22. Ian Jentgen, Chief Revenue Officer at Frontify - Why Human SDRs Still Win, Enterprise Selling with MEDDICC and Running a Pipeline with AI

(upbeat music) Welcome back to Inside the Pipeline. I hope you enjoyed last week's episode with Charlotte Delafos from Nirvana. What a great conversation that was. This week, I'm really looking forward to sharing my chat with Ian Junction, Chief Revenue Officer at Frontify. This was the first week of podcasts that took place in New York. If you're listening to this in the future, it took place between the 12th and the 16th of October, 2026. Now, Ian's career sits right where marketing meets technology. He started out in New York, tech scene advising early and growth stage companies across social media, e-commerce and digital platforms. Then he spent five years at Circus Street, building out the US commercial team from the ground up and selling digital skills training to Fortune 500 clients. From there, Ian moved to Frontify, the Swiss brand platform used by the likes of Microsoft and Uber. He ran the US side and since December, he's been the Chief Revenue Officer. Before that, Ian was a competitive college soccer player and he'll tell you, that's what pulled him into sales. What I loved is how honest he is about AI. He clearly uses it all over his pipeline, but he still thinks human STRs and cold calls win. We get into why. Welcome to Inside the Pipeline. Episode 22, here with Ian Jenkchen, Chief Revenue Officer at Frontify. We're here in New York, just off. We're in Midtown Manhattan. I've got that completely wrong. You're a little off-base. Oh, no. We're in the NoHo area to be specific. Yeah, I think it's a little bit more trendy from an office perspective than Midtown. Okay. We look out for our colleagues. We want to be in the downtown area a little bit more. Nice. Well, I'm sorry if I've just done you guys down there. No, it's okay. You're in an uncle area, but you're actually in the cool one. I really want to dive in today into what the sales organization looks like here. Also into your career. I think we spoke before a bit about your background through marketing and different businesses that sort of take marketing through different lens. Also to talk more about AI and how that's impacting the team here and how you guys are going to market. Maybe you could just start by telling us how you ended up in sales. Yeah, it's a good question and one to reflect on. I think when I was in university, I wasn't sure what I wanted to do after school. But there was this natural gravitation towards sales because I think it replaced the void which playing competitive college soccer, you know, represented. I didn't play to a super high level, but I always had like a competitive nature. And when you think about your career and what kind of avenues you could explore that give you the opportunity to jump into something like that, I think sales afforded that platform. So it was naturally drawn to commercial roles. Initially, I actually started out, as you said, I have a background in marketing. So started out working within OmniCom some more on the account side. But there was a sales component. And I was just drawn into the new business elements of the role and then found my footing in tech and kind of never looked back and was able to progress from individual contributor roles to management and go on from there. And it was circus street where you work. Tell us more about exactly what circus street does as far as I'm aware, you're almost like selling skills. Yeah, in some ways. So I think one of the underlying tenets of that business was we were in the marketing space, but building out capability plans software that built out capability plans for large enterprises. So this idea that large marketing organizations, if you were a unilever, you had 5,000 marketers globally. Digital marketing was certainly ramping up. Be commerce is ramping up. How do you educate those marketing teams around the latest and greatest trends and what's happening in the space? So we had a software solution which was really focused on delivering best in class content and curating best in class capability programs to lift the floor and raise the ceiling in terms of capabilities for those organizations. And there you went from like an individual contributor up to leading a team. Yes. And the company then got acquired by, was it QA? QA, correct. Which is part of CBC, so private equity. Like how much did your role change and what were the key characteristics of yourself that developed throughout that? And how much did the company change when it was acquired by QA? You know, that chapter in my career I'll always look back on it quite fondly. As you said, when I joined, the sales manager role was more in a team league capacity, but still was doing a lot of direct selling and getting involved in deals. And I like to think I still get involved in deals today in my current role. But the business changed a lot. I think when I joined, you know, we were in our infancy in the US. So had under a million in revenue. And it was really about getting to seven figures first and the eight figures. So Circus Street I think it was quite that story of navigating those innings of growth. And then when we were acquired by QA, it was about integration, you know, being part of the more private equity sponsor, operating model. There was some other adjacent businesses that we were integrated into. And I stayed for a little bit of time on the back end of that integration, but it ultimately, you know, made the move over to Frontify. Yeah, and what was it about Frontify that drew you here? Yeah, I think what was interesting is I was super happy at Circus Street. But I think like I mentioned the competitive nature of my personality. I also I take with me index highly on learning too. And I'd been at Circus Street, stroke QA for about five years. So I was starting to think about, hey, what is the next four or five years in my career look like? What other surface area could I entertain or get involved with? And yeah, I had a