"The Four Pillars of Commercial Excellence: How Richard Perez helps Drives Efficient Growth in 2026"

Right, before we jump in, I need about 10 seconds of your time. If you're enjoying revenue unplugged and finding these conversations valuable, then please hit subscribe, give us a like and if you are feeling generous, leave a review. It genuinely helps us to reach more sales leaders to hear this stuff. So here's a question for you. Why is it that half of all sales reps will fail to hit target this year? Is it because they're not good enough, not working hard enough, or is there something fundamentally broken in how we are building sales organisations? My guest today would say it's the latter. Richard Perez leads the sales and go to market practice at APEC partners, working with portfolio companies worth billions to help support and grow their commercial engines. 30 years in the game, he's seen it all, built teams from five people to 500, and what Richard's discovered is fascinating. Many sales leaders are obsessing over the wrong things. They're chasing new logos when the biggest opportunity is sat right under their noses. Their spending over $2 took quite every $1 of new revenue, and they're building forecasts based on optimism rather than data. In this conversation, we're breaking down his four pillars of commercial excellence. We're talking about why your ICP could be wrong, how to actually fix your forecasting process, and what AI tools are worth your attention, but this is which one could be just noise. This is proper tactical stuff you can use as you're building your plan for next year. So get comfortable, grab a coffee. This is Revenue Unplugged with Richard Perez from APEC's partners. Richard, welcome to Revenue Unplugged. It's amazing to have you join us and share just some of the knowledge you've picked out from the world of sales. We're going to be talking about the four pillars for commercial excellence, ICP and target markets, value proposition and messaging, operational excellence and customer growth, or really exciting and interesting topics to dive into. Before we get going, as usual, I always ask our guests just to give a bit of background as to who they are. Sure. Thank you, James. It's good to join you and delighted to be with you. Richard Perez, I lead our sales and go to market practice here at APEC's partners. I am part of the operational excellence practice, which is our value creation team that are about 30 of us in our group who work with the portfolio. I've been in sales for over 30 years and it worked in a number of roles leading small startup teams, large global teams and everything in between. It's a world that I know very well and enjoy quite a bit and delighted to be doing it here at APEC's. Let's dive into this detail. We're looking at the four pillars. The first one up there is ICP and target markets. Why was this one of the things you chose to talk about? It's one of the things that we care about quite a bit is certainly growth but efficient growth. One of the biggest drivers for sales inefficiency is sales teams going after the wrong kinds of opportunities. When I was a sales rep, we had a firm called the Corporate Executive Board C-E-B, which was acquired by Gertner. We had a fantastic team who pointed us in the right direction at exactly the right accounts that we should go after and each account had a score based on the value of those accounts. That's the level of detail that you want to get into to ensure that your sales team is focused on the best opportunities. I see too many sales organizations who indicate that they have an ideal client profile but generally they have it on paper and they will tell you what they think they should be going after. Then I asked them to take a look at their territories for each of their reps and those two are not in sync often times. They don't take that all the way through down to the individual territory in the specific accounts that reps should be going after and that wastes a lot of sales teams times going after opportunities that they will either never buy for them or will eventually churn if not quickly in the customer service efforts. We just see a lot of waste from that. We really try to focus our portfolio companies on ensuring that they define very clearly what are the best opportunities, the best accounts that will give them the best win rates, greatest LTV and greatest chance to grow with those customers. We find that that is a really good starting point to drive efficient growth. It's a really valid point and I think quite often businesses think they have their time all sorted out but they haven't really done enough detail into it. What advice could you give any listeners to actually the process of really defining and turning that time into a proper ICP to move forward, particularly going into 2026 where new logos are going to be really important? Yeah. Starting with the TAM is always a good thing but that is really high level and what you want to be able to get to is a really deep understanding of which customers are going to give you the greatest growth opportunity. Not just by once, not just by a single product but who are likely to buy multiple products from you. So that cross sell and up sell opportunity is really rich with that account. We look at the firmographics. What industry are they in? What's the size of the company? How complex is the business? Are they US focused only? Are they UK focused only? Or do they have a global footprint? So you want to look at all those things about the company and then the individual that you're selling to. Is this a marketing product? Is it just work for the CMO or does it work for the digital marketer? Like you want to understand who in the organization can buy? Do you have multiple buying opportunities? And then you want to understand the technographics of the firm, right? Of the company. What technology do they have in place and how does my system integrate or not with that system? So you want to look at the totality of what that potential buyer gives you, the potential that it gives you to sell your product. And so too many organizations just look at a service, a surface level sort of view of the customer, either size or industry, but you need to get much deeper and understand really the personas at the company who are going to buy from you. Hopefully multiple personas, the technology that they have that would give you the greatest chance for success there. And oftentimes organizations aren't spending enough time on some of those finer details as it worked. And for companies that are doing a review right now and looking at the target market and clients from next year, what do we want to have read flags that would be an immediate indicator that they're looking or they've been targeting the wrong companies that they should look out for? Yeah. So if I'll give you two. One, if you're seeing a decline in win rate across your organization over time, that could be an indication that your sales team is going after the wrong kinds of opportunities, right? That's a little bit more obvious. Now that could be inefficiency. It could be market headwinds. It could be a number of things. But if I see a declining win rate, one of the first things that I want to go do is go look at my pipeline and say, all right, are the opportunities that I have in my pipeline, the right opportunities and within our ICP or is our ICP shifting? And we're selling to the same old customers that we have tried in the past, but those are no longer the right customers. You should be doing an ICP segmentation review at least twice a year, if not quarterly, to make sure that your ICP hasn't shifted on you. The second indicator, and this is often a question that I get that exactly is misunderstand sort of the true meaning behind it, is they will see a churn issue and they will say, Richard, we need you to take a look at