#88 Rolling Out SPICED across a 750-Person Sales Org - with Julien Cerutti, VP of Global Revenue Strategy at Meltwater

Welcome to the RedOps Lab, a podcast exploring the art and science of revenue operations. To find more episodes and resources on scaling your revenue engine, visit getweflow.com slash RedOps. This episode is brought to you by WeFlow, the easiest way to automate Salesforce data capture. Are you tired of chasing reps for clean CRM data? WeFlow auto captures emails, meetings and contacts from Google or Microsoft, maps them to the right records and stores them in Salesforce permanently. Our A9 notetaker transcribes meetings, populates fields across any Salesforce object and syncs everything, including AI summaries and transcripts back to Salesforce. So you stay in control and your pipeline stays clean. That's what RedOps teams at Plaque Lane, Coder, IDNow and many more love about WeFlow. Start your free 14-day trial with a quick intro call at getweflow.com today. Hello and welcome to another episode of the RedOps Lab. We're here with Julian Cerruti. I don't know if I pronounced that one correctly. Always, always. It's a running joke. I always pronounce names very poorly. Julian, great to have you. Welcome on the show. Thank you. Really excited to be here and excited about the topic we're going to get into. Absolutely. We're going to go deep on paid methodologies and qualification frameworks today. But before we do that, you know, who are you? What do you do? Yeah. So my name is Julian Cerruti. I work at Meltwater. I'm the VP of revenue strategy. And so for me, it's basically looking at the holistic customer journey and architecting go-to-market initiatives, programs around that. Yeah. Awesome. I mean, we actually met through Seth, right? Like who we had here on the show talking about RedOps and FP&A. He recommended to reach out and now we're here actually two weeks later. So that's awesome. We love that. You know, I always say like, you know, choosing a sales methodology is easy. Implementing it is really, really, really hard. So maybe, you know, that's the kickoff for our topic today. You know, you, you just went through this process. So today we want to talk about, you know, how did you come, like find the right methodology for you? You know, what were pitfalls introducing those and, you know, how do you implement them and how do you make it a living project? So maybe let's kick off with like, you know, why did you actually want to do it in the first place? Why did you feel you need a sales methodology? Yeah. I mean, a lot of this is just contextually where Meltwater was at the given time. We had a new CRO, step in and similar to a lot of companies, we started to say, we're going to start moving up market. We're going to be focusing on the enterprise. And as we were looking at basically redesigning the enterprise, go to market motion, I just felt like it was that time and place to say, we really need to put our foot down and say, there is a sales methodology and there's a consistent way for us to create operational learning as an organization really developed. And so when I spoke to the CRO, I just said, you know, this is going to be something that we have to hit on from the center. And a lot of that was basically a byproduct of, it was a bit of a wild west or, and, or like, you know, what you call hero ball where you just had top performers and everything. So, you know, it just seemed like as we were growing as an organization, it was a maturity thing in terms of just stepping into something much more structural as an organization. Yeah. And then I think you mentioned, I mean, you've been working on this for a bunch of months. Like when did you start the process? How long has it been so far? Yeah, no, it's been, it's been like two, three years now since, since the very beginning stages of it. And so, you know, I, I initially, when I came into enterprise, I actually adopted the medic methodology and I am well versed in that and knew the ins and outs of it. But then as we were looking at the go-to-market design for, for enterprise and thinking about future implications for Meltwater, you know, I obviously wanted to see what else was out there. And so one of the big things that we were thinking about was the GRR and thinking about the entire customer journey. And I think because it was about re-architecting the entire customer journey, it started to speak to me in terms of a holistic way of, Hey, if we're going to rebuild what we're thinking about in the enterprise, let's not just, you know, zero in on the sales methodology. Let's look at an architecture that makes sense that can also really influence and impact our GRR because I think that was one of the key things that we wanted to drive with it. And what did you end up choosing in terms of? Yeah. And so I, we chose with winning by design. So I'm sure some of the listeners are familiar with that and, and selecting Spice as part of that framework. And the key thing was that holistic architecture, which in many ways, you know, it was selected. And I think there's still implications as to things I can build in the future that are already preset there or saying, Hey, we already have those fields in Salesforce. So now I can integrate and provide that information to a product marketing or, or hand that to the onboarding team for CS to do X, Y, and Z. So it just seemed to be very well-rounded in terms of a holistic architecture. And I think, you know, a lot of the trends has been the focus on the post-sale and how you need to focus on NRR and everything. I just felt like it was very tightly integrated in terms of having that holistic focus. Versus us just primarily focusing on less, you know, increased conversion, ASP, you know, all of those things on the