recruiter reach out and I started to evaluate the business and I was like, wow, there's something here. And what I thought about from the sales leadership perspective is it had the right leverage to learn ratio. So there was enough that I could learn about this new space, but there was enough about my previous experience that I could leverage. So that really jumped out at me. And I think that and the opportunity to take the product up market outside looking in. I was like, wow, there's products amazing. But we're in the early innings of what we can accomplish in the enterprise when you look at enterprise go to market. And when you look at enterprise customer value. And so being able to take on that challenge was really exciting. And ultimately why I wanted to join Frontify. And you guys have some great little guys. On your website you see the likes of OpenAI, Byne Munich. And it takes a lot of work to sign an enterprise. What's the Ian Jenkins approach to enterprise sales? Maybe you could just spend a couple of minutes telling us, how do you break into an account? How do you build that champion? And how do you get that deal closed? I think it would be anchored into like that principle that I have around competition and learning. Like I think a lot of like my methodology like anchors to those two tenants. And so one of the first things that we did in early in my 10 years, as you would expect. And it was very up the moment at the time. But we rolled out company wide medic training. And I think our organization had to go through the transformation that enterprise selling as a team sport. As an account executive, you're the quarterback in the deal knowing how to pull in power and influence both on the customer side. And then internally to get a deal over the line is incredibly important. And I think we took massive strides in terms of the sophistication of our motion, the resources that we provide a yeast to sell transformational deals. There's just a number of things that we've done to ensure we're operating at the true enterprise grade go-to-market motion that you would expect for a business like ours, giving the ACV and the term length and that sort of context. And how do you guys make sure that you're getting the most usage out of fundify and the clients you guys are working with? Because I saw that your pricing is very much based on that. Is that a daily check-in? Is it a weekly check-in from the guys managing the accounts? How do you really look to expand and find new opportunities to grow revenue within these accounts? So I think that, too, is a team sport. What I would say is it starts actually downstream of the product and some of our differentiation. So you would categorize us oftentimes in the digital asset management space. And I think one of our true differentiators is although we take into deep consideration the need states of the dam librarian or the dam product owner, we're really thinking about providing this technology to the enterprise. And so independent of what we're doing from an activity standpoint on the commercial side, I think our product is really engineered for the enterprise. And how do you lower the bear to entry for various stakeholder groups of interacting with our platform? That said, the CSM's and our CSM org, we've got around 50 people, and you are globally, they're thinking deeply about how do I drive adoption of the platform, usage of the platform. And there's various enablement initiatives that we run within our customer base. On the cadence, I think it varies based on the customer needs date, the customer profile, in a lot of different contexts. But we have. You know, a lot of, a lot of intentional data within our CRM that prepares CSMs to understand, "Hey, this is where I stand within that particular account, these are the steps that I should take, and this is what my approach or playbook should be." And why should an enterprise team use Frontify? Why should they not just put their brand guidelines into Claude and hope for the best? Yeah, yeah, I think that's certainly like the question of today, which is, and back to like our, you know, the core talents of our go-to-market motion, and why do we need to exist? And what's our differentiation? I think expressed differently, it's like, what's the difference between, yeah, brand guidelines being converted into an artifact or a markdown file and just, you know, sitting in Claude? I think what we've observed is it's one thing to store the information in a central system or central access point. It's another to ensure the fidelity of that information gets cascaded throughout the organization in the right way. And a more practical example of that is if you're a large enterprise, let's say a CPG company and you're operating in North America and the UK, if you're reliant on the brand guidelines in Claude for the field marketer in the UK and in the US to pick up the same context, that's not personalization at scale, that's not going to be with the right context, it's not going to consider the right personas, and that's before you even consider regulatory and legal concerns that might exist with photography, assets, talent, things of that nature. Yeah. So a lot of it comes down to the permissioning and governance of your brand at scale. Talk to me a bit more about your work with Byin Munich. I know that you guys work with a number of football clubs. You also work with the Kansas City Chiefs. Yeah. Just paint a picture on exactly what their team would be looking at day to day and where the value of front files. The whole sports ecosystem has been interesting to observe in the last, you know, number of years and I think what's interesting actually, this was described to me the other day as we were, I'm going to take us down a rabbit hole that I think maybe doesn't answer your question, but I think it might be relevant for the viewers as well. I was looking at like we cut our date in all different types of cohorts when we look at things like ICP, et cetera, and I was surprised like it's the GCIS, like standards for