our customer success organization, our account management team. We don't have a properly defined customer journey map or we're not servicing them well, we're seeing a churn issue. And so once I start to peel the layers back on that, it may in fact be that we have a service issue, we don't have a good customer journey map. But oftentimes it is, we're selling to the wrong customer. The sales team is brought in somebody we should have never sold to. So those are two indications that I look forward to understand, do we have an ICP issue or not? Interesting. When we were talking in preparing for this, you mentioned customers with the greatest lifetime value and best win rate. What's the difference and how do you balance the two? So ideally you find customers who achieve both. I don't know that you always can, but ideally, customers who are a really good fit for your product, if the sales team is effective, then you're going to see pretty good win rates with that part of the market. Because you can build a great win rate. You can get to 25, 30% win rate and never really see a great NRR. Well, that could be that we are, we don't have enough products to sell to them or we haven't built a great cross sell and up sell motion. But ideally you want to find those customers who we can land effectively with a really good win rate and have the potential to buy multiple products if we have them to offer. And so ideally you're doing both. But there are a lot of dependencies there. Again, do we have a strong product portfolio? Do we have a strong expansion motion? Some organizations struggle with who should own expansion? Should it be sales? Should it be account management? Should it be some combination of the two? But you have to figure out that motion. But ideally you're finding organizations that can buy multiple products from you. Again, assuming you have them to offer. There's lots of really great detail in the NRR and pillar one. It's fascinating to hear a lot talking to sales leaders where they do get lost in this area of the time and the ICP. Before we move on to pillar two, if there was just one key bit advice that you'd give to sales leaders right now who are planning their forecasting and their new logo's win for 2026, what would that be? particularly around time and ICP. Yeah, so here's the thing I would say. So we, as you can imagine, a firm like ours, we have a lot of relationships in the market and we work with a lot of different external partners. There is an organization that we get benchmarking information from on a regular basis, bent sites, a guy named David Spitz, as well as Jaco from winning by design and a few other organizations. But in talking to those different external partners, we've learned that the cost to acquire a new logo dollar is north of two dollars. I think that the media is something like two dollars and eight cents according to one of those firms that that we work with. So it's gotten really expensive to go get a new logo dollar of revenue, right? And so one of the biggest drivers is ICP were not selling to the right customers. So if I were a CRO today, I would be looking at my performance across the year. I'd be looking at my pipeline for 2025 and say, did we really sell to customers that are going to be good buyers for us? And if not, then I need to go look at my not only my ICP, but my territory allocation. That last mile of making sure that you deliver only targeted accounts to your sales team is often overlooked by sales organizations. And so that's what I would want to look at as did we do as a management team or part to make sure that we're pointing the sales team in the right direction. And then I would do that every quarter at a minimum twice a year. Yeah, that's great advice. Moving on to pillar two value proposition and messaging. I think they kind of succinct together really nicely. Once you've got the ICP right, the messaging that goes out is critical here. What are some of the key things that you've seen where businesses have struggled with messaging? And why do you think that is? Yeah. So too many organizations focus on the softer side of the value proposition, right? They focus on ROI calculators. They focus on discounting to try and achieve a closed sale, but not enough organizations are focused on what's the impact that I have on my customer? Whatever my product or service is, I want to understand what changes at my customers company when they use my product or service. Do we accelerate their revenue? Do we reduce their cost? Do we mitigate risk? And if so, at what level? And most organizations aren't going to that level of detail to understand what is the impact? Buyers necessarily are going to make decisions on an emotional impact and a rational impact. The rational impact is the business side, right? Do we move the needle on the business? Do we, again, save the money, accelerate revenue, mitigate risk? But you also want to think about what's the emotional impact? What's it risk for the buyer? How are they going to make this decision? What's it stake for them if they get this decision wrong? Or if they make no decision, indecision is a very real issue. If you don't understand why they are going to do nothing, why they would arrive at indecision and make no change, then you're putting yourself at risk. You're putting that deal at risk. But you need to be very clear about what's the impact of the business at my customers business, and too many organizations don't get to that level. They just talk generically about cost savings. We had this conversation with one of our portfolio companies. It was very focused on the amount of money that companies could save, and they were seeing a decline in wind rates. Once we got under the hood, we understood we were overly, and we were overindexing on cost savings. In some cases, they could save a company $500,000, but this is a multi-billion dollar company. That may not be enough to move the needle. We started to shift the conversation to what really matters to that CEO, that CFO, the board of that company. If they have a churn issue with their customer base, then I might focus on that instead of cost savings. Get to the real business impact that matters to your customer. I think it's a really important point. I talked to salespeople all the time. Often here, people just talking about features a lot without referring to benefits or understanding which features are right. You mentioned bringing this back into pillar one, looking back over your pipeline that you've had over the year and seeing if you had the right. How could you look at the data to understand if you had the wrong IPP or the wrong messaging if the pipeline didn't move in the right direction? There are a few things that I would want to look at. The first step is to look at the pipeline and say, "Okay, what's in there? What's the profile of the opportunities that we have? Do they fit our IPP?" The second thing I want to understand is, is the pipeline moving? What's the pipeline velocity look like? Are we converting across the pipeline effectively from one stage to the next? Are we really clear about what the customer verifiable outcomes are in each of those opportunities? In other words, are they doing the things that signal that they really want to buy from us? And there's a lot we could talk about there. So those are the things that I want to start with. Ideally, you have a call intelligence platform that helps you capture some of those conversations, if not all of those conversations, so you can start to understand how did these conversations go with a particular segment, with a particular vertical industry vertical? Are they signaling to us that our product or service is really compelling or not? Are they talking to us about the things that are going to change their business when they use our product or not? And are we as a sales team? Are we effectively positioning