sales side. Yeah. I'm, I'm, I'm curious about like this, you know, that you've been on it for such a long time now. And I wonder if we could go back like a bit of it to the beginning, you know, how that actually, like how that actually worked out, like, you know, starting to talk about, you know, Spice. I think that you probably, there's like this discussion that you have more like on the frontline. Yeah. Level, you know, like individual contributors, um, you know, kind of like getting their buy-in, but then there's also the managers, there's the leadership. Yeah. Sort of like, how did that go down? Um, yeah. So, you know, at Melwater, we're, we're a fairly large organization. I think our sales force is around six to 700 people, 750, right? Um, so you have to think holistically, like, how do we get our champions? How do we have influence that people? don't think of this as flavor of the month right it's like oh well some of us nomadic and you know down market a lot of us like bant like why are we going to take this head on right so i'm sure it's what everyone else is thinking for the most part where you you have to have executive buy-in you have to have the executives ready to go and and understand what it is and speak the language and then the bottoms-up approach uh which with winning by design you know a lot of the stuff we did in designing the programming was developing playbooks and or motions but it was essentially co-built by being very selective around key champions around the global ecosystem sales cs and so on and so if you're co-building with a lot of the champions in that broader ecosystem that you know have leverage have have that um presence in certain offices super areas and so on then that helps create a lot of the adoption um and so you know you I pulled at all of those levers. And it's not to say it was the most perfect thing ever. And, you know, everything changed overnight. And I think what I'm experiencing now, two, three years later, is the continued evolution and iteration that needs to occur and looking at the data and deciding, like, what is the next step? What are we seeing to improve upon that? Touching on the frontline manager piece. Yeah, that's like, I have a lot of commentary on that. I joke, like, if I was going to write a book around go-to-market, it would be about how the frontline manager makes or breaks, especially for a large organization like Meltwater, where you've got, you know, the entire global ecosystem, right? We have offices from Tokyo all the way to LA and Europe and so on, right? So the thing is, like, we can educate, we can coach. We can teach. We can give all of the enablement, full 360 programming. And I'll talk about probably operational cadence in two because that's just absolutely significant because we want to create habits. But the truth is, someone can look at one document and the other person can look at the same document and interpret that differently. And so even though you said, hey, we've created a unified way of understanding how we look at our customers and how we evaluate deals and we break it down to modular components, every manager looks at it differently. They coach differently. And then the outcomes become different. And that's something I'm still constantly battling, which I'm happy to talk about, too. Yeah, yeah. I love that. I love that. Also, like, the piece about the, you know, how things can break, you know, with the make or break it with, like, the frontline managers. Definitely, I think also our experience, right? Like, introducing a tool like WeFlow, it can be change managed, right? Basically, depending on what part of our product, but it can be change management and you need to have champions in your organization. You need to convince. Like, the frontline managers as well. I'm curious about, like, the cadence piece, because I think that's such an important point on, like, introducing this, particularly with the frontline managers, right? Because, like, they own some of those cadences. So if they don't, you know, start using Spice. in your case um you know during those meetings um then you know it's never it's never really gonna work out yeah so yeah curious like what you did to incentivize that or like if you did or maybe the opposite of incentive i don't know yeah yeah i'll kind of break it down i mean one of the key things in that rollout was actually designing a frontline manager playbook and a core pillar of that was basically introducing the concept of operational rhythm operational cadence and saying you're we're going to look at your week we're going to look at your month your quarter and structurally this is how you need to approach your business um and you know there's something called deal inspections in in the past there would be a lot of forecast calls where the inspection would happen in the forecast calls but maybe you guys have experienced this too right the forecast call turns into hey so what's up with that deal okay and what's the next okay great next right no it's not it's not real it's not real inspection right there's no inspection it's not real there's not the time nor the like uh calmness and the room is too full and so yeah and everyone is sitting silently on the side waiting for their turn they're typing away that's me you know you i'm sure everyone's laughing at that point because it's just like that's exactly it right so it's like one of the simplest things was just saying there is a separate call that should be around deal inspection you should choose you know based criteria you should choose these type of accounts these type of reps you need to have everyone come together and coach and learn together um there's simple things like three and me um from someone um lindsey by at winning by design introduced to us