Speaker 1Hi, I'm Warren Zena, founder and CEO of the CRO Collective, and welcome to the CRO Spotlight Podcast. This show is focused exclusively on the success of chief revenue officers.
Speaker 2Each week, we have an open, frank, and free-form conversation with top experts in the revenue space about the CRO role and its critical impact on B2B businesses. This podcast is the place to be for CROs, sales and marketing leaders who aspire to become CROs, and founders who are looking to appoint a CRO or want to support their CRO to succeed. Thanks for listening. Now, let's go mix it up.
Speaker 1Hi, welcome. Good to see you again. So, as I mentioned before, we're having a CRO roundtable here in Chicago. I'm at the chief offices in Chicago, nicely lent to us by one of my other clients. But Guy Rubin, who was a former guest on the show, is one of the sponsors now. We'll talk a bit about in what capacity. We thought it'd be a great opportunity to do the first ever live sort of, or let's say, studio version of a podcast. So, welcome back. Any person. Yeah, exactly. It's very different not having a big screen around. It is. It is. It's a different business. It's a different vibe, but it's cool. So, first of all, congratulations. Why don't you tell everybody some news since you came last and what's going on?
Speaker 3Yeah. So, 10 weeks ago now, my business, Epson, that I was the CEO of, we sold business to a company called Fullcast, which is a business based in Utah. And they're going through a process of acquiring businesses in the ghost market space and doing a roll-up to build the revenue platform for revenue leaders.
Speaker 1Gotcha. So, congrats on that. Thank you very much. It's really cool news. So, I'm just curious, like, why Fullcast and what was your thinking a little bit more about some of the insights into what motivated the sale of the purchase? Well, Epson
Speaker 3was a bootstrap business. We took on some angel money in the early days, but primarily we were bootstrapped. And while we were achieving a lot of attraction in this kind of revenue intelligence space, when I look forward through this, you can see that this whole ghost market environment is changing so dramatically. And we're going to see so, so much change in the tech and the insights and the data and AI and so on that were in the space that we were going to need a lot of capital to try and compete and to win that space.
Speaker 1Yeah, it makes sense. And you have a great offering. And what it does is solves a real important problem. But like I know from my business, it doesn't matter. It's so hard to get the traction early enough to get the gains, you know? So, it's great news. I think it's a great partnership. And I happen to know some of the people there, as you know, and I'm, familiar with the Silicon Slopes environment. It's amazing what's going on out there. And those are great people. So, it's a really, really good partnership. So, I'm interested in hearing more about, so you look at this company and it's building essentially like almost like a full service stack of sorts for a go-to-market. Most companies are making more, you know, specific approaches into point solutions, double down on the point solution. What's the sort of thinking around in your view? This idea that kind of bringing along a lot of
Speaker 3different companies into one. So, if we think about what's happening in go-to-market and the momentum now that we're seeing, there's a, we're living in a world where the cost of building tech is going through the floor. But the cost of going to market is going through the roof. Okay. And so, we're seeing anyone and everyone is coming up with all sorts of interesting kind of AI tools that are almost amazing. And they sound good. But once you start playing with these things, they need, they, they're not quite ready for market, at least most of them. I agree. And I think there's, there's so much choice out there. And every day there's something like a dozen new, new tech or AI products coming in the go-to-market space. And so, it's getting busier and noisier as we go. The challenge that a lot of the customers are having is that they're trying all these different tools, but there's doesn't seem to be a consistent approach to it. And you get some early adopters that are liking this feature or that product. And I think if I, if you think of it, think about the market at the moment, AI is kind of falling into one of three categories. You've got some very, very niche use cases where someone has a very specific challenge they're trying to address, and they might use some AI tools to do that. And that's really great. But it's not really scalable. It's not for the rest of the business. It's just for a very particular niche. Then, as I said before, you've got these tools that are out there that are almost amazing. But once you start stress testing them, it turns out that actually the interactions with customers aren't quite what you expect them to be. There's a lot of noise. Perhaps it's right, nine out of 10 times. And that one out of 10 is causing a lot of pain. And then you've got adoption issues. I came across a company the other day, sub 2 million ARR, and they've got 150 agents, right? It's like, well, how is that? How are your customers ever going to adopt that? You know, let's get them adopting one property. So