the value proposition of our product or service effectively? So call intelligence gives you really great insights to what's happening in the market, how is your product or service being perceived, and how effective is your sales team at positioning that versus competitors and versus the customer needs? Those are the two things that I would focus on. You mentioned about understanding, there's an emotional side to buying and how do you investigate or research probably is the right word into what the messaging should be like so that we're not too focused on cost saving or the real obvious side of things, but actually how we solve the problem that people have. So what are the different ways that they can go out and find that information? Yeah, well, I'll put a plug in for one of my colleagues, Molly Chapman, who is our product marketer on our team. She is exceptional at helping organizations understand what is their value proposition and how is it being received in the market and how do you tweak it and adjust it to ensure that it resonates? I think if she were here with us, she would say you really need to understand what's the customer perspective, right? And so ideally you go listen to some call recordings. She has taken like call recordings from one of our portfolio companies, done it and now, pardon me, done analysis, through chat, GBT to really understand what's happening in those transcripts. What are they saying? What are customers saying about the product or service? And what are they not saying? What are they like? What are they not like? And so you really want to get that customer perspective. And ideally, you go the next mile and you interview customers, really happy customers, your largest customers, your happiest customers to understand how they're using it, what they're using, what difference it's making. So that's the first point of orientation is really understand what's the customer perspective. Customer centricity is often overlooked in organizations and that's the starting point is really understand what matters to them. That starts to shape the narrative around how do I want to position my product or market based on customer feedback? And would you say in many large organizations, particularly in the private world where on average there's probably close to 100 million ARR, so a number of clients, should there be a number of different propositions that go out, depending on who the client is or is it one size should fit all to scale? Yeah, it's the former for sure. Like, it is not one single value proposition, especially if you have multiple products, but even if you have a single product, the way that your consumers or your customers rather consume that product is going to be different. If you're selling, I gave you an example earlier about a product that might be sold into the marketing organization. The way a CMO, a cheap marketing officer might consume your product is going to be very different than the way a digital marketer might consume a little more branding expert might consume it. So you really need to understand how does this product impact the different personas, the different buyers, and then adjust your messaging and your value proposition for each. It may be different elements. I hesitate to use benefits or features here, but maybe different elements of your product that people will use that provides a very, very different value. So you need to understand how you are different personas and your different parts of your customer base are going to use the product, but it should be different value proposition for different parts of the organization, different buyers in the organization, different users in the organization. Otherwise, I think you'll sell yourself short, trying to stick to a single value prompt. For sure. And in the world of sales, do you find that sometimes people rely too much on messaging? And how much is too much of messaging that is going out to clients over when's the right time to just pick up the phone, book a meeting, have a conversation? Yeah. And so if I understand your question correctly, James, so messaging, meaning campaigns, are they over relying on email outreach versus picking up the phone and calling? For sure. Yeah, it's a delicate balance. I long ago I saw a statistic from I don't remember if it was gone or one of these other tech vendors who suggested you need a multi-touch strategy to get a call book, right? Something like 18 different touches to get somebody to actually schedule a meeting with you. That's just to get the first meeting started. I don't think that number shifted a lot. Maybe more touches, who knows. But I think they were right in saying, when you do that outreach, you need a variety of different touches, everything from email messages to LinkedIn messages, to phone calls, and you need to contemplate every tool that you have available to, you're not be over-reliant on one. Those people who, oh, salespeople who over-reli on email, in my view, are afraid to pick up the phone, right? And they're afraid to have the conversation and try to answer the question they might get asked. It's really, really important you try all channels available to you, not over index on one. Perfect. There's a critical part of the play within the playbook, so I really appreciate you giving your insight into that. Pin of three, operational excellence is something I've spoken this year, probably more than ever before. It's a really interesting part. Revops is becoming more and more important. Why do you put operational excellence in this for pillar three? What's your thought process behind that? Yeah, so you can absolutely have a really clear ICP and very clearly define the best opportunities that you want to go after. And you can have a really strong value prop and message that's very compelling to the market. But if your sales team is not effective at engaging the market, at reaching out to the market, in managing those opportunities that they've engaged, then you will not achieve the outcomes that you want to achieve, right? And so you want to make sure that you have sort of the basic building blocks of operational excellence in place. Everything from, did we define, you know, the right profile of the sales talent that we want to have in our organization? Do we have a really good onboarding process for bringing that into the organization and shrinking, pardon me, shrinking their ramp time to make sure that we can get an impact out of them as quickly as possible? Do we have a good management structure that's going to provide the right oversight, coaching and guidance? Did we enable our managers to be maximally effective at developing those reps as they come on to their team? And then do we have really effective sales process in place for them to engage the market, to manage their pipeline, to manage forecasting? We have an exceptional RevOps advisor on our team, Chloe, who is really good at helping organizations in our portfolio understands what does good process look like? And every organization, if they're good, will have sales stages in their pipeline, sales stages in their CRM, but where a lot of organizations fall short is they don't have clear entry and exit criteria to move opportunities from one stage to the next that tells you whether or not this buyer is the right kind of buyer is going to move through the journey with me. And that those entry and exit criteria should map back to the buying process that the customer is going to or the prospect is going to go through. The other thing you need to look at is what we call the customer verifiable outcomes. Is the customer doing things that are signaling very clearly that they're taking the journey with you? Are they inviting the decision maker into the meeting? Are they looking and reviewing your collateral that you send over to them that talks about the value and the impact that you could have? Are