it's like before you become the savior as a manager you first ask well philip what do you think janice what do you think before i answer because you want to get that collaboration you want people critically thinking about things um so anyway with with the cadence we we were just introducing you need to create this and we wanted to do was create habit forming structure to the organization this is like this is what i do it's just typical right every tuesday i do this for an hour or two hours or whatever it is that they do structurally um so that that was some of the operational cadence stuff that we brought into the organization and again you know that's where a couple months later you you ask your frontline manager and it's like are you oh well we i don't do i do it on my one-on-ones and you know and then you're like oh well i don't do it on my one-on-ones and you're like oh well i don't do it on my one-on-ones and then you start going back to iterating again saying all right how do we solve for this how to create scoreboards and rankings and you know anything else that we can modify and or tweak in the ecosystem that would um you know ask a manager to say hey i need to look deeper into this right and and the the what's really validating is that those who have taken on uh a lot of methodology and and you know i have deal scoring that's tied into salesforce so i could look at someone's pipeline i know the average score and what's the lowest score if we have economic buyers engaged all of those things some of the best managing uh performers right now are are fully are the ones that are champions of it and their scores are super high and their conversions are way better than anyone else year over year um there's someone in emea that's had like 17 percent in q2 from q2 to q2 you know it's substantial uh and then you have other ones that are flat or kind of declining and then you ask and then there's there's a breakdown and somewhere in that process so it's it's all validating and even the deal scores i have in salesforce the higher the score goes up the higher the conversion rate we've looked at all the historical analysis we have everything so it's it's funny the data is compelling but you still find the cracks and and that's you know maybe where i could talk about four or five years ago where i could talk about four or five years ago where i could talk about four or five years ago and lead measures and other things that we're trying to do with it i mean as a as a you know as you know philip and i are building we flow that automates salesforce data capture and then you know drives insights and stuff like that right like obviously super curious about kind of your implementation in salesforce so can you tell us a bit more like how did you operationalize yeah spiced um you know okay in salesforce yeah yeah so a lot of this was thinking about like that whole 360 design like i can't just roll out and say hey we're doing spiced data capture you got a couple training sessions here's like a deal inspection sheet go after it um so operational cadence was one of those things but the other things was like it needs to live in our ecosystem there needs to be data to support it so deal scoring actually came from the fact that i used a lot of the medic playbook of win uh loss and slip deals and what i did was it was initially more of a manual scrub i wanted to get a sample size of deals and i actually just sent it out to reps and said and had a list of questions check boxes scores everything like that and said give me a really deep dive into this deal as to why we won slipped or lost it and then i collected all that data and started to deeply analyze it and then based upon that i created a weighted scoring of spiced medic essentially um but then i went to uh within a rev ops team uh in it to basically say i want to put this into salesforce and started building so i had a lot of good momentum behind it because there was adoption people were excited about the methodology they liked the scoring uh and it was it was really a pragmatic design in terms of like hey if we can have deal scores like imagine the implications for the future and to me you know i said it's a bit of a watershed moment because it really allows for true adoption because now we have data that shows reps are doing it they're scoring it we're waiting it all of those aspects are happening and i think that's happening um so i think there was just a part of it was momentum it's like one of my things that i always use in my arsenal is like keep momentum if you lose momentum on projects it just it dissipates as well you know it was about moving super fast uh so when i collected that data it was i mean as fast as i could just create that wave of momentum everyone talking about you know that kind of thing so maybe just to recap on the implementation set right so ensuring that you have champions especially on the frontline manager executive buy-in obviously champions on the on the rep level right like illustrate success so that's super important then secondly like being able to you know properly enable train on the recurring basis thirdly that you capture the data and you make the data actionable what i find really interesting here uh is that you started with um analyzing the data first to then decide how to implement it into the crm right like yeah starting with like kind of win-loss analysis uh slip uh slip deals uh push deals right like really understanding like what that what it is and and any insights there that you found yeah i'll tell you some of those insights so you know i i come from sales background i i've been in ae and and part of me was just seeing like how do i sell this in many ways how do i get people really fired up and excited so i said i'm going to do this