Speaker 1Our 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.
Speaker 2This is why I'm also able to target and bring the best account executives in the industry for my competitors because they know they're going to make more money.
Speaker 1And we discuss why the traditional way of looking at sales math and setting targets is fundamentally broken.
Speaker 2I don't really care that much about the quota. I care about how much I think they actually can produce.
Speaker 1Knowing 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.
Speaker 2You need to be able to answer to the CEO that says your target is $10 million a quarter.
Speaker 1You 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 sales and customer conversations. It animates 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 sales force directly, captures forecast and churn risk, auto-fills CRM fields, shares product signals, and tracks sentiment. Companies like Cursor, Zscaler, Ramp, and 11Labs 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, three out of four 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 in. I'm really excited. I'm excited for this one.
Speaker 2Awesome. Thank you so much, Kyler, for having me. I love the show.
Speaker 1Quick programming note. So we've been off for two weeks. I had a couple guest cancellations. I was out on vacation. I also, as you can tell by the gear attended the Superbowl as I wanted to give a quick shout out to Amanda Callow from one mind. 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, 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 data rails make the bet, like what gave you the confidence you could step into that seat? What gives company confidence? Just like talk me through a little bit of that journey.
Speaker 2Four and a half years ago, I was actually a VP marketing, a different startup. And then one day I was approached on LinkedIn by one of the co-founders of a data rails. His name is Yal Cohen. I looked him up, seemed like a serious guy already built a billion dollar startup, which was a walk me 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 with, it was like a couple of million. It was 90% outbound, like 20 something like SDRs, just some calls trying to get the meetings as you do, you know, when you start a startup and DD, the CEO and he told me about marketing. Let's see what happens. And fast forward, you know, four and a half years later from a company that was 90% outbound. Now we're 90% inbound based on that. In the last, like two 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 is anyway, most of the sales were coming from marketing. They're looking to have someone manage everything from the lead at the beginning to close 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.
Speaker 1Congrats. Wow. That's a good one.
Speaker 2Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. So exciting times. So yeah, happy to dive deeper.
Speaker 1I 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?
Speaker 2Yeah. 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 goal time just after like our series A funding. So I had some budget to spend. So I decided to build both. So I started with like a paid media activities, like our growth channel, as well as organic. And in organic, I started to do like a 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 DataReal 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 three 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 two or three people, but it just felt like, you know, like you were drilling and you're discovering oil. There was a product market fit. You know, you need to have. A 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 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 we're 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. Still, we're doing outbound. We're doing partnerships. But inbound and marketing, paid media and specific, like that's the main channel.
Speaker 1Were these agencies that you had used before?
Speaker 2I 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 do we think like we can generate. Talking already like in, you know, SQLs, opportunities, revenue, good agencies have like some sort of experience. And now we started seeing revenue coming in.
Speaker 1I 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, which is you, 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.
Speaker 2Yeah. So I started doing organic from the beginning, actually, like in my first week on the job, I looked at like our LinkedIn page. Super boring as most LinkedIn page 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 means? And I told him, trust me with time, it's going to work. I used the playbook of a gong, you know, what he 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 they took over that. And now we have like more. We have like more than 60,000 followers. We have some, uh, 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 and sometimes like thought leadership and that worked. And also the second thing that we did organically was, um, we started a podcast like we're doing now, like with our niche of FP and a financial planning and analysis, there was no like weekly podcast in the. In the field that we partnered with the leading FP and a, uh, guru, like influencer, uh, to do that. And now like four years later, we have more than 600,000 downloads to our podcast.
Speaker 1Wow. Good for you.