they viewing the videos that you send them? Are they going through contract review and you can see red lines happening? Like, those are very clear signals that you want to see. And then you want to be able to ensure that you have a strong forecasting process as well, which we can spend more time on. But those are the elements on the new logo side of the things that I want to see when it comes to operational excellence. And then ensure you have a tech stack that allows your sales team to be as efficient in that process as possible and as effective in that as possible. Post sales, same thing. Do we have a really good customer journey map, a really good engagement model for how we serve our customers and identify opportunities for growth? So end to end, you want to make sure that you have that really good operational rigor to achieve the growth outcomes that you're shooting for. We are definitely going to dive into forecasting. But before we do that, you mentioned onboarding. And I just wanted to see if you could give a couple of tips or advice on what good onboarding looks like. And the reason why I say that is hiring salespeople is one of the biggest challenges of a sales leader. But I genuinely feel that leaders don't often get it as wrong as often as they think. I think onboarding fails them. So what tips would you, from a high level perspective, a couple of tips that you could give that helps show what a good onboarding process looks like? Yeah. Boy, you could get a lot of different answers from a lot of different people here. I'll do my best to take a shot here. So first, you need to ensure that you're recruiting the right people in the organization. Second, you need to have a clear plan for what onboarding looks like. Too many organizations will go out and do some recruiting and then just plug people into the organization so they go figure it out or they'll pair them up with another sales rep who doesn't give them enough time to try and help coach them or onboard them. But that's highly ineffective. So you need to have a clear plan. That plan should involve training on your organization, your product, and how you sell, the tools and technology that you're going to make available to them, and clear sort of process for managing pipeline, managing forecasts. So those are some of the core elements that you want to have in place. And the thing that you need to be careful of is not overwhelming those new reps right out of the gate. So you can't train on all of that in the first two weeks. Yet too many organizations do. We work with an external partner, Caroline Holtu does a lot of our training with some of our portfolio companies. And I think if she were here, she would tell you that ensuring that you get your reps out in the market as quickly as possible, not spend too much time on product training or some of the other internal knowledge sharing would be really important. Now, before you put a rep out in the market, they need to know a little bit about what they're talking about. So there is some training you need to do on the product and value proposition, but don't overwhelm them in those first two or three weeks. But the thing that I would say is just have a clear plan and involve your managers, involve your best reps in some of that training to ensure that they the new reps get exposure to what's working well in the organization. And who it's working well for so that they can learn from their peers and really strong managers. I love the theory. And the bit that you mentioned there about getting reps out there and talking to the marketplace, I think that is so true. And I think a lot of reps kind of hide behind wanting to know everything before you get out there. And I always liken it back to kids learning a sport. You can do all the drills on the training ground, but put them on the pitch. That's where they're going to learn. You know, that's where and then you can come back and you take what happened on the pitch and you can then, but if you are sat there in the classroom going through it all, you know, it's the same as it comes to the to the military, you can practice all you want. Once someone shoots at you, it becomes a different game. So I totally agree with that. I think sometimes it gets driven a lot by the reps they want to have an answer to everything before making that call, before having that conversation. And I always say no one knows everything. And it's if you try and pretend to know everything, that's when it becomes a problem. And I'm yet to meet a decent human being who mind when you go, I don't know the answer to that, but I will find it out for you to be to prevent it. So I think you make a great, great point there. The other thing, James, if you're if you're permit me, I would add is, you know, we tend to think of onboarding as a fixed period in time, right? It's two months of training. It's three months of training. What I would say is yes, you should have that initial onboarding program, clear plan, clear involvement of other sort of managers and top sales reps. But that should be an ongoing process, right? And so don't just think of it as a 60 day training program. Think of it as a how do I enable them post onboarding, right? In month three, if you're training program, if you're onboarding program is two months, what does month three look like? One four month five, because that's going to be a continuous learning journey. If you don't contemplate that, you're going to fail them, right? Because the learning doesn't stop in 60 days. The other thing I'll say is you may want to consider some great AI tools out there that are really good for role playing, role playing in context, and gives you a good assessment on whether or not the reps are diagnosing effectively, delivering value prop effectively and making strong competitive differentiation statements. So there's some great AI tools that could help with that as well. So do great. Big topic for casting. If we be fair, 50% of reps won't hit target this year, which kind of suggests forecasting is out in 50% of businesses. How can we be more accurate at forecasting for 2026? Because I can't believe that the reps are all that bad. Is it more than numbers aren't quite right? Or would you disagree with that statement? Boy, it could be any of those things. It could be all of those things, right? It could be we set really aggressive targets that we, you know, that that warn a bottoms up target setting process. They were top down. That can skew things in against the favor of the sales team, right? But more often than not. And so I'm going to set aside right now the quota achievement and attaining targets. I'm going to focus more on forecast. What would it takes to deliver an effective forecast? It really starts not to be repetitive here, James, but it really starts with, are we inviting the right kinds of opportunities into the pipeline? But then the next thing that you need to have in place are those really strong sales process with that entry and exit criteria, the CBOs, customer verifiable outcomes I mentioned. If you don't have good stage management, good process management, good CBOs, you will never get to an accurate forecast. So when Chloe and I work with our portfolio companies on building a stronger forecast program, we start there. We start with a show us what your sales stages look like, show us what your entry and exit criteria look like, and we start to refine those things. We don't jump straight to forecast. We start here on the sales process to understand how effective are they managing each opportunity. Then once you zero in on that, we want to understand what is the management layer look like and helping sales teams manage their pipeline? How often are they reviewing a pipeline with their teams? What does the pipeline management cadence look like? Then we shift to forecast and say, "Okay, what does the forecast cadence look