analysis and i can give it back to the organization and say hey mid-market hey enterprise these are the reasons why you win deals why you slip deals this is why you're losing and going into like a written document that you know if you're an ae and saying this isn't generic this isn't a book you can read this is about real meltwater data that tells you why you're winning slipping and losing deals and the advantages you can have having that context and what you should do moving forward so i wanted to create something really compelling in that so that was kind of bundled with and we're going to launch deal score and we're going to launch deal score and we're going to launch deal scoring um and so now you have a modular approach to look at it and you know the outcomes i'm sure many companies see the same thing surprise surprise we win deals when we're we have really strong champions they're the domino effect of getting access to power the economic buyer and um and information which is basically the decision process decision criteria that's that's the main thing and and it was a bit of i have other things like executive interlock for executives um engaged uh beyond just the economic buyer but you want you know your ceo or or some someone in c-suite engaged with it uh and so it incrementally increases the score if you have these other attributes but the champion is the centerpiece for slip deals it's it's all no surprise right slip deals guess what decision process that was that was the score that just had the biggest margin of change when we were losing or slipping deals right and then the reason we're losing deals was decision criteria we actually didn't really uh document and synthesize exactly what they were buying and creating value differentiation and saying why us um so those are were the big big headlines and what's funny is i first started enterprise and then i did it in midmark smb the data was almost entirely the same so i just said hey this is the water use system and you know i'm sure it's pretty universal what i just said um but i had the real meltwater data supported hey philip here are you enjoying this episode well good news because you can find more free rev ops and go to market resources on get me flow.com slash rev ops access over 20 cheat sheets reports and guides that will help you become a better revenue operator or join over 2 000 subscribers who already get the latest resources right into their inboxes with our free newsletter just go to get me flow.com slash web ops. it might be universal but it's very different to go to a rep and basically tell that story and tell this is why it matters and tell that to the frontline managers and then basically the what they are thinking is like oh look this is not some fluff stuff that people tell me and put on top just to control me this is something that can advance me in my career this is something how i can make more money right like this is really doing the sales quotes right now exactly and and so so i think i think i think right like i yeah i think this is uh this is a really really important thing because it really starts in the head right like it really starts in the head like the people need to see that it's not just for the sake of creating a sales methodology uh it's really like to basically become better sellers better managers more successful right right and it was important for me to ground it in in the realest way possible which is like i used real meltwater data this is not like hey you read a book or like our cereal read something and now we're everyone's running for it you know that kind of thing because i i do feel companies sometimes have that jaded response of leadership decided this out of nowhere or whatever it may be right um so i just wanted it to be as grounded as possible yeah yeah i really like that i really like that on on that actually i have a follow-up question so how transparent is that so is that something you know where you actively um or proactively try to create like a lot of transparency around the different like spiced metrics that you you know uh track calculate and cover so can any rep sort of like look into that how people are doing and so okay okay yeah i try to make it as transparent as possible and there's still like iterations of that but there's there's dashboards um that give full exposure to different teams managers across the world i i have a one dashboard is basically every frontline manager in the enterprise and i just have them all stanked real-time data and i just have them all stanked real-time data and i just have them all stanked um you know commit stage versus evaluate and um you know given the fact that i told you champion economic uh buyer decision process decision criteria the needle movers i actually have that live data in the dashboard i'm like we're going to track towards this which maybe is a good transition with the 40x stuff that i'd like to talk about but yeah we i'm trying to give as much visibility scoreboards rankings so people have a sense of that yeah yeah actually yeah perfect actually that's what i try to do to like little segue into 40x so yeah i think perfect uh i mean you know julian please just take it away i think yeah so um one of the things right now that i had that data in my hands and i knew exactly why we're winning slipping and losing um i wanted to find a way to continue adoption and programs to create excitement and so on uh this idea actually came from a board member that we have and and he utilized it at another company um that he was running and he was running a company that he was running and he was running at a company called 40x and it's called 40x it's the four disciplines of execution there's a book and a whole methodology around it but to to overtly simplify it um