Speaker 2Thanks. Yeah. It became big. And, uh, 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 going to spend some of your time now hiring new aes investing time training them they're not going to help you in q1 results but they're going to help you in q3 so i think it's 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 should show results within this quarter
Speaker 1too 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 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 like crazy consumption hours on youtube so people are like really um 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 to spend a bunch of money that has this like long-term payoff you need
Speaker 2to show examples like exactly like the conversation we're doing now we're 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 a gone before even within our industry there are companies that are crushing it they'll 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 it's impacting everything like you know like we're seeing now some great uh sales coming in from outbound where when i listen to the calls it's like you know a complete cold album call saying okay i'm calling blah blah from data rails 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 course it's 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
Speaker 1talked a little bit about like getting this early marketing traction and so obviously like this helps you build tons of credibility and 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
Speaker 2all depends on like the person you know it's for 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 rev ops 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 dollars i know how much more marketing budget we need to spend how much meetings is going to generate what's the conversion into opportunities from opportunities to close one based on the number of meetings and you 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 increased like you know like the cost of meeting changing per quarter with increased like the cost of meeting budget but you know the moment that it worked just i think makes it also easier for the ceo when they're you don't have like this weird situation like in a management meeting where the vp marketing says oh i hit my target i generate enough pipeline the vpc says that i missed my target it doesn't make sense so as a zero that you know also understands marketing it's like for the 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
Speaker 1and obviously you know coming in for 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
Speaker 2complement 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-shape model and other things like that you can't know everything what i did when i took over sales there were just uh six account executives back then the first decision i did was promote one of them to be a team lead a few months later i promote another one to be a team lead and the first team lead i promoted fast forward now two and a half years later she's now vp sales managing a team of 30 aes wow good
Speaker 1for her yeah yeah she
Speaker 2absolutely crushed it and i think like when you have like a good team and we have worth you know the account executives as well as like those team leads that 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
Speaker 1easier so you didn't bring in outside sales leadership expertise you it was about promoting
Speaker 2from 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 uh but it's not obvious if we didn't have the right person on the team i would have hired someone external what gave you
Speaker 1the 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 uh understanding i think
Speaker 2we always trusted her she was always super smart even when we had like uh 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 come there to ask her opinion and stuff she knew how to give feedback she knew how to balance between you know what's the aes are complaining about what really is needed with time in a career you can tell like the right personalities and 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 without so we decided to go with her and she was like i'm going to go with her and she was like we don't need to hire a director above her and she
Speaker 1can take over all right let's get into the your comments on aes so like lay at aes and prospecting just lay out for people your thesis first off and then and then i'd love to unpack it yeah
Speaker 2so what i wrote is like i don't believe a should prospect that's a big claim especially i would say like smb at 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 at 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 every one person has their role and 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 solution consultants can help make in the process and do their roles customer success does their role in account management and it's not that like i'm opposed to it because of the skill set 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 my previous skills and company i did get like a little bit of leads from inbound but when i asked them okay but how much of your sales actually came from inbound most of the answers were 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
Speaker 1of 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 lost and it's a good way to supplement supplement their funnel but i don't think our reps generate more than 10 or 15 percent 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
Speaker 2exactly maybe like the fact i didn't come for on sales i don't have this 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 like i don't care if like in the past like you know you earned your right by like prospecting if it's not the best use of your time or you don't have a good way to do it again and sm even market might be different in enterprise i don't want you to do it like and i mentioned that not only do we fill the calendars like we have a whole system of how we do it like our account executives can get more than 100 meetings a quarter it can be like you know more than two a day sometimes i only hire more account executives when i know i have more pipeline i would not hire when I build my client, 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 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.
Speaker 1I 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 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 equations. It's just different. It is not AEs 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.
Speaker 2Exactly. 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 AEs. 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 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 a plan of just hoping people are going to prospect or having them spend all their time in like an outreach or sales stuff, trying to get meetings if it's not productive. Like, I don't see the point of it.
Speaker 1Plus, 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 be able to do it. And I think that's one of the things that we're trying to do. 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.
Speaker 2After talking with like a lot of AEs and other companies, when I interviewed, like I learned something where another company is 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. And prospecting. So here's like an interesting stat for you and like the audience. So this is why I'm also able to target and bring the best account executives in the industry for 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.
Speaker 1Our per rep productivity is three to four X, 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, but most people will 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, like way more than their OTE. You know, if you have this level of efficiency, if you have that three to four X, you can just pay top of market. You can pay for the rev ops 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.
Speaker 2Similar to like what I tell my team, like, you know, you're going from the CF 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 going to 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.
Speaker 1We've done a bunch of analysis to look at like, what is X, 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, 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 four booked demos a day and three 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 because marketing like way over produced 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 gotta find a balance point.
