A's need to prospect because they always prospect. Like I'm sure salespeople in the past had to meet people in person and drive around the country. That doesn't happen anymore. Okay, so the same thing in marketing, in every business. So that's my thought process about it.

You had incredible sales craft before versus being like really systems-oriented, those two things were relatively equally valuable. But now that AI gives you so much more leverage, being systems-oriented just like is so much more important in terms of its impact because the value of having great salescraft is relatively the same. But now the value of being like system and technology and architecture advantage is gone up by like, I don't know, 2x, 10x, is it? It's tough to say where we're going.

You know, sometimes I love like what I'm doing at work and I feel it's like when I was a kid playing video games, you just need to understand what's your goal, what you're trying to like manipulate, like what kind of numbers you want to beat, whether it's revenue growth targets or CAC and magic number and all that. And like you have different levers, you know, you can pull, but that should be the mindset. It's not like about like, you know, being like the artist that does like the best funny marketing campaigns or the best sales executions, like how it all works together, how it works like as a machine for you to hit your numbers.

Let's start with some of your use cases first, and then I want to unpack like where are you going to learn and like how can people stay up to date? So yeah, I would love to hear some of the most impactful AI use cases that you guys have in place today.

Yeah, so let's start with like the top of the funnel. You know, my background is in marketing. That's my passion. And like I mentioned also where most of our revenue is coming from. If in the past, you know, every time I wanted to do like a new video, a new campaign, well, you have to work on a script, work with a production company. It's going to cost you $30,000, $40,000. You know, we create videos within a few days, work with whether it's Sora or other crazy tools like I have teamwork with stuff like from China, like stuff, talking about like what you can do with Gemini and like, there's so many like amazing things you can do. Like we're able to generate, I think more than 100 pieces of like campaigns like in a month. And we couldn't have done that without AI. We even like one of our team members just recently did this kind of funny video like in Sora where he had like that famous painter Bob, what's his name, you know, from TV.

Oh yeah, Bob Ross.

Bob Ross. Yeah, like paint like an Excel, like he did it like in Sora. We posted it like organically on TikTok. And again, I'm selling to CFOs. It got more than a million impressions, thousands of like comments also from the Microsoft account. Like all this in something that took him maybe like 10 minutes to do. If we didn't need to film something, we now have a team that can even do it in the office, but all the editing is done like with AI. There's so many possibilities of stuff you can be self-efficient on. So our marketing team is very AI reliant. We use like AI to create like spam filters to understand, you know, what is the right account and what isn't. Like because we have so many inbound traffic coming in, you know, if in the past we had to have like an SDR evaluate something, now, you know, we have our spam agent look at like all the leads coming in. You know, it can check, you know, the domain if it's serious and then it's, if it's gibberish before the domain, it can check it. If it seems like a name of a person, it can run it on LinkedIn and see if this person actually exists.

Did you make that in-house or is that like a Clay table or what?

Yeah, in-house, like RevOps team made it. Yeah, like connecting Clay with OpenAI.

That's a Clay workflow that uses the OpenAI model?

Yes, yes. And sales, like we mentioned Momentum, how our account executives as well as our solution consultants that in the past I had to push them a lot on updating for, fields, barely need to update anything. Everything is automated. Not only like summaries of meetings, but we have like different fields of saying like which competitors were mentioned. By the way, if competitors are mentioned, it sends like automations to their directors that they can like look at it and see like how they were talking about those competitors. So it's really like throughout the whole funnel, there's like so many things, but still I always feel FOMO. Especially when I'm listening to you, but also other people, it's like you always feel you're behind. There's so many things happening.

Let's talk about the transformation there. So was it about hiring AI experts or applied AI talent? Is this about just getting all of your existing teams to adopt? And if so, how'd you do it?