like? How often are you doing it? When you sit down and do a forecast review, are we rolling up the sales team's best guess? Oftentimes that's what it is at these opportunities. Or is it thumb in the air? Or are we trying to figure out based on a lot of optimism from the sales team on whether or not we're going to hit this? That's where a lot of organizations tend to trip up is they do this roll up from the sales teams. They ask the sales team to give us their best commit for the week. Oftentimes that's not based on any factual data. We want to teach organizations to start their forecast review, their forecast conversations with looking at your pipeline, what stage are they in? We've seen in some of our conversations, forecasted opportunities that are in stage two in an eight stage process. There's no reason a stage two opportunity should be in your forecast. That's a clear signal that we don't have the level of rigor that we need in a forecasting process. We start there and say, "Okay, show us your forecast." What opportunities are being forecasted? Where are they in the sales process? Do we have the right CVOs indicating the customers coming along to the buying journey with us or not? Then we want to inspect the, what is management's process for evaluating the forecast in those conversations? Are they probing effectively in those reviews? Are they asking the right questions? Have they identified the decision maker? Have they pressured tests of whether or not they really met the entry and exit criteria for the stage that they're at? Those are critical elements to getting to really strong forecast. So it's the process from a pipeline management process and a sales process. And it's also the process of reviewing the opportunity in the forecast reviews. Is there rigor around that on a weekly or biweekly or monthly basis depending on your cadence to really get to a good forecast? You made some super interesting points there. I just want to touch on one of those we mentioned where sales leaders are asking sales reps basically say, "What do you think you can do next year?" And you know what, I've been involved in those in my early days in recruitment where my sales managers are like, "Well, what do you think you can do next year?" But is there also where the CEO and the board are saying, "Right, we need X amount of revenue or X amount of profit. Go work out how much revenue you need to do off the back of that to hit that target." Does that happen a lot? Of course. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, I was having this conversation with the CEO, not too long ago, who had a CRO roll up a forecast that was going to be well short of budget. And so she was asking for my view on what she should do. Look, in my view, you need to be realistic about what's achievable. What I want to go do is then go back and look at the pipeline and say, "Okay, do we have proper pipeline coverage here? Do we have enough opportunities to pipeline? And maybe we just don't have a good understanding of where the opportunities are." So then I want to go inspect, you know, maybe late stage opportunities. Are there any of them that didn't make it into the forecast? I would want to go review those to say, "Are any of those actually able to, are we able to accelerate any of those opportunities?" As a CRO or head of sales, like your job is to get the budget, whatever your targets are, that's your job. And if you roll up a forecast short of that, your job is to go back to your team and really inspect the pipeline and say, "Are there any late stage opportunities that we can pull forward? Are there, if we've got a short sales cycle, are there any upcoming meetings we think we can close rapidly? If we've got a longer sales cycle, do we have an opportunity to pull some of those forward that are a little bit later stage that we can incentivize or or identify sort of a critical event on the near term horizon that would move that forward? But absolutely, you get that that push all the time from your board and your your CEO to hit targets and you should. And your job as a CRO is to figure out how you can get there. We touched on this when when you were over in London about the skill sets of a CRO in a modern world. And the way I look at forecast sin, it is very data heavy. Would I be right in saying that you could create, if you've got all the right tools and all the right information in the days, you should be able to make an accurate forecast without talking to any of your sales reps and needing them to add their insight. I think that's possible. Yes, I think it's possible. But boy, the tools have to be right. Now, I wouldn't want to do that, right? Because I want would want to get the additional context from my reps and my management teams to understand that opportunity that's that that is a million dollar opportunity. I would want to understand, do we really have clear line of sight on those CVOs? Do we really have line of sight into the decision making process? So there's a level of detail that you will not get the data in your systems or whatever tools that you're using that you're going to need to go get through contextually relevant conversations. Now, maybe your your Collins intelligence platform can get you part of the way there. And so you've got a combination of really good data, really good Collins intelligence information that you can review. But I'm still going to want to go talk to the rep and get full context about what's going on there. So it's possible, but I wouldn't want to rely just on the data tech. We've mentioned that a few times. Is there any bits of tech that you feel is absolutely must have to help you get as accurate insight to create your forecasting? It starts with this is an obvious answer maybe disappointing to you and your listeners, but it starts with a really good CRF, right? You have to have a great CRF that works for your organization. There are very well known players in this space sales force for the large enterprise HubSpot. I think works fairly well for smaller sort of SMB, maybe lower mid-market businesses. I think they're trying to push up market. But we'll see. But it starts with a really strong CRF. Now, having the CRF in place is one thing. Getting sales teams to use it is a very, very different thing. And so, you know, I know we're going to talk about AI here in a bit, but what I'd say is, you know, as a sales rep, I didn't enjoy putting stuff into the system and I wasn't very good at it. And I think that's true for a lot of sales reps, but there's some great AI tools that you can use now, including call intelligence platforms that will take the call intelligence transcript, take that information and log a lot of that data for you into your CRM. And that's removing the the administrative burden from the sales rep. I like those kind of capabilities. And so, what I'd say is have a great CRM look for tools that take some of the administrative burden off of your sales team and captures information that they would ordinarily need to key in themselves, make it easier for them to spend more time with customers. So, those are two things that I would think of. And then a really strong call intelligence platform, I think is critical. On the marketing side, you need a strong marketing automation platform. And there are known players in that space. Use that to drive top of funnel to drive outreach to your existing customers and support the sales table and some of their campaign and outreach efforts. A CRM is only as good as the data that's been put into it. And it is absolutely critical. And I'm often saying that now a salesperson that isn't willing to put the information in is just not a modern salesperson because as much as you can be a great salesperson hitting your number, you're preventing the business from picking up. So, really valuable insight. You know, back in the day when when we were hands on