agree. Yeah. So you've got all of this noise in the market. And that there's very few people that are actually broke in the back of it. And in my opinion, when I look forward as to what's going to happen and go to market and the technology that you need, it's going to be more important than ever, that this, stuff is joined up. And rather than going into this kind of world of individual point solutions all over the business, which aren't really talking to each other, I think we're going to find ourselves in a place where companies are leaning in on perhaps a single data platform that covers everything against market, where you've got then agent, you've got that data being turned into insights, and then you've got agency on top of those insights that are delivering value and helping solve specific cases. And when you look at the larger organizations, they've got real complex challenges, and those things can't be fixed or solved. So it's really, it's really, it's really important to understand what's going on in the business, and what's going on in the industry. And so when we decided to make a decision, when we decided we were going to sell the business, we ended up having conversations with 40 companies. But the vision that the leadership team at Forecast had was just so much greater and so much clearer than the others. And as you rightly said, that community in Salt Lake City is just incredible. And the caliber of resources that they've got access to and the vision that they've got as to what direction to travel this thing is going in really alive with my thoughts, too. And they were already on that journey. The first business that they acquired was Forecast themselves. And that's a territory planning product. And I didn't realize how complex territories really are. It can be a real challenge. And actually, as we, you know, I'm a data guy. So we started diving into the data. And you can see where territories are over-resourced, the revenue per seller is too low. And when it's under-resourced, the win rates drop, because they're not over-resourced. And when it's under-resourced, the win rates drop, because they're not giving each individual opportunity the attention it needs. The challenge businesses have is they're working through territories through spreadsheets and getting individual sellers moving from one territory to another. And they've got deals in flight on territory A, but now they're focused on territory B. All of this stuff can get very complex very quickly. So that was the first product that they took to market and really blown away when I saw that. Then they acquired a business in the commission space, a business called Commissionly. Then us, Ebster, and Atrium were acquired. And then more recently, they've just announced the acquisition of Copy.ai. So when you think about how this stuff comes together, there's an amazing narrative there that allows the enterprise customer to have one consistent experience on the whole go-to-market motion, effectively building one revenue platform for the revenue leader.
Speaker 1You know, it all makes sense. And I could see the wisdom in that. Especially territory management, because you need the data to know what's wrong with the territory, but you need a tool to get that data. And if they don't have a good one, they're doing it themselves that way. So by having Ebster come at the front end is the perfect way to get that data, to give them the insights needed for the next one. It's like everything leads to the next thing. Exactly. You really need more data per layer to inform the next layer or else you have a broken system. And I do think, the problem you mentioned aside from, I agree that a lot of these tools are coming out too fast. They look good on a demo. They're hard to manage, but then they sort of don't connect to anything and you're left with something, but you can't progress to the next level in the same way. Now, I do think that as things mature, that's going to close up. And I think the race there is going to be fascinating when you look at all the players and they go to market space, but you certainly can't argue with the wisdom of this decision and how these things link together, particularly which calls like how your platform is like the entry point of this whole thing.
Speaker 3Yeah. We call it kind of plan to pay, right? Because it's all the way through that cycle. But the vision and that we've all seen, there's lots of interesting businesses out there that are trying to solve really interesting tech challenges. And very quickly, you can go, well, that's an interesting problem and it sounds great. You're trying to solve that break. But when you get into it, do they really have the caliber of resources to actually execute? Are they really able to scale that business model? And more often than not, the talk doesn't necessarily match the reality very much. And what really hit me when I met with Ryan Westwood, who's the CEO of the group and his leadership team, was that clarity was there. They are not going to let anything get in their way and they are very focused on becoming this revenue platform to revenue it.
Speaker 1So you mentioned before we had a little chat about how you think that the go-to market space is going to look different through years. Yes. So what do you think about that? What do you think it's going to look like?