it's really about creating a wildly important goal and then creating lead measures around that and so the whole premise is it's very noisy go to market's really noisy and you've got so many competing priorities your manager's saying this your cro is saying this um your customers are screaming xyz how do i manage all of this all that noise and and that goes from an ic all the way to to managers to vps and so on so the idea of wildly important goal is that i'm going to spend an exorbitant amount of time on this one thing and ensure that it executes well and so what you do is if you 40x something your monday morning meeting where you all have your team no matter what those first 10 15 minutes whatever it is will always be 40x it doesn't matter if a building's on fire you know we're going to talk about 40x it's going to be a priority and you're going to be able to do that and you're going to just cascade that down and so what you can do is say hey we're going to increase our conversion by 10 that's our wildly important goal because it's going to create this xyz revenue right so that's my wildly important goal similar to okrs i'm going to have that trickle down and ultimately goes down to a frontline manager where then i'll say okay your goal is that you need to increase the champion score from here to there that would actually create the the conversion rates that we need so what are going to be activities that would actually move that number from a one to a two a two to a three and so that's what we call lead measures those are inputs you know some people remember of inputs and outputs what are the inputs that would make the output of that moving up so then you actually have to design it with your team and you have conversations which is already great in itself right hey guys how would we increase our champion score how would we increase our decision criteria score and and sparring that out with the team and designing it and then just saying okay i'm going to create a simple scoreboard every week i just want to make sure we're creating this new habit and if we can create that habit weekly and you know your manager is going to ask you every monday morning how many of those did you do or like did you follow through on this then it starts to create habits and now i do it in every single deal and then it starts increasing the champion score so i'm simplifying all of the concepts around it's just kind of give like an easy way of digesting that but then now there's something that's called lead measures 40x and managers start their calls and say let's focus on these lead measures because ultimately that should increase our deal scores which ultimately increases our conversion which ultimately gets us more revenue is this um is this specifically like the the cascading of the kpi i could just call it a kpi tree right you have the the basic top kpi then you have the leading measures that lead into those yeah is that something that you and ref ops decide on is that a discussion how yeah the wildly important goal would be something like i'd sit with my serum be like hey i'm looking at the enterprise like what what do we want as a wildly important goal um and and then you know there would be discussions like what is the key lever here because the problem is right you start going into like well we can do these sales plays and we can do uh we need to accelerate our pipeline we need to do this i mean and it's like okay that's whirlwind that's what the book would call right that's that's everything you can't do everything what's the one thing you're going to do that you know is going to move the needle um um and so i love i love the focus of it admittedly after i had read that book and digested all of it it was like this will be part of my playbook even if it's not exactly to a t i think i will always utilize this to say i need a groundswell of just everyone coming together and focusing on this one thing and making new habits form in the org and then you fold it back into the whirlwind once you see like people know how to build champions here no problem right um so that's part of the iteration right of just learning bringing new ideas and concepts in because uh i'm sure you guys know there's no silver bullet you know you can read busting silos or some book out there and be like oh my gosh you know but you got to you got to bring your own secret sauce to it and bring the pieces know the culture and figure it out yeah yeah 100 100 um is that is that like the full 40x i think so we have the we have the focus right we have the the leading measures yeah we've talked about a scoreboard uh before kind of keeping it condensed for you but yeah there's a scoreboard and the idea is like i actually don't want people building like complex ecosystems of scoreboards like it's got to be simple back of the napkin i should show you the scoreboard and it should take you five seconds to know who's doing their job it's not kind of you know yeah i mean i i think this is so compelling because what you're basically alluding to is like changes that's really hard habits is just really hard right it's not something like you say once and then it just happens and i really like this term of like widely important goal i don't know i just heard the first time but i it resonates with me because it's like yeah we have this like very more star yeah the north star right like yeah it's kind of the north star metric yeah yeah and it was funny it's like you initially hear it and you're like wildly important goal are you serious like yeah what do you mean you know um but like as you start sitting with it and structuring it you're like oh my god i don't know what i'm doing i'm like okay there's there's a lot more here um so yeah yeah it's been really interesting exercise so far