Meet the CRO (Chief Revenue Officer) from Positive Momentum

Stephen Slattery is SVP Global Sales for Informa Festivals' FinTech verticals — the team behind Money20/20, Finovate and FinTech Futures. He brings international sales leadership experience across the US, Europe, the Middle East and Asia, and 29 years in selling. Host Sarah first worked with Stephen and his team through COVID, "when building relationships in person still meant hoping that someone remembered to come off mute."

What we cover

• How you get to CRO: 29 years of practice, and no shortcut. There's no book to read — it's the hard graft of experience and expertise you can only accrue by doing it.
• Why growth: a father in banking gave him deep sector expertise before he understood what a company function even was, and sales turned out to be the skill set that unlocked access to any industry
• Y2K at Reuters as his first crisis — working through midnight, and getting hooked on guiding other companies through moments that matter
• Understanding your customer without being your customer: you don't have to be the banker or the engineer, but you do have to understand their world well enough to fuel what they do
• Sizing growth potential: who's making money, who's in a moment of transition, and why regulation creates opportunity — open banking in Europe, decentralised finance in payments
• Ambition versus achievability: the ambition is valid if the plan behind it is solid. So stop polishing the goal and refine the plan. His test — could I sell this plan to the room, or do I get the eye rolls?
• The three things he looks for in first-line salespeople: genuine interest in the sector, coachability, and product expertise at the value level rather than the brochure level
• Two interview questions that expose all three — what have you read about payments or fintech recently, and what was the last learning you undertook since graduating. The number of blank faces is telling.
• Why sales doesn't have a qualification, and why that's no excuse. Would you hire a lawyer who hadn't trained recently?
• AI and the shape of the profession: the transactional end of selling is gaining enormous efficiency, so the expert part moves to human interaction, knowledge and the experience created for the customer
• Where a CRO actually spends time — finance, marketing, operations, content — and why mutual understanding has to run both ways. Siloing is a heavy risk, and the surprise of discovering his own operations team had never seen how the sales function was structured.
• Collaboration as a retention issue: harmony affects whether people stay
• Metrics: all of them matter, but not individually. The job is reading across the data sets to spot the next move — plus the hours spent explaining what weighted pipeline actually means.
• Reporting transparency, and why a salesperson needs to see how their inputs turn into a red, amber or green next to their name in a room they're not in

Stephen's three pieces of advice for CROs and sales leaders

1. Be an expert in your customers. How they make money, how they measure success, and — the detail he singles out — who is accountable for the ROI, not just what the ROI is. And be visible. Sales leaders behind a spreadsheet are long gone.
2. Be an expert in tactics, not just strategy. Does the team know what to do today? What are the three ways we could tackle this? Inactivity is the opposite of growth.
3. Invest in your people and give them belief. If they're good enough to be hired, they're good enough to be here. And as a leader — you have to earn the right to give hell.

Host Helen Sutton speaks with Jason Tooley, Executive Advisor to CEO.

Jason Tooley recently stepped back from Chief Sales Officer at Soldo into an advisory role with CEO Carlo and the incoming SVP Sales, alongside his board role at techUK. His career spans Veritas, Viridium, Dynatrace, Informatica and Citrix, with a consistent focus on growth through both direct and indirect channels.

He started as the first non-graduate BP Exploration hired into its IT organisation, moved to Reuters, then set up his own consultancy — where running the business and driving sales pulled him into a sales career proper, beginning with a sales director role at Tivoli.

What we cover

• Moving from operator to adviser, and giving the team room to run the business
• Why Jason chose growth: creating value for clients, and innovating around how you take that value to market
• His approach to assessing a business's real potential — go-to-market differentiation, market maturity, competitor behaviour, and whether the value sell touches multiple stakeholders
• The two limiting factors most people miss: whether your customers can transform at your pace, and whether your own business can innovate at the pace the market demands
• The Citrix pivot in the early 2010s from a technology play to mobility and remote working — including bringing the partner ecosystem along at the same pace
• Setting targets that stretch without breaking: build the plan with the integrated team, show the path, not just the number
• Why the CRO must be invested in every go-to-market function, not just the ones they came from
• Silos, collaboration, and why Jason talks about demand generation rather than pipeline
• What he hires for in individual contributors and, differently, in first-line leaders

Jason's top three for anyone stepping into a CRO role

1. Don't just be an operator — be an innovator. Drive and differentiate the go-to-market, and be willing to challenge clients on the value you can create.
2. Make everyone a great storyteller — sales, marketing, PR, technical. It's at risk of becoming a dying art, and executive-level clients value it enormously.
3. Don't create silos. Break them down, insist on an integrated go-to-market model, and invest in every area of the business.

Host Julian March speaks with Matthew Smith, Chief Revenue Officer at mumsnet.

Host Sarah Beauvallet speaks with Colin Close, Chief Commerical Officer at Planet.

Host Helen Sutton talks with Steve Neat, Chief Revenue Officer at Solidatus.

Host Helen Sutton talks with Vicky Nisbet, Senior Vice President at Appian

Host Stephen Fowler talks with Henrik Salicath, Chief Strategy & Revenue Officer, sa.global

Host Julie Heneghan talks with James Johnston, VP EMEA at Azul

Host Adrian Hands talks with Laura Doughty, Director of Income Generation & Communications at Carers UK

Host Chris Taplin talks with Chris Kiely, Chief Commercial Officer at Basis Technologies