Speaker 3Well, as I say, I think we're going to see a lot of consolidation. I don't think there's going to be as many players in the space as we seeing at the moment there's a there's a whole host of ai companies out there um and everyone seems to be uh pitching the same uh same point solutions yep um but i i'm not seeing as much value i'm not seeing people are actually getting the value out of these things and a lot of that's just down to the maturity of the technology but also it takes a lot more you need a combination of data insights technology and service or change agents to actually and when you bring all of that stuff together special things happen um and we see it we see it in the data um introducing consistency and go to market is what this whole motion is all about if we really are going to achieve possible official growth it only comes if everybody's seeing us your question so um and most organizations are nowhere near that at the moment you know you ask you ask um the vp sales marketing success what their icp is they're going to give you different answers great um but actually we don't need them to have an opinion the data will tell us what icp looks like yeah right and icp is something that evolves and changes and the more data points you can throw at it the more clarity you can get so for example maybe the organization is going through a growth phase maybe they just rose money maybe they're about to exit the business so all of these things influence whether they fall into or out of your icp yeah and so the more information you've got visibility over um and giving the right information to the right person at the right time and getting out of their way you know what ai is very good at is taking away all the admin but that frankly sellers are never good at in the first place what ai is really bad at is building really good ships for customers building that trust uh running a sales function and then and then actually closing deals yes right and so that's what that says people are good at um and i think what the ai will do the good ai will start facilitating that and we we were in a world two or three years ago how do we get our b players to act more like a players now we're in a world where do you know what if the b players can't step up let's let's move them on and let's enable the a players to do 50 more yeah okay and we can do that by by filling their diary with the right types of meetings and by all the burden all the distractions so that they're able to perform at a higher level hey
Speaker 1everyone i want to thank you again for listening get great comments across linkedin and other channels about the show and it's really gratifying to see that we're having an impact on you another thing i wanted to let everybody know is that we also produce events about two and a half years ago we started these cro round tables uh predicated on the idea that well two premises one and a half four hour discussion between between 20 and 30 chief revenue and the other one is we created a round table event that is essentially that it's a three and a half four hour discussion between between 20 and 30 chief revenue and a three and a half four hour discussion between between 20 and 30 chief revenue and a three and a half four hour discussion between between 20 and 30 chief revenue and a three and a half four hour discussion and and a three and a half four hour discussion between between 20 and 30 chief revenue and a three and a chief revenue officers. And these are amazing events. The format took off. People love them. And I get requests all the time as to when is your next CRO event. So to that end, I just want to let you all know that we have a number of roundtables coming up over the next year, over the next like 2026. I want to share them with you. So if they're in your market, you can come. So the next one we're having is going to be in London, actually, in February, February 24th in London. So if you happen to be a chief revenue officer in the UK or even in Europe and you want to come by, you'll be hearing about it more on my website and LinkedIn, but throw in your calendar. And then following that, we're probably going to be doing an event in San Francisco in March. There's going to be one in New York in March. I'm going to do another one in Chicago, probably in April. And then I'm going to do an event in Boston. I'll do an event in Atlanta. I'm going to do an event in Salt Lake City. I'm going to do an event in Austin, and I'm going to do an event in Los Angeles or the Southern California area. So those dates are to be determined, but they'll be going across all next year. And these events are taking on huge momentum. They're the place to be if you're a chief revenue officer and you want to be in a room with no interruptions and have an opportunity to really share with each other in sort of a private and confidential. Open discussion about everything that you want to talk about as a chief revenue officer and collaborate with great people. So thank you. And thanks for supporting the show. And I look forward to seeing you at the events. Yeah, it's interesting to me because I don't think, I don't know how far away from we are with this. I don't know if this is going to be a CRM anymore. Like the idea of us entering data into a sheet and entering stuff into forms and chasing people to do it all the time. We're at a point already where we sort of gummed it up a way that it could be done automatically, but there's still a form. Yeah, I think that form is going to go away. I don't want to be too like sort of prognosticator here, but I can't imagine why you wouldn't have a data lake of sorts and everything in it. And you just inquiry into it and they automatically sort of knows how to look at the data and derive the answer you're looking for. It's we're going to be outcomes driven. Exactly. This is what I'm looking for. Help me understand X and then it'll be able to look at the data, give you back. But I think the key is going to become knowing what questions to ask it. Because you don't, you don't, you don't ask the right questions a lot of the time, but you and I are in this situation a lot. And we see that people just sort of like, they're asking the same questions that they're used to asking, but then asking the right ones. So you don't get the right answer. So I think the training is going to, is going to come in sort of knowing more and being clear about what outcome you're looking to get so that you can get the right information out of it. And I think that's a shift is a much different shift than hoping that you do stuff long enough. You'll start to figure something out. It's, it's a, it's going to become a much different flip thing. And I think companies that have interfaces and stuff are going to be sort of not as big anymore. I don't know. I'm, I'm, I'm definitely seeing that. Plus I only almost always talk to my computer now. Yeah. I very rarely type anymore. Yeah. So I'm getting better at speaking what I want in ways to these machines. And I'm seeing a lot of this. So I'm just curious in your perspective, how long is it going to be before where, I don't know if you know the answer, but you know, you're on top of this stuff. How far away are you from the point where we're just sort of really just allowing things to come to us as opposed to a lot of these tools that we have to connect together?