a set of issued, the data didn't do too much in the CRM. So, it was kind of like what was the point? But now there's a real point to it. There's a real value add to have it in there. And it's not just for everybody. So, I think the right CRMs are not cheap, but it's throwing money away if it's not being used in the right way. But percent. And in, by the way, there's several other tech capabilities that I think you would want to have in your tech stack. Those are some of the what I would call table stakes. But they're, you know, I think I mentioned their AI tools for role playing. I think are becoming more and more critical value engineer or sales engineer agents that could be really interesting. So, there are a lot of tools that are coming on the market that could be really useful. The thing that I would caution organizations against is creating too much complexity with their sales tech stack. It's one of the things that my colleague Chloe and I look at with our portfolio is what does the tech stack look like now? Do we need all of those? Are we using all of those? Can we do an audit to see is every license being used? Is it having the desired impact? Is it moving the metric that we thought it would move when we purchased the licenses or not and simplify wherever you can? So, yes to sales tech, but be smart about it. Be judicious about what you add and take things out that you're not using. Moving on to pillar four customer growth. Because it's a hugely important one. I guess that's basically doing more with what you've got. Why is this got a pillar on its own customer growth? Why is it in your eyes? Why is it so important? It is often overlooked by sales organizations and sometimes management teams more broadly in terms of real growth driver. And so, we over index on new logo growth spend. I can't remember if this stat is still accurate, but last year I heard that 70% of marketing dollars were spent on on average spent on new logo acquisition that's a real imbalance in my view. Why? As I mentioned earlier, a new logo dollar costs north of two dollars to go get. The easier path to growth is your install base. Now, doesn't mean that you don't focus on new logo, but we need a rebalance of the resources we're putting into growth. The best path to growth is your install base. So I would want to do a white space analysis to understand if all the customers that I have, how many of them are buying all of the products that I have on offer, right? If we are averaging 1.1, 1.2 products per customer, I have a lot of white space. If I have multiple products that I can sell, we've already done the hard lifting of getting into the organization, right? We have a relationship. They are ideally using the products. Somebody is engaging with them on a regular basis. So we have something that we can monetize even more in existing relationship. So I would go do that white space analysis to understand what else could and should they be buying from us and involve sales if your account managers are sales oriented and most certainly involve marketing to market to your install base. I don't see enough marketing organizations investing customer marketing dollars to reach out to their customers on a regular basis and help make them aware of other capabilities you have. And then lastly, product has a role to role here as well. Products should be designing the product in a way that makes it really easy to understand the total value on offer with your organization. You can do some in-product promotion and marketing, right? You can offer free access to other products that perhaps they haven't bought for 30 days so that they get exposure to the product. And then when they start to like it, then you give them the the easy ability to add that product to their to their bundles. So everybody in the organization should be oriented to growing share wallet. And it's a place that I think is an easier path to growth. Again, because I mean, you start new logo, but I would really consider rebalancing resources so that we grow with the install base. It's really interesting. There's loads of bits I want to pick up on and what you just said there. The focus on new logos, I see in what I do in recruitment, large part of CROs who don't make it past the 14, 15 month tenure, put a big focus on transformation going in on new logos, rather than looking at what they have and looking to grow revenue. The bottom line is a sales leader is normally it's about money and that's how they look on whether it's been success or not. Why do you think so many go down the new logo route and don't actually sit there and put enough of the focus on current customers and building that out? I suspect it's one of two things either they grew up in new logo sales and never really had much experience on the customer success side, the account management side. And so that's easier for them to understand, oh, I've got a new logo and I understand that metric and I understand win rate for new customers. So it's either they're overindexing there because that's what they're comfortable with or management and the board is telling them, hey, we need to grow market share so you need to go sell to new new customers and grow as many new logos as possible or some combination of the two, right? And I think that's a mistake. Again, I think you don't abandon one for the other but you rebalance your efforts. And if I were a new CRO coming in today, I would first want to understand what's my boards expectations and CEOs expectations about how we're going to achieve growth. What are the metrics that I'm being measured against? Are we just being measured on new logos or we've been measured on NRR as well? Net retention. So I would want to understand what's the expectation here than two. I would want to understand what is my product portfolio look like and do I have the ability to expand with my install base or not? And if I don't, I'm going to work with product to try and figure out what else should we be developing that we could sell to our install base. So I think I think I would start there. Understand what are you being measured against? And is there an opportunity to rebalance our resources to focus on growing the install base? And here's a big question. Where should responsibility of growing, decline-based be? Customer success or sales or both? Yeah, boy, you will get a million different answers to this question, James. I think it depends. It depends on the product or service that you're offering. It depends on the complexity of the product or service that you have. It depends on the skill steps that you have. People define customer success and account management differently. Customer success might just be focused on ensuring that customers know how to use the products or services that you have, but don't really have a commercial orientation. They may lead that to account managers if they have an account management function. Some organizations only have customer success in the expectations that is that CS managers will also have that commercial responsibility for renewal. Where I see a divergence in a lot of organizations is around ownership of that expansion motion, or maybe they don't have an expansion motion to find. But if their ambition is to grow the install base, too many organizations are unclear about where that ownership sits. And there's not a one-size-fits-all answer to be honest. But the thing that I want to think about first is the customer experience. If I'm going to go, if I'm serving them with customer success over here, and I want to expand with them, I'm going to kick them back over to salesperson. They haven't talked to in 24 months. That's a bit of a lumpy experience for the customer. So I would want to think about how do I smooth that out for the customer experience and make sure that it seems and feels effortless to that customer, whatever that cross-cellup cell experience