industries and verticals, sports fall with an entertainment. And initially I was like, oh, I didn't expect like sports to be like entertainment coupled with media, et cetera. Yeah. But truly these organizations are media platforms. If you think about the value that they create the way money flows into these organizations and out of them, it's media and it's entertainment. And so if you look at the work that we do with the Kansas City Chiefs or Bayern Munich, these organizations I think are thinking more deeply about the fact that they truly are global media platforms. And they're thinking deeply about how do they engage fans on a global scale. And with that, you need to meet the moment in terms of having a modern content supply chain. So there's a number of different workflows and ways in which we support those organizations. But in higher level terms, it's thinking about, okay, there's a football match, or there's a football match in either in either geography. Yeah. It's thinking about, hey, how do I get the latest photography up on our digital asset management platform or a brand site. So our partners can pick it up and that's approved in a seamless way. And we can ensure that we're supporting, you know, if you're the Kansas City Chiefs, you're supporting your tier one partners and giving them assets to the latest and greatest content so that they can pick that material up for cross promotion and promotional activity on a fit purpose basis. And how do you guys pitch return on investment when it sounds like it's obviously efficiency and making sure that a large organization is all seeing off the same him sheet. But how do you pitch that in the sales conversation? Because return on investment is always such an important thing. It's super important. I think this is part of the fun and challenge with being an account executive or meaning go to market at at-frontify is, and this isn't maybe unique to us, but you have to be audible ready and understand who's across the table. So return on investment, if you are a large CPG company versus if you're a large technology company versus if you're one of the sports teams that we've mentioned that can evidence itself in different ways. Some of the organizations we work with will marry the return on investment or answer the return on investment question with an understanding of hey, our current content production workflows cost x. We rely on this third party vendor. It's this manual arduous process. Yeah. If we lean into frontify, we can really see the true benefits of content reuse and create efficiencies in that light. That might be one way. But equally, I'll give you another example. There's liability that exists if you're in a regulated environment or if you have usage rights assigned to an asset. And that asset gets put out market in a market that you don't have the rights to use it. And then you have the lawsuit in the liability associate with that to contend with. So there's multiple ways. That's a long way of saying there's multiple ways to demonstrate ROI. And it's up to our account executives to ascertain, hey, how are we going to make the business case that drives the most business value given the context of the customer we're talking to? So it's almost like on one hand compliance. And then the other hand, it's unrealized opportunity of a new way of doing things. I think that's a fair characterization. And I would take it like a step further, which is we've certainly seen and observed that with the introduction of all of our favorite AI tools and all the various AI applications, there's this opportunity to create so much more content and content more quickly. But at the same time, a lot of our customers, and if you look at our ICP, brand is their mode. And so producing exponentially more content, which isn't in compliance with the brand can actually have a net negative effect. So I think we have a really strong story to tell around, hey, here's how you can lean into AI content creation, but do so in a way that's brand compliant, and that you as a central brand and marketing team feel like the human is in the loop, and you have control over the outcomes. I think that when you rely on AI tools without properly directing them, they always end up back at this sort of like semi-clawed semi-your brand. And you're not quite there. And it makes it so painfully obvious to the viewer if you've just used Claude or Chatchee PT to create something because they have that, you know, they've been trained off of something, and that's what comes out in the back end. I would love to go now to talk about, you know, building a team and what you look for. But first, if you could look back at the first 90 days of becoming CLRO here, how would you, how would you do it differently? It's a good question. It's been a lot, it's been a while, so like I have to go to the back, you know, I, it's probably a good exercise for me to look at, you know, as I think, you know, many, many folks interviewing for leadership positions, one of the, the final tasks is to deliver a 90 day plan, so I should dust off that plan and see what, what did I execute on? What did I not execute on? I think what, what I would do differently in broad terms, when I look at the role event and I look at the role now and it's, it's evidence itself in a few ways, like my, my role is about momentum. It's about generating momentum, addressing limiting factors. I think, you know, there's this sort of paradox that exists, like when you're joining a new organization, you want to give space and time to learn what's really happening within the organization, but I think if I, if I look back, there's certainly some areas where I probably had strong convictions from day one and I probably could act on those a little quicker, so it goes back to that momentum piece. Yeah. But yeah, I mean, I also like to think, not too much about what I've done in the past, and it's like, you know, I'm thinking about what's what I can do. Of course, of course, there's a lot of talk about sales reps and, and SDRs, and over the last