yeah um wow i think we can you know talk a lot more about it and i think you know like with this 40x all the things that you you know talked about before creating transparency using your own data to build a lot of like trust and like really like a culture that truly believes in it and loops everyone in and gets their buy-in creating using those cadences for accountability right i think that's that's that's that's a lot of stuff that's going on right now and i think that's a lot of it's all these it's all these parts and aspects of it and all of them need to be executed and focused on otherwise yeah i don't think um i think initiatives like this one uh work out right i mean like spiced um i just counted six letters so you know six mistakes like you can do it just with like you know different interpretations of you know what the methodology um you know actually stands for and then different teams you know like okay what is a compelling event yeah so yeah all these definitions that you need to get like grounded like you said i'd like um i think uh it's so so important um you know moving also like into 2025 and beyond um i'm curious like has ai changed anything for you um in regards to spiced is like an ai filling out all the spiced fields now for you automatically and no one actually thinks about it anymore or how does that work yeah so yeah You know, we are using Gong for conversational intelligence, and we've kind of built those trackers, which I'm sure a lot of people are doing with medic or spice and so on. I am thinking about the future implications of how I can augment the sales rep, you know, and we're talking about different frameworks of how we're going to approach it. And it could be from, you know, creating some matrices in terms of high impact and low hanging fruit and all of that, in terms of the holistic customer journey. But another part of me just says, what if I just looked at a sales rep, or a CSM and said, what are all the jobs to be done around a CSM, and then strip those out and say, how can I create teammates, agentic workflows, assistive AIs, that would basically go co create build programs around them. And so what we've done already with this program is I've created a deal inspection bot, right? It knows why we win, why we lose, why we slip, and those are scoring methodology, that's all weighted. And it's, it's a medic and spice coach. And, you know, you can, it will give you a score, which a rep can say, hey, my champions are three, I got this, this and this, and I'll say, your champion isn't a three, you don't have these things. So it's actually pressure testing, which was a big thing I focused on in designing that. That's exactly what I want a manager to do, right? It's like pressure that is the champion of three, is the economic buyer engaged? I don't see that here, right? And it's been, you know, initial stages, as we iterate, it keeps improving. And I've been really impressed by the fact of, you know, be like, oh, you should just reach out to the economic buyers, like, actually, my champion would lose their mind, you know, I tested that kind of stuff. I know what a rep would say, and be like, no, champion said, do not reach out. And then it will be like, oh, okay, I understand. Here are alternative ways of how you can get to build up your champion, create a champion deck to engage the economic buyer, you know, or you can have your, your executive reach out via email, you know, all of these alternative paths of how you can execute on it. So I'm building that, you know, a deal inspection. And then we're just talking about like, do we have other teammates? Or do I fold more concepts in like value justification, ROI calculators, all of those types of things. So right now, we're basically designing the infrastructure in the background. And, you know, there's all the discussion around build versus buy. But right now, I definitely want to just kind of build and create point of views. Yeah. One thing I want to want to add on, right, so I think one of one of the beautiful things about AI, and like, I mean, we flow, right, we also do conversation, intelligence, and automatic field updates, and things like this. But one of the beautiful things I find when when we talk about, you know, what to do with the eyes, also, it gives you this ability to, you know, connect data points a lot easier, like on a much larger scale. So you know, when you talk about spiced, right, then, you know, and like, another big thing is just like looking at activities, right, like how many meetings, response time, interactions, all of the things that are also discussed outside of like those, you know, six letters, and then, you know, sort of like, you know, connecting them back to, you know, what actually, you know, was discussed in regards to spice and, you know, bring that all together. And I think this is one of the things where AI is like, so powerful. Yeah. In actually enabling you to do that, which before I was like, super manual process. Yeah. And, and we know activities are such like a strong leading indicator of like, whether a deal is moving forward velocity of a deal. So I love all the agentic workflows, I want more data to basically really unpack it. So there's organizational learning, but also like, at a rep level, they start seeing those signals. There is this other piece of like, I do want reps to look at a list of questions, and sit down and think about them and answer them, right? Because in an agentic workflow, right? Like I said, you don't have to fill out anything. The score automate automatically comes from conversations and activities log into Salesforce, and you're champions of three or it's a two. But there is that deal inspection thing where there are questions and I do want them to reflect. And so