Speaker 2Yeah. 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 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 got to find the right balance and make sure you have like a good hypothesis, like how you're doing it, like learn from it, different mistakes and so forth. But this is again, how you build a efficient revenue.
Speaker 1So what was the pushback? Like what, what were, I didn't even see this post. What were people saying was the issue with it?
Speaker 2I saw like some comments saying stuff like you're not a real account executive. You don't know how to prospect or.
Speaker 1Yeah. It's exactly that.
Speaker 2And like some AEs were also saying, I don't want to count at 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're going to fail. You have to work on it together as a, for example, like also like for marketing, like they can talk about how they can generate like all these amazing leads, maybe 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.
Speaker 1That's a good, I've never heard that analogy. That's good. Yeah.
Speaker 2So it's, 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 that kind of thing.
Speaker 1So 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, of predictability? What were the big lessons learned?
Speaker 2First 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 a marketing budget, you know, understanding close rates. So, uh, going back, you know, to like, let's go through the math. Like if, uh, I know I, uh, have like a specific target, I go back and say like, okay, how many deals is it? Uh, let's say I need to get through 200 deals and then it's like a 50% conversion rates or like 400 opportunities. And you know, you can continue the bath 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, from 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 per meeting. 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 to 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're able to do it. So we mentioned, you know, three out of the four cores last year, we w 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 and 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 a model, but you know, once it happened, I updated the model, you know, for the coming course.
Speaker 1You must've had good instrumentation in place to like, understand the inputs that closely and any lessons learned on being able to, to have that level of visibility.
Speaker 2Yeah. 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 carry the bag. I'm not like, you know, when I took over sales, my goal was like, you know, I'm going to be more involved in sales. I'm going to help improve the conversion rate just because of my title, getting into more calls. Like I was more focused, like in being building, you know, the, the system and the spreadsheets, you know, to support the, the logic of how it works and just put the right people and the right spots to make it happen.
Speaker 1Is it RevOps in your org that owns building the data foundations and the visibility, or is this like a separate data team? How's that constructed?
Speaker 2So I have 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, they can generate meetings with outbound or with marketing, whatever's needed. But at the end of the day, I have someone there that is in charge in that part of the funnel of how many meetings and opportunities are generated. One level down, we have the sales team. It's all about the revenue. They know how many meetings they're going to get this quarter, what they need to do to get to the revenue number. We also have solution consultants. In our industry, it's the deep dive, the second meeting, the demo. You get added a solution consultant. We know the sales cycle length. 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. Because they want the brand to do crazy fun stuff. I don't want them to think about MQL. Or opportunities and all that kind of stuff. Because then it's like, you can't really be creative. You can't do stuff that every time is like, the goal is I request a demo.
Speaker 1And so who's building the visibility and the BI? Is that RevOps under growth?
Speaker 2Yes. So it's RevOps under growth. We're doing that. Now we're also building 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.
Speaker 1How 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 have you addressed that?
Speaker 2You know, one of the frustrations is, you know, having CRMs that updated, especially as I'm 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 the difference is AI. Like, you're the one that also recommended me like Momentum.
Speaker 1Oh, you're a Momentum customer now?
Speaker 2Yeah, 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 mentalists 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, you look at them in 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 don't like you're, you're the pro on that.
Speaker 1This is my default answer. I'm like, just go get Momentum to do it all. Like, well, doesn't AI make mistakes? It's like way less mistakes than your sales reps are making. Because 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 to from 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. I'm 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 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 is just going to write all the fields, we're never going to 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 every time we have a new thing we're trying to solve, or like, well, just make a Momentum prompt in a field for it. And you can just get that information and make decisions.