is. If you don't have the right skill sets on the customer's success side, it may mean that you need to kick that back over to sales whose natural orientation is much more around those commercial conversations. But it also might mean that you want to stand up and account me in as much function that is partnered with the CS team all year long, and you build those commercial skill sets over there. There are a number of ways that you can pursue this. There's not a one-size-fits-all. Anybody that tells you that there is James is, in my view, absolutely wrong. But you have to figure out what works for you, and more importantly, you have to figure out what works for your customer and makes that experience as effortless as possible. I think you kind of answer every right way there, and it's what works for the customer. And do you have the right processes in place, and then the right people with the right skill set in the right seats to run that process? That is right for the customer. If you nail that, you're all right. Agreed. Look, that should be all of our orientation. We should, as much as possibly, be customer-centric, and all that we do, everything from the way that we sell to the way that we market, to the way that we build, we should all do that from the lens of making the experience of working with us effortless for our customers, and making sure that we're delivering impact and not just a vague notion of value. It's been great talking about the four pillars. I think it's actually really timely for you to be sharing your insight at this time of year, and you probably have been with that, but a lot of your portfolio companies heavily in planning for next year. And I think there's an exciting opportunity for growth for almost every industry sector that's out there. So, thank you so much for that. Of course. We've got just enough time, because it wouldn't be a podcast with a gentleman like yourself right now that we don't talk about AI. We mentioned, when we were speaking about this, you've been talking to a lot of peers and some of them like Deep Your Toe and others alike, just get all in. You're kind of some way between the two. Why are you some way between the two? What's your thought process at the moment around AI? Yeah, look, I start by saying this, there's no one size fits all on this either, right? Some organizations would be able to easily tolerate or mostly be able to tolerate a transformational change on this dimension, right? They have the infrastructure, they have the resources, the people to undergo a big change. Not all organizations can tolerate that. Not all organizations have the resources for a major transformation of business, right? Would it be great if you do? And we've got a couple of businesses in our portfolio who've done that, who've looked across the entire enterprise and said, all right, here are the five, ten things we're going to do across the organization to drive a transformational change at the business. That's great. On the other end, you have those who are still trying to figure out what AI means to them, what they could try, what they could use. And they're a little bit intimidated by AI. It's still pretty new for most of us, right? And so they might just want to stick their tail on the water. I would say that's probably not right either, right? It is worth, and I don't want to speak for the firm more broadly, but my view is probably sensible to be somewhere in the middle, right? To understand across the organization, where do we have highly repetitive tasks? Where do we have high inefficiency? Where do we have a lot of process that is repetitive that we can streamline using AI tools? And so I would want to understand across my business, where are those opportunities to make us more efficient, to automate certain workflows? And you don't have to do it all at once, right? Define two or three places that you want to test out. So that's sort of my view is like, be somewhere in the middle, but do what makes sense for your organization because resources is different for every organization, right? And the amount of change that an organization can tolerate is different for every organization. So you have to do what works best for you, but I would say if you're just sticking your toe in the water, that's probably a mistake. And you may not have the answer to probably going back 10 years ago, I was talking to a CIO of an energy trading house. And I was asking him, what's one of the biggest challenges you have now? You're the CIO of this business. And his answer was actually quite surprising, but it was keeping up with new technology. understandings what is right, what's the thing to go with, to go so much other bits going on. Those leaders are not necessarily at one with technology and what they should be using. Like just to, you know, from a really basic level, I can get my head around, whether to go for chat, GP, Pro or Claught. And I went for Claught in the end, but I couldn't give you a real defined reason as to why, who should sales leaders have in around the business? I think they could spot what they could automate. What is a repetitive task? How do you work out with so many tools out there, are changing all the time, update, and all the time? Who should sales leaders begin around them to help them make decisions on what could have an impact? And also, I always say the easiest person to sell to as a salesperson, and you see something shiny, you think, that's not telling you how much money you can save, how many clients you're going to win with any slot, dumb, I'll take it. How do we help sales leaders assess the tech and make the right decisions? And should it be them? No. So I'll start with the internal resources that you have first. And then I'll go external. On the internal side, you should absolutely have your IT team as your partner in helping you evaluate things. Now, the challenge sometimes, not all the time, with IT departments, is they want to own it, right? And they will pull it in their direction. They will say it's their decision. I don't think that's right. I think this is a business decision, but you need tech as your partner. And so hold your CIO and or whoever they designate to help with the evaluation process, but be very clear about what their role is versus what your role is. You are the decision maker, in my view, they are the partner that's going to help you evaluate the tools and determine what's going to be the impact to the rest of the business. How does it integrate with our existing architecture? So though that's sort of IT's role in my view. That's partnership number one. Partnership number two is if you're large enough, you need a revops person along for the ride. A lot of the really good revops people have a very good understanding of their tech stack. And if they're good, they're tracking the technology that's out of the market and what is available as part of an enterprise package. So a Salesforce AI solution versus a Gung solution, AI solution. So they will understand those things. You absolutely need them at the table. And ideally, they're driving that process for you as a CIO. You need that partnership, right? You need them driving that for you. And then you need, depending on the tool, you're going to need product. You're going to need marketing involved in those decisions to help you evaluate them. So those are the internal partnerships that I would look at. Look at external. If your PE back to our portfolio is reached out to your operating group to understand who within the operating group can support those efforts. Here at Apex, we have a SWAT team who is helping a lot of our portfolio companies evaluate how they should be thinking about AI capabilities. And some of us are helping them evaluate specific tools. A lot of PE firms have those operating partners and operating teams who can help with those evaluations. And then lastly, are there