Speaker 3Yeah, I, for what it's worth, I agree. I don't think CRM is a long-term play anymore. Now, whether people call what comes next CRM or not is another, is another question, but I think what will happen is we'll all become managers. But instead of having human teams, we're going to have a team of agents that are serving, serving us. But you're absolutely right. We've got to get that data right. Correct. It's got to be right. And the data is coming from all sorts of sources. And it's not good enough to just solve one specific use case because you don't have enough data to do that. So we need, we need a data lake that covers everything from plant to home. And then we need those, that data to be interpreted. And then we need agents that can use that, those insights to actually drive the right outcomes for the sellers and ultimately the buyer. Right. So, yeah, I agree with you. And I think, I think the investment, the companies that are not investing right now are the ones, that are going to fold behind right now.
Speaker 1Yeah. I see this too. So, you know, I have clients who live in weird bubbles. Like you and I, we're in this stuff a lot. I talk about this all the time. So I sort of have this awareness and I speak to other people, other industries, they don't know anything about it. It's almost like they're not aware of it at all. They hear about this stuff, but it's all more very superficial things like weird videos they see talking to stuff, but they don't work with these things on a day-to-day basis. There's still a much larger audience of people that need to be educated about these things. Yeah. Because, you know, in the SaaS business stuff like that, it's, it's table stakes for us. I think we're deluded into thinking that there's a lot more awareness than there isn't. We're very much part of like a bubble of sorts in a way. And I think that that's a, it could be, you know, I was saying last night, we had dinner last night. Things are moving fast, but they still take a lot longer to happen than we think. I think that's very true.
Speaker 3And also, while everything is changing, nothing's changing as well, right? We still need to be curious as sellers. We still need to run structured processes. We still need to help buyers through their buying journey. My gut feel is that we're, buyers are doing more and more of the buying process without the seller involved. That's for sure. And we're seeing technology now where that can help a buyer build a whole complex business case without ever talking to a seller. Because the case studies are on the website. And, you know, you answer a few questions and here's your case. Or your business case and it looks beautiful and it's all the pictures within it. And rather than needing sellers, I think what we're going to be leaning into more is that it's kind of the clay model where you've got more solution engineers there to support the buyer rather than sellers there to sell them something. So I think that's the direction of travel we're going in. We're also seeing in the data that the partnership motion is taking off in a way I've never seen before. If you're not already engaging with getting, mature and material amount of your revenue now through partners, you're either going to fall behind or you're going to need to invest in that. People are leaning into their communities. They're leaning into their networks. They're leaning into references. And, you know, imagine if a buyer could speak to one of your customers before they speak to you. And ultimately the buyer gets to choose who they want to talk to. Do I want to talk to a salesperson? Do I want to talk to a solution engineer? Do I want to talk to an existing customer? And there's going to be ways of breaking down those barriers because ultimately sellers at the moment are really just intermediaries. They're trying to facilitate a process and the technology is out there to do that. And the buyers want to go through that process in a more efficient way than talking to a really expensive seller who maybe doesn't have all the information they want and it's giving them an angle that maybe they don't want to hear yep seriously i was buying
Speaker 1a car again recently and uh i haven't really ever bought a car like this before where i have a very specific vehicle i want with specific features and you know there's price issues and you know i was getting into that so i started using chat cpt and i did all this research and i basically trained it to be sort of like a car buying consultant okay great right and i had his dialogue with it and i was like all right so here's the car i want or well actually here's the car i'm thinking about getting yeah and here's what i want to do let me know if this is the right vehicle yeah based am i just wrong because i think it's a good looking car or maybe because i'm attracted to it like maybe it actually isn't really what i think but i know this is the point if i spoke to the car dealer he would absolutely tell me it was the right car of course he would right so it basically helped me make choices it showed me these three models of the same vehicle that had different features and why the one that they were selecting might be a better choice for me based on the things i wanted and the costs i think the preference is that then it helped me find where that configuration was available okay within my 50 radius or 100 mile radius that they're on the lot right now with the vid number on them and then it offered me a script of how i should speak to the dealer when i go into the dealer and the way that i should ask for the car it was great and i thought you know these guys are screwed because you know that's an environment where you're really fighting a bunch of gladiators and to your point i'm a far more educated customer that that business is to change their model dramatically and i think that that's indicative of the way anyone's selling anything it's a lot smart even doctors people coming to the doctor's office really smart about things yeah okay so here's the question that i have is when are what's that ship going to look like in your view the way that buyers are going to manage people go to market systems being smarter because i mean this is like a whole other shift too is on the other side of it we're talking about selling things to people but the buyers now have a whole other event i think that there might be almost an evens out in a weird way we're going to be smart about go to market they're going to be smart about buying i think the purchasing decision is going to happen in a much shorter everyone's going to come to the table knowing enough that there's probably what three things to work out