I feel like I'm going to have to hit some wall or have some time where I'm going to have to think about what what is that? What does that balance look like in the future? So I feel like this is going to be our next episode with you, you know, where we come together because I like we, I mean, we've seen probably now hundreds of like Salesforce setups. And I think the reality is the data is very silent, right? You have the activity data somewhere. You have the conversation data somewhere. You have the CRM data. You might have some web data. You have some contact data somewhere else. And so like we've been like actually a big initiative for us is being like, how do you bring this all together into one data engine? So that you can query it and you can, you know, structure the unstructured data, make it available. And then, you know, there should always be these like decisions, right? Like, you know, do you want to fully automate or not, right? Or do you, right? And I think this is really like a decision, right? Like AI coaching, right? Should the AI coach because the managers can't do it for every meeting or do you want to have like an additional coaching workflow? And so I think it's really like the way we approach it is like, it depends, right? There's different preferences, but what is most important is that you bring all the data together and you make it actionable. And I think the other piece you said really resonates well, because like, I mean, whether it's like 40%, 50% or 60% of reps and CSM spending on non-selling activities. There's a lot of stuff, right? There's a lot of stuff they need to do, whether that's internal meetings, whether that's, you know, CRM updates, follow-up emails, you know, prep research, right? And so in my mind, right? Like I think the future is very much the 10x seller, the 10x seller that, you know, gets automated a lot of things and it's just more efficient, but also more effective, right? Like I think the reality is like we always talk about efficiency, but there's a lot we can do to be more effective. If you think about the typical way deal management is done, you sit in front of a list, you have no clue what you should be doing, right? That is the reality for most sellers today. And so how do you create like, how do you have the agents tell you, hey, look, this is because I have all the context data. I have all the scores. I know what's going on, right? Like I can now make recommendations and you can basically then start executing. You still need somebody who is in the meeting and who holds that conversation and brings it all together, right? Like I don't think that's going to go away. At least not for like mid-market Enterprise, right? Like I think on the SME, you know, highly transactional, right? Like product that is already doing it. Well, like mid-market Enterprise, you need those folks for, I think, a long time and then they'll have, you know, a variety of different agents that help them, you know, execute better and faster. You're speaking exactly my language of where my head's going, where it is like a 10x seller. And I said teammates before, right? Those are agentic things that will basically like, you know, I want January to walk reps, walk in and say, you have new teammates that are going to make you a 10x seller. Now, you're going to have your portfolio, your territory. But here all of these teammates, here's a prospecting agent. Here's a territory planner agent. Here's a deal inspection. Here's a value, you know, whatever we decide is going to be. Here's a meeting prep planner, whatever it may be. And 10x their output. That's where my head's going in terms of how we want to design it. And that's for the CSM and everything like that. But that's kind of, you know, my ambitious goal for Jan 1 kind of thing. Okay, so this is the sneak peek to our next episode. I'm already very excited about it because we are basically on the same path building it. So it's essentially. You know, coming together and jamming on this topic. Before you go, I mean, is there any book outside of revenue architecture? I know you've read it. I mean, we had Jakko on the show speaking about it. It's a fantastic book. Everybody should read it. But like any other book you would recommend or any other research report or any other paper? I'm totally blanking being on the spot about it. I literally just gave someone like a list of like 10 books. Like you need to read all of these 10 books. Gosh. I mean, there's a lot of staples out there that I've always liked. I like the Ultimate Sales Leader, the John McMahon book. I like all the Challenger stuff, Matt Dixon, the Joel stuff. Go To Market Advisors has a book. I'm forgetting the name that I think is a good structural framework. I like Roberge. You know, I know it's a little older, but I like the Marc Roberge book as well. It's also a great podcast. Yeah, yeah. It's very, very good. Yeah, it's great. I mean, to be honest, you know, we put you on the spot here. We should have said that in the beginning. We typically say that. But you're right after and be like, oh my gosh, in this book, you know, but it doesn't matter. This was like a really fantastic episode. I mean, this was like exactly how we love it. You know, very deep, very, very much focused on what you've done and lived through with the hard learnings. So thank you so much for sharing. Really appreciate it. And yeah, wish you a great day. All right. Thank you. Thanks for your time. Thank you. Thank you for listening to the RevOps Lab podcast. If you enjoyed this episode and would like to support us, share it with a RevOps friend or drop us a five-star rating right now. And if you have feedback, questions, or guest ideas, just send a message to Janis or me on LinkedIn. Thank you and see you next time.