really good external partners who sort of live and breathe through this evaluation that you know and trust? And they could help you do that evaluation, but you should not do this alone to your point, James. It's moving way too fast. There are too many new entries into the market and not all of them are going to make it. And so you're going to need some support in evaluating these tools and understanding what's available in the market. And it's probably too early to really tell, but what should a sales leader be doing to have in place to review that the technology is actually being effective and moving the business forward. And if not, put in a stock to it because I can see before long, it's probably already happening where people have got so many different bits of tech that they're paying for and so much for not being being used in that time now, where you know, revenue is really important. So when should reviews be taking place and how do we, what advice have you sin from peers in the conversation, turning we see whether technology is actually doing the job you wanted? Yeah. Yeah. So I'll tell you what we've done and hopefully this is helpful. So Chloe on my team has done a fantastic job of building. She brings the revenue operations leaders from our portfolio together every other month and they talk about different issues. They set the agenda. She drives it and we've worked with them to define what's the, what's the rubric that we want to use to evaluate technology, whether it's AI or not. And so we've got a framework that we've shared with those revenue operations leaders that says, we're going to define what the intent of this technology is going to be, what it's supposed to do, what metric it's supposed to impact. What's our evaluation criteria that we're going to use to assess whether or not this is an effective tool for us, what the implementation plan is going to look like what change management is going to look like. And then what is the ongoing evaluation of that tool that we want to have in place to ensure that we're getting the value out of it? So that's, that was designed with the intent of looking at new tech before you go out and buy it. What we've encouraged our revenue operations teams to do is to use it as well for their existing tech stack to say, all right, we have five, 10 different technology solutions we deployed. Are we using them? We have a certain number of seat licenses or whatever the construct of the license that the contract is. Are we actually using it to its fullest extent? We bought it with the intent to do X. Is it doing X? Is it improving our win rate? Is it improving our average ACV? Is it improving on boarding? Whatever that metric was that we intended to move. I want to know on a quarterly basis. Are we moving it? And if not, I want to get ahead of my renewal cycle and pull that out of my tech stack. If I'm not using it, if it's not delivering value, I think it's critical. What I think you said Chloe's doing their ringing the revops together and talking about it. I think it's one thing that would say the sounds leaders should be doing is talking to peers about what they're doing and the success they're seeing from it. Before I let you go, what's one of the most exciting things that you're seeing from AI that 2026 could could show for more the conversations that you've been seeing excite to whether or not improves it. It works. What are you looking at going? That could be cool. So I'll give you two on is we're seeing a lot of tools that will automate workflows for organizations. And I really like that capability. So there are a lot of people saying AI is going to replace people. My view is that's probably right, but to an extent, I think the right way to look at AI is can AI assist us in doing our jobs better and more effectively. In the world of the sales and the sales world, whether what I want to know is how can I enable my sales reps to spend more time in front of customers? That's the most valuable way to use them. Can I remove the administrative burden from them? Can I capture information that they ordinarily would have to key in the way that you and I used to many years ago? Make that easy for them so they can spend more time with customers. So that's number one is any tool that makes the job the administrative part of the job for sales rep easier so they can spend more time with customers. That gets me pretty excited and there are a lot of tools on the market that look pretty interesting. The second is around enablement. So I mentioned a couple times that there's some really cool tools that are providing roleplay capabilities for sales reps that will give you contextually relevant role plays. In other words, it will pull data from your CRM emails, phone transcript, call transcripts and other information decision makers involved or copied into emails and it will look at the totality that information to say, okay, Richard, we're going to roleplay your call with company A and we're going to know what they care about. We're going to know what their issues are. We're going to know what they asked you about last time and now we're going to build it into a roleplay with you and James. James, the AI agent is going to be your potential customer and now we're going to see just how well prepared you are, how well you know what the issues are for this particular company, whether or not you truly understand the value proposition. And that's a really powerful tool back in my days when I was a sales rep. We went out on the George Washington lawn there in Washington DC and we would roleplay this together over and over with our start group. And while that was a lot of fun, that wasn't the most effective way to prepare you for the market or for a specific sales conversation. AI gives you some great capabilities of train reps in a way that we've never been able to train before and then evaluate them real time. Did Richard ask the right questions? Did he use the right language? Did he do a good job doing competitive differentiation and score your performance and provide that to your manager so you know they know where to coach the rep, right? That's a really powerful tool. There's some great players in the market on that space, but I think we're just getting started. Totally agree. I know such at the point about, you know, will AI replace people. I tend to go along the phrase that it will replace roles, not people. And I think people will just take on other opportunities and they'll be able to use their skill set in other ways. So I don't think it's going to replace people. It's just going to replace roles and flipping it to the other side before I let you go. What worries you most about AI that it intemidates people keeps them on the sidelines. Right. Look, are there security risks? Can you get it wrong? Absolutely. But if you do your job properly, you involve your IT and your info sect team, you can mitigate some of those risks. What I worry about is that it paralyzes people keeps people from trying to figure out, how can this make us more effective, more efficient reach out to our customers more frequently or more effectively? and they don't get the benefit of it. So I'm not concerned about AI itself necessarily. I'm concerned about a willingness to get out and try it and see how it can have a positive impact on the business. Now, the other potential risk here is that you do what we've been doing for the last 10 or so years in sales and marketing is that you just build up a big stack of technology that you never really use that makes your environment really complex. That's a very real risk. And so I don't fear it, but it's something to be aware. Richard, I super appreciate all the time you've given up in planning to put this podcast together and for the time today sharing your knowledge and insight. So thank you very, very much indeed. - No problem, James. Enjoy it. Thank you.