Speaker 3you know yeah i know i hear you i think um again what we're saying is that um people will make their decisions based on their network so um the the the idea that um we talked earlier about the fact that cost of going to cost of building tech is going to fall sure it's easy well easy but it's faster
Speaker 2thank you so much again for listening to the sierra spotlight podcast this podcast is uh
Speaker 1an important plank in the sierra collective communication strategy and we're really thrilled to have such great guests on here so listening and sharing the podcast with other people is really vital because we want to get as many people listening to this great stuff as possible a couple things to note uh if you're a aspiring cr o or a recently hired cro or even a old salty cro and you're looking to either become a chief revenue officer or improve your chops and gain some more insights and improve your competencies as a chief revenue officer we offer the cro accelerator course it's five years now it's the first cro focused course that was out there it's a 15-week course that is populated by aspiring chief revenue officers and cro's uh we're pretty selective in terms of who can be a member of the sierra accelerator course it's uh people who are probably like more like ready to be a cro right now they have a number of years under their belt as a revenue leader whether it be a sales leader or a marketing leader or even rev ops leader and they either want to move into the c-suite or they're zeros that want to just make sure that they win in the role so if you are interested in being a member of the next cohort uh please uh just write me a note on linkedin just dm me cro accelerator and we'll set up a time to talk and we'll see you next week then i can send you more information to give you a brochure of course so again cro accelerator course 15-week program for aspiring and newly hired cro's take advantage of it it's been great and um you'll see some more information about it on the website thanks
Speaker 3it's a whole lot faster you can get agents to help you build things to spin things up very very quickly um but the cost of going to market is very very very expensive and so you know building uh having a brand that people recognize having a brand that you trust um uh having a brand that people will recommend is what's going to make the difference right um and being in those communities you know getting back to a place where people are meeting you and they're shaking hands and so on is all very important um but people are going to lean in much much more to their network and ask for those recommendations um and then as you say they're going to go through that buying process more and more on their own or their own advisors and if they need access to a reference site they're going to ask they're going to find ways of connecting to your customer's director yeah so it's going to be a lot easier if they're going to connect to your customer's director yeah so finding ways of doing that or helping to facilitate that i think is going to be key and leaning into those communities this stuff takes time um but having that go to market motion through partners through through community through networks is going to be transformational um and it's going to be a barrier for the for the smaller businesses to come into um and which is why i think we're going to see a lot of consolidation and a few key brands are going to accelerate away from
Speaker 1the rest of the market so let's talk about the leadership so i'm in a company which you've got an officer and now i have access to all different sorts of new tools but i'm already embedded into the tools that i'm currently using and i have all the friction that comes with making decisions of which tools to buy how do i evaluate them how do i implement them like uh where would it cro for example start in terms of determining how to make those changes when they have to take care of what is on the table right now they also have to learn how to innovate or else they'll lose the the game to someone else who's innovating i run and do this a lot my clients don't feel determined what's the right thing for me so first