two years, we've seen the rise of things like AISDR and artisan and people saying that you no longer need to, to high humans. Where do you stand on that? How valuable is the role of this, of the sales development rep sensitive here at Frontify? Valuable. This is just the short answer. I think we're all for augmentation of the role and exploring how AI can impact the role, and and I think, you know, we would be remiss not to explore the reinvention of the role to a certain extent, but I think it's valuable, you know, from my perspective, for a number of reasons, but I'll start with one, which is our SDR cohorts are producing some of the most predictable AIS who move up into our growth segment or mid market. And so I look at it as like, it's an awesome entry point for young sales professionals, and where, as I reflect when I was in the VP sales role, we probably didn't execute well in that transition. Now I have other leaders in the team that have executed much better than some of the mistakes I've made, but we've seen tremendous benefit from that career progression point. But also, we've seen a lot of value, we used to have, we used to struggle with SDR source win rates. You know, I was just on. Why is that? Why is that? I think, doing that's like the quality of the outreach, do you think it's the co-calling? I think It's a conflict of factors that we struggled in the past. There was reasons. I think some of it was ICP related. I think some of it was, they hand off to AE related. I think some of it was, the outreach in the past wasn't as AI enhanced as it is today with signals, things of that nature which demonstrate a higher propensity to buy, so SDRs are able to target the right accounts. Now we have closer collaboration with AE. There's a lot of factors. But what I would say is, we used to question much more deeply the channel's efficacy when the wind rates were much lower. Now it's where we've seen one of the biggest swings. And I think it's because we've leaned into a much more all-bound motion and more sophisticated motion. And we've done our homework and we've made a lot of improvements. And so it's one of, in this year, one of the true, I think, levers where we've been able to have an impact on our overall wind rate is with SDR source. - Yeah, okay. And obviously you're a CRI, so you must receive tons of cold outreach every single day. What does someone have to do on either an email or a cold cool to grab the attention of a CRI? - Yeah, it's a good question. I think it's got to be, I mean, the things that we know right moment, right time, business value. I think if you just filtered through my inbox though, there's maybe what I would say that doesn't work that well. I get a lot of things in my inbox about our competitors. Or like, our competitors are doing this. Our competitors are doing that. And I think that fails to understand, at least in the context of how I would evaluate our competitor set and competitive set. Actually, it has nothing to do with how I would evaluate our competitive set. We're growing the fastest. And I think I'm not looking for our competitors for inspiration. So you're starting with this message that just isn't going to resonate with me. So I think it's back to value. It's being able to connect the dots. But that's one thing that I would be careful of because I can tell you a lot of the outreach that reaches my inbox. It's like, this competitor does this. This competitor does that. I'm like, I'm not interested with any of those things. - This is what we can do to help you. - Yeah, regardless. - Regardless, or also, I think the other chord which really does work is, hey, I have this insight about your business that you probably haven't heard from within your business. That's hard to get to as an SDR, but some are able to do it. And if it's an insight around, hey, I've talked to this person that we've assessed this and we've seen this. And this is actually a limiting factor and I'd love to talk to you about that. I think that sparks my interest a little bit more, at least where I'm reading it. - You guys have been on a great growth trajectory. I know that maybe some of it's not public. I don't know how much you can talk about it now. I know that you guys haven't raised funding since, like 2021. House growth been over the last couple of years. What are your targets for the future and how has AI impacted that growth trajectory that you're on? - Yeah. So I think we have a really strong growth narrative. I mean, the business is nearly four or five acts in the time that I've been here. I mentioned the time at Circus Street was around going from seven to eight figures, frontifies more of the story going from eight to nine figures. - Come on. - And yeah, we're gonna be there in short order. And I think with AI, I think about in two contexts. One, in our install base, AI is making it more apparent that you need a solution like, like, frontify and that's helped re-accelerate our growth as we look at 2026. It's been a strong foundational point that we can rally around. And then on the growth side as well, which I'm happy to share a little bit more. And I think we might get there, which is, hey, how do we become an AI native go-to-market organization of the future? And what are we doing not only to deliver the business result to frontify in our shareholders that is cutting edge when it relates to AI workflows from a go-to-market perspective, but also how are we preparing our talent? So the alums of frontify go-to-market are among the top cohort that you'll meet when it comes to using AI when it relates to being a great AE or CSM or SER, et cetera. - And how all your team using AI, specifically your sales team? - Sales team. - Yeah, so I would say extensively, like I get the reports of AI utilization. It's been interesting to see the token consumption in spend and the adoption go up across the board. I'll give you one practical example of like, where I think it's really moved the needle for us this year, is we had a commercial strategy with these pillars of like focus