You need to just have the right people. Some people came to us, like our now director of RevOps team, she was a stewardess in the past, but she just loved doing operational stuff and with that figured out and now she's doing amazing things with AI. Same goes with like our head of the creative team that is like just loves playing with Sora and Gemini, all this kind of stuff. And like I would say most of our team members just love AI, are native to it. And you know, if you're not, maybe you're not the right person on the team. I think it's like, it's a personality. No one comes with like 10 years of experience like in AI. Yeah, just finding like the right people that are open to it. And again, you can, by the way, you can be great on your job without being like AI first or native, but I think you need to have enough people that feel comfortable with it and feel free to make mistakes. I always encourage my team to try new things. Even like 2 years ago when all this AI stuff got started, I did an internal competition in the team where everyone had to use AI for something to make their job better, even give them like a robot, you know, for the person that won. It needs to come from the top. I think really encouraging your team to experiment and try and make mistakes. That's the most important thing. So if they don't make mistakes and they don't screw up something, they're never going to learn.

Are they just all learning on their own and like in YouTube and Twitter, or have you done stuff centrally? You brought in experts, like how have you got people to make this evolution?

They're just, I think, learning themselves. I wish I could mention, you know, a specific class or YouTube channel. Also, you know, we see examples like whether it's listening to podcasts or reading different LinkedIn posts. Sometimes we see like a good idea someone posted and share it with the team. It's like, oh, let's figure out how we can do this too.

So you mentioned it needs to come from the top. How did, how did you make that clear to people?

So I mentioned like, you know, one was like the competition we're doing, also like sharing with them, like I constantly share with them examples. I don't know how you do it with your team, but like I send like emails all the time saying, oh, check out this post on LinkedIn, like see what they did. Maybe we can do this, maybe that. And like, I love it when, you know, they come up with their own ideas. So I wish like I had this magic formula, but it's just, I guess, having the right people on the team and allowing them to experiment.

You have to see the art of the possible. That's the tricky thing with where AI is today. All of this is so new that you don't even think to know that that thing is possible unless for me, like I see something on Twitter. I follow a bunch of AI people, but I don't actually use my like follower feed. I only use my For You page because my For You page is just like, Kyle only cares about one thing and it's right now it's Open Claw. Like I could go, I could scroll for like 10 minutes and see nothing but Open Claw stuff. And I find that that Twitter algo is just dialed in for me. But you know, you got to like engage with that content and avoid everything else. But I'm like constantly texting things and I ask my product team a lot. There's a couple guys in product that I'm close with and I'll ping them and be like, hey, what do you think of this? Or like, could we apply it in this way? There is no course out there. You just have to do it and you have to be really genuinely interested and excited yourself and be on the front foot if you expect to be able to pull everybody along in the same way. And if you want everybody to be AI native and you're not, you're just not really going to get the result you want.

Let them experiment and show stuff. And it's also important to mention, sometimes if someone's listening to this, it seems like we're making people do stuff. I'm sharing with them ideas all the time, but it's not like everything has an action item. It's like, oh, we have to do this, we have to do that. I'm saying them stuff and every now and then they come back to me and say, oh, this was great. I'm actually now doing this, or I have a better way of doing that. We also encourage people. Different Slack channels. Should we share examples? We see something that's good. I'm not going to share this with one person. I want the whole team to see it. And maybe it's going to inspire them to try to do something.

What's the best personal productivity thing you do with AI? How have you used it to make yourself a more effective or productive executive?

For me, it's the strategy with just ChatGPT and all that. So I mentioned we are using tools for work like Momenta and Ditto, et cetera. We have many different tools, Clay. I feel like, you know, you have the knowledge of the world like in front of you. Again, whether it's you're using like ChatGPT or Claude or anything like that. I consult with it about commission plans, about strategies, about like messaging for different new campaigns. It's amazing. Of course, you know, you don't want to rely too much. You want to be skeptical. You want to double-check things. But it is so amazing. I can't imagine like how people decide, you know, talk about strategy or revenue architecture, how you do these things like without consulting, you know, with a chat. It's just so powerful.