Speaker 3of all it's about working out what is the problem that you're trying to solve um what we see a lot is in large organizations in particular you've got a rev ops team that know what the problems are and they keep talking to the leadership team about we've got to solve this we have these challenges how are we going to go about it and the leadership team kind of serve it with lip service yeah yeah we'll get around to that but we've got to focus on the next quarter skills and we'll come around to that later i think um i think revops has got an amazing role to play um and i think the the challenge most organizations have is that revops function isn't as senior as it should be so revops really does need a secret table alongside you know vp sales with your marketing success we also need vp operations and that that that role is a strategic role um and then really the the the data and the insights will tell us what they need to prioritize and so once what one of the things that we did that really transformed our business we have all sorts of insights within our platform i mean you can't imagine we know everything from you know how multi-threaded you need to be every central sales cycle which personas are giving you better outcomes at certain stages you know what happens when you spend a certain number of days in a certain stage on the win rates all of these things and and many many more the challenge we've got is our whole platform is delivered inside salesforce and the c-suite that we sell to they they don't open salesforce so what we did is come up with a way of extracting the latest insights and delivering it back to our customers in kind of picture format um and so they're able to digest the problems and the challenges they're facing in a really easy to digest format and they can see right here are the next three challenges we need to address this quarter so i sit with the leadership team of our customers every three months and i walk them through this kind of audit their whole go-to market and what it does is it highlights what they need to prioritize and then three months later we can see whether they actually executed on that did they actually have an impact did they did they solve that problem oh yeah people skipping through stages and that's leading to late stage close loss are we not qualifying well enough and therefore we're losing deals far too late and costing us too much money and and as soon as they start to see that look um our earlier doctors are our more innovative sellers are are being a lot more consistent the way they're working and we're seeing the outcomes suddenly the penny drops and now everybody comes on board now you've got a desire because ultimately however much ego the sellers might have ultimately they just want to earn more money and when you can show them look um i if you can be if you can engage the finance persona stage two instead of stage four we're going to double our win rates look at the data and now all of a sudden they want to follow that that process so the the beauty of fixing the data is that you can convert it into insights that everyone can understand and get behind and it's the same with the icp question we talked about earlier yeah right we need everyone singing from the same sheet we need consistency and then when we've got it we can make small changes that can have a big impact um and so what we're seeing is that um by by unlocking the insights now we've got access to these data that's still sitting inside us we've still got a huge volume of data in our mailboxes in our cold quarters in our crm and all over the business but if we can bring that data together and convert it into insights that everyone can get behind then you've now got the opportunity to introduce consistency across the business
Speaker 1which leads to accelerated growth so this is fascinating because i do think that the first thing a zero needs to do is to get under the bottom of all this stuff which is why it is that i've always been attracted to what you guys are doing because when i talk to michael cereal club the first time they get the role first thing is you got to figure out what's going on but the problem is you're never given enough time to figure it out yeah and you don't have a process to do it so you're kind of in the dark a bit you're given maybe a month do something like that takes three months with the current tools that people have and not the right questions to ask. So a platform like yours is like the easiest way for a CRO to become really smart about a lot of things pretty quickly. And like you said, being able to present a very compelling report to their board and their CEO very quickly and say, this is what's going on. And it sort of makes the CRO a hero in a way of being able to someone who kind of came in fresh provider, all sorts of insights, good news and bad news, mostly not great news, but stuff that needs to be addressed. And I think this is like the opportunity, I think, for the incoming chief revenue officer to be able to sort of quickly get themselves situated in a way that they can make intelligent decisions and the foundation of their job, which the most reasons why I see CROs fail is because they don't do that. And they're sitting on top of bad data. And then six or seven months later, everyone's wondering why this didn't work because they were never getting the opportunity to solve the real inherent problem. And I do think that this is what's going to create a big shift in the role. I think people in this role are going to be afforded with ability to be successful faster, smarter, faster. And the only thing I'm seeing as a barrier, and I'm interested in your perspective on this, is just the, given all the tools you're talking about, removing the silos that still impact everything, right? We still got the marketing organization, sales organization. I know you go to work most of the time. But you and I both know that the marketing organization has to get packed out of those things. And you probably reveal a lot of those things in your reports, right? That's the shift I see, is aside from the CRO being smarter, the organizations now need to embrace that there needs to be one leader in charge of a go-to-market organization that can manage all this stuff. Because you take all the stuff and you put it into an organization that's broken up into silos, you've got three different opinions about it, right? I think there's two things. It's good data, good insights with the right organization. And the barrier we see is it's hard for people to make that shift. It's very difficult.