areas and then one spine for us was operational rigor. - Yeah. - And so with operational rigor, what we looked to do was really level up our forecasting discipline and pipeline inspection across both new business and existing business and do so in a way which was AI enabled and we're leveraging the full opportunity that AI allows us to do. And so what that looks like is we have these playbooks, which mean all of our pipeline inspection meetings run at the same cadence and the same format. All of those meetings are recorded. Their transcripts go to markdown files. The markdown files get stored in a specific location. I then have loops that go through those transcripts and surface risks, opportunities, things in that nature. So that's how I think that's probably maybe one of the biggest net benefits that I've seen. I have this like CRO harness that has all these loops that are running around not only that pipeline inspection data but looking at data in gong and snowflake and in Salesforce have tremendous rev off support to help us accomplish that. And then there's much more tactical in the flowwork AE examples and CSM examples I could give to but that architect model that we've built as part of the harness has been where it's shown up the most for me. - A hundred percent. We have the same thing at Throxie, which is basically like company brain. Every single, we record every single conversation. - Reportings or yeah, yeah. I think like some people were kind of shocked when we tell them that, you know, we've got a phone out at lunch on the table. If there's anything of value that's being spoken about. - It's good. - And then it goes into we it's called Cortex in our system. But it means that I don't have to ask a customer success manager a question about the success or failings of what they've done over the last two weeks. I just ask Claude to give it to me and it's faster. It's probably more accurate. It doesn't have any bias. It's just off, you know, data and customer conversation. - Removing like the bias is like some of the most like a creative applications. I think like removing the bias and like, you know scoring a call of scale I wanted to end. How did this go, you know? Which is a simple like exercises that you can do and we're certainly seeing the benefits. - Yeah, a hundred percent. I know that we're coming to the end here. So I just have some quick five questions to close out. Cold email or cold call, if you could only keep one call call. - Not call, well I was gonna make a joke around called FaceTime, but no, these are just two call calls. And what have I got here? I've read these down. - Okay, I think this is a good one for young people. Or just for anyone in sales where you when you're the buyer what makes you stop trusting a salesperson instantly? - I think if there's privileged information that leaks in some ways. - Yeah, so like trusting. - It's a trusting. - I think, and I think that trust is actually, particularly I'm not going into a not a quick fire answer. But trust is why we will still have humans in sales positions in the enterprise for a period of time much longer. - Okay. And what did you believe about sales five years ago that you've realized actually now was wrong? Did you have any sort of, no, it's a good question. - I think, I wish this wasn't a quick fire format because I would take that. - It doesn't have to. - This is the loss to the quick fire. - The last of the quick fire. - I've failed the quick fire around. I think what I, you know, when I think about sales and where this debate goes the most, I think you think about revenue leaders or you think about AE talent and two things come up. They say revenue leaders, you know, if you're at this size and stage of company, like that's the size and stage for you, I don't really believe in that. Like I think like if you're a good revenue leader, you can adapt to the playing field and you can succeed in, you know, late stage companies, early stage companies, you know, like kind of trying to pigeonhole people into stages doesn't really make sense. And I believe that to be more true now than I did five years ago. And equally, I would say, I think there's two truths that can live in conflict around domain experience. Some businesses, domain experience or vertical experience and you know, working exclusively with that buyer for 20 years is super relevant. But I think in other contexts, that's not needed. And so I used to have a stronger conviction on that, which was I think like many people hold like, hey, domain experience isn't that important? But I think now and into the future, particularly when you look at proprietary data and how much that means and like the depth of workflow as it means in the context of vertical software, I think the domain aspect. There's certain contexts where it is less relevant and then there's certain contexts where it is entirely relevant. And I would have been in a different position maybe five years ago. - That's very interesting. And actually to go back to the Max Freeman, interview we were talking about before the the SVP of sales at ramp. He was saying that he likes hiring bankers, but obviously it's a finance product. Yeah. So it makes sense if they're reading your CFO, but I agree with you. And I think like in the AI world as well, people with high agency, people that can develop relationships and build trust are going to be ones that do well. Yeah. Yeah. I think in the domain experience, I would encourage anybody to like spend, deep work, understanding domain. And I think that helps you as a seller. Awesome. Just finally, where can people find out more about you and where can people find out more about Frontify? You can find me on LinkedIn, e-in-jension, I'm on, that's pretty much the only thing I'm on. I'm on X as well at i-jension and Frontify Frontify.com. We're also, you know, super active on social, doing a lot of events, posting dinners for folks in the marketing community. So we're out there and come find us. Awesome. Thank you so much for your time. All right. Thanks. Cheers.