Speaker 2Exactly, 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 Dito, 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, you know, the field in Salesforce, the aid decides, you know, why we lost the deal, which is, you know, it can be a lot of different things, like, I don't know, like, how the A's gonna pick it. Now, we automate, like, is going to our closed loss saying like okay we'll pay like 50 a hundred dollars just get a call you speak with ai it gives the answers and then it pre-populates like uh salesforce much better like you hear it from the customer yeah i want something that is more scientific uh as much as possible
Speaker 1for those who don't know momentum got bought by salesforce two weeks ago what did that make you feel like as a customer
Speaker 2yeah 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 going to 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 going to be continue and be great as it was before and they're going to keep like innovating uh and also there you know there's the opportunity the fact that goes into salesforce that is anywhere crm hopefully there's going to be opportunities there what do you think
Speaker 1about it i'm excited i like i went from being a big salesforce skeptic a couple 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 and 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 because 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
Speaker 2yeah 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 uh 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 gonna like drop salesforce and vibe code like a crm it's like it's easier for me if everything is there and i think it's
Speaker 1like yeah i've been on a bit of a buying spree uh 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 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 gonna be completely run by robots in a couple years i think that they have a big cogs reduction opportunity but yeah it's a it's gonna be a fun it's gonna be an interesting couple years
Speaker 2yeah 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 want to grow and just make it more efficient and faster
Speaker 1our 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 gonna 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
Speaker 2you know it makes sense and i think the same thing like with the product like you're talking about like you know developers but like like we mentioned with salesforce the same thing with the product like you're talking about like the thing goes with like startup like ours is the fact that we could be more productive like we want to be come more like an fba solution we we started the shipping new products like a month in 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're doing probably for restaurant owners they're like the same reason like you know in salesforce are buying all these companies like you want to be the one-stop shop like the platform where you know people reside on your target audience
Speaker 1for folks that are listening they're like this sounds good i'd love to be more predictable it's 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
Speaker 2they need to expect from their leaders like whether it's director of vps like to create stuff that's predictable for example like if you manage even in like a sdr team you want to know like how many meetings you generate how many opportunities what's the conversion rate to close one just to understand like you know if that works like maybe quadruple the team you know if you have the right metrics and of course like i mentioned the examples like 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 etc 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 the ones numbers 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 a hundred million dollars like let's do like let's do whatever works like with 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 mentioned before you can just say like a's need to prospect because they always prospected like i'm sure sales people in the past had to meet people in person and drive around the country it doesn't happen anymore okay so something in marketing and every business so that's my thought process about
Speaker 1it 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 systems oriented just like is so much more important in terms of in terms of its impact because the the value of having great sales craft is relatively the same but now the value of being like system and technology and and architecture advantage is is gone up by like i don't know 2x 10x is it uh it's it's tough to say where we're going you
Speaker 2know 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
Speaker 1let's start with some of your use cases first and then i want to unpack like where are you going to learn and and like how can people stay up to date so yeah i would love to hear some of the the most impactful ai use cases that you guys have in place today
Speaker 2yeah 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 40 000 you know run we create videos within a few days work with whether it's sora or other crazy tools like i have a teamwork with something like from china like stuff uh but not a lot of people want to be in the video industry so i'm not talking about like what you can do with uh gemini and whatever like there's so many like amazing things you can do like we're able to generate i think more than a hundred pieces of uh 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 um 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 tick tock and again i'm selling to cfos it's not more than a million impressions thousands of like comments also from the microsoft account like all this and 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 so our marketing 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 a sdr value it's 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 a gibberish you know before the domain it can check it if it seems like a name of a person can run it like on linkedin and see if this person actually exists did you make that in
Speaker 1house or is that like a clay clay table or
Speaker 2what yeah in-house like uh rev ups immediate yeah like connecting like clay with open ai
Speaker 1that's a clay workflow that pulls that uses the open ai model
Speaker 2yes yes and sales like we mentioned like momentum how our account executives as well as our solution consultants that in the past 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 you know we have like different fields of saying like which competitors were mentioned by the way if competitors are mentioned it sounds like automations you know to their directors that they can like look at it and see like how you know they were talking about those competitors so it's really like you know throughout the whole funnel there's like so many things but still i always feel formal especially when i'm listening to you but like for also other people it's like you always feel you're behind there's so many things happening uh let's talk