Speaker 3Yeah. Well, one of the reasons you and I have been working so closely together, one of the takeaways for me from our engagement, so we've got this whole platform now that we've put into our customers, and inevitably there's an implementation process, and we need to get it onboarded and so on. And then three months later, we can get people out with their first report, and we can show them the whole audit. And what you came to us to say was, look, that's all well and good, but we need the customers to commit to this whole kind of buying of software and implementation and activation and so on before they can start to see the insights. Is there a way we could break that down? And then six months ago, what we came up with was, well, what if we could separate the two? What if buying the licenses was stage two rather than stage one? What if we could just connect to the data sources and deliver back to CRO that kind of snapshot of where they are, what's happened over the last 12 months, so that they could see where the challenges were, and then go about trying to solve the challenges, whether they had their own tech internally or whether they wanted to implement some of what we had. But that could be a separated phase. So it's only recently in the last six months where we've had the ability to offer customers the ability to effectively connect all their data sources to us, but we don't give them any tech back. All we do is give them that complete audit. And the beauty is it goes back a year, and it fixes the data, the incomplete, inconsistent data that everybody's got in Salesforce. The reason what we hear over and over again is, we can't start to affect change because our data is so bad. We can't affect change because we don't know what's actually happened in the past. And so we've built this beautiful engine that can actually go back and fix all the historical data. It deals with the data hygiene issues by going to source, so mailboxes, calendars, phone systems, and CRM. And then without the customer having to commit to buying licenses, we can give them that audit. Now suddenly they've got that x-ray vision as to what our problems really are, and they can go about trying to fix them. And three months later, when we present the next quarter's report, we can start to see how good, how well they're doing at affecting change in those specific areas. And what that does is it gives the CRO the edge, and they're able to now understand where they should prioritize, and then they can present back to the leadership team, look, here are all the problems that we've got. We're going to prioritize fixing this one, this quarter. And then three months later, as an independent, we're coming in and showing them how have we done on that. And then they can make some, and then if they started to have an impact, and you can see that it's having an outcome, it's delivering a positive outcome, that's when they can start to double down and invest in whether that's change agents, you know, consultancy services, or buying technology to speed up and ramp up the changes that they want to make. But rather than starting with the tech and the data, or starting with the tech and the platform and the implementation and, you know, three months in before you start seeing impact, we've decided to switch that round. And a lot of that came from
Speaker 1discussions, where we just make so much more sense to be able to do that fast. Everyone's like, quick return, easy way to get in there, give this CRO a win. And I tell you the truth, what it really does for the chief revenue officer, aside from the credibility it gives them, they really need that. They need to be able to show, like, what's the return on investment for you? We've paid a lot of money for you. We searched hard for you. Now go make a difference for us. If you can come back in six weeks with a report like this, very quickly, they're like, wow, this was really good. Great. Thank you. Like we already see, we could see a difference happening already, just from that knowledge, particularly when it's followed by, now we can track this particular situation. And I think it's a really good thing. CROs need this. They don't have this. And so that's important. I'm curious about something. Now, it sounds to me, to me, I've been thinking about this, PE would be like, just a crazily big place for this. I mean, they need this sort of thing. So they go to market in that whole area, their business is sort of still plodding a little bit. What are your thoughts on private equity and how to kind of get them to adopt these sort of things across their portfolios? Because I think it makes perfect sense to me.
Speaker 3Yeah. So look, we do a lot of work with PE-backed businesses, and again, they are outperforming the rest of the market at the moment. So the work that PE does with their portfolios is having an impact, but they don't have the visibility that they need. And I think, again, it was that Eureka moment that we had together when we realized that actually, if we swap this around and deliver people the insights before they commit to technology, we can give them, it doesn't even need to take six weeks, we can deliver them within two weeks at that complete go-to-market audit and giving them visibility of content they just couldn't have just by analyzing just the CRM on its own. Yeah. Because we're connected to all these different data sources across the business, we're giving them that one vision. So when we kind of made that, when we had that Eureka moment, we swapped them around and we started with the insights. What happened very quickly was we saw that we were able to then offer that as a service to PE. And we've now seen, we've now got three different PEs that are engaging with us to produce these reports for their portfolio companies. I see. Okay. And in fact, I thought we might be able to get involved kind of during the acquisition process, the process that they're doing. We haven't seen that. But the day after, we bought this asset, they told us they got this pipeline. It's interesting, right?