What do you think changes in a CRO role over the next 24 months? So with AI, with everything changing in the world, how do you think this changes what we spend time on day to day, what we need to be able to do? Let me know if you got thoughts there.

Yeah, I think it all comes out like you need to know your north star. Which is again like revenue growth, cost of acquisition and so forth. But you need to be able like to break everything, make big changes and adapt to new things that are happening. Like we mentioned like a few of the things now, but like, you know, what's gonna happen, you know, with AI calling, how much people are gonna be open to like buying stuff, you know, with chatting online, you know, with chat. Like there's so many things that can happen and you just need to be quick on your feet, like adapt to changes and, be willing to, you know, like the old saying goes, like, you know, break things. If you're not willing to break things, I don't think you're going to adapt to this new reality. Like things are going to change faster than ever. And nothing is sacred as far as I'm seeing it. But, and I think if you look at it that way, you can make everything more efficient. Like, I don't think like if someone's listening to me, like an SDR, they need to be concerned about the role. Like they are going to be, if they're good at it, they're going to be much more productive. Like our AEs increased like their ARR, like how much revenue they're generating in the past year by 20%. I want them to sell 100% more. So again, it's not about like giving them a higher quota. I want to enable them, give them the tools to sell even more. The same thing goes with SDRs or with marketing and all that. So I think the same discussion happens with developers, right? Like they're saying like you'll still need developers, but like the best developers are going to be better than everyone. So I would say maybe the same thing with CROs, you know, the best CROs are going to be much better than other CROs.

What do you think separates a good CRO from a truly great one?

Revenue architecture, like I mentioned before, thinking about the big picture, willing to question everything. You need to be able to answer to the CEO that says, okay, your target is $10 million a quarter. You need to know how to deliver.

What's the most common advice you give your— you give to your new second-line leaders or like a first-time VP of sales?

Make, make decisions fast, especially I think around employees. I think it's— it takes time for all of us to learn, for me as well, but very early, you know, if someone's amazing and they're going to crush it, or if it's the wrong fit. And I think that's something that even some of the best leaders aren't that good at. And it's hard because it's personal, but I've been seeing too many great leaders spend months or even a year on people that they hired that were just not the right fit. And it's just not worth it.

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

Sometimes it's just not going to work with a company, whether it's, you know, you're not aligned with the founders or the CEO and all that, and you just need to move on because there's all this strategy of things you can do, things you can try to change. But sometimes, you know, you're just in the wrong place. So there are more jobs out there.

When do you know that?

Like I now work with a coach, it really helps me. Like you need to set like different goals, you need to understand the challenges, you need to try to overcome them. But if you made like a few different attempts, whether it took you a month, a few quarters, at some point you need to put like a target and say like, if it doesn't work by this point, it's time to move on and set deadlines for yourself.

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

So actually, like I give here a couple. So in terms of business and what you're talking about, I highly recommend Contagious Marketing by Udi Ledergaard. From Gong. Again, I mentioned that this really inspired me when I built our marketing operation. It gives specific examples and how he did marketing and built Gong to what it is today. And also in terms of something that is semi-relevant, like my background for many years ago is in PR, so I love the book All the Worst Humans written by a very shady PR guy in the US. Super fascinating stories that made me Long enough for the days in PR, also be happy of why I'm not there anymore. But really, really exciting stories about how we worked with probably the best, the worst, sorry, the worst people out there, whether it's dictators or corrupt politicians and all that. But it's fun, especially as a marketer to know how you can spin things.

Aviv, this was awesome, man. I really appreciate you coming on and this was fun to unpack. Hopefully we have convinced everybody out there that AE prospecting is, uh, potentially overrated depending on your market, your segment. There's always nuance, but it's, uh, it's a really important topic and comes back to this like first principles thinking, not getting stuck in this is the way it's done for some reason, like you're not a real AE if you don't prospect. This is a perfect example of that. So this was, this was a great one and thanks for coming on.

Thank you so much. I really enjoyed it.

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.