Speaker 1about like the transformation there so was it about hiring ai experts or applied ai talent is this about just getting your all of your existing teams to adopt and if so like how'd you do it you need to
Speaker 2just have the right people some people came to us like our now director of rev ops team like she was stewardess like in the past but she just loved doing operational stuff and with that figured out enough she's doing amazing things with ai same goes with like our head of the creative team that is like just loves playing with uh sora and jim and i all this kind of stuff and like i think we'd say most of our team members are just love ai are native to it and you know if you're not maybe you're not they're not the right person on the team i think it's like it's a personality it's 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 a 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 two years ago when all this ai stuff was going on i was like you know i'm gonna do this i'm gonna do that i'm gonna do that i'm gonna do that i'm gonna do that i'm gonna do that i'm gonna do that i'm gonna do that i'm gonna do that i'm gonna do that i'm gonna do that 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 to the top i think really encouraging your team to experiment and try and make mistakes that's the most important things if they don't make mistakes and they don't screw up something they're never gonna learn are they just
Speaker 1all 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 yeah they're just
Speaker 2i 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 listening reading different linkedin posts sometimes we see like a good idea someone posted and sharing with the team it's like oh let's figure out how we can do this too
Speaker 1so you mentioned how it needs to come from the top how did how did you make that clear to people so i mentioned
Speaker 2like you know one one's 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 sending like emails all the time saying oh check out this person 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
Speaker 1to 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 and i find that that twitter algo is just dial dialed to him for 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 and i i ask my product team a lot there's a couple guys in product that i'm close with and i'll 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 on along in the same way and if you you want everybody to be ai native and you're not you're just like not really going to get the result
Speaker 2you want let them experiment and like show stuff and it's also important to mention like sometimes if someone's listening to this it seems like you know we're making people do stuff i'm sharing with them ideas all the time but it's not like everything has an action and it's like oh we have to do this we have to do that i'm saying them stuff and every now and then like they come back to me and say like oh this was great i'm actually now doing this or i have like a better way of doing that we also encourage people we have like uh you know different like slack channels so we share examples you know we see something that's good i'm not gonna share this with one person i want like the whole team to see it like and maybe it's gonna inspire them to try to do something
Speaker 1what's the best like personal productivity thing you do with ai have you used it to make yourself like a more effective or
Speaker 2executive for me it's the strategy with just you know chat gpt and all that like so i mentioned you know we are using tools for work like momenta and detail you know etc we have like 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 chat gpt or cloud 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 able to do a lot of things you don't 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 that's so powerful what do you
Speaker 1think changes in the 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
Speaker 2there 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 going to happen you know with ai calling how much people are going to be open to like buying stuff you know 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 gonna adapt to this new reality like things are gonna 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 like listening to me like an sdra 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 increase like their arr like how many 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 the arts 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 crs you know the best crs are going to be much better than other zeros what
Speaker 1do you think separates a good cro
Speaker 2great 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 dollars a quarter you need to know how to deliver what's
Speaker 1the most common advice you give your you give to your new second line leaders or like a first time vp of sales
Speaker 2make 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 very early you know if someone's amazing and they're going to crush it or it's 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 like and people that you know they hired that were just not the right fit and it's just not worth it what's the
Speaker 1hardest lesson you've had to learn in your career
Speaker 2sometimes it's just not going to work with a company whether it's you know uh 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 uh 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 you need to put like a target and say like if it doesn't work by this point it's uh time to move on and set deadlines for yourself what's the
Speaker 1best thing you've read in the last 12 months all right
Speaker 2so actually like i give here a couple so in terms of our business and what you're talking about i highly recommend the contagious marketing by ud letter gourd from uh gong again i mentioned that this really inspired me when i uh built uh our marketing operation it gives specific examples how he did marketing and build 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 uh all the worst humans uh written by a very shady pr guy in the us super fascinating stories it made me long we know for the days in pr also be happy of why i'm not there anymore but uh really really exciting stories about how we worked with probably the best the word sorry the worst people out there whether it's dictators or corrupt politicians and all that but uh it's fun especially as a marketer to know how you can spin things aviv
Speaker 1this was awesome man i really appreciate you coming on and 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 news nuance but it's uh it's a really important topic and comes back to this like first principles thinking not getting stuck and 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
Speaker 2you so much i really enjoyed it
Speaker 1thank 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 five-star review share it with your network and please join me next wednesday for another great conversation
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