Speaker 1Now they want to analyze it.
Speaker 3It seems to me a perfect due diligence tool, right? I thought that, but it turns out that more often than not, they're in a competitive temper and they want to minimize the amount of asks on the business until they own it. Interesting. But once they own it, the first thing they want to know is how real is it, right? And you can't get that data from one source. It doesn't work just from Salesforce. But if you can get that data and if you can connect to Salesforce and these other data sources, we can go back a year and give you that x-ray vision as to what's actually going on. And it becomes really easy to identify which problems we want to prioritize and then go.
Speaker 1So it really just accelerates the way they can get their business ramped up. Exactly. They make the purchase, they evaluate it. Now they know where to go to work as opposed to waiting six months to get that out the hard way, or maybe not filling it in at all.
Speaker 3Not filling it in, yeah. Or using whatever's available in Salesforce to try and understand what's going on when in fact Salesforce is only being populated by the sellers themselves. Yeah, so it's inconsistent. So yeah. But it's really been, it feels like we've been pushing outside the dual now in PE. It makes sense.
Speaker 1It's interesting too, but you know, I would imagine that PE has sort of like, most of them have their own sort of managerial methodology they put across their teams, right? Yeah. It'd be cool for them also, I suspect, if you're thinking about this, is even testing their own management technologies or management processes to see how well those are working so they can modify their own way that they manage them. Not just a company, but the way of whether our model works or not. I mean, it could be an interesting way to have some scale across a lot of different businesses, maybe change the way that they go to market themselves. I don't know, but it just seems like it's not just the one business, it's all businesses and how they, there are trends in the way that companies are not making that change.
Speaker 3Yeah. Well, last year we analyzed over 650,000 opportunities representing, I think, $48 billion worth of pipeline. And we produce our benchmark report each year, and it seems to get very well received. But what's been interesting, and we're looking at the case for 2026 now, is looking at how PE are outperforming the rest of the market. Not necessarily, they haven't solved all the problems. They've still got 60% of their sellers missing quota, but the market's seeing 78% of their sellers missing quota, right? So they are having a positive impact in their approach and their consistent approach and the way that they manage their teams and perhaps the caliber of resources they bring in to actually run their businesses. We are seeing that PE businesses are having better outcomes than the rest of the market, but there's still a long way to go. We live in a world where sellers are spending three quarters of their time on deals that close lost, okay? And we spend twice as long on deals that close lost as we do on deals that close won. And so you find yourself in a world where less than 10% of the seller's day is being spent on activities that are going to generate revenue. I don't know any other industry that's that inefficient. And so what that means from our perspective is this huge opportunity to have an impact. And we talked earlier about, look, a couple of years ago, we try and bring the big players up to A-planner standard. We can now free up the A-players to focus focus all of their energies and time spending on deals that kind of generate And the intelligence is there and the data is there to drive that behavior. And we can now achieve a whole lot more with a whole lot less.
Speaker 1So what's your plan for the next year? How are you taking this to market? What's the kind of people looking to speak to? Who's your customer? You know, how have you identified that? How could, you know, maybe some of the people listening to this get a little more understanding of how you can help them?
Speaker 3Well, Fullcast has a whole suite of technology. As I mentioned earlier, they have everything from territory planning through to commissions. Obviously, we're part of the revenue intelligence piece. And then we've recently bought Copy.ai. And I suspect there might be more to come. The piece of the puzzle I'm now focused on is this revenue insights as a service. And we're now offering that as a standalone solution. So those who are interested in finding out more, you know, get in touch. We can connect with me on LinkedIn. And if they mention the podcast, I promise to accept the invite.
Speaker 1Fair enough. And we can have a conversation and see what happens. Well, as always, man, it's really exciting. Excited about it. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. Thank you for listening to the
Speaker 2CRO Spotlight Podcast. The CRO Collective's mission is to help CROs succeed and help founders and CEOs build CRO-ready organizations. You can find out more information about our services at thecrocollective.com. That's thecrocollective.com. And we look forward to having you join us next time. Thank you.
PodcastTranscript AI